Sophia Loren photographed by David Seymour

Sophia Loren photographed by David Seymour at her home in Rome, 1955.

Italian Favourites / Claudia Cardinale & Sophia Loren

 

Sophia Loren

Italian Favourites – Claudia Cardinale & Sophia Loren

August 30, 2011 by TidiousTed

Claudia Cardinale  is an Italian Tunisian actress, and has appeared in some of the most prominent European films of the 1960s and 1970s. The majority of Cardinale’s films have been either Italian or French. She was also an iconic sex symbol of the 1960s.Claudia Cardinale was born Claude Joséphine Rose Cardinale in La Goulette, an Italian Tunisian neighbourhood of Tunis. Her mother, Yolande Greco, was born in Tunisia to Italian emigrants from Trapani, Italy. Her father was an Italian railway worker, born in Gela, Italy. Like many Italian Tunisians, her native languages were Tunisian Arabic, French, and the Sicilian language of her parents. She developed her skill in speaking Italian as a teenager, as she pursued her acting

Marlon Brando fury at ‘feeling like a freak’ among revelations in new book of Hollywood secrets

 

'En ninguna película había logrado aún la inarticulación total que ahora lo dominaba': Marlon Brando conoce a Sophia Loren en el estreno en Roma de On the Waterfront, 1954.
Photo: Keystone

Marlon Brando fury at ‘feeling like a freak’ among revelations in new book of Hollywood secrets

This article is more than 6 months old

Brando, Ava Gardner, Anita Ekberg and other A-listers are featured in a memoir about the glamour of the 1950s film industry

Dalya Alberge
Saturday 4 January 2025

Marlon Brando was the original angry young man, winning an Oscar for On the Waterfront, Elia Kazan’s movie about union corruption. But anger got the better of him at the 1954 Italian premiere of the film, when he refused to watch it after discovering that his voice had been dubbed, a new book reveals.

 

Sophia Loren on set in Italy, 1955.

Life Lessons from Sophia Loren

By Interview

September 23, 2021

Welcome to Life Lessons. This week, in honor of her 87th birthday, we revisit some of the captivating Italian legend Sophia Loren’s most memorable quotes, from Interview’s November 1977 and October 1993 issues. So sit back and take in the screen legend’s wisdom—you just might learn a thing or two.

Sophia Loren at 80 recalls her unconsummated affair with Cary Grant

 

Sophia Loren

Sophia Loren at 80 recalls her unconsummated affair with Cary Grant

Still charming, engaging and beautiful at 80, screen icon Sophia Loren reminisces about her early years, path to stardom, great romances - and her love of eggplant parmesan.

By Chrissy Iley
November 13, 2014 — 12.25pm

Sophia Loren has always seemed to epitomise glamour, pure sex and the Hollywood state of mind, even though many of her movies were, in fact, Italian. There is probably no greater on-screen chemistry than Sophia Loren and Cary Grant in Houseboat (1958). They met when they made The Pride and the Passion in 1957. They really were in love.

I loved the chapters about Grant in her new autobiography, Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow: My Life as a Fairy Tale. I have gone to Geneva, where she has lived for the past 36 years, to meet her and discuss the book.

She is wearing a black-and-white trouser suit. She is slim and voluptuous. A great body, even at 80. Her breasts still buoyant. Her eyes brown like chocolate melted over honeycomb. Giant eyelashes, giant lips.I note evidence of some facial landscaping and her hair is, in fact, a rather stiff wig. Nonetheless, she is still full of Italian-mama warmth and spiky charm. She comes over as an interesting mix of shyness, reserve, confident to the point of fearless, open and wary in equal parts.

Sophia Loren and Cary Grant

Cary Grant never proposed to me on set, says Sophia Loren

Actor puts myth to bed in Radio Times interview in which she also reveals her one regret

Aamna Mohdin
Tue 3 Nov 2020 06.00 GMT

It was one of the greatest cinematic love stories of the 20th century, but Sophia Loren has now revealed that Cary Grant never proposed to her on set.

The 86-year-old Italian actor has previously detailed the torrid love affair she had with Grant while filming the 1957 film The Pride and the Passion. Also starring Frank Sinatra, it was the first American film she had worked on.

 

Sophia Loren and Cary Grant

Sophia Loren: how Cary Grant begged me to become his lover

This article is more than 6 years old

Actress’s letters reveal the Hollywood star’s passionate pursuit of her while filming in Spain

Vanessa Thorpe, arts and media correspondent
Sun 19 Oct 2014 00.05 BST

When the young Sophia Loren dances a sultry flamenco in the role of Juana in the 1957 film The Pride and the Passion, the onlooking crowd of peasants appear spellbound, not least among them Cary Grant, who plays the English hero. Now the public are to learn what the film star was really thinking as he watched Loren stamp her feet and swirl her skirt.

Cary Grant and Sophia Loren

The Italian screen goddess, who turned 80 last month, was drawn into a torrid love affair with Grant during the making of the film in Spain and her memoirs, to be published in a few weeks, will reveal the intimate details of the matinee idol’s determined pursuit of her on set, despite the fact he was 30 years older than her and married to his third wife.

Sophia Loren, 1961

In her first volume of autobiography, prompted by the discovery of a cache of letters and souvenirs in her Swiss home, Loren recalls that Grant urged they pray together for guidance about whether to leave their partners.

 

Sophia Loren having lunch on the second floor terrace of her villa near Lake Albano, Rome.
 Photograph: Alfred Eisenstaedt/Time & Life Pictures

Frozen in time: Sophia Loren, June 1964

Outrageous beauty, a million dollar movie deal and a dream home outside Rome: it's hard being Sophia Loren

Euan Ferguson
Sun 16 Sep 2012 00.05 BST

M

any actresses have loved, before friends and certainly for the still camera, to play the "homebody": to show they can combine red-carpet smiles with a down-to-earth way in the kitchen garden; whistle up a rustic lunchtime banquet for 30 and serve it without fussings or frissons or primping about drips. Yet none with such verisimilitude as Sophia Loren; waiting tables, juggling seven hands and six different smiles, had been living through some very difficult teenage years.

Even here in 1964, living in her and producer Carlo Ponti's 50-room mansion near Rome's Lake Albano, complete with acres of poplars and sheep, and stuffed inside with medieval hangings and masters both old and modern, and having just made headlines for her $1m advance for The Fall of the Roman Empire, there's an earthy authenticity.

Even if she hadn't been the most award-adorned beauty of her times, there is such a vigorous snap-happy grace in her serving of – it's hard to tell exactly, but salami, tomatoes, eggs, cheese, gherkins, bread with a little napkin to dissuade the flies – that it's hard not to think this is one of the truest manifestations of La Dolce Vita, of life itself.

It was not always thus. Through and beyond the war years she was dishwashing and waiting tables for her grandmother, who had a tiny pub in her front room near Naples, serving home-made cherry liqueur to lingering GIs who had recently been trying to kill them. She was 12 and blooming. And smart. And at 16 she met Ponti, 22 years her elder, with whom she stayed until his death in 2007. Grace, humour, beauty, riches and a way with eggs, and a great friend in the phenomenal Life photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt, whose Leica M3s had also captured that enduring VJ Day picture of a sailor kissing a girl in Times Square: who would not, that day in 1964, when the world still seemed so young, have wanted to be Sophia Loren, in the Roman sun? With olives, and napkins, and a hat, and the world?

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Photograph: George Konig

Frozen in Time: Sophia Loren, London, June 1960

On the set of The Millionairess, the Italian star blends in with the East End locals and discover the joy of whelks

Eva Wiseman

Sunday 16 June 2019

T

hree sets of diamonds, emeralds and rubies were among the jewels stolen from Sophia Loren as she filmed The Millionairess in 1960; she played the richest woman in the world. The theft layered drama on drama. Loren was 25 at the time, and starring with Peter Sellers, who left his wife and two children citing his love for her, despite their affair being no more than a “delusional fantasy”, or what today would be called “stalking”. His five-year-old daughter asked Sellers if he still loved them. He replied: “Of course I do, darling, just not as much as Sophia Loren.”

“Hunger was the major theme of my childhood,” Loren later wrote. In the 1940s her mother begged on the streets for food; when an American soldier gave some chocolate to Loren, she didn’t know what it was. During pregnancy, Loren started making recipe notes, drawing on her famous passion for food (“Everything you see I owe to spaghetti”) to create a “gastronomic autobiography”. Eat With Me was published in the UK in 1972, and is a collection of Italian antipasti and glamorous full-page portraits of Loren. “Straddling a 5ft display of pâté while simultaneously patting the heads of two live pheasants,” wrote food historian Polly Russell in the Financial Times, “Loren, cook-housewife-goddess, triumphs.” Russell’s descriptions suggest Loren’s well-broadcast passion for food was less about the food and more a way of solidifying her image as passionate. Hungry. “The presentation of Loren as desiring and desirable are reminders that to be a woman is a part to be played – something that Nigella Lawson, with an ironic, feminist wink would later come to embody as the nation’s ‘domestic goddess’. Eat With Me was a taste of what was to come.”

The impact of Loren’s recipe books was far outweighed by the impact of her photoshoots with food – sausages, a flying disc of dough, these whelks on the Millionairess set. After the film’s success, Loren and Sellers recorded a single called Bangers and Mash. He sang the part of a Cockney man distraught at his Italian wife’s insistence on cooking such muck as tagliatelle. “I met her down in Napoli and didn’t she look great. And so I brought her back to Blighty just to show me mates. And though we’re married happily, I’ll tell you furthermore, I haven’t had a decent meal since 1944.” Loren is a great actress, but here, you can hear her patience running out.

THE GUARDIAN

 

 

Sophia Loren in Los Angeles last year. Photograph: Jordan Strauss

Sophia Loren returns to movies aged 86

Italian superstar plays a Holocaust survivor who befriends an orphan in Netflix film The Life Ahead, directed by her son Edoardo Ponti

Catherine Shoard
Wed 23 Sep 2020 12.29 BST

Sophia Loren is returning to cinema after an 11-year absence. Loren, 86, stars in upcoming Netflix drama The Life Ahead, which is directed by her son, Edoardo Ponti.

In the film, Loren plays Madame Rosa, a Jewish Holocaust survivor who helps raise the children of deceased sex workers with whom she once walked the streets. She then strikes up an enduring friendship with Momo, a 12-year-old Senegalese orphan who tries to steal her candlesticks.

Sophia Loren with the boy, played by Ibrahima Gueye. Photograph: Regine de Lazzaris Aka Greta/Netflix

It will be the second film adaptation of the novel by Romain Gary, following a 1977 movie named after the main character, starring Simone Signoret.

Following a premiere in Rome in October, the film will be available on Netflix a month later, on 13 November, with Deadline reporting that the streaming service will mount a considerable awards campaign behind the title.

Loren won her first Oscar in 1961 for Two Women, before receiving a second, honorary, Oscar in 1991 for “a career rich with memorable performances that has added permanent lustre to our art form”.

The actor says she “jumped at the chance” to play the character, who reminded her of her own mother. She has worked with her son twice before, most recently on 2002’s Between Strangers.

 

Edoardo Ponti, 46, is Loren’s second child with the film director Carlo Ponti, to whom she was married from 1966 until his death in 2007. Speaking to Deadline, he called his mother “a survivor … a thoroughbred in the best sense of the word”.

He also indicated that the role – which requires her not to blink for an extend period – would offer her the chance to showcase previously unseen acting skills. “Sophia Loren has never done parts where she loses her mind, when she gets into this kind of mental paralysis.”

Loren’s last role was in 2010 TV biopic My House Is Full of Mirrors; the previous year she played Daniel Day Lewis’s mother in Nine, based on Federico Fellini’s semi-autobiographical 1963 film 8½. Loren presented Fellini with his honorary Oscar in 1993, shortly before his death.

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Neapolitan encounter ... Ibrahima Gueye with Sophia Loren in The Life Ahead. Photograph: Regine de Lazzaris

The Life Ahead review – Sophia Loren serves up some grandmother courage

 

The actor plays a Holocaust survivor and creche worker who takes in a troubled Senegalese boy in this solid if sentimental drama

Peter Bradshaw
Thu 12 November 2020

At 86, Sophia Loren returns to the screen for the first time in 10 years in this sentimental tale for Netflix, directed by her son Edoardo Ponti. It’s adapted from the novel The Life Before Us by Romain Gary, which was first filmed in 1977 as Madame Rosa with Simone Signoret in the title role.

In truth, the part Loren plays here is not so very different in spirit from the “mother courage” roles which made her a star in the 1960s, only now it’s a matter of grandmother-courage (the scene in which she is heartrendingly stretchered out of her apartment building by medics is a weird echo of the beginning of Vittorio de Sica’s Marriage Italian Style). There’s no doubt about it: Loren still has an imperious address to the camera. I spent much of this film wishing she were allowed to let rip with something more spirited, but it’s a heartfelt performance. Loren has an undiminished screen presence and it’s great to see her with a substantial role.

She plays Madame Rosa, a Holocaust survivor who wound up walking the streets of Naples, and now runs an informal creche for the kids of all the other women, including her best friend, played by the Spanish transgender performer Abril Zamora.

Watch the trailer for The Life AheadThen her doctor (Renato Carpentieri), who is also a charity worker and old friend, asks her to take in a troubled Senegalese boy, Momo (played by newcomer Ibrahima Gueye) and instantly the trouble starts. Momo is angry at the world and secretly working for an unscrupulous and exploitative drug dealer, but after a rocky start, he becomes increasingly concerned for his grumpy, but caring new landlady, who is apparently succumbing to dementia and plagued with nightmarish memories of a place Momo thinks she’s calling “Housewitch”. Madame Rosa’s destiny is of course to be a sacrificial one.

Perhaps you need a sweet tooth for this, but it’s good to see Loren in a movie that is worthy of her.

• The Life Ahead is on Netflix from 13 November.

THE GUARDIAN