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

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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?

THE GUARDIAN

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

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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.

THE GUARDIAN