Agostino "Dino" De Laurentiis,
film producer, born 8 August 1919;
died 11 November 2010
Italian movie tycoon whose list of credits
featured as many disasters as hits
11.11.2010
FOTO - The Oscar winning La Strada, produced by Dino De Laurentiis, in 1954. Photographs: Photo12; Kobal; Rob Loud/Getty
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The Italian-born film producer Dino De Laurentiis, who has died aged 91, will perhaps go down in movie history as the last "transatlantic" tycoon. Over a career spanning more than 60 years, producing films on both sides of the ocean, he had as many flops as hits. But De Laurentiis almost always succeeded in staying afloat.
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In Rome, he produced Federico Fellini's Oscar-winning La Strada (1954) and the grandiose spectacular War and Peace (1956), but also made The Bible: In the Beginning (1966) and Waterloo (1970), which never recovered their costs. Relocating to the US, he enjoyed success with Serpico (1973), Death Wish (1974), Three Days of the Condor (1975) and Conan the Barbarian (1982), but had financial disasters including Year of the Dragon (1985) and a failed food emporium, which he opened in New York. De Laurentiis was also a starmaker, both in Italy, where he launched the career of the actor Silvana Mangano, who became his wife, and in the US, where he boosted Al Pacino's career.
.
The Italian-born film producer Dino De Laurentiis, who has died aged 91, will perhaps go down in movie history as the last "transatlantic" tycoon. Over a career spanning more than 60 years, producing films on both sides of the ocean, he had as many flops as hits. But De Laurentiis almost always succeeded in staying afloat.
.
In Rome, he produced Federico Fellini's Oscar-winning La Strada (1954) and the grandiose spectacular War and Peace (1956), but also made The Bible: In the Beginning (1966) and Waterloo (1970), which never recovered their costs. Relocating to the US, he enjoyed success with Serpico (1973), Death Wish (1974), Three Days of the Condor (1975) and Conan the Barbarian (1982), but had financial disasters including Year of the Dragon (1985) and a failed food emporium, which he opened in New York. De Laurentiis was also a starmaker, both in Italy, where he launched the career of the actor Silvana Mangano, who became his wife, and in the US, where he boosted Al Pacino's career.
Born in Torre Annunziata, in the province of Naples, De Laurentiis was the son of a pasta manufacturer for whom he worked as a travelling salesman in his teens. While selling pasta in Rome in the mid-30s, he decided on an impulse to enrol at the city's film school, the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, as an actor. He soon realised that his flair was more for production. He was able to gain experience in most sectors of the industry before producing his first film, L'Amore Canta (Love Song, 1941), at the age of 22.
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After serving in the army during the second world war, De Laurentiis became an executive producer at one of Rome's most important emerging film companies, Lux. Among the films he produced for Lux was Riso Amaro (Bitter Rice, 1949), directed by Giuseppe De Santis. The film starred Mangano, whom he married in July that year, after the annulment of his first marriage, to Bianca de Paolis, a banker's daughter. A product of what was then becoming known as neorealism, and reflecting the director's leftist political views, Riso Amaro achieved a phenomenal box-office success at home and abroad – an early indication of the producer's intuition. Neorealism was all very well but, as the film proved, sex and melodrama were what sold tickets.
.
So did Italian comedy – in the domestic market at least. As a Neapolitan, De Laurentiis was proud to have made the film Napoli Milionaria (Naples Millionaire, 1950), which the great actor and dramatist Eduardo De Filippo adapted from his stage hit, presenting a slice of life in Naples during and after the second world war. De Filippo resumed his original role in the film, but it was De Laurentiis's inspired idea that his character's best scene (in which, during a police inspection, he pretends to be dead to hide the blackmarket goods hidden under the bed by his wife) be given to another character, played by the comic star Totò.
.
In 1950 De Laurentiis and another of the Lux team, Carlo Ponti, broke away and formed their own company, Ponti-De Laurentiis Cinematografica, producing films including Europa 51 (No Greater Love, 1952), directed by Roberto Rossellini. Ponti and De Laurentiis had a critical and commercial hit with Fellini's La Strada, which starred Anthony Quinn as a strongman and Giulietta Masina as his timid assistant. The film won the Oscar for best foreign-language feature in 1957.
.
Many years later, the director Jean-Luc Godard, in a speech paying tribute to film producers, said at the Venice film festival: "Without Ponti and De Laurentiis, La Strada would never have been made." Fellini, who was present, shouted sarcastically: "La Strada was made in spite of Ponti and De Laurentiis!" His later film Le Notti di Cabiria (Nights of Cabiria, 1957) was also produced by De Laurentiis, who had by then split with Ponti.
.
In the meantime, De Laurentiis had begun his attempted Americanisation of the Italian cinema with his first historical spectacular, Ulisse (Ulysses, 1954). The film was made with the familiar Italian gusto for the genre, but with a big American star, Kirk Douglas. It was to have been directed by Georg Wilhelm Pabst, but he quit at the last minute and the film was directed instead by a respected craftsman, Mario Camerini, best known for his sophisticated comedies.
.
Having encouraged the tradition of signing up big Hollywood stars for Italian-produced films, De Laurentiis never looked back. In 1955 he decided to bring King Vidor to Rome to direct War and Peace. Another producer, Michael Todd, also planned to film Leo Tolstoy's novel, and both wanted Audrey Hepburn for the role of Natasha. De Laurentiis let it be known he was negotiating with Jean Simmons and Stewart Granger for the lead characters and secretly went to Switzerland, where he got a commitment from Hepburn and Mel Ferrer.
.
He already saw himself as a Hollywood tycoon and was also an expert player of the Italian political game. In order to obtain public finance for the costly studios he was to build in the early 1960s on a sprawling site south of Rome, De Laurentiis somehow succeeded in pushing its boundaries southwards so that it could qualify for the government's Cassa per il Mezzogiorno (Fund for the South).
.
Like the state-owned Cinecittà studios, built by Mussolini in the 1930s, the new studio complex was in open countryside. Its stages were impressively modern, but the promised production facilities were never fully to materialise. It was there that John Huston shot The Bible: In the Beginning, which ran absurdly over-budget, and where Sergei Bondarchuk made the mammoth Italian-Soviet co-production Waterloo, for which the only cost savings came on location in Moscow, where they got thousands of Soviet Army soldiers as extras free of charge.
.
By the end of the 1960s, the studios, dubbed "Dinocittà", were in dire financial straits. A costly project never realised was Fellini's Il Viaggio di G Mastorna (G Mastorna's Journey), for which they built a main square and cathedral that remained on the backlot for years after the studios had been abandoned. De Laurentiis had hoped to make up for having missed out on La Dolce Vita (1960), the biggest commercial and artistic hit of the Italian cinema of those times. He had refused to take on the project because he wanted Paul Newman rather than Marcello Mastroianni in the lead role.
.
De Laurentiis had consoled himself in 1959 with the inspired idea of teaming Italy's two most popular stars, Vittorio Gassman and Alberto Sordi, as two seedy first world war soldiers in Mario Monicelli's La Grande Guerra (The Great War), which won the Golden Lion at the Venice film festival.
.
His mania for signing up big names induced De Laurentiis to hire Richard Fleischer to direct the biblical epic Barabbas (1961), with an incongruous cast of mixed nationalities. He later brought Roger Vadim and Jane Fonda to Dinocittà to make an enjoyable and erotic Barbarella (1968), adapted from Jean-Claude Forest's comic, but he came a cropper with another comic-strip movie, Diabolik (1968), directed by the cult horror guru Mario Bava. He later directed another film based on a popular comics character, Flash Gordon (1980), directed by Mike Hodges.
.
De Laurentiis finally abandoned Italy in the mid-70s amid a financial scandal surrounding his attempts to rescue Dinocittà. It was an undignified exit, but he landed on his feet in the US, even if one of his first films there, a 1976 remake of King Kong, was ridiculed by many.
.
During the making of the mafia drama The Valachi Papers (1972), directed by Terence Young and starring Charles Bronson as the Cosa Nostra's Joseph Valachi, De Laurentiis said he had received threats. He arranged a meeting with a boss in Miami, after which he had no more trouble. He made another crime drama, Serpico, the following year. It was directed by Sidney Lumet and starred Pacino, whom De Laurentiis had seen in a play off-Broadway. He was impressed by the actor's resemblance to the real detective.
.
De Laurentiis also produced Conan the Barbarian, which helped to launch the career of Arnold Schwarzenegger. Both Milos Forman and David Lynch were able to survive two exorbitant flops with De Laurentiis, Ragtime (1981) and Dune (1984) respectively.
He became an American citizen in 1986 but continued to return to Italy, where he made the submarine drama U-571 (2000) at Cinecittà and shot locations for Hannibal (2001) in Florence. He first met the author Thomas Harris when he produced Manhunter (1986), an adaptation of Harris's novel Red Dragon, about the serial killer Hannibal Lecter, played in the film by Brian Cox.
.
Having missed out on directing the sequel, The Silence of the Lambs (1991), starring Anthony Hopkins as Lecter, De Laurentiis paid Harris $10m for the rights to the third novel about the serial killer. The result was Hannibal (2001), directed by Ridley Scott and starring Hopkins. The following year, he produced a remake of Red Dragon, again with Hopkins, who presented De Laurentiis with the Irving G Thalberg Memorial award at the Oscars in 2001.
.
De Laurentiis dedicated the award to the six women in his life, all of whom survive him. These include his three daughters by Mangano: Raffaella and Francesca, who are both film producers, and Veronica, who is an actor. De Laurentiis's and Mangano's only son, Federico, was killed in a plane crash in 1981, after which Mangano left the US and returned to Europe, settling in Madrid. She and De Laurentiis divorced shortly before her death in 1989. The other three women in De Laurentiis's life were Martha Schumacher, whom he met in New York during the filming of Dune and married in 1990, and their daughters, Carolyna and Dina.
.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/
.
After serving in the army during the second world war, De Laurentiis became an executive producer at one of Rome's most important emerging film companies, Lux. Among the films he produced for Lux was Riso Amaro (Bitter Rice, 1949), directed by Giuseppe De Santis. The film starred Mangano, whom he married in July that year, after the annulment of his first marriage, to Bianca de Paolis, a banker's daughter. A product of what was then becoming known as neorealism, and reflecting the director's leftist political views, Riso Amaro achieved a phenomenal box-office success at home and abroad – an early indication of the producer's intuition. Neorealism was all very well but, as the film proved, sex and melodrama were what sold tickets.
.
So did Italian comedy – in the domestic market at least. As a Neapolitan, De Laurentiis was proud to have made the film Napoli Milionaria (Naples Millionaire, 1950), which the great actor and dramatist Eduardo De Filippo adapted from his stage hit, presenting a slice of life in Naples during and after the second world war. De Filippo resumed his original role in the film, but it was De Laurentiis's inspired idea that his character's best scene (in which, during a police inspection, he pretends to be dead to hide the blackmarket goods hidden under the bed by his wife) be given to another character, played by the comic star Totò.
.
In 1950 De Laurentiis and another of the Lux team, Carlo Ponti, broke away and formed their own company, Ponti-De Laurentiis Cinematografica, producing films including Europa 51 (No Greater Love, 1952), directed by Roberto Rossellini. Ponti and De Laurentiis had a critical and commercial hit with Fellini's La Strada, which starred Anthony Quinn as a strongman and Giulietta Masina as his timid assistant. The film won the Oscar for best foreign-language feature in 1957.
.
Many years later, the director Jean-Luc Godard, in a speech paying tribute to film producers, said at the Venice film festival: "Without Ponti and De Laurentiis, La Strada would never have been made." Fellini, who was present, shouted sarcastically: "La Strada was made in spite of Ponti and De Laurentiis!" His later film Le Notti di Cabiria (Nights of Cabiria, 1957) was also produced by De Laurentiis, who had by then split with Ponti.
.
In the meantime, De Laurentiis had begun his attempted Americanisation of the Italian cinema with his first historical spectacular, Ulisse (Ulysses, 1954). The film was made with the familiar Italian gusto for the genre, but with a big American star, Kirk Douglas. It was to have been directed by Georg Wilhelm Pabst, but he quit at the last minute and the film was directed instead by a respected craftsman, Mario Camerini, best known for his sophisticated comedies.
.
Having encouraged the tradition of signing up big Hollywood stars for Italian-produced films, De Laurentiis never looked back. In 1955 he decided to bring King Vidor to Rome to direct War and Peace. Another producer, Michael Todd, also planned to film Leo Tolstoy's novel, and both wanted Audrey Hepburn for the role of Natasha. De Laurentiis let it be known he was negotiating with Jean Simmons and Stewart Granger for the lead characters and secretly went to Switzerland, where he got a commitment from Hepburn and Mel Ferrer..
He already saw himself as a Hollywood tycoon and was also an expert player of the Italian political game. In order to obtain public finance for the costly studios he was to build in the early 1960s on a sprawling site south of Rome, De Laurentiis somehow succeeded in pushing its boundaries southwards so that it could qualify for the government's Cassa per il Mezzogiorno (Fund for the South).
.
Like the state-owned Cinecittà studios, built by Mussolini in the 1930s, the new studio complex was in open countryside. Its stages were impressively modern, but the promised production facilities were never fully to materialise. It was there that John Huston shot The Bible: In the Beginning, which ran absurdly over-budget, and where Sergei Bondarchuk made the mammoth Italian-Soviet co-production Waterloo, for which the only cost savings came on location in Moscow, where they got thousands of Soviet Army soldiers as extras free of charge.
.
By the end of the 1960s, the studios, dubbed "Dinocittà", were in dire financial straits. A costly project never realised was Fellini's Il Viaggio di G Mastorna (G Mastorna's Journey), for which they built a main square and cathedral that remained on the backlot for years after the studios had been abandoned. De Laurentiis had hoped to make up for having missed out on La Dolce Vita (1960), the biggest commercial and artistic hit of the Italian cinema of those times. He had refused to take on the project because he wanted Paul Newman rather than Marcello Mastroianni in the lead role.
.
De Laurentiis had consoled himself in 1959 with the inspired idea of teaming Italy's two most popular stars, Vittorio Gassman and Alberto Sordi, as two seedy first world war soldiers in Mario Monicelli's La Grande Guerra (The Great War), which won the Golden Lion at the Venice film festival.
.
His mania for signing up big names induced De Laurentiis to hire Richard Fleischer to direct the biblical epic Barabbas (1961), with an incongruous cast of mixed nationalities. He later brought Roger Vadim and Jane Fonda to Dinocittà to make an enjoyable and erotic Barbarella (1968), adapted from Jean-Claude Forest's comic, but he came a cropper with another comic-strip movie, Diabolik (1968), directed by the cult horror guru Mario Bava. He later directed another film based on a popular comics character, Flash Gordon (1980), directed by Mike Hodges.
.
De Laurentiis finally abandoned Italy in the mid-70s amid a financial scandal surrounding his attempts to rescue Dinocittà. It was an undignified exit, but he landed on his feet in the US, even if one of his first films there, a 1976 remake of King Kong, was ridiculed by many.
.
During the making of the mafia drama The Valachi Papers (1972), directed by Terence Young and starring Charles Bronson as the Cosa Nostra's Joseph Valachi, De Laurentiis said he had received threats. He arranged a meeting with a boss in Miami, after which he had no more trouble. He made another crime drama, Serpico, the following year. It was directed by Sidney Lumet and starred Pacino, whom De Laurentiis had seen in a play off-Broadway. He was impressed by the actor's resemblance to the real detective.
.
De Laurentiis also produced Conan the Barbarian, which helped to launch the career of Arnold Schwarzenegger. Both Milos Forman and David Lynch were able to survive two exorbitant flops with De Laurentiis, Ragtime (1981) and Dune (1984) respectively.
He became an American citizen in 1986 but continued to return to Italy, where he made the submarine drama U-571 (2000) at Cinecittà and shot locations for Hannibal (2001) in Florence. He first met the author Thomas Harris when he produced Manhunter (1986), an adaptation of Harris's novel Red Dragon, about the serial killer Hannibal Lecter, played in the film by Brian Cox.
.
Having missed out on directing the sequel, The Silence of the Lambs (1991), starring Anthony Hopkins as Lecter, De Laurentiis paid Harris $10m for the rights to the third novel about the serial killer. The result was Hannibal (2001), directed by Ridley Scott and starring Hopkins. The following year, he produced a remake of Red Dragon, again with Hopkins, who presented De Laurentiis with the Irving G Thalberg Memorial award at the Oscars in 2001.
.
De Laurentiis dedicated the award to the six women in his life, all of whom survive him. These include his three daughters by Mangano: Raffaella and Francesca, who are both film producers, and Veronica, who is an actor. De Laurentiis's and Mangano's only son, Federico, was killed in a plane crash in 1981, after which Mangano left the US and returned to Europe, settling in Madrid. She and De Laurentiis divorced shortly before her death in 1989. The other three women in De Laurentiis's life were Martha Schumacher, whom he met in New York during the filming of Dune and married in 1990, and their daughters, Carolyna and Dina.
.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/
