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

Her relationship with the Hollywood actor Vincent D’Onofrio, the father of her 16-year-old daughter, Leila, is also problematical. She is reluctant to be drawn about it but says ‘it makes me livid that we are unable to come to an accommodation for the sake of our child’.

She lives now in Sussex with her cousin, Carlo Mantegazza, by whom she has a son, Matteo, who is nine. Their farmhouse is not far from the home where her English-born mother Pamela, a dancer and antiques dealer, had brought her up singlehandedly and took her to the local theatres, which was the beginning of her love affair with acting. ‘I remember a teacher I had, too, called Mrs Grove who taught me about poetry and literature and how to savour a great line. I used to come out of her classes feeling as if I was walking on air.’

Miss Scacchi has some high-profile film work coming up — a part in the cinema adaptation of Brideshead Revisited and Shoot on Sight, a television film about the 7/7 London suicide bombings, in which she plays the wife of a Muslim police officer — but the theatre is her greatest love. ‘It always amazes me with film the way they can Sellotape together some bits and pieces an actor has done, normally in no particular order, and make it look part of a logical narrative. With theatre you do the whole thing from start to finish and you grow and grow in the parts you play.’

She has always been drawn to Rattigan — she appeared in Ronald Harwood’s brilliant 1994 film adaptation of The Browning Version — because of the power of the words. She certainly seems to have a special affinity with them. When she was on tour with The Deep Blue Sea, the peerless Daily Telegraph critic Charles Spencer said that, as an actress whom he had previously regarded as ‘little more than eye candy’, Miss Scacchi was a ‘revelation’ in a role that ‘demanded acting of the highest order’.

‘My agent didn’t think I would like the bit about eye candy, but I loved it because of the sense of acceptance that went with it. Most actors spend 20 or 30 years trailing around theatres and then maybe they get into films. With me, it’s been the other way around and, you know, I feel I saved the best bit till last.’

Tim Walker Is The Theatre Critic Of The Sunday Telegraph.