Edoardo Ballerini (1970)

 career

 Early roles

Edoardo Ballerini's first professional role was as an autistic teenager on Law & Order . Two years later, he starred in the John Leguizamo comedy The Pest and, after that, in (Whit Stillman's The Last Days of Disco, 1998) and (Amos Kollek's Sue, 1998).

 Major roles

Ballerini was cast as a "star chef" in Bob Giraldi's Dinner Rush opposite Danny Aiello. The film grossed only $638,227 but received largely positive reviews. Internationally, the film did much better and broke into the top ten in box office receipts in Japan in 2003.

 Valentino

The same year, Ballerini wrote, directed and starred in a short film about 1920's film icon Rudolph Valentino. The film premiered at the 2003 Sundance Film Festival and was entered into the permanent archive at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Los Angeles. The film was also presented at the National Museum of Cinema in Turin, Italy in 2009 as part of a Valentino retrospective. Emily Leider, in her biography Dark Lover (Farrar, Strouss & Giroux, 2003), wrote that Ballerini "infuses his with exactly the right mix of pride, elegance, grace and anguish... on screen, Ballerini's resemblance to Valentino is uncanny." A feature length script written as a follow-up Ballerini's Valentino short has recently been optioned by producer Andrew Lauren.

Ballerini was also cast as another famous 1920's Italian, the anarchist and labor leader Carlo Tresca, in No God, No Master .

 Theater

Ballerini made his first professional appearance on stage as a child in 1980 at Theater for the New City, New York, in Mario Prosperi's "Uncle Mario." He subsequently joined the Italian Commedia dell'Arte troupe "I Giullari di Piazza" for several performances. Stage credits as an adult include John Jesurun's "Chang in a Void Moon" , "The End of Cinematics" (St. Ann's Space), "Crossroads" , and several pieces in "The Eugene O'Neill Project" (The Actors Studio, The Eugene O'Neill Center).

 Audiobooks

Ballerini is also a frequent narrator of audiobooks. Titles include "Z," by Michael Thomas Ford ; "The Moscow Club," by Joseph Finder ; and "West of Here," by Jonathan Evison .

 personal life

Edoardo Ballerini was born to an Italian father, the poet Luigi Ballerini, and an American mother. He grew up between New York City and Milan, Italy. He is a dual citizen, and bilingual. His early schooling took place in New York, at P.S. 41 and later Friends Seminary, before he left home at age 14 for boarding school. From there, he attended Wesleyan University. The summer following his graduation with Honors, Ballerini was given a scholarship to study Latin in Rome. In Italy, he discovered a group of ex-pat actors who were forming a theater company. He joined the troupe. The following fall he attended regular acting classes in New York at HB Studios and The Lee Strasberg Theater Institute. He later became an observer at The Actor's Studio. After living for several years in New York, Ballerini moved to Los Angeles in 2000 before eventually returning to New York, where he continues his career.