News from Italy
A Cinderella Story
City Lights: Sophia Loren
by Andira Vitale
Sophia Loren was considered the best Italian actress in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s and still holds that honorary title. Her career was incredibly swift and successful: Sophia appeared in over 80 films and received numerous awards.
Today, we will tell you the fairy tale life story of Sophia Loren. We will wander through that tale again, travelling through Loren’s illegitimate birth, her moments of poverty, the war years, her relationship with Carlo Ponti, who introduced the jewel within her to the whole world, and the moments when she is torn between two men. Yes, she was a star… She became a shining star not only in her beloved country but all over the world…
She shines as the star of a fairy tale, as described in her autobiography “Yesterday Today Tomorrow: My Life as a Fairy Tale.” Sophia Loren’s words that best summarise her life must be: “When I think back on my life, sometimes I’m surprised that it’s all true. I say to myself, I’ll wake up one morning and find out it’s all just a dream.”
Let’s get started.
Sophia Loren was born on September 20, 1934, and was named Sofia Villani Scicolone. In strict Catholic Italy, she was a child of shame: Her parents were aspiring actress Romilda and a simple engineer Riccardo. They were not legally married since both of them had spouses, but Italian laws at the time prohibited divorces. Abandoned, Romilda had no money or work, so she had no choice but to flee to her parents in the sleepy seaside town of Pozzuoli in Naples.
Although Romilda was afraid her family would not accept her illegitimate infant, Mama Luisa and Papa Domenico welcomed the two of them. Mama Luisa quickly found the starving baby a wet nurse, and the family went without meat to pay her. But the town of Pozzuoli was not so kind. Loren writes movingly of being a thin and “ugly” child who felt out of place with her beautiful mother and absent father. It’s hard to imagine, but she was a relatively slim teenager, which earned her the nickname “stiletto” (which translates to “twig”). Sophia had a sister named Anna Maria, and the two girls were inseparable during childhood.
The war came to Naples when Loren was six years old. He saw hunger and fear, hiding in a dirty, crowded railway tunnel. During this period, he felt the terrible face of war most closely when a piece of shrapnel from a bomb pierced his jaw. During this period, life stopped. School, cinema and theatre were closed. The band playing in the town square had stopped. There was no life except the movement of bombs and the air of fear that played the leading role. Attacks frequently targeted the town of Pozzuoli due to its proximity to the sea and a military factory. The family moved to Naples for safety and returned to Pozzuoli only after the war ended. Then, Loren’s grandmother opened her pub in town. Sophia’s mother played the piano there, Maria sang, and the future star of Italian cinema worked as a waitress.
“As I was about to turn fifteen, I suddenly found myself living inside a curvy, glowing body, filled with life and promise,” Loren writes. “Whenever I walked down the streets of Pozzuoli, the boys would turn around and whistle after me.”
According to Loren, her mother seized the chance to make her own thwarted dreams come true through her blossoming daughter. 1949 she entered Loren in the “Queen of the Sea” beauty pageant. But there was a problem: the family did not have enough money for an evening gown. Always resourceful, Loren’s grandmother took down the family’s pink taffeta curtains to fashion a gown, and her mother painted her only pair of shoes white. “‘Holy Mary, I beseech you, don’t let it rain,’ my fairy godmothers whispered in quivering voices,” Loren writes.
Loren did not win, but she was named one of the twelve princesses. One of her prizes included a train ticket to Rome, so Loren and her mother made their way to the city to find their fortune.
The war was over. Much of Rome’s entertainment was centred around Cinecitta Studios. She worked as an extra in the immortal city of Rome, entered beauty pageants and became the “Queen of Photo Romances” by modelling for soap opera comics aimed at female readers. When she was just 16 years old, dancing happily with a girlfriend in a restaurant near the Colosseum, she met Carlo Ponti, the mega-producer of Italian films. He was 39 years old, fat, and petite, but he would change Loren’s life like a prince… He invited Loren to stroll in the garden, and she was quickly accepted. She writes:
I had a strange impression that he’d understood me. He had read the traces of a reserved personality, my complicated past, and my great longing to be successful… It wasn’t just a game for me; it was much more than that.
Ponti offered her a screen test, proving that not everyone was as enamoured with her as he was. “She’s impossible to photograph,” Loren heard the cameraman gripe. “Her face is too short, her mouth is too big, and her nose is too long.’ As usual, I was ‘too much’ of something. But that’s how I was; what fault was it of mine?”
One of her notable early roles was playing the slave Ligia in the film “Quo Vadis” (1951), a starting point for Sophia’s career. After that, the aspiring actress changed her stage name to the well-known variation, Sophia Loren, under which she appeared in the film “La Favorita” (1952).
The turning point in Loren’s career came with her role in the film “The Gold of Naples” (1954), directed by Vittorio De Sica. In the movie “Too Bad She’s Bad” (1954), Sophia starred alongside Marcello Mastroianni for the first time, and their partnership would last long. Over the next three years, the actress graced many famous films that are still celebrated today, including “Bread, Love and…” (1955) and “Lucky to Be a Woman” (1956).
Despite the cameraman’s pronouncement (and her father’s attempt to get her and her family kicked out of Rome by suggesting to authorities they were running a brothel), Loren quickly became a star of Italian cinema. She also became a mistress to the very married Ponti, whom she openly admits to partially treating as a father. “He gave me a rootedness and stability that kept me grounded,” she writes, “while the world around me seemed to swirl dizzyingly.”
Their secretive relationship, taboo in conservative Italy where divorce was illegal, would be tested when Ponti negotiated Sophia’s American breakthrough, playing opposite Frank Sinatra and Cary Grant in 1958’s The Pride and the Passion.
When Grant first heard about the project, he refused to work with Sophia. The married Grant changed his tune once he met Loren: “He held out his hand, looking at me with a pinch of mischief: ‘Miss Lolloloren, I presume? Or is it Miss Lorenigida? You Italians have such strange last names I can’t seem to get them straight.’”
The film’s shooting process, which took place in the Spanish countryside, was accompanied by scenic, slow, long walks and romantic meals. And he was falling in love with Sophia. Grant began begging Loren to marry him, and she told him she needed time to decide: “I was more and more muddled, torn between two men and two worlds…I knew that my place was next to Carlo—he was my safe harbour,” she writes in her book. “I also knew it was hard to resist the magnetism of a man like Cary, who said he was willing to give up everything for me.”
While Loren and Grant were filming the 1958 movie Houseboat, the situation between the trio became apparent. Reading the paper one morning, she and Ponti were read in Louella Parson’s column that their lawyers had married them by proxy in Mexico to circumvent Italian laws. “On the set,” Loren writes, “Cary, who was slightly dazed and, at last, resigned, reacted in a truly gentlemanly way: ‘All the best, Sophia. I hope you’ll be happy.’”
She waxes rhapsodic about her beloved Marcello Mastroianni, her on-screen partner in twelve films. Mastroianni, with his “gentle gaze” and “kind smile,” the charming director Vittorio De Sica and Loren formed what she calls “our perfect triangle.” “What fun we had! We were young and irresponsible, and the world was our oyster,” she writes. Loren costarred with Marcello Mastroianni in more than a dozen films. She said the two “had chemistry; we didn’t know why. But I was in love with my husband, and he was in love with his wife.”
In 1960, Loren was offered a million dollars to star in the film “The Fall of the Roman Empire” as Lucilla, making her a millionaire. Her performance in the movie “Two Women” (1960), directed by Vittorio De Sica, where she starred alongside Jean-Paul Belmondo, earned her the Silver Bear for Best Actress at the Cannes Film Festival and an Academy Award in the same category. The film received over 20 international awards from renowned film festivals worldwide.
Loren received her second Academy Award for her role in “Marriage Italian Style” (1964), where she acted alongside her excellent friend Mastroianni. While the list of films in which Loren appeared is extensive, some notable ones include “El Cid” (1961) with Charlton Heston, “The Millionairess” (1960) with Peter Sellers, “It Started in Naples” (1960) with Clark Gable, and “Arabesque” (1966) with Gregory Peck.
In the 1970s, the Italian actress starred alongside Richard Burton in the film “Il Viaggio” (The Journey, 1974), for which she received the David di Donatello Award for Best Actress.
Sophia Loren loved cooking Italian food for her co-stars and flirted with them. He even let them fall in love with him. Among her co-stars, Sophia would not fall in love with anyone other than Cary Grant.
Everyone from Peter Sellers (who was obsessed with her) to William Holden to Sidney Lumet and Gregory Peck was enamoured with her. During the filming of 1967’s More Than a Miracle, she describes how she and Omar Sharif, another smitten co-star, invited their mothers on location to see who made the best eggplant parmigiana. Sharif’s mother won by a hair.
Everyone from Peter Sellers to William Holden to Sidney Lumet and Gregory Peck was enamoured with her. During the filming of 1967’s More Than a Miracle, she describes how she and Omar Sharif, another smitten co-star, invited their mothers on location to see who made the best eggplant parmigiana. Sharif’s mother won by a hair.
However, Sophia remained faithful to her one and only husband, Carlo Ponti, expressing her love for the film producer throughout her life until his death in 2007.
“We were a team, a solid pair; we complemented each other as in the best of families,” Loren writes of her relationship with Carlo Ponti. But the Italian government—and some particularly judgmental members of the public—hounded the pair for years, charging them with bigamy and sending them into exile in the U.S., France, and Switzerland. Ponti’s estranged wife, a lawyer Giuliana, finally devised a solution. She, Sophia, and Carlo became citizens of France, where divorce was legal. Ponti’s Mexican proxy marriage was annulled, Carlo and Giuliana were divorced, and he and Sophia finally married face-to-face in 1966. They had two children together, Carlo Ponti Jr. İn 1968 and Edoardo Ponti in 1973.
However, Italy’s outdated legal system (divorce wouldn’t be legalised until the 1970s) wasn’t done with that. 1977, Carlo Ponti was accused of numerous crimes, including illegal currency trading. Italian property was confiscated, and they were exiled again. 1980, Loren was convicted of tax evasion based on income tax returns from the 1960s.
Loren decided to return to Italy in 1982 and serve her sentence. After turning herself into authorities, she was taken to the women’s jail in Caserta. “Crowding around the entrance was a flock of people who greeted me warmly, almost as though it were some kind of celebration,” she writes. The carnival-like atmosphere continued, with fans “chanting Neapolitan songs and dancing the tarantella” under her window to entertain her. Inside, though, Sophia was falling apart. “Prison should not be a hell without hope,” she writes.
Awards and Recognition
Sophia Loren holds the record among actors for the number of awards she has received. In 1961, Sophia Loren became the first actor to win an Academy Award for a foreign-language performance. She received the prestigious Oscar for her role in the Italian film “Two Women” (La Ciociara), directed by Vittorio De Sica. The iconic star boasts six David di Donatello Awards for Best Actress. In addition to her Oscars, Loren has won a Grammy, five special Golden Globes, a BAFTA award, and many other symbols of success in her acting career. In 1994, she was honoured with the 2000th Star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
Loren’s talent wasn’t limited to acting; she also ventured into the world of music. In 1957, she released her debut single, “S’agapò” (I Love You), which became a hit in Italy. She recorded several albums and performed alongside renowned singers like Frank Sinatra and Eros Ramazzotti throughout her career.
Sophia is a passionate fan of the Napoli football team. She has posed for photographers as a model, including for the Pirelli Calendar in 2007, where, at the age of 72, she showcased her amazing figure. Currently, Sophia lives in Geneva, but she also has homes in Naples and Rome. She has dedicated many decades to Italian cinema, making her the true industry gem.
Sophia Loren’s legacy goes beyond her filmography. She advocates for human rights, especially for children’s welfare. In 1999, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) named her a goodwill ambassador, and she actively supports various charitable causes.
“There is a source of youth: it is your mind, your talent, the creativity that you bring into your life and the lives of your loved ones. When you learn to drink from this source, you truly defeat age.” Sophia Loren
