Sophia Loren (born September 20, 1934) is a motion picture and stage, Academy Awards-winning actress, widely considered to be the most popular Italian performer.Sophia Loren was born Sofia Villani Scicolone in Rome, to engineer Riccardo Scicolone and aspiring actress (to whom he was not married), and piano teacher, Romilda Villani. Loren grew up impoverished in wartime Pozzuoli, near Naples sharing a small flat with her sister Maria, her grandparents and her uncles and aunts. She has said on many occasions that being born into and living with extreme poverty for most of her childhood gave her a strength of character that allowed her to succeed and appreciate every moment she has been given as a human being. Up until Sophia Loren was about 14, she was considered an ugly duckling. Seemingly overnight, she bloomed into a beautiful woman.In 1949, at age 15, Loren left for Rome and a about a year later began her film career with bit parts in mostly minor Italian films. In 1951, Loren and her mother worked as extras in Quo Vadis, which was filmed in Rome and provided Loren with an early brush with Hollywood. She also appeared as Aida in Aida (1953), in which the singing of Loren's role was dubbed by opera star Renata Tebaldi which caught the eye of Cecil B. DeMille who once said of Loren that 'You could build mountains around that girl.'Loren also supported her mother and sister by working as a model in the weekly illustrated romantic stories, called fumetti or fotoromanzi under the name, Sofia Villani or Sofia Lazzaro. She also took part in regional beauty contests, where she won several prizes. Loren was discovered by her future husband, the much older film producer Carlo Ponti, and they married on September 17, 1957, three days before her 23rd birthday. Their first marriage had to be annulled to keep Ponti from being charged with bigamy, and they remarried on April 9, 1966 but only after Sophia, Ponti and Ponti's first wife all obtained French citizenship thus enabling Carlo to divorce his first wife and subsequently marry Sophia without any Catholic divorce laws looming over them. They would have two sons together, Carlo Ponti, Jr., and Edoardo Ponti.Eventually Sofia Scicolone changed her name to Sophia Loren and appeared in film roles that emphasized her voluptuous physique, even appearing topless in the films Two Nights with Cleopatra and It's Him, Yes! Yes! (which was considered acceptable in European cinema at the time, though said scenes were usually cut out when the films were distributed in the United Kingdom or in North America). These early films were the only times she would appear nude stating that she did not feel comfortable exposed to the camera as her nude state represented 'a lot of nakedness.' Loren's acting career took off upon meeting Vittorio De Sica and Marcello Mastroianni in 1954. Many feel that her collaborations with De Sica would mark her finest work as an actress.