Dino De Laurentiis, the high-flying Italian film producer and entrepreneur behind such movies as “Serpico,” “Death Wish” and “Three Days of the Condor,” died on Wednesday at his home in Beverly Hills, Calif. He was 91.
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Dino De Laurentiis with Oscars for “La Strada” in New York in 1957.
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Dino De Laurentiis at the Cannes Film Festival in 1984.
His death was confirmed by his daughter Raffaella.
Mr. De Laurentiis’s career dated to prewar Italy, and he worked in a wide range of styles and genres. His long filmography has several important titles of the early Italian New Wave, including the international success “Bitter Rice” (1949), whose star, Silvana Mangano, became Mr. De Laurentiis’s first wife; two important films by Federico Fellini (“La Strada,” 1954, and “Nights of Cabiria,” 1957); and the film that many critics regard as David Lynch’s best work (“Blue Velvet,” 1986).
But Mr. De Laurentiis never turned his nose up at unabashed popular entertainments like Sergio Corbucci’s “Goliath and the Vampires” (1961), Roger Vadim’s “Barbarella” (1968) and Richard Fleischer’s “Mandingo” (1975) — several of which hold up better today than some of Mr. De Laurentiis’s more respectable productions.
Mr. De Laurentiis 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.
Mr. De Laurentiis lured Anthony Quinn to Rome for “La Strada,” and shortly after that cast Kirk Douglas in the title role of “Ulysses,” a spectacular directed by the Italian film veteran Mario Camerini (with an uncredited assist from the new director and cinematographer Mario Bava) that Mr. 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.
Actors like Audrey Hepburn and Henry Fonda (“War and Peace,” 1956), Anthony Perkins (“This Angry Age,” 1958), Vera Miles and Van Heflin (“5 Branded Women,” 1960) and Charles Laughton (“Under Ten Flags,” 1960) made their way to Italy, where they often performed with other international stars. The results, filmed in a Babel of tongues, were dubbed into different languages for different markets.
At the same time, Mr. De Laurentiis continued making films for the home market. He had a close relationship with the legendary Italian clown Toto (for whom he produced the 1952 “Toto a Colori,” the first Italian film in color) and Alberto Sordi, a rotund comic whose portrayals of middle-class Romans struggling to stay ahead of the game became a projection of the national identity. His success, aided by the government subsidies that had been put in place to encourage postwar production in Italy, eventually allowed him to build his own studio, which he named Dinocittà.
Mr. De Laurentiis’s empire began to crumble in 1965, when Italy’s Socialist government passed new regulations that put severe restrictions on what could be called an Italian movie.
With his subsidies in doubt, his contract with Sordi coming to an end and a continuing legal battle with Fellini over unmade projects, Mr. De Laurentiis closed Dinocittà in 1972 and the next year moved to New York, where he opened an office in what was then the Gulf and Western Building on Columbus Circle.
In New York, Mr. De Laurentiis initiated a series of well-known productions, including “Serpico” (1973), “Death Wish” (1974), “Three Days of the Condor” (1975), John Wayne’s final film, “The Shootist” (1976), and John Guillerman’s big-budget remake of “King Kong” (1976).
But the successes alternated with failures, like “King of the Gypsies” (1978) and “Hurricane” (1979), and soon Mr. De Laurentiis was founding and closing production companies with dizzying speed, often selling the rights to his old films in order to secure the financing for his new ones.
Expensive follies, like a hotel opened on the Bora Bora location of “Hurricane,” an upscale deli on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and a new studio complex in North Carolina, took their toll on Mr. De Laurentiis’s bottom line, and in later years he was forced to sell of many of his properties and rein in his activities.
Still, he persisted through the 1980s and 1990s, thanks chiefly to a relationship with Stephen King, many of whose books were filmed by Mr. De Laurentiis, and his ownership of Thomas Harris’s first novel in the Hannibal Lecter series, “Red Dragon,” which Mr. 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.
Mr. De Laurentiis was born Agostino de Laurentiis in Torre Annunziata, a town outside Naples, on Aug. 8, 1919, the third in a family of seven brothers and sisters.
He had four children with Ms. Mangano: Veronica, Raffaella (who eventually joined her father in business), Federico and Francesca. After Ms. Mangano’s death in 1989, Mr. De Laurentiis married the American-born producer Martha Schumacher, with whom he had two daughters, Carolyna and Dina. Other survivors include a granddaughter, the chef and Food Network star Giada De Laurentiis.
Mr. De Laurentiis’s second wife, as Martha De Laurentiis, continued to work with her husband as a co-producer. Their most recent project was “Hannibal Rising” (2007), a prequel to the Lecter saga starring the young French actor Gaspard Ulliel as the apprentice flesh eater.
Dino De Laurentiis, Prolific Film Producer, Dies at 91 - NYTimes.com
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