Cremona, 1922 Rome, 1990. “A life in projection”: Ugo Tognazzi truly lived that way, with the screen as a mirror of the soul.

An accountant at the Negroni cured meat factory, an amateur actor in the workers’ club, then radio alongside Raimondo Vianello  that duo who invented Italian television comedy in the Fifties. But it was cinema that revealed the complete actor: Il federale (1961) by Luciano Salce opened the way, and then the masterpieces followed. La voglia matta, I mostri, My Friends, La Cage aux Folles  where he dared to play a homosexual with a grace no one had ever shown before. And then Marco Ferreri, the director who forced him to dig into the grotesque: The Queen Bee, La Grande Bouffe, scandals that were screamed truths. Bernardo Bertolucci chose him for The Tragedy of a Ridiculous Man and gifted him the Palme d’Or at Cannes for Best Actor.

His wife Franca Bettoja recalls that in private Ugo was just as he appeared on screen: a great storyteller with a vivid imagination, a singular companion. Intelligent, obsessive about food cooking was his second art  yet with a veil of sadness that never quite left him. He would be moved to tears, and he exorcised the thought of death by never celebrating his own birthday. Maria Sole, his youngest daughter, remembers a powerfully strong personality and a love of play. In this documentary, witnesses to his greatness speak: Monicelli, Lattuada, Claudia Cardinale, Michele Placido, and the children who keep his memory alive.