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Sophia Loren’s True Life Of Drama, S_e_x Symbol Status And Scandal
She’s in a new film, ‘The Life Ahead.’
The brutally honest and beautiful Sophia Loren is back in the news. Just days, her infamous photo, where she was caught glancing at Jayne Mansfield’s bust from the corners of her eyes at a dinner party at Romanoff’s restaurant in Beverly Hills, went viral. And now, she’s back on screen in a new film, “The Life Ahead.”
The 86-Year-Old is back on screen after a 10-year pause & the film will air in selected theaters on Netflix in November.
Loren’s 70-Year career in cinema has been one of glamour, sexy relationships, a brush with the law, and decades-old beefs that are still talked about. Her journey dates back to when she met with famed Italian producer Carlo Pont at age 17, during a pageant he was judging in 1951.
At the time, Carlo was 22 years her senior, and the pair was reportedly off to a rocky start.
While Loren was doing a screen test for him, a cameraman had allegedly shouted: “She’s impossible to photograph. Her face is too short, her mouth is too big, and her nose is too long.” Instead of siding with his wife, Carlo poured gasoline. Loren recalled him saying in her 2014 memoir “Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow: My Life, “Sophia, have you ever thought about it? You know, softening your, your dominant profile?”
In response, she said: “Carlo, if you’re suggesting that in order to make movies I’m going to have to slice off a piece of my nose, when then I’m going back to Pozzuoli because I have no intention of getting a nose job.”
Fortunately for Loren, her looks were good enough for Cary Grant. The English Americana actor, known for his role in His Girl Friday and Alfred Hitchcock’s To Catch A Thief, was cast in the 1957 film The Pride and the Passion alongside Frank Sinatra and Loren. The trio reportedly met amid a cocktail party at the Castellana Hotel in Madrid.
“Miss Lolloren, I presume? Or is it Miss Lorgenigida? You Italians have such strange last names, I can’t seem to get them straight,” Grant had allegedly said when he approached Loren wearing a tux.
From there, the pair began regularly eating dinner together and driving around Spain, becoming more and more emotionally entwined. It was no innocent courtship as she was then 22 while Grant was 52. Accordingly, Loren was set to marry Carlo, and Grant was already married to his third wife, Besty Drake. But regardless, Loren was torn between two men and two worlds.
And more interestingly, on the last night of filming, Loren alleged that over dinner, Grant dropped a bomb “Will You Marry Me?”
The Italian actress is undoubtedly a spitfire that when asked about Marlon Brando at AFI Fest in 2014, she shrugged and replied, “Eh.” However, Loren has recently backtracked the comments she made in her memoir, telling Radio Times that Cary Grant was a very handsome man and a wonderful actor, but he didn’t propose. While the relationship never wandered down the aisle, it was admitted Grant never stopped thinking about Loren.
As she moved to the United States, he kept sending her bouquets of roses in full view of Carlo.
Loren wrote of becoming an enduring meme due to glancing at Mansfield’s bust: “The image went around the world. I refused to autograph it.”
In 2014, the actress also explained herself to Entertainment Weekly: “I’m staring at her nipples because I am afraid they are about to come onto my plate. In my face, you can see the fear. However, in April 1957, when she took her first trip to America, Loren tied the knot with Carlo in September of the same year.
