Marina Cicogna, an unconventional countess who in the late 1960s and early 1970s emerged as the first major female producer in Italian cinema, helping bring to the screen films by Pier Paolo Pasolini and Franco Zeffirelli as well as Elio Petri’s Oscar-winning “Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion,” died Nov. 4 in Rome. She was 89.by the Venice Biennale, a celebration of the arts that includes the oldest film festival in the world, which was co-founded by Ms. Cicogna’s maternal grandfather.
Her father, Count Cesare Cicogna Mozzoni, a banker, helped finance the production of director Vittorio De Sica’s 1948 film “Bicycle Thieves” , a neorealist masterwork about desperation and poverty set in Italy in the aftermath of World War II. Ms. Cicogna was soon enticed to move into production. “I realized that the producers kept the rights to the negatives, and I said, ‘This doesn’t make sense — we need to start producing ourselves,'” sheMs. Cicogna’s brother and Fulvio Morsella were credited as executive producer and producer, respectively, of “Once Upon a Time in the West” , director Sergio Leone’s 1968 spaghetti western starring Henry Fonda and Claudia Cardinale. But Ms.
Off the set, Ms. Cicogna dined, partied, sunbathed and skied with a set that included actors Audrey Hepburn, Greta Garbo, Elizabeth Taylor and Rock Hudson, former first lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Princess Margaret of England, artist Andy Warhol and fashion designer Valentino.