Vincenzo Labella

Vincenzo Labella was an Italian-American writer and producer.

Labella was born in Vatican City, where his father was the dean of the Pontifical Halls. Having spent his childhood with access to the Apostolic Library of the Vatican, he started out as a historian, journalist and documentarian.

Producer Dino De Laurentiis asked him to serve as advisor on the 1961 film Barabbas (with Anthony Quinn), a job which led to many other history-based projects.

Labella produced the 1977 NBC mini-series Jesus of Nazareth, which starred Laurence Olivier, Anne Bancroft and Christopher Plummer, and received an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Limited Series.

He also produced Moses the Lawgiver, starring Burt Lancaster, which started as a six-hour series and was also released as a feature film.

Marco Polo was the first Western production to film in the Forbidden City and Ming Tombs in China. It starred Burt Lancaster, John Gielgud and John Houseman. Labella won an Emmy for Outstanding Drama Special for producing Marco Polo, and he co-wrote the eight episodes with director Giuliano Montaldo and David Butler.

Labella also wrote a film about Pope John XXIII with Ermanno Olmi, which won the Golden Rudder at the Venice Film Festival. He co-produced A Man from a Far Country on the life of Pope John Paul II, and wrote a biography of Michelangelo, Leonardo and Raphael, A Season of Giants, which he adapted into a special for TNT.

His final project was a series of documentaries entitled The Wonders of the Vatican Library, in 2004.

Labella died July 28, 2018, in Los Angeles, California. He was 93.