A list of Hollywood stars who speak awesome Italian or are such great actors that managed to speak it very well on stage.
Some Hollywood actors speak (or spoke) Italian very well, others tried to speak a credible Italian but simply couldn’t. Some others, learned Italian only for acting properly, with astonishing results.
Vincent Cassel
We are sure that 14 years of marriage with actress Monica Bellucci helped Vincent Cassel with his Italian. He speaks quite flawlessly, with a slight French accent, but he’s definitely very fluent. Being French is of course a great advantage for learning Italian or other Romance languages. Cassel loves Brazil and he’s also proficient in Portuguese.
Christoph Waltz
Unforgettable performance in Inglorious Basterds. An Austrian-born actor, Waltz is of course a native German speaker, and he’s fluent in English and French. Listening to this performance alone, it would be easy to assume he’s fluent in Italian too, but actually he admitted he’s not. He learned a few lines for the movie and that’s it. I’m sure though he would learn very quickly. Great accent, fluency and intonation, he fooled me.
Colin Firth
This versatile English actor, good on stage and on the big screen, married Livia Giuggioli in 1997 , an Italian producer and director. They live in London and Italy and have two sons with Italian names, Luca and Matteo. He started to learn Italian when he and Giuggioli began to date and he now is fluent. He has a house in Siena and spends as much time as he can in Italy. In this recent message, he shows advanced Italian skills mixed with a great British accent.
Audrey Hepburn
The tribute here is a must. Hepburn was a polyglot, fluent in Dutch, French, Spanish and Italian. in 1968 she married an Italian doctor, Andrea Dotti. The legendary Vacanze Romane, the unforgettable movie with Gregory Peck, made Italy even more famous and desirable than it was already, a romantic destination for millions people. In this interview, she displays a near-native knowledge of Italian an elegant syntax and a very good pronunciation. A real charm.
Jodie Foster
Jodie Foster is fluent in French, Spanish and Italian. In this quick interaction with an Italian journalist, Jodie speaks naturally and complains about her French accent, which is hardly noticeable. I wasn’t expecting that, it was a nice find. She speaks naturally. Beautiful smile…
Viggo Mortensen
It’s well known that Viggo Mortensen speaks 7 languages and Italian too. He uses sophisticated vocabulary and describes his beautiful movie Green Book with all the nuances of a native Italian speaker. Intelligent, charming, polyglot. One of my favourite actors. Bravo.
Penelope Cruz
Surprisingly, there are not many Spanish actors fluent in Italian, even though our Spaniard cousins speak a nearly identical language. Penelope Cruz is an exception. Her Spanish accent is beautiful and she tries to find appropriate words when she talks about her childhood. Brava e Bella.
Robert De Niro
Alla prossima!
And I wish I could have met Paul Muni, Edward G Robinson, Danny Kaye,and Sam Jaffe so we could speak some Yiddish. Maybe Cagney and Monte Hall to!
I really was surprised at Colin Firth!
And Audrey was elegant as always.
You realize, of course, that De Niro is of Irish and Italian descent on his father’s side, Dutch, English, French, and German on his mother’s and doesn’t speak Italian. He did spend months studying Sicilian and even then many Italians have said he pretty much mumbled through lines and they had difficulty understanding what he said, including my own grandfather from Ribera, Sicily. His father just happened to have an Italian name. On the other hand, Alfredo James “Al” Pacino is the son of Italian American parents Rose Gerardi, whose parents were from Corleone, Sicily (my grandmother was also from Corleone) and Salvatore Pacino from San Fratello, Sicily. If he “didn’t seem comfortable speaking broken Italian”, it’s for 2 reasons – it was intentional as Michael Corleone, an American, wasn’t supposed to be fluent in Italian and just as my grandparents raised my mother, her sister, and brother, children were encouraged to speak English and assimilate, he didn’t speak Italian at home.
I’m Italian, I mean born and raised in Italy, and I teach Italian. De Niro’s Sicilian lines in that movie are awesome, he didn’t “mumble” at all. He knew what he was saying. Not only De Niro has an Italian passport, speaks basic Italian (Pacino doesn’t) but can even vote in Italy in the electoral district of Molise. That said, I love Al Pacino, De Niro, Joe Pesci, Harvey Keitel and the Scorsese gang.
I thought Keitel was Jewish? Either way, I said hello to him at JFK, and he was horribly rude. It was totally uncalled for?
My mother was a full 100% Sicilian. I speak a little Italian but I want to be fluent in it. It’s the most beautiful language in the world.
Si, Si!
And that is the extent of my Italian unfortunately, as it is true, no other language is as beautiful nor a people more gracious & loving than the people who live in Alitalia!♥️
It’s always nice to speak another language.Mine wax Yiddish, but I am sad there is no one around for me to speak it with. Take advantage of it whije you can.
I agree with you, the Italian language is beautiful, I wish everyone should speak Italian, the romance language, just my opinion
Note that Colin Farrell is actually Irish!! His native accent would be Irish-English-Dublin.He also does a good fake English-English, and American-English accent 😉
He’s Colin Firth. You picked the wrong Colin.
Robert De Niro’ is NOT of Irish decent. His mother was Jewish.
“Robert Anthony De Niro Jr. (/də ˈnɪəroʊ/; born August 17, 1943) is an American actor, producer, and director who holds both American and Italian citizenship.[1][2]”
“the son of painters Virginia Admiral and Robert De Niro Sr.[5] He is of Irish and Italian descent on his father’s side,[6] while his mother had Dutch, English, French, and German ancestry.”
From Wikipedia.
I never knew that !
I love Robert De Niro!!! Hearing him speak Italian in Godfather was so sexy!!! Too bad he doesn’t speak it all the time. AL Pacino is another Italian who spoke the language in the movie but I don’t think he actually speaks it.
DeNiro is more Irish than Italian.
He is more Italian