Loren fights to ban party's posters

John Hooper in Rome
Wednesday June 29, 2005
The Guardian

The actor Sophia Loren has begun legal action to stop a poster campaign launched by Italy's former neo-fascists that implicitly links foreigners and rapists.

A lawyer for Loren said she was ready to take "any necessary action" to prevent the National Alliance, the second biggest party in Silvio Berlusconi's government, from using a still from one of her films on posters that have begun to appear in Rome. The party's campaign follows outrage over a string of recent sex attacks.

The lawyer's statement said the actor shared the public's concern, but was "not willing to lend her image to an individual political party or group".

The posters show Loren in her Oscar-winning role in the wartime drama Two Women, Vittorio De Sica's 1961 film in which the actor and her screen daughter are raped by Moroccan soldiers after taking refuge in a church. The film, and the Alberto Moravia novel La Ciociara on which it was based, reflected events still seared into Italy's folk consciousness.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/italy/story/0,12576,1516949,00.html