page_title: Asia Argento
section_title: Early life
hierarchical_section_title: Asia Argento / Early life
caption_attribution_description: English: Asia and Dario Argento at the Cannes film festival
context_page_description: Asia Argento is an Italian actress, director, and singer. The daughter of filmmaker Dario Argento, she had roles in the films XXX, Land of the Dead and Marie Antoinette. She has won two David di Donatello awards for Best Actress for Let's Not Keep in Touch and Traveling Companion.
  After the Weinstein scandal in 2017, she became a leader of the "#MeToo" women's rights movement. In August 2018, The New York Times detailed allegations that Argento raped actor Jimmy Bennett in 2013 when he was 17 and she was 37; Argento denied the allegations.
context_section_description: Her father is Dario Argento, an Italian film director, producer and screenwriter, well known for his work in the Italian giallo genre and for his influence on modern horror and slasher movies. Her mother is actress Daria Nicolodi and her maternal great-grandfather was composer Alfredo Casella.
  When Argento was born in Rome, the city registry office refused to acknowledge "Asia" as an appropriate name, and instead officially inscribed her as "Aria" (a name accepted by the city registry). She nonetheless always went by the name Asia, which she later used professionally. She pronounces her name as "AH-zee-ah," which friends sometimes abbreviate to sound like "Ozzie." Argento has said that as a child she was lonely and depressed, owing in part to her parents' work. Her father used to read her his horror scripts as bedtime stories. At age eight, Argento published a book of poems. At the age of 14, she ran away from home.
  Argento has mentioned in interviews that she does not have a close relationship with her father. She has mentioned that he was absent when she was a child, and has also mentioned that, because of this, she did not have a happy childhood. Regarding her relationship with her father and her reason for acting, she has stated that:
  I never acted out of ambition; I acted to gain my father's attention. It took a long time for him to notice me – I started when I was nine, and he only cast me when I was 16. And he only became my father when he was my director. I always thought it was sick to choose looking at yourself on a big screen as your job. There has to be something crooked in your mind to want to be loved by everybody. It's like being a prostitute, to share that intimacy with all those people.
  In an interview with Filmmaker magazine, she stated that, at one time, "I was sick for a while; I was agoraphobic. I was afraid to go out of my apartment for a long time, I could only go out to work."
caption: Asia Argento and her father Dario at the 1993 Cannes Film Festival
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