Getting to Know: Sophia Loren

As news comes that Sophia Loren is to make a return to features for the first time in a decade, Cinema Paradiso reflects on the remarkable career of a genuine screen icon. Director Vittorio De Sica called her 'the essential Italian woman', but she also became a major star in Hollywood and was the first actress to win an Academy Award for a performance in a subtitled film. Seven decades have passed since Loren made her acting debut, but it's not all been glitz and glamour.

Eleven years have elapsed since Sophia Loren played Mamma in Rob Marshall's Nine (2009), a musical version of the Federico Fellini classic, 8½ (1963). But the need to tell a story about the realities of daily life in today's Italy has persuaded the 85 year-old to go back before the cameras to play a Holocaust survivor rearing an unconventional family in The Life Ahead. It's a tough tale told with tenderness and, in many ways, it takes Loren back to her own childhood in wartime Naples.

The Neapolitan Toothpick

In 1984, the organisers of the annual David Di Donatello Awards, which are the Italian equivalent of the Oscars, presented a special plate to six performers who had become serial winners. Alongside such titans of Italian cinema as Vittorio Gassman, Nino Manfredi, Mariangela Melato, Alberto Sordi and Monica Vitti was Sophia Loren, who had been chosen as Best Actress by her peers on six separate occasions. Not a bad accolade for a girl from the backstreets of Naples who had subsisted on bit parts in over 20 largely forgotten features before finally catching the public eye.

Sofia Villani Scicolone was born in a charity ward at the Clinica Regina Margherita in Rome on 20 September 1934. Her mother, Romilda Villani, had hoped to become an actress after winning a Greta Garbo lookalike contest organised by MGM in 1932. However, her mother, Luisa, had not let her travel to Hollywood as part of her prize and she had taken up with Riccardo Scicolone, a construction engineer who refused to marry Romilda when she became pregnant. When he insisted on naming his daughter after his own mother. Luisa gave her the nickname of 'Lella' and tried to keep Romilda away from Scicolone. She failed, however, as he also fathered Romilda's second child, Maria. Loren rarely saw her father before she visited him on his deathbed in 1976. Yet, such was his aristocratic background that she could claim the title of the Marquess of Licata Scicolone Murillo, although she had to sue him through the courts in order to do so.

Leaving Rome, Romilda took her daughters to live with Luisa, as well as a number of uncles and aunts, in the southern city of Pozzuoli. During the Second World War, however, the nearby harbour and munitions plant were targeted by the Allies and Sofia was hit by a piece of flying shrapnel while rushing to an air-raid shelter. She retains a slight scar on her chin, but it was her physique that led to her being nicknamed 'Toothpick' by the neighbourhood kids after Romilda had relocated to Naples to get her family out of the firing line. Once the war was over, however, she returned to Pozzuoli to help her mother run the bar she had opened in her front parlour. While Romilda played the piano and Maria sang, the 14 year-old Sofia collected and washed the glasses. But she was already dreaming of an escape route from this grinding poverty, although her plans didn't involve accepting a marriage proposal from the PE teacher who was twice her age.

Romilda had recognised Sofia's sudden physical transformation and, in 1949, she entered her underage daughter in the Queen of the Sea beauty contest. Although she didn't take the title, Sofia won 25,000 lire, eight rolls of wallpaper and a train ticket to Rome. Before she left for the capital, however, the teenage Sofia Scicolone took acting lessons and made her screen debut when Romilda landed her a tiny role in Giorgio Bianchi's Hearts At Sea (1950), which just happened to be shooting in Naples.

On arriving in the capital, Sofia found work as a model for the photo-romance magazines known as 'fumetti'. In all, she appeared in over 80 stories under the name Sofia Lazarro and received marriage proposals from across Italy. She also continued to lobby for work as an extra and Romilda joined her in the cast of Mervyn LeRoy's Quo Vadis (1951), which was filmed at the Cinecittà Studios and played a huge part in the rise of such Peplum or 'sword and sandal' pictures as Mario Mottoli's Two Nights With Cleopatra (1952), in which Loren took the title role opposite leading comic actor, Alberto Sordi.

Sofia also continued to enter beauty pageants, especially as the top four contestants in the 1947 edition of Miss Italia - Lucia Bose, Gianna Maria Canale, Gina Lollobrigida and Eleonora Rossi Drago - had gone on to become film stars. When she entered in 1950, Sofia was deemed 'too provocative' by the judging panel to take the crown. However, film producer Carlo Ponti had been so impressed that he had persuaded his fellow judges to create the title 'Miss Elegance' as a consolation prize.

Despite the 22-year age gap, Sofia and Ponti fell in love, although they had to keep their liaison quiet, as he was already married. But, while she was grateful for his support, Sofia refused his suggestion that she had plastic surgery on her nose after a studio underling assessing her screen test had reported, 'Her face is too short, her mouth is too big, and her nose is too long.' She did agree to changing her name to Sophia Loren (in homage to the Swedish star, Märta Torén) for Giovanni Roccardi's Africa Under the Seas, for which she had to learn how to swim for the numerous underwater sequences depicting her in a bathing suit. However, it was the lead in Clemente Fracassi's adaptation of Giuseppe Verdi's opera, Aida (both 1953), which thrust Loren into the spotlight, even though her singing was dubbed by Renata Tebaldi.

Hollywood Calling

Revelling in the sense of security that Ponti gave her, Loren began to develop as an actress. In 1954, she pipped Gina Lollobrigida to the role of Sofia, the volcano-tempered baker's wife in The Gold of Naples (1954), a portmanteau comedy that was directed by Vittorio De Sica, the onetime matinee idol who had become a key exponent of neo-realism with such films as Bicycle Thieves (1948) and Umberto D (1952). Such was De Sica's reputation that the film launched at Cannes and Loren followed up an appearance on La Croisette by being introduced to the newly crowned Elizabeth II at the London premiere.

De Sica would become one of Loren's favourite directors, while Alessandro Blasetti's Too Bad She's Bad (1954) saw her teamed with Marcello Mastroianni for the first of their 13 features together. Sandwiched between these pictures was Pietro Francesco's Attila, a biopic of Attila the Hun that reunited Ponti with Anthony Quinn. This was a conscious effort to promote Loren in the United States, where films like Mario Camerini's The Miller's Beautiful Wife (1955) had already been released in cheaply dubbed versions. The gambit paid off handsomely, as Loren was cast as Juana alongside Cary Grant and Frank Sinatra in Stanley Kramer's The Pride and the Passion (1957), an adaptation of CS Forester's The Gun, which was set in Spain during the Peninsular War against Napoleon Bonaparte.

Despite having to deliver some of her dialogue phonetically, as she was still learning English, Loren made such an impact on the US box office that she was offered a contract by Paramount. Famously, she was caught flashing the buxom Jayne Mansfield a disdainful glance when the blonde starlet tried to upstage Loren at her own welcome party. But she hardly had time to unpack before she was whisked off to the Greek island of Hydra to play a sponge diver competing for a priceless statue with archaeologist Alan Ladd in Jean Negulesco's Boy on a Dolphin. She then got to spend some time in Rome before heading to Libya to help John Wayne track down a vanished city and its fabled treasures in Henry Hathaway's Legend of the Lost (both 1957). However, the assignment almost proved to be her last, as she had to crawl to safety after a gas stove in her hotel room sprang a leak.

Now having a firmer grasp on English, Loren took the pivotal role of Anna in Delbert Mann's simmering adaptation of Eugene O'Neill's Desire Under the Elms (1958), in which an Italian migrant becomes torn between tyrannical New England widower Burl Ives and her stepson, Anthony Perkins, who is determined to prevent her from inheriting the family farm. Loren would be drawn to another widower in the form of Anthony Quinn in Martin Ritt's The Black Orchid (1958). Loren would win the prestigious Volpi Cup at the Venice Film Festival for her performance, but she had no time to rest on her laurels, as she teamed with William Holden and a BAFTA-winning Trevor Howard in Carol Reed's The Key (1958), a reworking of Jan De Hartog's novel, Stella , which was set in wartime Dorset and centred on the travails of a Swiss expatriate mourning the death of her tugboat skipper lover.

While Loren was being subjected to romantic ordeals on screen, her own private life was somewhat complicated. Cary Grant had fallen head over heels during the making of The Pride and the Passion and had arranged for Loren to join him in Melville Shavelson's Houseboat (1958). This comedy about a widower who hires a free spirit to care for his three children had originally been scripted by Grant's wife, Betsy Drake, as a co-starring vehicle. However, she was ditched so that Grant could convince Loren that his intentions were entirely honourable. He even tried to talk Alfred Hitchcock into casting her in North By Northwest (1959) so they could spend more time together. However, Loren was already fully committed to Ponti, who had obtained a Mexican divorce from his wife, Giuliana, so that he could marry Loren.

Unfortunately, the Italian authorities took a dim view of the ceremony conducted on 17 September 1957 when two male lawyers stood in for Ponti and Loren at their proxy wedding. Thus, they were lucky to escape bigamy charges in 1962, the same year in which Loren's sister, Maria, married Romano, the youngest son of the former Italian dictator, Benito Mussolini. However, the Vatican annulled the 1957 marriage and the pair relocated to France to obtain citizenship in order to tie the knot on 9 April 1966.

Oscar and Marcello

One of the more curious aspects of Loren's career during this period was that Italian audiences didn't get to hear her voice in the dubbed versions of her American films, as her lines were spoken by either Lydia Simoneschi or Rita Savagnone. However, her time at Paramount was drawing towards an end, as neither Sidney Lumet's wartime romance, That Kind of Woman (1959), nor George Cukor's lively adaptation of Louis L'Amour's Heller in Pink Tights (1960) set the tills ringing. Yet Loren sparked well with Anthony Quinn as a pair of vaudevillians in the Old West and she found another sympathetic co-star in Clark Gable in her final Paramount outing, Melville Shavelson's It Started in Naples (1960), which earned Loren a Golden Globe nomination for her performance as an aspiring singer determined to prevent Gable's Philadelphia lawyer from taking her rascally nephew back to the United States.

Vittorio De Sica guested as a lawyer in Loren's corner and he cropped up again to direct a couple of additional scenes for Michael Curtiz's A Breath of Scandal (1960), an adaptation of Ferenc Molnar's play, Olimpia, which takes Loren to Vienna in 1908 to play a princess who defies mother Isabel Jeans to romance John Gavin, a Pittsburgh engineer who has become friends with her roué father, who is essayed with customary charm by Maurice Chevalier. Indeed, there was no getting away from De Sica in 1960, as he played the owner of a pasta factory in Anthony Asquith's The Millionairess, a loose reworking of a George Bernard Shaw play that cast Loren as the world's richest woman, Epifania Ognissanti di Parerga, who has set her heart on marrying an Indian doctor. In order to promote the picture, Loren and Peter Sellers released the single 'Goodness Gracious Me', which reached the Top 5 in the UK hit parade.

De Sica's most significant contribution to Loren's year, however, came when he decided to cast her instead of Anna Magnani as Cesira in Two Women, an adaptation of an Alberto Moravia novel inspired by the brutal events that followed the Battle of Monte Cassino in July 1943. Loren must have recognised the sacrifices made by her own mother in playing a widow trying to protect her 12 year-old daughter, Rosetta (Eleanora Brown), as the truthfulness of her performance resulted in her winning 22 awards worldwide, including the Best Actress prize at Cannes, a Golden Globe, a BAFTA, a Donatello and an Academy Award. In the process, Loren became the first performer to win an acting Oscar in a foreign-language film, although her crippling stage fright meant that she couldn't attend the ceremony in person and she only discovered she had won when Cary Grant called her in Rome with the good news.

Despite the fact that Loren was at the peak of her powers, she and Ponti weren't entirely sure whether her future lay in Hollywood or Europe. Director Anthony Mann was so determined to secure her services for his epics, El Cid (1961) and The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964), that he persuaded producer Samuel Bronston to pay her $1 million for the latter. Yet a surprising number of Loren's movies from this period are not currently available on disc, with teamings with Anthony Perkins, Paul Newman and Omar Sharif among the missing.

But Cinema Paradiso users can still enjoy Vittorio De Sica's collaborations with Loren on 'La Riffa', an episode in the anthology selection, Boccaccio '70 (1962), and the classic commedia all'italiana couplings with Marcello Mastroianni, Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow (1963) and Marriage Italian Style (1964), which earned Loren her second and third Donatellos, while the latter also brought her a second Oscar nomination for Best Actress. They can also enjoy a clutch of films with which Loren was connected in the gossip columns during the 1960s, including Blake Edwards's A Shot in the Dark (1964), David Lean's Doctor Zhivago (1965) and the multi-directored Bond spoof, Casino Royale (1967). Even more intriguingly, Loren was originally linked with three pictures that ultimately starred Elizabeth Taylor.

Instead, Loren opted to work with Gregory Peck and Marlon Brando. She was perfectly paired with Peck in Stanley Donen's Arabesque (1966), an adaptation of Alex Gordon's novel, The Cipher, that followed Charade (1963) in adopting a Hitchcockian tone in following the misadventures of an Oxford hieroglyphics specialist and the mistress of a sinister shipping magnate. However, Loren had a less enjoyable time on Charlie Chaplin's final feature, A Countess From Hong Kong (1967), as Brando made an ungallant remark about Loren's nasal hairs and insisted on patting her on the back in spite of repeated requests (and the odd threat of a slap) to desist. However, Chaplin shrewdly ensured that their antipathy fed into their performances, as a Russian prostitute and the married American diplomat in whose state-room the fugitive stows away during a voyage Stateside.

More to Life

It's fair to say that cinema wasn't Loren's primary concern after the birth of her sons, Carlo Jr. and Edoardo. However, she did join forces with De Sica on Sunflower (1970) and The Voyage (1974), while she reunited with respective co-stars Marcello Mastroianni on Dino Risi's The Priest's Wife (1970) and Richard Burton on Alan Bridge's flawed, but fascinating 1974 TV-movie remake of David Lean's model of romantic restraint, Brief Encounter (1945). She also got to work with legendary French actor Jean Gabin on André Cayatte's Verdict (1974).

Sadly, these films are among the many from this phase of Loren's career to be unavailable for rental. But Cinema Paradiso can still tempt users with Arthur Hiller's Man of La Mancha, a musicalisation of Don Quixote that sees Loren play Dulcinea to Peter O'Toole's deluded knight-errant; Alberto Lattuada's White Sister (both 1972), a variation on the Don Camillo theme in which Loren plays a nun who strikes up a rapport with Communist mayor Adriano Celentano while nursing him through a variety of spurious illnesses; and George Pan Cosmatos's The Cassandra Crossing (1976), an all-star disaster movie that boasts Loren, Richard Harris, Burt Lancaster and Ava Gardner on the passenger list of the plague-ridden Stockholm-Geneva Express.

Far and away the pick of Loren's films from the 1970s, however, is Ettore Scola's A Special Day (1977), which saw her reunite with Mastroianni to play a Roman housewife and a gay radio announcer who meet by chance on the day in 1938 that the capital comes to a standstill for Adolf Hitler's first visit to Benito Mussolini. Earning Loren another Donatello and Mastroianni an Oscar nomination for Best Actor, this powerful drama feels more relevant four decades on. The same can't be said for the duo's next pairing in Blood Feud (1979), although this was one of the few occasions on which Loren was directed by a woman and she and Lina Wertmüller reunited in 2004 on the frustratingly little seen, Too Much Romance... It's Time for Stuffed Peppers.

Having played herself and her own mother in Mel Stuart's teleplay, Sophia Loren: Her Own Story (1980), the actress spent much of the 1980s attending to domestic issues. She turned down the roles of Alexis Carrington in Dynasty (1981-88) and Francesca Gioberti in the 1984 season of Falcon Crest (1981-90). In between times, Loren served 18 days of a month-long sentence imposed in 1982 in relation to the tax evasion charges that had been brought against her husband. But she remained content to keep out of the spotlight when not accepting assignments like Jeremy Kagan's teleplay, Courage (1986), in which she plays a mother helping her son battle his drug addiction.

Over the years, Loren has graced a range of documentaries, including Gene Feldman and Suzette Winter's Anthony Quinn: An Original (1990), Frank Sinatra: Memorial (1999), Robert Trachtenberg's Cary Grant: A Class Apart (2004), Heinz Bütler's Riviera Cocktail (2006), Craig McCall's Cameraman: The Life and Work of Jack Cardiff, Mila Turajlic's Cinema Komunisto (both 2010), Liz Garbus's Love, Marilyn (2012) and Fabien Constant's Mademoiselle C (2013), which profiled fashion designer Carine Roitfeld. Bur dramatic roles have become rarer since she bade a fond farewell to Mastroianni after their cameo in Robert Altman's Prêt-à-Porter (1994). There was talk of another hook up after Loren had slotted so easily into Howard Deutch's Grumpier Old Men (1995) alongside Jack Lemmon, Walter Matthau and Ann-Margret. However, Mastroianni's death put paid to a second sequel and Loren has since preferred to work with her son, Edoardo, who directed her in Between Strangers (2002), in which she plays a Toronto wife who enlists the help of French gardener Gérard Depardieu to help wheelchair-bound husband Pete Postlethwaite rediscover his zest for life.

In 2004, Loren won a Grammy for narrating the Prokofiev segment of the Russian National Orchestra album, Wolf Tracks and Peter and the Wolf , which was co-narrated by Bill Clinton. Despite being widowed in 2007, Loren has remained busy, writing cookbooks and a volume of autobiography. She also played her mother for the second time in Vittorio Sindoni's mini-series, My House Is Full of Mirrors (2010), while also taking the lead in Edoardo Ponti's 2013 short, The Human Voice, which was based on a play by Jean Cocteau. Who knows, perhaps their latest collaboration is the start of a glorious comeback that will see Sophia Loren bring up her 100th career credit?