10 Actors Whose Careers TANKED After Winning Oscars

Robert Benigni was on top of the world when he won the Best Actor Oscar for his performance in Life Is Beautiful in 1998, while also receiving nominations for Best Director and Best Original Screenplay.

Benigni's excited, affable presence at the Oscars endeared him to basically everyone, especially when he famously climbed up on his seat after Life Is Beautiful won the Best Foreign Language Film award.

It seemed like the big Hollywood offers would start rolling in, then, but it never happened, and even in Benigni's native Italy, his next project as director-writer-actor was a brutal dud.

We're talking of course about 2002's Pinocchio, which despite being the most expensive film in the history of Italian cinema at the time, was a box office bomb and went on to score a devastating 0% on Rotten Tomatoes.

Worse still, Benigni himself received four Razzie nominations, and in a feat of tragic irony, won the Worst Actor award just five years after he scooped the Best Actor Oscar.

Pinocchio's failure torpedoed Benigni's career as both a filmmaker and an actor, shaking industry-wide confidence in him following Life Is Beautiful. He's directed only a single film since, 2005's The Tiger and the Snow, which was also a critical and commercial bust.

Though Benigni poetically redeemed himself by starring as Geppetto in Matteo Garrone's 2019 adaptation of Pinocchio, his career is nevertheless proof perfect of how damaging one massive flop can truly be, even if you've got an Oscar on your mantle.