Oscars Flashback: Sophia Loren Missed Her Best Actress Win at the 1962 Ceremony to Stay Home and Make Sauce

Ahead of the 2025 Oscars, PEOPLE is looking back at past ceremonies and sharing behind-the-scenes stories from Hollywood's most prestigious event.

Sophia Loren made history when she won the Oscar for Best Actress in 1962, becoming the first performer to win for a foreign language role.

But the star of the Italian film Two Women wasn’t on hand to collect her trophy at the star-studded ceremony; instead, she stayed home in Rome with her husband, producer Carlo Ponti.

“When I received an Oscar nomination in late February 1962, I could hardly believe it. ‘The Oscar?’ ‘The Academy Award?’ I kept rereading the names of the other candidates,” Loren, now 90, wrote in her 2014 memoir, Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow: My Life.

Loren faced stiff competition: Audrey Hepburn (Breakfast at Tiffany’s), Natalie Wood (Splendor in the Grass), Piper Laurie (The Hustler), and Geraldine Page (Summer and Smoke).

Though Loren said she was “flattered” to be included in such company, the actress — who was just 27 years old at the time — let her insecurities get the better of her. “I knew that disappointment was potentially always just around the corner, and that triumph was only for the few,” she wrote.

“After much procrastination, I decided I would not go to the ceremony. If I lost, I’d faint. If I won, I’d faint anyway. I couldn’t allow myself to do that in front of that audience, and before the eyes of the whole world,” she continued.

“‘I’m going to stay right here in Rome, on my couch,’ I said to myself, and that is indeed what I did,” wrote Loren.

She and Ponti spent the evening of April, 9 1962 in their apartment in Piazza d’Aracoeli, where they tried to distract themselves: “Some music, a sip of wine, the umpteenth cigarette, a cup of chamomile, the window open to let in the springtime.”

Loren also busied herself peeling garlic and chopping onion to make a sauce — and she and Ponti stayed up all night.

Hoping for a phone call with some good news, the two gave up as the sun was rising: “We just kept sitting there in the gray light of dawn, staring at the walls, the paintings, the photographs. And finally we dozed off like two kids," she recounted.

Then at 6:39 a.m. — a full nine hours ahead of Los Angeles, where they ceremony took place — the phone rang. On the other line: Cary Grant, Loren’s two-time costar and onetime love interest.

Ponti picked up, recalled Loren, and after a silence heard her husband exclaim, “‘Sophia win!” Loren took the receiver from Ponti and heard “Cary’s warm voice,” she wrote. “‘It’s wonderful, Sophia, it’s wonderful. You’re always the best!’” 

“I was smiling at Cary all the way across the ocean,” continued Loren, who hung up and then dashed into the kitchen to make sure the sauce she was making hadn’t burned.

Conan O'Brien hosts the 2025 Oscars, which will air live from the Dolby Theatre at Ovation Hollywood on Sunday, March 2, at 7 p.m. ET on ABC and Hulu.