Forget the scripts Cary Grant and Sophia Loren performed on screen. In a story that sounds more like a dramatic romance novel than a Hollywood memoir, the Italian star once opened up about Cary Grant’s ten-year obsession with her.
Using private letters that had never been seen before, the 80-year-old described how Grant, then 52, dropped his usual smooth-guy act to beg the 22-year-old actress to leave her producer fiance. He even said that God wanted them to be together.
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It happened in 1956 on the dusty set of ‘The Pride and the Passion‘ in Spain. To everyone else, it was just another war movie, but in reality, it was a hotbed of longing. Grant, already on his third marriage, was so taken with the young Neapolitan actress that he used religious talk to persuade her. He sent daily letters filled with prayers.
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“Forgive me, dear girl. I press you too much,” one of the private notes in Loren’s memoir, ‘Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow‘, reads. “Pray—and so will I—until next week. Goodbye Sophia. Cary.“
Grant chased her hard but also with a kind of reverence. He didn’t frame what he wanted as an affair; he said it was something God had planned. “You’ll be in my prayers,” he wrote in another desperate plea. “If you think and pray with me, for the same thing and purpose, all will be right and life will be good.”
Why Sophia Loren Rejected Cary Grant’s Marriage Proposal
For Loren, who was not yet the huge star she would become, the attention was overwhelming. But she felt stuck between the “Hollywood giant” and her pull toward producer Carlo Ponti.
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“It was hard to resist the magnetism of a man like Cary, who said he was willing to give up everything for me,” she later said. Still, she did resist. On their last night of filming, as the sun went down in Spain, Grant made his final move. He looked her in the eyes and asked her to marry him.
“I was like an actress in a movie who’s forgotten her lines,” she remembered. But she turned him down politely. The rejection didn’t kill his feelings. Two years later, while making the comedy ‘Houseboat‘, Grant tried again. However, Loren had already made her choice. Looking back, she explained why she picked roots over romance.
“You know, I had to make a choice,” she told Vanity Fair about her decision to marry Ponti. “Carlo was Italian; he belonged to my world. I couldn’t make up my mind to marry a giant from another country and leave Carlo. I didn’t feel like making the big step.”
Inside Sophia Loren Memoir and the Man Who Got Away
Loren has softened the story a bit over the years. She told the Radio Times in 2020 that the proposal story might have been an “impossible” exaggeration. But her 2014 memoir leaves little doubt about how hard he chased her.
In the end, Loren kept the letters and the story, and Cary Grant was left with the one thing his charm could never buy: the quiet knowledge that he was the one who got away.
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