Sophia Loren: The Italian Screen Queen Bares All in New Memoir — elle.com

In myths there are mortals and gods; in Hollywood there are film stars, and then there is Sophia Loren. In her new memoir, Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow: My Life, the recent octogenarian recalls her glamorous past with entrancing candor. A true rags-to-riches story, Italian Loren—née Sofia Scicolone—grew up dirt-poor with an absent father whose most durable contribution was his last name (though even that didn’t last), and found her deus ex machina in a 1949 beauty pageant that won her a train ticket from her small town to Rome. There, she successfully auditioned for a bit role with Rome MGM and went on to bask in the golden glow of ‘50s Hollywood, win an Oscar, and cavort with an aging (in the fine wine way) Cary Grant. From her politically entangled, four-decade-long marriage to producer Carlo Ponti to her unlikely incarceration in an Italian prison, Loren invites us into her mythic world with the same warmth she brought to one of her earliest roles as a pizza-vendor’s popular wife, calling to the people of her town—venite, venite, come in!

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