It is impossible to believe now, but there was a time in our dark entertainment past when someone in the movie business saw fit to tell Sophia Loren that she was not perfect exactly the way she was. She needed to lose weight & to fix her nose.

It was so early in Loren’s career that she didn’t really have a career. At that moment, she was not yet the screen icon who inspired Mick Jagger and Keith Richards to write “Pass the Wine.” Or the woman who turned down a marriage proposal from Cary Grant.
At that moment in time, Loren was a young beauty-contest winner from the very small Italian town of Pozzuoli who was in Rome for her first screen test. She had no movie experience and no clout whatsoever. What she did have was a strong sense of who she was and who she did not want to be.
All these years later, she has no regrets. Not about her nose, or anything else. It is Loren’s first feature film in 10 years, but if audiences are surprised that she is still giving her all to movies after all these years, Loren is not.
She is many decades and many films away from the young nobody who wouldn’t change herself for anyone else, but she is still ferociously dedicated to the career that let her be everything she wanted to be.