- He was also a very successful songwriter. His "Arrivederci Roma" remains one of the most famous Italian songs.
- Son of actor Cesare Ranucci, father of composer Cesare Ranucci Rascel.
- Diminutive Italian comic actor, who, at the age of eight, sang with the Sistine Chapel Choir. Both his parents were opera singers.
- He was an Italian film actor and singer.
- Rascel represented Italy in the Eurovision Song Contest in 1960 with the song "Romantica" which was placed equal eighth out of thirteen entries.
- With the arrival of the television set in the Italian household, RAI (the national Italian Television) entrusted Rascel with the role of entertaining the country in the very first live Saturday night show.
- In 1942 he shot the first of a long series of films, Pazzo d'amore (Crazy For Love) developing and establishing his very peculiar kind of humor.
- In 1941 he created his own theater company and he began to develop his distinctive kind of humor that in the following years will crown him as the inventor of the "non-sense" with phrases like "two friends that didn't know each other".
- In the wake of the great Latin American successes, Rascel gathers a small group of friends and forms a band of bogus tangos. With them he goes to seek his fortune in the north, presenting himself to the public as "Renatin, typical Argentinian singer".
- His most famous song, "Arrivederci Roma," is among the three most famous Italian songs of all time.
- He also wrote a number of internationally famous songs such as "Venticello de Roma", "Con un po' di fantasia", "Vogliamoci tanto bene", "Romantica", and "Te voglio bene tanto tanto".
- His post second World War success is due mainly to his leading roles in the musicals by Pietro Garinei and Sandro Giovannini. The artistic trio is responsible for the existence of the "musical" in Italy with Attanasio cavallo vanesio in 1952 (featuring the American trio Peters Sisters, Alvaro piuttosto corsaro (1953), Tobia la candida spia (1955), Un paio d'ali (1957), Rascelinaria (1958), Enrico '61 (1961), and also performed for an entire year in London at the Piccadilly Theatre in 1962, along with Il giorno della tartaruga (1965) and Alleluja, brava gente (1970).
- At the age of 14 Renato started to play drums in ballrooms around Rome. Soon after, he joined the Di Fiorenza Sisters as an actor, dancer and clown and in 1934 he was hired for his first big role by the Schwarts Brothers in the operetta "Al Cavallino bianco".
- Among the sixty plus films he worked in, one of the most relevant was Il Cappotto (The Overcoat) by Gogol, winner of the Golden Palm in Cannes.
- Among his most memorable performances are "Rascel la nuit" in 1956 and "Stasera Rascel City" in 1964.
- His performance in "Father Brown" in 1970, where he interprets a priest that solves crimes in his community, was one of the biggest television successes of the decade.
- In 1935, he joined Elena Gray for his first foreign tour in Africa.
- He decided to make his small size work for him, being only 5'2" tall, one of his major assets becoming known as the "Tiny Italian" (il piccoletto nazionale) and in his show he accentuated his stature by wearing huge extravagant coats, his most famous one had a large pocket on the back.
- He created some of his most famous characters such as "Napoleon" and "Il Corazziere" (a parody on his size since the Corazziere is a military division that employs only soldiers over 6 feet tall) that brought him to an extraordinary popularity in Italy.
- He also had a leading role in The Secret of Santa Vittoria with Anthony Quinn and Anna Magnani, Seven Hills of Rome with Mario Lanza, Questi fantasmi with Eduardo De Filippo and Figaro qua Figaro là with Totò.
- He completed his first studies at the Pio X elementary school, in his neighborhood, raised by the Brothers of Our Lady of Mercy, teachers, among other things, of singing, music and acting, with large parentheses dedicated to football.
- In his childhood, Renato lived in the Borgo district, raised together with his sister Giuseppina (who later died at the age of 17) by an aunt who replaced the continuous absence of his parents, wanderers for work, and by a grandmother, Margherita, who encourage acting.
- In 1977, he appeared in the Zeffirelli film Jesus of Nazareth as the blind man.
- In his career, Rascel had established himself as a comic and dramatic actor, dancer, singer and songwriter.
- The Seventies opened for Rascel with the definitive abandonment of the cinema. 1970 also marks the last interpretation in a musical comedy by Garinei and Giovannini - Alleluja brava gente - and Rascel has the burden at the last moment of replacing Domenico Modugno with an almost unknown young man, Gigi Proietti .
- In 1942 Rascel met Tina De Mola , with whom he fell in love, and with whom he starred in his first film, Pazzo d'amore . The two will form a steady couple in the subsequent theatrical performances signed, among others, by Nelli and Mangini , Dino Falconi , Michele Galdieri and Alfredo Polacci . With the latter, Rascel presents a preview of the famous cartoon of the Corazziere , in which he manages to make an authentic comic drama out of his stature.
- From a French powder of the time, the boy changes his stage name to Rachel , and later Rascel , due to the homonymy with Donna Rachele Mussolini.
- The very first theatrical experiences take place in the amateur dramatics directed by his father, the "Fortitudo".
- His swan song unfolds in the theatre, alongside Walter Chiari , in a play by Beckett revisited according to "his" theater of the absurd, Endgame : it is the most propitious occasion, with which Rascel can be said to be dramatically accomplished and take leave of his devoted audience.
- The first appearance on stage is in Più che monelli - a heartbreaking drama - in the part of a child who dies from a stone on the head dealt to him by a companion. He later played his first brilliant role, that of a burin who comes to town to have his photograph taken, in a farce called The Photographer in Embarrassment. In the meantime he works as a boilermaker, bricklayer and barber's boy.
- Under the pseudonym Sunny Boy , at the age of 15 he joined a small musical band called "Arcobaleno", which toured the Roman dance halls. Luigi Vitolo, alias "Majestic", Neapolitan impresario, dancer and director of the homonymous orchestra, launches him in some various art numbers, including performances of charleston and tap-dance. His companion is the Ligurian Piero Pieri .
- 1960 saw Rascel triumph at the Sanremo Festival with Romantica . For this song he is accused of plagiarism and involved in a legal case from which he will emerge unscathed thanks to an expert report signed by Maestro Igor Stravinsky .
- He l joined the Lulu Gould-Jole Naghel band as a ukulele player and was noticed by the public for his fantasist numbers: in addition to performing musical pieces, the artist was hired to accompany eccentric starlets: during his performances "for two ", he disguised himself as a gaucho, bullfighter, hussar of the queen, and sometimes, in the dance, he suddenly abandoned his partner to improvise frantic claquettes. This kind of repertoire, mixed between dance, singing and comic acting, developed better with Livia Muguet, Lutis Nar and, above all, the Di Fiorenza sisters , with whom he participated in the first vaudeville revues.
- In 1932 Rascel was noticed and engaged by the Schwartz brothers for the revival of the operetta The White Horse .
- It was in Turin where his parents, who were opera singers, were performing a show at the time Renato could really say that he was born in the back stage of the theater and that's where he spent all of his life.
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