Dino De Laurentiis, the Oscar-winning Italian producer of films including "Serpico," "Death Wish" and "Red Dragon," died in Los Angeles on Thursday (November 11) at the age of 91.
The prolific De Laurentiis began his career in the 1940s and produced more than 500 films over the next seven decades. Following World War II, he produced two Federico Fellini films, "La Strada," which won a Foreign Language Oscar, and "Nights of Cabiria." He went on to produce high-profile projects on both sides of the Atlantic, notably Audrey Hepburn and Henry Fonda's "War and Peace," Anthony Perkins' "This Angry Age" and Kirk Douglas' "Ulysses." He also had a taste for the lowbrow genre flick, producing films like 1961's "Goliath and the Vampires" and 1968's "Barbarella."
In the 1970s, De Laurentiis set up shop in New York and worked on films including "Serpico," starring Al Pacino, "Death Wish," with Charles Bronson, and "Three Days of the Condor," featuring Robert Redford. Later he produced David Lynch's "Blue Velvet," as well as four movies in the Hannibal Lecter series: "Manhunter" (1986), "Hannibal" (2000), "Red Dragon" (2002) and "Hannibal Rising" (2007), which was his final film.
His storied career was marked by 38 Oscar nominations and two wins, one for Best Foreign Language Film for "La Strada" in 1957, the other the honorary Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award in 2001.
In his personal life, De Laurentiis was married to actress Silvana Mangano, the star of "Riso Amaro," one of his first films, from 1949 to 1989, when Mangano passed away. They had four children together: Veronica, Raffaella, who is also a film producer, Federico, who died in a plane crash in 1981, and Francesca.
De Laurentiis was later married to American film producer Martha Schumacher, with whom he had two daughters, Carolyna and Dina. In addition to his second wife and five children, he is survived by his granddaughter, celebrity chef Giada De Laurentiis.
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