In one of cinema’s great potential sliding doors moments, Sophia Loren misread the address.
During the summer of 1950 she was 15-year-old Sophia Scicolone, newly arrived in Rome from Naples with her mother. One evening, mother and daughter were at an outdoor bar in the Parco di Colle Oppio where the Miss Rome pageant was taking place nearby.
An official from the contest approached the teenager and invited her to take part. Loren declined. Shortly afterwards a short, balding, tubby man with glasses introduced himself as the film producer Carlo Ponti and, as Loren remembered it, “started to talk exactly like a film producer”.
Ponti had, he told her, launched the careers of Italian film stars such as Alida Valli and Gina Lollobrigida and could do exactly the same for her. Young as she was, Loren could still spot a line when she was spun one.
“But he had very kind eyes,” she recalled, “and didn’t look at me the way most men did.”
Ponti gave Loren his card and invited her to his office the following day for a screen test.
Wearing a borrowed dress, the next morning Loren arrived at what she thought was the address on Ponti’s card. It turned out to be a police station. Thinking she’d been had, Loren was about to leave when a police officer looked at the card and pointed her towards the building next door.
“I walked up the stairs into a large office, and there was Carlo, surrounded by some of his people,” she said.
“He smiled, and I felt guilty for not trusting him.”
If Loren had just gone home that day, European cinema might have been deprived of one of its biggest stars as well as its most unusual and enduring love story. Despite a 25-year age difference, Carlo Ponti and Sophia Loren would marry and stay married until his death in 2007.
There was something delightfully stereotype-confounding in how, even in his own obituaries, Ponti was captioned as “husband of Sophia Loren”, but his contribution to postwar European cinema cannot be underestimated. During a career that encompassed more than 300 films, Ponti was a rare thing: a big-time film mogul who saw the importance of making art as well as the bottom line.
His many successes included David Lean’s 1965 classic Doctor Zhivago and Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up, released the following year. Directors such as Roberto Rossellini, Federico Fellini, King Vidor and Jean-Luc Godard might not have scaled their creative heights without Ponti’s recognition that one could make daring and challenging cinema and still turn a profit.
“People talk about making art films, experimental films,” he said. “I can make an art film every day of the week. There’s nothing to it. What is difficult is to combine a commercial film with art.”
Milan born, Ponti studied law as he saw it to be the fastest route to wealth. Soon after graduating, however, a friend persuaded him to supervise production on a film he was making when he had to go abroad.
Before long Ponti had joined the company permanently, risen to executive vice-president and scored his first commercial success with the 1941 historical war epic Piccolo mondo antico, (Old-Fashioned World), directed by Mario Soldati. He followed that with a successful adaptation of War and Peace.
After the war Ponti joined the Rome-based studio Lux Films, producing as many as 15 titles a year, and by the time he met Loren in 1950 he had joined fellow Lux alumnus Dino de Laurentiis in their own production company. There he would be responsible for such notable works as Rossellini’s Europa ’51 and a much more ambitious, Vidor-directed War and Peace starring Audrey Hepburn and Henry Fonda.
In 1954, having formed his own company, Ponti signed Anthony Quinn on a three-film deal that included Fellini’s 1954 classic La Strada, an Oscar-winner for Best Foreign Film.
By then Ponti was separated from his first wife, Giuliana, and in a relationship with Loren. In 1957 came the events that would catapult the couple on to the front pages, not to mention kickstart a radical review of Italy’s draconian marriage laws.
On a visit to Hollywood that year, Ponti obtained a divorce from Giuliana in Mexico followed a few weeks later by a proxy marriage where the couple were represented by lawyers – Ponti and Loren receiving confirmation of their union via Louella Parsons’ famous Hollywood gossip column.
Divorce was illegal in Italy, meaning their unusual marriage would not be recognised there. Not only that, bigamy charges were filed against Ponti, while Loren was charged with being a concubine.
Excommunication also seemed possible, the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore della Domenica noting that “civil divorce and successive civil marriage are gravely illicit acts” for which Ponti and Loren were therefore “public sinners” who should be punished with “the penalty of infamy”.
Unable to return to Italy, they remained in the US where Ponti became a noisy advocate for his wife’s talents, ensuring she became Italy’s best-known cinematic export despite the limited success of her films.
He was also singularly unimpressed with the workings of Hollywood, noting the vast suites of offices on a tour of a major studio and commenting, “They spend millions of dollars keeping these offices going and they are making two films. In Rome I have a secretary and a boy with a Vespa to run errands and I make five pictures a year”.
In 1960 the couple returned briefly to Italy to film La ciociara (Two Women), which would earn Loren the first Best Actress Academy Award given for a performance in a foreign language film. In return Ponti and Loren had to appear before a prosecutor where they denied they were married which, in the eyes of Italian law, was true.
The case was allowed to rest and in 1966 the couple moved to France, where Ponti obtained a more legally acceptable divorce and married Loren the following year.
Their legal travails did not end there: when they settled permanently in Paris in 1977 – after two foiled kidnap attempts in Italy – they were hit with charges of smuggling valuable artworks and large amounts of currency out of Italy.
While Loren was acquitted, Ponti was convicted in absentia, fined $26m and sentenced to four years in prison, a conviction that meant he could never return to his homeland.
Yet despite everything, unlikely as their relationship may have seemed, Ponti and Loren overcame this and every other challenge placed before them.
“I have done everything for love of Sophia,” he said. “I have always believed in her.”
