Agostino “Dino” De Laurentiis was born in 1919 in Torre Annunziata in the province of Naples, and grew up selling spaghetti made by his father’s pasta factory. He started his studies at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome in the years 1937–1938 then interrupted by the outbreak of the Second World War.
Following his first film, L’ultimo Combattimento (1940), Laurentiis produced nearly 150 films during the next seven decades. In 1946 his company, the Dino de Laurentiis Cinematografica, moved into production. In the early years, De Laurentiis produced Italian neorealist films such as Bitter Rice (1949) and the Fellini classics La Strada (1954) and Nights of Cabiria (1956), often in collaboration with producer Carlo Ponti.
De Laurentiis relocated to the US in 1976, and became an American citizen in 1986. In the 1980s he had his own studio, De Laurentiis Entertainment Group (DEG), based in Wilmington, North Carolina. The building of the studio made Wilmington a center of film and television production. In 1990, De Laurentiis obtained backing from an Italian friend and formed another company, Dino De Laurentiis Communications in Beverly Hills.
De Laurentiis made a number of successful and/or acclaimed films, including Serpico (1973), Death Wish (1974), Mandingo (1975), Ragtime (1981), Conan the Barbarian (1982), Blue Velvet (1986) and Breakdown (1997). De Laurentiis’ name became well known through the 1976 King Kong remake, which was a commercial hit; Orca (1977), a killer whale film; The White Buffalo (1977), a western; the disaster movie Hurricane (1979); the remake of Flash Gordon (1980); and King Kong Lives (1986). De Laurentiis also produced several adaptations of Stephen King works, including The Dead Zone (1983), Cat’s Eye (1985), Silver Bullet (1985), and Maximum Overdrive (1986).
In the 1980s, de Laurentiis owned and operated DDL Foodshow, a specialty retailer with two gourmet Italian markets in New York City and Los Angeles. DDL Food Show was an Italian specialty foods store with three locations, two in New York City and one in Beverly Hills in Los Angeles. They were opened in the early 1980s and owned and operated by De Laurentiis. DDL Foodshow was later considered to be a forebear of the new Italian specialty goods food-store restaurant dining attraction Eataly.
In 1949, De Laurentiis married actress Silvana Mangano, with whom he had four children: Veronica; Raffaella, who is also a film producer; Federico, another producer who died in a plane crash in 1981; and Francesca. De Laurentiis and Mangano divorced in 1988. In 1990, he married Martha Schumacher, who produced many of his films since 1985, and with whom he had two daughters, Carolyna and Dina. One of his grandchildren is Giada De Laurentiis, host of Everyday Italian, Behind the Bash, Giada at Home, and Giada’s Weekend Getaways on Food Network.
De Laurentiis died on November 10th, 2010 at his residence in Beverly Hills at the age of 91.