Oscar-winning Italian film producer Dino De Laurentiis has died in Los Angeles aged 91, Italian media said today.
De Laurentiis brought to the big screen nearly 500 films including Serpico, Three Days of the Condor and King Kong. He produced several Italian classics in collaboration, including Federico Fellini's La Strada, for which he won an Oscar in 1957.
De Laurentiis was born, the son of a pasta manufacturer, in Torre Annunziata in Campania, Italy in August 1919. He enrolled in film school around 1936, supporting himself as an actor, extra, propman, or any other job he could get in the film industry.
His persistence paid off, and by the time he was 20, he already had produced one film. After serving in the Italian army during World War Two, De Laurentiis went back into film production, and scored a critical and commercial international hit with Riso Amaro in 1949. He later married its star, Silvana Mangano.
De Laurentiis eventually formed a partnership with producer Carlo Ponti, and the team had a string of hits, including La Strada and The Nights of Cabiria - both winners of best foreign film Oscars.
He moved to the United States in the 1970s after the failure of his film studios in Rome, and he turned to a string of big international productions, including a few flops.
De Laurentiis was behind the legendary King Kong remake of 1976, the killer whale film Orca, several adaptations of Stephen King's novels, and most recently Hannibal, the sequel to The Silence of the Lambs.
In 2001 he was given the Irving G Thalberg Memorial Award, an honour typically reserved for purveyors of serious, thoughtful and provocative films. In 2003 the Venice Film Festival awarded him a Golden Lion for a lifetime of achievement.
Reuters