AFI Fest to pay tribute to ‘timeless’ actress Sophia Loren

Meet the face of this year’s AFI Fest: Sophia Loren, the Academy Award-winning actress and Italian bombshell, will receive a tribute at the film festival and grace its promotional materials via a striking photograph from the summer of 1965.

A celebration will be held Nov. 12 in Hollywood and will feature a 50th anniversary screening of the newly restored “Marriage Italian Style,” for which Loren earned an Oscar nomination; a conversation with the actress about her career; and a presentation of her son Edoardo Ponti’s recent short “The Human Voice,” in which she appears.

Loren, 79, got her start in a series of 1950s Italian films and burst onto American screens playing opposite such leading men as Cary Grant, Anthony Quinn and John Wayne.

She won the first major Oscar given to a foreign-language performance with her lead role in the 1961 drama “Two Women,” and she went on to star in such films as “El Cid,” “Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow,” “Arabesque” and “A Countess From Hong Kong.” In 1991, she received an honorary Oscar for her contribution to world cinema.

“In a world where the daily obsession seems to be, ‘What’s next?’ Sophia Loren is a rare and welcome reminder that true talent is timeless,” AFI President and Chief Executive Bob Gazzale said in a statement. “It is AFI’s honor to shine a proper light on all the gifts she’s given the world across the years.”

AFI Fest will run Nov. 6-13.

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