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Born in Naples in 1925, Alberto Grimaldi initially entered the movie business in the 1950s as an entertainment lawyer, before embarking on a career as a producer at the start of the 1960s. His three earliest efforts were fairly routine action/adventure films, two of them -- Shades of Zorro (1962) and Legacy of the Incas (1964) -- starring American leading men Frank Latimore and Guy Madison, respectively. In 1965, however, fate took a hand when director Sergio Leone, who had just found unexpectedly impressive success with his first western, A Fistful of Dollars (starring a young American named Clint Eastwood), was preparing the sequel, also starring Eastwood, and ran into resistance from his producers over the cost of the movie. Leone and Grimaldi were brought together on this project, which led, in turn, to The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly, directed by Leone, and The Big Gundown directed by Sergio Sollima, among other highly acclaimed and lucrative films of the late 1960s. By the dawn of the 1970s, Grimaldi was in a position to produce movies by many of Italy's top directors, including Fellini,Bertolucci, and Pasolini. He achieved something of a pinnacle among his fraternity of film financiers in 2002 when he served as producer of Martin Scorsese's Gangs of New York, one of the most high profile productions to come out of Hollywood in a generation. His last production to date, as of 2012, was the short La Tivu de Fellini (2003).