Virna Lisi
Showing posts with label Italian actress. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Italian actress. Show all posts
Sunday, November 16, 2025
Wednesday, September 24, 2025
Claudia Cardinale had toughness, charisma and sensual allure.
Claudia Cardinale had toughness, charisma and sensual allure. Yet Hollywood just couldn’t do her justice
Wednesday 24 September 2025
Claudia Cardinale was part of the great wave of Italian movie stars whose postwar career took them from Europe to Hollywood; these included Sophia Loren, Gina Lollobrigida and Monica Vitti, who the American film industry prized not merely for their beauty but also for their mystery: an exotic feline allure and sense of toughness and survival, and even tragedy. But Cardinale perhaps had something her contemporaries didn’t: a kind of simplicity and frankness to go with the sensual allure. She often played opposite Alain Delon, whose own beauty complemented – almost merged with – hers.
Monday, November 25, 2024
Isabella Rossellini / ‘People never talk about the freedom, the lightness, that comes with ageing’
Interview
Isabella Rossellini: ‘People never talk about the freedom, the lightness, that comes with ageing’
The Italian star is having a late career renaissance, including a powerful turn in acclaimed Vatican thriller Conclave. She talks about the serenity of being single, enjoying farming in later life – and what it means to be a nepo baby
GUY LODGE
Sunday 24 November 2024
Most great female actors get to play a nun at some point in their career: a kind of thespian rite of passage that comes to many in their grande dame years. Isabella Rossellini, however, checked off that box in her very first screen appearance, aged 24: in 1976’s little-remembered Vincente Minnelli musical A Matter of Time, in a bit part opposite her mother, screen legend and three-time Oscar winner Ingrid Bergman.
Isabella Rossellini / ‘Ageing brings a lot of happiness. You get fatter – but there is freedom’
Interview
Isabella Rossellini: ‘Ageing brings a lot of happiness. You get fatter – but there is freedom’
Isabella Rossellini is a busy woman. It is hard to know how the model, actor, writer, animal behaviourist and farmer finds so much time to talk about sex. But she does. In recent years, she has made numerous tiny films about the sex lives of animals under the umbrella titles Green Porno and Seduce Me. Now she hopes to take them to a larger audience – or, to be more accurate, she hopes to bring a larger audience to her farm.
Sunday, March 19, 2023
Italian Movie Star Claudia Cardinale Had a Thing for Brigitte Bardot’s Ponytail
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| Claudia Cardinale |
Italian Movie Star Claudia Cardinale Had a Thing for Brigitte Bardot’s Ponytail
Claudia Cardinale, 84, is an Italian actress who starred in more than 100 films, including “8½” and “The Pink Panther.” Twenty of her films will be screened by New York’s MoMA, with restorations by Italy’s Cinecittà, starting Feb. 3. She and her daughter, Claudia Squitieri, spoke with Marc Myers.
Tuesday, December 27, 2022
Claudia Cardinale / My heart is in Africa and my head is in Europe
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| Cardinale enjoying a boat ride in Venice, 1967. She was first discovered at the Venice Film Festival in 1957, during a trip that she had won from a beauty contest in which she was crowned “The Most Beautiful Italian Girl in Tunisia.” |
"My heart is in Africa and my head is in Europe"
Claudia Cardinale
by Alain Elkann
“My heart is in Africa and my head is in Europe. In Paris the Tunisian taxi drivers do not want to charge me for my fare because I am one of them, but I am also Italian and French.”
On a tour of Italian theatres in December 2002, the actress Claudia Cardinale discusses her roots and her work.
Friday, November 20, 2020
Cary Grant never proposed to me on set, says Sophia Loren
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| Sophia Loren and Cary Grant |
Cary Grant never proposed to me on set, says Sophia Loren
Actor puts myth to bed in Radio Times interview in which she also reveals her one regret
Tue 3 Nov 2020 06.00 GMT
It was one of the greatest cinematic love stories of the 20th century, but Sophia Loren has now revealed that Cary Grant never proposed to her on set.
The 86-year-old Italian actor has previously detailed the torrid love affair she had with Grant while filming the 1957 film The Pride and the Passion. Also starring Frank Sinatra, it was the first American film she had worked on.
Frozen in time: Sophia Loren, June 1964
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| Sophia Loren having lunch on the second floor terrace of her villa near Lake Albano, Rome. Photograph: Alfred Eisenstaedt/Time & Life Pictures |
Frozen in time: Sophia Loren, June 1964
Outrageous beauty, a million dollar movie deal and a dream home outside Rome: it's hard being Sophia Loren
Euan Ferguson
Sun 16 Sep 2012 00.05 BST
M
any actresses have loved, before friends and certainly for the still camera, to play the "homebody": to show they can combine red-carpet smiles with a down-to-earth way in the kitchen garden; whistle up a rustic lunchtime banquet for 30 and serve it without fussings or frissons or primping about drips. Yet none with such verisimilitude as Sophia Loren; waiting tables, juggling seven hands and six different smiles, had been living through some very difficult teenage years.
Even here in 1964, living in her and producer Carlo Ponti's 50-room mansion near Rome's Lake Albano, complete with acres of poplars and sheep, and stuffed inside with medieval hangings and masters both old and modern, and having just made headlines for her $1m advance for The Fall of the Roman Empire, there's an earthy authenticity.
Even if she hadn't been the most award-adorned beauty of her times, there is such a vigorous snap-happy grace in her serving of – it's hard to tell exactly, but salami, tomatoes, eggs, cheese, gherkins, bread with a little napkin to dissuade the flies – that it's hard not to think this is one of the truest manifestations of La Dolce Vita, of life itself.
It was not always thus. Through and beyond the war years she was dishwashing and waiting tables for her grandmother, who had a tiny pub in her front room near Naples, serving home-made cherry liqueur to lingering GIs who had recently been trying to kill them. She was 12 and blooming. And smart. And at 16 she met Ponti, 22 years her elder, with whom she stayed until his death in 2007. Grace, humour, beauty, riches and a way with eggs, and a great friend in the phenomenal Life photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt, whose Leica M3s had also captured that enduring VJ Day picture of a sailor kissing a girl in Times Square: who would not, that day in 1964, when the world still seemed so young, have wanted to be Sophia Loren, in the Roman sun? With olives, and napkins, and a hat, and the world?
Frozen in Time / Sophia Loren, London, June 1960
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| Photograph: George Konig |
Frozen in Time: Sophia Loren, London, June 1960
On the set of The Millionairess, the Italian star blends in with the East End locals and discover the joy of whelks
Eva Wiseman
Sunday 16 June 2019
T
hree sets of diamonds, emeralds and rubies were among the jewels stolen from Sophia Loren as she filmed The Millionairess in 1960; she played the richest woman in the world. The theft layered drama on drama. Loren was 25 at the time, and starring with Peter Sellers, who left his wife and two children citing his love for her, despite their affair being no more than a “delusional fantasy”, or what today would be called “stalking”. His five-year-old daughter asked Sellers if he still loved them. He replied: “Of course I do, darling, just not as much as Sophia Loren.”
“Hunger was the major theme of my childhood,” Loren later wrote. In the 1940s her mother begged on the streets for food; when an American soldier gave some chocolate to Loren, she didn’t know what it was. During pregnancy, Loren started making recipe notes, drawing on her famous passion for food (“Everything you see I owe to spaghetti”) to create a “gastronomic autobiography”. Eat With Me was published in the UK in 1972, and is a collection of Italian antipasti and glamorous full-page portraits of Loren. “Straddling a 5ft display of pâté while simultaneously patting the heads of two live pheasants,” wrote food historian Polly Russell in the Financial Times, “Loren, cook-housewife-goddess, triumphs.” Russell’s descriptions suggest Loren’s well-broadcast passion for food was less about the food and more a way of solidifying her image as passionate. Hungry. “The presentation of Loren as desiring and desirable are reminders that to be a woman is a part to be played – something that Nigella Lawson, with an ironic, feminist wink would later come to embody as the nation’s ‘domestic goddess’. Eat With Me was a taste of what was to come.”
The impact of Loren’s recipe books was far outweighed by the impact of her photoshoots with food – sausages, a flying disc of dough, these whelks on the Millionairess set. After the film’s success, Loren and Sellers recorded a single called Bangers and Mash. He sang the part of a Cockney man distraught at his Italian wife’s insistence on cooking such muck as tagliatelle. “I met her down in Napoli and didn’t she look great. And so I brought her back to Blighty just to show me mates. And though we’re married happily, I’ll tell you furthermore, I haven’t had a decent meal since 1944.” Loren is a great actress, but here, you can hear her patience running out.
Thursday, November 19, 2020
Sophia Loren returns to movies aged 86
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| Sophia Loren in Los Angeles last year. Photograph: Jordan Strauss |
Sophia Loren returns to movies aged 86
Italian superstar plays a Holocaust survivor who befriends an orphan in Netflix film The Life Ahead, directed by her son Edoardo Ponti
Catherine Shoard
Wed 23 Sep 2020 12.29 BST
Sophia Loren is returning to cinema after an 11-year absence. Loren, 86, stars in upcoming Netflix drama The Life Ahead, which is directed by her son, Edoardo Ponti.
In the film, Loren plays Madame Rosa, a Jewish Holocaust survivor who helps raise the children of deceased sex workers with whom she once walked the streets. She then strikes up an enduring friendship with Momo, a 12-year-old Senegalese orphan who tries to steal her candlesticks.
It will be the second film adaptation of the novel by Romain Gary, following a 1977 movie named after the main character, starring Simone Signoret.
Following a premiere in Rome in October, the film will be available on Netflix a month later, on 13 November, with Deadline reporting that the streaming service will mount a considerable awards campaign behind the title.
Loren won her first Oscar in 1961 for Two Women, before receiving a second, honorary, Oscar in 1991 for “a career rich with memorable performances that has added permanent lustre to our art form”.
The actor says she “jumped at the chance” to play the character, who reminded her of her own mother. She has worked with her son twice before, most recently on 2002’s Between Strangers.
Edoardo Ponti, 46, is Loren’s second child with the film director Carlo Ponti, to whom she was married from 1966 until his death in 2007. Speaking to Deadline, he called his mother “a survivor … a thoroughbred in the best sense of the word”.
He also indicated that the role – which requires her not to blink for an extend period – would offer her the chance to showcase previously unseen acting skills. “Sophia Loren has never done parts where she loses her mind, when she gets into this kind of mental paralysis.”
Loren’s last role was in 2010 TV biopic My House Is Full of Mirrors; the previous year she played Daniel Day Lewis’s mother in Nine, based on Federico Fellini’s semi-autobiographical 1963 film 8½. Loren presented Fellini with his honorary Oscar in 1993, shortly before his death.
The Life Ahead review / Sophia Loren serves up some grandmother courage
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| Neapolitan encounter ... Ibrahima Gueye with Sophia Loren in The Life Ahead. Photograph: Regine de Lazzaris |
The Life Ahead review – Sophia Loren serves up some grandmother courage
The actor plays a Holocaust survivor and creche worker who takes in a troubled Senegalese boy in this solid if sentimental drama
Peter BradshawThu 12 November 2020
At 86, Sophia Loren returns to the screen for the first time in 10 years in this sentimental tale for Netflix, directed by her son Edoardo Ponti. It’s adapted from the novel The Life Before Us by Romain Gary, which was first filmed in 1977 as Madame Rosa with Simone Signoret in the title role.
In truth, the part Loren plays here is not so very different in spirit from the “mother courage” roles which made her a star in the 1960s, only now it’s a matter of grandmother-courage (the scene in which she is heartrendingly stretchered out of her apartment building by medics is a weird echo of the beginning of Vittorio de Sica’s Marriage Italian Style). There’s no doubt about it: Loren still has an imperious address to the camera. I spent much of this film wishing she were allowed to let rip with something more spirited, but it’s a heartfelt performance. Loren has an undiminished screen presence and it’s great to see her with a substantial role.
She plays Madame Rosa, a Holocaust survivor who wound up walking the streets of Naples, and now runs an informal creche for the kids of all the other women, including her best friend, played by the Spanish transgender performer Abril Zamora.
Watch the trailer for The Life AheadThen her doctor (Renato Carpentieri), who is also a charity worker and old friend, asks her to take in a troubled Senegalese boy, Momo (played by newcomer Ibrahima Gueye) and instantly the trouble starts. Momo is angry at the world and secretly working for an unscrupulous and exploitative drug dealer, but after a rocky start, he becomes increasingly concerned for his grumpy, but caring new landlady, who is apparently succumbing to dementia and plagued with nightmarish memories of a place Momo thinks she’s calling “Housewitch”. Madame Rosa’s destiny is of course to be a sacrificial one.
Perhaps you need a sweet tooth for this, but it’s good to see Loren in a movie that is worthy of her.
• The Life Ahead is on Netflix from 13 November.
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