Italy’s Oscar-winning film producer Dino De Laurentiis has died, aged 91, his family said on Thursday, drawing tributes from Italian politicians — and Hollywood star Arnold Schwarzenegger.
De Laurentiis, whose career included art house masterpieces and box office blockbusters, worked with some of Italy’s best-known directors such as Federico Fellini and Roberto Rossellini before breaking into Hollywood.
He died in Los Angeles after being gravely ill for two weeks.
Photo: AFP
“Cinema has lost one of its greats,” said Walter Veltroni, an Italian lawmaker and former mayor of Rome who founded the Rome Film Festival.
“The name of Dino De Laurentiis is tied to the history of cinema,” he said.
His nephew Aurelio De Laurentiis, also a well-known producer, confirmed his uncle’s death as he spoke to reporters in Rome ahead of his departure for the funeral in the US.
He described his uncle as an “intellectual” who used cinema as “a way of embracing and understanding life.”
He said his uncle’s passion for film began when Dino was a young boy and flourished in the “magic climate” of the 1950s.
“There wasn’t a fascination with television at the time, but a great fascination with cinema,” he said. “When you talked about work with Dino one thing was sure: It was fun, you would toss ideas back and forth.”
Film star turned California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger paid tribute to the man who gave him his break in cinema.
“The world lost a great entrepreneur, genius and salesman today with the passing of Dino De Laurentiis,” said the former Austrian bodybuilding champion and actor, who is due to quit his job as California governor in January.
“Dino always treated me like a son and gave me my first big break in the movie business with Conan the Barbarian, which launched my career,” Schwarzenegger said.
“Dino always said you need three things in life: brains, heart and balls, and I hope I’ve exemplified that advice throughout my career,” he added.
Dino De Laurentiis produced more than 500 films over his entire career, working with some of the biggest names in European film as well as Hollywood.
Starting out in film aged just 20, he became one of the leading producers of Italy’s post-war cinema boom and the neo-realist genre.
One of the first films he produced was Riso Amaro (“Bitter Rice”) by Giuseppe De Santis, a 1949 classic and one of the best examples of neo-realism.
He won an Oscar in 1956 for Fellini’s La Strada and was nominated 38 times. In 2001, he received the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award at the Oscars for demonstrating “a consistently high quality of motion picture production.”
In 2003, he won a lifetime achievement award at the Venice Film Festival.
De Laurentiis worked closely with the legendary Italian comic actor Toto and Alberto Sordi, one of Italy’s best-loved stars whose portrayals of middle-class Romans struggling to get by became national classics.
In the 1960s, De Laurentiis built a film studio near Rome known as Dinocitta — after the famous Cinecitta (“Cinema City”) — that was inaugurated by US director John Huston.
His work became increasingly in demand in Hollywood, enjoying box office success with Serpico starring Al Pacino in 1973, Three Days of the Condor with Robert Redford and Faye Dunaway in 1975, King Kong in 1976 and Ridley Scott’s Hannibal in 2001.
However, not all of his movies were hits.
His 1984 science fiction film Dune, written and directed by David Lynch, was a commercial flop and was slammed by critics.
De Laurentiis was born on Aug. 8, 1919, in Torre Annunziata near Naples and moved to the US in the early 1970s. His parents were pasta makers.
He married Silvana Mangano, the star of Riso Amaro and one of the beauties of her day. They had four children together, but later separated.
In 1981, his son died in an airplane accident in Alaska.
Following Mangano’s death, he married Martha De Laurentiis in 1990 and they had two daughters.
His granddaughter, Giada, is a well-known US chef and hosts a program on the Food Network.
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