Goodness gracious me, Sophia Loren is 70!
(Agencies)
Updated: 2004-09-20 16:32

It may come as something of a shock to generations of men across the globe, but Sophia Loren, the very paragon of sultry Latin beauty, celebrates her 70th birthday on Monday.

Sophia Loren [file/AFP]

As screen goddesses go, Loren has few peers, her smouldering good looks more than matched by a sassy southern intelligence and a Mediterranean common sense which has carried her through an acting career which has embraced everything from tragedy to high comedy.

Of her generation, she is the last great European sex symbol still working, with more than 100 films behind her, while the likes of Brigitte Bardot and Gina Lollobrigida have long since given up the hectic schedules of film-making.

She herself recognizes her gifts and has systematically made the most of them, having once said: "Being beautiful can never hurt, but you have to have more. You have to sparkle, you have to be fun, you have to make your brain work, if you have one."

More pertinently, she pinpointed the secret of her success. "Sex appeal is 50 percent what you've got and 50 percent what people think you've got," she is on record as saying.

Born Sofia Scicolone on September 20, 1934, in a Rome clinic to a single mother, Romilda Villani, she grew up in extreme poverty in the rundown Naples quarter of Pozzuoli and, in true Neapolitan style, never forgot where she came from.

The grinding poverty never dampened her spirits, though, as she explained in a recent interview: "Being Neapolitan means always having an optimistic outlook on life."

From such unpromising origins, she got her first break at the age of 14 when her mother entered her in a beauty contest, lying about her age. By the time she was 16, she was already posing for photographs for comic-strip novels and got her first acting role as an extra playing a slave girl in the film "Quo Vadis".

But it was her meeting with producer Carlo Ponti -- later to become her husband -- which was to transform her life. Ponti groomed her for stardom, recruiting drama coaches and casting her in small movie roles, including an appearance in the 1951 smash "Anna", under the name Sofia Lazzaro. For 1952's "La Favorita", her first major role, Ponti changed her name to Sophia Loren.

Ponti, now 91, was already married and with divorce an impossibility in the Italy of the time, the couple had to carry on their affair in secret until they finally legalized their liaison, marrying twice, first in Mexico in 1957 and again in 1966 near Paris after the pair obtained French nationality.

But such was the moral climate of the day that one prominent Italian Catholic magazine even called on its readers to boycott Loren's films.

In the early 1960s, Loren landed some of the finest acting roles of her career, notably in Vittorio de Sica's 1961 film "La Ciociara" (Two Women), based on a tale by Alberto Moravia and which won her her first Oscar -- the second coming in 1990 for lifetime achievement, which was accompanied by a pompous citation by the Academy, praising Loren for "a career rich with memorable performances that has added lustre to our art form".

De Sica was also responsible for two of her most memorable roles, in "Ieri, Oggi, Domani" (Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow), which was rewarded with a Golden Globe, and an Oscar nomination for her next role in "Matrimonio all'Italiana."

She also achieved unexpected success with a pop hit, "Goodness Gracious Me", a novelty song, in which she duetted with Peter Sellers, her co-star in "The Millionairess" based on a play by George Bernard Shaw.

Her Hollywood adventures included "Boy on a Dolphin", with Alan Ladd, "The Pride and the Passion", starring Frank Sinatra and Cary Grant, Martin Ritt's "The Black Orchid", George Cukor's idiosyncratic "Heller in Pink Tights", "A Countess From Hong Kong", "It Started in Naples", with Clark Gable, "Arabesque" and "El Cid", with Charlton Heston.

Over the years, Loren claims that her roles have encapsulated "Italy's most positive values", but for all that, it is her legendary beauty for which she will be remembered - a quality still very much in evidence earlier this month when she charmed the audience with her closing speech at the Venice Film Festival.

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