Happy Birthday, Sophia
Sophia Loren turns 80 today. Here are some then and now photos to feast on.
Loren is one of my most favorite actresses, and I’ve written about her on this blog several times before. She’s been blessed with beauty, brains, warmth, and a rare acting talent that mixes naturalness, comedy, and pathos, and makes them all look easy.
My favorite film of Loren’s—“Marriage, Italian Style” (1964)—is one that’s not very easy to obtain*. It features an actor who was probably Loren’s favorite co-star, Marcello Mastroianni, and was made by a man who was probably her favorite director, Vittorio De Sica. It’s a hard movie to describe: over-the-top, schmaltzy, extremely funny, very Italian, cynical and yet ultimately heartwarming. It probably doesn’t lend itself to little video clips, and there aren’t many on YouTube anyway, but I’m putting this one up to show just how very versatile Loren was.
It’s a different Loren than you’re used to. Here, although she’s only thirty years old, it’s towards the end of the movie and she’s made up to look older, her waist padded a teeny bit in a vain effort at middle-age spread (which she hasn’t got much of even now, fifty years later). Her character has become hardened and worn out by life and its disappointments, but she still—well, watch how subtly she uses just a look, and then another, to convey worlds of hidden feeling:
Nobody else can compare.
[* Some commenters have pointed out that “Marriage, Italian Style” is quite easy to obtain these days. I was in a hurry when I wrote the post and hadn’t checked, but I was going by the fact that I’d been looking for many, many years to no avail. A year or two ago I finally found a version and purchased it, but it wasn’t of very good quality (I think it may have been pirated). Since videos and DVDs of films have been made for decades, and this film had not had an official release in a video or DVD version in all those years, I assumed that nothing new had happened in the last couple of years. Turned out I was wrong, and I’m very happy to hear it because I’ve always thought it was a shame it was unobtainable. Now that’s been remedied.]
Good moving in heels on irregular steps. Actors have to be able to do anything. My father had a friend in college with immense talent but didn’t make it on Broadway, despite trying very hard, because she couldn’t sing–and she was a fabulous singer–and smile at the same time.
It’s clear there was back and forth across the Med, looking at her features.
She was so good-looking that it was sometimes difficult to get past that and see the person she was being.
One of the things that makes me recognize, if not feel, my age is that when people talk about beautiful women, ideals of beauty, and so forth, it’s women like Sophia Loren who come first to my mind. Such beauty, and something more–a sense of warmth and depth that does not always, to say the least, accompany beauty. I’ve never seen this movie. I need to.
btw it’s on Netflix. I just put it on my list.
Not easy to obtain? Must’ve taken me a good thirty seconds to find multiple dvd and bluray listings on Amazon-both as a single feature and as part of a larger multi-film set.
Sophia Loren is one of the very few celebrities I think I would like to meet for a glass of wine. Beyond her ageless beauty, she comes across on screen and at public appearances as a genuinely interesting and likeable person. May she live to enjoy 100 years of beauty.
William Holden said it best: “She fills up the room…”
Truly easy on the eyes.
In the late summer of 1981 I was sitting in a car in the front parking lot of the Adams Mark Hotel in Buffalo. I was in the passenger seat and another guy (Sam) was in the driver’s seat.
We were working on a political campaign and the candidate was inside the hotel. We were waiting for him and tired from a long day on the road.
It must have been about 8 in the evening or so, just after the darkness had slowly descended.
The Adams Mark is a wonder of Stalinesque architecture, one of the ugliest blots on the surface of the Earth. But its facade was clear glass, so you could see the entire lobby (not worth seeing except for checking out the human activity) and also a walkway about a hundred feet long, running along the front of the hotel from the lobby to the various meeting rooms on the other side of the hotel.
It was a Saturday night, but the lobby and walkway were both empty, except for a single clerk behind the counter.
Sam and I remarked how strange it was that the hotel lobby should be so devoid of life. Were things that dead in Buffalo? Or was it a fluke?
We were parked facing the interior walkway, brightly but not glaringly lit.
Then Sophia Loren entered our frame of reference, stage right, coming from the lobby and going through the walkway. She was alone. When she passed right in front of us, she could not have been more than twenty feet away.
She was serene. She glowed with genuine joy, as if amused, content, and beneficent.
She wore a white gown-type of dress.
She floated. Her walking looked like a special effect, like she was gliding through the walkway undisturbed by gravity.
She was stunningly beautiful, but that was not the most noticeable thing about her. What mattered most was how good she seemed, how down to Earth, angelic in the moral as well as the aesthetic sense.
Sam and I agreed, we both fell in love with her immediately. And this was not a gross man feeling, it was a much higher calling.
She radiated an ethereal likeability and charisma one would imagine coming from a saint.
That comment, Tonawanda, reminds of a passage from Solzhenitsyn, the Cancer Ward, about a boob. Yes, a boob that was destined for the knife. I couldn’t find the passage, but here are some quotes.
https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/3202343
Don, Mac:
See the addition to the post at the asterisk.
A couple of quotes:
The two big advantages I had at birth were to have been born wise and to have been born in poverty.
There is a fountain of youth: it is your mind, your talents, the creativity you bring to your life and the lives of the people you love. When you learn to tap into this source, you will truly have defeated age.
That some are able to age so gracefully is one of the mysteries of life. If the secret was known it would be a priceless gift. Maybe it’s the “Mediterranean diet.”
Though I admired Sophia (what man wouldn’t?), Gina was always more appealing to me. La Lollobrigida, who’s now 87, (in spite of her recently rumored death) has also aged remarkably well.
Here’s to La Dolce Vita and those who have lived it.
Neo, were you using old school methods to find DVDs back then, back when digital distribution was a non phenomenon?
Ymarsakar:
I think I was looking for any method (which would include streaming), and it just wasn’t available. I seem to recall that I kept encountering other people searching too, and asking why it was so hard to get. And then about two years ago I found a decent copy, but I also seem to recall finding that wasn’t straightforward, either.