Born in 1919 as Agostino De Laurentiis, Dino spent his early years selling pasta for his father's company. Er, did I mention he's Italian? I should probably mention that.

He went to the national film school in Rome in fact, and formed his own Italian film company, which moved fully into production in 1946, eventually building its own studio facilities in the 60's. It was during this era when (amongst many, many other films) he produced Danger: Diabolik, which was eventually featured in the final episode of MST3K's Sci-Fi Channel run, experiment #1013-Diabolik.

(The character of Diabolik has a fascinating history all its own, which you can read about here.)

He went on to produce a whole ton of movies (193 by IMDB's count, but who knows really). Many of them were very good, and even those that weren't were at least pretty entertaining.

He's also responsible for Giada De Laurentiis (he was her grandpa).

Dino passed away on November 10th, 2010, at the age of 91.