Sophia Loren was once the ‘most beautiful woman in the world’. But she had a rival

The great Italian film star Sophia Loren is, of course, famous for the work that she has done on screen over the past seven decades. But she is equally well known for the adoration that she inspired in many of her co-stars. Omar Sharif sighed that he fantasised about her naked after they acted together. Clark Gable confessed that he’d had “the wrong thoughts” about the beauteous Loren when they appeared in the otherwise forgotten 1960 drama It Started in Naples.

Cary Grant, meanwhile, was cast opposite her in the 1957 epic The Pride and the Passion and was initially horrified at the idea, declaring, “My God! You want me to play with this Sophie somebody, a cheesecake thing? Well, I can’t and I won’t.”

He was soon converted when he met Loren in the flesh, and the two embarked on a love affair. This was considerably more than Peter Sellers managed, when he starred with Loren in the now-problematic 1960 romantic comedy The Millionairess. Sellers decided that he and the Italian star were destined to be together, and although Loren did not return his affections, he declared to his then wife, Anne Howe, and his children that he was leaving them for his co-star. When his young daughter, Sarah, asked her father if he still loved his family, he replied: “Of course I do, darling, just not as much as Sophia Loren.”

But it’s easy to forget that Loren hasn’t always been universally loved – at least, not by her fellow doyens of Italian cinema. When Grant first met Loren, he was not above poking some fun at her, and the joke that he chose to express himself with may have touched a nerve. In Loren’s 2015 memoir Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow: My Life, she recalled Grant introducing himself: “He held out his hand, looking at me with a pinch of mischief. ‘Miss Lolloloren, I presume? Or is it Miss Lorenigida? You Italians have such strange last names I can’t seem to get them straight.’”

It was a clear verbal reference to the other leading star of Italian cinema of the day, in the equally beauteous form of Gina Lollobrigida, who was seven years older than Loren and who had begun her career in Italian and international film just a few years beforehand. Both vied for the title of “the world’s most beautiful woman”, a description that each of them received, at one time or another, and zealously guarded for as long as they might.

A feud had started between the two that would duly become infamous, although both participants claimed that it was simply a PR-confected fantasy or, more amusingly, that it was the other who was continuing it in order to maintain their presence in the headlines.

In one of the relatively few pictures that exist of both stars together, taken in 1954, the body language makes it clear that they are not relishing sitting next to one another. Lollobrigida, in particular, has an expression that suggests that she would really rather be elsewhere at that moment. The photograph was taken at the Italian Film Festival in London, in the presence of Queen Elizabeth. Loren attracted most of the media attention due to her ornate outfit, which included a fittingly regal cape and crown.

The two women both enjoyed significant success early … but there were disparities between their levels of recognition and acclaim.

The two women both enjoyed significant success early in their careers, but there were disparities between their levels of recognition and acclaim. Lollobrigida was signed up by the American mogul Howard Hughes (who, was, predictably, smitten by her) to a seven-year exclusive contract, but her ventures into English-language cinema were comparatively limited, compared to her standing in Italy. She appeared in such pictures as John Huston’s Beat the Devil, and starred opposite a decrepit Errol Flynn in his attempt to revitalise his swashbuckling career, Crossed Swords. More significant roles in films included the circus drama Trapeze and The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

However, she won the greatest acclaim and recognition for Italian-language projects, and received a British Academy Film nomination for 1953’s Bread, Love and Dreams. Further awards followed and Lollobrigida revelled in her standing as the best-known, most beloved Italian export since spaghetti.

This did not sit well with the ambitious Loren, who had been born Sofia Scicolone, and had a successful early career as a model. When she was 15, she met the Italian film producer Carlo Ponti, who was judging a beauty pageant that she appeared in. Although the 37-year-old Ponti was no Adonis, he was sufficiently charismatic and intelligent to realise that the young Scicolone had the potential to go far in the film industry, if he could shape her. He changed her name to the more pronounceable Sophia Loren and encouraged her to learn English and to shed her strong Neapolitan accent.

Under Ponti’s tutelage, Loren established herself as a comely figure with strong sex appeal. She’d appeared in more than 25 films by the age of 21, making her a ubiquitous presence in Italian cinema. Perhaps egged on by Ponti, she now decided to pick a fight with the queen herself, Lollobrigida, and told the European press that she was better endowed – “bustier” – than the older actor.

Lollobrigida duly snapped back that she was capable of playing a peasant, but that Loren was not able to convincingly embody an aristocrat. “We are as different as a fine racehorse and a goat!” she complained to one reporter.

The barbs must have stung because, later in her career, Loren suddenly remembered that her father, an unsuccessful railway engineer, had been descended from nobility, which supposedly gave her the right to call herself “Viscountess of Pozzuoli, Lady of Caserta”.

The feud soon stretched from the personal to the professional, when Loren replaced Lollobrigida in a sequel to Bread, Love and Dreams (the older actor had asked for more money). In recognition of Loren’s charms, it was filmed in colour rather than black and white.

Matters worsened when Loren had a more significant international breakthrough than Lollobrigida in 1960 by winning both an Oscar and Best Actress award at the Cannes Film Festival for what may well be her greatest performance, in Two Women.

The film, a gritty and decidedly unglamorous war drama directed by Vittorio De Sica, featured Loren as a widow who is struggling to care for her 12-year-old daughter. It climaxes with the two of them being raped by a group of soldiers inside a church, and Loren’s bold rejection of the sexuality that she had embodied since she began her career made for stunning viewing. “I thought it was worth taking the risk at 25 to play an older woman because the story was so beautiful,” she later said.

Lollobrigida did not make any public comment on Loren’s awards at the time, but it was perhaps no coincidence that she lobbied for the role of Napoleon Bonaparte’s sister Pauline in the 1962 biopic Imperial Venus, presumably in the hope of attracting similar attention. She won two major Italian awards, the Nastro d’Argento and the David di Donatello, but Oscars and Cannes gongs were not to be hers. Loren, meanwhile, enjoyed an elevated status as a Hollywood film star, appearing in leading roles in such epics as El Cid and The Fall of the Roman Empire and the Hitchcockian comedy-thriller Arabesque.

Such was her standing that, when she was cast opposite Marlon Brando in the 1967 Charlie Chaplin-directed flop A Countess from Hong Kong, she was able to put the American star in his place. As she recounted, “One day … he suddenly reached out and grabbed at me. I twisted around and very calmly hissed in his face, like a cat when you pet its fur backward: ‘Don’t you dare. Don’t you ever do that again.’ As I gave him my dirtiest look, I suddenly saw how small and harmless he really was, almost a victim of an aura that had been created around him.” Disparagingly, she called Brando “a man ill at ease in the world”.

Loren went on to have a rollercoaster career that even encompassed a brief prison sentence in the early 1980s for tax evasion, though the incident did not damage her significant popularity. In their later years, Loren and Lollobrigida were pictured in the same place together exactly once: at a 1988 event honouring Michael Jackson in Los Angeles.

Yet Lollobrigida continued to brood, and, in 2015, gave an interview to Vanity Fair in which she tried to suggest that she was truly first among equals. “My God! She and her press agents started this ‘rivalry’ with me – and she hasn’t stopped for 50 years,” Lollobrigida said. “It was really boring for me … we are different. We made completely different careers. I wanted to be an artist more than anything else. I wanted a career on a high level.”

Belying, perhaps, the idea that Loren was obsessed by publicity, the younger star declined to comment. So it was not entirely surprising that, two years later, Lollobrigida was still keeping the feud going. She told the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera that “I was not looking for any rivalry against anyone: I was the number one” and, in an obvious dig at Loren and Ponti, announced that “I succeeded only thanks to myself, without any producer supporting me. I did everything alone.”

However, when Lollobrigida died in 2023, Loren was able to have the last word, announcing that she was “deeply shaken and saddened” by the death of her one-time rival, thereby exhibiting a magnanimity at the conclusion of the feud that was sorely lacking – on both sides – while it continued.

The Telegraph UK

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