It hasn't been great for her career, but at least passing 40 has finally let Greta Scacchi act like the complex person she is, writes Christine Madden
Dressed discreetly in a fawn sweater and Burberry trousers, with an incandescent saffron-yellow scarf around her neck instead of pearls, Greta Scacchi sips at a glass of wine. "I came to Ireland 20 years ago as a student, hitch-hiking round for a week and staying in Dublin. And I remember when I came here on The Serpent's Kiss and Love And Rage, I was miles away." She pinches some shag tobacco from a pouch on the table, rolling it into a cigarette. "But I found excuses to come back and come through Dublin. It's so changed and so hip now, isn't it? Exciting place." She lights the roll-up and pulls on it elegantly.
The scene is reminiscent of one in Cathal Black's film Love And Rage, in which she smokes a dúidín presented by her dubious lover, James Lynchehaun (Daniel Craig), because it's what the "bad women" in Ireland smoke. Except Scacchi isn't bad. And she isn't good, either. A cultural hybrid, she can't be pigeonholed; she follows her own rules, on and off the set.
Born in 1960 in Milan, to an Italian painter and an English dancer, Scacchi grew up in Sussex with her mother after her parents split up. But she continued to visit Milan during school holidays, and at 15 she moved to Australia with her mother, who had remarried. As her mother was no stranger to the stage, Scacchi's decision, at the age of eight, to become an actor was perfectly acceptable.
It wasn't the prospect of being on the boards that first attracted Scacchi to acting, but the sumptuous nature of language. "I like words. I came to acting first of all through my love of poetry. Before I started school I learned to read, because my mum used to read poems to me. And then I'd want to learn them and read them myself and read them out loud. I love verse. I leave poetry books around the house so that, if I've got a minute, got to wait or sit on the loo, I'm reading a poem."
Not the kind of introduction to drama you expect a sex symbol to have had. But while Scacchi is remembered for her steamy, sexy characters, she genuflected only briefly towards mainstream cinema. "I did avoid completely going to Hollywood for the first eight years I was working," she says. "I got invited to Hollywood, but I felt very suspicious of it. But when it happened a few times that I lost roles in European films to other actors who had names in America - because that box-office thing can be so important for financing a film - I realised I'd have to go to America. So I went when I was 30, and I got Presumed Innocent, and while I was doing that I got another film, and another film, till I spent two years, more or less, in America, always escaping back to Europe when I had time off."
What was so unbearable about the American experience? "I found it really excruciating to have to work in a studio system." She relights the tip of her roll-up. "There's such a star system; the actors are very much separated from the working arena on a film set. Not so much in the Gillian Armstrong film [Fires Within, from 1991], but definitely the film with Harrison Ford [Presumed Innocent]. I wasn't allowed to approach him. I wasn't allowed to discuss my scenes with him. There weren't moments for an exchange between the actors in a scene and the director."
The tip of the cigarette glows back to life as she draws air through it. "He \ had private meetings behind a closed door with the director, and I would try and knock on the door and go in there, and the assistants would be dragging me away. And I'd be saying: 'They're talking about my scene. I want to go in there.' And they'd say: 'No, no, no, no.' And then the doors would open and Harrison would walk by, and everybody would keep their distance. Because it's like a caste system over there, and he's quite a shy man.
"That situation was really extreme, and I found it ludicrous. It was completely the opposite extreme to the kind of auteur film-making that's more European, which I like."
Were it not for the memory of her performances, it would be hard to imagine the beautiful, soft-spoken Scacchi in front of me fending off a determined Hollywood film crew. It is no easier to believe a woman with such a lustrous complexion will be 42 on Monday.
In earlier years, with a younger, antenatal body, she found herself accepting roles as a sex kitten, but those aren't coming her way now. She regards her situation philosophically. "Your goals have to alter, as you grow older. I won't be thinking of Nina in The Seagull; I'll be thinking of Arkadina, or Madame Ranevsky [in The Cherry Orchard]. Or it won't be Ophelia any more; it might be Gertrude.
"Generally, in the last few years I've been very optimistic." She trails off, then smiles. "With little ground, because actually the roles and the number of scripts have diminished, and that's inevitable. But the older I get, I know, the further I get from getting roles because I'm young and photogenic. In my 20s, I felt that that was like a curse, almost.
"Now I can see it was a great gift, but at the time I felt so frustrated that I wasn't offered plays: I was offered films, and my job was often to look great. I found it very inhibiting. I wasn't enjoying then the glamorous side of it as much as I would now. Now, in order not to have to play the mother always, I wouldn't mind playing something glamorous, a femme fatale or something sexy."
So what can an actress do when, unfairly, erroneously, she finds herself stripped of her allure as soon as she passes the 40-year-old high-water mark? "I would love to go back to Hollywood and do even a studio film and earn some money. Remind people that I'm around. And carry more weight again, to do more independent kind of projects outside of America.
"You can bring a lot of help to film production in smaller countries if you've got a Hollywood name, so it's very useful, even though I've just talked about what I don't like about it. And I'd like to come and work in the theatre here. I'd love to." With this in mind, she has been speaking to Michael Colgan, of the Gate.
Scacchi's film career has eclipsed her stage presence, but she has appeared in the UK and Australia in a number of projects, including Miss Julie, A Doll's House, Uncle Vanya and plays by Harold Pinter.
This experience helped inform her work in Love And Rage, in which Scacchi plays Agnes MacDonnell, an English divorcee who comes to live by herself on Achill Island, joined only by a female servant, after she is forced out of sniffy London society. She is treated with equal parts awe and suspicion by the locals, until the roguish Lynchehaun - the historical inspiration for The Playboy Of The Western World - seduces and comes to control her.
Unfortunately, the film develops from an Irish Miss Julie to The Irish R.M. meets American Psycho, but Scacchi's performance humanises and animates MacDonnell - a strong, lusty woman brimming with joie de vivre who tragically loses her will and self- esteem in her consuming passion for a sadistic and manipulative lover.
"I think it's rare to get a part like that, which has such a journey, such a scale of changes of situation, emotional changes," says Scacchi. "Not only a well-established character, but a character who has an emotional journey." Something like Scacchi herself, then, as she struggles to redefine herself. If there's one good thing about growing out of sex-symbol status, it's that she can finally act like the complex person she is.
Love And Rage opens today at the IFC
