Actress Sophia Loren celebrates her 90th birthday

Italian star Sophia Loren, a cinema icon crowned with two Oscars in Hollywood, celebrates her 90th birthday in Rome on Friday evening, just a few days before French actress Brigitte Bardot, “two divas who redefined the feminine imagination of the 20th century” according to an Italian daily.

Born in the Eternal City on September 20, 1934, the unforgettable protagonist of “A Special Day” (1977) will celebrate her 90th birthday at a private party held in a luxury hotel in the historic center.

After a tribute organised in a Roman cinema by the Cinecittà studios and the Minister of Culture, the actress will meet some 150 friends, colleagues and family members for a dinner on the terrace of the hotel, where she will also inaugurate a suite bearing her name, according to the newspaper Il Corriere della Sera.

For the occasion, Sophie Loren will be dressed by her great friend Giorgio Armani.

On Friday, the peninsula’s major dailies looked back at the extraordinary career of the brunette with almond-shaped eyes, who had as partners in Hollywood the greatest actors of the time, from Anthony Queen to Clark Gable, including Marlon Brando, Cary Grant, Peter Sellers, John Wayne and Frank Sinatra…

“Sophia Loren, the myth is 90 years old,” is the headline in Il Corriere, while the Roman newspaper Il Messaggero pays tribute to “the unexpected icon of women’s rights.”

La Repubblica chose to associate her with her French colleague Brigitte Bardot, who will turn 90 on September 28. “Splendid nonagenarians,” praised the left-wing daily, which paid tribute to “the two divas who redefined the feminine imagination of the 20th century.”

Sophia Loren’s 90th birthday will also be marked by a retrospective at the Lincoln Center in New York.

Public television Rai has planned several reruns of its films, including Friday evening on Rai3 a restored version of “Marriage Italian Style” with Marcello Mastroianni, which in itself combines several anniversaries: the 60th anniversary of the film, released in 1964, the centenary of Mastroianni’s birth (September 26, 1924) and the 50th anniversary of the death of its director Vittorio De Sica (1974).

A legend of the 7th art, the actress, widowed since the death of producer Carlo Ponti in January 2007, made a return to Italian small screens in 2010 in a TV film about her life in which she played her own mother.

In 2014, she published an autobiography entitled “Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow” for her 80th birthday.

Her last film appearance was in 2020 in “La vie devant soi”, an adaptation of Romain Gary’s novel directed by her son Edoardo Ponti. Thanks to this role, she won the Best Actress award at the 2021 Cesar Awards for Italian cinema.