Sophia Loren and Brigitte Bardot – two stars at 75 · 2009-09-07 19:11
Sophia Loren and Brigitte Bardot, two legends of 1960s, will both turn 75 this month within days of each other.
Two observers, Elizabeth Day (guardian.co.uk) and Deborah Sherwood (Mirror.co.uk) compare the stars.
When Sophia Loren turned 72 three years ago, she celebrated by posing semi-naked for a Pirelli calendar alongside a handful of women less than half her age. Wearing a silk negligée, she draped herself languorously under a bedsheet with her head tilted sensually upwards in a suggestion of ecstatic abandon, Elizabeth Day writes.
In the same year, Brigitte Bardot was photographed on her way to a meeting with Nicolas Sarkozy, then French interior minister, to discuss cruelty against Canadian seals. Bardot was dressed in black and limping on crutches because of a nagging hip complaint. According to one mid-market tabloid, her appearance was marked by “sagging jowls covered in heavy make-up and a wiry, unkempt patch of greying hair”.
Brigitte Bardot was once known as the Bikini Girl. It’s been nearly 35 years since Bardot gave up movies and stopped bothering about her sex kitten status, Deborah Sherwood writes.
Gone are the trademark pout, the blonde beehive and the nipped-in waist that earned her roles in 48 movies, including And God Created Woman. To celebrate her 40th birthday and show the world she still had it, she posed nude for Playboy magazine.
Now she’s no longer interested in her film star looks – she has dedicated her life to animal charities and is an outspoken campaigner against animal cruelty.
“I gave my beauty and my youth to men,” she said. “I am going to give my wisdom and experience to animals.”
She lives simply, with “no make-up, straight hair with the lines on my face”.
Sophia Loren has been voted the world’s most natural beauty – and she puts it down to good genes, not good surgeons.
Her beauty regime is said to include bathing in olive oil and she puts her voluptuous figure down to pasta.
_“Beauty is how you feel inside, and it reflects in your eyes. It is not something physical.
“You have to be born a sex symbol. You don’t become one. If you’re born with it, you’ll have it even when you’re 100 years old”
Elizabeth Day resumes that both deserve respect. They are two different women who have chosen two different lives and who feel no need to explain themselves. At 75, they are making their own rules.
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