Italian film producer Dino De Laurentiis died at his home in Beverly Hills, California, on 10 November 2010. Born Agostino de Laurentiis in Torre Annunziata (a suburb of Naples), Italy, on 8 August 1919, he won an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1957 for La strada, and then the following year for Nights of Cabiria. He also won the Academy’s Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award in 2001, and the Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror Films Lifetime Achievement Award in 1997. At the other end of the spectrum, he was nominated for two Razzies for Worst Picture, for Year of the Dragon (1985) and Body of Evidence (1993).
His film production career dates from the early 1940s, and covers many genres and styles, including several major titles from the early Italian New Wave. But he was willing to work on almost anything, from Fellini to comic book adaptations. The New York Times writes that he “was among the first European producers to realize the potential of the international co-production. In the early 1950s, when the vertically integrated Hollywood studios were breaking up because of a Justice Department anti-monopoly decree, studio-groomed stars were turning into freelance agents, and back lots were beginning to be sold off in favor of using location photography, the studios started to turn to outside suppliers to keep a steady stream of product coming in for their distribution apparatus.” De Laurentiis brought high-powered, high-priced Hollywood talent to Italy to keep costs down on big name films. For instance, he imported Anthony Quinn for La Strada and Kirk Douglas for Ulysses, “a spectacular directed by the Italian film veteran Mario Camerini… that De Laurentiis sold to Paramount. The formula proved to be a profitable one, allowing Mr. De Laurentiis to pay grandiose salaries to his imported stars while cutting costs by using local technicians.”
His filmmaking empire fell apart under the Italian Socialist government in the mid-1960s, and in the early 1970s, he stopped fighting and moved to New York. His new US company opened with a bang, producing films such as Serpico (1973), Death Wish (1974), John Wayne’s finale, The Shootist (1976), and King Kong (1976). But his success wasn’t monolithic, and he found his share of failures, such that he opened and closed a series of production companies, selling off rights to older films to fund new productions.
The Times also says “he persisted through the 1980s and 1990s, thanks chiefly to a relationship with Stephen King, many of whose books were filmed by De Laurentiis, and his ownership of Thomas Harris’s first novel in the Hannibal Lecter series, Red Dragon, which De Laurentiis filmed twice: first in 1986 as Manhunter, with Brian Cox in the role of the cannibalistic serial killer, and then under the novel’s original title in 2002, with Anthony Hopkins, who had become a star playing Lecter in the non-De Laurentiis Silence of the Lambs, back for another turn in the role.”
In the end, he produced literally hundreds of films. His genre productions include: The Last Legion (2007), Unforgettable (1996), Army of Darkness (1992), Sometimes They Come Back (1991), King Kong Lives (1986), Maximum Overdrive (1986), Silver Bullet (1985), Cat’s Eye (1985), Dune (1984), Conan the Destroyer (1984), The Dead Zone (1983), Conan the Barbarian (1982), Amityville II: The Possession (1982), Flash Gordon (1980), Orca (1977), King Kong (1976), Barbarella (1968), L’odissea (1968), Matchless (1967), The Flying Saucer (1964), and Goliath and the Vampires (1961).
In 1949, he produced the Italian New Wave film Bitter Rice, which starred Silvana Mangano. He married her in July of that year, and they had three daughters (including his later business partner, daughter Raffaella) and one son (Federico, who died in an airplane crash in 1981). After Mangano’s death in 1989, he married American-born producer Martha Schumacher, with whom he had two daughters. He is also survived by several grandchildren, including chef and Food Network star Giada De Laurentiis.