Italy’s Dino De Laurentiis who passed away today at 91 will always be remembered as an iconic science fiction film maker.
Read all about him from Wikipedia.
Agostino (Dino) De Laurentiis (August 8, 1919 – November 11, 2010) was an Italian Academy Award-winning film producer.
He was born at Torre Annunziata in the province of Naples.
He produced close to 150 films starting with Lultimo Combattimento (1940).
De Laurentiis initially produced neo-realist films such as Bitter Rice (1946) and the Fellini classics La Strada (1954) and Nights Of Cabiria (1956), often in collaboration with producer Carlo Ponti.
In the 1960s, De Laurentiis produced films as Kiss The Girls And Make Them Die, Navajo Joe (1966), Anzio (1968), a World War II film, Barbarella (1968) and Danger: Diabolik (1968), both successful comic book adaptations, and The Valachi Papers.
In the 1970s, De Laurentiis relocated to Wilmington, North Carolina, the United States.
He made acclaimed films, including The Scientific Cardplayer (1972), Serpico (1973), Death Wish (1974), Mandingo (1975), Three Days Of The Condor (1975), The Shootist (1976), Ingmar Bergman's The Serpent's Egg (1977), Ragtime (1981), Conan The Barbarian (1982) and Blue Velvet (1986).
King Kong (1976) was also a commercial hit, as were Lipstick, the killer whale film Orca (1977), The White Buffalo (1977), the disaster movie Hurricane (1979), the remake of Flash Gordon (1980), Halloween II (the 1981 sequel to John Carpenter's 1978 classic horror film), David Lynch's Dune (1984), and King Kong Lives (1986).
De Laurentiis also made several adaptations of Stephen King's works, including The Dead Zone (1983), Cat's Eye (1985), Silver Bullet (1985) and Maximum Overdrive (1986).
Army Of Darkness (1992) was produced jointly by De Laurentiis, Robert Tapert and the movie's star Bruce Campbell.
They distributed the animated Transformers movie.
De Laurentiis also produced the first Hannibal Lecter film Manhunter (1986).
He passed on adapting Thomas Harris' sequel, The Silence Of The Lambs, but produced the two follow-ups, Hannibal (2001) and Red Dragon (2002), a remake of Manhunter.
He also produced Hannibal Rising (2007), which tells the story of how Hannibal becomes a serial killer.
He had a strong preference for adaptations of books, especially The Bible: In The Beginning (1966), Barabbas (1961) and Dune (1984).
In 2001 he received the Irving G Thalberg Memorial Award from the Academy Of Motion Picture Arts And Sciences.
He had four children with his first wife, actress Silvana Mangano, who died in 1989.
He later married movie producer Martha Schumacher and they had two daughters.
One of the children from his first marriage, Raffaella De Laurentiis, is also a producer.
Another, Federico De Laurentiis (February 28, 1955 – July 15, 1981), died at 26 in an airplane crash.
His grand daughter is Giada De Laurentiis, host of Everyday Italian, Behind The Bash, Giada At Home and Giada's Weekend Getaways on Food Network.
His nephew is Aurelio De Laurentiis, a film producer in his own right and the chairman of SSC Napoli Football Club.
