The two roles Sophia Loren cherishes the most: “Means a great deal to me”
Sadly, as the passing of Robert Duvall showed this week, we are reaching a point in time where there aren’t too many of the stars of Hollywood’s Golden Age of cinema left, which means the time to celebrate them is now, and one of those actors is undoubtedly Sophia Loren, the Italian-born siren who dropped jaws around the world.
From her debut in 1950 at just 16 and for the next 70 years, Loren was a genuine trailblazer, the first actor ever to win an Oscar for a non-English language performance, the only living member of the American Film Institute’s Greatest Stars of film history. Loren was still acting up until 2020’s Netflix-backed drama The Life Ahead, which was Oscar-nominated and saw her take on her first role in ten years, as a former sex worker providing a home for the children of her colleagues.
Loren made over 140 movies in her career, both in her native Italy and in Hollywood, which included a prolific partnership with the Bicycle Thieves director Vittorio De Sica. Together, the pair made more than a dozen films, including the Oscar-winning Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow in 1963, which was one of four films De Sica would pick up in his career.
One of their most famous films together remains a highlight for Loren, as she told the New York Times: “My role in Two Women means a great deal to me.”
It was the film for which she won an Oscar, playing a struggling single mother trying to protect her daughter in World War II and the movie that brought in a huge amount at the box office on a budget of less than a million dollars. Amazingly, Loren didn’t show up to collect her Academy Award, convinced that she would faint if she did. Instead, Cary Grant phoned her to tell her of the win.
It led to Loren becoming one of the most sought-after and highly paid actors in the world, commanding fees of over $1m for movies like El Cid with Charlton Heston and ticking off a list of working with almost every male star of the decade, Paul Newman, Marlon Brando, Gregory Peck and even Charlie Chaplin in his final film.
Some 15 years later came the second of the movies Loren thinks of as another highlight, as she explained: “The role I played in (1977’s) A Special Day. It all depends on the story, and on the perfection of great directors like De Sica. I loved working with him, as well as the films I made with Marcello Mastroianni.”
A Special Day was a period drama starring Loren and Mastroianni set in Rome at the end of the 1930s that told the story of a woman and her gay neighbour who decide to stay at home during a visit from Hitler to the city to meet Mussolini. It has since gone down as one of the finest films of the era and was an immediate success, securing an Oscar nomination for Mastroianni and a Golden Globe for ‘Best Foreign Language Film’.
Loren continued to work on and off through the next few decades, juggling raising her family with film roles and continued acclaim, picking up a Golden Globe as late as 1994 for Robert Altman’s Pret-a-Porter. She then had huge success the next year in the comedy sequel Grumpier Old Men starring Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon. One of her most acclaimed final roles came with 2009’s Nine, an adaptation of the Broadway show co-starring Daniel Day-Lewis, Penelope Cruz and Nicole Kidman. It was nominated for four Oscars.
