Book Review: “Sophia Loren: Movie Star Italian Style”

Like Ava: A Life in Movies by Kendra Bean and Anthony Uzarowski, Sophia Loren: Movie Star Italian Style by Cindy De La Hoz is a pictorial biography. While we learn a lot about the famous international star, it’s the pictures that really take center stage; the biography is filled with gorgeous images on almost every page.

Sophia Loren was born out of wedlock to Romilda Villani, a concert pianist and Riccardo Scicolone, a man with “a distant nobel lineage.” Villani hoped Scicolone would marry her (she had another daughter by him, Maria), but that wasn’t to be. As a teenager, Villani won a Greta Garbo look-alike contest sponsored by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Unfortunately, Villani’s parents wouldn’t allow their daughter to travel to the United States. Villani’s Hollywood dreams may have been dashed, but she invested all her energy into her eldest daughter “Sofia.”

“The two big advantages I had at birth were to have been born wise and to have been born in poverty.” –Sophia Loren

Sophia started her career as an extra in Italian films after World War II. She and her mother were among the thousands of extras used for the 1951 epic Quo Vadis starring Robert Taylor and Deborah Kerr. Before too long, she was appearing in minor roles in Italian films, slowly developing a reputation in Italy. Sophia appeared in all kinds of movies in Italy, but in 1954 she had the good fortune to work with Vittorio De Sica on the The Gold of Naples. De Sica was a respected actor and director and their collaborations on screen would further both their careers. The Gold of Naples made Sophia a star in Italy and Europe; she was the toast of the 1955 Cannes Film Festival.

Sophia and Cary Grant in
The Pride and the Passion

Sophia’s career really took off when she went to Hollywood in 1957. Americans first got to see Sophia in Boy on a Dolphin, although the first American movie she worked on was The Pride and the Passion co-starring Cary Grant and Frank Sinatra. Boy on a Dolphin, filmed on location in Greece, was released first. Sophia starred alongside Alan Ladd and Clifton Webb in the colorful adventure tale directed by Hollywood veteran Jean Negulesco. Negulesco went on say “[Sophia] has, without a doubt, the most extraordinary talent I have ever met.”

As a film fan, I really like the way the book features all of Sophia’s movies chronologically with movie stills, film posters, as well as on-the-set images. It’s a great way to revisit the film icon’s career and relive some of the great movies she was a part of. My favorite Sophia Loren movie is Houseboat (1958). It made a big impression on me as a child and it has stayed with me every since. Sophia’s charm and personality really come through. Plus it doesn’t hurt that her costar is Cary Grant. As an Italian socialite trying to escape the tight grip of her father, Sophia’s character (Cinzia) gets a job as a nanny to widower Grant’s three young children. Sophia is a natural with the kids and everyone looks like they’re having a ball. As biographer Ms. De La Hoz says, it “is a delight from start to finish.”


If you’re a movie or Sophia Loren fan, you’re sure to enjoy Sophia: Movie Star Italian Style. If you put this book on your coffee table alongside Ava: A Life in Movies, your guests will never leave!

Sophia: Movie Star Italian Style
Hardcover 264 pages
Publisher: Running Press (September 26, 2017)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0762461314
ISBN-13: 978-0762461318
Product Dimensions: 8” x 10”
Price: $35.00

Book Review: "Ava: A Life in Movies"

This new biography of screen legend Ava Gardner is one pretty package. Authors Kendra Bean and Anthony Uzarowski, while focusing on Gardner’s “life in movies,” also smoothly weave in pertinent information on the star’s personal life. The book is loaded with gorgeous photographs—some candid, some studio generated—that remind us what a beautiful woman Gardner was.

Gardner was born in “a five-bedroom clapboard house in Johnston County, North Carolina on Christmas Eve, 1922.” Her rise to stardom and iconic stature during Hollywood’s Golden Age is the stuff of fairy tales. Gardner never having any ambition to be an actress of any stripe got noticed by Barney Duhan, a Loews Incorporated employee (parent company of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). Gardner’s photo was prominently displayed in her brother-in-laws photographic studio in New York and Duhan, looking for a date, inquired about the beautiful girl in the window. In a phone call to the photo shop, Duhan mentioned that he worked for MGM. Gardner wasn’t in New York so she never met him. Based on Duhan’s interest, Gardner’s brother-in-law decided to deliver her photos to MGM’s New York office. This led to a screen test and a contract in 1941. She was only 18 years old.

Ava: A Life in Movies details the actress’s rise from bit player to major movie star with words and pictures. And as mentioned before, the photographs are plenty and beautiful. Many haven’t been seen before. My favorite is a studio test shot of Gardner taken in 1942  (page 31). This headshot was attached to her MGM employment questionnaire. She already looks like a movie star; it’s obvious that the camera loved her. I don’t know how many pictures of Gardner Bean and Uzarowski looked at, but all the pictures in their biography are pretty amazing. The woman apparently never took a bad picture.

A studio publicity photo of Gardner in fashionable beachwear

Not meaning to take anything away from the text—which is engaging, well researched, and easy-reading—I would be negligent if I didn’t mention what a beautiful package this book is. The cover, the endpapers, the typography, all make it the perfect book for your coffee table (it’s too beautiful to put on your bookshelf). If you’re interested in Ava Gardner and classic Hollywood, I think you’ll enjoy Ava: A Life in Movies.


Ava: A Life in Movies
Hardcover: 264 pages
Publisher: Running Press (July 11, 2017)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0762459948
ISBN-13: 978-0762459940
Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 1.2 x 10.4 inches
Price: $30.00

New Barbara Stanwyck biography out this month

A Life of Barbara Stanwyck: Steel-True 1907-1940 by Victoria Wilson comes out this month. I’m looking forward to reading and reviewing it, but thought I’d post the description of the first part of the two-part biography from Amazon for your review. At the end of this post is a video of Wilson describing how this project (a work that took her 15 years!) came together and what sets it apart from other Stanwyck biographies. Anyone who reads this blog knows that I'm a huge Stanwyck fan. You can pre-order Wilson’s biography by clicking here.

Frank Capra called her “The greatest emotional actress the screen has yet known.” She was one of its most natural, timeless, and underrated stars. Now, Victoria Wilson gives us the first full-scale life of Barbara Stanwyck, whose astonishing career in movies (eighty-eight in all) spanned four decades beginning with the coming of sound, and lasted in television from its infancy in the 1950s through the 1980s—a book that delves deeply into her rich, complex life and explores her extraordinary range of motion pictures, many of them iconic. Here is her work, her world, her Hollywood.

We see the quintessential Brooklyn girl whose family was in fact of old New England stock . . . her years in New York as a dancer and Broadway star . . . her fraught mar­riage to Frank Fay, Broadway genius, who influenced a generation of actors and comedians (among them, Jack Benny and Stanwyck herself ) . . . the adoption of a son, embattled from the outset; her partnership with the “unfunny” Marx brother, Zeppo, crucial in shaping the direction of her work, and who, together with his wife, formed a trio that created one of the finest horse-breeding farms in the west; her fairy-tale romance and marriage to the younger Robert Taylor, America’s most sought-after— and beautiful—male star.

Here is the shaping of her career with many of Hol­lywood’s most important directors: among them, Frank Capra, “Wild Bill” William Wellman (“When you get beauty and brains together,” he said, “there’s no stopping the lucky girl who possesses them. The best example I can think of is Barbara”), King Vidor, Cecil B. De Mille, and Preston Sturges, all set against the times—the Depression, the New Deal, the rise of the unions, the advent of World War II—and a fast-changing, coming-of-age motion picture industry.

And here is Stanwyck’s evolution as an actress in the pictures she made from 1929 through the summer of 1940, where Volume One ends—from her first starring movie, The Locked Door (“An all-time low,” she said. “By then I was certain that Hollywood and I had nothing in common”); and Ladies of Leisure, the first of her six-picture collaboration with Frank Capra (“He sensed things that you were trying to keep hidden from people. He knew. He just knew”), to the scorching Baby Face, and the height of her screen perfection, beginning with Stella Dallas (“I was scared to death all the time we were making the pic­ture”), from Clifford Odets’s Golden Boy and the epic Union Pacific to the first of her collaborations with Preston Sturges, who wrote Remember the Night, in which she starred.

And at the heart of the book, Stanwyck herself—her strengths, her fears, her frailties, her losses and desires; how she made use of the darkness in her soul in her work and kept it at bay in her private life, and finally, her transformation from shunned outsider to one of Holly­wood’s—and America’s—most revered screen actresses.

Writing with the full cooperation of Stanwyck’s family and friends, and drawing on more than two hundred interviews with actors, directors, cameramen, screen­writers, costume designers, et al., as well as making use of letters, journals, and private papers, Victoria Wilson has brought this complex artist brilliantly alive. Her book is a revelation of the actor’s life and work.

For you chance to win a copy of the new Victoria Wilson biography click here.