Italian cinema legend Dino De Laurentiis dies

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 yesterday.

Mr De Laurentiis was in Malta at the end of summer of 1998 for the production of the film U571 which was shot at the Rinella surface tank, in Kalkara. During his stay in Malta Mr De Laurentiis met the then Prime Minister Alfred Sant to discuss issues relating to the taxing of film production companies.

In September 1976, Mr De Laurentiis had sent to Malta his brother Alfred for the shooting of the film Orca the Killer Whale which was also shot at the Rinella tank.

The Oscar-winner also produced several famous films in the US, 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. Mr De Laurentiis was born on August 8, 1919 in Torre Annunziata near Naples and moved to the US 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. He 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 the same film. They had four children together and later divorced.

Mr De Laurentiis 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.