Sophie’s mother Romilda did not immediately give up her desire to be an actress, but it was not easy with her daughter on her neck, so she never went beyond the provincial level. She made a living primarily as a piano teacher. Riccardo, the girl’s father, had unfulfilled career plans of his own. Although of noble birth, he failed in his attempt to become an engineer and ended up as a rank-and-file worker on the railway.
In addition, he refused to marry Romilda, even though he had another daughter Maria with her, whom he even refused to legally accept as his own. It wasn’t until many years later, when Sophia was already famous, that she paid her father a handsome sum to acknowledge Maria, allow her to take his surname and shake off the stigma of an illegitimate child. Sophia met her father only three times in her life, the last time on his deathbed in the 1970s, when she “forgave him but did not forget” his betrayal.
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It is certainly not surprising that with such a shaky background, Sophia grew up in very poor conditions, made even more difficult by the Second World War. Her home port town of Pozzuoli was a frequent target of Allied raids, during one of which she was wounded by shrapnel in the chin. After the war, the situation calmed down a bit, and Sophie’s grandmother, who did not stop helping her daughter and granddaughters, opened a modest pub in her apartment, where she served homemade cherry liqueur. Here Romilda played the piano, Maria sang, Sophia worked as a waitress. The intimate establishment became very popular, especially among the soldiers of the liberation garrisons, who could feel at home in this environment.
From the age of fifteen, Sophia began to participate in beauty contests, which were a ubiquitous and popular pastime in Italy. But of course that was just the beginning. Italian post-war cinema was experiencing a boom, and productions there far exceeded the local reach. So the teenage girl applied to the school of film acting, where she soon began to be noticed. Already at the age of sixteen, she appeared as an extra in the spectacular American technicolor opus Quo Vadis, created in Italian studios. Very soon, the famous producer Carlo Ponti took over her protective hand, who also modeled her public persona, following the example of other successful stars, he named her Sophia Loren. .. and finally married her in 1957. By then she was already a major European star, especially after breakthrough leading roles in The Two Nights of Cleopatra and The Gold of Naples by the revered director Vittorio De Sica. She jumped from role to role at that time, playing in more than five films a year. And people loved her. First the Italians, then the Europeans and finally the whole world.
Marcello Mastroianni and Sophia Loren in A Special Day. | Compagnia Cinematografica Champion In 1958, a contract for five films came with the American studio Paramount, which firmly anchored Loren as an international megastar. Romance on the river with Gary Grant or Farm under the Elms with Anthony Perkins are not among her biggest legacies today, but they served their purpose at the time and made Sophie an actress suitable for pairing with Hollywood’s biggest names. The artistic peak of her career probably came in 1960, when she played the lead role in another De Sicco film, Horalka, a harrowing drama about a mother trying to protect her daughter in wartime Italy. Sophia was originally cast as the daughter, but she herself fought for the role against type and eventually took on the role of the mother. The film won her the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival, and what’s more, even the first acting Oscar awarded to a non-English-speaking actor or actress. Loren refused to attend the ceremony, reportedly out of fear that she would pass out on stage if she won. Cary Grant, with whom she had a wild affair just before her own wedding, informed her about the acquisition of the statue by phone in Rome, but she gave the famous actor a kick at the last minute.
However, her successes did not end there, she maintained her full commitment to work throughout the 1960s. It was then that she reached her commercial peak, when she charged millions in royalties for the blockbuster films Cid and the Fall of the Roman Empire. Meanwhile, her marriage to Ponti, who was not officially divorced from his first wife throughout their relationship, was annulled. However, the couple continued to live together and this time a permanent marriage took place in the mid-1960s. Leaving aside the not-so-pleasant fact that the thirty-seven-year-old Ponti first met Loren when she was fifteen, we have here one of the rare cases of a permanent life-long partnership between similar megastars, which was only interrupted by Ponti’s death in 2007. From the seventies, Loren started to loosen up a bit, although she never stopped being star and never resented the world of film. Even the 17 days spent in prison for tax fraud did not mar her career, according to the actress, a mere accounting error. She more or less cleared the screen only in the new century, but still in 2010 she portrayed her own mother in the biographical TV movie My House is Full of Mirrors and in 2020 she played the lead role in her son Edoardo Ponti’s film Life Before You. Over the years, she became a French citizen and spent quite a bit of time in the United States.
Sophia Loren has indeed conquered the world. In his nineties, he is one of the last icons of Hollywood’s golden era and a major figure in European cinema. He now lives in Switzerland. He’s probably lounging by some gorgeous mountain lake and watching his beloved football.
Check out the list of the best actresses according to the Kinobox database.
Sources: Wikipedia, Kinobox, IMDb