Adorable Story #127: Marina Cicogna
The Movie Producer Who Played by Her Own Rules
“Cinema has always been in my life, in my DNA since birth.”
— Marina Cicogna
When the credits of 20th‑century cinema roll in our heads, the list is usually crowded with directors and actors: film producers rarely make it into the limelight.
Yet there was always one exception that comes to mind: Marina Cicogna.
She was commonly introduced as Italy’s first major female film producer. But she was way more than that: Marina lived a life that mixed family heritage, artistic daring, and personal freedom.
Table of Contents: Family Background / Education and Early Curiosity / Breaking Into Film / Style and Influence / Beyond Producing / Personal Life
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Family Background
Marina Cicogna was born in Rome on May 29th, 1934.
Her father, Count Cesare Cicogna Mozzoni, came from one of the grand Lombard families tied to centuries of northern Italian history.
Her mother, Annamaria Volpi di Misurata, brought in another formidable legacy.
Annamaria’s father — Giuseppe Volpi, Count of Misurata — was a powerful industrialist and political figure, who also founded the Venice Film Festival in 1932.
Marina had a brother, Giuseppe “Bino” Ascanio (less than two years younger than her), who sadly would later commit suicide in 1971 in Rio de Janeiro.
Education and Early Curiosity
After childhood between Rome and Venice, Marina Cicogna attended a boarding school in Switzerland, and later pursued studies abroad.
After WWII, she traveled to Los Angeles, where she studied photography at the University of Southern California and immersed herself in the Hollywood system. That American exposure gave her two things: technical skill behind the lens and, more importantly, a new idea of independence from her family.
Instead of preparing herself for the quiet life of Italian nobility, she was training her eye for cinema.
Breaking Into Film
By the early 1960s, Marina Cicogna refused to follow the tradition of Italian nobility and sit still in salons: she started small, observing shoots, taking pictures, working her way into the overlooked corners of the industry.
Contacts were never a problem — she knew everyone in Hollywood — but influence alone was not enough. She calibrated her position by taste and courage, insisting on backing projects that (at least potentially) startled or unsettled the audience.
Her breakthrough arrived with Luis Buñuel’s Belle de Jour (1967), the daring drama starring Catherine Deneuve as a seemingly conventional Parisian wife who leads a secret double life. The film not only shocked audiences with its blend of surrealism and sensuality but also triumphed at the Venice Film Festival, where it won the Golden Lion, sealing Cicogna’s reputation as a leading force in European cinema.
The film also broke box office expectations and established Marina Cicogna as a producer who understood the elusive secret of bridging filmmaking art and commercial success.
The project had an erotic edge mixed with a surrealist angle that scared off many other producers: Cicogna, instead, embraced it.
That year she threw what came to be known as a legendary festival party in Venice, at the Ca’ Vendramin Calergi palace.
“I didn’t give a big ball, but rather said that everyone could dress as they wanted, as long as they were in white and yellow or white and gold”.
— Marina Cicogna
The event included sending Learjets to Corsica and Rome to fly in Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton (featured in the Adorable Story #118) and Jane Fonda and Roger Vadim respectively.
In 1968, together with her brother Bino, Alberto Grimaldi and Fulvio Morsella, Marina Cicogna produced the legendary Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West film.
Next came Giuseppe Patroni Griffi’s Metti una sera a cena (1969), a glossy, transgressive drama capturing the atmosphere of late‑1960s Italy. Stylish and controversial, it confirmed once again her instinct for the zeitgeist.
Her crown jewel arrived in 1970 with Elio Petri’s Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion. A sharp political allegory, the film skewered abuse of power with dark irony. It won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1971 and gave Marina Cicogna one of the most prestigious trophies a producer can place on a mantle.
Few Italian producers, let alone women of that era, had ever stood in such a spotlight.
Marina Cicogna’s slate through the 1960s and 1970s consistently favored directors who tested boundaries: ambitious scripts, moral ambiguities, aesthetic flourishes that needed bold financial backing.
She backed (and delivered) it all.
Style and Influence
Marina Cicogna stood out not just because she was a woman in an overwhelmingly male‑dominated power circuit, but because she behaved as though none of the business and artistic rules applied to her.
Her decisions mixed aristocratic confidence with a shrewd gambler’s instinct: she was willing to take on political stories, erotic dramas, and surrealist fantasies when more cautious producers exclusively stuck to safer crowd‑pleasers.
Her reputation was not of someone reading screenplays and managing budgets quietly in her office: she was a presence on set, a figure at festivals, a persuasive voice in boardrooms. Many called her the first lady of Italian cinema — then at its historical peak — not only for her family name but because she embodied authority without apology.
Beyond Producing
Marina Cicogna’s love of images was not confined to cinema. Her skills as a photographer produced exhibitions and publications. She captured moments from travels and personalities from her world with the same eye she had for casting and framing.
In 2021, she also released her long awaited memoir, “Ancora Spero” (“Still Hoping”, the Volpi family motto since XV century), where she reflected on the arc of her life: nobility, cinema, friendships, disappointments, and the ongoing desire to remain curious at any age.
Personal Life
“By nature, I feel neither resentment nor envy.”
— Marina Cicogna
Marina Cicogna never married.
During the winter of 1964, Marina Cicogna went to Megève with her friend Ljuba Rosa Rizzoli:
“Officially to ski, but in reality we had learned that Alain Delon, the legend of French cinema, was also headed there after yet another breakup with Romy Schneider."
One evening they found a note under the door:
“I’ll wait for you in room 104, Alain.”
It was not easy to guess which of the two friends staying in the same hotel room was convinced she was the recipient of the invitation.
“From Megève, I followed him to Paris for a few weeks. I didn’t walk, I didn’t live, I floated suspended in another dimension. He was the most handsome looking guy, I was the girl infatuated with a legend. It lasted a breath.”
In the 80s, and for more than 20 years, Marina Cicogna was the life companion of Brazilian actress Florinda Bolkan (extensively featured in the Adorable Story #53).
After they split, she began a relationship with Benedetta Gardona, whom Marina would legally adopt for inheritance purposes (same-sex unions were not legally recognized at the national level in Italy until 2016).
Marina Cicogna divided her life between her villa in Cortina d’Ampezzo, Villa Volpi (a stone’s throw from Venice), Villa Maser near Treviso (which would later become the set of Lovers, with Faye Dunaway and Marcello Mastroianni), an apartment at the Excelsior Hotel at the Venice Lido and one in Miami Beach.
Marina Cicogna died from cancer in Rome on November 4th, 2024, aged eighty-nine.
—Alberto @ Adorable Times
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