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Sophia Loren: Wwii Italy
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Sophia Loren was born Sofia Villani Scicolone on September 20, 1934, in a poverty-stricken part of Rome, Italy. Her father, Riccardo Scicolone, refused to marry her mother, Romilda Villani, but allowed Sofia and her younger sister Maria to take his surname.
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Born to an impoverished mother in Fascist-ruled Italy, Sophia Loren grew up to become her country's leading screen siren and, later, an Academy Award-winning international star. Follow the at-times stormy life story of famed cinema beauty Sophia Loren in this compelling documentary filled with vintage interviews and film clips, insights from friends and colleagues, and more. 85 min. Widescreen; Soundtrack: Italian; Subtitles: English; interviews. In Italian with English subtitles.
A movie starlet, film legend and glamour queen of the very highest order, Sophia Loren remains to this day one of the sexist, classiest and most beloved actresses to grace the screen. Born Sofia Villani Scicolone on September 20, 1934 in Pozzuoli, Campania, Italy, this Italian bombshell was one of the very few of the glamour set of the 1950's to become as regarded for her acting talent as her incredible looks, as she became the first performer to win an Oscar for a performance given entirely in a foreign language, as a woman raped by two soldiers in 1961's "Two Women".
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Sophia Loren was once described as Italy's most perfect - and enigmatic - work of art since the Mona Lisa. Called "more than a movie star, a force of nature", she is a truly international artist whose career spans a remarkable five decades.
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Loren quickly became a major star and pin-up girl in Italy, and her first film to find success beyond her native land was La Donna del Fiume, released in America as The River Girl. Her first English-language film was Boy on a Dolphin with Alan Ladd in 1957, where she was memorable mostly for emerging from the water in a wet, skin-tight, transparent dress. She starred in numerous American films through the rest of that decade, but most were received lukewarmly at best. In 1960 she returned to Italy to star in the brutal wartime drama La Ciociara (Two Women) with Jean-Paul Belmondo. She won the Best Actress Oscar for her performance -- the first Academy Award ever given for a performance not in English -- but Loren had been unable to attend and no-one from the Academy called to tell her she had won. She found out the following morning, when Cary Grant, an ex-lover and Loren's co-star in Houseboat, called to offer his congratulations.
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Moving melodrama from director Vittorio De Sica stars Marcello Mastroianni as a newlywed in WWII Italy who reluctantly leaves wife Sophia Loren and is sent to the bitter conditions of the Russian front. Years later, after Mastroianni was declared missing in action, Loren journeys to the Soviet Union to find out what happened to him, and is shocked to find him alive and married to a Russian woman. Lyudmila Savelyeva, Germano Longo ... star. 101 min. Standard; Soundtrack: English (dubbed).
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