Ponti, Carlo

(1913-2007)

   Producer. A law graduate from the University of Milan, Ponti practiced as a lawyer before being attracted into the film industry in the early 1940s, his earliest productions being Mario Soldati's Piccolo mondo antico (Old-Fashioned World, 1941) and Alberto Lattuada's Giacomo I'idealista (Giacomo the Idealist, 1943). After World War II he worked as an executive producer for Lux Film on over a dozen films, among them Luigi Zampa's Vivere in pace (To Live in Peace, 1946) and Lattuada's Il mulino del Po (The Mill on the Po, 1948), before leaving in 1950 to join Dino De Laurentiis in setting up the Ponti-De Laurentiis company with which, for the next seven years, he produced a host of important films, including Roberto Rossellini's Europa 51 (The Greatest Love, 1951), Mario Camerini's Ulisse (Ulysses, 1954), Vittorio De Sica's L'oro di Napoli (The Gold of Naples, 1954), and Federico Fellini's La strada (1954). After producing King Vidor's monumental War and Peace (1956), the company was dissolved and, due in part to legal problems relating to his Mexican marriage to Sophia Loren, Ponti moved to France, where he nevertheless produced some of De Sica's most important films of the 1960s, including La ciociara (Two Women, 1960), Ieri, oggi, domani (Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, 1953), and Matrimonio all'Italiana (Marriage Italian Style, 1964). At the same time he also lent support to the emerging French New Wave by producing, among others, Jean-Luc Godard's Une femme est un femme (A Woman Is a Woman, 1961), Agnes Varda's Cleo de 5 a 7 (Cleo from 5 to 7, 1961), and Claude Chabrol's L'oeil du malin (The Third Lover, 1962). In 1965 he scored one of his greatest critical and box office successes with David Lean's Dr. Zhivago (1965), for which he received the Academy Award nomination for Best Picture. Among the most notable of his subsequent productions were Michelangelo Antonioni's first three international films, Blowup (Blow-Up, 1966), Zabriskie Point (1970), and Profession reporter (The Passenger, 1974), and Ettore Scola's Una giornataparticolare (A Special Day, 1977), which received both the Cesar award and the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Film. More often remembered as the husband of Sophia Loren than as a major figure in the international film industry, Ponti produced over 140 films in an illustrious career that spanned six decades and which was recognized with a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Milan International Film Festival in 2000.

   Historical Dictionary of Italian Cinema by Alberto Mira