She is known as “Bella Bellucci” and is arguably the world’s most beautiful actress. Comparisons with Sophia Loren are endless and inevitable, and Monica Bellucci has not been slow to exploit her looks. She will take her clothes off for a role faster than you can order lasagne with a bottle of Valpolicella. And, as I was to learn, she would probably polish off the food and drink, too, rather than pick at a lettuce leaf. For, as with many models who turn actress, Bellucci would now rather have credibility than beauty.
Ugly scenes, in fact, are something of a speciality of hers. The most notorious saw Bellucci as a rape victim in a disturbing nine-minute sequence in the violent thriller Irréversible, which led to angry walkouts at the 2002 Cannes film festival. She also ignored objections from other Catholics in playing Mary Magdalene in last year’s surprise hit from the director Mel Gibson, The Passion of the Christ. And no sooner has she finished playing the Mirror Queen in Terry Gilliam’s fantasy The Brothers Grimm, for which we meet to talk in Venice, than she will be seen as a prostitute in a French film, Combien tu m’aimes? “It is the fantasy of many women to play a prostitute,” she says darkly. “I get to pretend — and be paid for it.”
Bellucci delivers her prostitute role in immaculate French. She has also spoken perfect English in a succession of American-backed films such as Under Suspicion (2000), with Gene Hackman and Morgan Freeman, and the Bruce Willis movie Tears of the Sun (2003). She appeared as the elegant Persephone alongside Keanu Reeves in The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions (both 2003). She now shines opposite the Australian Heath Ledger and the American Matt Damon, both attempting English accents of their own, in The Brothers Grimm. It’s a film loosely based on the adventures of the children’s storytellers the Grimm brothers, Wilhelm (Damon) and Jacob (Ledger), in 19th-century Germany. Even here, Bellucci can’t resist a surprise, transforming her immortal and beautiful queen into one who looks 500 years old, thanks to four hours in make-up and some stomach-churning prosthetics.
“I liked the idea of playing a woman who had been granted her wish of living for ever,” she says. “The one thing she had forgotten was to ask for eternal beauty too, which eludes her.” Most actresses would leave such comments on a film fantasy at that. Yet Bellucci can’t resist taking it a step further. “I think about age and am scared to get old, because I’m going to die,” she says. “I like an easy life, and if it was possible to reach 500, I’d take it. I always want to be young, do not want to be sick and would like to stay as I am.”
Bellucci clearly has the same attitude about her actual age. It has varied wildly over the years. Her birth date on the internet (not always reliable) is given as September 30, 1964, which makes her 41. So, how old is she? “I am 36,” she says crisply. That’s that, then. Whatever age she is, Bellucci looks stunning. She’s 5ft 10in, with a womanly figure that today she has packed into a flowing, short-sleeved dress. She seems to revel in her olive skin and rich brown hair, which forms a fringe over dark eyes. “I have always felt good about myself,” she says, without apology. “Not because I think I am pretty, but because I had a great family, and so much love and protection. It is not about beauty — that fades — but a state of mind.”
That mind was clearly working well even when she was a teenager in the small Italian village of Città di Castello, in Umbria. She won a place at Perugia University to study law and used her beauty as a weapon, by modelling, to earn money to help finance her studies. She was signed up by a model agency in Milan, swapped her lawyer’s robes and the courtroom for dresses and the catwalk, and made an instant impression. She became known for a series of advertisements for Dolce & Gabbana, including a black-and-white television commercial. “But I wanted more,” she says. “Models are rightly expected to look good and not express an opinion.”
Since Bellucci’s opinions flow fast and furious throughout our conversation, this was clearly not for her. She remained silent in her movie debut, as a topless vampire in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), but within weeks had dumped full-time modelling and enrolled in acting classes. “I had seen what life on a film set was like, and realised it was for me,” she says. “I knew it was a risk because I was doing so well, but it was a risk I was prepared to take.”
As it has for a handful of models who became actresses — most notably, the Oscar-winner Charlize Theron — the risk paid off. She won a César award for best actress in her breakthrough French film, the thriller L’Appartement (1996). And her international success began with the 2000 film Malèna, playing a young widow making a big impact in a small Sicilian village. It was directed by Giuseppe Tornatore, who also directed her in the Dolce & Gabbana ad. “It is possible to make progress, with enthusiasm and the energy always to do your best,” she reasons. “I have often found that one film has led to another because of recommendation. I do not always impress people at first meeting. I have to work at it.”
Bellucci apparently had to work at her relationship with her fiery French actor husband, Vincent Cassel, when they met on L’Appartement. “It was not love at first sight,” she reports. “In fact, it was the opposite. I thought, ‘This guy is very pretentious — who does he think he is?’ But we got to know each other over time. I realised he was not as he seemed. He put up a public face, like many of us. He also told me later, ‘I thought you were just a model pretending to be an actress. Then, I realised you could act.’”
She knows relationships that form in front of a camera lens — hers graduated to marriage in 1999, with a baby daughter, Deva, born in September last year — are always fragile. “It is impossible to say why one marriage stays stable and another collapses,” she says. “For me, it is a miracle every day.” That relationship was put to the test when Bellucci performed so convincingly and so disturbingly as the rape victim in Irréversible — a film in which Cassel co-starred. He burst into tears when he saw it for the first time. “He is an experienced actor,” she tells me, seemingly still puzzled three years after the event. “I told him, ‘It is acting — it is pretend.’ But he could not get over the fact that my character was being abused in this way.”
The scene took place in a subway that her character, Alex, was using as a short cut across a main road. “We did six separate takes in that tunnel, on a night shoot,” Bellucci recalls. “I was wearing this sexy dress. Before we started filming, I said, ‘Can you make me a copy of this dress, to keep?’ But when the scene was finished, I never wanted to see that dress again in my life. So I just left it behind. It is irrational, I know, but I could not touch that dress again. And I know my husband would never have wanted to see me wear it.”
It is difficult to gauge exactly how her fellow Italians view Bellucci. There has been criticism of how she has kicked back the barriers — she played another prostitute in the 2001 film Brotherhood of the Wolf, for example — and the church remains offended by her role as Mary Magdalene. Yet another sector of Italian society obviously regards her as a saviour. “Most women in Italy rarely get to be free birds,” she says. “I have shown my body because I do not object to nudity on screen. That offends some people, I know. But I have always felt sensual — I felt like a woman at 15, and accepted it.”
While Europe seems to have no trouble with the mature woman, America is a tougher market. “Hollywood?” she questions, with a snort. “I could never live there. They are obsessed with youth and beauty even more than us. There is this thing in America where actresses reach 40 and go mad. The film industry wants all these young people. They also like a different sort of woman.” The implication is obvious. Hollywood star actresses are so stick thin, they hardly cast a shadow. I have often felt like taking food baskets along to my interviews. “I will never be skinny,” says Bellucci reassuringly. “I also had a child a year ago, and I have been lazy. I love to eat. Who cares? I am natural.”
It’s a look that has certainly hooked directors. Gilliam, director of The Brothers Grimm, asks: “Have you ever seen a more beautiful actress?” He does not wait for an answer to his rhetorical question. “She is like that all the time, too,” he says. “It is not an act. She is like those old-style Italian actresses, like Loren, Claudia Cardinale or Gina Lollobrigida. They are never girls. They are women. We just don’t get their type in other areas of the world.” The role of the Mirror Queen also presented him with a problem: how to find an actress who would, with a magic mirror, stop a cinema audience in its tracks with her ravishing beauty. “Who else are you going to get but Monica?” asks Gilliam.
Bellucci, however, is looking beyond her beauty. “When I agree to do a film, it is because I am interested in the script and the director,” she says. “Then I will do anything — absolutely anything.” Her role in The Brothers Grimm amounts to a memorable 20 minutes or so in a film lasting more than two hours. But she says: “It is not a question of how long I am in the film. It is something special to play.” She also has a mature and carefully considered view of the message behind the movie. “This film is a metaphor for anyone who believes in their image,” she says. “When the image is destroyed, the person gets destroyed along with it. In a different way, we can all be victims of vanity.”
Bellucci insists this is not one of her besetting sins. “I act what is on the page,” she says. And although she lives in Paris with her husband and baby daughter, and has property throughout Europe, including an apartment in Chelsea, she remains true to her birth. “My head can be everywhere, but my heart will always be Italian,” she says.
The Brothers Grimm is released on Friday
