Alberto Grimaldi obituary

© Provided by The GuardianPhotograph: Nacho Gallego/EPA

The producer Alberto Grimaldi, who has died aged 95, worked with most of the giants of Italian cinema, including Sergio Leone, Federico Fellini, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Bernardo Bertolucci. Fittingly for someone who began his career as a lawyer, he seemed to spend almost as much time in court, defending the films he had developed and financed, as he did on set. Hardly surprising when his credits included Bertolucci's erotic chamber piece Last Tango in Paris (1972) and Pasolini's remorseless study of fascism, Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975). These were among eight of his films that Italian censors and prosecutors accused of offending public decency.

© Photograph: Nacho Gallego/EPAAlberto Grimaldi pictured in 2007. The producer worked with Italian film greats including Sergio Leone, Federico Fellini, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Bernardo Bertolucci.

After a three-year legal battle over Last Tango in Paris, Grimaldi received a suspended prison sentence in 1976, along with the director and the film's stars, Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider, for "concurring to produce an obscene spectacle". The movie remained banned in Italy until 1987.

During the initial trial in 1973, Grimaldi was simultaneously fighting obscenity charges levelled against Pasolini's bawdy adaptation of The Canterbury Tales (1972). That was nothing compared with what lay in store for Salò. Complicated legal struggles over that picture began in Italy a few weeks after Pasolini's murder in November 1975 and continued for several years, even as the film was being shown and acclaimed abroad. It was finally released in 1977 with four sequences expunged, and would not be seen intact in Italy until the following year.

Grimaldi's final producing credit came on Gangs of New York (2002). In the late 1970s, he had secured for the director Martin Scorsese the rights to Herbert Asbury's 1927 nonfiction book of the same name. This movie, too, landed him in court, although for once it was Grimaldi who was suing. He prevailed in 2000 in a high-profile lawsuit against Disney and Universal after the studios tried to freeze him out of the deal. The terms of his settlement included a payment of more than $3m along with a cut of the profits and a lead producer credit.

Born in Naples, Alberto was raised by his mother, Elena, in the city's Vomero district. His father, Pasquale, a lawyer, died of malaria when he was three. Alberto was educated at the Antonio Genovesi secondary school, and later gained a law degree, founding his own legal firm after two years' training. He learned about the film business from some of his earliest clients, who were regional distributors. "In my case, film-producing started almost as a hobby," he said. He founded a production company, PEA (Produzioni Europee Associati), in 1962, and took his first producing credit that year on The Shadow of Zorro.

Impressed by Leone's A Fistful of Dollars (1964), an early example of the spaghetti western, Grimaldi offered the director a lucrative deal (50% of the film's profits) to make a follow-up, For a Few Dollars More (1965). They teamed up once again, along with that film's stars, Clint Eastwood and Lee van Cleef, for The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966). After this, Grimaldi said, he tired of Leone. "I think he changed in a way that everyone changes when they become successful . he became very demanding."

Nevertheless, Grimaldi later tried to help him make a film version of Harry Grey's book The Hoods, introducing Leone to Norman Mailer, who wrote a perfunctory and unsatisfactory screenplay before banking his $60,000 fee. (The film was eventually made in 1984 as Once Upon a Time in America, with the producer Arnon Milchan, who bought the rights from Grimaldi.)

His relationship with Fellini began when he suggested the director as a contributor to Spirits of the Dead (1968), a portmanteau feature comprising adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe stories by different film-makers (Roger Vadim and Louis Malle were the others). He later produced Fellini Satyricon (1969) and Fellini's Casanova (1976). The director was also responsible for the final PEA production, Ginger and Fred (1986), a sweet but toothless comedy about Italian TV.

Grimaldi had his hands full overseeing the troubled production of Burn! (1969). The shoot in Colombia was disrupted by arguments between the director, Gillo Pontecorvo, and his lead actor, Brando. By the final weeks of the shoot, they had stopped speaking, and the actor stormed off the set prematurely.

The producer was in the process of suing Brando for deserting the film when it struck him that he would be a far better fit for Last Tango in Paris than Bertolucci's original choice, Jean-Louis Trintignant. Brando was on his best behaviour this time. "He was excellent - just like an angel."

Grimaldi went on to produce Bertolucci's historical epic 1900 (1976), starring Robert De Niro and Gérard Depardieu, although their planned adaptation of Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest never came to fruition. His other productions during that decade included Billy Wilder's comedy Avanti! and the musical Man of La Mancha (both 1972) with Peter O'Toole and Sophia Loren.

In the mid-70s, Grimaldi opened a branch of PEA in Los Angeles. When his wife and sons were bound and gagged during a break-in at their house in Rome in 1976, he moved them permanently to the US.

He spent his later years in Monaco, where he had lived since the early 90s, overseeing the rights management of his past work. His biggest hits - Last Tango in Paris and his two films with Leone - continued even latterly to pay him the equivalent of several million pounds a year.

He is survived by his second wife, Melanie (nee Vaughan-Hughes), whom he married in 1995, as well as by Massimo, Maurizio and Marcello, his sons with his first wife, Maria Rosaria (nee Buongiorno), to whom he was married from 1953 until her death in 1983.

. Alberto Grimaldi, producer, born 28 March 1925; died 23 January 2021