Marina Cicogna, Italy’s first major female film producer, who oversaw films by Pier Paolo Pasolini, Franco Zeffirelli and Elio Petri, including Petri’s Oscar-winning “Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion”, has died. She was 89.
Cicogna died at her home in Rome on 4 November after a long battle with an unspecified form of cancer, according to the Italian news agency ANSA.
In a statement, the Venice Biennale Foundation praised her as “the first female film producer in Europe” and noted that she had always been closely associated with the Venice Film Festival, which was founded by her grandfather, Giuseppe Volpi di Misurata.
Born in Rome on 29 May 1934, the daughter of Count Cesare Cicogna Mozzoni and Countess Annamaria Volpi di Misurata, Cicogna attended high school in Italy and graduated from Sarah Lawrence College in New York, where she befriended Jack Warner’s daughter, Barbara Warner, and established a link with Hollywood.
In 1966, at the age of 32, Cicogna entered the film industry, taking over the reins of the family-owned distributor Euro International Films. In 1967 she had three films as a distributor at the Venice Film Festival, including Luis Buñuel’s “Belle de Jour”, which won the Golden Lion.
Encouraged by the box-office success of her film choices, Cicogna ventured into production with Antonio Leonviola’s “The Young Tigers”, a 1968 comedy about five teenagers up to no good in Milan, starring Helmut Berger. In the same year, she produced Pier Paolo Pasolini’s “Teorema”, starring Terence Stamp as an enigmatic stranger who seduces the members of a wealthy Milanese family one by one.
“Teorema won the best actress award in Venice in 1968 for Laura Betti. It was followed by Pasolini’s Medea with Maria Callas (1969) and, in 1970, Petri’s psychological thriller Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion, starring Gian Maria Volonté and Florinda Bolkan, which won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film (as the prize was then known).
Cicogna, who was openly bisexual, had a 20-year relationship with Bolkan during the 70s and 80s.
Other notable films directed by Cicogna include Michele Lupo’s A Man to Respect, starring Kirk Douglas; Franco Zeffirelli’s 1974 Oscar-nominated Bother Sun, Sister Moon; and Vittorio De Sica’s Lo Chiameremo Andrea, starring Nino Manfredi and Mariangela Melato.
Cicogna stopped producing films after the mid-1970s, but remained a jet-setter, photographer and prominent member of the country’s film community, especially in recent years.
Last May, Cicogna was honoured with a Lifetime Achievement statuette at the David di Donatello Awards, Italy’s most prestigious film awards. A documentary by Andrea Bettinetti celebrating Cicogna’s career, ‘Marina Cicogna – Life and All the Rest’, will be screened at the Rome Film Festival in 2021.
Cicogna is survived by Benedetta Gardona, her partner of more than 30 years.
