Barbara Ronchi spent a decade as the mother in men’s films before Italy let her lead

Barbara Ronchi

Photo: Cinemio / CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	June 22, 1982 Rome, Italy
Occupation	Actress
Known for	The Children's Train, Kidnapped, Still Time
Awards	David di Donatello · Nastro d'Argento · Globo d'oro

In Leonardo Di Costanzo’s Elisa, Barbara Ronchi plays a woman who has spent ten years in prison for killing her older sister and burning the body, and who still cannot say why she did it. Over long conversations with a criminologist, played by Roschdy Zem, the holes in her memory begin to close. “Her crime is paradoxical,” Ronchi told ANSA when the film reached Venice: “taking a life to have one for herself.” It is a long way from the parts that made her name, most of them mothers and wives standing at the edge of somebody else’s story.

She knows how late the turn came. “My first leading roles came when I was around forty,” she told La Voce di New York in June. “It was a fair journey, let’s put it that way.” She never felt the need to lead early, she added: “I do not think I would have been ready before then.” The modesty is sincere. It also describes an industry that took a decade to see what Marco Bellocchio saw in one film.

Acting was not the first plan. Ronchi was born in Rome on 22 June 1982, the daughter of a lithographer and a housewife, and took a degree in historical and archaeological sciences at Sapienza University before sitting the entrance exam for the Accademia Nazionale d’Arte Drammatica Silvio D’Amico, where she graduated in 2009. Archaeology, she says, “remains one of my great passions. But theatre moved me too deeply.” The following years belonged to the stage, with directors such as Carlo Cecchi, Valerio Binasco and Fausto Paravidino, while cinema offered small parts, among them one in Valeria Golino’s Miele.

Bellocchio changed the scale. In Fai bei sogni, his adaptation of Massimo Gramellini’s memoir, which opened the Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes in 2016, she played the mother whose sudden death a nine-year-old boy refuses to accept, a presence the film keeps circling for decades. The role won her the Premio Alida Valli for best supporting actress. Television brought a far wider audience from 2019, when she joined Rai1’s Imma Tataranni as Diana De Santis, the court clerk and confidante of Vanessa Scalera’s prosecutor, a warm comic part she has now carried through five seasons.

Then the leads arrived in quick succession. Claudio Noce cast her opposite Pierfrancesco Favino in Padrenostro, in competition at Venice in 2020. Giulia Steigerwalt’s first feature, Settembre, gave her Francesca, a woman whose medical results make her rethink her life and draw her toward Debora, the friend she has long been attracted to; it won her the David di Donatello for Best Actress in 2023. On Netflix she was Alice in Alessandro Aronadio’s Still Time, partner to Edoardo Leo’s workaholic, a man who keeps jumping a year ahead and forgetting the damage he did in between. Hers was the harder job: playing a grievance that the man who caused it cannot remember.

Bellocchio called again for Rapito, his film about Edgardo Mortara, the Jewish boy taken from his family in Bologna in 1858 by the Papal States so that he could be raised Catholic. As Marianna Padovani Mortara, the mother who will not accept the abduction, Ronchi supplied the film’s rage, and the part, shown in competition at Cannes, won her the Nastro d’Argento for Best Actress and a second David nomination. Around the same time she played the opera star Caterina Gabrielli in Petr Václav’s Il Boemo, which brought her a Czech Lion nomination.

Line those roles up and a pattern shows. In Fai bei sogni, Padrenostro, Rapito and Still Time she is the mother or the wife, and the camera’s real subject is a man or a boy. Francesco Costabile’s Familia, shown in Orizzonti at Venice in 2024 and later chosen as Italy’s Oscar submission, pushed it to the limit. She played Licia, whose violent husband returns after ten years to reclaim his family, in an adaptation of Luigi Celeste’s memoir of killing his father to protect his mother. It brought another David nomination, yet the film’s arc belongs to the son. Asked why she keeps choosing dark material, Ronchi says such stories “explore very deep human structures.” The reception of Elisa showed the cost of that taste: in Il Fatto Quotidiano, Davide Turrini wrote that the film sacrifices the pleasure of cinema to lessons in ethics, and Panorama found it unconvincing. The awards kept coming anyway.

The past two years have been crowded. Steigerwalt’s Diva Futura, about Riccardo Schicchi’s porn agency, cast her as Debora Attanasio, the secretary whose book the film adapts, and Cristina Comencini’s Netflix drama The Children’s Train made her Derna, a former partisan in Modena who takes in a boy from post-war Naples. Elisa premiered in competition at Venice in September 2025; in 2026 it earned her the Globo d’oro for Best Actress from the foreign press in Rome and a David nomination, next to a supporting nod for Diva Futura, though the David went to Aurora Quattrocchi. In May, Lucia Calamaro’s first feature as director, Antartica – Quasi una fiaba, reached Italian cinemas with Ronchi as Maria Medri, a rebellious scientist who lands at an isolated Antarctic base and clashes with her former teacher, Silvio Orlando’s mission chief. Rai1 aired the fifth season of Imma Tataranni in March, and at the end of the summer she sat on the Orizzonti jury at the Venice Film Festival.

Away from sets she keeps her private life quiet. Her partner is the actor and theatre director Alessandro Tedeschi, and their son, Giovanni, was born in 2018. “We advise each other on professional choices,” she has said, “but we do not interfere with each other’s creative work.”

Next comes Nemesi, a six-episode Netflix legal thriller directed by Piero Messina, in which she plays Diana Potenza, the lawyer defending Favino’s Milanese heir against the charge of killing his wife, played by Elodie. Netflix has not yet dated it, and Roberta Torre’s Le scarpe rotte is also on her slate. Having played the accused in Elisa, Ronchi now takes the other side of the table.

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Tags: actors, actresses, Italian cinema, Barbara Ronchi, Still Time, Elisa

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