Sophia, Italian everything

At 75, legendary screen goddess Sophia Loren possesses a youthful vitality to match her ageless good looks. She talks to Jane Gordon about the secret of her sex appeal, being a grandmother and the great love of her life .The most striking thing about Sophia Loren isn’t her charm or her beauty or even her magnificent décolletage (discreetly displayed in a silk shirt). It is her vitality. Arguably the most successful European actress of all time (she was the first person to win an Oscar for a non-English-speaking leading role in Two Women), she possesses, at 75, an energy and youthful optimism as stunning as her physical appearance. At 10am, Miss Loren has already taken 60 minutes’ exercise, spent two hours studying a script and made breakfast for her two-year-old grandson Vittorio, who is staying with her in her elegant Geneva home.
‘I always wake up early and jump out of bed – sometimes not wanting to, because one can always find an alibi not to exercise – and then I take a walk for an hour. And as I walk round the park I always think, “Maybe round the corner I am going to find something beautiful.” I always think positively. It is very rare that you find me in a mood that is sad or melancholic,’ she says, with a smile that accentuates her extraordinary bone structure.Widely regarded as something of a man’s woman (she once said she found the approval of women harder to gain than the approval of men, but more valuable), she has nothing but praise for her female co-stars. ‘It was like being a family. We were so happy. Everyone thought that all these actresses together would start a fire or something, but we got on so well. Nicole Kidman had her baby with her all the time and seemed so contented when her husband [country singer Keith Urban] came on the set; Judi Dench was so funny in that way only the English can be, and Penélope Cruz was very Spanish. We all sang and we all danced and we were drunk with music on the set. We cried when we parted, which is something that generally doesn’t happen on films.’ Sophia believes that the ability to act is something that you are born with – not something you can learn – and her own history as an actress, which spans nearly 60 years, seems to bear that out. One of two daughters of classical musician Romilda Villani and engineer Riccardo Scicolone, who never married, Sophia grew up with her sister and her mother in her grandparents’ home in Pozzuoli, near Naples.
As a statuesque teenager, she entered a beauty contest, came second, and encountered Carlo Ponti – 23 years her senior – a film producer who would become her mentor and the love of her life until his death two years ago. Older, shorter and altogether less alluring than his wife, he recognised her talent and masterminded a career that moved, almost seamlessly, from walk-on parts in low-budget Italian films to starring roles in Hollywood blockbusters alongside actors such as Frank Sinatra, Charlton Heston and Marcello Mastroianni, in movies such as The Pride and the Passion, El Cid and Marriage Italian Style.

Daily Mail