Celebrity Biographies
Alberto Grimaldi
He produced Sergio Leone’s spaghetti-western “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” and Martin Scorsese’s “Gangs of New York,” among many others. Alberto Grimaldi died on January 23, 2021, at his residence in Miami, at the age of 95, as confirmed by Maurizio Grimaldi, his son.
Born in Naples, Italy, on March 28, 1925, Alberto Grimaldi – who shares a name with Alberto de Monaco, with whom he has nothing to do – studied law before founding his own production company, Produzioni Europee Associati, or PEA (Associated European Productions), in 1961, together with Maria Rosaria Bongiorno, his wife. “He worked as a lawyer for the film distributors in Naples,” he recalled in an interview. “When I came in contact with producers I thought I could do better than them.”
He began his journey with the film shot in Spain Riding towards death , by Joaquín Luis Romero Marchent , although he achieved his first successes endorsing Sergio Leone in Death had a price and The good, the bad and the ugly , both starring Clint Eastwood , who became a big star.
Over the next four decades, Alberto Grimaldi worked as a producer on more than eighty films in Europe and the United States. He endorsed Federico Fellini in Satyricon , Casanova and Ginger and Fred, Bernardo Bertolucci , in Last Tango in Paris , and Pier Paolo Pasolini , in films like The Thousand and One Nights , or Salo or the 120 days of Sodom . “I’ve always been a rebel: when an author proposes issues like freedom of thought and expression, or racial equality, I always come out in front,” the producer commented.
His last film production was Gangs of New York (2002), starring Daniel Day-Lewis and Leonardo DiCaprio , nominated for nine Academy Awards, including Best Picture.
Grimaldi is survived by his three sons, Massimo, Maurizio and Marcello, and three grandchildren.