How Loren went from toothpick to sexgoddess
How the ‘toothpick’ became...
As so often, Noël Coward put it best. ‘Sophia,’ he said, ‘should have been sculpted out of chocolate truffles, so the world could devour her.’ Here’s the world’s chance. Cindy De La Hoz’s book doesn’t pretend to be a complete biography of Sophia Loren. But like its subject, it’s a thing of beauty – sumptuously designed, luxuriously crafted, festooned with fascinations.
Certainly there is much to learn here. Who would have guessed that the mother of the movies’ most famous brunette could have won a Greta Garbo lookalike competition?
Or that the fabulously well-upholstered Loren was nicknamed ‘La Stuzzicadenti’ – the toothpick – at school in postwar Naples?
Mind you, the toothpick was already toothsome. Sofia Villani (as she then was) was only a couple of years into her teens when her PE teacher asked her mother if he might marry the girl.
The answer was no. Romilda Villani was herself unmarried, and had bigger plans for the daughter who had been born in a charity ward for single mothers.
Instead, in late 1949, she encouraged the now 15-year-old Sofia to enter a newspaper beauty contest. She didn’t win, but she was selected as a ‘princess of the sea’. Among her prizes was a train ticket to Rome. Which was handy because Mum had heard that MGM were looking for extras for a movie of the
Romans v Christians epic Quo Vadis. Sofia got the gig, and settled down in Rome for a few weeks.
One night, dining at a restaurant near the Colosseum, she was spotted by Carlo Ponti – one of Italian cinema’s biggest big shots. Twenty years her senior, Ponti was unhappily married in an Italy that still wouldn’t allow divorce. But from this moment on, he and Loren (as Sofia soon became) were rarely apart until his death, 56 years later.
In between came a cascade of movies, each lovingly itemised here – from Loren’s youthful days in what De La Hoz properly calls ‘the Golden Age of Italian Cinema’, through the Hollywood blockbusters (outshining Alan Ladd in Boy On A Dolphin, Clark Gable in It Started In Naples, and even Cary Grant in The Pride And The Passion) and on to the numerous ravioli rom-coms she made with her favourite co-star Marcello Mastroianni. By the end of the Sixties, though, Loren’s great period was over, and she was reduced to appearing in romantic potboilers – often as not opposite a booze-blurred Richard Burton. In 1980 her career was so off the boil she actually agreed to play herself – and her mother – in a Sophia Loren biopic. But the movies have never been kind to older women and Loren was far too intelligent to stake her life on a medium so unforgiving. As De La Hoz makes clear, despite her status as one the silver screen’s most sensational sex goddesses, Loren’s main aim in life was to see that her children enjoyed the secure home life her own illegitimate beginnings had denied her. La dolce vita, indeed.
‘In Sophia’s early teens her PE teacher asked her mother Romilda if he might marry the girl’