Italian film producer Carlo Ponti dies at 94

ROME — Carlo Ponti, the film producer who discovered Sophia Loren, launched the movie icon's career and whose more than half-century romance endured threats of bigamy charges and excommunication, has died. He was 94.

"I have done everything for love of Sophia," Ponti said in a newspaper interview in 2002. "I have always believed in her."

Ponti died late Tuesday at a Geneva hospital, his family and Loren's agents said Wednesday. He had been hospitalized about 10 days earlier because of pulmonary complications.

"My aunt was with him, certainly," said Loren's niece, Alessandra Mussolini, who also is a granddaughter of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. "He was lucid until the end."

Ponti produced more than 100 films, including "Doctor Zhivago," "The Firemen's Ball," and "The Great Day," which were nominated for Oscars. Other major films included "Blow-Up," "The Cassandra Crossing," "Zabriskie Point" and "The Squeeze."

In 1956, the Federico Fellini film "La Strada," which he co-produced, won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film, as did "Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow" in 1964.

But it was his affair with the young ingenue Loren that captivated the public.

Loren was only 15 — and 25 years younger than Ponti — when the couple met in 1950. Ponti was married to his first wife, Giuliana, at the time.

They tried to keep their relationship a secret in spite of the huge media interest, while Ponti's lawyers went to Mexico to obtain a divorce from his first wife. Divorce was not yet legal in Italy.

While Ponti worked with legendary producer Dino De Laurentiis and directors such as Federico Fellini, Jean-Luc Godard, David Lean and Roman Polanski, his career was to become inextricably tied to that of Loren, who had roles in 34 of the more than 151 movies he produced or co-produced.

Ponti and Loren were married by proxy in Mexico in 1957 — two male attorneys took their place and the happy couple only found out when the news was broken by a society columnist.

But they were unable to beat stringent Italian laws and the wrath of the Roman Catholic Church. Ponti was charged with bigamy and Loren with being a concubine.

"I was being threatened with excommunication, with the everlasting fire, and for what reason? I had fallen in love with a man whose own marriage had ended long before," Loren has said.

"I wanted to be his wife and have his children. We had done the best the law would allow to make it official, but they were calling us public sinners," she said. "We should have been taking a honeymoon, but all I remember is weeping for hours."

The couple first lived in exile and then, after the annulment of their Mexican marriage, in secret in Italy.