Dino De Laurentiis, legendary Italian film producer, dies at 91

Dino De Laurentiis, the flamboyant Italian movie producer who helped resurrect his nation's film industry after World War II and for more than six decades produced films as diverse as the 1954 Federico Fellini classic "La Strada" and the 1976 remake of "King Kong," has died. He was 91.

De Laurentiis, who moved to the United States in the 1970s and continued to produce films until 2007, died Wednesday night at his Beverly Hills home, his daughter Raffaella De Laurentiis, said in a statement Thursday. The cause was not given, Los Angeles Times reports.

De Laurentiis, who has been making movies for nearly 70 years, passed away inside his Beverly Hills home, where lived with his third wife, Martha. He has six daughters; his only son, Federico, died in a 1981 plane crash. His granddaughter, Giada, is a chef on the Food Network.

De Laurentiis entered the film industry at age 20, and went on to produce more than 500 movies, including those by Federico Fellini and Roberto Rossellini.

He won his first Oscar in 1956 for Fellini's La Strada, and another in 1957 for Nights of Cabiria. He was nominated at least 30 more times, and received the Irving G.Thalberg Memorial Award in 2001 at the Oscars for demonstrating a "consistently high quality of motion picture production," according to The Hollywood Reporter.