Italian diva Sophia Loren slipped at home and broke a femur, but she’s feeling better, she said in a note to the press. “I thank everybody for the love they expressed” writes the 89-year-old from the Geneva clinic where she underwent an operation to her hip. “I’m feeling better, I just have to work at my rehabilitation program and take some time off”.
Well wishes poured in after the news that Loren – whose birthday was on September 20 – had had a fall while in the bathroom of her Geneva house, suffering several fractures to her hip – a common occurrence for people after a certain age, potentially dangerous. All her engagements were canceled, including the party she should have attended in Bari, in the Puglia region, where she would have become a honorary citizen, and where she was to open the fourth restaurant in her name. In the days before the accident she had been the patroness for Giorgio Armani’s fashion show, One night only, in Venice.
Sophia Loren has the status of a national monument in Italy: not just a sex symbol in her time but an iconic actor working with all major directors – Vittorio De Sica, Mario Monicelli, Ettore Scola – and with colleagues such as Marcello Mastroianni. Born in Rome as Sofia Scicolone in 1934, she was celebrated also in Hollywood, where she worked with Sidney Lumet, Charlie Chaplin, George Cukor alongside Cary Grant, Clark Gable, Gregory Peck – among many others.
Her role as a sexy beauty in the Fifties took a back seat as she advanced in complexity, playing women somehow discomfited by life or circumstances: she won an Oscar in 1960 for such a character in Vittorio De Sica’s La Ciociara, from an Alberto Moravia’s novel. She was a Neapolitan former prostitute –next to Mastroianni – in De Sica’s Matrimonio all’italiana (1964, from Eduardo De Filippo’s theatre drama Filomena Marturano), and a poor Roman housewife in fascist Italy next to Mastroianni – again – in Ettore Scola’s Una giornata particolare (1977). In 1991 she was also honored with an Oscar for a lifetime achievement.
Loren has two sons, Carlo and Edoardo Ponti, born from her marriage with producer Carlo Ponti. Her last cinematic endeavor was in 2020, when she appeared in the Netflix movie La vita davanti a sé, entirely set in Bari; the reason for the honorary citizenship she will now receive when healed.
