I never want to be as insecure as Olivier

14 May 2008

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Tim Walker talks to Greta Scacchi about her new role in The Deep Blue Sea, the gaucheness of Bill Murray — and being offered the lead in Basic Instinct

She made one or two films in Hollywood — such as Presumed Innocent with Harrison Ford — but she looks back now on that town and its values with a sense of indignation. To be young, attractive and female there was, as she tells it, to be in a very vulnerable position indeed. ‘I remember going to casting meetings in hotel rooms and there would be all these men looking at me. I went to one with that guy who was in Ghostbusters. Oh yes, Bill Murray. He asked me for my telephone number in front of everyone and I gave it to him. It was important to show the team that there was chemistry between their two putative stars. “Yeah, sure, come over tonight,” I said, doing what I was expected to do.

‘And, sure enough, Murray came round. I had an eclectic collection of friends in my apartment and we were cooking, playing music, dancing, all completely stoned. He just sat on a sofa, utterly out of his depth. He was wearing his stupid farmer’s boots, a lumberjack shirt and looking like the country bumpkin from the Midwest that he really always was. And he left, shaking his head, and I never had to see him again.’

This woman could write an extraordinary autobiography and, yes, she says, she has thought about it. If she hasn’t yet put pen to paper, it is probably because there is an aspect of her life that remains unresolved: her relationship with her father, Luca Scacchi Gracco, an Italian art dealer and painter. He hit her when she told him that she wanted to be an actress, and abandoned her mother and her when she was still a child; they moved to live in Sussex without him.

‘He was brought up in Como, which is one of the most bourgeois towns in all of the world. He accepted me as an actress eventually, but only when it became a useful badge for him to wear. It is not for nothing I guess that a lot of the most enduring friendships I have had in my life have been with men who are my father’s age — Joss Ackland, for instance, and Michael Blakemore.’