Sophia Loren eventually became a Hollywood movie star, best known for her beauty and captivating lifestyle. Her journey to the spotlight was not easy, she was born into a very poor family and even when she did enter the limelight, her looks were criticized.
Today we know her as the prettiest woman ever to honor our screens, still amazing at 88 years old.
It’s unbelievable the woman who influenced music, rejected a marriage proposal from Cary Grant, and she became the first actress who win the Oscar for a foreign-language film had the start she did.
Sofia Villani Scicolone was born in Rome,Itlay in 1934. Her mother was a piano tutor and a good actress. Her unusual beauty also draws the attention of Hollywood. Sophia’s beautiful mom once won a Greta Garbi lookalike contest but some restrictions from her family didn’t allow her to follow her career on the big screen.
Sophia’s mother guided her and helped Sophia in her future film career.
Sophia was raised without the support of her father. Her father was also the dad of her younger sister Maria but refused to marry their mother and had no more engagement in family life.
”I saw my father only six times in my life,” she told People Magazine. “He was a great source of pain and humiliation for my mother, whom he seduced and abandoned, for my younger sister, Maria, who suffered terribly because he would not give her his name, and for myself.”
Life with a single parent was financially very callous.
“She was raised in severe poverty, sharing a bedroom with eight people at her grandparents’ home and living with other relatives,” writes Direct Expose. “Conditions eventually got so bad… that Loren’s mother would sometimes take water from the car radiator to feed to her daughters.”
Sophia lived through World War II, during which she was knocked to the ground in one aerial raid and was struck by shrapnel, leaving her with a scar on her chin.
”I was a little girl, but the sound and the experiences of the war never, never leave you,” she once said.
Of being so skinny she was bullied at school and she also suffered from mites and lice.
But she comes out as the victorious look as we know her today.
After becoming a finalist in the Miss Italia 1950 beauty scene, she then went on to attend the National Film School in Italy.
But still, her look was under criticism, and she was told her nose wasn’t right and she had to lose weight.
“It was an interesting nose, which is why I still have never changed it. Sometimes when you are very young, you have to wait for nature to shape you on the face or on the body. Then little by little, people see the nose was much nicer than they thought,” she told the San Diego Union-Tribune.
When she played an Ethiopian slave in the movie Aida a very good opportunity she got when she was only 19 years old, was condemnatory praise.
She co-starred with Cary Grant and Frank Sinatra in The Pride and the Passion after four years and in 1960 her role-playing a mother desperate to provide for her daughter in war-torn Rome in Two Women earned her an Oscar.
Loren also won five special Golden Globes, a Grammy Award, an Honorary Academy Award, and the Golden Globe Cecil B. DeMille Award for lifetime achievements, to name a few.
Her life was afflicted with stories of relationships and monogamy but stayed married to Italian film producer Carlo Ponti for 50 years until he died in 2007.
The very first time the couple met Sophia was just 16 years old. Carlo put forward a contract and became her adviser, ensuring her fame in Italy before she was 25.
”It was love at first sight for both of us. We met at a beauty contest in Rome when I was 16, and he was on the jury. He saw me sitting at a table with friends and sent me a note asking me to join the contest,” she said.
Sophia and Carlo got married in 1957, but Carlo’s earlier divorce was not known in Itlay so they charged bigamy.
Calo was 21 years older than her and was still married to his first wife when they initially wed.
That’s why Sophia and Carlo’s marriage was declared unverified in 1962. The couple solved the matter by becoming French citizens and they married again legitimately.
The couple had two sons, Carol Jr., who is an orchestra conductor, and Eduardo, who is a filmmaker. Today, Sophia has four grandchildren.
Sophia’s love life has been in the stardom many times; for example, she once rejected a marriage proposal from Cary Grant.
Despite having an amazing look she never pays attention, she only focuses on making sure to provide a perfect secure life for her children, whom she was deprived of in her childhood.
“My character is my best feature,” she told the Telegraph newspaper. “I was really a nobody, a little girl, unhappy, in desperation because of the life I was living with my family and no father.”
There is still too much that was unknown about this pretty screen goddess as she burns her dairy every year.
However, it is confirmed that she is loyal to her family and her work.
In 2020 Sophia Loren acted in her first leading role over a decade. In the American-Italian drama film The Life Ahead, directed by her son Edoardo Ponti, Sophia acted as Madam Rosa, a Holocaust survivor, and former sex worker.
”I [tapped] into my own experiences during the war and [found] Madame Rosa’s truth and honesty by uncovering my own,” Sophia said
The screen goddess is also a businesswoman these days. Two restaurants in Italy bear her name, one in Florence and one in Milano. The latter opened its doors in 2022 and she attended the opening ceremony.
“In my life, I have had many passions, one of them is undoubtedly food” – Loren is quoted on the restaurant website.
”No director has ever managed to put me on a diet and I have never given up a good plate of pasta in favor of the figure.”
Although she had a very difficult childhood her struggle to reach the limelight is very admirable. She also has much love for her family as well.