Saturdays with the Stars: Sophia Loren

Each month of 2020 we will be looking at the movies of some of Hollywood's most famous sex symbols, women whose intense beauty frequently overshadowed their filmic careers.  Last month, our focus was on Jayne Mansfield, one of many women who came of age of in the wake of Marilyn Monroe   This month, we will hit a first for our "Saturdays with the Stars" series-we will profile the career of an actress of whom the bulk of her work was not in English, and the only one sex symbol in this series who won an Academy Award, and yet is still today remembered more for her ageless beauty and earthy screen presence than for any actual acting she got around to in the 1960's (and yes, it is no coincidence that we have back-to-back the actresses in one of Old Hollywood's most legendary photographs).  This month, our star is Sophia Loren.

She was born Sofia Villani Scicolone in Rome, the daughter of Italian nobility (Loren has claimed in the past that she's technically a Marquess, though I can't find anyone who's actually fact-checked that she's truly entitled to such a nominal).  Loren would, like so many of the women we've profiled this year, get her start in a beauty pageant, being one of the finalists in the Miss Italy contest.  She soon changed her name and was getting starring roles as early as 1953, when she was just nineteen.

Loren is one of the few actresses of this era who gained fame as an international beauty to translate into genuine Hollywood stardom (in actual Hollywood movies), as well as to get critical recognition at the time.  She would act in studio productions opposite some of the biggest stars of the era, men like Cary Grant, John Wayne, Clark Gable, Marlon Brando, and Frank Sinatra.  This sets her apart in a lot of ways from someone like a Brigitte Bardot, who was never really a proper star in the Hollywood sense, instead having most of her important films not be in English.  That said, it was in Italian that Loren got her biggest critical praise, winning an Academy Award for Two Women, and becoming the first person ever to win an Oscar for a foreign-language performance.

One could argue that Loren doesn't deserve to be on a list of actresses who have their chief fame from their status as a "sex symbol" as she did, in fact, get treated as a serious actress by winning an Oscar.  However, if you talk about Loren today, it's almost always in connection with her seemingly eternal youthfulness (she's never lost her beauty), and her physique.  Films like Two Women or Marriage Italian-Style (her other Oscar nomination) are mere footnotes in discussions of 1960's cinema, and so this month we're going to take a look at Loren, a serious actress that history has forgotten, distracted by the appearance of one of the last great stars of Hollywood's Golden Era.