Sophia Loren Talking Pictures

As a child growing up in poverty in Italy,

Sophia Loren was so skinny she was nicknamed the toothpick.

Then someone once said, "When they gave up femininity,

"they issued Loren with a double ration."

After being discovered in a beauty contest by a film producer

and future husband, Carlo Ponti, she exploded into film

and became one of the cinema's ultimate international sex symbols.

Cary Grant proposed to her.

Peter Sellers fell in love with her.

Noel Coward once said,

"She should've been sculpted in chocolate truffles

"so the world could devour her."

In those early days,

it was all about her striking looks rather than her acting talent

as this BBC interview with Cliff Michelmore displays.

Miss Loren, you've made the grade with nothing very much

except your face, your figure and your own determination.

Are you surprised at the success you've achieved?

Well, I've been working very hard on it,

you know, I've been working since I was 15 years old.

And I'm very glad what I am now.

But...

..of course, you have to work very hard all the time.

But you've come out, haven't you, as a star in the past, what?

-Four or five years?

-I think six...yes, yes.

-You count it at six?

Yes. I started when I was six, yes.

This is a surprisingly short time, isn't it?

-To achieve the amount of success that you've got.

-Yes.

Now, it's often been reported that you were a scraggy,

ugly little girl and I quote.

What do you enjoy most about now being a world famous beauty?

Immense admiration.

-Maybe I didn't understand...

-Yes, you did.

-Really?

I was waiting for you to go on. I was hoping that you'd go on.

Well, what can I say more?

When did you first think that you ought to be a film star?

Is there a moment in your life? How old were you?

Oh, I was very, very young

when I was seen in Pozzuoli which is a little town where I lived and...

-Where you lived with your very beautiful sister too.

-Oh, yes.

She was beautiful.

As a matter of fact,

she was the most beautiful girl I have ever seen in my life.

She was blonde and very fat, she won many contests

and I was always in the shadow and I was hidden.

But I've seen the pictures,

especially the American pictures I liked very much.

The fairy tale, the pictures that Yvonne De Carlo made in colour

and while I was seeing that pictures I never thought that

I really could sometime be a star.

-Let me go back to your sister.

-Yes.

-You said you were always in the shadow.

-Do you know her?

No, I've seen her picture on several occasions though in magazines.

Yeah.

Did you like being in the shadow or did you resent being

overshadowed by your sister?

Well, she was my sister, she was not a stranger so I liked it.

-Miss Loren, thank you very much indeed.

-Thank you.

The balance shifted for Loren in 1960

when she won an Oscar for the harrowing war drama Two Women.

It was the first time Hollywood had given an Academy Award

to a non-English acting role.

The breakthrough confirmed she was a great actress as well as

a great beauty and would ultimately lead to other opportunities

like a judging role at the Cannes Film Festival.

This year with Sophia Loren president of the jury,

things are even more simplified or confused than usual

in that direction.

Sophia is out of time and space but not everybody is.

If you're another actress,

be careful about the hour at which you arrive at Nice airport.

The festival can treat you cruelly.

While Sophia Loren was pursued into a car in a trail of glory,

another actress Leslie Caron, once equally famous,

was left with three photographers,

such is the penalty for getting on the wrong plane.

Yesterday at the airport,

you were welcomed mythically as you usually are and at the same time

another star, who had perhaps picked the wrong time to arrive,

and a very famous one, only had three photographers around her.

Does this sort of thing worry you?

It's unfair of you to ask me that kind of question.

I don't wish to talk about it, no.

What do you look for in a film?

I like honest films.

I like films that are a great deal to do with real life.

I like real characters in the films

and which very, quite rarely you see nowadays because every feeling

is so mixed up and you can't really see a wonderful, sincere love story.

Why were you chosen as president?

Well, I've no idea really.

I'm very flattered as matter of fact and surprised by this choice

because generally the presidents of such an important jury

as the film festival in Cannes is always given to people

who have behind them an artistic career much longer than mine.

So this thing really flatters me a great deal.

Do you think that the fact that your husband is a well-known

film producer had anything to do with it?

-I don't think so, no.

-Nor the fact that he became French recently?

Not really, because I was supposed to be part of the jury

even last year and I couldn't make it.

How does it feel to be president of a jury of presidents?

Since this jury is a very special one

composed of presidents of all the last years.

It's not easy, you know, to be seated among these important people,

these great thinkers and many of them, some of them are even

-immortels L'Academie Francaise...

-Yes, members of the French Academy.

-That's right.

-Immortals.

Immortals, it's not really easy but I think they have adopted me

in a very nice way and they are marvellous to be with.

Now, you're going to judge colleagues officially.

-What problems does that raise?

-Well, I have no idea.

-This problem is not risen. Risen?

-Well, for the moment...

Arisen yet so I don't know what's going to happen.

For the moment, as far as we can see,

they're two queens of the festival.

There's yourself and from the selection of films it seems

-that Jeanne Moreau is going to be the other queen.

-Yes.

What do you think of her as an actress?

Well, I've always admired her very much.

I think she's a great actress, Jeanne Moreau.

Very different from yourself?

Oh, yes. Quite different, yes.

-Now, today we're being shown La Religieuse...

-Yes.

-The Nun.

The film that was banned by the French Minister of Information

and offered as an official French entry by the Minister of Culture.

-How do you react to this so curious censorship game?

-Well, I can't...

-I know that you've had your own problems...

-I think it's forbidden.

-..with the Catholic church.

-No, no, it's not that.

I can't talk about the films that are in competition

because generally a member of the jury can never talk about it.

How do you feel about the whole censorship business?

Well, of course I feel very strongly about it

but I think that in life

and in movies you can do anything with style and elegance really and

there is no censorship that is going to forbid you

a certain kind of story if it's done with good taste.

Years later, Loren would talk about acting and Two Women,

the film that changed perceptions of her

in an interview with Pebble Mill

timed to coincide with the release of her autobiography.

Do you know what they have done? Those heroes that you command?

Do you know what your great soldiers have done in a holy church?

Under the eyes of the Madonna?

Do you know what they have done?

-Peace, peace.

-Yes, peace. Beautiful peace.

You've ruined my little daughter forever. Now she's worse than dead.

No, I'm not mad! I'm not mad!

Look at her!

-Look at her and tell me if I am mad!

-No!

Rotten, filthy bastards! You know what you've done!

The power that blazes across the screen there is what really

does separate you from a lot of actresses who simply were

beautiful but who couldn't deliver the real power of acting.

Acting was always very important to you, wasn't it?

From the very beginning.

For me, acting is a kind of...

I'm sorry because I'm still very moved by the scene I've seen so far.

And I think that for me there's a...

It's a release feeling and

I don't think I could live without acting in my life

because I adore my profession and I love the work I do, very much indeed.

When you were a young girl,

when you first saw the Hollywood films in the one and only cinema

in your native town, you fell in love with Tyrone Power, I know.

Yeah, I was about eight, nine years old.

But it wasn't the glamour and living in Beverly Hills

and the swimming pool as a dream that attracted you, was it?

I was never attracted by the glamour of an actor

because by being an actor you could have so much money and buy furs

and a Cadillac at that moment and a house.

No.

I thought that I wanted to be an actress

just because maybe I was living in a little town like Pozzuoli

and I really wanted to get away on anonymity

and to become an individual and to do something in life

and the only thing I thought, I don't know why,

I could do was to be an actress.

One of the most moving parts of the book

and it's a very brief part of the book but I thought very significant.

A lot of people have asked you about your reaction to Cary Grant

and Clark Gable and, you know, the male actors that you've met

but I found one of the most significant moments was

when your husband told you that

Marilyn Monroe had committed suicide.

-You had never met her...

-No.

..but you felt you had a deep insight

in to the sort of person she was.

Well, because, I don't know why, I never met Marilyn

but I thought that she died because she could, she couldn't...

..endure herself no longer to be alone.

I think that she had no friends and she killed herself

not because she was getting too old because when she killed herself

she was about 36, 35 years old so she was very young,

but I thought she couldn't stand any longer to be alone

and she had no friends to talk to

and really to release her soul of the burdens that maybe she had.

I don't know.

Because you make a very clear distinction between solitude,

which you enjoy greatly, just going away from everyone and enjoying...

-I like to be alone.

-Yes.

-Yes.

But that's very different from loneliness, isn't it?

Oh, well, I think so.

Marilyn was lonely. I like to be alone sometimes

because I choose to be alone sometimes

because I like to talk to myself and ask myself what I want from life.

Yes, it's very easy for all of us to be amateur psychiatrists

but it is irresistible in reading your book.

-You really think we are amateur psychiatrists?

-Well, I think all of

us try to be and read into things perhaps that we're not...

-I think we're very good ones.

-..qualified to do.

-Well, maybe.

Because reading about your attitude to your father who abandoned

your mother more than once and who gave you his name but little else

and yet when he died you...

He didn't only give me his name, he gave me life...

-Yes.

-..and I'm here talking to you because of him.

That's why I forgive anything he did

and there's nothing I can reproach on my father. Nothing.

Well, it's an enigmatic part of the book.

I think a lot of people might feel very differently to you.

It's remarkable forgiving...

But I'm not everybody, I am myself and that's the way I think.

-Now comes the amateur psychiatrist bit.

-Oh.

-The fact that you were without a father...

-Yes.

For, in every sense of the word, throughout your life,

your husband Carlo Ponti, again as an enigmatic figure for some people

who cannot understand that the depth of the relationship that you have.

Was he, in any way for you, the father that you never had?

As well as husband and lover?

Well, it goes without saying that in life, I mean,

we choose always the people that we think are good for us

and I thought I had a great complex

because my father never married my mother and I had a father complex.

It goes without saying.

That's why I was always attracted in life, I think,

by men who was older than I was because I needed a father,

because I needed to be protected

and because I needed a family of my own

and I needed legality and I needed children,

I needed a family all my own in few words, just to be,

to find a balance in my life,

to find an equilibrium in my life.

And I'm very happy now that I did.

Because from the very earliest days,

you said that you had a sense of your own destiny even with very

little evidence that it was going to be a successful life.

Even in poverty as a young child, you felt, "I'm going to be someone."

Well, it's something you feel when you are very desperate.

It's the only thing, "I'm sure I'm going to be somebody somewhere." And,

you know, later in life but I never knew what was going to happen to me.

-How could I know?

-Indeed.

But I know that I worked very hard for whatever I had.

I work very hard to be somebody in my profession.

I worked very hard to have a husband.

I worked very hard to have two children

and I'm very happy that I did.

The interesting thing about this book or one of the most

interesting things is why you felt now that you were prepared to

open out your life because you have been known as a very private person.

I'm still a very private person

but I think that since I was terribly young,

I was about 18 or 20 years old,

there'd been...

..writing a great deal of books about me,

about maybe ten or 12,

and none of them gave of me the image that I like of myself.

So I thought that the time had come for me to write a book

about the most important things that really happen in my life

but besides that to talk about the truth, my own truth.

It is a very honest book and I wonder

if I could start with the beginnings of your life.

The term poverty can mean very different things

in very different countries.

You say poverty in the Italy of the late '30s, early '40s and wartime.

Just how bad were conditions?

Well, there was war and when there is war there is a lot of poverty.

There is no money to buy food,

no money to buy things to light the fire.

And besides that, you have to struggle for your own food,

for the things you have to eat day by day or hour by hour,

and besides that, you don't know where to go to sleep because

there's bombing every night so we used to go in a tunnel

and sleep there and I think that we went to this tunnel for about...

..seven, eight months, you know, bringing our mattress

and every night, every night the same routine.

What is equally strong and powerful in the book is that apart from that

poverty, which was a time of poverty and squalor

and fear of starvation,

there was also though a compensating warmth of the family,

the large family, your uncles and aunts and your grandparents

who really did bring a tremendous amount of comfort to one another.

Well, that's the only comfort you can have if you are very poor.

It's your family, it's your mother, it's your grandmother,

your grandfather, your uncle, your sister

and that's how you survive.

Sophia's struggles as a child

and the first days of her career would come up in another interview

around this time for the programme Arena,

starting with how she got a role as an extra

in the 1951 Biblical epic Quo Vadis.

On Quo Vadis, I went to Rome

and we didn't even have the money to make a phone call

so we walked from the station to Cinecitta

because we knew that Quo Vadis was, they were shooting Quo Vadis

and they needed a lot of people to be extras in it,

so just to make a little money we went then to Cinecitta

and we saw Mervyn LeRoy.

And he spotted me right away and he said, "Come. Come."

So he did this, so I understood that he said, "Come."

Because I didn't speak a word of English.

So I did go in his office and he started to ask me many questions

and my mother said, "You always say yes. You always say yes.

"No matter what he asks you, you say yes."

And finally after half an hour he really found out that

I didn't speak any word of English

because otherwise he would've given me my first chance

in an American film in Quo Vadis,

a small part but I had to speak English.

But the fact that you took that part as an extra,

that wasn't really the thing that made you decide,

"Oh, I must be an actress." You'd already decided that way back.

I mean, on the trip. Oh, yes, absolutely.

I wanted to, maybe it was the feeling I wanted to get out of anonymity,

I wanted to do something. I needed to work, I didn't have any money.

I had no future, I had nothing.

Listen, my Hollywood period I consider it a very positive one

because I had a chance to work with so many actors.

Big actors, I mean, I could give you a very long list,

Clark Gable, Cary Grant, Peter Sellers...

But and also because I had the opportunity to learn

the language that I didn't know.

So for me it was like going to school and learn and when I was there,

I was just about 21, 22.

So it was a good school for me to go to America.

And then when I came back I did Two Women with De Sica in Italian.

Do you see yourself doing more of those sort of roles?

Well, you know, this is part of my, it's part of my life.

I mean, when I shoot a picture in Italy,

all the little treasure that you carry with you since your childhood,

it comes out because you really work in your own country.

You speak your own language

so you can express yourself in a wonderful way.

I know that I speak English quite well

but it's not my own native language and the characters that I can

do in Italy, they are familiar to me and I think I'm best in these roles.

Was it the hard struggle that you had in your childhood,

do you think, that gave you the ambition

and the drive to become the success that you are?

-It can be part of it, yes.

-I mean, it's true that you were hungry...

But you can be ambitious.

You can...

You can dream about success.

You can have it but I don't think,

if you don't have a talent you can't last very long.

Impossible.

Are you sure that you had a talent that you were born with or

-did you learn...?

-Well, then,

I was not sure but I think now for the things that I have done,

maybe a little talent I have.

I mean, of course you have,

but did you learn that talent or did you have it when...?

You can't learn talent, whether you got it or not.

I mean, they can't teach you how to have talent. Who can teach you?

Then it would be very easy.

Whether you've got it or not,

it's something that you're born with, I think.

You can learn technique, yes,

but talent, it's there or not.

Is there anyone you see around you now, ten years younger,

15 years younger who's going to be another Sophia Loren?

I don't know. No, for the moment. Do you mean in Italian movies?

In world movies.

-What does that mean to be another Sophia Loren?

-Exactly.

This next interview from Barry Norman's Film 79 programme

finds Sophia discussing her appearance in one of

cinema's most famous stripping scenes from the film

Yesterday, Today And Tomorrow, a classic Italian comedy,

featuring her most frequent co-star Marcello Mastroianni.

I think that every Neapolitan has sense of humour, I don't know

if it's great sense of humour but some sense of humour we have.

A very realistic one because we laugh about the tragedy of life sometimes.

That's where our comedies are based upon, you know,

when we make comedies in Italy.

Woo!

'Being a very shy person, I don't like to rehearse a scene

'but when the camera is rolling and I have to do the scene

'so I just go all the way because I feel very much

'protected by the character that I'm playing and I feel fine.'

'You can't talk about any other couple that is working

together on the screen nowadays like Marcello and myself

'when we are in the film together.'

I don't know if there is something that clicks on the screen that

I've never had with any other partner since I've been in this business.

There were so many cameramens.

They said that my nose looked too long and they couldn't light it

so when my husband told me that I, maybe I should've shortened my nose

a little bit, I said, "I don't think so.

"I think that I like to stick to my nose

"because I like the way I look and I think you have to change cameramen

"and if you do change cameramen, maybe I have a chance in the movies.

"Otherwise I change everything or maybe I will never be in the

"movies because I like the way I look, I've no complex about my nose."

So I didn't and here I am with my nose.

-Long nose...

-Long!

-..but nice.

The '70s and '80s would see Sophia focusing on motherhood

over acting, bringing up her two young sons.

In 1982, there was a sensation

when she was found guilty of tax evasion

and spent 18 days in an Italian prison,

an experience she spoke about

on a visit to the Wogan programme, two years later.

In 1982, you went to prison.

-Yes.

-Yes, was that...?

-There's nothing to laugh about.

No, I'm sure there isn't.

That... What sort of effect did that have on you?

Did it change your life? Did it change your approach to life?

Listen, I decided to do that on my own because I thought

it was the only...

..possibility for me to go back to Italy and to see my mother,

my sister and my nieces and my other relatives

and I couldn't do anything else,

so I went but I didn't know...

..what I was going to find there and...

..it's something, it's an experience that I will never forget and...

..it's a traumatic experience for me and, of course, it leaves...

-..a scar.

-Of course.

-And...

-Did they treat you like every other prisoner?

Why should it have been different?

Because you're Sophia Loren obviously.

Yeah, because you've been reading the wrong papers.

I read in the papers that I had a...

No, it was only a question, I didn't read it in any of them.

..pink carpet on the floor, that I had a big bathroom

and that I was treated, I had a television, a colour television.

You believe me?

I was in prison like everybody else and I had to be among all these

girls that had committed crimes and it was not an easy experience for me.

-But you're glad you faced up to it, surely?

-I'm not glad.

-I think that this kind of experiences enrich, enriches you.

-Enrich, yeah.

Enrich you very much and...

But if they would ask me to do it again, I would run.

I wouldn't go there any more. It has been terrible.

Many top Hollywood stars are now,

as TV continues to go from strength to strength.

I mean, TV's soap operas.

Now I had Rock Hudson on the show couple of weeks ago

and he never told me he was going to go into Dynasty, he kept it from me.

You're not thinking of moving into any one of these soap operas?

Is it not true that you were at one time approached to take

-one of these soap opera parts?

-Oh, yeah, I have been approached

many times to do some series on television

but I always reacted in a very instinctive way.

Erm...

Not reasoning really, I said no.

But then I thought, "I'm an actress, if I go in a series,

"I have to play this character for months and, if I am successful,

"maybe for years and how would I feel inside to play always,

"all the time, all over again the same character?"

The wonderful thing, the magic thing of our profession is to be able to

go from one film to another, changing character and disguise yourself

and I think this is, it's wonderful

and in a series on television you can't do that

so that's why I never accepted it.

Is it true that you were offered the Alexis Carrington part?

-The part that Joan Collins subsequently took.

-Yes.

-I can't quite see you in that part.

-No, I'm too good.

-You are too good!

LAUGHTER

APPLAUSE

It took 30 years for the Italian Supreme Court to clear

Sophia of those tax evasion charges.

In the meantime,

she embraced new roles like that of UN Goodwill ambassador

raising awareness of poverty in Africa.

She's continued to act and she's continued to pick up awards,

being honoured for her lifetime's work by numerous

international film organisations,

all recognising her as one of the last of the great screen goddesses

and a genuine treasure of world cinema.