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After she had done bit parts in about ten pictures, a producer at Rome's Titanus films rechanged her name to Loren.
Taking voice lessons, she shed her Neapolitan dialect for a clearer Italian. She posed for more pictures—semi-covered with a bath towel, twirling an eel like a two-foot hot dog, being lassoed by Indians, having her brassière adjusted by a male volunteer, going to Mass, holding her skirt so high that the Italian police confiscated the entire edition of the magazine that ran the picture on its cover.
Editors took one look at that wonderful set of beautiful big luminous eyes and craved photographs of Sophia for their newspapers and magazines.
Walk in the Rain. Suddenly Sophia Loren was a star. Mouthing Verdi while Renata Tebaldi's voice was fed into the sound track, she became a voluptuous, musky Aïda. And in Gold of Naples, the picture that spread her reputation across continents and seas, she played a Neapolitan pizza vendor's wife whose wonderful, self-congratulating look seemed to say: "Look at me. I'm all woman, and it will be a long time before you see such a woman again." She took a long, unforgettable walk in the rain through the streets of the city, drinking the applause of venal eyes.
Within four years, she starred in 21 pictures, some of them with Hollywood companies working abroad. She bared her north temperate zone in Two Nights with Cleopatra and her subtropics in Woman of the River. But the great moment of that early phase of her career came when she played a sponge diver in Boy on a Dolphin. Following the custom of native girls in the Greek islands, she lifted her skirt toward her hips, tucked it between her legs, and pinned it in back to her belt.
She dived into the mottled blue-green Aegean, and when she came up, all dripping and skin-soaked, the sea had yielded its finest vision since Botticelli painted Aphrodite on her shell.
All the Best. Supervising all this with a watchful eye was Producer Carlo Ponti, who met Sophia when she first went to Rome, signed her to something the Italians call a "personal contract," helped shape her career, became her lover, then her husband (in 1957) by proxy marriage in Mexico, then technically her lover again —this year—when bigamy charges pressed by a religious zealot in Milan forced the couple to disavow their marriage. Carlo had been married before, and his divorce, also Mexican, is recognized in Italy by neither church nor state. "I give up," says Sophia. "I'm married, I'm not married.
I'm this, I'm that. Basta. I feel married, and lots of married people don't feel married." Ponti is a major figure in the Italian cinema in his own right. He has produced hundreds of films, including Gold of Naples, La Strada and War and Peace. It is sometimes barbarously pointed out that he is twice as old as she is and half as tall.