Died: November 10, 2010 (at age 91)
Birthplace: Torre Annunziata, Campania, Italy
Agostino "Dino" De Laurentiis ( 8 August 1919 - 10 November 2010) was an Italian film producer. Along with Carlo Ponti, he was one of the producers that brought Italian cinema to the international scene at the end of the Second World War. He produced or co-produced more than 500 films, of which 38 were nominated for Academy Awards. He also had a brief acting career in the late 1930s and early 1940s.
He was born at Torre Annunziata in the province of Naples, and grew up selling spaghetti made by his father's pasta factory. He started his studies at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome in the years 1937-1938 then interrupted by the outbreak of the Second World War.
Following his first movie, L'ultimo Combattimento (1940), Laurentiis produced nearly 150 films during the next seven decades. In 1946 his company, the Dino de Laurentiis Cinematografica, moved into production. In the early years, De Laurentiis produced Italian neorealist films such as Bitter Rice (1946) and the Fellini classics La Strada (1954) and Nights of Cabiria (1956), often in collaboration with producer Carlo Ponti. In the 1960s, Laurentiis built his own studio facilities, although these financially collapsed during the 1970s. During this period, though, De Laurentiis produced such films as Barabbas (1961), a Christian religious epic; The Bible: In the Beginning (1966), Kiss the Girls and Make Them Die, an imitation James Bond film; Navajo Joe (1966), a spaghetti western; Anzio (1968), a World War II film; Barbarella (1968) and Danger: Diabolik (1968), both successful comic book adaptations; and The Valachi Papers (1972), made to coincide with the popularity of The Godfather.
De Laurentiis relocated to the United States in 1976, and became an American citizen in 1986. In the 1980s he had his own studio, De Laurentiis Entertainment Group (DEG), based in Wilmington, North Carolina; the building of the studio quickly made Wilmington a busy center of film and television production.
De Laurentiis made a number of successful and acclaimed films, including The Scientific Cardplayer (1972), Serpico (1973), Death Wish (1974), Mandingo (1975), Three Days of the Condor (1975), The Shootist (1976), Drum (1976), Ingmar Bergman's The Serpent's Egg (1977), Ragtime (1981), Conan the Barbarian (1982), Blue Velvet (1986) and Breakdown (1997). De Laurentiis' name become well known through the 1976 King Kong remake, which was a commercial hit; Lipstick (1976), a rape and revenge drama; Orca (1977), a killer whale film; The White Buffalo (1977), a western; the disaster movie Hurricane (1979); the remake of Flash Gordon (1980); David Lynch's Dune (1984); and King Kong Lives (1986). De Laurentiis also made several adaptations of Stephen King's works, including The Dead Zone (1983), Cat's Eye (1985), Silver Bullet (1985), and Maximum Overdrive (1986). De Laurentiis's company was involved with the horror sequels Halloween II (1981), Evil Dead II (1987) and Army of Darkness (1992).
De Laurentiis also produced the first Hannibal Lecter film, Manhunter (1986), an adaptation of the Thomas Harris novel Red Dragon. He passed on adapting the novels' sequel, The Silence of the Lambs (1991), but produced the two follow-ups, Hannibal (2001) and Red Dragon (2002), a re-adaptation of the novel. He also produced the prequel Hannibal Rising (2007), which tells the story of how Hannibal becomes a serial killer.
In the 1980s, de Laurentiis owned and operated DDL Foodshow, a specialty retailer with two gourmet Italian markets in New York City and Los Angeles.
His brief first marriage in Italy was annulled. In 1949, De Laurentiis married actress Silvana Mangano, with whom he had four children: Veronica; Raffaella, who is also a film producer; Federico, another producer who died in a plane crash in 1981 (Dino's movie Dune is dedicated to him); and Francesca. De Laurentiis and Mangano divorced in 1988; she died in 1989. In 1990, he married Martha Schumacher, who produced many of his films since 1985, and with whom he had two daughters, Carolyna and Dina. One of his grandchildren is Giada De Laurentiis, host of Everyday Italian, Behind the Bash, Giada at Home, and Giada's Weekend Getaways on Food Network. He was the younger brother of Luigi De Laurentiis, who became a film producer after Dino did, and uncle of Aurelio De Laurentiis, also a producer and the chairman of S.S.C. Napoli football club.
In 1958, he won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film for producing La Strada, back when producers and directors would win the award instead of the country it was made in.
In 2001, he received the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
In 2012, he received the America Award of the Italy-USA Foundation (in memory).
De Laurentiis died on 10 November 2010 at his residence in Beverly Hills. He was 91 years old.
Year | Title | Director |
---|---|---|
1940 | Boccaccio | Marcello Albani |
1946 | Black Eagle | Riccardo Freda |
1947 | The Captain's Daughter | Mario Camerini |
1948 | Bitter Rice | Giuseppe De Santis |
1949 | The Wolf of the Sila | Duilio Coletti |
1951 | Anna | Alberto Lattuada |
1952 | Europa '51 | Roberto Rossellini |
1954 | La Strada | Federico Fellini |
1955 | Ulysses | Mario Camerini |
1956 | War and Peace | King Vidor |
Nights of Cabiria | Federico Fellini | |
1958 | This Angry Age | René Clément |
1965 | Battle of the Bulge | Ken Annakin |
1966 | The Bible: In the Beginning | John Huston |
1967 | Lo Straniero | Luchino Visconti |
1968 | Danger: Diabolik | Mario Bava |
Barbarella | Roger Vadim | |
1973 | Serpico | Sidney Lumet |
1974 | Death Wish | Michael Winner |
1975 | Mandingo | Richard Fleischer |
1976 | The Serpent's Egg | Ingmar Bergman |
1976 | King Kong | John Guillermin |
Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull's History Lesson | Robert Altman | |
Drum | Steve Carver | |
The Shootist | Don Siegel | |
1980 | Flash Gordon | Mike Hodges |
1981 | Halloween II | Rick Rosenthal |
Ragtime | Miloš Forman | |
1982 | Fighting Back | Lewis Teague |
Conan the Barbarian | John Milius | |
Amityville II: The Possession | Damiano Damiani | |
1983 | Amityville 3-D | Richard Fleischer |
Halloween III: Season of the Witch | Tommy Lee Wallace | |
Dead Zone | David Cronenberg | |
1984 | Conan the Destroyer | Richard Fleischer |
Firestarter | Mark L. Lester | |
Dune | David Lynch | |
The Bounty | Roger Donaldson | |
1985 | Maximum Overdrive | Stephen King |
Raw Deal | John Irvin | |
Marie | Roger Donaldson | |
Silver Bullet | Daniel Attias | |
Cat's Eye | Lewis Teague | |
Year of the Dragon | Michael Cimino | |
Red Sonja | Richard Fleischer | |
1986 | Crimes of the Heart | Bruce Beresford |
Blue Velvet | David Lynch | |
Trick or Treat | Charles Martin Smith | |
Tai-Pan | Daryl Duke | |
Manhunter | Michael Mann | |
King Kong Lives | John Guillermin | |
1987 | Million Dollar Mystery | Richard Fleischer |
Hiding Out | Bob Giraldi | |
Evil Dead II | Sam Raimi | |
The Bedroom Window | Curtis Hanson | |
1989 | Collision Course | Lewis Teague |
From the Hip | Bob Clark | |
1990 | Sometimes They Come Back | Tom McLoughlin |
Desperate Hours | Michael Cimino | |
1992 | Once Upon a Crime | Eugene Levy |
Kuffs | Bruce A. Evans | |
1993 | Body of Evidence | Uli Edel |
Army of Darkness | Sam Raimi | |
1995 | Solomon & Sheba | Robert Young |
Slave of Dreams | Robert Young | |
Rumpelstiltskin | Mark Jones (I) | |
Assassins | Richard Donner | |
1996 | Unforgettable | John Dahl |
Bound | The Wachowskis | |
1997 | Breakdown | Jonathan Mostow |
2000 | U-571 | Jonathan Mostow |
2001 | Hannibal | Ridley Scott |
2002 | Red Dragon | Brett Ratner |
2006 | The Last Legion | Doug Lefler |
2007 | Hannibal Rising | Peter Webber |
Virgin Territory | David Leland |