In My Defence

I couldn't resist:

the wayward curls atop a perfect face


the mimicking


the towelette thingy - oh, and the hands spreading it


clever concentration, with big hands holding a tiny stylus


double Bobby

Expressions

He has a lot. I love them all.




















Poor Bobby needs a hug.

What do we want?

The hand?


The neck?


The tongue?


Do I hear a resounding "yes please" to all three?

The offending article

The link for the article on GS where she (yet again) slags off our beloved is:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2012948/Greta-Scacchi-Why-I-child-cousin.html

Just in case you can't access it where you are, I've cut and pasted the text, but there are lots of pictures with it which may be of interest if you can go to the page itself. Oh, and it looks like my comment has been deleted, and Diane's has been given the thumbs down. Icky people...

'Scorchy' Scacchi: Why I had a child with my cousin
By Angella Johnson

For several months, the secret relationship had been her own private illicit thrill.
But having reached the first trimester of her pregnancy, Greta Scacchi knew she had to tell her family about the baby and who the father was.
The explosion, especially from the Italian branch, was inevitable.

Sultry beauty: Italian actress Greta Scacchi, posing in a doorway
‘My dad Luca was deeply offended and quite devastated. He was very angry,’ she says. Several elderly uncles were equally outspoken in their condemnation, declaring the relationship with Carlo Mantegazza unacceptable and against the Catholic Church.

Even Greta’s then five-year-old daughter Leila, whose father is the Italian American actor Vincent D’Onofrio, was furious – though her objections were more about having to share her mother’s affections for the first time.

More than a decade on and Greta says she still can’t believe some people continue to react negatively to the fact that she and Carlo, the father of her 12-year-old son Matteo, are first cousins (her father’s sister is Carlo’s mother).

‘We were hounded by the media and a lot of nasty stuff has been written about me as a result,’ she says. ‘But we’ve weathered the storm and are still together.’

The award-winning actress, whose smouldering looks in films such as Heat And Dust and White Mischief earned her the nickname ‘Scorchy Scacchi’, says the general reaction when the news first broke left her reeling.
We meet at a rented home in East Sussex, to which she fled last October following a bitter six-year legal dispute with neighbours at her idyllic cottage in Hurstpierpoint, West Sussex.

At 51, she no longer has the sex-bomb looks that made her famous and helped win her an array of femme fatale roles. The blonde hair is now shorter, darker and carelessly untamed.
She is carrying a few extra pounds but her beauty still shines through – even without a scrap of make-up on her face.

In her frankest interview ever, the Emmy-winning star reveals that falling in love with her cousin and best friend almost tore her family apart. She admits even she was initially horrified to have romantic feelings for Carlo, who is three years older and worked for the family’s import-export textile business.

No regrets: Greta Scacchi with partner Carlo and their son Matteo
She says: ‘It happened one night when he was visiting and it came as a complete shock.

We were friends for a long time before we got together in 1997 and I had never seen him in that way before. I was definitely scandalised by it and worried about how to tell people – especially my family.

‘Some of the Italian relatives were utterly outraged. My dad found it especially hard because he had cut himself off from all his kin [because of personality clashes] except Carlo, who was his favourite nephew. They were close friends and for a while afterwards they didn’t speak. Dad was furious and Carlo was very hurt.

Greta in a scene from the 1999 film Cotton Mary
‘Catholic newspapers were so disapproving when it became public knowledge. I was scared because I thought I might have to get rid of the baby I was having. It felt like the end of the world.

‘Leila, who I had brought up as a single mother from the time she was six months old, was simply annoyed to have a man come into our lives without her consent – followed swiftly by a baby brother. There were tantrums and tears but we muddled though.’
Greta adds: ‘Thankfully, my mother Pamela was very supportive, which meant the world to me. Mum is very broad-minded but she’s always been a strong critic. And although she would have wanted me to find someone rich, profoundly intellectual and urbane, she accepted my choice.

Greta with actor James Wilby in film, Cotton Mary
‘I was looking for someone who would love me, support me and be there for me and my children. Carlo is a rock, a giver and a carer. He absolutely knows when something is a priority and works very hard for our family. By the time our son Matteo was born I had an extraordinary feeling of it being right.’

Greta is now enjoying something of an Indian summer as an actress and has just finished a successful West End run, playing Bette Davies to Anita Dobson’s Joan Crawford in Anton Burge’s play Bette & Joan, about the Hollywood stars’ great rivalry.

Greta in a scene from the film White Mischief
Next week she will start recording a Radio 4 production of Vasily Grossman’s eight-hour masterpiece, Life And Fate, with Kenneth Branagh.
An Italian film project is also under consideration.

Greta says acting is all she can remember ever wanting to do. It was a passion fuelled by her English mother Pamela, a dancer who came from a working-class family in the Cotswolds.

‘She was a Bluebell when there were only ten women in the troupe and she was also the model for the statue in the middle of the fountain in Sloane Square,’ says Greta.

Pamela was working in Italy in the late Fifties when she met Luca Scacchi, a handsome and gifted young artist who had studied as an apprentice to Picasso.

‘Dad came from a very rich self-made family,’ continues Greta. ‘My grandfather owned the most famous silk factory in Como and made all the silk for the Vatican.
Picasso had considered his a wonderful talent, but he never fulfilled his early potential.’

Greta and her twin brothers Tom and Paul, who are a year older and are both craftsmen involved with restoring historic buildings and furniture, were all born in Milan.
Luca sent the family to live in London when Greta was four, but never joined them. He would turn up during holidays bearing gifts only to disappear again, leaving his children bereft.

‘He was rather feckless and kept breaking all his promises to us,’ says Greta. ‘I remember him saying he would be there for my eighth birthday and I would rush to the window every time a car drove up the gravel path. But it was either my friends being dropped off or being collected. He never came.’

Pamela, who eventually ran her own dance studio in Haywards Heath, West Sussex, brought up her children single-handedly. ‘She was steady and disciplined. I’ve got a lot of her inside me, I think,’ Greta says.
Greta, left in the film Cotton Mary
‘That’s why I’m quite hard on myself. She used to read Christopher Robin poems, Winnie The Pooh and classical verses to me. I developed a love for the sound of speech, which for me is at the core of all acting. So I came to it cerebrally, not visually.’
When Greta was 15, Pamela divorced Greta’s father and married Giovanni Carsaniga, an Italian professor, and the family moved to Perth, Australia.
In 1977, Greta won a place to study drama in the UK at the Bristol Old Vic theatre school and stopped off in Milan to visit her father.

She was spotted by a model scout and found herself working with Oliviero Toscani, the top photographer in Italy at the time. Soon she was on the pages of all the national glossy magazines.

Left to right, Greta Scacchi, Sakina Jeffrey and Madhur Jeffry in the film Cotton Mary
But modelling was only a means to an end. ‘I was always embarrassed by my so-called beauty and disassociated from the work by changing my name to Gracco.

‘I did it to earn enough to pay for my acting tuition and at age 20 I was able to buy a house in Bristol,’ she says.
When her first two film offers came via her modelling agency she was furious because they were based on how she looked. ‘I turned them down flat. I knew from the beginning that I wanted a career of quality. I didn’t want to be treated like a commodity.

‘I was always disparaging about the fact that people were so hung up on my looks. I fought against the artifice of Hollywood, like Bette Davis, and would tell every aspiring actress to study Bette.
Her views are valuable for anyone starting out.’

Greta in a floor-length dress at the 1997 Golden Globe Awards in Beverly Hills
Fresh out of drama school, where her contemporaries included Miranda Richardson and Daniel Day-Lewis, on whom she had a big crush, Greta won the part in the Merchant Ivory blockbuster Heat And Dust in 1983.

It made her a star at just 22. Her next big hit was White Mischief in 1987, but by then she was being typecast as an actress who would strip on screen. ‘Everything was about looks and I hated it. I wasn’t even being paid that much money for it,’ she says.

Between filming Presumed Innocence with Harrison Ford and Shattered, she met D’Onofrio on the set of a film called Fire Within, which never saw the light of day.
‘He was my first big love and it was a truly traumatic time. We filmed for ten weeks during which I fell completely. It was my first head-over-heels, stupid love where I handed over the key to my heart.
‘I have never been so lost before. I was overwhelmed by him. There were plenty of signs that it wasn’t going to work or last. But I didn’t want to see them. We were constantly rowing and breaking up.’

Greta was thrilled when she became pregnant. ‘He begged me to have his child and buy a house with him in New York. I thought we were going to be a family but he couldn’t even bear to hear the baby crying,’ she says.
‘One morning when Leila was six months old and we were staying in a rented flat in Leicester Square in London, he suddenly said, “I’m not ready for family life, I’m going back to New York.”

‘I was devastated. Early in our relationship he had been fiercely jealous over other men being attracted to me. But I was completely monogamous. Fidelity was his issue, not mine.’

Greta even turned down the role eventually taken in Basic Instinct by Sharon Stone in 1992 because of D’Onofrio’s possessiveness. She says: ‘I wanted my relationship with Vincent to work out and this kind of mega project would have been the death-knell. Sometimes I regret it because I can see how my passion influenced my decisions. I was headstrong.
A portrait of actress Greta Scacchi looking naturally beautiful
‘They offered a ridiculous amount of money and then doubled it. My agent even told me Michael Douglas wanted me so much that he would come to Italy to try to persuade me. But I was with my dad at the time and Vincent was coming to woo me after a fall-out. I didn’t want Douglas spoiling things.’ Ironically, it was then that D’Onofrio left her before the end of 1992.

‘I found myself a single mum and it was very hard to function for four years. I was so deeply shaken.
‘I had been a winner from a very early age. I thought if I worked hard I would always get what I wanted and I had been lucky until then,’ she says.

His abandonment rocked her self-belief and she retreated to the cottage in Hurstpierpoint. She barely worked during what should have been her golden years as an actress and had too little confidence to go to London to parties.

Greta, centre starring in the film Cotton Mary
‘Looking back at the wreckage I feel rather foolish that I let myself go through that amount of pain. I was seduced by someone who was incapable of caring. Someone like my own father, who was completely egotistical. My dad also did whatever the hell he wanted to do and regularly put himself first.’

Carlo, who was a sales representative for his family’s clothing company, became her closest and most trusted friend during those turbulent years. She had met him only twice – when she was aged seven and 14 – before becoming friends when she left drama school at 21.

‘He was my solace and my rock and the man to whom I turned when I felt desperate,’ she says.

‘He was the first person at the hospital after Leila was born and is her godfather. He was always at the end of the phone but it was no more than a close friendship. We got together and it just seemed right. He was my best friend and he became my lover. I call him my husband but we’ve never married.’

Even though their family have long accepted them as a couple, their lives have been dogged by the stigma of their kinship.

‘We are very close and have been through so much together. Still I don’t know where we will end up.

‘It’s not been an easy road but I have no real regrets over the choices I’ve made.’

It's arrived!

And to prove it, it's here:

I still have an episode of the Season 5 DVD to cap, but I couldn't resist just having a little dip into my new box.

A Response

Great Skanky was in the Sunday press again this week slagging off the D'Ivine One. Diane was incensed, and she and I both left comments on the online page.

To celebrate the fact that Vincent had the good taste to rid himself of the Harpie, I decided to post some pictures from Fires Within, the film on which they met, with a minimal amount of non-Vincent interference.

I didn't have to edit this one, he did it for me!











That's me on top of him - or you, as you will no doubt prefer!


Luckily the eye and nose are non-identifiable.


That's it, Vincent, poke her eye out!







Yes, it would be a much better film if just Vincent was in it.

End of S1 Games

The peppermint game

The "I know you're lying" game


The Sardines game


The Collar game (anyone think they'd look like this dog if they were held in his arms?)


The innocence game


The manhandling game (yes please)


The angry game


Love it when he plays.

Contrasts

The silver speckles in his black hair


Soft, strong hands


Dry split on such a kissable lip


Finger pointing but not at me


Hand in a pocket where mine should be


Handsome hunk and horrible harpie


Wrinkly hands with knobbly knuckles, and then Vincent's smoothies


Would you just look at that wrist!