”I saw my father only six times in my life,” she told People Magazine. “He was a great source of pain and humiliation for my mother, whom he seduced and abandoned, for my younger sister, Maria, who suffered terribly because he would not give her his name, and for myself.”
Growing up in a single-parent household was tough financially.
“She was raised in severe poverty, sharing a bedroom with eight people at her grandparents’ home and living with other relatives,” writes Direct Expose. “Conditions eventually got so bad… that Loren’s mother would sometimes take water from the car radiator to feed to her daughters.”
Sophia lived through World War II, during which she was knocked to the ground in one aerial raid and was struck by shrapnel, leaving her with a scar on her chin.
”I was a little girl, but the sound and the experiences of the war never, never leave you,” she once said..
She suffered from mites and lice and was bullied at school for being so skinny.
But she emerged as the successful beauty we know her as today. After becoming a finalist in the Miss Italia 1950 beauty pageant, she then went on to attend the National Film School in Italy.
Still, her looks were criticized, and she was told her nose wasn’t right and she had to lose weight.
“It was an interesting nose, which is why I still have never changed it. Sometimes when you are very young, you have to wait for nature to shape you on the face or on the body. Then little by little, people see the nose was much nicer than they thought,” she told the San Diego Union-Tribune.
Full length portrait of Sophia Loren, Italian actress, wearing sheer black gown over black underwear, circa 1955. (Photo by Silver Screen Collection/Getty Images)
Her big break came playing an Ethiopian slave in the movie Aida when she was 19 years old, earning her critical acclaim.
Four years later she co-starred with Cary Grant and Frank Sinatra in The Pride and the Passion and in 1960 her role-playing a mother desperate to provide for her daughter in war-torn Rome in Two Women earned her an Oscar.
The awards didn’t stop there, Loren went on to win five special Golden Globes, a Grammy Award, an Honorary Academy Award and the Golden Globe Cecil B. DeMille Award for lifetime achievements, to name a few.
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