He’s also physically extremely courageous. Radford explained: “This is about a guy who’s determined – he’s a forceful character. In working on the script with Bocelli, Radford got to know him and began to understand exactly why the singer “doesn’t consider himself to be handicapped in any way”. “Then, when he was 12, he was playing football in his blind school and somebody kicked a ball that hit his other eye and blinded him.” He was categorised as blind, but with a limited amount of sight,” he said. He was in hospital most of his early childhood until they managed to save about 10% of the sight in one eye. The director was initially wary of making a film about a living person, but he said he found Bocelli’s story so inspirational. He said that Bocelli tries to avoid embarrassing people, believing that “nobody wants to see me reaching for a chair like a desperate man with my arms stretched out and feeling about”.

Radford told the Observer that Bocelli asked that Sebastian did not attempt to portray a blind person “because I spend most of my life trying to pretend that I can actually see”. He is portrayed in the film by Toby Sebastian, the British actor known for Game of Thrones, who speaks with an Italian accent and mimes to tracks of Bocelli’s voice that are synchronised in a complex technical process. Having made ends meet as a bar singer, Bocelli went on to perform to sold-out audiences all over the world, sang to presidents and popes, and was awarded a star on the Hollywood walk of fame.

Bocelli went blind as a child, struggled to teach himself to read music in Braille, and competed in talent shows until his potential was recognised by Luciano Pavarotti, who declared that “there is no finer voice than Bocelli”. This new film, based on Bocelli’s autobiographical novel of the same name, explores the relationship between blindness and hearing, as well as other senses heightened by the loss of sight.

Opera singer botticelli