Sophia Loren, the very last Hollywood star!
A few months ago, “Sophia Loren Restaurant” opened in Wan Chai inside the historic Woo Cheong Pawn Shop. The Pawn Shop and the 3 adjacent tenement houses at Johnston Road, Wan Chai constitute a row of 4 bays of balcony type tenement buildings forming a continuous façade veranda rarely seen nowadays. It is believed that certain parts of the buildings could date from around 1888. The shophouses were a mixture of Chinese and Western architectural features including high ceilings, light wells, French windows to the balconies, and covered pedestrian arcade formed by the projected balconies and the columns on ground floor.
The buildings were preserved and redeveloped in 2008, now have become the stage for this unique concept: four floors hosting a Neapolitan pizzeria, an Italian restaurant, a cocktail bar and a panoramic terrace overlooking one of Hong Kong's most iconic neighbourhoods. An ambitious project that adds prestige to the culinary scene of the Island.
But who is Sophia Loren? For film buffs in Italy and Hollywood, her name is that of a great diva, a woman who made the history of cinema, an icon of style and elegance at any age, still beautiful today, on the dawn of her 90th birthday.
Raised in Pozzuoli (also the birthplace of Chef Antimo), a small town near Naples, thousands of kilometres far from Hollywood. It is here that in the 1940s, during the war, among the rubble of the bomb sites and the sound of sirens, a star was born.
During the war raids, she found a shelter in the cinema of Pozzuoli, a true escape from the atrocities of daily life during the Second World War and from the pangs of poverty and hunger. It is here that she discovered Rita Hayworth, Greta Garbo and the great actresses of that time. At the age of 15, thanks to a beauty contest, she found the money to move to Rome and begin her career in the film industry.
In the early 1950s she met producer Carlo Ponti, her great love, whom she married in 1957. Together with him she remained in the United States working in Hollywood. It was in these years that she established herself as an international star and her definitive consecration as an actress came with her performance in the film Two Women, in which she was initially supposed to play the daughter Rosetta, but in the end, she played the part of Cesira that had initially been offered to Anna Magnani. Set during the Second World War, the film is based on the novel by Alberto Moravia. At that time Sophia Loren was only 25 years old, when Vittorio De Sica unexpectedly offered her the role of Cesira. This performance earned Loren an Oscar, the Palme d'Or at Cannes, the BAFTA, the David di Donatello and the Nastro d'Argento.
In the 1960s, she also began her collaboration with Marcello Mastroianni, with whom she remained friends until Mastroianni’s death in 1996: during their career, they filmed together Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow, Marriage Italian Style, Sunflowers and Pret-a-Porter, Matroianni’s last film.
During her years in Hollywood, she always refused to correct some of her physical characteristics. In her memoir, “Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow: My Life”, she wrote “I knew perfectly well that my beauty was the result of many irregularities all together in one face, my face. Whether I won or lost, it would be in the original version”. And in fact, she won.
Sophia Loren shines in every character she plays, a true icon on and off the screen. Even though her roles vary from escorts to millionaires, from pizza chefs to countesses, and from modern housewives to noblewomen of ancient Rome, what ties all her characters together is their strength. Today, a few days away from her 90th birthday, celebrated as the most successful Italian actress of all time also thanks to the concept “Sophia Loren Ristorante” which has now become a brand of excellence, we wish her 100 of these days.