Now 86, she’s considered one of the most beautiful women in the world — Here are her secrets
Sophia Loren in 1992. Image by SGT M. Preston via Wikimedia Commons.
Sophia Loren’s tears began before she was born. Her father was descended from Italian nobility, but he refused to marry her mother, a piano teacher who dreamed of being an actress.
Despite those tears (or she might say because of them), Loren is ranked the 21st greatest female star of Classic Hollywood Cinema in a list compiled by the American Film Institute. She is the only living actress on that list of 100 top stars.
Over the past half-century, the incredibly candid Loren has taught the secrets to her way of winning over people in a series of interviews. At the heart of her method, taking everything in as a gift and using it to build her art — and her appeal.
As a small child during World War II, Sophia was hit by shrapnel, wounded in her chin, during an Allied bombing raid of Italy. A scar remains nearly eight decades later. Yet, she is universally considered one of the most beautiful women — and one of the most talented actresses — who ever lived.
Her parents’ love affair continued on and off: they had another daughter four years after Sophia. Again, the father wouldn’t marry the mother of his children. But she accepted her pain as an art-strengthening gift.
Sophia would only meet her father three times: at age 5, age 17, and again when she was 42 and famous, coming to his deathbed to forgive him for leaving them.
“If you haven’t cried, your eyes can’t be beautiful,” Loren believed.
Tears make your eyes more beautiful?
True beauty, she teaches, “is how you feel inside, and it reflects in your eyes. It is not something physical.” While many run from pain and negativity, she embraced all her challenges as opportunities.
“The two big advantages I had at birth were to have been born wise and to have been born in poverty,” she argues. And as for any mistakes? She called mistakes “part of the dues one pays for a full life.”
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Her mother’s poverty meant Sophia and her sister wound up living with a grandmother. Her struggles helped her portray a young widow fighting to save her child in war-torn Italy in the 1960 film Two Women. That work helped her become the first actress performing a non-English speaking role to win the Academy Award for Best Actress.
After winning her Oscar, she performed in another 90 films, becoming widely admired as one of the most admired “sex symbols” of the 20th century. Was it the tears in her eyes that strengthened her appeal? Even as she aged — she is now 86 — the camera continued to catch her allure, making heads turn.
“There is a fountain of youth: it is your mind, your talents, the creativity you bring to your life and the lives of people you love,’’ Loren explains. “When you learn to tap this source, you will truly have defeated age.”
She never tried to block out her painful memories of her past, preferring to work with all those memories in the perfection of her art and life, adding, “I don’t understand people who hide from their past. Everything you live through helps to make you the person you are now.”
“You have to enjoy life,” she says. “Always be surrounded by people that you like, people who have a nice conversation. There are so many positive things to think about.”
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“At the dressing table, every woman has a chance to be an artist,” Loren says. “Art, as Aristotle said, ‘completes what nature left unfinished.’”
Part of the art of “sex appeal,” she believes, is remembering it’s half “what you’ve got” and “50 percent what people think you’ve got.”
She’s compared the choices women make in choosing clothing to a barbed-wire fence, “serving its purpose without obstructing the view.”
“I think the quality of sexiness comes from within,” Loren believes. “It is something that is in you, or it isn’t, and it really doesn’t have much to do with breasts or thighs or the pout of your lips.”
She’s compared sex to “washing your face — just something you do because you have to. Sex without love is absolutely ridiculous. Sex follows love; it never precedes it.”
People “have to be born a sex symbol,” she’s added. “You don’t become one. If you’re born with it, you’ll have it even when you’re 100 years old.”
Similarly, as a mother, Loren argued you are never truly alone because you are thinking for yourself and thinking for your child simultaneously.
“When you are a mother, you are never really alone in your thoughts,” she argues. “A mother always has to think twice, once for herself and once for her child.”
Sophia Loren’s secrets to achieving your goals
Everyone has goals and things they want, “but they don’t really have the strength, the discipline. They are weak. I believe that you get what you want if you want it badly enough.”
She teaches that learning is ongoing, a regular, daily part of life.
To get ahead in a tough profession, she recommends “avid faith in yourself. That is why some people with mediocre talent, but with great inner drive, go so much further than people with vastly superior talent.”
“Nothing makes a woman more beautiful than the belief that she is beautiful,” she says. “You must all, somewhere deep in your hearts, believe that you have a special beauty that is like no other and that is so valuable that you must not abandon it. Indeed, you must learn to cherish it.”
Sophia Loren: 1961 image by By Nicholas Volpe via Wikimedia Commons.