Marina Cicogna, Italy’s first major female film producer who shepherded 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 on Nov. 4 in her Rome home after a long battle with an unspecified form of cancer, according to Italian news agency ANSA.
The Venice Biennale foundation is a statement, praised her as “the first female film producer in Europe” and noted that she was always deeply linked to the Venice Film Festival that was founded by her grandfather, Giuseppe Volpi di Misurata.
Born in Rome on May 29, 1934, to 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 struck up a friendship with Jack Warner’s daughter Barbara Warner and established a connection with Hollywood.
In 1966, at the age of 32, Cicogna entered the film industry fray taking the reins of 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.
Emboldened 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. The same year, she produced Pier Paolo Pasolini’s “Teorema,” starring Terence Stamp as an enigmatic stranger who, one by one, seduces the members of a wealthy Milanese family. “Teorema” won the 1968 best actress award in Venice 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 bestforeign language film (as the prize was then known).
Cicogna, who was openly bisexual, was in a relationship with Bolkan for about 20 years during the 70s and 80s.
Other standout titles shepherded by Cicogna comprise the Kirk Douglas-starrer “A Man to Respect” by Michele Lupo; Franco Zeffirelli’s 1974 Oscar-nominated “Bother Sun, Sister Moon”; and Vittorio De Sica’s “Lo Chiameremo Andrea,” with Nino Manfredi and Mariangela Melato.
After the mid-1970s, Cicogna stopped producing movies but remained a jet-setter, photographer and prominent member of the country’s film community, especially in recent years.
Last May, Cicogna was honored with a lifetime achievement statuette at Italy’s David di Donatello Awards, the country’s top film prizes. A documentary by Andrea Bettinetti celebrating Cicogna’s career titled “Marina Cicogna – Life and All the Rest” screened at the Rome Film Fest in 2021.
Cicogna is survived by Benedetta Gardona,her partner of more than 30 years.
