Sophia Loren

The judges at Miss Italia 1950 thought the 15-year-old from Pozzuoli was "too provocative" to win the crown. She got Miss Elegance as a consolation prize and caught the eye of Carlo Ponti, a film producer 22 years her senior who renamed her, restyled her, and eventually married her. Ponti got her a five-picture deal with Paramount in 1956, but her real breakthrough came in Italian, not English.

Two Women (1960), directed by Vittorio De Sica, made her the first actress to win an Oscar for a non-English-language performance. She didn't show up to the ceremony because she was afraid she'd faint if she lost. Cary Grant called her in Rome the next morning to deliver the news.

At 91, she's the last living name on AFI's list of the screen's all-time greats. That's not longevity. That's outlasting everyone.

The Life Ahead (2020), directed by her son Edoardo Ponti, peaked in Netflix's top ten in 37 countries and proved she could still carry a film at 86. The Academy Museum ran a full retrospective in November 2024, screening new 4K restorations of her work. She celebrated her 90th birthday at a gala in Rome with Giorgio Armani and Zubin Mehta in attendance. She's said she hopes never to retire, which at this point feels less like optimism and more like a statement of fact.

On the last day of filming The Pride and the Passion in 1957, Cary Grant proposed. She turned him down for Ponti, which turned out to be the more complicated choice. Their first marriage, by proxy in Mexico, triggered bigamy charges in Italy because Ponti was still technically married. She was charged with being a concubine and threatened with excommunication.

The legal mess took over a decade to sort out. In 1982, she voluntarily flew back to Italy and served 17 days in prison for tax evasion. She came out the other side of both scandals with her reputation not just intact but reinforced. Italy eventually gave her honorary citizenship of Naples.