| 11th January 2007 05:00 PM |
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| Ten Thousand Motels |
Carlo Ponti, Film Producer, Dies at 94
By DOUGLAS MARTIN
Published: January 11, 2007
New York Times
Carlo Ponti, the influential film producer whose vast body of work encompassed Italian realism, French New Wave and Hollywood fluff but who etched his name in popular legend by defying law and church to marry Sophia Loren, died on Tuesday in Geneva. He was 94.
Mr. Ponti worked with many of the pre-eminent postwar film directors, including Roberto Rossellini, Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni, King Vidor, Jean-Luc Godard and Roman Polanski. Though no stranger to big budgets and big stars, he insisted that his goal always was to produce meritorious movies that also made money.
“I don’t make deals, I make pictures,” he often said. He compared moviemaking to building a house, with the difference being that “with films you give life to things that don’t exist.”
Francesco Rutelli, the Italian culture minister, said, “His death marks the end of an era in filmmaking because Ponti embodied a great and courageous push to innovate, promoted unforgettable talents and enjoyed huge success.”
Mr. Ponti, short and roly-poly, said in one of his last interviews, in 2002, that his entire career had been dedicated to Ms. Loren, the young actress he met when she was 15. She regularly appeared in his productions, and under his tutelage was the first actress to win an Academy Award in a foreign-language film, “Two Women” (1961).
“I have done everything for love of Sophia,” he told Blick, a Swiss daily. “I have always believed in her.”
Mr. Ponti, who was a quarter-century older and considerably shorter than Ms. Loren, faced bigamy charges and threats of excommunication when he married her by proxy in Mexico in 1957, and their comings and goings were tirelessly scrutinized by squads of reporters and photographers. Their existence became even more movielike when magazines dwelled on Ms. Loren’s difficulties in pregnancy; kidnappers repeatedly threatened their family, and gossip columnists ceaselessly predicted the demise of their marriage.
Mr. Ponti’s showman’s gift of gab also commanded notice, as when he explained to The New York Times in 1990 why he had almost bought a property at Porto Ercole in Tuscany.
“They told me there is this underground cave where the sea throws up great waves right through the fortress floor — you can see them exploding beneath you,” he said. “I think Sophia would like that. Such power! Such emotion!”
Among the many films Mr. Ponti produced were “La Strada” by Fellini (1954), Vidor’s “War and Peace” (1955) and three of Vittorio de Sica’s landmark works — “Two Women,” “Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow” (1963) and “Marriage Italian-Style” (1964).
Others were Godard’s “A Woman Is a Woman” (1961), David Lean’s “Doctor Zhivago” (1965) and two Antonioni hits, “Blow-Up” (1966) and “The Passenger” (1975).
Mr. Ponti called producing motion pictures “a strange and curious game” that “attracts many, but few know how to play it.” He collaborated with another master, Dino De Laurentiis, from 1950 to 1957, then produced films independently.
“People talk about making art films — experimental films,” he said. “I can make an art film every day of the week. Nothing to it. What’s difficult is to combine a commercial film with art.”
Carlo Ponti was born on Dec. 11, 1912, in the Milan suburb of Magenta, to Leone Ponti, a music printing shop owner, and the former Maria Zardone. He entered the movie industry by chance. He first wanted to be an architect, but decided to study law at the University of Milan because the curriculum was less arduous and he wanted to make more money more quickly. A friend asked him to join a film company, where he soon became executive vice president and resolved to be a producer.
In 1940 he produced the first great success of the director Mario Soldati, “Old-Fashioned World,” dealing with Italy’s 19th-century struggle against invading Austrians. He recalled that it was easy to see “the Austrians as Germans” in World War II. The film was an enormous success. Mr. Ponti said it was proof that Italy was not really fascist.
After the war, he worked at Lux Films in Rome, producing all its movies, up to 15 a year, and played a major role in Italy’s modern movie industry. Starting in 1950 he and Mr. De Laurentiis produced such major films as Rossellini’s “Europa ’51, Robert Rossen’s “Mambo” and Vidor’s “War and Peace,” starring Audrey Hepburn and Henry Fonda.
In 1957 he and Mr. De Laurentiis each began producing films independently. At times Mr. Ponti owned a score of companies across Europe to juggle his complex financial and artistic machinations.
He had met Sophia Loren a few years earlier. She was a model using the name Sofia Lazzaro; he was a judge in the Miss Rome beauty pageant. Ms. Loren, whose birth name was Sofia Scicolone, was sitting in the front row with friends. He sent someone over to ask if she wanted to be a contestant.
He later signed her to a contract and personally supervised her dress and choice of films and parts. Ms. Loren was not the first woman he had helped start an acting career: Gina Lollobrigida and others preceded her.
“I don’t like actors, I like women,” was one of Mr. Ponti’s famous lines.
He and Ms. Loren became engaged in 1953, but did not attend their own wedding. After obtaining a Mexican divorce in 1957, they were represented at the wedding, in Mexico, by two lawyers. They learned they were married from reading Louella Parsons’s gossip column.
The problem was that Mr. Ponti was already married to Giuliana Fiastri, who acknowledged the marriage was over and consented to a divorce. Private Italian citizens nonetheless sued, correctly asserting that the Mexican marriage was illegal under Italian law. Soon the Roman Catholic Church threatened to excommunicate the newlyweds, and the Italian authorities brought bigamy charges against Mr. Ponti and concubine charges against Ms. Loren.
Not until 1967 were these charges dropped, a year after the couple had been married in another ceremony, in France, where they and Ms. Fiastri had become citizens. Later, Mr. Ponti and Ms. Loren faced Italian charges of cheating on taxes that resulted in the confiscation of their art collection.
Mr. Ponti’s survivors include his wife; their sons, Carlo Jr. and Edoardo, and two children from his previous marriage, Guendalina and Alexander.
In the 2002 interview with the Swiss newspaper, he acknowledged that his life had been largely defined for many people by his association with Ms. Loren. People magazine 18 years earlier told how that relationship had gradually transcended its steamy early years.
The magazine quoted Anna Strasberg, their friend and the widow of the theatrical giant Lee Strasberg, as saying that each day Mr. Ponti brought his wife a rose he had grown himself. “They sat in the dining room looking at them,” she said.
[Edited by Ten Thousand Motels] |
| 11th January 2007 05:02 PM |
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| glencar |
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| 11th January 2007 05:03 PM |
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| sirmoonie |
The bigamy charges are cool, but what was he doing during the war? |
| 11th January 2007 05:03 PM |
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| Gazza |
No sympathy from me. Lucky bastard got to wake up beside Sophia Loren for 50 years. I'm only amazed he lasted more than 6 months.
[Edited by Gazza] |
| 11th January 2007 06:12 PM |
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| GotToRollMe |
RIP Mr. Loren.
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