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Sophia Loren: Miss Rome
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Sophia Loren (born September 20, 1934) is a motion picture and stage, Academy Awards-winning actress, widely considered to be the most popular Italian performer. Biography Early life and career Sophia Loren was born Sofia Villani Scicolone in Rome, to engineer Riccardo Scicolone and aspiring actress (to whom he was not married), and piano teacher, Romilda Villani. 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
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Sophia Loren made more than a dozen films with Vittorio De Sica, and her memory of him on the set suggests that his performances behind the camera were just as vivid as those on film. "De Sica was an actor, and his way of directing other actors was to show them what he wanted," Miss Loren said in a phone conversation the other day. "Instead of telling the scene, he was acting it for you. He did that for everybody, from the old lady to the sexy woman to the little kid.
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Italian movie legend Sophia Loren looks on prior to receiving the Campidoglio award by the city of Rome in a collateral event of the Rome Film Festival, at Rome's town hall, Saturday, Oct. 20, 2007. (AP Photo/Riccardo De Luca)
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Sophia placed second in the Miss Rome beauty contest in 1951 and encountered one of the event's judges, film producer Carlo Ponti, who would ... become her husband. Subsequently, she was given a tiny part in the big hit Anna (1951) and won her first leading role as Leonora in Cesare Barlacchi's La Favorita (1952). After signing a contract with Carlo Ponti and changing her name to Sophia Loren, she costarred with Silvana Pampanini and Eleanora Rossi Drago in Luigi Comencini's Tratta delle bianche, La (a.k.a. Girls Marked Danger, 1953).
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Sophia was born Sofia Villani Scicolone at the Clinica Regina Margherita, Rome, on September 20, 1934 to Riccardo Scicolone and Romilda Villiani. Riccardo refused to marry Romilda, leaving Romilda, a piano teacher and aspiring actress without support. Romilda, Sofia and sister Maria returned to Pozzuoli, near Naples to live with Sofia's grandmother in order to survive. She would eventually change her name to Sophia Loren.
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At 15 years of age, Sophia was bullied by her mother into entering a beauty contest. She was not the winner, but she received a modest runners-up prize which was impressive by the standards of her impoverished family. Her mother then dragooned Sophia into acting lessons where she learned that MGM were making "Quo Vadis" in Rome, and were hiring extras for the crowd scenes. This was enough for Sophia's mother, and the two of them traipsed to Rome to audition. They were successful, and Sophia claims to be in one of the scenes with Deborah Kerr.
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