ROME — Dino De Laurentiis, producer of some of Italy's best-known films including works by Federico Fellini and Roberto Rossellini, has died in Los Angeles aged 91, Italian media reported on Thursday.
The Oscar-winner also produced several famous films in the United States, including "Serpico" with Al Pacino in 1973, "Three Days of the Condor" with Robert Redford and Faye Dunaway in 1975 and Ridley Scott's "Hannibal" in 2001.
"Cinema has lost one of its greats," said Walter Veltroni, an Italian lawmaker and former mayor of Rome who founded the Rome Film Festival.
"The name of Dino De Laurentiis is tied to the history of cinema," he said.
De Laurentiis was born on August 8, 1919 in Torre Annunziata near Naples and moved to the United States in the late 1960s. His parents were pasta makers.
He started out in film aged 20 and became one of the leading producers of Italy's post-war cinema boom and the neo-realist genre.
De Laurentiis produced more than 500 films over his entire career.
One of the first films he produced was "Riso Amaro" ("Bitter Rice") by Giuseppe De Santis, a 1949 classic and one of the best examples of neo-realism.
In 1949, he married Silvana Mangano, the star of "Riso Amaro" and one of the beauties of her day. They had four children together and later divorced.
He won an Oscar in 1956 for Fellini's "La Strada" and was nominated 38 times. In 2001, he received the Irving G.Thalberg Memorial Award at the Oscars for demonstrating "a consistently high quality of motion picture production."
In 2003, he won a lifetime achievement award at the Venice Film Festival.
(source:afp)
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