Producer Carlo Ponti, one of the forces behind Italy's post-war film renaissance and husband of Italian film icon, Sophia Loren, died early Wednesday at the age of 94 in a Geneva, Switzerland hospital. Carlo produced more than 100 films during his 60 year career. Among his most famous productions were David Lean's "Doctor Zhivago"(1965), Federico Fellini's "La Strada" (1954) and Vittorio De Sica's 1960 classic "La Ciociara" (Two Women), for which Sophia won the 1962 Oscar for best actress. "His was a life dedicated to cinema," Loren and her two sons, Carlo and Edoardo, said in a statement. Carlo Ponti began his film career in Milan during World War II. He produced a few minor films during the war and immediately afterward, but became noted for his 1948 production of "Les Miserables”.  Carlo met a then unknown young girl named Sophia Villani Scicolone , during a beauty contest in Naples in the 1950s and persuaded her to change her name to Sophia Loren and begin studying acting and English. They were married in 1957. On year prior, "La Strada," which he co-produced, won the Academy Award for best foreign film, as did "Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow" in 1964. But it was his affair with the young Sophia that captivated the public, rather than his work with top filmmakers such as Dino De Laurentiis, Federico Fellini, Jean-Luc Godard, Peter Ustinov, David Lean and Roman Polanski. "I have done everything for love of Sophia," he said in a newspaper interview shortly before his 90th birthday in 2002. Carlo was briefly imprisoned by the Fascist government in Italy during World War II for producing "Piccolo Mondo Antico" ,which was considered anti-German. An Italian court later gave Ponti a six-month suspended sentence for his 1973 film "Massacre in Rome", which claimed Pope Pius XII did nothing about the execution of Italian hostages by the Germans. The charges eventually were dropped on appeal. In 1979, a court in Rome convicted him in absentia of the illegal transfer of capital abroad and sentenced him to four years in prison and a $24 million fine. It took Ponti until the late 1980s to settle his legal problems and finally obtain the return of his art collection, which had been seized by authorities and given to Italian museums. He also survived two kidnapping attempts in 1975. In recent years, the couple lived mostly in Switzerland.