So many directors, so many leading men. Sophia Loren's favorite may surprise you

Sophia Loren has shared the silver screen with Charlton Heston, Peter Sellers, Clark Gable, Marcello Mastroianni, Paul Newman, Cary Grant and Gregory Peck. But it's a director she remembers most fondly.

"Charlie Chaplin," she says.

The two shared a can't-forget moment that brought tears to a young woman's eyes.

"I cried, I really cried," she says. "I was in my room on the set. Because I couldn't believe that I would have arrived at being able to work with this person, with this man. It was really the moment of my life."

Still an iconic beauty at 81, Loren will expound on such moments Sunday night at the Winspear Opera House, where she's the guest of honor for "An Evening with Sophia Loren." She won the Oscar for best actress in 1960, for the Italian film, Two Women, whose original title was La ciociara.

It says much about her character that, despite her beauty, she fought hard against type by demanding to be cast in the story of two women not as the daughter but as the girl's widowed mother, both of whom are raped in war-torn Italy.

Loren's victory became a defining moment in a landmark career launched in 1950. During her earliest pictures, she was showcased as "Sofia Lazzaro," because, as IMDb.com reports, "people joked her beauty could raise Lazarus from the dead."

She entered a pageant at 14 under her real name, Sofia Villani Scicolone. There, she caught the eye of a man 22 years her senior. She fell in love with Carlo Ponti, whom she married for a second time in 1966. In 1962, she agreed to have their first marriage annulled, to shield Ponti from charges of bigamy.

By the time she appeared in Chaplin's A Countess from Hong Kong in 1967, Loren was a sought-after superstar, whose talent Ponti had pinpointed. She co-starred with Marlon Brando, who didn't exactly win her over by asking, "Did you know you have hairs up your nostrils?" Chaplin wiped away any unpleasantness.

"He was a very shy person," Loren says of her favorite director. "I had a wonderful time with him." She recalls the "love story between me and Marlon" and in particular a dance scene that left her with a profound sadness. Chaplin made it all better by paying her a compliment:

"I feel that, when I direct you, I am the director of an orchestra." She was so good, he said, he didn't have to speak -- only gesture. Directing her, he said, was simply of matter of saying, albeit with a gesture, "A little more, a little less, and you do everything I want you to do." She repaired to her dressing room, where, she said, "I cried for an hour." He was, she says, "so beautiful, so simple. What a person. What a person."

In 1975, she and Ponti came to Dallas for the Italian Fortnight hosted by Neiman Marcus, where the couple spent time with the late Stanley Marcus.

"It was such a long time ago," she says with a laugh. "My God, it was such a long time ago." And yet, "Good times I remember about that. Very good things."

The Internet long ago embraced the magnetism of a woman whose photographs routinely go viral. In one famous example, Loren stares pointedly at the exposed cleavage of actress Jayne Mansfield. The two were photographed at a Hollywood party, Loren's first since moving from Italy. Good luck getting her to autograph that one.

"I never signed that picture!" she says. "Never! Because," she says, adding with a laugh, "it was a moment that for me was very difficult to cope with. I couldn't believe what I was looking at. I couldn't believe it. You know, it was something ... It didn't really upset me, but I was a little shocked."

Ever gracious, Loren can't let it go without saying of Mansfield, who died in a car crash in 1967, "She was a beautiful lady."

Plan Your Life

"An Evening with Sophia Loren," 7:30 p.m. Sunday, Winspear Opera House, 2403 Flora St., Dallas. $35 to $125. 214-880-0202, attpac.org.

Loren receives an honorary Oscar during the 1991 Academy Awards ceremony: