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VOL.31, NO.11
Sophia Loren comes to town
NOVEMBER 2019
I N S I D E …
PHOTO BY ARMANDO GALLO
By Margaret Foster Take one look at Sophia Loren, who was born in 1934, and it’s clear she knows the secret of aging well. “There is a fountain of youth,” Loren once said. “It is your mind, your talents, the creativity you bring to your life and the lives of people you love. When you learn to tap this source, you will truly have defeated age.” Loren, 85, is still bringing her passionate creativity to the world — in fact, to Rockville, Maryland. In November, she will speak to audiences at the Robert E. Parilla Performing Arts Center on the Rockville campus of Montgomery College. In honor of her two public appearances there on Nov. 20 and 21, the center will also screen 10 of her films as the Sophia Loren Film Festival from Nov. 15 to 24. One of them, Two Women, is the film for which she won an Academy Award for Best Actress in 1962. In the Italian film, Loren portrays a widow in Italy during World War II. It’s the performance she’s proudest of in a role that mirrors her own life.
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L E I S U R E & T R AV E L
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A child of war and poverty Born in Rome to a single mother, Sophia Villani Scicolone was six years old when World War II began. Abandoned by her aristocratic father, her mother had retreated to her hometown of Pozzuoli, a suburb of the port of Naples — and therefore a target for Allied air raids. When bombs fell, villagers fled to dark, dirty train tunnels teeming with mice and cockroaches. Loren still has a fear of the dark and sleeps with the light on today, she confessed in her 2014 memoir, Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow: My Life. When Loren was 10 years old, a piece of shrapnel cut her chin, leaving a small scar. The scars of the war are still with Loren, she said in an email to the Beacon. “My memories are strong,” she said. “We went through a lot.” In her 2014 memoir she recalls the sounds of bombs, sirens and screams — and the ache in her stomach when the family had nothing to eat except bread. However, she told the Beacon, “Mother was our savior. She saved us from a very poor childhood. And finally helped us to get out.”
ARTS & STYLE
Laughter and insight at Shakespeare Theatre’s irreverent look at death; plus, Marian Anderson at the Portrait Gallery, and Bob Levey on the good ol’ days page 43 Sophia Loren rose from a childhood of poverty during World War II to an iconic, decades-long career in Hollywood. She will address local audiences and answer their questions on Nov. 21 and 22 at Montgomery College in Rockville, Maryland, where 10 of her films will be screened starting Nov. 15.
Emerging from starvation After the war ended, when Sophia was 11 years old, her mother turned their living room into a pub. Every Sunday afternoon, the family served homemade brandy to American GIs as Sophia played piano and her sister sang for the soldiers, who shared their bread, coffee and chocolate with them. With the American soldiers came their movies, which offered the shy, skinny Sophia — taunted by her classmates as a “toothpick” — a more optimistic view of the world. She longed to be like the actors, who were “allowed to express their feel-
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ings,” she wrote in her memoir. Her mother, a Greta Garbo lookalike whose parents wouldn’t allow her to go to Hollywood, enrolled the teenaged Sophia in acting school and entered her in a Naples beauty contest. Wearing a pink dress fashioned from the living room curtains, Loren won wallpaper, tablecloths, $36 and, most importantly, a train ticket to Rome.
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When in Rome There, in a restaurant near the Colosseum, See SOPHIA LOREN, page 47
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ADVERTISER DIRECTORY
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