Sophia Loren looks comfortably at home in her sumptuous suite at New York's Mayfair Regent Hotel. With her elegantly cut business suit and carefully coiffed hair, she's the perfect match for her surroundings.
It's not hard to understand why: Both the star and her favorite Manhattan pied a terre are Old World princesses whose gracefully accumulated years only seem to emphasize their elegant charms.Now 58, Loren looks decades younger. Her famous Neopolitan features retain their expressive beauty, and her quick laugh and flashing eyes can cause instant cinematic reverie.
It's a face that defined Continental beauty for a generation of audiences in movies from "Houseboat" to "Man of La Mancha."
Yet though her glamour seems ageless, Loren acknowledged that she is part of a long-departed era in movies - that distant time when stars remained as mysterious as they were magnetic, directors were tempestuous demigods with foreign accents, and Hollywood cranked out Big Movies.
"I think I belong to another generation, for sure," she admitted. "I've been in this business for a long time. I started when I was a teenager."
Loren was in New York recently to attend the re-release of one such Golden Age dinosaur - "El Cid," a three-hour epic first released in 1961 - at the Joseph Papp Theater.
The previous evening's premiere had been a gala event: Loren and "El Cid" co-star Charlton Heston were given full paparazzi treatment; renowned director Martin Scorsese, who had presided over the restoration of "El Cid," gushed lovingly about a "forgotten masterpiece" in his introductory talk; Marisa Tomei and other current hot young things were in respectful attendance.
As the lights came up at the film's end, Heston and Loren received enthusiastic ovations for their respective portrayals of El Cid, the medieval Spanish folk hero, and Chimene, his long-suffering lover. Afterward, many remarked on Loren's ability to transform an insubstantial and sometimes unsympathetic role into a character with many nuances and believable motivations.
But despite the compliments and adulation, Loren suffers no illusions about the sometimes brutal rules of the trade that dictated her career: Beauty was paramount, and talent often was overlooked. She was quick to point out that like most screen beauties, she was forced to peak young.
"I'm the same generation as Robert Redford, but his films came later. Even Robert De Niro is only a little younger, and Dustin Hoffman and Al Pacino."
Loren believes she suffered from a pervasive sexism that she says still plagues the film industry. "There always seems to be a lack of good ideas, a lack of good stories, particularly for women," she said. "Somehow, men always manage to put together a story that can work for them, and in these stories, the woman has the type of role that, well, she can be there or she can't, you know?
"So this is very sad for us because I think there are so many actresses who have a lot of talent, and they don't get the opportunity to be able to find the right parts."
Fortunately, Loren was persistent enough to land roles that displayed her considerable abilities. Originally marketed as little more than a bombshell with a cute accent, she proved herself with substantial dramatic roles in films such as "Two Women" (1961), in which her heart-wrenching portrayal of a wartime mother won her a dark horse Academy Award.
Later films such as "Marriage - Italian Style" (1964) showed her to be a talented comedian as well.
Still, Loren candidly admits that she felt unprepared for stardom, and she remembers being more than a little intimidated when she found herself, in her early 20s, in the arms of Cary Grant, William Holden, Charlton Heston and other leading men of Hollywood.
"When I started working with these people, it caused a lot of tension (in me). I am a very shy person, and I had to work out some psychological things inside of myself to overcome this timidity that I have."
Director Vittorio de Sica, who led her to her Oscar-winning performance, once gave her a tip that, Loren said, helped with such difficulties.
"Sometimes when I was working with a very important actor who was maybe not being very nice, I would imagine inside of myself things that I couldn't repeat. And I would keep a very nice smile on my face."
What kinds of things?
She smiled devilishly. "De Sica told me once that if you're working with somebody who thinks of himself as a big shot, look at him and think that there is, uh, something bad on his forehead. So I would read imaginary words on his forehead."
She lets loose with a descriptive insult - first in Italian, then in English - then erupts into peals of laughter.