The beginnings with Strehler
“They asked me to become an altar boy at my church and I accepted immediately. The celebration of the Catholic rite is a performance: a costume is worn, certain gestures are performed, sentences are spoken, and songs from a script are sung. Let’s be honest: it’s a real show… There, as a boy and in front of the altar, I felt the first symptoms in myself, the first signs of an actor’s soul.” The actor and theater director Massimo Ghini turns 69 today . He was born in Rome on October 12, 1954 and began acting in the 1970s. He failed at the audition for the Academy of Dramatic Arts, but after a while his revenge came: “When Giorgio Strehler chose me, albeit for a small role, in his King Lear … and sorry if it’s not much,” recalled Ghini a few months ago according to Corriere -. When I told my mother, she thought I had made it up… Instead, the great director idolized me and liked to call me the “Romanaccio.” But then I was chosen by Vittorio Gassman to play Cassio; Franco Zeffirelli plays Mortimer in Maria Stuarda with Rossella Falk and Valentina Cortese… and so on. Some people were annoyed that I was hired by such personalities because I was too cool, didn’t have the physique of a young Werther and then didn’t go to school or even to the avant-garde basement of the 70s: I I went immediately into Serie A. In order to earn some money in the summer, when the theater tours ended, I took the trouble to organize shows in the Valtour villages with Rosario Fiorello. In short, I didn’t miss anything.”
The first meeting with Nancy Brilli
In the second half of the 1980s, Massimo Ghini met his first wife: Nancy Brilli, on the set of the miniseries “Two Brothers” directed by Alberto Lattuada. In 2015, the actress revealed the (funny) details of that first meeting to Corriere: “She entered the wrong dressing room, we were both in our underwear.”
The wedding in 1987
Massimo Ghini and Nancy Brilli married in 1987 after a six-month engagement. “He went to ask my father for my hand in marriage,” Brilli recalled in the L’Arena, “perhaps it was the most embarrassing moment in my father’s life.” He wanted to do everything as well as before. He gave me a wonderful gift because Massimo is very generous. That famous point of light… I think he visited half the shops in Rome. In the end he bought me this light point. I accepted it, I was very happy, but after that I brought it back because we didn’t have a cent left.”
Married… even to pretend
After three years, the couple said goodbye, but Nancy Brilli and Massimo Ghini continued to have an excellent relationship: “Nancy and I didn’t have children, but we loved each other very much,” said Ghini a few years ago in an interview with Sorrisi The Work what we do has led to us becoming more and more distant and taking different paths without conflict. In fact, we remained excellent friends.” In 2016, the two met again on the set, in wedding dresses for the fiction “Weddings and Other Follies.”
Two twins
From his relationship with Federica Lorrai in 1994, Massimo Ghini had twins Camilla and Lorenzo. The separation between the actor and his partner, which occurred when the children were still small, was not easy: “With the mother of Camilla and Lorenzo – Ghini told Sorrisi in 2022 – it was a very difficult separation: it would be a perfect case “Studio Battaglia” (feature film broadcast last year on Rai 1 with the actor among the protagonists, editor’s note)».
Love for Paola Romano
“Every now and then they portray me as Jean Paul Belmondo, but I have been with the same woman, my wife Paola, for 22 years,” the actor told Io Donna in 2017. In the 2000s, Massimo Ghini found love again with Paola Romano, a former costume designer who married in 2002. “I conquered her at Alessandro Haber’s house at a New Year’s Eve party,” said the guest actor from Oggi è unaltro day –. We looked at each other and recognized each other because we had already met (but we hadn’t spoken).
Leonardo and Margherita
Paola Romano and Massimo Ghini are the parents of Leonardo (1996) and Margherita (1999). The actor’s four children followed very different paths: Lorenzo is not part of the entertainment world, Margherita moved to London, while Leonardo chose acting. The world of entertainment has also come into the spotlight for Camilla: she is one of the assistants of the Forum on Canale 5 and is a speaker on Rtl 102.5 and Radio Zeta.