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After his movie La vita è bella (1997) received seven Academy Award nominations, he met the Italian President Oscar Luigi Scalfaro and said, after shaking his hand: "Now I have the Oscar in my hand!". His father Luigi Benigni (1918-2004), who worked as a farmer, carpenter and bricklayer, was a prisoner in the concentration camp Bergen-Belsen between 1943 and 1945. Roberto used his stories as the basis for his film La vita è bella (1997). Sister: Bruna Benigni (textile worker), born 1945. Sister: Anna Benigni (teacher's aide), born 1948. Left the seminary after two-thirds of Florence had been flooded by the Arno River (4 November 1966). He and Laurence Olivier are the only two actors to have directed themselves in Oscar winning performances. He is the sixth actor in history to win the Oscar for Best Actor in a comedy after Clark Gable in It Happened One Night (1934), James Stewart in The Philadelphia Story (1940), Lee Marvin in Cat Ballou (1965), Richard Dreyfuss in The Goodbye Girl (1977) and Jack Nicholson in As Good as It Gets (1997). The first actor to win a Worst Actor Razzie for a non-English speaking role. When he "won" the 2003 Razzie Award for Worst Actor in Pinocchio (2002), Razzies.com declared his win "By a Nose!", as he'd just barely beaten fellow nominee Steven Seagal in the film Half Past Dead (2002) by a mere few votes. Member of the jury at the Berlin International Film Festival 1990 Was awarded Doctor Honoris Causa by the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium (2 February 2007). Winning the Best Foreign Language Film category at the The 70th Annual Academy Awards (1998) (TV), he famously climbed on the back of the seat for his procession to the stage and applauded the audience. The following year, while announcing the nominees for the Best Actress Award, Billy Crystal appeared behind him with a large net to restrain him. After leading a crowd of thousand in Rome, protesting against Silvio Berlusconi's government's decision to cut state arts funding by 35 percent, he hijacked the opening credits of Italy's most watched news show, removed his shirt to drape it over the anchorman's shoulders and announced "Berlusconi had resigned!" the next day (15 September 2005). Is one of five performers to win an Oscar playing a character that spoke mostly in a foreign language. The other are Sophia Loren, Robert De Niro, Marion Cotillard and Benicio Del Toro.