The age of the producer extraordinaire, whose name on the opening credits was a guarantee of operatic emotions and grandiose spectacle, looked one step closer to the end today, with the announcement that Dino De Laurentiis has died aged 91.

A man whose diminutive stature (he was 5ft 4in) was no obstacle to his enormous ambition or prodigious output (more than 500 films), De Laurentiis started his career selling his family's pasta. After serving in the Italian army in the second world war, he established himself as a film producer, and swiftly became famous for the 1949 classic Bitter Rice, directed by Giuseppe De Santis, and then a handful of neo-realist hits made in collaboration with Carlo Ponti, including Federico Fellini's La Strada in 1954 and Nights of Cabiria in 1957.

De Laurentiis went solo, and produced a string of films that belied both his eagerness for commercial success and his joie de vivre, among them James Bond spoof Kiss the Girls and Make Them Die, a spaghetti western, Anzio (1968) and Barbarella (also 1968). But the film business in Italy wasn't as thriving as a decade before and he left the country for the US in the early 1970s, where he set up his own studio in North Carolina. This became a powerhouse of what even at the time were recognised as classics (cult or otherwise), including Sidney Lumet's Serpico (1973), Michael Winner's Death Wish (1974), Sydney Pollack's Three Days of the Condor (1975), John Wayne's final western, The Shootist (1976), Ingmar Bergman's The Serpent's Egg (1977) and Arnold Schwarzenegger's breakthrough film, Conan the Barbarian (1982). He also worked fruitfully with David Lynch – making Dune in 1984, and Blue Velvet, two years later. These films – and others, such as Ragtime in 1981 – were testimony to De Laurentiis's talents not just as an old-school movie mogul, prepared to lavish cash on whatever genre he fancied, but also a producer with the guts to take a punt and the ability spot a serious talent.

Yet his name became, for a while, synonymous with a particular type of costly endeavour that, were it not a turkey, certainty pushed the boundaries of taste. Movies such as the legendary King Kong remake (1976), killer whale film Orca (1977), disaster movie Hurricane (1979), Flash Gordon remake (1980), Halloween II (the 1981 sequel to John Carpenter's 1978 classic horror film) and King Kong Lives (1986) led to his being dubbed "Dino De Horrendous" by critics Harry and Michael Medved in 1980.

Most recently, De Laurentiis was the driving force between the big-screen transfers of Thomas Harris's Hannibal Lecter novels, beginning with Manhunter in 1986, skipping 1991's The Silence of the Lambs, and picking the series up again for Hannibal (2001), Red Dragon (2002) and Hannibal Rising – one of an astonishing three titles he oversaw as recently as 2007. De Laurentiis picked up an Oscar for La Strada in 1954, and was honoured by the Academy in 2001 with Irving G Thalberg Memorial award.

De Laurentiis was married twice and is survived by six of his seven daughters. His only son, Federico, died at 26 in a plane crash.