Abstract

The chapter provides insights into the enduring power of Sophia Loren’s star image in American popular culture of the 1990s. Focusing in particular on Loren’s role in Grumpier Old Men (1995) along with the visual materials and the promotional, publicity and critical texts circulating around the film and star, the chapter explores the narrativisation of Loren’s star persona at the end of the twentieth century as illustrative of the production and consumption of ‘authentic’ Italianness in the USA. The chapter concludes that, as Italianness emerges and is validated as a very marketable form of white ethnicity, Loren’s Italian identity functions as a literal and metaphorical incarnation of a specific dimension of ethnicity in American culture of the time, namely the fantasy of de-assimilation.