Widely considered one of the most influential filmmakers in the history of cinema, four of the films he directed won Academy Awards: Sciuscià and Bicycle Thieves (honorary), while Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow and Il giardino dei Finzi Contini won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.

[3] De Sica was also nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for playing Major Rinaldi in American director Charles Vidor's 1957 adaptation of Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms, a movie that was panned by critics and proved a box office flop.

[5] His father Umberto De Sica was from Giffoni Valle Piana, Campania; he was a journalist, and in the later years worked for the Bank of Italy.

At the age of 15, De Sica started performing as an actor in amateur plays staged in hospitals for recovering soldiers.

He started studying to become an accountant when in 1917 through a family friend Edoardo Bencivenga he got a small part in the Alfredo De Antoni film The Clemenceau Affair.

During that period he met Umberto Melnati, an actor from Livorno, with whom formed a successful comic duo and collaborated in many films and theatre plays.

With Za-Bum, De Sica, Rissone and Melnati played in Una segretaria per tutti, Un cattivo soggetto, Il signore desidera?, Lisetta, and many other revues written by Mattoli and Luciano Ramo.

The duo became famous on the national level after the success of radio sketch Düra minga, dura no and a popular song Lodovico sei dolce come un fico sang by De Sica.

Tofano-Rissone-De Sica performed mostly light comedies, but they also staged plays by Beaumarchais and worked with famous directors like Luchino Visconti.

The play Due dozzine di rose scarlatte, written by Aldo De Benedetti, premiered on 11 March 1936, in Teatro Argentina.

Together they released a series of successful plays: La scuola della maldicenza (based on Richard Brinsley Sheridan), Ma non è una cosa seria written by Luigi Pirandello, Il paese delle vacanze by Ugo Betti, Liolà, etc.

[14] In 1945-46, he played in two spectacles directed by Alessandro Blasetti: Il tempo e la famiglia Conway written by John Boynton Priestley and Ma non è una cosa seria by Luigi Pirandello.

[15] In the early years, De Sica combined his theatre and cinema careers: in the summer months, he was engaged in filmmaking and spent the winters performing on stage.

[12][16] In the 1930s his credits included many notable performances such as in I'll Give a Million (1935), Il signor Max (1937), Department Store (1939), Manon Lescaut.

The film brought De Sica his second Oscar as well as multiple other awards and accolades, however, again the success in Italian box office was tepid.

[27] In 1937 Vittorio De Sica married the actress Giuditta Rissone, who gave birth to their daughter, Emilia (10 February 1938 – 23 March 2021).

It is said that, at Christmas and on New Year's Eve, he used to put back the clocks by two hours in Mercader's house so that he could make a toast at midnight with both families.

I came out of the theater, tears streaming, and overheard the petulant voice of a college girl complaining to her boyfriend, "Well I don't see what was so special about that movie."