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Hollywood prejudice is unlikely to break down all the way in one year, so the odds are that the winner will be one of the other four nominees—Audrey Hepburn (Breakfast at Tiffany's), Piper Laurie (The Hustler), Geraldine Page (Summer and Smoke) or Natalie Wood (Splendor in the Grass). Sophia's work in Two Women is more than comparable to any in that list, and she is going to fly 6,000 miles on the chance that Hollywood has the courage to agree. "Imagine," she says, "if an Italian girl gets an Oscar for an Italian picture and suppose I'm not there." Deep but Narrow. A short time ago, all this serious attention toward Sophia Loren would have seemed as preposterous as the suggestion that Jimmy Hoffa might some day win a Nobel Prize. She owes her newfound status almost exclusively to European film makers, a fact that illuminates the general difference between films made by Hollywood and films made by Europeans. The difference is a matter of maturity and honesty. In Europe, for example, realism means graphic truth; in Hollywood it means sordidness. Romantic fantasy, in Hollywood, means juvenile sentimentality. Europeans know how to dream better than that.
Sophia Loren is an actress of narrow range, but under skillful direction she is an actress of enormous depth. With an authority that beggars the cheap criticism that she is merely playing herself, she can put her hands on her hips, cock her head, turn bargaining eyes toward the camera and drench an audience in the sunshine and sadness, shrugs, shouts, laughter and song of southern Italy. She does so for De Sica in Two Women—hair blowing in her eyes, dressed sexlessly in threadbare clothes, pouting, cursing, writing chapters in the air with her hands. She plays a ferociously protective mother who is helpless to prevent her daughter's rape by Moroccan soldiers. It is a brutal but honest film.
Hollywood, on the other hand, which drew her to the U.S. in 1957, mainly cast her in dishonest stories with dishonest endings. In A Breath of Scandal, she was a fin-de-siècle Austrian princess falling in love with a mining engineer from Pittsburgh. In Heller in Pink Tights, she was an actress traveling the Old West who bet her "honor" in a poker game with a desperate gunfighter.
She was given difficult parts before she knew the language, as in O'Neill's Desire Under the Elms, and she was matched with leading men whom she could have swallowed with half a glass of water. "It's very difficult to find a man who can compete with me, with how I look on the screen," she says with professionally detached candor. "It would be a nice experience to be dominated for once." Tab Hunter was her partner in That Kind of Woman. When little 5-ft. 6-in. Alan Ladd did a film with 5-ft. 8-in. Sophia, a trench was dug so they could walk along side by side. Houseboat gave her a chance to show her comic talent opposite Cary Grant, but by then she had had enough of Hollywood, and she returned to Rome.
She showed no sign of regret at abandoning the moneyed and meaningless roles Hollywood had assigned her, knowing with sure instinct that such parts would never be right for a girl born to the tumbling poverty of Italy's back streets. Says one director: "Sophia is perhaps the only movie star who has never forgotten where she came from."