She is best known to English-language audiences for her roles in Rain Man, Big Top Pee-wee, and Hot Shots!, where she performed the "olive-in-the-belly-button" scene.

Golino was born on 22 October 1965[2] in Naples, Italy, the daughter of an Italian father who was a Germanist scholar, and a Greek mother, Lalla,[3] who was a painter.

[13] Her career started by chance when her uncle Enzo received a phone call from the director Lina Wertmüller, who was searching for a young girl for her movie, and encouraged Golino to go to Wertmuller's house to meet her.

She was offered roles in Giochi d'estate (1984) and other similarly themed romantic films about teenagers, but she turned them down[15] to focus on smaller and more challenging projects.

Later that year, she was involved in a car accident[16] which displaced the metal rod[citation needed] in her back and had to have surgery in order to fix it: she was bedridden for five months.

She was supposed to reunite with Maselli for his following film L'uomo della casa di fronte, co-starring Marcello Mastroianni, but the project never happened.

[24] In 1993, she was heavily involved in producing and starring in an independent feature film, Cat in the Box, which was never made, and because of that project, she was forced to turn down a role in a movie directed by Carlo Verdone.

[25] During the following year, she was offered the leading role in True Lies, but she had to turn that down because of conflicts in scheduling with Slaughter of the Cock (1996), an independent film made in Cyprus.

[27] In early 1996, she was supposed to play a journalist in the film Bravo Randy, directed by Alessandro D'Alatri and also starring Jovanotti in the titular role of a tramp who falls into a coma after an accident.

[28] However, the project fell apart just a few months before shooting was slated to begin: fearing a lack of influence, the Italian production company blocked the funds as the film would have been shot in California.

[10] In January 2001, she was supposed to star with Claudio Amendola in a TV mini-series called Cuore di ghiaccio, directed by Luciano Casciani, produced by Mediaset and set in Cefalù, but the project never took off the ground.

[26] Her role as Irene in Sacred Heart (2004) had been written specifically for her by director Ferzan Ozpetek, but she was forced to abandon the project for personal reasons.

[34] The following year she was offered the chance to direct a short film by the company Pasta Garofalo, Armandino e il Madre, for which she also wrote the script.

[35] She played Armida Miserere, a high-security warden in Like the Wind (2013), directed by Marco Simon Puccioni, a difficult leading role praised by the critics and awarded in festival.

[40] In 2018, she directed Euforia which was screened in the Un Certain Regard section at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival and is considered to be one of best performances of Riccardo Scamarcio, who played the main role.