Source:Biography– The Italian Goddess Sophia Loren.

“Sophia Loren is an Academy Award-winning Italian actress. A striking beauty, Loren is often listed among the world’s all time most attractive women.
Who Is Sophia Loren?
Raised in poverty, Sophia Loren began her film career in 1951 and came to be regarded as one of the worlds most beautiful women. Loren won the Best Actress Academy Award for the film Two Women in 1961 and an Academy Honorary Award in 1991. Married to producer Carlo Ponti for 50 years until his death in 2007.

Early Life
Actress Sophia Loren was born Sofia Villani Scicolone on September 20, 1934 in Rome, Italy. Her father, Riccardo Scicolone, considered himself a “construction engineer,” but in fact he spent most of his time hanging around the fringes of show business, hoping to romance young actresses. Sophia Loren’s mother, Romilda Villani, was one of them. Bearing an uncanny resemblance to Greta Garbo, Villani had once been offered a trip to the United States to play Garbo’s body double, but her mother refused to let her go.

After Loren’s birth, her mother took her back to her hometown of Pozzuoli on the Bay of Naples, which one travel book described as “perhaps the most squalid city in Italy.” Although Riccardo Scicolone fathered another child by Villani, they never married. As Loren’s mother put it, “That pig was free to marry me, but instead he dumped me and married another woman.”

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“Sophia Loren Documentary”

Source:Know The History– The Italian Goddess Sophia Loren.

From Know The History

Sophia Loren is perhaps the best looking Italian woman, (American or native Italian) that Italy has ever produced, even though I’m more obviously more familiar with Italian-American women than native Italian women.

I would put Sophia up against any other ethnic Italian woman who has ever lived and any other woman period who has ever lived as far as physical beauty and appearance go. A perfect example of that is her role in Grumpier Old Men from 1995 when she is 60 years old and still a goddess, turning on older and younger men at this point.

But as the corny saying goes, it doesn’t stop there, because, like Raquel Welch, Marilyn Monroe, and other goddesses who’ve worked in the entertainment business, she was a very talented entertainer who could act and sing and make anyone laugh and go toe to toe with great comic actors like Cary Grant when it came to wit and wisecracks, as in the movie Houseboat. She is an actress with great comedic timing and stage presence in addition to her physical beauty and stage command.

Another thing I love about Sophia is how real she was, coming from nothing and raised by people other than her parents in Rome, Lazio, Italy in the 1930s at the height of the fascist Benito Mussolini regime. She made something great of herself with incredibly hard work, especially after we saw the Sophia that the rest of the world is so familiar with, this tall, curvy hot baby-face goddess with the great Italian voice.