Plot

L's elegant, elderly lady who recalls her past loves and lusty adventures of her life.

Loren stars with Paul Newman as the stunningly beautiful, charming and ribald Lady L. At the end of a long, adventurous life, Lady Lousie Lendale (Loren) tells the story of her rise from laundress to mistress of gambler and anarchist Armand Denis (Newman), before marrying the suave aristocrat Lord 'Dicky' Lendale (Niven) in this sexy comedy.

Much loved and respected native French, long-widowed Brit, Lady L, how she is affectionately referred to, has just turned eighty to great fanfare among the British aristocracy, including with most of her family. On this milestone, Sir Percy, who loves her, announces that he has authorization from his publisher to write her biography, he having a private conversation with her for her to relay her as of yet never told story. From Sir Percy's perspective, it does not start off well in she beginning when she was a young woman under her birth name Louise Baldinucci working as a laundress for among others a Paris brothel, with the story getting increasingly worse. While facilitated wittingly or unwittingly by other men, it is through her connection to the brothel that she would meet the first of two men who would have the greatest effect on how she got to become beloved Lady L. He is Armand Denis, a Robin Hood styled criminal turned anarchist. It is with Armand that she would have the greatest passion, as such their love often crossing the line into hate. It is in the two of them trying to evade the authorities that she would meet the second, Dicky Lendale, who saw in Louise a very specific intimate role in his life, and a time sensitive one at that, one that he had the wealth to fund.—Huggo

Today Lady Louise Lendale (Sophia Loren) is eighty-years-old, and she tells her long-time admirer, British poet Sir Percy (Cecil Parker), all about her eventful life. In the beginning, she was a young laundress working in "Le Mouton Bleu", a renowned Paris whorehouse. There, she met Armand (Paul Newman), both a charming man and a bomb-throwing anarchist, and it wasn't long before she became his mistress. One day, while Armand was away in Switzerland, working for a revolutionary movement aiming to murder a Russian Prince, Louise met the second man in her life, a British Lord she soon called Dicky (David Niven). The latter offered to marry her. In exchange, he would save Armand from the police's grip. She accepted on the condition she could still see Armand.—Guy Bellinger