ON THIS DAY SEPTEMBER 20 2023

This Day in History: September 20

Featured Event

1973







In a much-publicized “Battle of the Sexes” tennis match, Billie Jean King defeated Bobby Riggs.


Battle of the Sexes, exhibition tennis match between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs that took place on September 20, 1973, inside the Astrodome in Houston. The match was something of a spectacle as the in-her-prime King defeated the 55-year-old Riggs in three straight sets, but the event nevertheless was a significant moment in the second wave of the women’s movement that took place during the 1970s.
A number of other tennis matches over the years had been referred to as a “battle of the sexes,” notably a match earlier in 1973 between Riggs and Margaret Court and a 1992 contest between Martina Navratilova and Jimmy Connors. However, the King-Riggs match had by far the greatest cultural impact of any of the “battles.” The King-Riggs event also laid claim as the most-watched tennis match of all time, with an in-house attendance of 30,472 as well as a worldwide television audience estimated at over 90 million.


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Featured Biography

Sophia Loren
Italian actress







Sophia Loren, original name Sofia Villani Scicolone, (born September 20, 1934, Rome, Italy), Italian film actress who rose above her poverty-stricken origins in postwar Naples to become universally recognized as one of Italy’s most beautiful women and its most famous movie star.
Before working in the cinema, Sofia Scicolone changed her last name to Lazzaro for work in the fotoromanzi, popular pulp magazines that used still photographs to depict romantic stories. Her first film role was as an extra, one of many slave girls in the American production of Quo Vadis? (1951). Under the tutelage of producer Carlo Ponti (her future husband), Scicolone was transformed into Sophia Loren. Her career was launched in a series of low-budget comedies before she attracted critical and popular attention with Aida (1953), in which she lip-synched the singing of Renata Tebaldi in the title role.


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