Sophia Loren looks back
Growing up in Naples, Sophia Loren was so skinny she was nicknamed “the toothpick”. By her 20s, she was one of the world’s most glamorous stars, says Celia Walden in The Daily Telegraph. And yet, she didn’t love her looks. “I never looked in the mirror and thought, ‘YouY are so beautiful.’ b I was never happy h about how I look ked.” And now? “NNow, I like myself wwhen I look in the mirror. m I don’t think baad things, only good. Buut it’s about what you d o with your life, isn’ ’t it?” Loren has ddone a lot, and still does: at 86, she has just made a nnew film. It’s wh hy, unlike som me stars, she lo ves seeing her ea arly films. “I li ike to watch Sophia S as she was at 17 or
8 years old. It makes m me cry, be ecause it rem minds me of the e wonderful life e I’ve had.”
In 1983, Leroy Logan’s lorry driver father was beaten up by two police officers, following a dispute over parking regulations. His injuries were so severe Logan didn’t recognise him when he went to the hospital. Logan was distraught, and also anguished – unbeknownst to his father, he’d been thinking of joining the Met himself. It was his future wife who persuaded him not to give up on his plan: the attack, she told him, was exactly why he should join – to change things from the inside. “I began to have a sense that there was a reason behind it all,” he told Hugh Muir in The Guardian. In uniform, he excelled – but he found that his success caused resentment. “Someone in the secure area of the station daubed the N-word on my locker.” False rumours were spread about him, and, after he was elected the first chair of the National Black Police Association, his name was smeared in the tabloids and he was also wrongly accused of fraud. Yet he persevered, and climbed the ranks. He was appointed MBE in 2000 and retired as a superintendent in 2013. He believes that the Met has made progress on race relations – which has been undermined by “arbitrary stops”, and the mistreatment of black people who are stopped. “There is a toxic environment again,” he says. “I see a real hatred for police officers again. And our black police officers are stuck in the middle of that.”