Robert Monell reports that the long lived Italian film producer Carlo Ponti has died.

A silent partner on the international coproduction deal which financed Jess Franco’s Venus in Furs (the party scene was filmed in one of his villas) Ponti produced over 150 films since the 1940s directed by such cinema luminaries as Vittorio De Sica, Antonioni (Blow-Up, Zabriskie Point), Fellini (La Strada), David Lean (Dr. Zhivago), Godard, Ettore Scola (Ugly, Dirty and Bad) and many others.

He will probably be most remembered as the man who discovered and married Sophia Loren.