Following a brief acting career in the late 1930s and early 1940s, he moved into film production; alongside Carlo Ponti, he brought Italian cinema to the international scene in the post-World War II period.
[citation needed] In 1973, De Laurentiis relocated his headquarters to New York and he was reportedly considering to produce an American television series.
[citation needed] In the 1980s, he had his own studio: De Laurentiis Entertainment Group (DEG) based in Wilmington, North Carolina.
De Laurentiis produced a number of successful films, including The Scientific Cardplayer (1972), Serpico (1973), Death Wish (1974), Mandingo (1975), Three Days of the Condor (1975), The Shootist (1976), Drum (1976), Ingmar Bergman's The Serpent's Egg (1977), Ragtime (1981), Conan the Barbarian (1982), Blue Velvet (1986) and Breakdown (1997).
De Laurentiis' name became well known through the 1976 King Kong remake, which was a commercial hit; Lipstick (1976), a rape and revenge drama; Orca (1977), a killer whale film; The White Buffalo (1977), a western; the disaster movie Hurricane (1979); the remake of Flash Gordon (1980); David Lynch's Dune (1984); The Bounty (1984); and King Kong Lives (1986).
De Laurentiis produced several adaptations of Stephen King works, including The Dead Zone (1983), Cat's Eye (1985), Silver Bullet (1985), and Maximum Overdrive (1986).
De Laurentiis also produced the first Hannibal Lecter film, Manhunter (1986), an adaptation of the Thomas Harris novel Red Dragon.
[4] The first store was opened in the restored palm court in the ornate lobby of the historic Endicott Hotel, now a co-op on Manhattan's Upper West Side, near the existing Zabar's food emporium on Broadway.
[5] In an interview with the Chicago Tribune a month later, she admitted that the store was "probably the most stunningly handsome grocery in the world, certainly in New York", but "the pricing was insane.
[15][16][17][18] In 1957, De Laurentiis and Carlo Ponti won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film for producing La Strada (1954).