Sophia Loren, 86, talks being directed by her son Edoardo Ponti after a 10-year break from starring in movies: ‘He knows my heart, my soul’
Sophia Loren has returned to the movies after a decade to act in the Netflix film The Life Ahead directed by her son Edoardo Ponti.
‘He knows me so well. He knows every inch of my face, my heart, my soul,’ the 86-year-old screen legend told Closer.
The Life Ahead stars her as an elderly Holocaust survivor who befriends an immigrant child from Senegal on Italy’s Adriatic coastline.
Edoardo was equally effusive about his mother saying: ‘The energy and passion with which she approaches every scene is marvel to watch.’
He gushed: ‘She wants to put it all on the line to make a movie that is so deep, so challenging, both emotionally and physically.’
The movie bows on Netflix in November and that month Sophia would like to travel to America from her home in Switzerland to see her sons and grandchildren.
Sophia drew international acclaim for the 1960 film Two Women which was also about the ravages of World War II in her native Italy.
Her performance in the Vittorio De Sica movie made her the first person ever to earn an acting Oscar in a language other than English.
However she has not appeared onscreen in a feature film since Nine, Rob Marshall’s 2009 movie adaptation of a Broadway musical of the same name.
Nine was based on the seminal Italian movie 8 1/2 directed by Federico Fellini whom Sophia never worked with despite the two being stars at the same time.
She has kept working since Nine – she dubbed a role in Italian for the 2011 Pixar movie Cars 2 and has appeared in a short film.
A decade ago she also played her own mother Romilda in the Italian miniseries My House Is Full Of Mirrors, based on a book by her sister Maria Scicolone, who once spent a decade married to Benito Mussolini’s jazz pianist son Romano.
Sophia shares her sons Carlo, 51, and Edoardo, 47, with her late husband Carlo Ponti, a producer who was more than two decades her senior.
They first tied the knot in Mexico in 1957 while he was separated from but still legally married to his first wife Giuliana, with whom he had two other children.
Although he had technically gotten a Mexican divorce from Giuliana, divorce was not yet legal in Italy and would not be so until the 1970s.
As a result Sophia and Carlo would have wound up on the hook for concubinage and bigamy in their native country and so they annulled their marriage in 1962.
The pair eventually worked out a deal with Giuliana whereby they all moved to France and obtained citizenship there.
Giuliana gave Carlo a divorce under French law in 1965, and the next year he remarried Sophia whom he stayed with until his ԁеаtһ in 2007.
Their elder son Carlo Jr. is an orchestra conductor and Eduardo is a director whose debut film Between Strangers also starred his mother.
Sophia has four grandchildren and told Closer she regularly keeps up with them, chatting daily with her family on FaceTime during lockdown.
‘My approach to life is very simple,. Enjoy all the good news that my children tell me about their lives,’ shared the Marriage Italian Style star.
Sophia, who lives in Geneva where she gave birth to both her sons, said: ‘The beauty of my grandchildren fills me with joy although they are far away in California.’
A few years ago she told the New York Times that what she enjoys about life in Switzerland is that ‘It’s calm. When you live in a big city like Rome or like New York, there’s so many things going on and the streets and the cars. Here, it’s a really very peaceful place. And then, of course, it’s the center of Europe.’
