Dino De Laurentiis Biography

Quick Facts

NAME: Dino De Laurentiis
OCCUPATION: Producer
BIRTH DATE: August 08, 1919
DEATH DATE: November 10, 2010
EDUCATION: Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia
PLACE OF BIRTH: Torre Annunciata, Italy
PLACE OF DEATH: Beverly Hills, California

Best Known For

Dino De Laurentiis was a film producer who over his 60-year career produced more than 600 films, from King Kong to Serpico to Flash Gordon.

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Dino De Laurentiis

APA Style

Dino De Laurentiis. (2013). The Biography Channel website. Retrieved 01:53, May 26, 2013, from http://www.biography.com/people/dino-de-laurentiis-271667.

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Dino De Laurentiis. [Internet]. 2013. The Biography Channel website. Available from: http://www.biography.com/people/dino-de-laurentiis-271667 [Accessed 26 May 2013].

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"Dino De Laurentiis," The Biography Channel website, 2013, http://www.biography.com/people/dino-de-laurentiis-271667 [accessed May 26, 2013].

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"Dino De Laurentiis," The Biography Channel website, http://www.biography.com/people/dino-de-laurentiis-271667 (accessed May 26, 2013).

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Dino De Laurentiis [Internet]. The Biography Channel website; 2013 [cited 2013 May 26] Available from: http://www.biography.com/people/dino-de-laurentiis-271667.

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Dino De Laurentiis, http://www.biography.com/people/dino-de-laurentiis-271667 (last visited May 26, 2013).

AMA Style

Dino De Laurentiis. The Biography Channel website. 2013. Available at: http://www.biography.com/people/dino-de-laurentiis-271667. Accessed May 26, 2013.

Synopsis

From horror to art house, Dino De Laurentiis produced a wide variety of films during his 60-year career. He produced the Oscar-winning best foreign films La Strada and Nights of Cambria, both directed by Federico Fellini. He also produced such films as Serpico, King Kong (1976) and Dune. In 2000, he received the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award in recognition of his life’s work.

Early Career

Producer. Born on August 8, 1919, in Torre Annunciata, Italy. From horror to art house, Dino De Laurentiis has produced a variety of films during his more than six-decade long career. He produced the Oscar-winning best foreign films, Federico Fellini's La Strada and Nights of Cabiria. The son of a pasta maker, he went to Rome to study at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia while in his teens. De Laurentiis then began gaining hands-on experience in film. Taking on nearly very task involved in filmmaking, he was a prop handler, an extra, an actor, and an assistant director.

At the age of 20, De Laurentiis produced his first picture, Troppo tardi t’ho conosciuta (1939). This was soon followed by L’amore canta (1941), but his work was soon affected by World War II. He scored his first international success with Riso amaro in 1949. It was later released in the United States as Bitter Rice. The drama starred Silvana Mangano as a beautiful peasant woman who works in the rice fields and gets tangled up in a difficult situation. Love blossomed between Di Laurentiis and Mangano, and the couple married that same year. They became a super couple in the Italian film world.

Italian Film Royalty

In the early 1950s, De Laurentiis joined forces with another legendary Italian filmmaker, Carlo Ponti (who also the husband of screen siren Sophia Loren). They established the Ponti-De Laurentiis production company and made several notable films together. Two of their most critically acclaimed projects were La Strada (1954) starring Anthony Quinn and The Nights of Cambria (1956), both of which won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film and were directed by Federico Fellini.

The pair also created elaborate film epics, such as Ulysses (1954), which starred Kirk Douglas and Silvana Mangano. The film tackled the ancient saga about the sailor Ulysses and his journey home after the Trojan War, which was written by the Greek poet Homer. De Laurentiis and Ponti also produced an adaptation of the classic Russian novel War and Peace (1956) by Leo Tolstoy. Audrey Hepburn, Henry Fonda, and Mel Ferrer played the lead roles in the film, which earned an Academy Award nomination for its director King Vidor.

After ending his partnership with Ponti in the late 1950s, De Laurentiis continued to work on a variety of projects.