Dino De Laurentiis

Dino De Laurentiis (born August 8, 1919, Torre Annunziata, Italy—died November 11, 2010, Beverly Hills, California, U.S.) was an Italian-born American film producer known for his prolific output of films ranging from the populist to the cerebral.

De Laurentiis—one of seven children—was raised near Naples. After leaving school at age 15, he briefly worked for his father, a pasta manufacturer, before attending the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, a film school in Rome. He acted and performed odd jobs on film sets before producing his first film at age 20. He scored his first hit with Riso amaro (1949; Bitter Rice), a drama about Italian rice-field workers that was dominated by the sensuous presence of Silvana Mangano, his future wife.

De Laurentiis formed a joint production company with fellow producer Carlo Ponti and produced films such as Federico Fellini’s La strada (1954) and Le notti di Cabiria (1957; The Nights of Cabiria), both of which won Academy Awards for best foreign-language film. In 1964 he opened a studio, Dinocittà, where he made several epics; their lack of success, combined with increasingly stringent nationalist restrictions on film production, forced him to sell the studio in the early 1970s. By that time, he had established strong relations with American studios, particularly Paramount Pictures, which distributed Romeo and Juliet (1968) and Barbarella (1968).

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De Laurentiis then moved to the United States, where he produced such popular films as the crime drama Serpico (1973)—the rights to which he acquired when the biography upon which it was based was only a 20-page draft—Death Wish (1974), Three Days of the Condor (1975), and King Kong (1976), as well as Ragtime (1981), a critically lauded adaptation of E.L. Doctorow’s novel. In 1984 he opened another film studio in Wilmington, North Carolina, and—after engineering the De Laurentiis Entertainment Group (DEG), an umbrella company—he opened production offices in Australia. DEG failed four years later, though it managed to release such classics as director David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986) and Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989).

However, the production company he cofounded (1983) with his future wife, Martha Schumacher, survived to produce cult classics such as Army of Darkness (1992). De Laurentiis had also acquired the rights to Thomas Harris’s novels about serial killer Hannibal Lecter, and, though he was not involved with the production of The Silence of the Lambs (1991), he produced Manhunter (1986)—later remade as Red Dragon (2002)—Hannibal (2001), and Hannibal Rising (2007).

In 2001 De Laurentiis was awarded the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award for lifetime achievement by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.