It's nice to let go."In the cottage, Matteo, who has Shirley Temple ringlets, leads me to the bathroom, to show off the tiles that are decorated with his and his sister's multicoloured handprints and footprints. Leila, who according to her mother ate woodlice as a baby "to get my attention when I was spending too long on the phone", occasionally wanders over to the piano to pick out "Greensleeves" with one finger.Scacchi's own childhood was split between Sussex, where her mother lived, and Milan, home to her art-dealer father Later, she followed her mother to a new home in Perth. "I felt divided," she recalls, lounging in the sunny room at the back of the cottage "It wasn't just that I was speaking in a different language I was choosing to say different things when I was in Italy I identified this when I was eight years old. I thought: 'I'm two people'."By the age of 10, she was being packed off to Italy with her older brothers for the summer. "I had a dinky handbag with my tickets and passport inside, and mum put us on the boat at Newhaven." Those bursts of vibrant socialising in Milan couldn't have been more of a shock after Sussex, but when asked what she learned from her sojourns to Italy, Scacchi becomes pensive. "My brothers and I know better than anyone how to wrap things up that could be breakable," she says enigmatically.
"How to handle fragile objects." I think she might be talking about something other than antique urns and vases.Then there is her mother, a former dancer "She's very critical," says Scacchi Do you find that positive? "Yeeesss..." she says hesitantly "It helped prepare me It meant I wasn't going to get exploited. When I started off – young, photogenic, all of that – I was never starstruck by opportunities." Perhaps, I suggest, she finds those qualities less appropriate in her mother now. "I suppose it would be nice for her to be not quite so critical any more," she concedes. Hasn't she given her approval on anything you've done? She thinks for a long time, her eyes scouring the walls. "I'd rather not answer that," she says, finally.If we're going to accentuate the positive, then it is as well to point out that this stiff-sounding upbringing gave Greta Scacchi the requisite tools to forge the career she has chosen. She has something: the pluck to steal herself off on eccentric detours just when it seems that she might take over the world. Did you know, for instance, that she turned down the Sharon Stone role in Basic Instinct? "I thought it was crap.
I don't like shoulder pads and I never will." And although she would be the first to admit that her choices were sometimes flawed – "Every film the Taviani brothers made was a masterpiece until I worked with them," she once remarked of Good Morning Babylon (1987) – her risk-taking has been vindicated by a number of quite dazzling performances.She coped handsomely with the burden of playing one of the few non-reptilian characters in Altman's The Player (1992), which she now calls "the highlight of all my film work". For me, that description better fits her portrayal of the adulterous wife in Mike Figgis's remake of The Browning Version (1994), a woman so cornered and used-up by life that she seems prepared to hiss and claw at anyone within reach. Few actresses would have braved so unflattering a character, let alone invested her with real hurt, real heartache Scacchi's relationship with Hollywood remains ambivalent "I'm off the boil over there at the moment," she muses. "I must get on the boil again." This is said casually, even distractedly, as though she is making a mental note to pick up something from the corner shop. You imagine that, should it slip her mind, she won't feel unduly troubled.Back in the late 1980s, she lost a number of high-profile roles because she wasn't familiar enough to US audiences, even after movies such as Heat and Dust (1982) and White Mischief (1987). It had never even crossed her mind to put herself about a bit.
