Valeria Golino /

Valeria Golino (born 22 October 1966) is an Italian-Greek film and television actress. She is perhaps best known to U.S. audiences for the 1988 Academy Award-winning film Rain Man and the 1988 comedy Big Top Pee-wee, and to international audiences for the Hot Shots! films alongside Charlie Sheen. She has won the David di Donatello, Silver Ribbon, and Coppa Volpi awards. Golino was born in Naples, Italy to an Italian father who was a Germanist and scholar and a Greek mother who was a painter; one of her grandmothers was Egyptian-French. She grew up in an "artistic household" and was raised between Athens and Naples. Golino is the niece of L'Espresso journalist Enzo Golino; her brother is a musician. She started work as a model in Athens and then dropped out of high school after her first film, after having been discovered by the film's director, Lina Wertmuller. Golino obtained her first starring role in 1985's Little Fires and won the Best Actress Award at the Venice Film Festival for Storia d'amore in 1986. She began to work in Hollywood in 1988 with the movie Big Top Pee-wee and received roles in prominent films such as Rain Man, as the girlfriend of Tom Cruise, and the comedy