Dominot

Dominot (1930 – 17 October 2014) was an Italian actor and female impersonator. For many years he was part of the avant-garde café society in Rome that was portrayed in the film La Dolce Vita. Dominot himself appeared in La Dolce Vita. Biography Antonio Iacono (or Jacono) was born in Tunis in 1930 (according to Andrea Pini in 1934), raised by the immigrants from Caltanissetta, and in his hometown he began his first theater practice. At a very young age, he started to perform en travesti in the local "la Pochinierre". Around the age of twenty he moved to Paris, where he studied acting at a theater school with Jacques Toulsa of the Comédie-Française. To pay for his studies, he did travesti striptease shows at Madame Arthur (which at the time was, in Europe, the most famous venue of travesti shows) in Pigalle, and sang at Le Carrousel de Paris. Later he also performed en travesti in Tehran, where he lived for a short time. At the end of the 1950s he settled permanently in Rome, where he attended the café society portrayed in the film La Dolce Vita, without hiding his homosexuality, and befriending among others, Giò Stajano and . In 1958 he met Federico Fellini, who gave him a part in La Dolce Vita. The final line of the film belongs to Dominot, who plays himself: an out, cross-dressing, gay man in Rome of the sixties. The film performances of Iacono and Stajano have been connected to the rise of homosexual visibility in Italy by the historian of homosexuality Andrea Pini.