This made-for-television biopic, like a classical drama, seems to fall into five acts. Act I deals with the relationship between Sophia Loren's parents. Her mother, Romilda Villani, was a piano teacher and aspiring actress from PozzuolI, near Naples. Her father, Riccardo Scicolone, was the playboy son of an upper-class Roman family. Although Scicolone acknowledged Sophia as his daughter, he always refused to marry Romilda, whom he kept for a time as his mistress; the two had another daughter, Maria.
Act II deals with Sophia's wartime childhood and Act III with her rise to fame as a beauty queen and as a young star of the Italian cinema of the 1950s. Act IV is centred upon the love-triangle involving Sophia and the two men in her life, both much older than her, the film star Cary Grant and the producer Carlo Ponti. Act V deals with her struggle to marry Ponti- not easy, because he was already married at a time when Italian law did not recognise divorce- and the birth of their elder son, Carlo junior.
Sophia Loren herself obviously wanted to be at the centre of the film- so much so that she insisted on playing not only her own mother (throughout the film) but also herself (in Acts IV and V). A simple glance at the chronology of Loren's life will show just what a bad piece of casting this was. The film was made in 1980, when Loren was 46, and she is simply not convincing either as the young Romilda (only 24 when her daughter was born) or as her younger self. At the time of her involvement with Grant, which began when they made "The Pride and the Passion" together in 1957, Loren was only 23, and 34 when Carlo junior was born in 1968.
The eccentric casting does not end with the use of a middle-aged actress to play two much younger women. Although Grant eventually became a naturalised American citizen, he was British by birth and off-screen always spoke with the accents of his native Bristol, but here he is played as an American by an American actor. The same actor, Armand Assante, is used to play Riccardo both as a young man and as an old one, with bizarre consequences. There is one scene in which Loren meets her now-elderly father for the first time in many years. Is this the only scene in cinema history in which a father is played by an actor fifteen years younger than the actress playing his daughter? The scene is particularly bizarre in that the make-up department appear to have made only the most perfunctory efforts to make Assante look older than 31, his actual age in 1980.
As far as the storyline is concerned, the film is actually rather better than some made-for-TV biopics of famous actresses. I am thinking in particular of that dreadful life of Grace Kelly with Cheryl Ladd, also from the early eighties, which gave us a bland, sanitised account of Kelly's life and made no attempt to explore what sort of a person she actually was. Kelly's numerous affairs are airbrushed out of history, whereas "Sophia Loren: Her Own Story" does at least make an attempt at a warts-and-all portrayal. It does not attempt to hide the fact that, during the love triangle with Ponti and Grant Loren was not only committing adultery by sleeping with a married man but was also cheating on him with a rival. (The Italian authorities threatened to prosecute her for "concubinage" but never actually did so, doubtless realising that the prosecutor responsible for putting La Loren in jail would have made himself the most hated man in Italy). Its attempts at honesty, however, cannot really hide the fact that this is little more than an ill-conceived vanity project on the part of Loren, simultaneously its subject and its dual star. 4/10
Act II deals with Sophia's wartime childhood and Act III with her rise to fame as a beauty queen and as a young star of the Italian cinema of the 1950s. Act IV is centred upon the love-triangle involving Sophia and the two men in her life, both much older than her, the film star Cary Grant and the producer Carlo Ponti. Act V deals with her struggle to marry Ponti- not easy, because he was already married at a time when Italian law did not recognise divorce- and the birth of their elder son, Carlo junior.
Sophia Loren herself obviously wanted to be at the centre of the film- so much so that she insisted on playing not only her own mother (throughout the film) but also herself (in Acts IV and V). A simple glance at the chronology of Loren's life will show just what a bad piece of casting this was. The film was made in 1980, when Loren was 46, and she is simply not convincing either as the young Romilda (only 24 when her daughter was born) or as her younger self. At the time of her involvement with Grant, which began when they made "The Pride and the Passion" together in 1957, Loren was only 23, and 34 when Carlo junior was born in 1968.
The eccentric casting does not end with the use of a middle-aged actress to play two much younger women. Although Grant eventually became a naturalised American citizen, he was British by birth and off-screen always spoke with the accents of his native Bristol, but here he is played as an American by an American actor. The same actor, Armand Assante, is used to play Riccardo both as a young man and as an old one, with bizarre consequences. There is one scene in which Loren meets her now-elderly father for the first time in many years. Is this the only scene in cinema history in which a father is played by an actor fifteen years younger than the actress playing his daughter? The scene is particularly bizarre in that the make-up department appear to have made only the most perfunctory efforts to make Assante look older than 31, his actual age in 1980.
As far as the storyline is concerned, the film is actually rather better than some made-for-TV biopics of famous actresses. I am thinking in particular of that dreadful life of Grace Kelly with Cheryl Ladd, also from the early eighties, which gave us a bland, sanitised account of Kelly's life and made no attempt to explore what sort of a person she actually was. Kelly's numerous affairs are airbrushed out of history, whereas "Sophia Loren: Her Own Story" does at least make an attempt at a warts-and-all portrayal. It does not attempt to hide the fact that, during the love triangle with Ponti and Grant Loren was not only committing adultery by sleeping with a married man but was also cheating on him with a rival. (The Italian authorities threatened to prosecute her for "concubinage" but never actually did so, doubtless realising that the prosecutor responsible for putting La Loren in jail would have made himself the most hated man in Italy). Its attempts at honesty, however, cannot really hide the fact that this is little more than an ill-conceived vanity project on the part of Loren, simultaneously its subject and its dual star. 4/10
