His devotion to Ms. Zadora included inviting Golden Globe Awards voters to private screenings of “Butterfly” (1982), a film he produced for her, and promoted her candidacy in a media campaign — all for someone considered a lightweight competing with the likes of Kathleen Turner, Howard E. Rollins Jr. and Elizabeth McGovern for best new star of the year in a motion picture.

When Ms. Zadora won the award — a shock in Hollywood and beyond — it was assumed that Mr. Riklis had somehow engineered her victory, although he and the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, which runs the Golden Globes, denied the accusation.

In 1990 Mr. Riklis and Ms. Zadora tore down Pickfair, the Beverly Hills estate once owned by the film stars Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, to build another mansion. Two years later they were ordered by a Manhattan judge to pay $751,000 in back rent for their apartment at Trump Tower to Donald J. Trump.

They divorced the next year.

“Pia didn’t hurt his reputation as a businessman,” Marcia Riklis said in a telephone interview. “It was quite the opposite. He created her celebrity and enjoyed it. And he enjoyed being known as Mr. Zadora while he was still working on his business deals.”

Mr. Riklis was born on Dec. 2, 1923, in Istanbul, while his parents, Pinhas and Batya, were on their way from Odessa, Russia, to Palestine, which at the time was under the British Mandate. As a child, he excelled in math and Bible studies; while in high school he was in charge of the physical fitness program of the youth battalion of Haganah, the main Jewish military organization of Palestine before Israeli independence.

After serving with the British Army in Europe during World War II, he returned to Israel, where he married Ms. Stern, his high school sweetheart. The couple and their daughter, Simona, immigrated to the United States and settled in New Mexico, where he briefly attended college before moving to Columbus, Ohio. He graduated from Ohio State University with a bachelor’s degree in mathematics.

The family then moved again, to Minneapolis, where he taught in a Hebrew school. But he wanted to earn more money than he did as a teacher — and wanting to work in finance, he found a job as a junior securities analyst at the investment firm Piper Jaffray & Hopwood and continued to teach for a while.