'It is not luck. I don't believe in luck. It is wanting that counts. I have always wanted. That is the secret of me.Even as a child from a poor family whose mother was not married to my father I wanted and I got. I did not want -- ever -- for others to get for me. I pay, not just in money, but in suffering and pain and anxiety for what I have achieved.' Loren's mother Romilda Villani lived in Pozzuoli a town near Naples and wanted to be a film star. She won a Greta Garbo look-alike contest when she was seventeen years old but Loren's grandmother stopped her taking the prize of a first class ticket to California and a Hollywood screen test. Loren's mother rebelled and ran off to Rome where she met Riccardo Scicolone. He was the father Loren only met when she was five-years-old. 'I always felt I had no father. Even when you're young you get accustomed to the negative things in life. You say to yourself: "Maybe it has to be like this." But at the same time you don't consider yourself like other children because they have a father and a mother. I don't talk like this about my father because I have feelings of hatred. Hatred is something I don't know of. Besides, I had a lot of love around me. My grandmother and my grandfather loved my sister and me very much.' Her sister Maria -- they are very, very close -- is four years younger and she too was the illegitimate daughter of Scicolone but it was only years later when Loren was a star that her sister was given his name. 'She suffered so much. She didn't want to go to school. We supported each other.' Her sons are also four years apart and she says: "I always tell Edoardo: You should love your brother. "I say the same thing to Carlo because I like it when brothers are really close to each other. For after all, what else do we have in life but family? When you go out and leave home....God!' The world found her quickly. Sofia Scicolone, as she was then, suffered from mites and lice as a child. She was so thin other children called her Sofia Stuzzicadente -- Sofia Toothpick. She blossomed and the filled-out 14-year-old Loren won, like her mother, a beauty contest which sent her on her way to Rome . Her mother, always regretful about her missed opportunity, was a supportive and often pushy stage mother. The young Loren won her first film role as an extra in 'Quo Vadis' the spectacular Robert Taylor vehicle in 1951. She appeared in a string of films including 'Era lui, si,si!' -- an Italian romp in which she went topless -- before moving on to nearly 100 films including her 1961 Best Actress Oscar performance in 'Two Women'. She is not precious about her early career joking:' 'I'm not ashamed of my bare-bottom beginnings.' Of course, she became a voluptuous sex symbol with 'Boy on a Dolphin' in 1957 but does not regret it: 'I liked it because I was doing it in a joking kind of way. And I knew that it was a preparation for what I would do later on. It's impossible to be a sex symbol all your life. You have to be terribly young and then your career is very short. so at some point you have to choose roles that you can go further with. That's what I did when I made "Two Women" -- I was 25 and I played the mother of 15-year-old girl. I really established myself as an actress with that and then I had wonderful roles.'
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