Valeria Golino

Acting

Valeria Golino

Born 1965-10-22 · Naples, Campania, Italy

Valeria Golino (born 22 October 1965) is an Italian actress and director. She is best known to English-language audiences for her roles in Rain Man, Big Top Pee-wee, and the two Hot Shots! movies, particularly the olive-in-the-belly-button scene. In addition to the awards David di Donatello, Silver Ribbon, Golden Ciak, and Italian Golden Globe, she is also one of the four actresses who has won the Best Actress award at the Venice Film Festival twice.

Acting credits

Portrait of a Lady on Fire poster
8.1

On an isolated island in Brittany at the end of the eighteenth century, a female painter is obliged to paint a wedding portrait of a young woman.

Portrait of a Lady on Fire

2019

Rain Man poster
7.8

When car dealer Charlie Babbitt learns that his estranged father has died, he returns home to Cincinnati, where he discovers that he has a savant older brother named Raymond and that his father's $3 million fortune is being left to the mental institution in which Raymond lives. Motivated by his father's money, Charlie checks Raymond out of the facility in order to return with him to Los Angeles. The brothers' cross-country trip ends up changing both their lives.

Rain Man

1988

Leaving Las Vegas poster
7.2

Ben Sanderson, an alcoholic Hollywood screenwriter who lost everything because of his drinking, arrives in Las Vegas to drink himself to death. There, he meets and forms an uneasy friendship and non-interference pact with prostitute Sera.

Leaving Las Vegas

1995

Hot Shots! Part Deux poster
6.5

Topper Harley is found to be working as an odd-job-man in a monastery. The CIA want him to lead a rescue mission into Iraq, to rescue the last rescue team, who went in to rescue the last rescue team—who went in to rescue hostages left behind after Desert Storm.

Hot Shots! Part Deux

1993

Hot Shots! poster
6.6

The gang that created Airplane! and The Naked Gun sets its sights on Top Gun in this spoof. Topper Harley is a talented but unstable fighter pilot with an axe to grind: clearing the family name. His mission is to avenge his father and save a mission sabotaged by greedy weapons manufacturers. He also gets involved in a relationship with Ramada Thompson, a woman with an unusually talented stomach. Hot Shots! makes fun of a variety of other films, from Dances with Wolves to The Fabulous Baker Boys.

Hot Shots!

1991

Escape from L.A. poster
5.9

Into the 9.6-quaked Los Angeles of 2013 comes Snake Plissken. His job: wade through L.A.'s ruined landmarks to retrieve a doomsday device.

Escape from L.A.

1996

Immortal Beloved poster
7.1

A chronicle of the life of infamous classical composer Ludwig van Beethoven and his painful struggle with hearing loss. Following Beethoven's death in 1827, his assistant, Schindler, searches for an elusive woman referred to in the composer's love letters as "immortal beloved." As Schindler solves the mystery, a series of flashbacks reveal Beethoven's transformation from passionate young man to troubled musical genius.

Immortal Beloved

1994

Four Rooms poster
5.9

It's Ted the Bellhop's first night on the job...and the hotel's very unusual guests are about to place him in some outrageous predicaments. It seems that this evening's room service is serving up one unbelievable happening after another.

Four Rooms

1995

Maria poster
6.5

Maria Callas, the world's greatest opera singer, lives the last days of her life in 1970s Paris, as she confronts her identity and life.

Maria

2024

Gioia poster
6.7

Gioia is a high school teacher who has never known any other love than the oppressive bond with her own parents, with whom she still lives. One of the students at her school, Alessio, is cashing in on his own body to make a couple of hundred euros to help his mother, a cashier in a supermarket. The relationship that dawns between Gioia and Alessio is forbidden fruit, fragile yet, inexplicably, one they can’t do without. Still, Alessio’s desire to improve his social standing is a silent killer that prevents him from ultimately accepting Gioia’s surprising affection for him. He goes and destroys it all, cancelling the only person who has ever loved him.

Gioia

2026

Respiro poster
6.6

Grazia is a free-spirited mother-of-three married to shy fisherman Pietro and living on the idyllic but isolated island of Lampedusa in the Mediterranean Sea. She shows signs of manic depressive behavior — one moment she's laughing wildly and swimming half-naked in the sea, while the next she's curled in a ball on her bed. Out of her earshot, the adult members of her extended family vaguely discuss sending her to a facility of some sort in Northern Italy.

Respiro

2002

Frida poster
7.4

A biography of artist Frida Kahlo, who channeled the pain of a crippling injury and her tempestuous marriage into her work.

Frida

2002

Clean Slate poster
5.8

Pogue is a private eye with a problem: every morning when he wakes up, he has total amnesia, waking up with a 'blank slate'. Since he is in the middle of a hot investigation and has a developing romance, this is less than convenient.

Clean Slate

1994

The Beautiful Game poster
6.3

A group of advocates to end homelessness organize an annual tournament for homeless people to compete in a series of football matches known as The Homeless World Cup.

The Beautiful Game

2024

A Brief Affair poster
6.1

Lea and Rocco meet by chance in a bar and an instant attraction ignites between them. From that moment, a secret affair begins, consisting of fleeting, clandestine meetings in a hotel room. However, as time passes, Lea's obsession with Rocco intensifies, leading her to intrude more and more into his life. The story soon takes an unexpected and unsettling turn.

A Brief Affair

2025

The Invisible Boy poster
6.3

Michele is thirteen year old, shy, unpopular at school, and in love with Stella. After wearing a costume for a Halloween party, he finds out that he's invisible.

The Invisible Boy

2014

Fuori poster
6.4

Rome. The 1980s. After the magnum opus The Art of Joy she has been working on for a decade is rejected by the Italian publishing world, writer Goliarda Sapienza commits a desperate theft that costs her her reputation and social position. Incarcerated in Italy’s largest female prison, she finds herself living alongside thieves, junkies, sex workers and revolutionaries. After her release, she continues to meet with these women and over the course of a sweltering summer, a life-changing relationship flowers – a relationship that will reawaken her the desire to live and to write.

Fuori

2025

Big Top Pee-wee poster
5.0

Paul Reubens stars as Pee-wee Herman in his second full-length film about a farmer who joins the circus after a storm drops a big tent in his front yard. Pee-wee, along with an outlandish cast of animals and circus performers, puts on the best show ever.

Big Top Pee-wee

1988

Jacky in the Kingdom of Women poster
5.6

In a country where women are in charge, a man goes to unusual lengths to make his dream of marrying the daughter of a military leader come true.

Jacky in the Kingdom of Women

2014

The Indian Runner poster
6.5

Two brothers cannot overcome their opposite perceptions of life. One brother sees and feels bad in everyone and everything, subsequently he is violent, antisocial and unable to appreciate or enjoy the good things which his brother desperately tries to point out to him.

The Indian Runner

1991

Human Capital poster
7.4

The destinies of two families are irrevocably tied together after a cyclist is hit off the road by a jeep in the night before Christmas Eve.

Human Capital

2013

The Catholic School poster
6.2

Three well-off young men—former students at Rome’s prestigious all-boys Catholic high school San Leone Magno—brutally tortured, raped, and murdered two young women in 1975. The event, which came to be known as the Circeo massacre, shocked and captivated the country, exposing the violence and dark underbelly of the upper middle class at a moment when the traditional structures of family and religion were seen as under threat.

The Catholic School

2021

Casanova, Last Love poster
4.8

Year 1763. Forced into exile, the famous libertine Giacomo Casanova leaves Paris and travels to London, where he meets Marianne de Charpillon, a young prostitute to whom he is so attracted that he forgets about the other women.

Casanova, Last Love

2019

Last Harem poster
5.5

On the eve of the fall of the Ottoman Empire: in the harem of Sultan Abdulhamit II, the odalisque of Italian origin Safiyè dreams of becoming the sultan's first mistress. To achieve her goal, the girl, aided by the eunuch Nadir, is even willing to kill. But when her dream is finally about to come true, her entire world suddenly collapses: the sultan is exiled, the harem is closed, and the odalisques and eunuchs are abandoned to their fate.

Last Harem

1999

Behind the camera

Gioia poster
6.7

Gioia is a high school teacher who has never known any other love than the oppressive bond with her own parents, with whom she still lives. One of the students at her school, Alessio, is cashing in on his own body to make a couple of hundred euros to help his mother, a cashier in a supermarket. The relationship that dawns between Gioia and Alessio is forbidden fruit, fragile yet, inexplicably, one they can’t do without. Still, Alessio’s desire to improve his social standing is a silent killer that prevents him from ultimately accepting Gioia’s surprising affection for him. He goes and destroys it all, cancelling the only person who has ever loved him.

Gioia

2026

Feeling Better poster
6.2

A man spends peacefully his days in hospital without too many worries. He has been hospitalized for a while but that condition seems like the best way to live his life, safe from everything and everyone, without responsibilities and problems of any kind. It feels really good in there and even if some of his ward companions feel trapped, for them he can also feel free like nowhere else. That precious routine runs smoothly until a new person is admitted to the same ward. She is a restless, angry companion, she accepts nothing of that condition, especially the unwritten rules. She is not willing to wait, she wants to leave that place better or even worse. She wants to live as she should or die, as happens to those who end up in there. He is overwhelmed by that fury, first trying to defend himself and then accepting something incomprehensible. That encounter will help him accept that if you choose to truly face your heart and your emotions, there is no possible repair.

Feeling Better

2025

The Invisible Thread poster
6.6

The teenage son of two fathers makes a documentary film about his parents but is surprised when a real-life plot twist occurs in his family.

The Invisible Thread

2022

Euphoria poster
6.5

Matteo is a young successful businessman, audacious, charming and energetic. Ettore instead, is a calm, righteous, second grade teacher always living in the shadows, still in the small town from where both come from. They’re brothers but with two very different personalities. A dramatic event will force them to live together in Rome for a few months, bringing up the opportunity to face their differences with sympathy and tenderness, in a climax of fear and euphoria.

Euphoria

2018

Euphoria poster
6.5

Matteo is a young successful businessman, audacious, charming and energetic. Ettore instead, is a calm, righteous, second grade teacher always living in the shadows, still in the small town from where both come from. They’re brothers but with two very different personalities. A dramatic event will force them to live together in Rome for a few months, bringing up the opportunity to face their differences with sympathy and tenderness, in a climax of fear and euphoria.

Euphoria

2018

A Common Story poster
NR

Erika and Mauro live in the province, living a simple life made up of reassuring habits and small gestures. When their daughter Irene leaves to study abroad, the house empties, and the balance on which the couple has built their existence seems to be shaken.

A Common Story

2026

Honey poster
6.6

Irene, nicknamed 'Miele', has devote herself to people looking for help, and tries to alleviate their suffering even when they make extreme decisions. One day she has to cope with Grimaldi and his invisible malaise.

Honey

2013

Honey poster
6.6

Irene, nicknamed 'Miele', has devote herself to people looking for help, and tries to alleviate their suffering even when they make extreme decisions. One day she has to cope with Grimaldi and his invisible malaise.

Honey

2013

Love Monster poster
NR

"Love Monster", the opening chapter of FENDI Couture Fall/Winter 2026-2027, a sensuous journey from Villa Borghese through Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, extending the collection’s exploration of sensuality, freedom, and pleasure.

Love Monster

2026

Julian Schnabel: A Private Portrait poster
7.3

A chronicle of the personal life and public career of the celebrated artist and filmmaker Julian Schnabel.

Julian Schnabel: A Private Portrait

2017

Pericle poster
5.4

A failed porn actor, working as an enforcer for a mafia kingpin, finds himself confronted with an all-out turf war after an errand goes drastically wrong. Going on the run is his only option.

Pericle

2016

Double poster
NR

«Destroy your ego» states writing on a wall left by a friend who died in tragic circumstances. The sentence triggers a thought process in the author’s mind, Cosimo Terlizzi, leading him to delve deep into himself. His thoughts are registered as in a spontaneous diary made of a couple’s life, voyeurism, constant geographical changes, multi media betrayals and book readings. The collected traces take him to discover the lights and shadows of his personality. What emerges is man’s dual nature, divided between instinct and morality.

Double

2012

Armandino e il Madre poster
5.8

An italian short comedy

Armandino e il Madre

2010

Armandino e il Madre poster
5.8

An italian short comedy

Armandino e il Madre

2010

Déi poster
4.9

The story of a young student in the South of Italy, his trip during the night, by feet, from the native village to the City, a long coming-to-age itinerary that will lead him to discover his familiy's secret story and free him from fears.

Déi

2018