Italian film producer Carlo Ponti, Sophia Loren's husband, died on Wednesday at the age of 94.
Loren, 72, was at his bedside in a Geneva clinic when he died, family friends told ANSA.
In a 50-year career starting just before WWII, he produced some 200 films including Federico Fellini's La Strada, David Lean's Doctor Zhivago and Loren's Oscar-winner Two Women, in which she was cast against type as a tragic wartime mother.
Ponti's fame as a producer held up under the unrelenting gossip-mag spotlight on his courtship, coaching and marriage to Loren as Italy's prime movie couple.
He discovered her as a beauty contest winner from a Naples slum in the early '50s and turned her into one of the world's most glamorous actresses.
Ponti set up Hollywood vehicles like The Key with William Holden, Desire Under the Elms with Anthony Perkins,, Houseboat with Cary Grant and It Started in Naples with Clark Gable - in which she challenged sex symbols Marilyn Monroe and Brigitte Bardot.
She also reeled off a string of cult Italian sexy comedies including Marriage, Italian Style and Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, both directed by Vittorio De Sica and co-starring Marcello Mastroianni.
But her burgeoning success was dogged by domestic furore.
SCANDAL.
The married Ponti's affair with the teenage Loren shocked Catholic Italy and the pair fled to Mexico to wed after he vainly sought a Vatican annulment of his first marriage. But the Italian state soon scotched the match.
An embittered Ponti went to France to dodge Italy's then ban on divorce and eventually sealed the split from his first wife in the mid-Sixties, enabling him celebrate a lavish paparazzi-fest Paris church wedding with Loren in 1966.
However, Italian bigamy charges were only dropped in 1968. The affair helped shift Italian public opinion towards scrapping divorce in th early '70s.
As well as giving him hit after hit, Loren bore Ponti two sons, music conductor Carlo Jr and film director Eduardo.
Ponti's French citizenship led to problems with Italian tax authorities, who secured a four-year jail term and a 26-million-dollar fine in 1979 for taking money out of Italy illegally.
Italy's Supreme Court quashed the verdict in 1987 and freed his frozen assets.
Ponti avoided speaking about his problems but was often quoted on the need to keep up film standards in the face of competition from TV. QUALITY OVER RETURNS.
A well-read lawyer of wide-ranging tastes, Ponti put quality before the bottom line and often said, "I make pictures, not deals".
After starting in films by accident in 1938, when a client of his firm fled Italy and asked him to take over his production, Ponti set out to embrace art - a recurring feature in an eclectic career.
"Even back then, my ambition was to make films of quality, preferably taking the subjects from literature and using directors with a literary background," he said in a rare 2002 magazine interview.
Ponti went on to bankroll art-house hits like Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow-Up, Zabriskie Point and The Passenger, as well as Jean-Luc Godard's Contempt and Marco Ferreri's controversial The Ape Woman.
Earlier in his career, he was the force behind neorealist dramas such as Pietro Germi's Gioventu Perduta (Lost Youth) and Alberto Lattuada's Mill on the Po.
But he also had an eye for potential box-office winner, however, producing sword-and-sandal epics like Ulysses, King Vidor's sprawling War and Peace and the cult classic Attila the Hun.
Other De Sica films featuring Loren included The Gold of Naples, alongside one-time rival Silvana Mangano.
Ponti was also behind a clutch of films by the great comic Toto' including Guardie e Ladri and Toto' a Colori, as well as the Alberto Sordi classic An American in Rome.
Ponti had an uneasy relationship with the critical establishment but claimed a lifetime achievement award in Venice in 1998. TRIBUTES.
"A piece of Italian movie history has left us," said Aurelio De Laurentiis, son of Ponti's one-time partner, the legendary Dino.
"He was very simpatico but ran a tight ship. He told you what to do with a smile," recalled Loren's press agent Enrico Lucherini.
His long-time lawyer, Giovanna Cau, said she spent "the happiest time of my professional life" with the "clever, generous" producer, recalling his "burning" desire to return to Rome.
Italian Culture Minister Francesco Rutelli said Ponti's death marked "the end of an era," saying the producer deserved posthumous honours from the Italian state.
Loren said during her husband's final illness: "He has always been my pillar, my rock."
