Sophia Loren's son reveals how his mother saw husband Carlo Ponti – who met legendary Italian star when she was  15 while he was 37 – as a 'father figure'

Sophia Loren’s son has described how her husband Carlo Ponti – who was 37 when he began an affair with the legendary 15-year-old actress in 1950 – acted as a ‘father figure’ for his mother.

Speaking to The Times, director Edoardo Ponti, 52, spoke of the how the 22-year age gap affected the budding star, who is now 90.

‘In addition to the romantic love and the attraction, he provided that sense of security, that sense of protection, which my mother was always in want of,’ he explained.

Sophia, who grew up not knowing real real dad that well, was brought up just outside Naples – but aged around 16, her mother Romilda relocated them to Rome and tried to track him down for financial support.

He refused. But whereas Romilda decided to make her way back, Sophia decided to set up camp in the Italian capital.

‘Imagine today a 16-year-old daughter telling her mother, “I’m not leaving. You go, I’ll stay”,’ Edoardo continued.

‘I mean, it’s absolutely unthinkable. Every character that my mother has built on screen comes from the fabric of her trauma – there’s no question. She understood that poverty for an artist is gold, because adversity, not knowing where your next meal is going to come from, all of those elements create such a wealth of inner life.

‘[She understood] the humility of being in the service of something, her characters, her directors. She has never been the diva. She’s always a team player.’

Sophia has previously recounted meeting her husband at a small town beauty pageant.

And in excerpts of her memoirYesterday, Today, Tomorrow: My Life – shared in anissue of Closer Weekly, the actress had also recounted similar sentiments of feeling a paternal fondness for her late husband.

‘By that time whenever I went out it was with Carlo,’ she reminisced in her autobiographical book. ‘True, he was married and we had to be careful, only later would our fondness turn into love.’

He helped launch her career as a sought-after star when the Italian film producer casted her in some of her first starring roles in Anna and I Dream Of Zorro.

Upon meeting him, Sophia knew Carlo would be someone in her life forever.

‘I was content to be lucky enough to finally have someone beside me who knew how to speak to me, who could give me advice, who supported me in the parts I chose, which is crucial when an actor is just starting out,’ she said.

Sophia added: ‘I was trying to get ahead but without taking any false steps, and knowing that Carlo was on my side was a huge help. There was something fatherly about his presence, too, and I’d never had a real father.’

‘He gave me a rootedness and stability that kept me grounded, while the world around me seemed to swirl dizzyingly, excitingly.’

During their early years of courtship, he was still married to first wife Giuliana Fiastri. But during the summer of 1954, both Sophia and Carlo knew they were destined to be.

‘It was there, while making Woman Of The River, that we finally understood we’d fallen in love. Our intimacy had turned into love,’ she wrote.

He had proposed marriage to Sophia in 1957, prompting for a divorce from Giuliana which was forbidden in his native country at the time.

However, Carlo could not deny his strong feelings for the sex symbol and married her by proxy after obtaining annulment documents in Mexico.

As a result Sophia and Carlo would have wound up on the hook for concubinage and bigamy in their native country and so they annulled their marriage in 1962.

The pair eventually worked out a deal with Giuliana whereby they all moved to France and obtained citizenship there.

Giuliana gave Carlo a divorce under French law in 1965, and the next year he remarried Sophia whom he stayed with until his death in 2007.

Two years later the couple welcomed their first child Carlo Ponti, Jr and another son, Edoardo, in 1973; their eldest is an orchestra conductor while the latter is a director whose debut film Between Strangers also starred his mother.

Sophia has four grandchildren and told Closer she regularly keeps up with them, chatting daily with her family on FaceTime during lockdown.

‘My approach to life is very simple,. Enjoy all the good news that my children tell me about their lives,’ shared the Marriage Italian Style star.

Sophia, who lives in Geneva where she gave birth to both her sons, said: ‘The beauty of my grandchildren fills me with joy although they are far away in California.’

A few years ago she told the New York Timesthat what she enjoys about life in Switzerland is that ‘It’s calm. When you live in a big city like Rome or like New York, there’s so many things going on and the streets and the cars. Here, it’s a really very peaceful place. And then, of course, it’s the center of Europe.’

In the Times article however, Edoardo also revealed that his brother often complained is mother ‘wasn’t like the others’ at school drop off, despite the star wearing jeans to be as lowkey as she could.

Sophia drew international acclaim for the 1960 film Two Women which was also about the ravages of World War II in her native Italy.

Her performance in the Vittorio De Sica movie made her the first person ever to earn an acting Oscar in a language other than English.

However she has not appeared onscreen in a feature film since Nine, Rob Marshall’s 2009 movie adaptation of a Broadway musical of the same name.

Nine was based on the seminal Italian movie 8 1/2 directed by Federico Fellini whom Sophia never worked with despite the two being stars at the same time.

She has kept working since Nine – she dubbed a role in Italian for the 2011 Pixar movie Cars 2 and has appeared in a short film.

A decade ago she also played her own mother Romilda in the Italian miniseries My House Is Full Of Mirrors, based on a book by her sister Maria Scicolone, who once spent a decade married to Benito Mussolini’s jazz pianist son Romano.