Cannes may be a hive of beautiful people, with Amber Heard, Cara Delevingne and Riley Keough just some of the facially stunning sorts turning up to lend their picture-perfect selves to the red carpet. But actress and veteran of being beautiful for double the amount of time we've been alive, Sophia Loren has said that you need much more than beauty to do well.
When asked at the film festival if she thinks beauty is still important for actresses, the 79-year-old said: ‘No, Beauty is not important – you have to be interesting. I’ve never been beautiful. I’ve never been a china doll.’
Um. Silly us, there we were, entirely convinced that Sophia Loren was an absolute babe. She continued, very self-effacingly: ‘My mouth was too wide. My nose was too long. People wanted to make me have straighter teeth.’
It’s either a horrible case of humblebraggery, or, what Sophia would better know as ‘oh what, this old thing?’ syndrome. Or, maybe, it’s an indictment of all of the producers of the 1950s who, before her big break in Vittorio De Sica’s The Gold Of Naples, were mad enough to think she wasn’t totally beautiful.
She also spilled the beans on what it was like to work with Marlon Brando in A Countess from Hong Kong: ‘He was not very nice, I have to say, but he was a fantastic actor. When I saw his very first films he was a great actor but [in later films] he was only eating ice cream.'
According to The Times, she continued: ‘He was very slim when he started a film and he would get really quite fat by the end of it.’
Hmmm, not sure it's legit for Sophia to say Marlon Brando's acting skills depleted as his waist broaded – I mean, he was great in Apocalypse Now, even if Francis Ford Coppola did have to use a super-tall body double in long shots to give the actor's bulk some 'stature.' Plus, we’re still not buying her assertion that she wasn't (and isn't) a total hottie. But it's still good to hear her for speaking out against the meanness she faced in her early career.
Follow Sophie on Twitter @sophwilkinson
Picture: Getty
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.