Monicelli was born in Rome to an upper-class family from Ostiglia,[1] a town in the province of Mantua, in the Northern Italian region of Lombardy.

After that he found work, as a camera assistant again, in Augusto Genina's film Lo squadrone bianco (1936)[8] and The Castiglioni Brothers (1937) by Corrado D'Errico.

There he met Giacomo Gentilomo, who hired him as an assistant director and co-writer for Short Circuit (1943),[9] considered as a possible precursor to the giallo genre.

Monicelli said that this experience was important for his training, as he learned to[13] "write for the cinema, to shoot, to deal with actors [...] And, above all, to realise, when I watched the film again in the theater, that what I was putting on the screen every day did not correspond, if at all, to my expectations".From 1939 to 1942, he produced up to 40 numerous screenplays, and worked as an assistant director.

In Big Deal on Madonna Street (1958), featuring the ubiquitous comedian Totò in a side role, he discovered the comical talent of Vittorio Gassman and Marcello Mastroianni and probably started the new genre of the modern commedia all'italiana ("Italian-style comedy").

It excelled in the absence of rhetorical accents and for its sharp, tragicomical sense of history while portraying the Italian defeat during World War I.

The film Toto and Carolina (1955) underwent three revisions, because according to the censors, the mere fact that the policeman was played by Totò was tantamount to pillorying the police.

Monicelli received two more Academy Award nominations with I compagni (1963), a heartfelt homage to "humanitarian socialism"[21] and The Girl with the Pistol (1968),[22] which tackled the themes of bride kidnapping and honor killing, still relevant in the Southern-Italian culture of the time.

The film tells the tragicomic tale of a Middle Ages Italian knight, with uncertain nobility and few means but high ideals, self-confidence and pomposity (Vittorio Gassman).

The bizarre macaronic Latin-Italian dialogues were devised by Age & Scarpelli, the most renowned writers of Italian comedies, and represent a whole linguistic invention which was followed by Brancaleone at the Crusades (1970), and less successfully in Bertoldo, Bertoldino e Cacasenno (1984).

[citation needed] My Friends (1975), featuring Ugo Tognazzi, Adolfo Celi, Gastone Moschin, Duilio Del Prete and Philippe Noiret, was one of the most successful films in Italy and confirmed Monicelli's genius in mixing humour, irony and bitter understanding of the human condition.

[25] He turned again to more cheerful comedy and attention to historical events from a popular, intimate point of view with Il Marchese del Grillo (1981), also featuring Alberto Sordi at his best.

Among the final works by Monicelli are Let's Hope It's a Girl (1986), Parenti serpenti (1992) and Dear Goddamned Friends (1994), featuring Paolo Hendel.

A documentary made by Roberto Salinas and Marina Catucci, Una storia da ridere, breve biografia di Mario Monicelli, appeared in 2008.

If, on the other hand, the old man is forced to do things for himself, make his own bed, go out, light the cooker, sometimes burn himself, he will live ten years longer.He died on 29 November 2010 at the age of 95.

He killed himself by jumping from a window of the San Giovanni Hospital in Rome, where he had been admitted a few days earlier for prostate cancer in the terminal stage.