Happy 90th birthday Sophia Loren! Her greatest films – ranked

20. Prêt-à-Porter (1994)

Loren’s 14th and final collaboration with her frequent co-star Marcello Mastroianni provides one of the few bright spots in Robert Altman’s dog’s dinner of a satire. They play ex-lovers reuniting during Paris fashion week, during which she re-enacts her famous striptease from Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow.

19. A Countess from Hong Kong (1967)

Charles Chaplin’s last film as director (and actor, in a cameo), and his first in colour, is a plodding misfire, not helped by a miscast Marlon Brando phoning in a lifeless performance. It’s left to Loren, as a stateless Russian countess who stows away in his cabin, to carry the show.

18. Grumpier Old Men (1995)

Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon reunite in this sequel for more curmudgeonly shenanigans. Matthau finds romance with Loren (now in her 60s and as alluring as ever), who plans to turn the oldsters’ favourite bait shop into a trattoria. All three actors have been in better comedies, but they are icons, so we’ll allow it.

17. The Millionairess (1960)

Looking like a goddess, Loren plays the world’s richest woman in this nonsensical adaptation of a George Bernard Shaw play, but an altruistic East End doctor (Peter Sellers in brownface) is immune to her charms. Loren and Sellers reprised these characters in a maddening novelty pop song called Goodness Gracious Me (not in the film).

16. Legend of the Lost (1957)

Loren, playing a woman of ill repute, gets sweaty in the Sahara with John Wayne, hired as a guide to help a Bible-basher (Rossano Brazzi) find a lost city. Not even Wayne can resist Sophia’s charms, but Henry Hathaway’s adventure yarn runs out of plot long before its characters run out of water.

15. Houseboat (1958)

Cary Grant and Loren, who had an affair while co-starring in The Pride and the Passion, reunited a year later for this serviceable romcom. He plays a widower who moves into a leaky houseboat; she’s a famous conductor’s daughter hired to look after his three children. She also sings Bing! Bang! Bong!

14. Heller in Pink Tights (1960)

George Cukor directed this minor but colourful western. Sophia wears a blond wig as an actress touring the old west with Anthony Quinn’s theatre troupe, and gets tied to a horse in his production of Mazeppa. The producer was Carlo Ponti, who nurtured Loren’s Hollywood career; their marriage lasted until his death in 2007.

13. It Started in Naples (1960)

An American lawyer (Clark Gable in his penultimate film) finds his late brother has left behind an eight-year-old son, now cared for by his aunt (Loren) on Capri. Cue local colour, May-September romance, dismantling of anti-Italian prejudice and Loren singing and dancing up a storm.

12. The Life Ahead (2020)

Loren came out of retirement to play a Holocaust survivor and former sex worker providing daycare in a southern Italian port in this drama written and directed by her son, Edoardo Ponti. She bonds with a 12-year-old Senegalese street kid who steals her bag. It’s manipulative and sentimental, and I wept buckets. By gum, she’s still got it!

11. Boy on a Dolphin (1957)

Loren’s first English language film, in which she plays a Greek sponge diver who finds an ancient statue, and is torn between an ethical archaeologist and a smarmy collector. It was the first Hollywood production filmed on location in Greece, but who’s looking at the Acropolis when Sophia is emerging from the Aegean sea in a wet dress?

10. Sunflower (1970)

Loren and Mastroianni get together again in Vittorio De Sica’s romantic melodrama – but not for long! Alas, it’s the second world war and he is dispatched to the Russian front. When the fighting is over she trudges all over the USSR searching for him, with results that will make you get something in your eye, dammit.

9. The Cassandra Crossing (1976)

Like many a Hollywood veteran in the 1970s, Loren found herself part of an all-star ensemble cast in a disaster movie. She and her ex-husband (played by Richard Harris) are trans-Europe train passengers exposed to a stowaway infected with a deadly plague. Not only that, but their train is speeding towards a dangerous viaduct. Fans of the genre won’t want to miss what happens next!

8. The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964)

Thanks to Loren’s larger-than-life screen persona, she holds her own against the pre-CGI spectacle in her two epics for director Anthony Mann. In an Edward Gibbon-inspired scenario (partly recycled by Gladiator), she plays Marcus Aurelius’s daughter, who joins her lover (Stephen Boyd) in trying to topple the despotic Emperor Commodus – Christopher Plummer on deliciously nutty form.

7. Arabesque (1966)

Stanley Donen fails to recreate the magic of his 1963 romantic thriller Charade, but Loren, looking ravishing in Dior as the villain’s girlfriend, almost single-handedly makes this chic England-set caper worth seeing. On the downside, Gregory Peck (playing a hieroglyphics professor) is no Cary Grant, while familiar British and Irish actors playing Middle Eastern characters in brownface are distracting, to say the least.

6. The Key (1958)

William Holden plays a Canadian tugboat captain assigned the suicidal mission of rescuing shipping from U-boats in the second world war. Like his killed-in-action predecessors, he seeks refuge in the flat of a Swiss expat played by Loren. She effectively dials down her sexiness for Carol Reed’s sombre drama (with exciting maritime action), but can’t help looking fabulous in striped pyjamas.

5. Marriage Italian Style (1964)

While Loren’s English language films often typecast her as a sexpot, the dozen or so films she made for De Sica provided her with more nuanced roles. In this romantic comedy, she plays the long-term mistress of a cynical businessman (Mastroianni, somehow making a despicable character likable) who fails to treat their relationship seriously until she pretends to be dying.

4. El Cid (1961)

In her first Anthony Mann epic (see Fall of the Roman Empire), Loren plays Chimene, whose marriage to the 11th-century Castilian hero (Charlton Heston) gets off to a rocky start when he kills her father in a duel. But they reconcile, and she ultimately radiates noble stoicism as her husband rides into legend, accompanied by Miklós Rózsa’s churchy score. Impossible to watch without blubbing.

3. Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow (1963)

Loren and Mastroianni show their range playing three sets of Italian couples in De Sica’s Oscar-winning comic anthology. A working-class Neapolitan keeps getting pregnant to avoid jail; the callousness of a Milanese trophy wife shocks her boyfriend; and, in Rome, a high-class sex worker treats her frustrated client to one of cinema’s sexiest stripteases.

2. Two Women (1960)

De Sica’s neorealist wartime drama, adapted from a novel by Albert Moravia but based on the horrific real events of the Marocchinate, gives Loren one of the meatiest roles of her career and won her an Academy Award for best actress. She plays a mother who flees the allied bombing of Rome with her daughter. But worse is to come, in a harrowing story of survival that still packs a mighty punch.

1. A Special Day (1977)

Ettore Scola’s sepia-tinted but still pertinent study of everyday fascism is set in 1938, during Hitler’s state visit to Rome. Loren plays an overworked housewife whose husband and six kids have left with their neighbours to watch the parade, leaving her apartment block deserted except for a gay radio announcer (Mastroianni) awaiting deportation. The two bond in unlikely ways, treating us to one of cinema’s greatest screen couples operating at the top of their game.