A Living Legend Sophia Loren Maintains Her Beauty And Positive Outlook

Sophia Loren is far from perfect., If you don’t believe it, just ask her. She’ll tell you that her mouth is too big, her nose too long, chin too short, hips too broad, eyes too far apart. She will admit, however, that it all seems to work for her.

At 61, it definitely still works for her, as evidenced by her sexy turn in “Grumpier Old Men,” which opened Friday, but even more so as she glides into her Los Angeles hotel suite, looking every bit, well, every bit of Sophia Loren. Is there any other Hollywood name that says it more?

That magnificent, olive-skinned face, those long dark legs, those alluring eyes, that … did we mention she was 61?

“Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder,” the actress said in typical understatement. “I don’t think I’m beautiful, at least not in the classical way.

“I think I have an interesting face, but I think it is the ensemble of the face, the body and the attitude that make me what I am. I think that is what people respond to. I happen to like myself, but if some people find me special then I suppose it is a mental thing they are experiencing.

“After all, sexiness is all mental,” she said while pointing to her head. “It starts here and then goes somewhere else.”

Loren, an Oscar winner who helped to define cinematic sexiness in the 1950s and ‘60s, is helping to redefine it in the ‘90s.

In a sendup of a scene from a film three decades earlier, she performed a sultry striptease for a sleepy Marcello Mastroianni last year in the Robert Altman movie “Ready To Wear” and plays the sexy outsider who comes between Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau in the new film, a sequel to the 1993 hit “Grumpy Old Men.”

“It was not difficult to come between two men,” she says matter-of-factly. “After all, I am a woman.”

Loren, who divides her time between homes in Switzerland and Los Angeles (where her two grown sons, Carlo and Edoardo, attend school), has been a star for more than 40 years.

It is a career that began with a bit part in the 1951 film “Quo Vadis” and has spanned 80 movies, including the 1961 film “Two Women,” which brought her the first Oscar won by an actress in a foreign film. In 1994, she was awarded a special Oscar for her body of work.

Born Sofia Scicolone in a charity hospital in Rome, she got her first taste of fame when she placed second in a beauty contest at age 15. One contest judge was movie producer Carlo Ponti, who took her under his wing, changed her name and launched her career.

In 1957, she faced two marriage proposals, one of them from Cary Grant, but she chose the older Ponti. She married him by proxy in Mexico and then remarried him in France in 1966.

“I picked him over Cary because I loved him,” she said with a look of bewilderment at the question. “But I suppose there was an element of the father-figure thing, too. He represented security to me.”

After four miscarriages, Loren remained in a bed for nine months for each of her two successful pregnancies.

One son is a classical musician and composer and the other a budding writer, and Loren said raising them has been more important to her than any aspect of her movie career.

“Family is very important to me, and while I think it is possible to be both a mother and have a career, I think it is very difficult,” she said.

“I learned from my mother that it takes complete dedication and sacrifice to be a good mother. Success in your career is fine up to a point, but then you have to face real life. You can’t be on a throne and raise children. Even with the sacrifice, I still feel guilty all the time. I always wonder whether I have been a good mother.”

Loren said her children joke about her “living legend” status and are often amazed at people’s reaction to her when the family is out in public.

“I’m just Mom to them, but I think they love teasing me. They call me the living legend, and that sounds so silly. That’s why it is hard to take this all too seriously.”

Unlike many actresses half her age, Loren said she is not afraid of aging. “It is not a privilege, it is a condition, and what can you do about it? Every day that goes by, you get another day older.”

But that doesn’t mean she is willing to age without a fight. She says she works out 45 minutes a day in front of the television, doing mostly abdominal exercises and stretching. If that doesn’t sound too rigid a regimen, she insists it’s really a mind-over-matter thing.

“If you rest, you rust, and I cannot afford to rust,” she says. “I try to keep moving all the time, but so much of it is in the head.”