On September 20, Sophia Loren celebrates her 90th birthday. The Italian actress conquered the world with her poignant roles of women from the people, and demonstrated a strong character not only on screen, but also in life.
RBC Life and film critic Maria Rakitina tell how a girl from a poor Neapolitan family grew to the status of a legend of world cinema.
The material uses: Sophia Loren’s memoirs “Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow: My Life”, interviews for The Guardian and Vogue, publications from Vanity Fair and Biography.
A Childhood of Deprivation and Dreams of Cinema
Sophia Loren grew up in Pozzuoli, a coastal town near Naples. Her father was virtually absent from her life, leaving her with her mother almost immediately after she was born. Her childhood was marred by a constant struggle to survive, spent in extreme poverty in her grandparents’ ramshackle home, where Sophia shared a bedroom with her mother and eight other relatives.
The situation worsened when World War II began. The hunger was so severe that sometimes the mother had to scoop water from a car radiator with a cup to give to her daughters, Sophia and her younger sister.
The future actress escaped from the unbearable reality to the cinema: during air raids she hid in the cinemas of Pozzuoli, where she admired Hollywood legends Rita Hayworth and Greta Garbo, dreaming of being in their place. The war left a noticeable scar on the actress’s face: during another shelling, a bomb fragment pierced her chin.
Lauren, nicknamed “Toothpick” by her classmates, wanted to become a teacher, but her mother, whose acting career had failed, decided to make a successful model out of her. At fifteen, Lauren was going to participate in the “Queen of the Sea” beauty contest, but there was one problem: she didn’t have enough money for an evening dress.
Her grandmother then took down her pink taffeta curtains to make an outfit, and her mother painted her only pair of shoes white. Lauren won second place in the contest, receiving a small amount of money and free wallpaper for the living room of her grandparents’ house. In 1950, she moved to Rome with her mother to make a living as an actress.
She was immediately noticed in the Italian film industry, but was offered to be an extra: in 1951, she made her screen debut in Mervyn LeRoy’s film Quo Vadis. The actress combined filming as an extra with working as a model for fumetti – Italian comics with photographs instead of illustrations.
Carlo Ponti, marriage and career takeoff
In post-war Italy, the magic of cinema was made at Cinecittà in Rome. In the “carefree, sunlit city,” Loren flitted from one supporting role to another until, at the age of 16, she met the influential producer Carlo Ponti.
When the actress was dancing with a friend in a restaurant near the Colosseum, a short, heavyset man in a suit approached her. The 39-year-old married Ponti promised to make a movie star out of the girl and chose the stage name Sophia Loren.
Today, the relationship between her and the mature Carlo Ponti would be unequivocally described as grooming (building trusting relationships with children for the purpose of subsequent seduction – RBC Life), but the actress herself admitted that she treated the producer like a father. “He gave me a sense of stability that kept me grounded, while the world around me seemed to be spinning at a crazy speed,” she explained.
Sophia Loren married Ponti in 1957 and still considers him the love of her life.
The marriage lasted 50 years until death separated them in 2007. The actress’s relationship with Ponti was subject to harsh criticism, with envious people claiming that the film producer provided her with a certain degree of protection and a dizzying career. Lauren, however, believes that she owes her incredible success in cinema to her own professionalism.
At the beginning of her career, she had to show an iron will to protect herself from the enormous pressure on women in the Italian film industry. At auditions, Loren heard from cameramen that she needed to have plastic surgery.
“My mouth was too wide. My nose was too long. Men wanted straighter teeth. I was never pretty. I was never a China doll,” Lauren recalled. She proved that you don’t have to have conventional looks to become a movie star, because charisma and willpower are what matter.
She gained fame in Italy for her brilliant roles in the film-opera Aida (1953) by Clemente Fracassi and the tragicomedy The Gold of Naples (1954) by Vittorio De Sica. In the musical epic, the actress poignantly embodied the daughter of the Ethiopian king, experiencing a love drama with the leader of the Egyptian troops, Radames. In The Gold of Naples, Loren played a comic heroine – the dissolute wife of a pizza seller who lost her engagement ring. The actress returned to collaborate with Vittorio De Sica after she conquered Hollywood in the late 1950s.
Italian in Hollywood
Lauren went to Los Angeles at the invitation of American producers and soon signed a contract for five films from Paramount Studios.
She didn’t speak English and was terrified of the language barrier: “I started by studying the script. What does this mean? What are they saying? I was trying to understand what was going on around me because I was completely lost. But I was willing to learn and move forward, although it was really hard for me to think about what I was supposed to do in front of the camera with some of the people I had seen in films, and, oh my God, in another language!”
The resilience and stubbornness that she inherited from her mother served Lauren well. The expressive Neapolitan had no intention of adapting to the tastes of Hollywood, which valued the regal elegance of her predecessors, Grace Kelly and Audrey Hepburn: “I don’t think I could change very easily. If they [the producers] had asked me to change anything, I would have said, ‘No, thank you, I’m not coming.'”
The actress “always tried to play women with strong characters.” Her American period brought her diverse roles – from a fearless rebel comrade in the war drama The Pride and the Passion (1957) to a governess in the romantic comedy Houseboat (1958). The actress’s partner in both films was Cary Grant, with whom she had an affair.
They met while working together on “The Pride and the Passion.” During romantic dinners, Grant talked about his difficult childhood, and once gave the actress invaluable advice: “Hollywood is a simple fairy tale. If you understand that, you will never be hurt.” Foreigner Lauren was never able to fall in love with the American dream factory, although the industry gave her several more iconic heroines.
In Boy on a Dolphin (1957), the actress played the insightful diver Fedra, who dreams of getting rich by selling an ancient statue, and in Black Orchid (1958), she shared the torments of the widow Rose Bianco, who was learning to appreciate life again. The role in the second film brought Loren the Volpi Cup for Best Actress in Venice.
The pleasure of filming was overshadowed by the love drama that occupied all of Lauren’s thoughts: “I was completely confused because I was torn between two men and two worlds… I knew that my place was next to Carlo – he was my safe haven. But it was hard for me to resist the magnetism of a man like Cary, who said he was ready to give up everything for me.” Lauren eventually returned to Italy, where her compatriots greeted her as a Hollywood star.
Triumphant dramas and a return to the dream factory
In the 1960s, Loren played the leading roles of her career with director Vittorio De Sica. In the drama Two Women (1960), she experienced the suffering of a young widow, Cesira, who was ready to sacrifice everything just to protect her teenage daughter from the horrors of war. To understand the tragic story of the heroine, Loren turned to the memories of her own mother, who spent her last strength caring for her children during World War II. In the heartbreaking role of Cesira, the 26-year-old actress used up her entire dramatic range, making the director cry on the set.
Thanks to her desperate performance in Two Women, Loren became the first woman to win an Oscar for a foreign-language performance.
After filming the war drama, she turned to comedy. In the triptych “Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow” (1963), Loren appeared in the roles of a rich housewife, a prostitute and a street vendor. Loren fully revealed her comic potential and even danced a striptease, which was considered quite provocative in the early 1960s.
In Marriage Italian Style (1964), she played sex worker Filumena Marturano, who met a wealthy businessman in the midst of the war and decided to make the most of this acquaintance in the future. For her complex portrayal of a pragmatic woman, Loren received an Oscar nomination. The comedy thriller Arabesque (1966) with Gregory Peck allowed her to reboot her Hollywood career. The fatal role of an oil magnate’s mistress somewhat devalued Loren’s dramatic talent, but the chemistry between the actors was felt in every scene.
Lauren owes her triumphant comeback to American cinema to Charlie Chaplin, without whom she would hardly have dared to return to Hollywood. The director offered her a role in his romantic comedy A Countess from Hong Kong (1967) with Marlon Brando. The actress brilliantly played the role of the aristocrat Natasha Alexandrova.
“Working with Charlie was a big moment in my life, and when we finished, I cried because it was one of the most wonderful moments of my career. He was teaching me a craft. My God! Charlie Chaplin himself! Everything was trembling inside me, but on the outside I looked very calm and pretended to understand every word he said,” she recalled.
Women of difficult fate
Loren considers the role of Giovanna in the war drama Sunflowers (1970) by Vittorio De Sica to be the highlight of her acting career. Critics called the story of a desperate Italian woman who in 1943 went in search of her husband, who had disappeared without a trace in the Soviet Union, “artificially romantic”, but noted that Loren played at the peak of her abilities.
The fates of women during and after the war run through the actress’s career like a red thread. Lauren escaped harsh dramas for comedies, but inevitably returned to films about ruined lives.
In the 1970s, the ironic roles of a pious nun (White, Red and… with Adriano Celentano) and a gangster’s mistress (Gangster Doll) were followed by another role of a woman with a difficult fate. In the drama An Unusual Day (1977), Loren tragically embodied an Italian housewife and Mussolini fan who spent a day in the company of an anti-fascist neighbor and realized that she, too, was a prisoner of the regime.
In the documentary Sophia Loren: Her Own Story (1980), the actress, playing herself, worked through her childhood traumas. On screen, the Italian woman told of the terrible hardships she suffered during the war.
Lauren’s latest feature film also involves reliving a painful past. In her son Edoardo Ponti’s drama The Life Ahead (2020), the actress selflessly played the tormented Madame Rosa, a former sex worker who survived the Holocaust and now cares for the children of prostituted women and tries in vain to cover up the remnants of her humanity with cynicism.
Critics have praised Lauren for still being able to deliver a heartfelt performance. The actress admits that there have been moments in her career when she felt lost: “But then I’m like, ‘Shut up. Be strong. Just keep going and try. Sometimes you make mistakes, and sometimes you win. I made a few mistakes, but I still won.’”
