Film icon Sophia Loren marks 80th birthday with memoir

(ANSA) - Rome, September 19 - Sophia Loren, considered Italy's most famous living actress, marks her 80th birthday Saturday with a tell-all memoir that promises a peek into the lives of Hollywood's most storied film legends as well as the diva herself.
    Loren, a self-described skinny street urchin from Naples who never knew her father, grew to star in some 80 films and became the first person to win an Academy Award in a foreign-language film in 1961 as Best Actress in the Italian drama Two Women.
    In a varied career, she starred alongside such leading men as Marcello Mastroianni, Gregory Peck, Frank Sinatra, Marlon Brando and actor and director Vittorio De Sica - many of whom, she reveals, ardently pursued her.
    Her memoir 'Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow - A Life' borrows its title from her 1963 smash comedy with Mastroianni, the fellow Italian with whom she shared the screen in 12 different films over a 20-year span. The film, directed by De Sica, won an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film at the 37th Academy Awards in 1965.
    "Of all my films with Marcello and Vittorio, I remember the smallest detail, everything...when filming certain scenes you already know that you are never going to forget them," she said earlier this year.
    She also won a Best Actress Oscar for the 1964 Mastoianni co-starred film Marriage Italian Style.
    Her memoir, including a love letter from Cary Grant as well as telegrams from Richard Burton, has been released in Italy and is due to be published in December in the United States.