She studied law, became a model, and then starred in everything from arthouse films to blockbusters. Now the multilingual Italian actor is overcoming a lifetime of stage fright to play opera diva Maria Callas

Monica Bellucci has been asked about her beauty for close on four decades. The Italian-born actor – who started out as a model and holds the somewhat ambiguous distinction of becoming the oldest Bond girl – has caused many male journalists to overheat. Nel 2004, one interviewer called her “a distillation of every Italian perfection”, dwelling on the way “she brushes the cappuccino foam from her lips with the long, unpainted nails of her perfect fingers.”

Sitting opposite me in a quiet corner of a hotel bar in Paris, Bellucci appears to drink her coffee like a regular person (and sweetly worries when I don’t order any). When I ask her about these breathless accounts, she pauses before saying: “It’s funny. It’s just a fantasy that keeps going for no reason, because nobody believes it. Io non ci credo. The other person doesn’t, either.” Does she even read them? "No. It can be very boring,” she says drily.

Unusually, Bellucci, whose career spans Italian and French arthouse films in addition to blockbusters such as the Matrix sequels and Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, isn’t here to talk about a film. Instead, she has recently added a new string to her bow, making her stage debut in Maria Callas: Lettere e memorie, directed by Tom Volf. After opening in Paris, it toured to Italy, Greece and Turkey. Bellucci was due to perform it at Her Majesty’s theatre in London in December, but Omicron struck. It has now been rescheduled for April.

The show is based on Volf’s 2019 book of the same name, which featured 350 of Callas’s letters alongside her unfinished memoirs. Such was her desire to perform the great soprano’s writings, Bellucci overcame a lifetime of stage fright. Negli anni, she has said no to numerous offers to appear in plays. “I wouldn’t have dreamt of it," lei dice. When I ask how she felt in the run-up to the 2020 prima, she lets out a staccato laugh. “Bad. You have all those people in front of you, and you have to deal with all these energies – even now, I’m always scared.”

Volf was introduced to Bellucci by a friend, he explains by phone, and visited her at home in Paris to convince her to take the role. A photographer and film-maker, he has made a career as something of a Callas diehard since 2013. Alongside three books about the singer, he directed the 2017 documentary Maria by Callas, which told the opera star’s story in her own words. “You know how love at first sight happens?” Volf says, of hearing Bellucci read Callas’s letters for the first time. “It felt like she immediately got a sense of her emotion and state of mind. There was a window letting daylight shine on Monica’s face and I could see some of Callas in there.”

Maria Callas: Letters and Memoirs covers both the influential opera singer’s passion for her work and her troubled personal life, including her long love affair with the shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis (who ostensibly left her to marry Jackie Kennedy). The show also delves into her lonely final years: “You feel that in the end, all she has is the music,” Bellucci says. “All the rest is gone.”

Ultimately, the key to Bellucci overcoming her stage anxiety came from Callas’s wardrobe: a 1960s black Yves Saint Laurent dress, borrowed from a Milan collection. Did it have to be adjusted? "No, it was perfect,” Bellucci says, her voice sinking to a whisper. She is considering having a replica made to avoid damaging it, but resisted such an idea for a long time for one simple reason: “I was scared to perform without that dress.”

Depending on the location, Bellucci delivers the show in French, Italian or English, a feat she shrugs off, pointing out that Callas spoke all three languages too, and “had an accent whenever she was speaking”. Bellucci often dubs her own scenes, so that Italian and French viewers will still hear her voice in English-language films. “When you want to express something, if you’re into it, it just comes naturally.”

Callas isn’t the only adopted Italian Bellucci is currently playing. She donned a blond wig for Antongiulio Panizzi’s The Girl in the Fountain, shown in the autumn at the Torino film festival. The title refers to Anita Ekberg’s famous scene in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita. Bellucci plays an actor tasked with portraying Swedish-born Ekberg. “She stayed in Rome but she should have left,” Bellucci says of Ekberg’s life post-Dolce Vita. “Everything looked so beautiful and dreamy, but in reality, life in Rome destroyed her.” Ekberg met, she adds, “the wrong man” – presumably a reference to the actor Anthony Steel, whom Ekberg married and later described as terribly jealous.

“The funny thing is, there is a picture of Callas at the premiere of La Dolce Vita,” Bellucci says. Ekberg and Callas had a lot in common, she thinks. “They’re both women who tried to be free at a time when it was so difficult. They were independent through their work, but still prisoners through their heart.”

Bellucci, who was born in Umbria and briefly studied law, rarely speaks publicly about her own starry marriage, with the French actor Vincent Cassel, which lasted from 1999 a 2013. The two met while filming a French film, L'appartamento, and worked on several projects together, most notably Gaspar Noé’s uber-violent Irréversible.

When she mentions Callas’s ability to live life “with strong emotions”, I ask if she relates to this passion. “Not like that,” she says with a laugh. “I have two kids, I have slowed down!” Although her turn as Persephone in the Matrix sequels (steamy kiss with Keanu Reeves included) helped to establish her reputation in Hollywood in the early 00s, Bellucci says she is glad she stayed in Europe. “The concept of VIP is different in America. In Europa, even in London, actors live more normally. I take my kids to school. I go and buy things at the supermarket.”

The pandemic brought some family worries, when her parents became ill with Covid in 2020. Bellucci was away from Italia poi, sheltering with her daughters in Biarritz to remain close to Cassel, who spends part of the year there. The pandemic was hardest on her elder daughter Deva, now 17, who had just started a modelling career. “It’s more complicated,” says Bellucci, “when you’re very young and you want to see your friends.”

Deva was first noticed at the age of 14, while attending a shoot with her mother. “They saw her and said, 'Oh mio Dio, we would like to do something with her.’ But she was too young, so we waited a bit.” They didn’t wait long: nello stesso anno, Deva became the face of a Dolce & Gabbana perfume and has gone on to grace catwalks and magazine covers. Her love life is already the subject of much attention in the French press.

“She has one foot in school and normal life,” says Bellucci, and the other in “the world of adults. She knows what it means to work.” On Instagram, 600,000 followers observe Deva’s every move, and Bellucci believes social media have helped her daughter’s generation bypass gatekeepers. “She says it’s easier for them than it was for us, because when you have talent, you can show your talent right away.” Being the daughter of two wildly famous actors may help bring your talent to the fore, too.

Still, Bellucci remains protective, and was glad to find the industry had grown less catty since her days as a full-time model. “The young people are not in competition like in the past, they’re more responsible," lei dice. “Categories were also more closed: modelling and acting – they couldn’t go together. It’s not like that any more.”

Bellucci applauds models such as Emily Ratajkowski who are now speaking more freely about what it was like to be objectified as young women. Bellucci feels she was lucky. “I started when I was very young, but at the same time, I was going to school. Then, when I moved into film, I was already 25 and independent. I got into the world of cinema already protected.”

She recalls appearing in a Harvey Weinstein-produced film, 2000’s Malèna, in which she played the object of everyone’s lust in a small Sicilian town. She only dealt with Giuseppe Tornatore, the film’s Italian director. “It was Tornatore who chose me. I think Miramax wanted another actress – more famous than me.” As so often, Bellucci had the last laugh, pulling off one of her many acclaimed performances. “We are in a world of image," lei dice, “but the work isn’t about beauty. If it’s just about beauty, you can’t work more than five minutes.”

• Maria Callas: Letters and Memoirs is at Her Majesty’s theatre, Londra, sopra 24 April.

(con) theguardian

M.B.: “Artistically, I always have been inspired by the Italian actresses like Sophia Loren, Claudia Cardinale, Anna Magnani…. and for all the women that fight for their passion. That is why I accepted to play “Maria Callas: Letters and Memoirs” by Tom Volf, because she is a woman and artist I really appreciate.”

Monica Bellucci, fotografata da Sabine Villiard e styling di Barbara Baumel per Schön! Magazine China N°2 Winter 2021/2022

Весной вы приезжаете в Москву и Санкт- Петербург с моноспектаклем о Марии Каллас. Что вас больше всего тронуло в ее истории?

Когда Том Вольф (режиссер-документалист, автор фильма «Мария до Каллас». – Прим. HB) предложил мне поучаствовать в постановке, я, честно говоря, испугалась, ведь на сценe до этого никогда не играла! Но отказаться не смогла, потому что письма и воспоминания, на которых построен весь спектакль, оказались невероятно эмоциональными. Я чувствовала, что прикасаюсь к душе героини. В нашем спектакле она больше хрупкая и уязвимая Мария, чем обласканная славой Каллас. И сильнее всего меня заинтересовала как раз эта ее двойственность: da un lato, она была настоящей дивой, а с другой – женщиной с простым и нежным сердцем. А еще она боролась за свою свободу с упорством и самоотверженностью, которые поражают даже сегодня. Ей хватало смелости слушать сердце и, per esempio, добиваться развода с нелюбимым мужчиной в те времена, когда в Италии они были строго запрещены. Принято считать, что жизнь Каллас похожа на греческую трагедию. Но я думаю, правильнее будет сказать, что она прожила смелую жизнь. Не каждой женщине выпадает воз- можность погрузиться с головой в такие сильные страсти.

Это точно! Но если говорить о смелости, страшно было впервые выходить на сцену?

Безумно! И до сих пор это дается мне не без трепета, хотя мы уже выступали в Риме, Милане, Венеции, Лондоне и скоро поедем в Америку и в Россию, чего я очень жду. У меня появились свои ритуалы: перед выходом повторяю toi, voi, voi (пожелание удачи в актерской среде, аналог «ни пуха ни пера». – Прим. HB), e, как ни странно, помогает. Ma penso che, чем сильнее нервничаешь, тем более искренно доносишь до публики чувства и переживания своего персонажа. film, в котором ты снялся, дальше живет без тебя – и даже если его увидят по всему миру, к тебе это уже будет иметь мало отношения. А на сцене со зрителем каждый раз работают твое тело, голос, непосредственная энергетика. На выступления Каллас, per esempio, шли не только из-за ее восхитительного сопрано, но и из-за удивительно мощной ауры.

«Я НЕ ВЕРЮ В ОСМЫСЛЕННОСТЬ ВОЙНЫ МЕЖДУ МУЖЧИНАМИ И ЖЕНЩИНАМИ – НАМ НАДО ИДТИ ВПЕРЕД ВМЕСТЕ».

Вы снимаетесь в кино больше 30 anni. Как считаете, положение женщин в индустрии сильно изменилось по сравнению с тем временем, когда вы делали первые шаги в профессии?

Все стало гораздо проще: есть возможность высказаться и быть услышанной. Трансформировались социальные роли, появилось гораздо больше уважения и самоуважения, наконец. Sì, ci, теперь карьера актрисы не заканчивается в 40 лет, как часто случалось раньше. naturalmente, о полном гендерном равенстве говорить пока рано, хотя процесс уже запущен и его не остановить. Но при этом я не очень верю в осмысленность войны между мужчинами и женщинами: нам необходимо найти опорные точки для диалога и идти вперед вместе, потому что мы не можем друг без друга – и так будет всегда.

А в модельном бизнесе похожая ситуация? 

В первую очередь изменились сами девушки: они знают свои права и умеют говорить нет. Я вижу это по моей старшей дочери Деве. Она похожа на меня в ее возрасте (осенью Деве исполнилось 17 лет. – Прим. HB): учится в школе и периодически снимается для журналов или участвует в показах. Но она защищена, с ней работают люди, которым я доверяю, а иногда и сама присутствую на площадке. И как только она чувствует малейшую неуверенность в ситуации, тут же сообщает об этом. come, как она входит в fashion-мир: без спешки, спокойно и не взрослея слишком стремительно, как часто бывало раньше с очень юными моделями.

Вы уже много лет дружите с Cartier. Как получилось, что вы с ювелирным Домом настолько хорошо подходите друг другу? И часто ли носите драгоценности в реальной жизни?

Украшения Cartier для меня от-дельный вид искусства. Я никогда не отказываюсь от возможности побывать в ателье – это ни с чем не сравнимое эстетическое удовольствие. И вообще, я женщина, я обожаю все драгоценности, а особенно люблю сапфиры и бриллианты. К тому же украшения часто связаны у меня с какими-то эмоциональными воспоминаниями, e, когда я надеваю их на ужины или важные выходы, переживаю эти мо-менты заново. А в «реальной жизни», когда я забираю девочек из школы или забегаю в магазин, мне нравится носить что-то маленькое, пару сережек, per esempio.

У вас такой женственный и классический стиль, что кажется, в вашем гардеробе просто нет кроссовок и худы. Это так?

Вовсе нет. Я действительно обожаю каблуки, но это не означает, что я их не снимаю. Поверьте, я больше похожа на обычного человека, чем может показаться. Какое у вас любимое время суток? Я люблю утро – встаю обычно ра-но, помогаю девочкам собраться и отправляю их на учебу, а потом обязательно выделяю часок для себя. Did, чтобы про-сто побыть женщиной, а не матерью, актрисой или кем-то еще, кого хотят увидеть другие.

А как вы поняли, что такие вещи необходимы?

Всегда это знала. И часом в день не ограничиваюсь – регулярно делаю перерывы в работе, иногда на несколько месяцев, потому что чувствую внутреннюю необходимость «растить свой сад» и не быть постоянно на виду.

И последний, но очень важный вопрос. Я не могувспомнить ни одну другую актрису, которую любили бы так же страстно, как вас. Как вы удерживаете градус женствен-ности и энергии на таком порази-тельном уровне?

certamente, я просто живу максимально насыщенно. А энергией заряжаюсь от самого процесса. И к возрасту эта способность не имеет никакого отношения: адаптироваться можно к любым обстоятельствам, а там, где тело стареет, душа только молодеет. Уж поверьте мне на слово!

foto: СТЕФАН ЛИСОВСКИЙ
stile: ЕКАТЕРИНА ТАБАКОВА
intervista: ДАША ВЕЛЕДЕЕВА

(con) bazaar.ru

On the face of it, they could not be more different. One was a tough cookie from the hard-knock streets of immigrant New York; a girl who saw herself as an “ugly duckling, fat and clumsy and unpopular”. The other would emerge from a happy childhood in rural Italy to be celebrated as “the most beautiful woman in the world”, a fashion muse and film star.

Yet when Monica Bellucci was approached to take on the role of the great operatic diva Maria Callas, she read the singer’s letters and the memoir she had left unfinished when she died at just 53, and “I was so moved. They were so full of emotion. I just had the feeling that, in some way, I could get in touch with her soul.”

Bellucci – who famously became a Bond girl at the age of 50 in Spectre (2015) – began her career as a model for the great Italian fashion houses Valentino, Versace and Dolce & Gabbana. She would go on to make her name in film after a cameo as a voluptuous vampire in Francis Ford Coppola’s phantasmagorical Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), and her entrancing performance opposite future husband Vincent Cassel in the French arthouse drama L’Appartement, four years later. She later had memorable roles in two of the most controversial films ever made: Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ (she was Mary Magdalene) and Irréversible, the Gaspar Noé sensation that provoked walk-outs at Cannes in 2002, in which her character is raped for nine awful minutes.

Adesso, she is preparing to appear on stage in London reading Callas’s words in a production by Tom Volf, the director of the pitch-perfect 2017 documentary Maria by Callas. She won’t be singing, lei fa notare, having sung only once before on screen, but admits that she is still a “little bit scared… well, a lot actually”, not least because when her Callas show premiered in Paris before the world ground to a halt in 2020, it was her first time on stage. Back then, Bellucci described her reaction as “pure terror”.

It felt close to home, pure. The opera singer, born in America to Greek parents in 1923, rose to great fame in the 1950s, long before Bellucci was born, yet Callas has been part of the actress’s world “for ever”, lei dice, when we chat over the phone between London and Paris. “In Italy, she is really part of the culture, because it was the place where she became a huge star. She is considered an Italian artist in some ways.”

Infatti, Callas, who trained as a singer in Athens as a teenager after her mother left her father and returned to Greece (soon to be occupied by the Axis powers in the Second World War), turned down a contract at the New York Met at war’s end and instead sailed for Italy, with her heart set on leading roles – and only leading roles – at La Scala in Milan.

Like Bellucci decades later, her fame would grow outwards from Italy’s shores. Whenever she returned to the US, she inspired a pre-Beatles press frenzy, and she was a sensation in London, Lisbon, Messico, and Paris, where Bellucci now lives with her daughters, Deva, 17, e Léonie, 11, from her marriage to Cassel. It is also where Callas died, in 1977, from a heart attack.

There are those who believe that the singer took her own life, but her friend the film director Franco Zeffirelli told Italian TV in 2004 that he suspected foul play. “In her final days, she came under the influence of a group of strange Greeks who were connected to her sister and who Maria hated. It’s possible they filled her with substances that killed her.”

I wonder if Bellucci thinks it’s possible Callas may have been poisoned? “Yes, ovviamente, because this is the part of her that nobody knows… when you are very famous like she was, you have to really be careful of the people around you.”

Callas died unhappy and alone. Her marriage at 26 to a much older man, the industrialist Giovanni Meneghini, had been a failure, and he had banked everything she earned in his name. The love of her life, the Greek shipping tycoon Aristotle Onassis, with whom she had shared a nine-year relationship in the 1960s, had died two years ­earlier. They had somehow salvaged a friendship after Onassis – an unapologetic womaniser who knew the value of strategic alliances – had abandoned her to marry Jackie Kennedy, the widow of US president John F Kennedy, in 1968. Callas learnt of the wedding from the newspapers. “What I feel is that this woman, when she was with Onassis, she knew who he was, she knew the risks of her choices,” says Bellucci.

“I think that the greatest pain of her life wasn’t Onassis,” she adds. “It was that she didn’t have a family and children… she said so many things about how difficult the relationship was that she had with her mother. She never had a happy family. And she was looking for that.”

Does she think Callas’s ­relationship with Onassis ruined her career? They met in 1957, with the diva at the peak of her dramatic and vocal powers. “I think that she sacrificed her youth for her career,” says Bellucci. “And then when she met Onassis, she discovered in some way her femininity through him and she wanted to live it fully.” For Callas to turn away from the path expected of her was in character, Bellucci believes. “She’s unpredictable – it’s why she’s so interesting as an artist, but also as a person.”

Callas’s unpredictability – the cancelled concerts, a reputation for temperamental outbursts – contributed to our lasting image of her as the definition of the modern diva; you can trace a line from her to Adele, the latest singer to be branded with that label, following the last-minute cancellation of her concerts in Las Vegas because the set design wasn’t ready. “I think that when you are uncompromising, it is just because you are so perfectionist,” says Bellucci. “You want your show to be like it has to be, and I respect it absolutely.

“It’s so hard to be on stage. Because when you’re a singer, when you’re an actor, when you’re a dancer, your instrument is your own person. That’s why all this is very delicate and very fragile. And you have to be protected.”

We talk about Bellucci’s years in fashion, long before the industry faced its #MeToo moment. Was it a toxic world when she was first part of it in the 1980s? "No, actually, I never went through those bad experiences. But I absolutely know that can happen.”

Her elder daughter, Deva, is “17 and a half, and she’s in the fashion business already. She works and works. e, ovviamente, I protect her, because in every work when you’re very young, and you didn’t have so much experience, you can be in difficult situations. As Maria Callas said, there are bad people, there are also very good people. And I met very beautiful people… And sometimes I was also in situations that could be difficult. But nothing that I couldn’t handle.”

When she says “difficult”, what does she mean? “I’m a woman in a world of men," lei dice, as though what this implies is obvious. “And then when I went to cinema, I was already 25 Anni, I was already independent, economically independent. Così, sai, I never was in situations that I couldn’t handle. I was lucky, very lucky.”

There is a famous photograph of her with Gianni Versace – Bellucci in a white suit; the designer behind his desk – taken in 1995, just two years before his murder. It was a shock: “Terrible. Incredible. And very sad. He was someone very human. It was a big loss.”

Bellucci’s brief first marriage (to photographer Claudio Carlos Basso) dates from her early years in fashion, but her marriage to Cassel lasted for 14 anni. “Me and Vincent, we are divorced for 10 anni," lei dice, pointedly, when I bring it up. In recent years, she has been photographed regularly with the 39-year-old French sculptor and former model Nicolas Lefebvre – prompting a slew of “Who is Monica Bellucci’s boyfriend?” articles.

How difficult does she think it is, even now, for a female superstar to stop her private life overshadowing her career? “I protect myself," lei dice. “I really need my private garden, to have part of my life completely mine. In America, the system makes it more difficult. But for European actors, I think we are more able to protect ourselves.”

Thankfully, she notes, things are changing for women in film. “Even 40 anni fa, even if you were ­talented, dopo 40 Anni, you wouldn’t work any more.” Bellucci, però, remains in demand: in the works are an action thriller with Liam Neeson called Memory, which is, she tells me, “the first time I have played an antagonist”, and a comedy, Mafia Mama, which she will shoot in the US with Toni Collette and Twilight director Catherine Hardwicke. Was she aware of the mafia while growing up in Città di Castello, in Umbria? “In real life? No. Ovviamente, it was there, but I didn’t feel it. And I hope I’m never going to feel it.”

I ask if she would do Irréversible if she were sent the script today. “I’m 57, I couldn’t play that role," lei dice. Cinema, pure, seems to have moved away from such direct confrontation with reality. The British actress Romola Garai said recently: “I don’t think anybody needs to see a rape on screen ever again.”

“It was another period of time,” Bellucci says. “Gaspar Noé, I have so much respect for him and, sai, it was a special project and I was protected. The result of the film is very violent, but the way we worked was absolutely under control.”

And what of her enigmatic character Lucia Sciarra, who shared a risqué moment with Daniel Craig’s Bond in Spectre – would Bellucci like her to come back in another film? "No, it was a moment," lei dice. “I had fun. I couldn’t imagine it would provoke such a fuss… a 50-year-old woman having an affair with James Bond. But maybe [direttore] Sam Mendes knew.”

And anyway, she adds, “we don’t know if James Bond can come back again”. ah, sì, indeed – how did she feel about the super spy choosing death for the love of a woman in last year’s No Time to Die? “I actually loved it," lei dice. “It was really great.”

She also enjoyed riffing on her public image in a 2018 episode of the Netflix series Call My Agent, in which she played herself, panicking about being single for three weeks, desperate to find an ordinary guy, and coming on to her agent – “the only man who can understand her”. Would the real Bellucci panic if she found herself alone again? She laughs.

"No! I have been single for a lot longer than that.” What about her desire for Mr Normal? Another sly laugh. “Not really.” Then: “Actually, nobody knows what it means to be normal – nobody.”

By Chris Harvey

12 febbraio 2022 • 5:00sono (con) www.telegraph.co.uk

Maria Callas: Lettere & Memoirs is at Her Majesty’s Theatre, Londra, SW1 (lwtheatres.co.uk) on April 24