ITALY today pays tribute to the “eternally magnificent” Sophia Loren, who celebrates her 70th birthday by starring as a 50-something in a new TV film, La Terra del Ritorno.
The Italian press has compared Signora Loren, the “living icon” of Italian cinema, with Brigitte Bardot, who also turns 70 next week.
“BB”, now a reclusive animal rights activist, has been pictured with a lined face and straggly hair. Photographs of “La Loren” show her with flawless skin, immaculately groomed hair and a voluptuous figure.
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“I feel triumphant,” Signor Loren said when asked how it felt to be 70. “All I want now is to become a grandmother. I do not feel like a living monument.” She denies that she has ever had plastic surgery. Her secret, she once said, was pasta: “Everything you can see I owe to spaghetti.”
She does, however, admit to getting up at 7am each day to do her exercises — after first putting on her make-up. “After all, La Loren is always La Loren,” she observed. “Nothing in life comes easily. I have always sweated.”
In her new film she plays a schoolteacher in a poor Italian village. The setting mirrors her upbringing as Sofia Scicolone in the poverty-stricken backstreets of Pozzuoli, Naples.
Signora Loren and her husband, Carlo Ponti, 91, the film director, divide their time between Geneva and California.