Beauty is in the eye of the
beholder, and many who beheld Sophia Loren during the 1950s and 1960s found
her very beautiful indeed. Beauty is also in the camera lens. The camera never
lies, declares another adage. On the contrary, the camera always distorts
minutely and imperceptibly, to some people's great advantage. It is now widely
recognised that the camera "likes" some people, and never did the
camera love more ardently than in the case of Sophia Loren. As Sophia herself
admits in her memoirs, her face has many imperfections; but both the movie
camera and the stills camera ignored these defects and accentuated her good
qualities. It was in fact a face of great flexibility, and in her photographs
Sophia has always been able to suggest a wide range of personalities and backgrounds.
Her body did not need special consideration from the camera lens. Below her
chin, Sophia Loren was one of the great Goddesses.
At the start of her career,
Sophia capitalised on her physical splendour by posing for pin-up pictures,
but when her movie career gained momentum, she abandoned such postures. Photographs
of Sophia in swim-suits are now a rarity, but though she stopped posing in
beach-wear early in her career, Sophia continued posing in low-cut dresses
well into middle-age. Photographs of Sophia Loren's cleavage are most certainly
not a rarity! It is quite evident from her photographs that Sophia always
knew that her face was not her only asset.
She was born Sofia Scicolone,
very famously out of wedlock, in 1934. If her memoirs, "Sophia
Loren: Living And Loving" are to be believed, Sophia's father was a thoroughly
nasty piece of work, and his consistent refusal to marry Sophia's mother was
apparently the least of his sins. Sophia grew up in poverty, which was intensified
by the Second World War.
At 15 years of age, Sophia
was bullied by her mother into entering a beauty contest. She was not the
winner, but she received a modest runners-up prize which was impressive by
the standards of her impoverished family. Her mother then dragooned Sophia
into acting lessons where she learned that MGM were making "Quo Vadis"
in Rome, and were hiring extras for the crowd scenes. This was enough for
Sophia's mother, and the two of them traipsed to Rome to audition. They were
successful, and Sophia claims to be in one of the scenes with Deborah Kerr.
This minor break-through
was all the incentive Sophia's mother needed, and from then on it was understood
between them that Sophia was to become a movie star. Everything in their lives
was subordinated to that goal, and for several months Sophia made the rounds
of agents and casting directors in search of work. One evening, she went with
some friends to a cafe/restaurant where she met a small-time film producer
named Carlo Ponti.
Under Ponti's guidance Sophia's
career began to make progress with a succession of small parts in minor
movies, and a flurry of pin-up photographs which emphasised her body. These
photographs caused journalists to compare Sophia's figure with Gina Lollobrigida's,
and there were competing claims about their respective bust measurements.
Although both actresses uninhibitedly used the pin-up culture to promote themselves,
their tactics were different. Gina talked openly to journalists about the
appropriateness of an actress stressing her bustline, shrewdly calculating
that editors would find such quotable remarks irresistible. Sophia and Ponti
were even more shrewd. They realised that the critical establishment disliked aggressive sexiness. Sophia made no comment about pin-up
pictures and, while brazenly flaunting her cleavage, modeled her postures
on Silvana Mangano in "Bitter Rice" and presented an "earthy"
image instead of a conventionally sexy one. Whereas Gina was often photographed
in tight-fitting cocktail dresses with revealing necklines, and presented a
very urban image, Sophia was frequently photographed in rural settings - splattered
with mud, wading through rivers, eating fruit, leaning on a farm gate - while
her body promised to burst through her threadbare clothes. The image was not
one of applied "show-biz" sophistication, but it informed the world
that Sophia Loren had one of the great bodies.
Sophia's public image came
to the attention of Stanley Kramer who offered her the female lead in "The
Pride And The Passion" where she played a Spanish peasant girl involved
in an uprising against the French. This was the turning point in Sophia's
career and was a huge stroke of luck. It lifted her out of the rut of small
Italian movies and placed her in the big international league; it gave her
two major co-stars, Cary Grant and Frank Sinatra, who guaranteed that the
film would be seen by a wide audience; it gave her a role in keeping with
her earthy public image; and it gave her a cinematographer,
Franz Planer, who had already demonstrated a gift for highlighting an actress's
beauty. "The Pride And The Passion" was a big commercial success,
and is still enjoyable today.
Sophia's next film was "Boy
On A Dolphin". As a life-long admirer of beauty and femininity, director
Jean Negulesco was greatly impressed by Sophia, but was not blind to her single-minded
determination. In his entertaining but lightweight memoirs "Things
I Did And Things I Think I Did", he describes Sophia as "cooperative,
pleasant, professional, and ruthless" and mentions that she was slightly
resentful when the limelight was taken from her. Negulesco felt that Sophia's
greatest asset was her earthy naturalness - "She was beautiful: she was
big - big eyes, big nose, big lips, big body. It was Mother Earth in all her
glory" - and concluded that if she avoided formal glamorisation, Sophia
could not fail to become a great screen Goddess.
Ponti and Sophia now decided
that she would concentrate on English-language movies, preferably opposite
a top star, and would try to secure a contract with a Hollywood studio. They
were very successful in their strategy. Sophia did work with big Hollywood
stars: with John Wayne in "Legend Of The Lost", with Clark Gable
in "It Started In Naples", with William Holden in "The Key"
and with Cary Grant again in "Houseboat". She also won a contract
with Paramount, but her Hollywood movies were not memorable and did not show
her at her best. They were not great commercial successes at the time, despite
her co-stars, and today are rarely screened, even on television. They did
however establish Sophia Loren as an international movie star. Her publicity
photographs changed to reflect this new status. Previously neither her postures
nor her facial expressions had been at all elegant, but now her pictures presented
her as dignified and well-groomed. Many of these publicity pictures showed
only her face, and Sophia began to be regarded by some as a great facial beauty,
rather than as purely a sex symbol. However this involved the kind of glamorisation
that Jean Negulesco had hoped she would avoid, and Sophia lost much of her
individuality.
She regained some of it by
returning to Italy and making "Two Women" with her old friend and
colleague Vittorio De Sica. In an unglamorous movie, Sophia played an unglamorous
part; that of a woman approaching middle-age who hopes to protect her impressionable
daughter from the sordidness of the world during The Second World War.
The climax of the film - and the only part of the film that most people remember
- is a scene where the two women are raped by a gang of Morrocan soldiers.
The film was released throughout the world, and Sophia's performance was almost
universally admired. She won an Academy Award and was the first actress to
win an Oscar in a non-English speaking movie. (She was not the first to win
by playing a rape victim.) In those days, winning an Academy Award still meant
something, and Sophia's reputation soared. Her new pre-eminence was consolidated
by "El Cid", where she played Chimene, whose father is killed by
her betrothed, Don Rodrigo Diaz de Bivar. "El Cid" is one of the
great classic movies, and Sophia's stock rose still higher.
Sophia was now one of the
biggest stars in the world, the darling of the critical establishment, and
admired internationally for her beauty and her talent. Until now Sophia and Carlo
Ponti had not put a foot wrong. They had accurately gauged the mentality of
the critical establishment. They had correctly judged the public mood. They
had played the pin-up game with real skill and judgement. They had astutely
paired Sophia with big stars to ensure that her films did respectable business.
However, having reached the top, Sophia began shooting herself in the foot,
and continued doing so for the next ten years.
Perhaps aware that her Hollywood
films removed her earthy naturalness, Sophia began to make more films in Italy.
To some extent this cut her off from audiences in English speaking countries
where foreign language movies rarely do good business. Those English language
movies she did make were still sub-standard, and very few have survived. Most
of all, in sharp contrast to their judgement in the 1950s, Sophia and Ponti
did not notice that the public mood was changing.
In the so-called "Swinging
Sixties" people became more cynical and less sentimental, more confident
and less deferential; and with the passage of time a new generation became
the cinema-going public. These new film-goers were still impressed by flamboyant
glamour and by an obviously exciting lifestyle, and this in part explains
the huge public interest in Elizabeth Taylor and Ursula Andress throughout
the 1960s. Elizabeth Taylor was conspicuously unlike the general public because
she lived on a grand scale, and earned and spent fortunes ostentatiously.
Ursula Andress was also different from normal people. She was always being
photographed at airports, in expensive restaurants or exclusive holiday resorts,
and this gave the impression that she too lived in another world.
By contrast, throughout the
1960s Sophia tried to win public sympathy by constantly talking in interviews
about her childhood poverty, her wish to have children, and her anguish at
her failure to do so. She did this so often and so repeatedly that eventually
there was no need to read a magazine article about her or an interview with
her, because the contents could be predicted. This damaged Sophia's status
with the film going public in two ways. First, by eternally lamenting her
failure to have children, Sophia reminded film-goers - who were predominately
very young people - that she was not some remote Goddess, not even some-one
remarkable and unusual, but was in fact no different from normal people. Second,
in a climate of jaunty opportunism and jovial cynicism, there was contempt,
not sympathy for some-one who so obviously felt sorry for herself despite
having a far better life than most people.
Gradually the media too began
to be less respectful towards Sophia. For example, when covering the press
conference for "A Countess From Hong Kong", they mercilessly reported
that Sophia tried to monopolise the limelight by kissing Carlo Ponti while
Chaplin was talking. Her film "Judith" got generally bad reviews,
but for the first time there were some personal attacks on Sophia. (The London
"Evening News", describing a scene where Sophia wears shorts, mentioned
"the unworthy thought that Sophia Loren needs to go on a diet."
The next day Sophia issued a press notice in which she said she had been over-working
and needed a rest.)
Although by the mid-1960s
there was less regard for Sophia both as a movie star and as a celebrity,
there was still keen enthusiasm for her a Love Goddess. When she made "Yesterday,
Today And Tomorrow", there was world-wide interest because it was announced
that she would perform a strip-tease routine. Stills from that sequence are
much sought after today, as are photographs from "Man Of La Mancha" of
Sophia in full bloom with a plunging neckline. Perhaps conscious of
this interest, Sophia continued to pose in revealing clothes for many years
after, although her career slowly went into retreat; first by withdrawing
from English language movies and then into television.
Sophia Loren remains a very
famous name, perhaps more among magazine readers than film-goers, and is unquestionably
one of the great Love Goddesses. Her films are now being re-issued on DVD.
It will be interesting to see how her reputation fares during the next twenty-five
years.
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