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| Home > actresses > Sophia Loren > Full Biography | |||||||||||||
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Sophia Loren Biography |
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| Sophia Loren is an Academy Award-winning actress, widely considered to be the most popular Italian performer. 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 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 as Aida in Aida (1953), in which the singing of Loren's role was dubbed by opera star Renata Tebaldi, and which caught the eye of Cecil B. DeMille. She took part in regional beauty contests, where she won several prizes. Loren was discovered by her future husband, the much older film producer Carlo Ponti, and they married on September 17, 1957, three days before her 23rd birthday. Their first marriage had to be annulled to keep Ponti from being charged with bigamy, and they 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 subsequently marry Sophia without any Catholic divorce laws looming over them. They would have two sons together, Carlo Ponti, Jr., and Edoardo Ponti. The couple remained together until Ponti's death on January 9, 2007. By the late 1950s, Loren's star began 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. Cary Grant fell so deeply in love with Sophia 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 clear that Loren also fell in love with Grant, but how serious their relationship was is now known only to Loren. Their romance is considered to be one of the most elusive romantic interludes by both Hollywood stargazers and celebrity biographers alike. In 1960, her acclaimed performance in Vittorio De Sica's Two Women, earned many awards including the Cannes, Venice and Berlin Film Festivals' best performance prizes. Her performance was also awarded an Academy Award for Best Actress, the first major Academy Award for a non-English language performance. During the 1960s Loren was one of the most popular actresses in the world, and continued to make films in both the U.S. and Europe, acting with the leading male stars. In 1964, her career reached its zenith when she received million to act in The Fall of the Roman Empire. Among her best-known films of this period are The Millionairess (1960) with Peter Sellers, Vittorio De Sica’s triptych Ieri, oggi, domani (1963) with Marcello Mastroianni, Peter Ustinov's Lady L (1965) with Paul Newman, and Charlie Chaplin's final film, A Countess from Hong Kong (1967) with Marlon Brando. After becoming a mother of two sons her career slowed down and Loren moved into her 40s and 50s with roles in films including the last De Sica movie, The Voyage, with Richard Burton and Ettore Scola's A Special Day with Mastroianni. She made headlines in 1982 when she served an 18-day prison sentence in Italy on tax evasion charges, a fact that didn't damage her career or popularity. In 1991, Loren received an honorary Academy Award for her contribution to world cinema and was declared "one of the world cinema's treasures". Loren appeared in the 2007 Pirelli Calendar at the age of 72. | |||||||||||||
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