Live interview something new for both Sophia Loren and Las Vegas

It’s not like Sophia Loren had an unexamined life.

The screen legend released her autobiography, “Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow,” two years ago, and may be the only actress to have played her own mother — twice.

The first was in 1980, a TV miniseries, “Her Own Story,” based on the previous year’s biography, “Sophia Loren: Living and Loving.” She played both herself and her mother in that one, and played her mother again in a 2013 Italian release based upon her sister’s memoir, “My House is Full of Mirrors.”

But March 26 brings a new way for Loren to tell her story. And at 81, there aren’t many career ventures where the word “new” can be applied.

If it goes like it did last weekend in New York, “An Evening with Sophia Loren” at The Venetian will find the star seated in conversation with a moderator and fielding questions from the audience.

“This encounter with the public, it’s absolutely amazing,” Loren said in a brief telephone chat last week. “You receive so much love. So much wonderful emotions from this public that is there with you.”

Whatever you call this live interview format — so new on the Strip we do not yet have a shorthand name for it — it’s a promising way to bring star names back to showroom marquees.

Loren seemed intrigued to know she was following in the wake of Al Pacino, who told his story at The Mirage last summer. But you might be shocked (though probably not) that Loren was unfamiliar with fellow ’60s bombshell Barbara Eden or her defining work in “I Dream of Jeannie,” though Eden and Joan Collins also explored the spoken-word format at the Suncoast and South Point, respectively.

Burt Reynolds may have been the first star to sell a casino ticket with a live memoir when he played The Orleans in 2002. He only got halfway through his career but promised to come back. We’re still waiting.

Loren said it was Cary Grant who first presented the intriguing notion of a live question-and-answer session way back around 1970, when she was shooting a movie (probably “Lady Liberty”) in New York.

When the Hollywood icon who had proposed to her in the late 1950s explained he was in town for just such a Q&A session, she remembers having to ask, “What is that?”

When he explained, she told him, “My English is shaky and I don’t think I can do this kind of thing.” He told her, “If you try it once, you will want to do it again. It’s a lot of fun.”

“It stayed in my mind, I must say.” She would even mention it to her agent from time to time, but it wasn’t a format deemed viable close to home. “In Italy we don’t do it,” she said. “Never, ever.”

But last weekend in Schenectady, N.Y., she was reminded, “Cary was absolutely right.”

“You say to yourself, ‘These people, almost all of them, they saw my films for such a long time.’ Because years go by. I’ve been in this business for 50 years, so many people have seen me when I was, I don’t know, 18 or 19, 20. All the years. So many years.

“The response from the public is absolutely moving for me,” she added. I am enjoying it so much. It’s such a nice thing to do, and it’s a pity they don’t do it in Italy. It’s really a pity. It’s very nice because people appreciate all the work that you’ve done.”

Loren will visit seven other cities along with The Venetian, where she helped cut the ribbon for the grand opening in 1999. Here in town, live interviews or performed memoirs found more of a home at The Smith Center for the Performing Arts. The likes of Hal Prince, Stephen Sondheim and Carol Burnett have embraced the format in the big room, and the R-J’s own Norm Clarke conducts “Conversations With Norm” in the Cabaret Jazz venue.

Some stars have blurred the line between interview and performance. Back on the Strip, Mike Tyson is squarely in the latter camp with “Undisputed Truth.” The resident run at the MGM Grand was inspired by Chazz Palminteri’s tour de force “A Bronx Tale.”

With luck, more stars will try either format in casino visits. Loren prefers to keep it casual, and not just because of her age or still-restricted command of English.

“The stories are the same (as in the book), but maybe in front of the public, it’s something much more alive,” she said. “I don’t know how to prepare myself” for what she will be asked. “I want to go as my heart goes. I want to be sincere, I want to get moved. I want to say, ‘No, this is not true.’”

It sounds like she is reaching for the word “spontaneous,” but settles for “sincerely … Not something you write down.”

And, she added, “sincerity is something that people wanted,” whether she was writing “books about beauty or books about my life.” The approach may change from book to film to this live stage venture, “but the facts are the same. I cannot change personality, I cannot change and invent another life.”

And each time she revisits her life in a new format, “I discover little by little so many other things, that it’s really … it’s beautiful. Life is really beautiful. It’s full of surprises all the time. And always very good ones. La vita e bella, we say in Italy.”

Read more from Mike Weatherford at reviewjournal.com. Contact him at mweatherford@reviewjournal.com. Follow him @Mikeweatherford.