Loren on the other hand, 75 on Sunday, was an illegitimate child raised by a single mother in abject poverty in the war-torn slums outside Naples.
After trying out for beauty contests, she scored a few small roles on screen and at only 16, in 1951, played a young slave girl. That same year she unveiled her breasts, posing nude for the first but very last time.
“When Sophia Loren is naked,” she once said, “that is a lot of nakedness.”
Commenting once on another Italian bombshell, Gina Lollobrigida, Loren said: “I don’t think she’s positively mad about me. Because I’m bigger than she? It’s possible. Who knows?”
It was in 1953 that Loren’s career really took off when she met husband-to-be Carlo Ponti, an already married producer 22 years her senior who later became the father of her two sons and with whom she lived until his death at 94 two years ago.
When they first married, Ponti was charged with bigamy after Italy would not recognise a Mexican divorce from his first wife. He and Loren annulled their marriage but continued living together — a huge scandal at the time.
Loren worked with great Italian directors including Dino Risi, Vittorio De Sica and Ettore Scola but unlike Bardot, who starred with French legends such as Jean-Luc Godard or Louis Malle, went on to work in Hollywood.
Playing alongside stars such as Clark Gable, Peter Sellers, John Wayne and Frank Sinatra, she scooped an Oscar for “Two Women” in 1962 and a second in 1991 honouring her entire career.
Amid her 90-odd films — she plans a biopic on her own life in which she will play her mother — she co-starred in 13 with fellow Italian Marcello Mastroianni, probably her best-known partner.
It is Mastroianni who in “Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow”, a 1964 movie, sits on the bed staring and sweating and roaring with joy as the sex icon peels off her clothes, swinging suspender-belt and stockings.
Their last film together was the 1994 movie by Robert Altman “Pret-a-porter”.
Bardot, however, took her pretty pout off screen long ago.
Unable to look after her son by a second marriage and unable to cope with life as a celebrity, she resigned from film-making shortly before turning 40 to pose instead on icebergs alongside baby seals as she switched from sex symbol to saviour.
Despite starring in some legendary movies, she told reporters on turning 72 that her animal work was the “most wonderful success of my life”.
Married to a former aide of far-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen, she has been prosecuted several times for inciting racial hatred, including writings attacking what she called the “Islamisation” of France.
In the mid-90s Bardot crossed swords with Loren over ads in which the Italian actress appeared in furs.
“Wearing a fur is wearing a cemetery on your back,” Bardot wrote.
Loren never responded.
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