Sophia Loren, Italy's most
famous living actress, marks her 80th birthday Saturday with a
tell-all memoir that promises a peek into the lives of
Hollywood's most storied film legends as well as the diva
herself.
Once a skinny street urchin from the Naples area, Loren
grew to become the first person to win an Academy Award in a
foreign-language film in 1961 as Best Actress in the Italian
drama Two Women (La Ciociara).
In a varied career, she starred alongside such leading men
as Marcello Mastroianni, Gregory Peck, Frank Sinatra, Marlon
Brando and actor and director Vittorio De Sica - many of whom,
she reveals, ardently pursued her.
Her memoir 'Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow - A Life'
borrows its title from her 1963 smash comedy with Mastroianni,
the fellow Italian with whom she shared the screen in 12
different films over a 20-year span.
The film, directed by De Sica, won an Oscar for Best
Foreign Language Film at the 37th Academy Awards in 1965.
"Of all my films with Marcello and Vittorio, I remember the
smallest detail, everything...when filming certain scenes you
already know that you are never going to forget them," she said
earlier this year.
She also won a Best Actress Oscar for the 1964 Mastroianni
co-starred film Marriage Italian Style.
Her memoir, including a love letter from Cary Grant who
wanted to marry the young Loren, as well as telegrams from
Richard Burton, has been released in Italy and is due to be
published in December in the United States.
The idea of a memoir came to her as she was going through
"a trunk full of memories," she said recently.
"Passing before my eyes are letters, telegrams, cards,
photographs," she recalled.
"I'm tempted to leave it where it is. Too much time has
passed, too many emotions," added Loren, who won a wide array of
international acting awards over her career, but also served 18
days in an Italian jail in 1982 for failing to file an income
tax return.
Ultimately, said Loren, she put aside her bad recollections
and her pain and decided to tell her own story.
Each chapter begins with a memory and a memento of the life
of one of the world's most beautiful woman who, at age 72,
appeared in the famous Pirelli pin-up calendar, making her the
oldest model in its history.
Born Sofia Villani Scicolone on September 20, 1934 in Rome,
her father Riccardo Scicolone did not marry her mother Romilda
Villani.
Romilda instead took her little daughter back to live with
her parents and other relatives in the impoverished community of
Pozzuoli near Naples.
At age 14, Loren did well in a beauty contest and was
spotted by director Carlo Ponti - her future husband - who
helped launched her career as an extra in the 1951 film Quo
Vadis.
But her troubled family life, especially her father's
absence, haunted her, Loren said in a recent interview with the
Corriere della Sera's Io Donna magazine.
"Because my family was different, I was filled with shame,
yet at the same time this pushed me to establish myself, to
prove who I am," she said.
Her first Hollywood film came in 1957, when she starred
with Grant and Sinatra in period drama The Pride and the Passion
and found herself caught between the much older Ponti and the
debonair Grant.
Ultimately, she choose Ponti to whom she was married for
some 50 years. Their two sons included Edoardo Ponti who
followed in his father's footsteps and became a film director.
He cast his mother in the 2014 La Voce Umana (The Human
Voice), a short-film adaptation of the Jean Cocteau play.
In the interview with Io Donna, Loren laid to rest rumours
of any romance between herself and Mastroianni.
"We had a shared optimism, a certain joy of living and the
awareness of our luck," she said.
"The chemistry was so palpable that they wondered if there
was something more between the two of us. The answer is: no".
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED © Copyright ANSA
