Product Description

"Creating an earthy new sexuality for the post-World War II world, she became Italy's most beloved export. She is the only performer to ever win the Oscar; for a foreign language film. Sophia Loren has enjoyed a storybook career, rising from a dirt- poor childhood to become one of the most celebrated and admired actresses ever. Trace her remarkable life in this revealing program. Clips from her many films, including rarely seen footage from Italian features The Gold of Naples and Attila, show her evolution as a performer. But while her career has been a string of successes, conflict and turmoil mark her private life. Period accounts bring her battles with the church and state to life, while rare stills and interviews with biographers chronicle her tempestuous romance with lifelong love Carlo Ponti. From Love, Italian Style to her own, inimitable style, this is a revealing portrait of a truly international superstar."

Product Details

• #37861 in VHS
• Released on: 1999-04-27
• Rating: NR (Not Rated)
• Formats: Black & White, Color, NTSC
• Number of tapes: 1
• Running time: 50 minutes

Amazon.com
Born a sickly infant in an Italian hospital charity ward to an unwed mother, Sophia Loren had a long, hard climb to her status as an international film star, Oscar winner, and United Nations Goodwill Ambassador. This 45-minute Biography, part of the A&E Great Entertainers series, engagingly chronicles her ascent and her tempestuous connection with her home country, which for years refused to acknowledge her marriage to her mentor, the divorced producer Carlo Ponti. Narrated by Peter Graves and rounded out with interviews from costars Tippi Hedron, Anthony Quinn, and Tab Hunter and biographer A.E. Hotchner, this video features clips of a young, heartbreakingly beautiful Loren in her early black-and-white Italian films all the way through to her 1995 performance in Grumpier Old Men. It also gives equal time to her personal life, including her refugee experience during World War II, her troubled relationship with her mother, and her well-publicized miscarriages, precarious pregnancies, and subsequent births to two sons with Ponti. --Kimberly Heinrichs