Sophia Loren is recovering from emergency surgery for a fractured hip following a fall on Sunday in her home in Geneva, Switzerland.
Italy’s most famous living movie star, who turned 89 on Sept. 20, suffered several fractures after accidentally falling at home on Sunday morning, according to multiple reports. On Sunday afternoon, “Sophia was operated with positive outcome and will now have to undergo a brief period of convalescence followed by a complete rehabilitation,” said Italian national news agency Ansa.
She sustained “serious fractures” to different parts of her hip and femur, according to her agent Andrea Giusti who confirmed that both Loren’s sons, Carlo and Edoardo Ponti, were at her bedside. “The surgery went perfectly and we only need to wait,” Giusti told PvNewin an email.
News of Loren’s hospitalization was first announced by a restaurant bearing her name that she was set to inaugurate on Tuesday in the Italian port city of Bari.
The iconic actress was also meant to receive an honorary citizenship from Bari, the southern city where Loren stepped out of semi-retirement in 2020 to shoot her last movie, “The Life Ahead,” a Netflix original directed by her son Edoardo Ponti. In “Life Ahead,” Loren plays a former prostitute and Holocaust survivor who bonds with a Senegalese orphaned street kid. For her performance, she scored Italy’s David di Donatello Award for best actress.
Born in the Neapolitan suburb of Pozzuoli, Loren broke out in Vittorio De Sica’s anthology film “The Gold of Naples” (1954), playing a pizza purveyor who turns heads. After marrying producer Carlo Ponti and moving to Los Angeles in the late 1950s, she rose to fame with a panoply of pictures including many Hollywood classics, starring with U.S. giants including Marlon Brando, Frank Sinatra and Cary Grant. But she continued to work in Italy as well. Loren returned home for “Two Women” (1960), playing a young widow who tries to protect her daughter from the atrocities of World War II. She later took another strong female lead in “Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow” (1963), which won the Best Foreign Language Film Academy Award in 1965. In 1990, Loren was celebrated with an honorary Oscar in 1990.
Loren’s last public appearance took place earlier this month, on Sept. 2, at the Armani “One Night Only” fashion show held during the Venice Film Festival where she was the guest of honor. Accompanied by Ponti and his wife Sasha Alexander, Loren sat in the front row with Jessica Chastain, Sydney Sweeney, Ang Lee and Ava DuVernay.
