It's high-anxiety time at a Hollywood studio. A photographer and his image team are preparing to shoot stills of a legendary film star. She is due any minute. The stylist wonders if the chiffon and sequined gowns he's brought will fit. The makeup artist frets about how much concealer can do. "How old is she?" they ask, just as everyone does when her name is mentioned. "Has she had surgery?" "Can she still do the goddess thing?"

"What's wrong with these people?" says Sophia Loren, glaring through the pink lenses of her glasses at the suggestion that time is marching on. "I'm not 100. I'm not even 58. Every young person—as young as I am—should look the way I do."

She proves her point when she emerges from the limousine at the studio, one impressive body part at a time. First the feet in red Charles Jourdan pumps with heels that could cripple an 18-year-old. Then the flawless stretch of suntanned gams in bronze hosiery so sheer it could never conceal spider veins and doesn't have to. A graceful hand (without so much as one liver spot) sporting a red-strapped Cartier watch reaches out. Tapered fingers manicured at home in beige lacquer (never red) hold a Chanel chain handbag. Now the face, beaming the smile Cary Grant loved and lost when Loren married producer Carlo Ponti, 24 years her senior. Clearly, time hasn't eroded the doe eyes, the strong nose, and the pouty lower lip that is still a veritable warehouse of natural collagen.

The legend is standing now, five foot nine with perfect posture, smartly turned out in a red-and-white-checked blazer, mid-thigh red skirt. demure red blouse with pleated jabot. (Sophia Loren does not wear torn Levi's like young stars. "Why pretend to be poor?" she says. "It's an insult to the homeless.")

"She's still Sophia Loren," declares the stylist, in awe.

"Older, but not any worse for wear."

Actually, her face is more chiseled today than it was in her starlet days, suggesting that something other than good genes (her mother, she says, "looked more like Garbo than Garbo") may be responsible for the remarkable jawline. "I'm all for it [plastic surgery]," says Loren in her British-edged Italian accent. "But for the moment, I am fine. As long as I can stay this way, I will. But if it makes people happy to think I've had it, I don't care." Only her eyes seem, if not older, then more austere, less trusting than those of the ingenue who sang limericks in the backseat of Cary Grant's convertible in Houseboat. Survival in the limelight requires constant wariness. "If I don't trust, I can be cold. I have been betrayed by journalists so many times," she says, sizing up the current interviewer. "I don't blame them. I blame myself."

The legend would rather be shooting a film today than goddess photos, but good scripts are hard to come by. Not that she doesn't savor having her picture taken. A successful photo session, she confides, "makes me feel secure, reassured. When you are in the dressing room," she admits, "you wonder if you can do what's expected. I need to be warmed up to relax and make faces. And then, all at once, it happens. Like an orchestra. It all works together."

But right now, the zipper on a model-size Isaac Mizrahi sheath is not coming together. The waist and hips are fine, but the gown is too tight in the bosom. "What can I do? It doesn't fit,' coos Loren in mock-apology as she peeks out from the dressing-room door, knowing full well it's the dress that's at fault, not her body. Her measurements—38.5-26-38—are barely changed from the mammary-mad mid-50s, when her 38-24-38 bella figura was a challenge to the bosom of the moment, Gina Lollobrigida's. "Sophia has the body of a 40-year-old," says Hollywood designer Nolan Miller, who makes much of her wardrobe for public appearances.

In anticipation of this shoot, Loren dropped five pounds in five days on a diet suggested to her by the president of Argentina: "The first day, only fruit. The second day, nonfat cheese, yogurt, skim milk. The third day, eggs and tomato, no oil. The fourth day, only chicken." Although it worked, she doesn't plan to do it again. "I don't believe in excessive regimens. I believe in taking from life what life gives you, generously."

Loren's thick auburn hair is freshly colored. She dyes it herself, although, she makes a point to say, "it's not that gray." (Her formula: equal parts Schwarzkoff number G7 and 08 with 20-volume Oxigenta Lotion, 25 minutes on the roots, comb through, and wait another 20 minutes. "In an hour it's done.") She even cuts her hair herself, in between cuts by Alexandre in Paris. She would prefer to do her own makeup. When makeup artists work on her face, she says, "they're in heaven, but they do too much. I want to be as simple as I can, but I don't like to upset people."

There is a collective gasp when Loren finally emerges from the dressing room—with full-strength kohl eyes and swept-back voluminous hair, wearing a strapless leopard-print chiffon gown by Nolan Miller. There is no doubt: Sophia Loren can still do the goddess thing. "My face is an ensemble of many irregularities," she likes to say. "Put together they don't do so badly. I'm very photogenic."

Photo assistants who weren't yet born in 1961, the year Loren won her Academy Award for Two Women, study the Polaroids in awe as the photographer puts the star through her paces—in the backseat of a Rolls-Royce Corniche convertible. As word travels that Sophia Loren is having her picture taken in the parking lot, workers stream out of the studio doorways. "You can keep your Madonnas. There are no stars today like this," says Houston Brady, a film technician.

"Look at me," the photographer instructs Loren. "Bella! Bella! Hold on. Stay. So beautiful. Yes. Lean toward me more." Loren is familiar with that trick. This is not the first photographer who wants to capture as much as possible of her awesome chest. She has no intention of falling out of her decolletage the way Jayne Mansfield did in a famous paparazzi photo of the two of them. "They can push a teenager, perhaps, but not me," says Loren later. "You have to feel good in your skin. Not lean forward so much."

The idea of "feeling good in your skin" is something Loren returns to again and again. The only time she wasn't comfortable in her skin was in her youth, when she was so skinny she was nicknamed "Sofia Stuzzicadente" (toothpick). But once she blossomed, she never again was embarrassed by her body-or anxious to change it. She doesn't sculpt her muscles. She has no personal trainer. An hour of stretching in the morning does the trick. "I concentrate on the looseness of joints. No rust in them,' she says, pretending to oil her knee.

Her perpetual suntan is more a way of life than a fashion statement. "You think I think only about my looks," she says impatiently, weary of explaining herself, but anxious to be portrayed accurately. "I'm Italian. I'm from Naples. I adore the sun. Dolce far niente. It's wonderful. I love the heat. It's not for my looks—you can get too dark for pictures. I have to be careful. I sit in the sun wearing only panties for three, four hours at a time. I use baby oil. I never burn."

The American obsessions with exercise, diet, and the dangers of tanning may indeed seem trivial to this child of hardship. Sophia Loren was born Sofia Scicolone in 1934. Her first struggle was to survive as a malnourished illegitimate infant.Then she had to endure the devastation of World War Il. "Who can forget the war, the suffering, the hunger, desperation, anguish, bombing? These things you carry with you forever," says Loren. (Still claustrophobic from endless nights spent in a train-tunnel bomb shelter, she asks that the black glass partition in the limousine be rolled down.)

At 16, after winning a beauty contest in Rome, for which Carlo Ponti was a judge, Loren decided to be an actress—encouraged by her mamma (a fierce stage mother). Loren became the sole support of her mother and sister, Maria (who eventually married Mussolini's son). Loren's mother died a year ago, and she still grieves for her. "I was her mother, her husband. She depended on me." In return, says Loren, "she was my anchor. We spoke every day. Now I'm a ship without a sail."

By her early 20s, Loren had become involved with Ponti. There was an engagement, a questionable Mexican marriage, and eight years of social ostracism before Ponti (who, because he was a married man, was denounced by the church, faced imprisonment for bigamy, and was forced into exile) became a French citizen and could legally marry her. Once they were wed, she was so desperate to have children after two miscarriages that twice, at the height of her career, she stayed in bed for her entire pregnancy to give birth to her sons, Carlo Jr. (now 23) and Eduardo (19). Over the years, assorted travails—a fire in her apartment house, two armed robberies, kidnapping attempts on her husband, and, finally, income-tax battles—kept the Pontis in the news.

Despite the personal traumas, Loren has made some 100 films, struggling all the while against the film industry's breast fetishism. It annoys her that almost every reference to her in film histories credits her body ("busty," "maternal," "sexual") for her success. "I haven't become what I've become because of my breasts," she argues. "The films I've been most successful in"—especially Two Women (in which Loren, then 27, was cast against type as a mother who, with her teenage daughter, is gang-raped by soldiers)—"are where I was not sexy." Very early in her career, she says, "I wanted to get out of being this sex symbol. If you rely on your body, your [acting] life is short." She speaks thoughtfully, twisting the blouse button over her cleavage. "I wanted to enter through the Big Entrance, be an actress with a capital A."

She also wanted to lead a respectable life. "To be called a goddess is nice, but my happiness is that people respect me and what I've done with my life and professional life." Although Italy's most famous expatriate has played everything from sex object to comic mistress to Mother Courage, her favorite role is wife and mother. "I am a very homey person. I like to be in my nest." Or, more precisely, nests.

The Pontis' primary residence is in Switzerland. They also have the use of a condo on Miami's Williams Island. And since their sons have been in college in Los Angeles, the couple has spent a good part of every year on their 40-acre San Fernando Valley ranch, Eve Arden's former estate. Here they live quietly, entertaining friends as diverse as Michael Jackson and Gena Rowlands.

When the Pontis say, "Pull up a chair," there are 40 or 50 comfortable ones to choose from. In Loren's own white-and-blue parlor, a cloud of a favored perfume, Joy, infuses the air. There is nothing remotely flat-chested about this room—not the pairs of oversize onion-shaped lamp bases or the voluptuous sofas, their swollen arms covered with antimacassars (the pride of every Neapolitan housewife). Is the sex goddess aware of the fertility symbolism here? "That's my husband's taste," she says. "He's not tall, but he thinks big."

Loren's life is simple. "I'm up at six," she says. "I work in the garden" (wearing hand cream under white cotton gloves under plastic gloves). "I check that everything is taken care of, make my phone calls, send faxes, watch the children, help with their problems. By 8:30 I'm in my room." Often reading scripts. Her bedroom is relatively Spartan—one part American quilts, one part European embroidered linens. A corner curio cabinet holds her sentimental collection of Capo di Monte porcelain bouquets and figurines—the only things of value she has allowed herself since the frightening jewel robberies. A crucifix hangs over her simple headboard.

Loren speaks English and Italian to her sons. She speaks only Italian to her husband, who has produced many of her films. "Whenever I have a doubt, I can talk it over with him. He is a person I know I could never live without. I help him a lot, too—although," she says. without any rancor, "he never agrees with me. because he takes me lightly." (Loren's current film, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, opening in the United States this winter, is the story of a tong-term marriage that is still full of emotion.)

Loren sees herself as a typical modern working mother. "I am the image every woman today would like to be." When mammina leaves for work, her husband and younger son give her the sort of affectionate send-off other families reserve for a voyage abroad. During the shoot, she calls home to tell the boys to wait up for her and asks the photographer for a Polaroid, "for my sons."

For the last picture of the day, the photographer asks the makeup man to kneel on the floor, his back to the camera, while Loren clasps the young man to her bosom, running her fingers through his hair. As the motorized camera clicks away, Loren pats the young man, encouraging him to hold the awkward pose, his face buried in her chest. "Close your eyes. Don't move," says the photographer to the goddess. "Absolutely amazing. Hold on, Stay. A little profile." Finally, it's over. The makeup man is fairly swooning, bringing to mind Loren's seduction of Marcello Mastroianni in A Special Day, her favorite film. "My life will never be the same again," he says. "It was unbelievable. Her skin is so soft. Her smell, so wonderful. I could feel her heart beat. I won't wash my face. Finally my mother will take my work seriously."

The next day, reassured that she can still do the glamour stuff, Loren gets back to her quest for artistic properties. A producer and writer arrive to meet with Loren at a bungalow of the Beverly Hills Hotel. "I'd better put on my glasses," she says, batting her lashes and turning on a smile brighter than the gas log blazing in the fireplace. "I pretend that I see, but I don't," she says. After a few minutes of chitchat, the pitch begins. The writer (in motorcycle gear from head to toe) perches on a sofa arm, "It's a nineteenth-century fairy tale about a countess," he says ."I wrote it for you, but it has to blow your soul, If you don't like the plot, we can change it. If you don't like the character, we can change it." He promises the part won't require a big commitment of time. Loren promises to read it.

After the two leave, she says, "I'll speed-read it. If I' m interested, I'll slow-read it. He kept saying it's not a demanding role. But I want a demanding role. We Italians demand a lot of our pasta and even more of our scripts. We want them a little al dente. A little raw."