Honestly, Sophia Loren is on the list of people who I first think of as themselves. Not just the famous picture of her giving Jayne Mansfield’s cleavage a side-eye but decades of the presence of Sophia Loren. She’s made 84 movies, of which I have seen maybe seven, and that’s including an uncredited performance in Quo Vadis before she even got renamed Sophia Loren. And yet I’ve been aware of her my whole life, familiar with her existence. Some people are just there, you know?

Specifically, she was Sophia Villani Scicolone. (She claims she has the right to call herself Marquess Sophia etc., but she’s the illegitimate daughter and therefore almost certainly does not.) She met her father three times, including once on his deathbed. She was wounded in the war. She competed for Miss Italia 1950. She took some acting classes and got some roles as an extra or barely above an extra. She was for a while going as Sophia Lazzaro.

Somewhere in there, she met Carlo Ponti, two years older than her own mother. He gave her the name Sophia Loren and repeatedly cast her in the movies he was producing. She married him twice—because divorce was illegal in Italy, and they wouldn’t accept his Mexican divorce and would have charged him with bigamy and her with “concubinage.” Just because I think the term is delightful doesn’t mean it’s a delightful thing to charge anyone with, you know?

I think I mostly know of her because I’ve routinely been around movie buffs older than I am. Or listened to them, anyway. I know Roger was a fan of hers. I’m pretty sure my sophomore English teacher, Mr. Garden, was, too. I’ve read a fair amount over the years about her. It wasn’t all about her sex appeal, either, though goodness knows she’s had enough of that to be getting on with. Even today, at 83, she’s hardly a bad-looking woman.

I honestly have not seen her in enough to have a real opinion of her acting. I know she fought for a few roles that were more challenging than others because it was important to her to show that she could act. I know the Academy thought enough about her talent to give her an Oscar—and not only that but to give her an Oscar for a mostly foreign-language role, something they do not often do. 1961 was hardly a light year in the category, either. I couldn’t get through the movie, but my problem was not with her.

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