Dario Fo

Dario Fo was born and raised in the Italian Alps, where his mother was a shirtmaker and writer, and his father was a railway station master and amateur actor. As a child, Fo spent countless hours listening to local fishermen and glassblowers tell jokes and tall tales, which inspired an early interest in comedy. While studying art and architecture in Milan during World War II, he was drafted into the army. But he refused to fight for Mussolini and Hitler’s fascist cause, so he ran away from camp and started working with his father to help Jewish refugees secretly escape to Switzerland instead. After the war, he quit his architecture studies and took up acting and painting instead. He began performing comic monologues on the national radio, then transitioned to the stage. After briefly working in Rome’s film industry and then returning to Milan to continue putting on plays, Fo and his wife, the actress Franca Rame, finally achieved international recognition for the 1959 play Archangels Don’t Play Pinball. Fo and Rame spent the next decade working in the commercial theater. But due to the political messages in their work, they faced attacks, censorship, and even a travel ban by the U.S. government. In protest, they decided to quit mainstream theater and found an independent, collectively run theater company instead. They set up a headquarters and community center in an abandoned Milan building, then started traveling around Italy, putting on their work in small, often improvised venues for working-class audiences. They continued doing so for four decades, even as the police raided their plays, the people they lampooned sued them, and a fascist militia even kidnapped and raped Rame. Fo’s most famous plays include Mistero Buffo (1969), Accidental Death of an Anarchist (1970), and Can’t Pay? Won’t Pay! (1974), which have been translated, adapted, and performed all around the world. But he also wrote dozens of other satires mocking figures as diverse as Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, Christopher Columbus, and even the Pope. In what was widely regarded as a shocking and unconventional decision, Fo was awarded the 1997 Nobel Prize in Literature—and he spent much of his acceptance speech mocking his audience. He also ran for Mayor of Milan in 2006 but finished second in the left-wing coalition primary. He continued writing and producing new work until his death in 2016.