Eighties film icon unimpressed by 'gratuitous' modern day sex scenes

Daily Mirror

5 days ago

Greta Scacchi did not hold back on her thoughts on bedroom scenes and intimacy coordinators
English-Italian actor Greta Scacchi says she wouldn't have benefited from an intimacy coordinator when she started her career in the 80s in Hollywood films including White Mischief, Heat and Dust and The Player.
Asked if it would have helped, Greta, 65, said: 'I don't at all. Actors don't want to be choreographed into positions unless there's a real antipathy or a communication problem. Luckily, I didn't have that. The most discomfort I've had in those situations was with directors and their own… appetites, let's say. It sometimes gets muddied by voyeurism, and that leads to us being shown stuff that a lot of us don't want to see. That's where you need the intimacy coordinator.'
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Since 2022 Greta's screen appearances have been a little different. In cozy Australian murder mystery Darby and Joan on U&Drama in the UK, she stars as widowed English nurse Joan Kirkhope. She teams up with Australian ex-detective Jack Darby (played by Bryan Brown). The pair have a will-they, won't-they relationship in the series but Greta says both actors think it would be a mistake if their characters got together.
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Asked if things have changed today on TV, Greta highlighted in the Radio Times that sex scenes on screen were now very different.
She said: 'In my 20s, the female voice was still struggling to emerge, directors were mostly male and simulated lovemaking was obligatory. But in the 80s, it was soft focus and made to look beautiful and slowed down, whereas now I find it really gratuitous – this explicit rutting stuff is very odd to see. I find it so uninteresting, ugly and very compromising for the actors. It sounds funny coming from me, because I got labelled for nudity and sex scenes, but I don't believe it was a deserved label.
'I had a bed scene with Laurence Olivier [in 1984's The Ebony Tower] and that's where it started. I got that label. It made me wish I'd used a stage name.'
Last year when promoting her work for Netflix show Bodies, Greta also looked back at her earlier work on screen.
She told the Guardian: 'It was very clear to me even then that I was always being invited to play a male fantasy. I had to work very hard to punch some integrity into the idea of being a woman when I was placed inside that male gaze.
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"I've seen that change a lot, and there are so many more female directors getting attention, which is great, but the way older women get portrayed is often still very odd. Where are the glamorous – or even not glamorous – representations of today's older women? Where are the women who went through women's lib?'
Greta was born in Milan, Italy but spent her childhood in England. She began working in theatre when she spent two years of her teens in Australia, where she began working in theatre. Her films include White Mischief, The Player and Emma.
In 2024 Scacchi played Mrs Hardcastle in a 1930s-style update of Goldsmith's She Stoops to Conquer at the Orange Tree theatre, Richmond.
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On theatre work, she said: 'It's like my sacred space. As you get older, life itself continues to throw more challenges and dramas your way, and doing theatre, with its pace, its timings of rehearsals and its rules, makes me feel a bit more in control.'
Greta has been in two long term relationships that resulted in children. She had a four year relationship with actor Vincent D'Onofrio, with whom she has a daughter named Leila George. They split soon after they had their first child in 1992.
The split reportedly left her so distraught she was unable to work for four years - just when her Hollywood career was taking off.
Later, she began a relationship with her first cousin, Carlo Mantegazza, and they have a son Matteo, born in 1997. This relationship ended more than a decade ago but was only confirmed years later in 2022 by her publicist.
* The full interview with Greta is in the Radio Times, out now.