THE PINT-SIZED BARBARIAN
He never feared failure, and this is the only way you can be successful in life. I learned that from Dino.” So said Arnold Schwarzenegger at the funeral of the Italian film producer Agostino ‘Dino’ De Laurentiis. Dino’s C.V. reads like a surrealist notebook, timeless masterpieces like La Strada, Serpico and Blue Velvet cheek-by-jowl with flamboyant catastrophes. An ingenious financier and talent spotter, as well as an adventurous anti-snob, he was instrumental in the careers of neorealist icon Silvana Mangano (whom he later married), Al Pacino, David Lynch and Schwarzenegger, as enlightened and audacious an operator in post-war Italy as in eighties Hollywood.
He was also a master of failure, not because he failed but because he knew how to harness it.
De Laurentiis was born in the Neapolitan seaside region of Torre Annunziata in 1919. After early work as a truck driver and a, which starred his future wife, Mangano, he formed his own company in 1950 with Lux colleague Carlo Ponti.
