Few starlets embodied the glitz and glamour of Hollywood's Golden Age quite like Italian actor Sophia Loren. Initially cast as Europe’s answer to Marilyn Monroe, her career was big and bold, groundbreaking in its international success: for her role in 1961's Two Women, she became the first actor to win an Oscar for a foreign-language performance. Her globe-trotting work took her back and forth between continents as she worked with all the greats of American and Italian cinema, making classics such as El Cid, Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, Marriage Italian Style, Houseboat, and A Special Day.
Now 86 years old, Loren recently returned to acting after a 10-year hiatus from filmmaking to star in the film The Life Ahead. During her time away, she says she focused on her family: namely her two sons, whom she shared with the late director Carlo Ponti, as well as her four grandchildren.
Today, her eldest granddaughter, Lucia Sophia Ponti, is 15—the same age as Loren when she first launched her iconic career by entering the 1950 Miss Italia beauty pageant in Naples. See Lucia now!
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Sophia Loren says her grandchildren are her “beauty secret.”
Sophia Loren is known not only for her acting chops, but also for her timeless beauty. So much so, in fact, that she’s often asked her secret to graceful aging.
While speaking with Al Roker on Today in 2016, the actor shared that her greatest beauty secret is not some treatment, product, or designer—it’s to nurture her “inside” beauty by living a life full of love and family—in particular, her grandkids. "I live for my family. I have the most beautiful grandchildren that I've ever seen in my life,” she said, adding, "I'm happy! I live a wonderful life."
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Lucia’s parents are both big names in Hollywood.
Lucia’s dad—Loren’s younger son—is Italian film directorEdoardo Ponti. In addition to directing Loren's most recent film, The Life Ahead, he and his mother have collaborated on two other films: Between Strangers and Human Voice. He’s also known for directing Coming and Going, which starred his wife and Lucia’s mother, Sasha Alexander.
Alexander is a film and television actor best known for her roles on Dawson’s Creek, Shameless, Rizzoli & Isles, and NCIS. You may also recognize her from movies like Yes Man and He's Just Not That Into You.
Lucia’s dad has also written a book of poetry addressed to his daughter.
During his wife’s pregnancy with Lucia, the couple's first child, Ponti wrote a series of poems for his unborn daughter, and later published them in a 2018 book called Letters From a Young Father. "I always used (poetry) to make sense of complicated feelings, make sense of thoughts I had, make sense of my life," Ponti told Milwaukee radio station WUWM. "There's something very direct and very intimate about poetry, and this is a very unique form of poetry, which is poetry letters in a sense."
"All these letter poems were addressed to my daughter, almost like a blueprint on how to live, how to love, how to remember," he explained. Though Lucia was 12 when he released the book—too young, he says, for her to fully understand its significance to him, "it's almost like a seed you plant, and then you see that seed grow and flower over the course of the years."
Today, Lucia is finding her own passions.
Though Lucia is only 15, and likely living the life of a (semi-)regular kid with a (mega-)famous grandmother and Hollywood parents, she’s now busy developing passions of her own. The teen seems to be particularly taken with dance, competing in the Radix Dance Convention for at least the past five years.
On her most recent birthday, her mom paid tribute to her firstborn, saying, “Happy Birthday to our Lucia! 15 today! She is taller than me, definitely more organized, a thinker, a dancer and a super funny human. What a difficult year it has been for all kids, but I must say I learned so much from Lucia and how she joyfully moved through it all. Bravo our love!”
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