Countess Marina Cicogna, who has died aged 89, was a rebellious aristocrat who became the first Italian woman to produce major films, including Sergio Leone’s 1968 epic Once Upon a Time in the West (with her brother Bino) and the daring 1970 Italian corruption satire Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion, which starred Marina Cicogna’s lover, the Brazilian actress Florinda Bolkan, and won an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film.

Self-assured and passionate, with a disconcertingly queenly bearing, she stood her ground against ungovernable geniuses like Pier Paolo Pasolini, whom she persuaded to cast Terence Stamp as the lead in Teorema (1968); and she managed to win the respect of Italy’s overwhelmingly Left-wing cultural firmament without adopting champagne socialism (unlike her fellow noble, Luchino Visconti) or ever pretending to be someone she was not.

Countess Marina Cicogna Mozzoni Volpi di Misurata was born on May 29 1934 in Palazzo Volpi in Rome, the daughter of Count Cesare Cicogna Mozzoni, a Milanese banker descended from a Venetian Doge, and his wife Anna Maria, a friend of Cecil Beaton and Nancy Mitford, who dedicated the novel Don’t Tell Alfred to her.

Marina’s maternal grandfather was the enterprising tycoon and prominent Fascist Count Volpi di Misurata, who, in addition to bringing electricity to Venice, negotiating Italy’s First World War debt repayment as minister of finance and governing a large chunk of Libya, had founded the Venice Film Festival in 1932 in the hope of bringing more tourists to the various hotels he owned there.

During the Venice festivals, young Marina played host to the children of visiting Hollywood producers, such as David O Selznick; he asked if he could adopt this cultured, polyglot young cinephile who forced her English governess to take her to the movies in the morning and stay there until the evening. When her parents separated after the war, 14-year-old Marina ran away from her father’s house in Milan and took a train to her mother in Rome.

After school in Italy, she enrolled at Sarah Lawrence in New York, but after a year ran away to Hollywood with her college roommate, Barbara Warner, daughter of the studio boss Jack Warner, and encamped at their Beverly Hills estate (now owned by Jeff Bezos). 

By this point in her life, it might be more efficient to list the stars she did not know, for in Hollywood she recruited a new layer of famous friends (such as Marilyn Monroe, Lauren Bacall and Rock Hudson) on top of those she knew through her family in Venice (not just Beaton and Nancy Mitford, but also Audrey Hepburn, David Niven, Princess Margaret and Lord Snowdon).

She then took some Hollywood friends to Tripoli in Libya, where her family still owned a resort; later, she helped one of Colonel Gaddafi’s sons host a party in Venice, which she told The New York Times was “awful. I’ve never seen people squander money in such a horrible way, hiring boats with tarts and things.” She holidayed on Aristotle Onassis’s yacht with Winston Churchill and Greta Garbo, who defied their respective reputations, Churchill by being taciturn and reclusive, Greta Garbo by her appetite for life and desire to step ashore.

In 1966, her mother bought Euro International Films, an Italian production and distribution company specialising in foreign films. Marina Cicogna, then 32, and her brother Giuseppe Ascanio, known as Bino (short for “Bambino”), began picking the films for distribution. Wasting no time, she chose the controversial German sex education documentary Helga, which showed a woman giving birth. “We put ambulances at the exit of the cinema, thinking that people would faint when they saw it,” she said. It was a huge hit.

A year later, three films distributed by the siblings were in competition at the Venice Film Festival: Pasolini’s Edipo Re, Visconti’s The Stranger, and the eventual winner, Luis Buñuel’s Belle de Jour, starring Catherine Deneuve, for which the Cicognas had risked the censor’s scissors. Marina Cicogna threw a party, sending a Learjet to Corsica to pick up Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, and another to Rome to pick up Jane Fonda and Roger Vadim. (After the protests of 1968, however, she recalled, “you couldn’t have a big party without hurting people’s feelings, you couldn’t go around with a Rolls-Royce without being thrown eggs at.”)

The Cicognas decided to start funding and producing films themselves. In 1968, they spent $2 million on Once Upon a Time in the West, the pinnacle of the spaghetti western era, starring Claudia Cardinale and Henry Fonda, with music by Ennio Morricone; that same year, they also produced The Young Tigers, starring Helmut Berger; and Pasolini’s Teorema. In 1969, she financed Pasolini again, this time for Medea, starring Maria Callas. That summer they had five productions showing in the US.

One film that she had to fight her own family to produce was Metti, Una Sera a Cena (“Let’s Say, One Night at Supper”, 1969), but it was a critical success, and marked her first collaboration with the sultry Brazilian model-turned-actress Florinda Bolkan, who would star the next year in their Oscar-winning Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion.

For a while, it seemed as if the siblings could no wrong. When Warren Beatty went to Rome to publicise Bonnie and Clyde, he rang up Marina Cicogna: “I hear you’re a genius – and you’re young and good-looking. We have to meet.” They had plans in the pipeline to produce a film with Trevor Howard and a big-budget Battle of Midway movie.

But the illusion of limitless family money that had sustained her charmed life was rudely shattered when the more fragile Bino, in her words, “went bananas”. He fell into debt, became a cocaine addict, fled to Rio de Janeiro to make a new start, then took in his own life, aged 36, in 1971.

Marina, meanwhile, had begun a relationship with Florinda Bolkan: “Ephebic, sensual, she didn’t look like anyone else.” She had also had flirtations with Alain Delon and Lex Barker, the actor who played Tarzan. (The playboy industrialist Gianni Agnelli, she recalled, had jealously burst in on her and Barker with a flashlight, “lifted the sheet and asked: ‘Can you show me this Tarzan? He’s actually not bad.’”) But she did not embrace the label of gay or bisexual: “I have never loved sensational displays of one’s sexuality. I consider parades, and in general the ostentation of one’s orientation, as something redundant.”

Marina Cicogna and Florinda Bolkan were together for 20 years, flitting between Rome, Rio de Janeiro, Los Angeles and New York, their orbits intersecting with Jackie Onassis, Andy Warhol, David Hockney and Paloma Picasso. Marina Cicogna went on to produce Elio Petri’s 1971 Palme d’Or-winning The Working Class Goes to Heaven, Lina Wertmüller’s 1972 comedy The Seduction of Mimi, Michele Lupo’s 1972 A Man to Respect, and Franco Zeffirelli’s 1974 Oscar-nominated Brother Sun, Sister Moon, but she became disenchanted with the Italian film industry in the late 1970s.

In the early 1990s, she separated from Florinda Bolkan, who had been frequently unfaithful but was intolerant of Marina Cicogna’s own infidelity, with Benedetta Gardona, 25 years her junior, who at one point was forced to hide from Florinda Bolkan in a wardrobe. Marina Cicogna remained with Benedetta Gardona, whom she adopted as her daughter for inheritance purposes, until her death.

Trim and stylish, much courted by fashion designers, she drank little, never smoked, and at the age of 50 gave up fried food, cooked butter, meat and bechamel. Having taken her first steps as a child on the slopes of Cortina, she skied until her final years.

She did not suffer fools gladly, but was remarkable for her curiosity, and her interest in talent, beetling in her car to tiny theatres in the outskirts of Rome well into her seventies.

She served as president of the Italian Film Institute, and helped found the Ischia Film Festival. In 2009, she had a London exhibition of her photographs of the 1960s jet set, and went on to publish three photographic books. In 2021, she was the subject of a documentary, Marina Cicogna: The Producer.

Countess Marina Cicogna, born May 29 1934, died November 4 2023