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Listen to Your Mother, Especially if She's Sophia Loren

Photo credit: Greta de Lazzaris / Netflix
Photo credit: Greta de Lazzaris / Netflix

From Town & Country

It isn’t unheard of for filmmakers to cast their children in their movies. Directors from John Huston to Francis Ford Coppola to Richard Linklater have bestowed plum parts upon their offspring. What is somewhat less common is when it happens the other way around—and for seemingly good reason.

“When I did my first movie with my mother, one of my main concerns was what I was going to call her,” says Edoardo Ponti, the filmmaker son of Sophia Loren and the late producer Carlo Ponti. “Am I going to call her the character name, or Sophia, or Mammina, which is what I call her normally? I resolved that I was going to call her the character name, but the first day on set the first word that came out of my mouth was Mammina. In the end it worked perfectly and created a very close, intimate relationship.”

On November 13, Ponti will release The Life Ahead, the third film he and his Oscar-winning mother have made together. The movie tells the story of Madame Rosa (played by Loren), a Holocaust survivor who looks after a group of local children and takes in one who recently robbed her. It’s a dramatic and at times very funny look at the families we choose, the paths we take, and the memories we can never quite outrun.

Photo credit: Greta de Lazzaris / Netflix
Photo credit: Greta de Lazzaris / Netflix

“The relationship with my son is not one that I have with other directors,” Loren says. “He pushes me until I reach something very good. He always knows what he wants, and he knows how to get it from me. Edoardo is a wonderful director. Otherwise I would just avoid working with him.”

This story appears in the November 2020 issue of Town & Country. SUBSCRIBE NOW

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