--- title: Death of a Showman: Dino De Laurentiis (1919-2010) description: A dreamer and a salesman, producer De Laurentiis gave the world masterpieces and flops, kitsch and Kong canonical: https://time.com/archive/6598026/death-of-a-showman-dino-de-laurentiis-1919-2010/ author: Richard Corliss article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2010-11-12T05:00:00.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-02-25T03:10:51.308Z article:section: Entertainment og:title: Death of a Showman: Dino De Laurentiis (1919-2010) og:description: A dreamer and a salesman, producer De Laurentiis gave the world masterpieces and flops, kitsch and Kong og:url: https://time.com/archive/6598026/death-of-a-showman-dino-de-laurentiis-1919-2010/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltde093bcdab65f2d0/6988d9b9bc6cfc69913e2a3c/time-logo.jpg?branch=production og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 675 og:image:alt: TIME og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Death of a Showman: Dino De Laurentiis (1919-2010) twitter:description: A dreamer and a salesman, producer De Laurentiis gave the world masterpieces and flops, kitsch and Kong twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltde093bcdab65f2d0/6988d9b9bc6cfc69913e2a3c/time-logo.jpg?branch=production --- * [Entertainment](/section/entertainment/) # Death of a Showman: Dino De Laurentiis (1919-2010) > Sponsored content. 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Terms and conditions apply. * Savings buckets are a feature of Ally Bank's Savings Account. * No ATM fees from Ally Bank at Allpoint and Moneypass ATMs plus we reimburse for fees charged by other ATM owners nationwide up to $10 per statement cycle. * Early direct deposit offers eligible direct deposits up to two days sooner. * Spending buckets are a feature of Ally Bank's Spending Account. by [Richard Corliss](https://time.com/author/richard-corliss/) Nov 12, 2010 5:00 AM UTC by [Richard Corliss](https://time.com/author/richard-corliss/) Nov 12, 2010 5:00 AM UTC For his first five years, Agostino De Laurentiis didn’t speak, but his mother Giuseppina showed no concern. “Look at it this way,” she said of the lively child. “When he begins to talk, nobody will be able to make him stop.” By the time he was 15, as a traveling representative for Pastaficio Moderno, his father Aurelio’s food business, the kid from Naples had turned words to his advantage. “Agostino’s greatest asset — which he’d use to straighten out a million different messes, in decades to come — was his overwhelming skill as a communicator,” wrote his biographer Tullio Kezich. “He knew how to charm, how to dazzle … The gratified Aurelio recognized that his son was a born salesman.” What is a salesman but a fellow with a dollar and a dream? Speaking in urgent Italian or broken English, peddling pasta for his papa or producing hundreds of films in a career that spanned nearly 70 years, Dino de Laurentiis knew that salesmanship demanded showmanship, and he had both in his blood. His dreams could cost a few lire, like the Italian comedies he made with Toto (10 films) and Alberto Sordi (22 films) or the many millions of dollars he poured into his 1976 remake of _King Kong_ . His production of Federico Fellini’s _La Strada_ won the Oscar for best foreign-language film; _Year of the Dragon_ and _Body of Evidence_ were short-listed for Razzies. Some of his movies _(Death Wish, Conan the Barbarian, Hannibal)_ earned a bundle; on others _(The Bible, Hurricane, Dune)_ he nearly lost his silk shirt. But Dino never lost his drive or his nerve. His death Wednesday, Nov. 10, at 91 in Beverly Hills, Calif., closed the books on a 5-ft., 4-in. giant of the movie business. [ (See the All-TIME 100 Movies.) ](https://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/completelist/0,29569,1953094,00.html) He could have been an Italian cousin of the East European Jews who built the American movie empire. Short of stature, chomping on a pricey cigar, seated behind an enormous desk in a chair that elevated him above his visitors, he pursued his impulses with energy and chutzpah. And like MGM’s Irving Thalberg and Dino’s partner and rival Carlo Ponti, he had a movie-star wife. Silvana Mangano had been an instant sensation as the dirty-dancing peasant in the 1949 _Bitter Rice_ . The star and her producer wed that year; they had four children and were still married when she died 40 years later. They made 22 films together, and if Mangano never reached the superstar heights of Ponti’s bride, Sophia Loren, she matured into an actress of erotic elegance. (Shortly after Mangano’s death, he married American producer Martha Schumacher, who survives him. They had two daughters.) [ (See TIME’s cover story on Dino De Laurentiis’ _King Kong_ .) ](https://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,918456,00.html) This golden huckster was susceptible to the spiels of other talented dreamers; he was a sucker for auteurs, from Roberto Rossellini to Sergei Bondarchuk, David Cronenberg to Sam Raimi. When Ingmar Bergman exiled himself from Sweden after a tax wrangle, he got De Laurentiis’ backing for the Berlin-made _The Serpent’s Egg_ . After David Lynch had a hit with _The Elephant Man_ , Dino financed Lynch’s goofball epic _Dune_ , and when no one in Hollywood would have lunch with the post– _Heaven’s Gate_ Michael Cimino, Dino let him make _Year of the Dragon_ . More than an enabler, he was a creative businessman. In 1953, seeing the potential for worldwide appeal in Fellini’s early films, he imported American actors Anthony Quinn and Richard Basehart to star with Fellini’s wife Giulietta Masina in _La Strada_ . De Laurentiis and Fellini teamed again on _Nights of Cabiria_ , another international success — though Dino filched the _Cabiria_ negative to excise a long monologue he thought superfluous. The two men never again worked together. Art-house hits are fine, but a big producer must make big movies. Emboldened by having crossed movie cultures with _La Strada_ , Dino hired Audrey Hepburn and Henry Fonda to star in the 1956 _War and Peace_ , directed by Hollywood stalwart King Vidor and shot at Dinocitta, the studio he had built in Rome. The film tanked, but the _paisano_ didn’t regret his overreaching. He’d do it again and again, leaving fate to sort out the hits and the flops. Gambling on movies wasn’t so much an addiction as a religion, as natural as breathing hard on a run up a steep hill — kind of like Sisyphus. “Dino is never happier than in a _King Kong_ situation,” one associate said, “where the stakes are enormous, where he can win or lose everything.” In the 1960s, toward the end of Hollywood’s fascination with biblical epics, De Laurentiis planned a series of Old Testament drama, beginning with _Genesis_ , to be directed by the great French minimalist Robert Bresson. For the Noah’s Ark sequence, Dino hired a huge menagerie of animals, but when Bresson told him he’d be shooting only the tracks left by the animals, Dino fired him and shut down the multifilm project. (He settled for one movie, _The Bible_ , directed by John Huston.) He then made a Napoleon film starring Rod Steiger and ignored the implications of the title — _Waterloo_ . After _Jaws_ did smash box office, Dino figured anything big, bad and wet was surefire. But the whale adventure _Orca_ went belly-up, and _The Hurricane_ was less a disaster movie than a disaster. Often he needed the less grandiose product — the Jane Fonda _Barbarella_ , the slave-lust melodrama _Mandingo_ , Charles Bronson’s _Death Wish_ series — to pay off the doomed epics. A Bergman or Fellini could stay close to home, but an ambitious producer just had to go Hollywood. De Laurentiis’ 1954 comedy _An American in Rome_ starred Sordi as a young Italian who loves all things American: he tries to speak like Gary Cooper and walk like John Wayne, and he threatens suicide unless he can secure a visa to the States. De Laurentiis didn’t have to go that far. When the Italian government reduced its film subsidies in the late ’60s, he left for America. First stop: New York City, where he sponsored four movies — _The Valachi Papers, Serpico, Death Wish_ and _Three Days of the Condor_ — that painted Manhattan as the town where every nightmare can come true. That description might also fit the New York–shot _King Kong_ , except that Dino, in a TIME cover story on the production, called it “the greatest love story ever made.” He was enthralled with Jessica Lange, his young leading lady (whom he had signed after nixing another promising ingenue, Meryl Streep, as “ugly”), and with the emotional bond between her character and the big ape. “No one cry when Jaws die,” Dino told TIME. “But when the monkey die, people gonna cry. Intellectuals gonna love _Kong_ . Even film buffs who love the first _Kong_ gonna love ours. Why? Because I no give them crap.” As it happened, De Laurentiis’ _Kong_ , like Peter Jackson’s 2005 remake, would not obliterate the memory of the original. The film’s only lasting poignancy is its connection with the site of the ape’s demise: the World Trade Center. After _Kong_ , De Laurentiis moved to Hollywood, where his record was just as impressively erratic. What other producer would find both E.L. Doctorow’s novel _Ragtime_ and Alex Raymond’s _Flash Gordon_ comic strip suitable for lavish film versions? In the ’80s, De Laurentiis forged sustaining relationships with two other authors: Stephen King, from whose fiction Dino birthed five features, and Thomas Harris, whose first Hannibal Lecter novel, _Red Dragon_ , he filmed in 1986 as _Manhunter_ . Over the next two decades he produced four more Lecter movies (another company made _The Silence of the Lambs_ ). To spur the notoriously slow writer to finish the _Hannibal_ manuscript, Dino sent his own pasta chef to Miami. He knew that, one way or another, artists need to be fed. [ (See Graydon Carter on De Laurentiis for TIME.) ](https://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,923113,00.html) Like father, like son: the De Laurentiises are ardent foodies. (So is Dino’s granddaughter Giada, who has her own show on the Food Network.) In 1982, believing that America didn’t have pasta nearly as _delizioso_ as the stuff from papa Aurelio’s spaghetti factory, he opened the DDL Foodshow in Manhattan. “He has filled his showpiece with a 32-ft. counter for cold salads, 20 ft. of charcuterie and 139 chefs, bakers and pastrymakers,” wrote then TIME staffer Graydon Carter. “De Laurentiis is no stranger to the delights of kitchen duty. ‘When I cook,’ says he, ‘my brain stops completely.’ ” Actually, the Foodshow shut down, but Dino’s brain never did, not until Wednesday. He dreamed for a living, constantly and productively, and left a film legacy nearly as succulent as his own legend. ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/archive/6598026/death-of-a-showman-dino-de-laurentiis-1919-2010/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/archive/6598026/death-of-a-showman-dino-de-laurentiis-1919-2010/"},"headline":"Death of a Showman: Dino De Laurentiis (1919-2010)","datePublished":"2010-11-12T05:00:00.000Z","dateModified":"2026-02-25T03:10:51.308Z","description":"A dreamer and a salesman, producer De Laurentiis gave the world masterpieces and flops, kitsch and Kong","url":"https://time.com/archive/6598026/death-of-a-showman-dino-de-laurentiis-1919-2010/","keywords":[],"thumbnailUrl":"","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Richard Corliss","url":"https://time.com/author/richard-corliss/"}],"articleSection":"Entertainment","image":[],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Time","url":"https://time.com/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://time.com/images/logo.png","width":528,"height":156},"foundingDate":"March 3, 1923","sameAs":["https://www.facebook.com/time","https://www.instagram.com/time/?hl=en","https://twitter.com/time","https://www.pinterest.com/timemagazine"]}},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/section/entertainment/","name":"Entertainment"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/archive/6598026/death-of-a-showman-dino-de-laurentiis-1919-2010/","name":"Death of a Showman: Dino De Laurentiis (1919-2010)"}}]}] ```