Loren thanks Mom for 'fairy-tale life'
Star plays mother in bittersweet TV film
10 March, 18:04
(by Denis Greenan).(ANSA) - Rome, March 10 - Sophia Loren is playing her late mother in a new TV film to thank her for the hardship she endured to help give her daughter "a fairy-tale life", the screen legend said Wednesday.
Loren, 75, broke down in tears several times as she talked about La Mia Casa E' Piena di Specchi (My House Is Full of Mirrors), a two-parter airing on RAI state TV Sunday and Monday.
"Sorry, even if you talk about things a lot they still stay inside you, you never forget, you can't do anything about it," said the actress, who rose to international stardom from the backstreets of Naples.
"This isn't fiction, it's the true story, it's my life, a marvelous fairy tale," said the actress, who won an Oscar in 1962 and was most recently seen as Fellini's mother in the musical Nine.
"My mother's life was unhappy, painful, dramatic. She was a woman who loved life, fragile inside, hard on the outside,," Loren said of Romilda Villani, who "was like a tiger" in protecting her and her sister Maria in Pozzuoli during WWII.
Loren said the story, taken from a book of the same name by her sister, was "a tale of war, hunger, begging, because my mother did that for us, fighting to give a name to her daughters and a future away from poverty".
During the war, the harbour and munitions plant in Pozzuoli was a frequent bombing target of the allies. In one raid, as Loren ran to the shelter, she was struck by shrapnel and wounded in the chin.
After the war Loren's grandmother set up a pub, popular with GIs, in their living room where her mother played the piano, Maria sang and Sofia waited tables and washed dishes.
A couple of years later, at 14, she did well in a beauty contest and was spotted by future husband Carlo Ponti who launched her career as an extra in Quo Vadis.
But her mother, too, had had similar ambitions before running into showbiz hanger-on and general ne'er-do-well Riccardo Scicolone in the 1930s, Loren recalled Wednesday.
"She won an MGM competition as a Greta Garbo lookalike but her family wouldn't let her pursue it".
"So I was her way of getting back at them. She sacrificed so much for me. She'd greet me at the door with baked melanzane and meatballs, building me up".
If Loren's memories are bitterwsweet, some of those of Maria Scicolone are downright bitter.
"I was already a tired grown-up when I was eight, and I was pressed hard by my Mom, who was tough sometimes without really meaning to be," said Scicolone, 71, former wife of Benito Mussolini's jazz-playing son Romano and mother to today's rightwing MP Alessandra Mussolini.
Scicolone, who started writing the recently published book 20 years ago, admitted that her own life was "lived in a light reflected from someone else's, but I guess reflected light is OK in the long run".
Despite the hard times, Maria Scicolone has continued to be close to her older sister and found time for some banter Wednesday.
"You were really quite ugly when you were a kid," she told her.
