Italian actress Sophia Loren’s return to the screen in 2020 after a decade-long hiatus in “The Life Ahead,” directed by her son Edoardo Ponti, was well-received. Her rise to fame and her beauty has continued to capture media attention — WWD included. Following her celebrated career for more than a decade, WWD spoke to the star in 1979, prior to the release of her autobiography, “Sophia, Living and Loving,” where she talked about seeing herself as an ethereal beauty, who delivered beauty uncompromised in the most complicated of situations. This interview with Sophia Loren at New York’s Pierre hotel, appeared in WWD’s Arts & People section on Feb. 21, 1979.
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Arts & People: Sophia Loren as she sees herself — Cinderella Italian style
NEW YORK – Comfortably ensconced in the corner of a sofa in her suite at the Pierre, Sophia Loren tucks her long, shapely legs beneath her with a kittenish grace that evokes memories of the pouty seductress she portrayed in “Marriage Italian Style.”
There’s very little else, however, about Loren that suggests the expansively animated, temperamental characters that have made her famous. The actress — who’s in town to promote her autobiography, “Sophia, Living and Loving,” (Morrow, $9.95) with A.E. Hotchner — conducts an interview with a singular, rather aristocratic poise and speaks of the trials and triumphs of her life with a professional detachment that is not unlike the tone of her straightforward, modestly compact book.
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Early in the interview, Loren apologizes when she refers to herself in the third person. “I always say, ‘She was,'” she says, with a slight laugh, in her perfect, precisely enunciated English. She adds that the third-person consciousness generally manifests itself “when I have to make an appearance as Sophia Loren.”
That sensibility, no doubt, came in handy during the hours spent taking inventory of her life in lengthy, tape-recorded conversations with Hotchner, who transformed the material into a book, a process the actress compares to psychoanalysis.
“It’s not easy to talk about such intimate things, or to feel again now what you felt 20 years ago,” says Loren. “When you start to analyze what your life has been, to wonder whether it’s been good or bad, you get rid of so many ghosts that have been haunting you.”
Among the ghosts Loren exhumes in her book are memories of a poverty-stricken childhood in ravaged, war-time Naples and an uncaring father who never married Loren’s mother and refused to give the actress’ sister his family name until Loren paid him her first substantial salary for it. “I sought him everywhere,” writes Loren in the prologue. “I married him. I made my best films with him.”
Loren’s father is now dead, but she subjects her living mother and sister to an equally unsparing Freudian-type microscope. Her mother, she reports matter-of-factly, has vicariously realized her own ambitions through Sophia, and her sister seems to lack the drive and energy to become a success herself. These observations are confirmed in inserts written by the mother and sister themselves.
“We are a family of three women,” explains Loren, “and we are very open. We always tell each’ other what we think of each, though always with grace, never with hatred.” Of the relationship, Loren, who has supported the family since she began working in films at 15, says, “My sister is my daughter, my mother is my wife. Nothing ever changes.” She pauses and adds, “I need them. It’s a beautiful relationship. You have to feel you have roots somewhere.”
From the time producer Carlo Ponti, who is now her husband, spotted her in a beauty contest in Rome, Lauren’s ascent to the top was rapid, “like a fairy tale – maybe it sounds a little banal; it is the Cinderella story. But it’s more than a fairy tale, it’s me.”
Ponti is not the only Prince Charming to have figured in the fairy tale. In her book’s most publicized segment, Loren describes a romance with sometime co-star Cary Grant, whom, she says, she was on the verge of marrying but ultimately turned down in favor of Ponti.
Asked if she feels the revelation is in any way unfair to Grant, Loren answers,
“When something as beautiful as that happens to two people, and a great deal of time has gone by, it shouldn’t offend anyone.”
Loren’s long relationship with Ponti, who was married to someone else when he met the actress, was condemned by the Catholic Church. And Ponti’s recent run-ins with the Italian tax bureau have forced the couple to live in semiexile in Paris and Switzerland, and they plan to take lodging in Manhattan in the near future.
But in spite of the fact that she’s traditionally found herself pitted against Italian orthodoxy, Loren says she doesn’t consider herself a rebel in any sense. “You don’t get anywhere by being a rebel,” she says.
Of her native country, Loren says, shaking her head, “I don’t know. Such dramatic things happen every day. People don’t know what to think about it, what to believe in.” Asked if she thinks she’ll ever return to Italy, she answers with a shrug.
Loren says she’s constantly trying to branch out as an actress and is proud of the fact that she can name at least five films which represent “big steps in my career.” On her recent offerings, she’s particularly pleased with “A Special Day” ー “It showed Marcello (Mastroianni) and me as a completely different on-screen couple” — and says the bedraggled housewife in the movie is the on-screen character with whom she most identifies. “It’s really what I am inside of myself — a resigned person, even though I don’t look it.”
Last year, Loren worked with director Lina Wertmuller, for the first time in “A Blood Feud,” yet to be released here, and speaks warmly of the experience. Of Wertmuller she says, beaming, “I’m enchanted by the enthusiasm, the strength of this woman who really looks like a man.” And she says the film will show her in a totally new light – “I’m very excessive, very aggressive, very everything. Even the makeup. It’s another face.”
Whatever the makeup, one imagines the renowned Loren beauty will somehow shine through. Loren admits she’s been used in films as mere window dressing, but says, laughing, the beauty “is never a handicap, as long as you don’t think too much of it.”
“When you advertise a product, there’s that first shock that gets your attention, but it doesn’t mean anything if you find out the product is no good.
Beauty’s like that. Fortunately, in my case, the product was very good — that’s why I’m still here.”
—Ben Bradley
Research by Tonya Blazio-Licorish