His many other achievements apart, Carlo Ponti will always be known as the man who discovered, and married (as his second wife), Sophia Loren, and an important part of his career was devoted to promoting hers.

But he deserves to be remembered for many other films, made in his native Italy and beyond, and covering the spectrum from international blockbusters to modestly budgeted art films.

The Ponti-Loren marriage was a glamorous union of different talents, exuding something of a whiff of sulphur in its early years especially, for being regarded as bigamous in their native Italy, until Ponti solved that problem by taking French citizenship. The marriage triumphantly survived periodic reports of strains, separations and Loren’s relationships with other men.

Carlo Ponti was born in 1912 in Magenta in Lombardy, 20 kilometres west of Milan. He was educated at the University of Milan, where he took a degree in law.

After qualifying he worked at first in the office of a Milan barrister before, in 1938, going into the cinema. In the early years of the Second World War he worked in the cinema in Milan, before joining the Lux Film company in Rome. He produced a series of films featuring the comedian Totò, and after the Second World War he was associated with leading directors such as Alberto Lattuada, Luigi Zampa and Mario Camerini.

In 1950 he went into partnership with another rising producer, Dino De Laurentiis. Together they were responsible for some of the most important Italian films of the period such as Roberto Rossellini’s Europa 51 (1951), Federico Fellini’s poetic-realistic La Strada (1954) and Vittorio de Sica’s collection of six sketches of Neapolitan life, Gold of Naples (1955).

They were also involved in such large-scale international productions as the violent historical romp Attila the Hun (1954) directed by Pietro Francisci (and starring Anthony Quinn and Loren); the Homeric saga Ulysses (1955), featuring Quinn again and Kirk Douglas; and the glamorous Italian-American screen version of Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1955) directed by King Vidor, and including among its formidable array of stars Audrey Hepburn as Natasha Rostov, Herbert Lom as Napoleon, Henry Fonda as Pierre Besukhov and Anita Ekberg as his faithless first wife Helene.

In 1957 Ponti ended his association with De Laurentiis and from then on headed his own production company, working in Italy, France, Britain and Hollywood.

In the same year, in Mexico, he married Sophia Loren. They had met when he was judging a beauty contest and he had encouraged her to take part. Determined to make her a star, he lined up several films for her, including the one that first made her reputation, Woman of the River (1955). Indeed, this frothing melodrama, from a story by Alberto Moravia, in which a peasant girl falls for a handsome smuggler, existed largely as a showcase for the abundant charms of Ponti’s new star.

Ponti’s divorce from his first wife, Giuliana Fiastri, whom he had married in 1946, was not, however, recognised in Italy and in 1962 he was committed for trial, in his absence, on a bigamy charge. The case dragged on for several years before he was finally acquitted, and as a result of it he decided to become a French citizen in 1964. He was remarried to Loren in a civil ceremony by the Mayor of Sèvres in April 1966.

Ponti’s later career as a film producer was largely devoted to furthering the reputation of Loren, and he chose many of his projects with her in mind. One of the most successful was Two Women (1960), directed by Vittorio de Sica, and based on the Moravia novel La Ciociara, which depicts a mother and daughter in flight through war- ravaged Italy and their attempt to build their lives after being raped by invading troops.

For her splendidly luminous performance as the mother who has to try to help her daughter come to terms with their horrific experience, Loren became the first actress to win an Oscar for a film not in the English language.

De Sica went on to make two popular comedies with Loren under the Ponti banner: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow (1963), a rumbustious though not entirely convincing excursion into the naughty lives of bold ladies; and the comedy of manners Marriage, Italian Style (1964), in which she starred opposite Marcello Mastroianni, as the mistress of a philandering businessman by whom she has one of the three children she has had by different men, and whom she eventually tricks (though willingly on his part) into a happy marriage.

Other Loren vehicles devised by Ponti included Lady L (1965), directed by Peter Ustinov. In spite of a distinguished cast which included Loren, Ustinov, David Niven and Paul Newman, this survey of a romantic life recollected in tranquil old age failed somehow to convince.

Sunflower (1970) was a poignant account of a marriage disrupted by war when the husband is sent to the Russian front, separated from his wife (Loren) and thereafter makes a new life in the Soviet Union. There were also two films with Richard Burton, a misconceived remake for television of Noël Coward’s Brief Encounter (1974) and De Sica’s Il Viaggio (The Journey, 1974).

Among the films not starring Loren, Ponti had his biggest commercial success with David Lean’s epic adaptation of the Boris Pasternak novel Dr Zhivago (1965). Its glamorous cast, which included Omar Sharif and Julie Christie as the protagonists Zhivago and Lara, aided and abetted by Rod Steiger, Rita Tushingham, Alec Guinness, Ralph Richardson and Tom Courtenay, and superb filming made it a box office hit, however the critics might cavil at its departure from the spirit of Pasternak’s original.

Ponti also produced three pictures that helped to bring Italy’s leading arthouse director, Michelangelo Antonioni, into the international mainstream. Blow-Up (1966), which featured David Hemmings as a fashion photographer who thinks he has witnessed a murder, was an intriguing puzzle piece set in “swinging London”. In spite of its plotlessness, it dazzled most critics by the way in which it sustained a juggling act between fantasy and reality.

Zabriskie Point (1970) was a somewhat modish exercise in the pitfalls awaiting the attempt to escape conventional constraints, shot in Death Valley, California. The Passenger (1975) starred Jack Nicholson as a television reporter who goes on the run (in the company of Maria Schneider, who had achieved notoriety alongside Marlon Brando in Last Tango in Paris) from the reality of his life by exchanging identities with a dead man, but finds that he has become a marked man. This sharply divided opinion: devotees of “art” film hailed it as the quintessence of the genre, but it did not make Antonioni popular with the commercial cinema.

But Ponti had not given up the art end of the cinema yet. Some were surprised when he took on Andy Warhol’s Flesh for Frankenstein (1973, aka Andy Warhol’s Frankenstein).

In the later 1970s Ponti was again in trouble with the Italian courts, when he was fined £13 million and sentenced to four years’ imprisonment on charges of smuggling money and works of art abroad. But he did not attend the hearing, and his French nationality made him immune from extradition. In January 1982 he was cleared by an appeal court in Rome of illegally transferring money from Italy to Switzerland, where he latterly lived.

Ponti virtually retired from the cinema in the late 1970s, but he returned in 1990 as joint executive producer of Loren’s screen comeback, after a similar time away, in the television comedy Sabato, domenica e lunedì (Saturday, Sunday and Monday).

From his marriage to Sophia Loren Ponti had two sons, Carlo junior, a former child actor now a conductor, and Eduardo, a film director. There was a daughter and a son, Alessandro, also a producer, from his first marriage.

Carlo Ponti, film producer, was born on December 11, 1912. He died on January 10, 2007, aged 94