Sophia Loren is the ultimate Hollywood movie star, synonymous with beauty and a glamorous lifestyle.

Her rise to fame wasn’t easy; she was born into a life of poverty, and even when she did enter the spotlight, her looks were criticized.

Today we recognize her as the most beautiful woman ever to grace our screens, still stunning at 88 years old.

It’s hard to believe the woman who inspired music, turned down a marriage proposal from Cary Grant, and became the first actor to win an Oscar for a foreign-language film had the start she did.

Born Sofia Villani Scicolone Rome in 1934, her mother was a piano tutor and actress whose good looks also caught the attention of Hollywood. Sophia’s beautiful mom once won a Greta Garbi lookalike contest – but her strict family wouldn’t allow her to pursue a career on the big screen.

Instead, the mother would guide her daughter and help Sophia in her future film career.

Sophia grew up without the support of her father, who was also dad to her younger sister Maria but he refused to marry their mother and had no involvement in family life.

”I saw my father only six times in my life,” she told People Magazine. “He was a great source of pain and humiliation for my mother, whom he seduced and abandoned, for my younger sister, Maria, who suffered terribly because he would not give her his name, and for myself.”

Growing up in a single-parent household was tough financially.