Italian star Sophia Loren, a cinema icon with two Oscars to her name in Hollywood, celebrates her 90th birthday in Rome Friday, just a few days before French actress Brigitte Bardot.

The two divas helped define film in the 20th century, becoming international cultural icons and revered by millions around the world. 

“Sophia Loren, the myth is 90 years old”, crooned the headline on Il Corriere della Sera daily. 

Loren, who was born in Rome on September 20, 1934, will blow out her 90 candles at a private party in a luxury hotel in the historic centre of the Italian capital.

After a tribute organised in a Rome movie theatre by the Cinecittà studios and the minister of culture, the actress will meet some 150 friends, colleagues and family members for a dinner on the hotel terrace overlooking the Baths of Diocletian.

There, she will also inaugurate a suite bearing her name, according to the newspaper Il Corriere della Sera. 

Loren will be dressed for the occasion by her friend and favourite couturier, Giorgio Armani. 

Italy’s main newspapers looked back Friday at the extraordinary, decades-long career of Loren, one of the last surviving actresses from Hollywood’s Golden Age.

During her career, Loren played opposite the greatest actors of the day, from Anthony Quinn and Clark Gable, to Marlon Brando, Cary Grant, Peter Sellers, John Wayne and Frank Sinatra.

La Repubblica newspaper paired her birthday with that of Brigitte Bardot, who will turn 90 on September 28. 

“Splendid ninety-year-olds”, wrote the paper, saying the duo “redefined the feminine imagination of the 20th century”. 

Loren’s 90th birthday will also be marked by a retrospective at the Lincoln Center in New York.

Italy’s public broadcaster Rai has planned several reruns of her films, including a restored version of Marriage Italian Style with Marcello Mastroianni, her favourite co-star who died in 1996. 

That choice incorporates several key dates: the 60th anniversary of the film released in 1964, the centenary of Mastroianni’s birth on September 26, 1924, and the 50th anniversary of the death of its director Vittorio De Sica. 

Widowed since the 2007 death of her husband, film producer Carlo Ponti, Loren made a comeback on Italian television in 2010 in a movie about her life in which she played her own mother.

In 2014 upon turning 80, she published her memoir, Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow. 

Her last film appearance was in 2020’s The Life Ahead, directed by her son Edoardo Ponti.