Sophia Loren (actor) | Embarrassment | Awkward Situations | Moments | Photographs | Experiences in Life

Sophia Loren (actor) | Embarrassment | Awkward Situations | Moments | Photographs | Experiences in Life

*It’s got to be this set of photos with Jayne Mansfield. Sophia later said of them that she was half expecting Jayne’s breasts to flop out of that dress and onto her plate.

This was at a dinner party for the Italian actress in 1957. The ‘blonde bombshell’ Jayne Mansfield arrived late and was seated at the table between Sophia Loren and her dinner guest Clifton Webb. 

What is Sophia Loren‘s most scandalous photo moment?

This is it.

Video: 

Sophia Loren (actor) | Embarrassment | Awkward Situations | Moments | Photographs | Experiences in Life

Sofia Villani Scicolone Dame Grand Cross OMRI, known professionally as Sophia Loren, is an Italian actress. She was named by the American Film Institute as the 21st greatest female star of Classic Hollywood Cinema. She is currently the only living actress and highest-ranked living person mentioned on the list.

Ostensibly, The Life Ahead spins the story of Madame Rosa, a fiery samaritan and former sex worker on the coast of southern Italy. But in essence, at heart, it is a luxurious showcase for the 86-year-old Sophia Loren, who strides through the action with her grey hair untethered and her hoop earrings swinging; a Mother Courage for the ages, bruised but unbowed. Directed by her son, Edoardo Ponti, the film mines the actor’s back catalogue, riffs off her colourful life story and stirs memories of the combative characters she played in her heyday, in films such as Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow (1963) and Marriage Italian Style (1964). “Things don’t change too much,” she says. “The body changes. The mind does not.”

The plan had been to premiere the picture in Rome. But then the pandemic intervened, which is why they are having to launch it from the living room of Loren’s house in Geneva, mother and son sat side-by-side at a laptop with the french doors to the garden open at their backs. The Zoom connection is spotty. The image keeps freezing. Ponti is amused, but Loren is borderline exasperated, pining for the old pomp and ceremony. She is still big; it’s just the pictures that got small.

Sophia Loren as Madame Rosa in the Netflix drama The Life Ahead. Photograph: Regine de Lazzaris Aka Greta/Netflix

Every major actor carries with them the trace of their earlier films or their personal history. But in the case of The Life Ahead, the evidence feels more obvious, and more lovingly arranged. Romain Gary’s source novel set the tale in Paris. Ponti, though, relocates it to the Adriatic port city of Bari, which he depicts as a rambunctious hurly-burly of Muslims and Jews, saints and sinners, and migrants of all stripes. The place made me think of John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row but it is also not dissimilar to Loren’s hometown of Pozzuoli, near Naples. And this has to be at least part intentional.

She pulls a face. “Yes, in a way,” she concedes. “But Pozzuoli is in the past. I lived there during the war, so it’s impossible to compare. Back then, we didn’t have anything. It was hunger, it was war. Everything was against us. We could have died every night.”

It occurs that Loren’s impoverished upbringing – as an illegitimate child in war-torn Catholic Italy – is as much a part of her legend as the fame and fortune that came later, so much so that it is sometimes difficult to separate the fiction from the fact. It is widely assumed that Peter Sarstedt’s 1960s hit single Where Do You Go To (My Lovely)? (raggedy children; the backstreets of Naples) was about Loren, despite Sarstedt swearing blind that it wasn’t. I have also read that Loren’s mother used to siphon water from the car radiator, just so she was able to give her starving daughter a drink. But this nugget, too, turns out to be false.

“No, no, no,” says Loren, briefly exasperated all over again. Then a further thought hits her. “What car?” she demands. “We didn’t have a car.”

Her mother, Romilda Villani, was an aspiring actor herself. She won a Greta Garbo lookalike competition and might have gone to the US to work as Garbo’s body double. But events made such a move impossible. She had two kids and no money. Her faithless middle-class lover – the father of her daughters – had all but cut her loose. So Romilda stayed in Naples and it was Sophia who achieved lift-off.

In The Life Ahead, Loren plays Madame Rosa as an exhausted survivor. She is a proponent of hard knocks, a dispenser of tough love. At some point during filming she realised she was channelling Romilda. “My mother’s feelings were all closed off inside herself,” she explains. “I was allowed to be a part of it, never in a good way, never like mother and daughter.”

Ponti chips in. The woman was his grandmother; he has his own perspective. What he most remembers about Romilda was her resilience, her combination of fragility and strength. Those are the qualities that Loren shared with Romilda. “She had a dignity in the way she carried herself. A vitality I remember even when she was 80. She was timeless but somehow quite sexy, despite her age,” he says.

An amateur psychologist might be tempted to view Loren’s career as a realisation of her mother’s dashed dreams. But that is getting the wrong end of the stick. If anything, she says, it was her father not her mother who was the real motivation. She longed for the secure, moneyed life that she felt was her birthright. “I wanted to be able to walk into the kind of places my father walked into. I wanted to understand what it was like to live like he did. I wanted reasons. I wanted answers.” She gives an angry shrug: “But I got nowhere.”

At the 1950 Miss Italia beauty pageant, the 15-year-old first met Carlo Ponti, a film producer who was only two years younger than her mother (they became lovers four years later). Again, it is tempting to regard Ponti as the adult protector she craved. Again, she is having none of it. “I don’t like the word protector,” she says. “It was more that he believed in me.”

It was Ponti, though, who changed her name and moulded her image. Ponti defended her against the Hollywood executives who insisted that her nose was too large and her lips were too full and who, in marketing her as “the Italian Marilyn Monroe”, somehow managed to do a disservice to both actors. And it was Ponti who helped plot her trajectory, so that she landed on the scene like some visitor from another planet; comically gorgeous and dizzyingly versatile, as comfortable in heated melodrama as she was in freewheeling light comedy. Her life turned around and caught her by surprise. She feels that, in hindsight, her harsh early years were a blessing in disguise. Whatever came next could only count as an improvement.

Before working in the cinema, Sofia Scicolone changed her last name to Lazzaro for work in the fotoromanzi, popular pulp magazines that used still photographs to depict romantic stories. Her first film role was as an extra, one of many slave girls in the American production of Quo Vadis? (1951). Under the tutelage of producer

Carlo Ponti (her future husband), Scicolone was transformed into Sophia Loren. Her career was launched in a series of low-budget comedies before she attracted critical and popular attention with Aida (1953), in which she lip-synched the singing of Renata Tebaldi in the title role.

Loren’s beauty often overshadowed her enormous talents as an actress, but her earthy charisma is evident even in such early works as
Vittorio De Sica’s L’oro di Napoli (1954; The Gold of Naples). With Ponti’s help, Loren increased her international visibility by appearing in Hollywood films opposite such major stars as Cary Grant (Houseboat, 1968), Clark Gable (It Started in Naples, 1960), Frank Sinatra (The Pride and the Passion, 1957, also with Grant), Alan Ladd (

Boy on a Dolphin, 1957), William Holden (The Key, 1958), and Paul Newman (

Lady L, 1965). Such exposure was undoubtedly instrumental in helping her win an Academy Award for best actress in De Sica’s La ciociara (1960;

Two Women), in which she delivered a powerful performance as the courageous mother of a teenage girl during World War II.

Two other De Sica films showcased her comic talents and paired her with another Italian film icon,

Marcello Mastroianni: Ieri, oggi, domani (1963;

Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow), a film that earned an Oscar for best foreign film; and Matrimonio all’italiana (1964;

Marriage, Italian Style). The best performance of her late career, again with Mastroianni, was for director Ettore Scola in Una giornata particolare (1977, A Special Day). Loren’s subsequent work included the television movie Courage (1986) and the feature films

Prêt-à-Porter (1994), which was directed by Robert Altman, and the musical Nine (2009). In 2010 she starred in the TV movie La mia casa è piena di specchi (My House Is Full of Mirrors), which was based on the autobiography of her sister, Maria Scicolone. Loren next appeared in Voce umana (2014; Human Voice), a short film based on a play by Jean Cocteau; it was directed by her son Edoardo Ponti. He also helmed La vita davanti a sé (2020; The Life Ahead), in which Loren starred as a Holocaust survivor who takes in a young refugee from Senegal.

Get a Britannica Premium subscription and gain access to exclusive content. Subscribe Now

International recognition for Loren’s distinguished acting career included a

lifetime achievement Oscar (1991) and a career Golden Lion from the Venice Film Festival (1998). She also made headlines in the 1990s for her strong defense of animal rights. In 2010 she received the Japan Art Association’s Praemium Imperiale prize for theatre/film.
The resulting famine was so great that Loren's mother occasionally had to siphon off a cup of water from the car radiator to ration between her daughters by the spoonful. During one aerial bombardment, Loren was knocked to the ground and split open her chin, leaving a scar that has remained ever since.

Nicknamed "little stick" by her classmates for her sickly physique, at the age of 14 Loren blossomed, seemingly overnight, from a frail child into a beautiful and voluptuous woman. "It became a pleasure just to stroll down the street," she remembered of her sudden physical transformation. That same year, Loren won second place in a beauty competition, receiving as her prize a small sum of cash and free wallpaper for her grandparents' living room.

In 1950, when she was 15 years old, Loren and her mother set off for Rome to try to make their living as actresses. Loren landed her first role as an extra in the 1951 Mervyn LeRoy film Quo Vadis. She also landed work as a model for various fumetti, Italian publications that resemble comic books but with real photographs instead of illustrations.

Movies

'Aida,' 'The Gold of Naples'

After various bit parts and a small role in the 1952 film La Favorita, the first for which she adopted the stage name "Loren," she delivered her breakthrough performance as the title character in the 1953 film Aida. Another leading role in The Gold of Naples (1954) established Loren as one of the up-and-coming stars of Italian cinema.

'The Pride and the Passion'

In 1957, Loren starred in her first Hollywood film, The Pride and the Passion, filmed in Paris and costarring Cary Grant and Frank Sinatra. At the same time, she became enmeshed in a love triangle when both Grant and an Italian film producer named Carlo Ponti declared their love for her. Although she had a schoolgirl's crush on Grant, Loren ultimately chose Ponti, a man the media joked was twice her age and half her height.

Even though they married in 1957, complications regarding the annulment of Ponti's first marriage prevented their union from being officially legally recognized in Italy for another decade. Loren and Ponti's marriage nevertheless remains one of the rare, heartwarming success stories among celebrity relationships. They remained happily married until Ponti's death in 2007. According to Loren, the secret to their relationship was maintaining a low profile despite their celebrity status. "Show business is what we do, not what we are," she said.

'Two Women' Oscar Win

In 1960, Loren turned in the most acclaimed performance of her career in the Italian World War II film Two Women. In a film with parallels to her own childhood, Loren played a mother desperately trying to provide for her daughter in war-ravaged Rome. The film transformed Loren into an international celebrity, winning her the 1961 Academy Award for Best Lead Actress. She was the first actress ever to win the award for a non-English-language film.

'Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow,' 'Marriage, Italian Style'

Throughout the 1960s, Loren continued to star in Italian, American and French films, cementing her status as one of the great international movie stars of her generation. Her most notable 1960s performances include Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow (1963), which won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film, Marriage, Italian Style (1964), for which she earned another Oscar nomination for Best Actress, and A Countess from Hong Kong (1967), costarring Marlon Brando.

Family & Other Ventures

Loren moved back to her native Italy during the 1970s and spent most of the decade making highly popular Italian films. She had given birth to two sons, Carlo Hubert Leone Ponti, Jr. (born December 29, 1968) and Edoardo (born January 6, 1973), and during the 1980s she backed off her intense filming schedule to spend more time raising her teenaged children.

Loren also expanded into other business ventures. In 1981 she became the first female celebrity to release her own perfume, following up with a personal eyewear line shortly thereafter. Loren published a book, Women and Beauty, in 1994. She continues to act and appear frequently in public as one of the film industry's greatest living legends. Some of her more popular and acclaimed later films include Prêt-à-Porter (1994), Grumpier Old Men (1995) and Nine (2009).

Later Years

Loren retains her youthful energy and age-defying hourglass physique. She still can be seen strutting down the red carpet into award shows, looking fabulous in high heels and low-cut dresses that women several decades her junior would be happy to pull off. However, after more than 100 films and five decades in the spotlight, Loren remains true to her humble Italian roots.

Sofia Villani Scicolone Dame Grand Cross OMRI, known professionally as Sophia Loren, is an Italian actress. She was named by the American Film Institute as the 21st greatest female star of Classic Hollywood Cinema. She is currently the only living actress and highest-ranked living person mentioned on the list

Ostensibly, The Life Ahead spins the story of Madame Rosa, a fiery samaritan and former sex worker on the coast of southern Italy. But in essence, at heart, it is a luxurious showcase for the 86-year-old Sophia Loren, who strides through the action with her grey hair untethered and her hoop earrings swinging; a Mother Courage for the ages, bruised but unbowed. Directed by her son, Edoardo Ponti, the film mines the actor’s back catalogue, riffs off her colourful life story and stirs memories of the combative characters she played in her heyday, in films such as Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow (1963) and Marriage Italian Style (1964). “Things don’t change too much,” she says. “The body changes. The mind does not.”

The plan had been to premiere the picture in Rome. But then the pandemic intervened, which is why they are having to launch it from the living room of Loren’s house in Geneva, mother and son sat side-by-side at a laptop with the french doors to the garden open at their backs. The Zoom connection is spotty. The image keeps freezing. Ponti is amused, but Loren is borderline exasperated, pining for the old pomp and ceremony. She is still big; it’s just the pictures that got small.

Sophia Loren as Madame Rosa in the Netflix drama The Life Ahead. Photograph: Regine de Lazzaris Aka Greta/Netflix

Every major actor carries with them the trace of their earlier films or their personal history. But in the case of The Life Ahead, the evidence feels more obvious, and more lovingly arranged. Romain Gary’s source novel set the tale in Paris. Ponti, though, relocates it to the Adriatic port city of Bari, which he depicts as a rambunctious hurly-burly of Muslims and Jews, saints and sinners, and migrants of all stripes. The place made me think of John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row but it is also not dissimilar to Loren’s hometown of Pozzuoli, near Naples. And this has to be at least part intentional.

She pulls a face. “Yes, in a way,” she concedes. “But Pozzuoli is in the past. I lived there during the war, so it’s impossible to compare. Back then, we didn’t have anything. It was hunger, it was war. Everything was against us. We could have died every night.”

It occurs that Loren’s impoverished upbringing – as an illegitimate child in war-torn Catholic Italy – is as much a part of her legend as the fame and fortune that came later, so much so that it is sometimes difficult to separate the fiction from the fact. It is widely assumed that Peter Sarstedt’s 1960s hit single Where Do You Go To (My Lovely)? (raggedy children; the backstreets of Naples) was about Loren, despite Sarstedt swearing blind that it wasn’t. I have also read that Loren’s mother used to siphon water from the car radiator, just so she was able to give her starving daughter a drink. But this nugget, too, turns out to be false.

“No, no, no,” says Loren, briefly exasperated all over again. Then a further thought hits her. “What car?” she demands. “We didn’t have a car.”

Her mother, Romilda Villani, was an aspiring actor herself. She won a Greta Garbo lookalike competition and might have gone to the US to work as Garbo’s body double. But events made such a move impossible. She had two kids and no money. Her faithless middle-class lover – the father of her daughters – had all but cut her loose. So Romilda stayed in Naples and it was Sophia who achieved lift-off.

In The Life Ahead, Loren plays Madame Rosa as an exhausted survivor. She is a proponent of hard knocks, a dispenser of tough love. At some point during filming she realised she was channelling Romilda. “My mother’s feelings were all closed off inside herself,” she explains. “I was allowed to be a part of it, never in a good way, never like mother and daughter.”

Ponti chips in. The woman was his grandmother; he has his own perspective. What he most remembers about Romilda was her resilience, her combination of fragility and strength. Those are the qualities that Loren shared with Romilda. “She had a dignity in the way she carried herself. A vitality I remember even when she was 80. She was timeless but somehow quite sexy, despite her age,” he says.

An amateur psychologist might be tempted to view Loren’s career as a realisation of her mother’s dashed dreams. But that is getting the wrong end of the stick. If anything, she says, it was her father not her mother who was the real motivation. She longed for the secure, moneyed life that she felt was her birthright. “I wanted to be able to walk into the kind of places my father walked into. I wanted to understand what it was like to live like he did. I wanted reasons. I wanted answers.” She gives an angry shrug: “But I got nowhere.”

At the 1950 Miss Italia beauty pageant, the 15-year-old first met Carlo Ponti, a film producer who was only two years younger than her mother (they became lovers four years later). Again, it is tempting to regard Ponti as the adult protector she craved. Again, she is having none of it. “I don’t like the word protector,” she says. “It was more that he believed in me.”

It was Ponti, though, who changed her name and moulded her image. Ponti defended her against the Hollywood executives who insisted that her nose was too large and her lips were too full and who, in marketing her as “the Italian Marilyn Monroe”, somehow managed to do a disservice to both actors. And it was Ponti who helped plot her trajectory, so that she landed on the scene like some visitor from another planet; comically gorgeous and dizzyingly versatile, as comfortable in heated melodrama as she was in freewheeling light comedy. Her life turned around and caught her by surprise. She feels that, in hindsight, her harsh early years were a blessing in disguise. Whatever came next could only count as an improvement.

Before working in the cinema, Sofia Scicolone changed her last name to Lazzaro for work in the fotoromanzi, popular pulp magazines that used still photographs to depict romantic stories. Her first film role was as an extra, one of many slave girls in the American production of Quo Vadis? (1951). Under the tutelage of producer

Carlo Ponti (her future husband), Scicolone was transformed into Sophia Loren. Her career was launched in a series of low-budget comedies before she attracted critical and popular attention with Aida (1953), in which she lip-synched the singing of Renata Tebaldi in the title role.

Loren’s beauty often overshadowed her enormous talents as an actress, but her earthy charisma is evident even in such early works as

Vittorio De Sica’s L’oro di Napoli (1954; The Gold of Naples). With Ponti’s help, Loren increased her international visibility by appearing in Hollywood films opposite such major stars as Cary Grant (Houseboat, 1968), Clark Gable (It Started in Naples, 1960), Frank Sinatra (The Pride and the Passion, 1957, also with Grant), Alan Ladd (

Boy on a Dolphin, 1957), William Holden (The Key, 1958), and Paul Newman (

Lady L, 1965). Such exposure was undoubtedly instrumental in helping her win an Academy Award for best actress in De Sica’s La ciociara (1960; Two Women), in which she delivered a powerful performance as the courageous mother of a teenage girl during World War II.

Two other De Sica films showcased her comic talents and paired her with another Italian film icon,

Marcello Mastroianni: Ieri, oggi, domani (1963;

Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow), a film that earned an Oscar for best foreign film; and Matrimonio all’italiana (1964;

Marriage, Italian Style). The best performance of her late career, again with Mastroianni, was for director Ettore Scola in Una giornata particolare (1977, A Special Day). Loren’s subsequent work included the television movie Courage (1986) and the feature films

Prêt-à-Porter (1994), which was directed by Robert Altman, and the musical Nine (2009). In 2010 she starred in the TV movie La mia casa è piena di specchi (My House Is Full of Mirrors), which was based on the autobiography of her sister, Maria Scicolone. Loren next appeared in Voce umana (2014; Human Voice), a short film based on a play by Jean Cocteau; it was directed by her son Edoardo Ponti. He also helmed La vita davanti a sé (2020; The Life Ahead), in which Loren starred as a Holocaust survivor who takes in a young refugee from Senegal.

Get a Britannica Premium subscription and gain access to exclusive content. Subscribe Now

International recognition for Loren’s distinguished acting career included a

lifetime achievement Oscar (1991) and a career Golden Lion from the Venice Film Festival (1998). She also made headlines in the 1990s for her strong defense of animal rights. In 2010 she received the Japan Art Association’s Praemium Imperiale prize for theatre/film.

The resulting famine was so great that Loren's mother occasionally had to siphon off a cup of water from the car radiator to ration between her daughters by the spoonful. During one aerial bombardment, Loren was knocked to the ground and split open her chin, leaving a scar that has remained ever since.

Nicknamed "little stick" by her classmates for her sickly physique, at the age of 14 Loren blossomed, seemingly overnight, from a frail child into a beautiful and voluptuous woman. "It became a pleasure just to stroll down the street," she remembered of her sudden physical transformation. That same year, Loren won second place in a beauty competition, receiving as her prize a small sum 

of cash and free wallpaper for her grandparents' living room.

In 1950, when she was 15 years old, Loren and her mother set off for Rome to try to make their living as actresses. Loren landed her first role as an extra in the 1951 Mervyn LeRoy film Quo Vadis. She also landed work as a model for various fumetti, Italian publications that resemble comic books but with real photographs instead of illustrations.

Movies

'Aida,' 'The Gold of Naples'

After various bit parts and a small role in the 1952 film La Favorita, the first for which she adopted the stage name "Loren," she delivered her breakthrough performance as the title character in the 1953 film Aida. Another leading role in The Gold of Naples (1954) established Loren as one of the up-and-coming stars of Italian cinema.

'The Pride and the Passion'

In 1957, Loren starred in her first Hollywood film, The Pride and the Passion, filmed in Paris and costarring Cary Grant and Frank Sinatra. At the same time, she became enmeshed in a love triangle when both Grant and an Italian film producer named Carlo Ponti declared their love for her. Although she had a schoolgirl's crush on Grant, Loren ultimately chose Ponti, a man the media joked was twice her age and half her height.

Even though they married in 1957, complications regarding the annulment of Ponti's first marriage prevented their union from being officially legally recognized in Italy for another decade. Loren and Ponti's marriage nevertheless remains one of the rare, heartwarming success stories among celebrity relationships. They remained happily married until Ponti's death in 2007. According to Loren, the secret to their relationship was maintaining a low profile despite their celebrity status. "Show business is what we do, not what we are," she said.

'Two Women' Oscar Win

In 1960, Loren turned in the most acclaimed performance of her career in the Italian World War II film Two Women. In a film with parallels to her own childhood, Loren played a mother desperately trying to provide for her daughter in war-ravaged Rome. The film transformed Loren into an international celebrity, winning her the 1961 Academy Award for Best Lead Actress. She was the first actress ever to win the award for a non-English-language film.

'Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow,' 'Marriage, Italian Style'

Throughout the 1960s, Loren continued to star in Italian, American and French films, cementing her status as one of the great international movie stars of her generation. Her most notable 1960s performances include Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow (1963), which won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film, Marriage, Italian Style (1964), for which she earned another Oscar nomination for Best Actress, and A Countess from Hong Kong (1967), costarring Marlon Brando.

Family & Other Ventures

Loren moved back to her native Italy during the 1970s and spent most of the decade making highly popular Italian films. She had given birth to two sons, Carlo Hubert Leone Ponti, Jr. (born December 29, 1968) and Edoardo (born January 6, 1973), and during the 1980s she backed off her intense filming schedule to spend more time raising her teenaged children.

Loren also expanded into other business ventures. In 1981 she became the first female celebrity to release her own perfume, following up with a personal eyewear line shortly thereafter. Loren published a book, Women and Beauty, in 1994. She continues to act and appear frequently in public as one of the film industry's greatest living legends. Some of her more popular and acclaimed later films include Prêt-à-Porter (1994), Grumpier Old Men (1995) and Nine (2009).

Later Years

Loren retains her youthful energy and age-defying hourglass physique. She still can be seen strutting down the red carpet into award shows, looking fabulous in high heels and low-cut dresses that women several decades her junior would be happy to pull off. However, after more than 100 films and five decades in the spotlight, Loren remains true to her humble Italian roots.

Sofia Villani Scicolone Dame Grand Cross OMRI, known professionally as Sophia Loren, is an Italian actress. She was named by the American Film Institute as the 21st greatest female star of Classic Hollywood Cinema. She is currently the only living actress and highest-ranked living person mentioned on the list.

Ostensibly, The Life Ahead spins the story of Madame Rosa, a fiery samaritan and former sex worker on the coast of southern Italy. But in essence, at heart, it is a luxurious showcase for the 86-year-old Sophia Loren, who strides through the action with her grey hair untethered and her hoop earrings swinging; a Mother Courage for the ages, bruised but unbowed. Directed by her son, Edoardo Ponti, the film mines the actor’s back catalogue, riffs off her colourful life story and stirs memories of the combative characters she played in her heyday, in films such as Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow (1963) and Marriage Italian Style (1964). “Things don’t change too much,” she says. “The body changes. The mind does not.”

The plan had been to premiere the picture in Rome. But then the pandemic intervened, which is why they are having to launch it from the living room of Loren’s house in Geneva, mother and son sat side-by-side at a laptop with the french doors to the garden open at their backs. The Zoom connection is spotty. The image keeps freezing. Ponti is amused, but Loren is borderline exasperated, pining for the old pomp and ceremony. She is still big; it’s just the pictures that got small.

Sophia Loren as Madame Rosa in the Netflix drama The Life Ahead. Photograph: Regine de Lazzaris Aka Greta/Netflix

Every major actor carries with them the trace of their earlier films or their personal history. But in the case of The Life Ahead, the evidence feels more obvious, and more lovingly arranged. Romain Gary’s source novel set the tale in Paris. Ponti, though, relocates it to the Adriatic port city of Bari, which he depicts as a rambunctious hurly-burly of Muslims and Jews, saints and sinners, and migrants of all stripes. The place made me think of John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row but it is also not dissimilar to Loren’s hometown of Pozzuoli, near Naples. And this has to be at least part intentional.

She pulls a face. “Yes, in a way,” she concedes. “But Pozzuoli is in the past. I lived there during the war, so it’s impossible to compare. Back then, we didn’t have anything. It was hunger, it was war. Everything was against us. We could have died every night.”

It occurs that Loren’s impoverished upbringing – as an illegitimate child in war-torn Catholic Italy – is as much a part of her legend as the fame and fortune that came later, so much so that it is sometimes difficult to separate the fiction from the fact. It is widely assumed that Peter Sarstedt’s 1960s hit single Where Do You Go To (My Lovely)? (raggedy children; the backstreets of Naples) was about Loren, despite Sarstedt swearing blind that it wasn’t. I have also read that Loren’s mother used to siphon water from the car radiator, just so she was able to give her starving daughter a drink. But this nugget, too, turns out to be false.

“No, no, no,” says Loren, briefly exasperated all over again. Then a further thought hits her. “What car?” she demands. “We didn’t have a car.”

Her mother, Romilda Villani, was an aspiring actor herself. She won a Greta Garbo lookalike competition and might have gone to the US to work as Garbo’s body double. But events made such a move impossible. She had two kids and no money. Her faithless middle-class lover – the father of her daughters – had all but cut her loose. So Romilda stayed in Naples and it was Sophia who achieved lift-off.

In The Life Ahead, Loren plays Madame Rosa as an exhausted survivor. She is a proponent of hard knocks, a dispenser of tough love. At some point during filming she realised she was channelling Romilda. “My mother’s feelings were all closed off inside herself,” she explains. “I was allowed to be a part of it, never in a good way, never like mother and daughter.”

Ponti chips in. The woman was his grandmother; he has his own perspective. What he most remembers about Romilda was her resilience, her combination of fragility and strength. Those are the qualities that Loren shared with Romilda. “She had a dignity in the way she carried herself. A vitality I remember even when she was 80. She was timeless but somehow quite sexy, despite her age,” he says.

An amateur psychologist might be tempted to view Loren’s career as a realisation of her mother’s dashed dreams. But that is getting the wrong end of the stick. If anything, she says, it was her father not her mother who was the real motivation. She longed for the secure, moneyed life that she felt was her birthright. “I wanted to be able to walk into the kind of places my father walked into. I wanted to understand what it was like to live like he did. I wanted reasons. I wanted answers.” She gives an angry shrug: “But I got nowhere.”