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Sophia Loren … A classic. An esteemed brand of world cinema. A living diva who had starred in Hollywood films with Cary Grant, Clark Gable, Frank Sinatra, William Holden, Paul Newman, Marlon Brando, Jean-Paul Belmando, Gregory Peck; and who had been at the film studios at times when Grace Kelly, Marilyn Monroe, Audrey Hepburn and Elizabeth Taylor also were. Sophia Loren is a legend still alive and still acting.

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I recently read an article about Sophia Loren and her latest film ‘The Life Ahead‘ (La Vita davanti a sé) directed by her son Edoardo Ponti in Paris Match. It is Loren’s first feature film after eleven years and the third film she starred in directed by her son following ‘Between Strangers‘ in 2002 set in Toronto and ‘Human Voice‘ in 2014 set in Naples. It is the story of Madame Rosa, an old Auschwitz survivor Jewish woman who takes care of and forms a special bond with a 12-year-old Senegalese boy named Momo. The film which streams on Netflix is based on a novel by Romain Gary. While the book and its first adoption (as ‘Madame Rosa‘ in 1977) is set in Paris, the 2020 movie is set in Bari, Italy. (screendaily.com)

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Besides the minor roles, Sophia Loren’s last feature film before “The Life Ahead” was 2009‘s “Nine” – based on a semi-autobiographical film of Fellini– where she starred with Daniel Day-Lewis, Marion Cotillard, Penélope Cruz, Judi Dench, Kate Hudson and Nicole Kidman. Loren told about those days in a newspaper:
“It was like being a family on Nine. Nicole Kidman had her baby; Judi Dench was so funny, and Penélope Cruz was very Spanish. … We all sang and we all danced and we were drunk with music on the set. We cried when we parted, which is something that generally doesn’t happen on films.” (dailymail.co.uk, Nov. 2009)

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Loren explained that the break in between, from the film Nine until her latest film, was due the reason that she didn’t know any films she wanted to do right away and that she wanted to be inspired and challenged. (usatoday.com). Until her son showed up with a project that inspired her.

In the interview in Paris Match, Loren explains that she got so involved in her role in her latest film since the character of Madame Rosa reminded her of her mother, whom she portrays as a wonderful being and a very kind woman beneath whose smiles there was so much fragility and pain. She says that her mother looked like two drops of water like Greta Garbo and she would have loved to be an actress. (Paris Match no: 3731, dd. Nov. 5, 2020). In the 1980 film “Sophia Loren: Her Own Story“, Loren played herself during adulthood and also that of her mother Romilda Villani.

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I have also read during my research that Sophia Loren’s mother Romilda Villani, a piano teacher, won a Greta Garbo lookalike competition and might have gone to the US to work as Garbo’s double but her mother refused to let her ago. Instead, she became influential in Sophia Loren’s becoming a star by having Loren enter in a beauty contest in Naples which she won and enrolling her in a drama school. Ms. Villani took her daughter to Rome when she was 15, after which Loren started to appear in films. (theguardian.com)

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It was also in Rome that she met her future husband, the Italian producer Carlo Ponti, at another beauty contest when she was 16 and he was in the jury. Loren tells in an interview that it was love at first sight for both of them. Ponti had seen her sitting at a table with friends and sent her a note asking her to join the contest. She had finished second but they started to see each other after then. (smh.com.au). It was a great love and they went through many challenges together.

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Sophia Loren and Carlo Ponti had two children named Carlo Ponti Jr., born in 1968 and Edoardo Ponti, born in 1973. Loren had two miscarriages before her first son was born and had complete bed rest throughout her pregnancies, which was another challenge they faced.

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Loren and Ponti were also accused of tax evasion. Loren voluntarily did her sentence in a prison near Pozzuoli in 1982 and after nineteen days, she was freed. She had later explained that the conviction was due to a little mistake by a tax specialist and that she wanted to serve the sentence to be able to see her mother, her country and her friends. (nytimes.com). Loren remained married to Carlo Ponti until he died in 2007. She described her marriage as ‘a wonderful marriage and a marriage of love‘ in an interview. (foxnews.com, 2019)

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I had heard about Sophia Loren’s latest film before and was astonished that she had starred in a film at the age of 86. However what drew me to write this post is her answer to a question in the interview in Paris Match. When the journalist remarks that in Loren’s latest film, Momo claims that old age causes people to forget who they are; Sophia Loren says the following, which affected me as the words of her wisdom and philosophy:

“You know, as soon as you are born, you get old! Everyone is getting old! This is the path of life. The difference is, what’s important when you’re 30 is less important when you’re 80. Existence works that way. We mature, we grow. If you continue to be well over 80, as I think I am, then everything is fine! I’m fine, at least at this point! I have not had any problems with old age, I have always believed that today and tomorrow are more important than yesterday. I cherish what I have accomplished. I wake up every day with the will to embark on new adventures. This is what makes my life passionate.” (by Sophia Loren, translated from the interview in Paris Match no:3731, November 2020)

I also read another interview of her where he had said that feeling happy is the key to ageing gracefully explaining as follows:
“Life is life. You should enjoy your time here, and ageing is part of that time. So enjoy it, too. Take care of yourself … What’s going to happen will happen, but your happiness is up to you. And that affects everything.“ (Sophia Loren – from an interview in The Sydney Morning Herald published in 2017).
 Having aged gracefully herself, Sophia Loren became the oldest model of Pirelli Calendar. She posed for the 2007 edition of the calendar at the age of 72.

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I watched the film ‘The Life Ahead‘ on Netflix. It is not of course the same seductive and cunning woman as in times when she was referred to as a sex symbol but the acting is there. I can confirm Loren’s following words: “Things don’t change too much. The body changes. The mind does not. (the guardian.com)”. An admirable performance at that age. Still Sophia Loren, still a classic.

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I also watched two documentaries about Sophia Loren on Netflix, “Cercando Sophia“(2004) and the recent one being “What Would Sophia Loren Do?” (2021) – a sweet portrait of Sophia Loren in the eyes of an Italian woman who admires her.

Born on 20 September 1934 in Rome as ‘Sofia Villani Scicolone’, Sophia Loren grew up in a poor neighborhood in Pozzuoli, near Naples, during World War II without her father who had refused to marry her mother. She lived in her grandparents’ home together with her sister and mother. She was so skinny that other children named her ‘The Toothpick’. She tells about those days in the documentary on Netflix as follows:

“The steps of my career have been really very hard. It was during the war. We didn’t have enough money to live. So we didn’t have enough food to eat. My father never took care of us. Never. my mother didn’t know what to do with herself, with me and with my sister. So my mother wanted me to be in a beauty contest in Naples. And I won that contest. And with the money I got from the contest, I was able to go to Rome and start to look for work.” (Sophia Loren, from “What Would Sophia Loren Do?”, Netflix)

I have read that Loren’s grandmother Luisa opened a pub in their living room after the war selling homemade cherry liquor, which was frequented by American soldiers. (wikipedia.org)

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Sophia Loren starred in many unforgettable films. She won an ‘Academy Award for Best Actress’ with her performance in the 1960 film “Two Women” (“La Ciociara“) directed by Vittorio De Sica. The film was the story of a courageous widowed woman and her teenage daughter trying to flee to Ciociara, a rural province of Italy, following the bombing of Rome during World War II. It was the first Oscar ever given to a foreign language film, which she did not expect and which she had learned from a phone call by Cary Grant while she was in her house in Rome.

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Loren tells in the documentary on Netflix that Vittorio De Sica was the one that really caught her. When she was 17 years old, she had done “The Gold of Naples” with him which was a great hit. She further tells that she considers the character of pizza maker in this film one of the best of her career. (‘What Would Sophia Do?’, Netflix)

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She was also talked upon a lot with 1963’s Oscar winning “Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow (leri, oggi, domani)”, famous for its funny striptease scene, and “1964’s “Marriage, Italian Style (Matrimonio All’Italiana)”. Sophia Loren starred with Marcello Mastroianni in both films directed by Vittorio De Sica and produced by Carlo Ponti. Loren told in an interview that she loved working with Mastroianni who was so delightful and fun and that it never felt like work with him. (smh.com.au, Sept. 2019)

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Marcello Mastroianni died in 1996. I have read that he would star in the third movie of Grumpier Old Men Series as the Italian husband of Maria Ragetti in Rome but passed away before the project could be fulfilled. Sophia Loren didn’t star in the first movie, ‘Grumpy Old Man’ (1993), but she played Maria Ragetti in the second movie, ‘Grumpier Old Man’ (1995), who purchased the grumpy guy’s favorite bait shop in US to turn it into an Italian restaurant – where Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon were among the cast. 

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Before I started writing this post, I also watched “Marriage Italian Style“, nominated for two Academy Awards, from my DVD collection. It is a wonderfully shot film about the relationship between a cunning businessman and his vivid, amusing and sensitive mistress named Filumena, with an unexpected end. There are many scenes of Loren noticeable with her great acting and manners which make you smile, my favorite of which is the walking scene showing Sophia walking attractively down the street in Naples in a gorgeous dress with a sweet teasing expression in her face – half-dancing with a child on her way.

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After her successful Italian films, Loren started to appear in Hollywood films also with the help of Carlo Ponti, such as ‘The Pride and The Passion‘ with Cary Grant and Frank Sinatra (where she had her first English-speaking role), ‘The Key‘ with William Holden, ‘It Started in Naples‘ with Clark Gable and ‘Houseboat ‘with Cary Grant.

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Cary Grant fell in love with Loren while shooting “The Pride and The Passion”, and proposed to her. Loren rejected this proposal and chose Ponti to be her husband which she explains in the documentary on Netflix as follows:

“I chose for Carlo because I thought he belonged to my world to my people. And to marry somebody that was not Italian, that was not of my hometown, I would have felt completely lost.” (Sophia Loren, from “What Would Sophia Do?”, Netflix)

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The most important things for Sophia Loren, which had shaped either her private life or her career, were having a family, having children and her Italian roots. She was especially fond of Naples, where she grew up and took the first steps of her career, as she also signifies in her following words: “I owe a lot to Naples. I owe a lot to my Naples, a lot. Everything.” (‘Cercando Sophia’, Netflix)

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During 1980s, Sophia Loren took some breaks from her intense filming schedule to spend more time raising her children. She raised two successful artists, Edoardo Ponti as a film director and Carlo Jr. Ponti as a conductor. How proud it must have been for their esteemed parents. I watched an interview made with Loren and Edoardo Ponti by Christiana Amanpour of CNN regarding Loren’s latest film. Besides the answers they gave to Amanpour’s questions, the interview reveals the intimate relationship between mother and son who were holding hands throughout the interview and praising each other by words or their gestures.

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Loren’s elder son Carlo Ponti Jr. had commissioned a symphony to be written by the deceased American composer Daniel Brewbaker for his mother’s 80th birthday. “Sinfonietta per Sofia“, a tribute concert to Loren, was performed in July 19, 2014 in Far Niente Winery, Oakville, California during the annual Festival del Sole (Festival Napa Valley) with Carlo Ponti Jr. conducting the orchestra. Following the concert was a dinner to Loren, hosted by Whoopi Goldberg, including Francis Ford Coppola and Robert Redford.
(Far Niente Winery in the Napa Valley, with the breathtaking views of its vineyards and the estate, has been a nice discovery for me while writing this post.).

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How nice that Loren has such creative and productive sons. She expresses in her interviews that family is everything to her. Although she lives in Geneva, she is in close contact with her sons and her grandchildren who live in California. Loren says in an interview that she chose Geneva a long time ago because it is peaceful and a quiet place to live and is very close to Italy, where she can easily go to visit her friends. (foxnews.com)

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Sophia Loren received “Honorary Academy Award for Lifetime Achievement” in 1991. She became a UN “goodwill ambassador” for the world’s refugees in 1992. She also won a Grammy Award in 2003 for Best Spoken Word Album for Children for reading Prokofiev’s “Peter and The Wolf” along with Bill Clinton and Mikhail Gorbachev.

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I also want to share here a nice anecdote I have read regarding Sophia Loren and Audrey Hepburn which made me smile. Sophia Loren and Carlo Ponti had rented a villa in in the mountains of Bürgenstock, Switzerland during Christmas in 1957. Audrey Hepburn and her husband Mel Ferrer were their neighbors then. Sophia Loren tells as follows:

“One day, while Mel was away for work, Audrey invited us to lunch. … The chalet was very beautiful, luminous, all decorated in white, set on a hill overlooking the lake. Audrey was dressed in white too, as was the table, on which she’d placed a few flowers and lots of candles. It was the height of elegance. … We chatted amicably, talking about movies, friends we had in common. … Then we sat down at the table. In came the appetizer, or so I thought upon seeing it. A leaf of lettuce, a curl of fresh cheese topped by a smidgen of raspberry compote. In the plate next to it, a crisp roll, bite size. The conversation was pleasant, the raspberry compote even more so, but when the help came back to take our plates away, Audrey got up from the table and with one of her airy, delicate, perfect smiles, she said: “I ate too much.” Our lunch was over. Diplomatically, I said: “It was so much, and all so delicious!” I was dying of hunger, and as soon as we got home I made myself a sandwich.“ (from Sophia Loren’s memoir titled “Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow: My Life” first published in 2014)

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Audrey Hepburn’s delicate portions were definitely not enough for a gourmet Italian from the land of pasta and pizza! Sophia Loren’s passion for cooking led her to write a cookbook titled “In The Kitchen With Love“, published in 1971. Her second cookbook “Sophia Loren’s Recipes and Memories” was published in 1998 in which she wrote about her favorite Italian family recipes also including memories of her home life and family photographs. I find it jolly that Loren is also a foodie and a pasta lover, like myself. I watched in the Netflix documentary that one of her favorite dishes is eggplant parmesan (Parmigiana Di Melanzane), which her mother used to cook very well.

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Sophia Loren had been a very active woman throughout her life stunning many with her vitality and positive energy. In an article I have read about her, published in 2009 when she starred in the film “Nine”, it says:
“at 10am, Miss Loren has already taken 60 minutes’ exercise, spent two hours studying a script and made breakfast for her two-year-old grandson Vittorio, who is staying with her in her home in Geneva“. (dailymail.co.uk, Nov. 2009)

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As I am to finish this post, I want to leave the word to Sophia again, whose philosophical aspect is also emphasized in the documentaries on Netflix:

“I always wake up early and jump out of bed — sometimes not wanting to, because one can always find an alibi not to exercise — and then I take a walk for an hour. And as I walk round the park I always think, ‘Maybe round the corner I am going to find something beautiful.’ I always think positively. It is very rare that you find me in a mood that is sad or melancholic.” (Sophia Loren, dailymail.co.uk, Nov. 2009)

By means of this post, I am very glad to know the Sophia Loren beyond the Italian icon of world cinema: A smart, self-confident, optimistic, witty, joyful woman. A master in Italian kitchen.

From the outskirts of wartime Naples, Sophia Loren has created an amazing life with her own magic. Her words and wisdom fill one with joy of life. I will remember her whenever I take a walk in a park and mind that I might find something beautiful round the corner. And next time I go to a Italian restaurant, I will order eggplant parmesan together with my pasta thinking of her.

Notes: You can find Sophia Loren’s memoir titled “Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow: My Life” here and her cookbook “Sophia Loren’s Recipes and Memories” here in Amazon.

You may check here for “Sophia Loren: Award Collection” movie set.