Sophia Loren, the Italian actress whose talent and beauty made her one of the great screen legends, says her instinct is always to please the audience, and then she offers an example from a recent stop on tour with her one-woman show, “An Evening With Sophia Loren.”
“One man, he stands up and says, ‘My aim is to give you a kiss,’” Loren says when asked what kinds of things fans ask during the question-and-answer portion of the night. “And I said, ‘Come on the stage, I give you a kiss.’ It was a wonderful thing.
“He give me a kiss on the cheek,” she says in a voice that at 81 remains as sultry and Italian-accented as ever. “And when at the end of the show everybody was clapping, everybody also cheered for him.
“He was the happiest man in the world.”
Loren brings her show to the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts on Friday, and while we shouldn’t encourage you to ask for a smooch of your own, we will tell you that Loren most certainly will be as open and honest, as charming and glamorous as she’s been since her career started in the ’50s.
“I am the way I am,” Loren says of her approach to these performances that mix an interview with stories and a Q-and-A. “I like to promptly answer because I don’t want to have the feeling that people think that if they ask me something that I don’t want to answer it’s because I have something to hide.
“I have nothing to hide,” she says. “My life is an open page. People can read it. They can laugh with me, they can cry with me, because we are together.”
Her life unfolded like a Hollywood story. Born in Rome in 1934 and raised near Naples, Loren grew up in poverty and World War II, her life taking a turn when at 14 she entered a beauty pageant and soon after, still a teenager, landed a few small parts in Italian films.
Those were sometimes successful but it wasn’t until the late ’50s (when Paramount signed her and she starred in “Houseboat” opposite Cary Grant, with whom she also had an on-set affair) and the early ’60s (when she starred in the Italian-language drama “Two Women” and won the 1961 Academy Award for best actress) that she found true stardom.
All of those and much more will surface in conversation onstage in Cerritos, Loren says, though some topics give her much more material with which to work.
“They want to know about many co-stars, but how can you know a person if you do one film with him?” says Loren, who played opposite big names such as Charlton Heston in “El Cid,” Clark Gable in “It Started in Naples,” Gregory Peck in “Arabesque” and Marlon Brando in “A Countess From Hong Kong.” “It’s impossible: ‘He’s great, he’s nice, he’s handsome, he’s a gentle person.’
“I can talk about Vittorio De Sica because we worked together for 25 years,” she says of her director for “Two Women” and many other films. “I can talk about Marcello Mastroianni because he was always in my life.”
As she talks about Mastroianni, her fondness for the late actor is clear in the warmth of her voice as she described films on which they’d teamed, including “Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow,” which De Sica also directed, and which won an Oscar in 1965 for best foreign language film.
“We were great, great friends,” Loren says. “We had a great sense of humor together and with De Sica we did a trio of films.
“In ‘Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow’ I do a striptease,” Loren says of one of the most iconic scenes of her career. “People go crazy. And then people go crazy when Mastroianni says, ‘My god!’”
Loren is famous for having the kind of effect on a generation or two of male viewers that she has on Mastroianni in that scene. Recently, Dick Van Dyke, before his own performance in Cerritos, mentioned seeing her name on the center’s calendar. “Did I see that Sophia Loren’s going to be there?” he said. “I’m stuck on her. I mean I’ve been stuck on her since her Italian days.”
“Two Women” is also prominently featured in her live show, and with good reason. It’s not only her most-honored role – in addition to the Oscar, she won another 20 or so awards for her work, including best actress at Cannes – it’s also her all-time favorite part, Loren says.
“‘La Ciociara’ is in my heart,” Loren says, using the Italian title for “Two Women.” “It made me an actress. I gave all that I had inside. All my soul. It’s not because I had an Oscar, but because the story was so beautiful and it’s so rare to find a beautiful story.”
A beautiful story, but a devastating one as well, given it’s about a mother, played by Loren, trying to protect her young daughter from the horror of war.
“I always wanted to do a tragic film about the war, because even though I was a tiny, tiny little girl during the war I never forget what happened to us,” she says. “This kind of things, they’re stuck in your mind and they never leave you. Now when I see children on television carrying bombs and things like that I really die inside.”
After the births of two sons with her husband Carlo Ponti, a producer who backed many of her best-known roles, Loren slowed the pace of her work through the ’70s and ’80s.
She teamed up with Mastroianni in director Robert Altman’s 1994 “Ready to Wear,” re-creating the famous striptease with a comic twist; joined Ann-Margret, Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon a year later for “Grumpier Old Men”; and then mostly stepped out of the spotlight, a part in the 2009 musical film “Nine” a more recent exception.
Her son Edoardo Ponti directed her most recent work, the short film “The Human Voice,” which had “a beautiful, beautiful story,” and she’s working on getting the rights to another project that might bring her back to the screen once more.
“I am feeling when I find the right story for me,” Loren says. “You learn so many things during your life. You learn how to act. You learn how to move. I want to find a subject that fits me perfectly.”
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