With a career spanning over 70 years, she is one of the last surviving stars from the Golden Age of Hollywood cinema. Encouraged to enroll in acting lessons after entering a beauty pageant, Loren began her film career at age 16 in She appeared in several bit parts and minor roles in the early part of the decade, until her five-picture contract with Paramount in launched her international career.
During the s, she starred in films as a sexually emancipated persona and was one of the best known sex symbols of the time.
Loren's performance as Cesira in the film Two Women , directed by Vittorio De Sica , won her the Academy Award for Best Actress , making her the first performer to ever win an Oscar for a non-English-language performance. She has won five special Golden Globes including the Cecil B. In , she received the Academy Honorary Award for lifetime achievements. In , the American Film Institute named her one of the greatest stars of American film history.
At the start of the s, Loren chose to make rarer film appearances. Her mother was a piano teacher and aspiring actress, her father a failed engineer who worked temporarily for the national railway Ferrovie dello Stato Italiane. Loren claimed in her autobiography that he was of noble descent, by virtue of which she is entitled to call herself "Viscountess of Pozzuoli, Lady of Caserta, a title given by the House of Hohenstaufen , Marchioness of Licata Scicolone Murillo".
Loren's father refused to marry her mother, [ 5 ] leaving her without financial support. Loren met her father three times, at age five, age seventeen and in at his deathbed, stating that she forgave him but had never forgotten his abandonment of her mother. Scicolone did not want to formally recognise Maria as his daughter.
