Sophia Loren was born
Sofia Villani Scicolone in
Rome. Her father Riccardo Scicolone was an engineer and her mother
Romilda Villani was an aspiring Neapolitan actress and piano teacher. Loren grew up impoverished in wartime
Pozzuoli, near
Naples sharing a small flat with her sister Maria, her grandparents and her uncles and aunts. She has said on many occasions that being born into and living with extreme poverty for most of her childhood gave her a strength of character that allowed her to succeed and appreciate every moment she has been given as a human being. Up until Sophia Loren was about 14, she was considered an
ugly duckling. Seemingly overnight, she bloomed into a beautiful woman.
In
1949, at age 15, Loren left for Rome and about a year later began her film career with bit parts in mostly minor Italian films. In
1950 she was among the contestants of the
Miss Italia beauty pageant, earning the 2nd place behind the winner Anna Maria Bugliari. In 1951, Loren and her mother worked as extras in
Quo Vadis, which was filmed in Rome and provided Loren with an early brush with Hollywood. She also appeared in the title role of the movie
Aida (1953), in which the singing of Loren's character was dubbed by opera star
Renata Tebaldi, and which caught the eye of
Cecil B. DeMille, who once said of Loren that 'You could build mountains around that girl.'
Loren also supported her mother and sister by working as a model in the weekly illustrated romantic
fumetti under the name Sofia Villani or Sofia Lazzaro. She also took part in regional beauty contests, where she won several prizes. Loren was discovered by her future husband, the much older and already-married film producer
Carlo Ponti, and they wed on
September 17,
1957, three days before her 23rd birthday. Their first marriage had to be annulled in order to keep Ponti from being charged with bigamy. The couple remarried on
April 9,
1966, but only after Sophia, Ponti, and Ponti's first wife all obtained French citizenship, thus enabling Carlo to divorce his first wife and marry Sophia in France, where, at the time,
Catholic doctrines regarding divorce did not prevent legal civil marriage. The couple eventually had two sons together, Carlo Ponti, Jr., and Edoardo Ponti. The couple remained together until Ponti's
death on
January 9,
2007.
Eventually, Sofia Scicolone changed her name to Sophia Loren (a twist on the name of Swedish actress
Marta Toren) and appeared in film roles that emphasized her voluptuous physique, even appearing topless in the films
Two Nights with Cleopatra and
It's Him, Yes! Yes! (considered acceptable in European cinema at the time, though said scenes were usually cut when the films were distributed in the United Kingdom or in North America). These early films were the only times she would appear nude; she stated that she did not feel comfortable exposed to the camera in the nude, as doing so represented 'a lot of nakedness'. Loren's acting career took off upon meeting
Vittorio De Sica and
Marcello Mastroianni in 1954. Many feel that her collaborations with De Sica would mark her finest work as an actress. Many of Sophia's Italian films were dubbed by voice-over actors for the English-speaking market. Wisely, Sophia dubbed herself in English to familiarize the international audience with the sound of her voice.
By the late 1950s, Loren's star had begun to rise in Hollywood, with films such as 1957's
Boy on a Dolphin and
The Pride and the Passion in which she co-starred with
Frank Sinatra and
Cary Grant. Grant, reportedly, fell so deeply in love with Loren that he ardently proposed marriage, despite her obvious loyalty to Carlo Ponti and Grant's own union with actress and writer
Betsy Drake. It is possible that Loren had an affair with Grant but how serious their relationship was is now known only to her. Stargazers and celebrity biographers consider the putative Loren-Grant romance to be one of the more mysterious and elusive romantic involvements in
Hollywood history.
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