ACTOR
Renato Rascel
26 archived facts 4 topics 1 source Last reviewed Oct 2026
All facts (26)
- #001
Renato Rascel was also a highly successful songwriter. His "Arrivederci Roma" remains one of the most famous Italian songs.
- #002
He was the son of the actor Cesare Ranucci and the father of the composer Cesare Ranucci Rascel.
- #003
A tiny Italian comic performer who sang in the Sistine Chapel Choir at the age of eight. Both of his parents were opera performers.
- #004
He was an Italian film actor and singer.
- #005
With the arrival of television in Italian households, RAI (the national Italian television network) entrusted Rascel with the role of entertaining the country on its first live Saturday night programme.
- #006
In 1942 he made the first film in a long series: Pazzo d'amore (Crazy for Love), in which he developed and established his distinctive style of humour.
- #007
After great success in Latin America, Rascel gathered a small group of friends and formed a band of fake tangos. With them he went north to seek his fortune, introducing himself to audiences as "Renatin, typical Argentinian singer".
- #008
His most famous song, "Arrivederci Roma", is among the three most famous Italian songs of all time.
- #009
At the age of 14 Renato began playing drums in ballrooms around Rome. Shortly afterwards he joined the Di Fiorenza Brothers as an actor, dancer and clown, and in 1934 he was hired by the Schwartz Brothers for his first major role in the operetta "Al Cavallino bianco".
- #010
Among the more than sixty films he worked on, the most relevant was Gogol's Il Cappotto (The Overcoat), which won the Palme d'Or at Cannes.
- #011
Among his most memorable performances were "Rascel la nuit" in 1956 and "Stasera Rascel City" in 1964.
- #012
His performance in "Father Brown" in 1970, in which he played a priest solving crimes in his own community, was one of the decade's biggest television successes.
- #013
In 1935 he joined Elena Gray for his first overseas tour, in Africa.
- #014
He also starred alongside Anthony Quinn and Anna Magnani in The Secret of Santa Vittoria, with Mario Lanza in Seven Hills of Rome, with Eduardo De Filippo in Questi fantasmi, and with Totò in Figaro qua Figaro là.
- #015
He completed his early education at the Pio X elementary school in his neighbourhood, raised by the Sisters of Our Lady of Mercy, whose teachers included, among other things, singing, music and acting, with large brackets devoted to football.
- #016
As a child Renato lived in the Borgo district and, together with his sister Giuseppina (who later died at 17), was raised by an aunt, who stood in for his constantly absent parents, who travelled for work, and by a grandmother, Margherita, who encouraged his acting.
- #017
In 1977 he appeared as the blind man in Zeffirelli's Jesus of Nazareth.
- #018
Over his career Rascel proved himself as a comic and dramatic actor, dancer, singer and songwriter.
- #019
The seventies opened for Renato Rascel with a definitive departure from cinema. 1970 also marked the final staging of Garinei and Giovannini's musical comedy Alleluja brava gente, and Rascel was tasked with replacing Domenico Modugno at the last moment with Gigi Proietti, a then almost unknown young man.
- #020
In 1942 Rascel met Tina De Mola, with whom he fell in love and opposite whom he starred in his first film, Pazzo d'amore. The two would form a steady couple in subsequent theatre productions signed by, among others, Nelli and Mangini, Dino Falconi, Michele Galdieri and Alfredo Polacci. With the latter, Rascel offered a preview of the famous Corazziere comic strip, in which he succeeded in creating an original comic drama in his own style.
- #021
His first theatre experiences came in amateur dramas directed by his father, "Fortitudo".
- #022
Under the nickname Sunny Boy, at the age of 15 he joined a small music group called "Arcobaleno" that toured Rome's dance halls. Luigi Vitolo, nicknamed "Majestic", a Neapolitan impresario, dancer and leader of the orchestra of the same name, introduced him in various variety shows including Charleston and tap dance performances. His friend was the Ligurian Piero Pieri.
- #023
1960 witnessed Rascel's victory at the Sanremo Festival with Romantica. He was accused of plagiarism over the song and became involved in a lawsuit from which he emerged unharmed thanks to an expert report signed by Maestro Igor Stravinsky.
- #024
In 1932 Rascel was spotted by the Schwartz brothers and engaged for a revival of the operetta The White Horse.
- #025
Renato could truly be said to have been born in the backstage of a theatre and to have spent his whole life there, at the time when his parents, both opera performers, were putting on a show in Turin.
- #026
Rascel represented Italy at the 1960 Eurovision Song Contest with the song "Romantica", finishing eighth among thirteen entries.
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