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Life Story: Sophia Loren

Life Story: Sophia Loren
Life Story: Sophia Loren

Photo: Getty Images

There’s a desperate gleam in Sophia Loren’s eyes as she steps in front of the army jeep and throws down her heavy suitcases, a torn, soiled dress hanging from her voluptuous figure. Her face is filled with frustration as she screams at soldiers attempting to drive by.

When they pass her, she hurls a rock into their dusty wake before collapsing to the ground with a despairing wail, her chest heaving as sobs escape her. Suddenly, out of nowhere, the director calls “cut!” and the film crew, overwhelmed by Loren’s powerful performance, snap out of their reverie.

But instead of getting to her feet, Loren remains crouched and weeping in the dirt, overwhelmed by the memories she conjured up for the camera. The year is 1960 and the film is Two Women, a harrowing tale of a mother and daughter fleeing Rome during World War II. Even though Loren is now an internationally renowned star, she is still haunted by her war-torn childhood.

Two Women was a tipping point for Loren, not only marking the intersection between her poverty-stricken past and successful present, but landing her a Best Actress Oscar – the first to be given to an actress in a foreign film. Looking back on it for her recent autobiography, Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow: My Life, Loren says the film “succeeded in wiping the slate clean so that I could start over in a new life”.

Sophia Loren was born on September 20, 1934, to 24-year-old Romilda Villani in a Roman hospital ward for unwed mothers. Romilda, an aspiring actress, had met Riccardo Scicolone Murillo – a handsome 20 year old who was from a noble family and claimed to be a movie producer – when she had arrived in the city looking to launch her career. She soon became pregnant, but Riccardo refused to marry her and Romilda was forced to return to her Naples home after the baby was born. A shy child, Loren shared a bedroom with seven relatives, who scrimped and saved to make ends meet.

Four years later, Romilda had another child with Riccardo – a daughter, Maria – but as he still refused to marry her, Sophia was to spend her childhood longing for a normal family. “My father was absent, my mother was too blonde, too tall, too lively, and above all, unmarried,” she recalls in My Life.

“I dreamt of a normal, reassuring family.”

Life Story: Sophia Loren
Life Story: Sophia Loren

Photo: getty Images

Bigger problems were looming, though, as the family soon found themselves in the midst of World War II (Naples being a key target for the Allies) with food supplies scarce. “When I think of my first memories,” recounts Loren, “I can hear the bombs falling and exploding … I can feel the hunger pangs and see the cold darkness of those dreadful nights of war.” Night after night, from age five to 11, Loren and her family would run to the railway tunnel to sleep with the mice and cockroaches. During the day, the famine that swept the area meant they had to beg for food; Loren was so skinny that classmates called her “Stuzzicadenti” – “Toothpick”.

But as the war – and famine – came to a close, Loren’s figure filled out. When Romilda heard about a local beauty pageant, she sensed a great opportunity for her daughter. Wearing a dress made from pink taffeta curtains from her grandmother’s house, and shoes painted white to look new, Loren won second place – which included the grand prize of $36, some rolls of wallpaper, a tablecloth, and a coveted ticket to Rome.

In 1950, aged 15, Loren set off with her mother for the Italian capital. She was cast as an extra in a big-budget Hollywood production, Quo Vadis, and found regular work as a model for fotoromanzi (magazine photo romance stories). A year later, she met the producer Carlo Ponti, who invited her for a screen test. It was disastrous – the cameramen complained about her too-big mouth, her too-long nose – but Ponti sensed a star, although he suggested she consider plastic surgery. Loren would have none of it.

“I didn’t want a small turned-up nose,” she recalls. “I knew perfectly well that my beauty was the result of a lot of irregularities all blended together in one face, my face.”

Ponti championed her, and bit parts led to a breakthrough performance in Aida in 1953. Within two years and a handful of lead roles, she’d become one of Italy’s most beloved actresses and was secretly engaged to Ponti – who was already married and two decades older.

“He was the producer who could help me fulfill my dream of making movies, and he was also the man who could offer me the gift of
the normal life I so longed for,” she says.

Life Story: Sophia Loren
Life Story: Sophia Loren

Photo: Getty Images

By 1955, Loren was the most photographed woman at the Cannes Film Festival. Soon, she was fielding offers from Hollywood and embarked on a crash-course in English. She would need it: her first role was opposite Cary Grant and Frank Sinatra in The Pride And The Passion, a period drama set in Spain. Grant, whose third marriage was floundering, was immediately taken with the Italian bombshell – 30 years his junior – and vice versa.

“[We] realised that the feeling between us was beginning to be laced with love,” remembers Loren. “I was very much involved with Carlo [Ponti], who had become my home and my family … [but] it wasn’t clear when we’d be able to get married and live together in broad daylight. I was torn between two men and two worlds.”

Grant proposed, but Loren stalled, so he pursued her on the set of their next film, Houseboat. Sensing he was about to lose Loren forever, Ponti arranged to divorce his first wife in a Mexican court in Ciudad Juárez – as divorce in Italy was then illegal. His lawyers then acted as stand-ins for a marriage by proxy to Loren, which meant the couple would be considered married everywhere, but in Italy. The day after, a surprised Grant was gracious and congratulated Loren while, ironically, filming their characters’ wedding scene.

Finally as Mrs Ponti, as she’d long hoped to be, Loren based herself in Los Angeles and set about moulding herself into one of the era’s biggest stars. She spent the late 1950s starring opposite leading men like Clark Gable, John Wayne, Richard Burton and Anthony Perkins and was soon as big in America as in her home country. But in 1960, Loren chose to return to Italy to film Two Women. The following year, while she was shooting It Started In Naples with Gable, she was nominated for a Best Actress Oscar. She was too nervous to attend the ceremony in Hollywood – “If I lost, I’d faint. If I won, I’d faint anyway. I couldn’t allow myself to do that in front of that audience, and before the eyes of the whole world” – so she remained at home with Ponti, making pasta sauce on the night. When the phone rang in the early hours, Ponti answered. It was Grant, to congratulate Loren, once again.

But just as Loren’s career – and life – were at an all-time high in Hollywood, it came under threat from rumblings back in Italy. Citing canon law, the Vatican had swiftly denounced the Ponti-Loren marriage when it happened, accusing Ponti of bigamy
and branding Loren a concubine. So when a woman from Milan reported seeing the pair together in Naples (they were there to film, in a further irony, Marriage Italian Style) the authorities charged them with bigamy.

In 1960, they were called before a judge and, at risk of a five-year prison sentence, had no choice but to declare their Mexican marriage illegal. “I knew in my heart that I had done nothing wrong,” says Loren. “I felt married, and that should have been enough,
but it was painful to be pilloried and branded with infamy.”

Eventually, in 1964, Ponti’s ex-wife found a solution: if all three players in this love triangle became citizens of France, they could legally divorce.

“It was a complete joke,” says Loren. In 1966, Ponti and Loren had a French courthouse ceremony that finally made their union legal, even in Italy.

Life Story: Sophia Loren
Life Story: Sophia Loren

Photo: getty Images

Amid the drama, Loren was hoping to become a mother. “I loved children, and the idea of having one all my own gave me a sense of peace and fulfilment I’d been searching for all my life,” she says. At 29, she fell pregnant, but miscarried. Four years later, she lost
a second pregnancy, and her doctor told her she would never have a child. But under the care of a Swiss doctor who pinpointed a hormonal imbalance, she carried a son, Carlo Jr, to term in 1968, and another, Edoardo, in 1973.

With the family she always wanted, Loren took a step back from acting and focused on raising her boys in Italy, where she and Ponti hosted friends like Richard Burton (whom Loren delighted in beating at Scrabble) at their 50-room home, Villa Sara, outside Rome. “At last

I was happy,” she recalls. “For the first time in my life I had everything I wanted. If I could have stopped time I would have at Villa Sara, sitting around the edge of the swimming pool as my son splashed water everywhere.”

But then, in 1977, two police cars drove through the villa’s wrought iron gates with warrants to search the house – Ponti was under investigation for alleged unlawful currency dealings and smuggling funds and artworks out of Italy. A month later, on her way to catch a flight to Paris, Loren was stopped at customs and held overnight for questioning about Ponti’s business practices. Then, she was sentenced for alleged tax evasion on earnings from years previously, when she was living overseas and hadn’t filed an Italian tax return (a mistake by her accountant). In 1980, she was given the choice: exile or a prison sentence of 30 days; although not convicted of a crime, her lawyers had made an error while appealing the charges.

So Loren handed herself in and was given a single cell in a small prison, where, as Prisoner Number 24, she read, wrote and watched TV for 17 days before being allowed to serve out her sentence under house arrest. Nearly 40 years later, in 2013, she was finally exonerated from any wrongdoing.

After serving her time, Loren moved permanently to Switzerland, where she continued to work and raise her children – in 1984, she was able to mix work and family when she appeared in a road movie, Aurora, with 11-year-old Edoardo. When Carlo Jr left for college in California, the family moved to America. “I continued to work, but I had become selective and would only accept parts that I was sure about,” she remembers. Nevertheless, the ’90s saw her embracing Hollywood again with roles in Prêt-À-Porter (1994) and Grumpier Old Men (1995). A spot on the Pirelli calendar in 2007 had Loren cornering the septuagenarian sexpot market.
Only Ponti’s death that same year slowed her down – slightly. “Every morning when I wake up, I struggle to believe Carlo is no longer here. I search for him in every corner of our house. I find him in our children’s voices, in the expressions of our grandchildren.”

These days, Loren lives in Geneva, a grandmother of four and the star of more than 80 films. She will visit Australia in April, as the guest of honour for a gala fundraiser as part of Melbourne’s La Dolce Italia Festival. In fact, now 80, Loren says she’s flourishing in her final act. “Ageing can be fun,” she says. “… If you know how to spend your days, if you’re satisfied with what you’ve achieved, and you’re still curious about the world around you.”