Carlo Ponti, a producer who was known both for classic films such as Doctor Zhivago and for his long marriage to the film star Sophia Loren, died early on January 10 at a hospital in Geneva. He was 94.
Family sources told the Ansa news agency that Ponti, who had been married to Loren for half a century, was being treated for a pulmonary infection in the Swiss city, where the couple lived.
Born in Magenta, northern Italy, on December 11 1912, Ponti started out in life as a lawyer, going into film production in the late 1930s.
He was to work with most of the great directors of his period, including compatriots Roberto Rossellini, Federico Fellini, Vittorio de Sica and Michelangelo Antonioni, as well as David Lean, who directed Doctor Zhivago in 1965.
Starting out in film production during the terrible years of World War II in Italy, Ponti had early success with Rossellini, whose Rome, Open City was a dramatic depiction of the home-grown resistance against the German occupation. The work, which appeared in 1945, was to win the New York Critics’ Prize two years later.
He was to confirm his reputation for picking winners with Fellini’s La Strada, co-produced with Dino de Laurentiis in 1954.
In all, Ponti had more than 140 films to his credit, including Doctor Zhivago, and Antonioni’s Blowup (1966) and Zabriskie Point (1970).
Loren, who survives her husband, featured in about three dozen of his productions.
Ponti was married twice, first to Guiliana Fiastri in 1946 and then to Loren, whom he first noticed, according to her official biography, when she was trying to advance a budding film career by taking part in beauty contests under pressure from her family.
A divorce Ponti obtained in Mexico from Fiastri — with whom he had had a son, Alex, and a daughter, Guendalina — was not recognised in Italy, and a first marriage to Loren, in 1957, had to be annulled to head off charges of bigamy.
At the time Sofia Scicolone, as she then was, was 22 and he 44. The couple nevertheless went on living together — a scandal in itself at the time — and finally Ponti obtained French citizenship in 1964, enabling them to remarry two years later.
Loren, now aged 72, continues to make waves as a star, featuring last year as a pin-up on the Pirelli tyre company’s calendar.
Ponti’s three sons are all in one branch or other of show business. Carlo Ponti Jnr is the music director of the San Bernardino Symphony Orchestra in the United States, while Edoardo Ponti is a film director. Alex Ponti is a film producer like his father. — AFP
