Happy Birthday Sophia Loren

My personal favourite film of hers has to be Ieri, oggi, domani (aka Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow) by Vittorio de Sica, which won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1965; in it Sophia Loren stars with Marcello Mastroianni as three very different characters - one in Naples (yesterday), one in Rome (today), and one in Milan (tomorrow). Sexy as he is, Mastroianni's characters all seem like the same man; cast as a paragon of Italian womanhood in all its variety, Loren triumphs over him as easily as she does completely. After all, it's the role she was born to play.

Not only did that film display her range as an actress, it arrayed her against any number of her homeland's architectural masterpieces - and proved that there isn't a villa, campanile, or cathedral in all of Italy that holds a candelabra to her in the beauty department.

Born on this day in - get this - 1934, the 76-year-old icon is still going strong. In fact, she posed for the famed Pirelli Calendar in 2007; the calendar, which usually features supermodels, just once they thought they should get a goddess - and did they ever!  Even more recently Loren appeared in Rob Marshall's film version of Nine.

Never content just to be a pretty face, Loren is also a savvy business woman, marketing her own lines of eye wear, jewelry, and perfume. Accustomed as she is to being the subject of superlatives, she insists that her greatest achievement is her two sons, Carlo Jr. and Edoardo.

An Oscar winner for De Sica's 1960 masterpiece Two Women, in 1991 she also received an Honorary Oscar for her contribution to world cinema; not only was she on hand to give Federico Fellini his Honorary Oscar in 1993, she also handed one to Roberto Benigni for 1998's bittersweet miracle, Life Is Beautiful. Needless to say, her majestic presence dissolving into girlish glee upon exclaiming 'Roberto!', as much as Benigni's antics upon accepting the award, were the highlight of the telecast.
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