Dino De Laurentiis

Agostino "Dino" De Laurentiis (Italian: [ˈdiːno de lauˈrɛntis] 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.

Early life

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.

Career

Film production

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

De Laurentiis is an Italian surname, and may refer to:

See also: