Greta Scacchi

Mark Worden (Standard British accent):

The February issue of Speak Up features an interview with Greta Scacchi. In this out-take we asked her how she first became involved in acting:

Greta Scacchi (Standard English accent):

My mother was a dancer, an English dancer. She joined the Bluebell company and travelled all over Europe and, like all the Bluebells in the ‘50s, fell in love with Italians, and so hence my Italian father and my English mother. And she always read to me when I was small and I particularly liked poems, the poems of Christopher Robin, Winnie the Pooh, written by A. A. Milne, and so when she wasn’t available to read them to me, I learnt to read, reading the poems myself out loud, and I always enjoyed reading out loud. It wasn’t until I was eight years old that I discovered that there was such a thing as theatre and, as soon as I discovered it, I knew that that’s what I wanted to do because that’s what I had already been doing and so I came to acting through a passion for theatre and the spoken word. And I was very lucky to have this vocation so early on because I was able to work at it and I did elocution lessons, when… from when I was 10 years old, so I got used to standing up in public and speaking, speaking from books and poems and the Bible, even; anything to have a chance to perform. So I always knew that I wanted to go to drama school and, by the time I was 18, when I got back to England from Australia, I knew I was going to be auditioning for drama schools, and, because I was at a model  agency, I got offered films straightaway, when I was 17, 18, but I didn’t want to do films because that wasn’t my passion, it was the theatre. I mean, I liked the idea of being in a film, but not if the director had chosen me because I looked good in a photo. I wanted to be chosen because I was good at acting. So I did three years at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, which is a very prestigious theatre training in England, and, when I came out of the theatre school, having done Ibsen, Shakespeare, Chekhov, Noel Coward, Rattigan, Pinter, and having a love for those materials, I found myself getting offered film roles! So my career really took off, from when I did my first film, Heat and Dust, directed by James Ivory, and that was a perfect role for me and a very good vehicle for me, at that age. I was 22 when I made the film, and when it came out in Cannes, at the festival in 1983, it was a big success and it launched me on the film market. So I found it quite easy to get roles in film, one after the other, but the theatre work, which I was still aching to do, came slower and later.

(Great Scacchi was talking to Massimiliano Civili)

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