La bella donna

Italian model and screen siren Monica Bellucci talks to Alistair Duncan about her life in front of the camera and her love for Chelsea

Monica Bellucci, erstwhile model and current Mediterranean screen siren, is effusing about our capital city. ‘I first came to London when I was 16,’ she says, purring her words in between long, raspy breaths. ‘I instantly fell in love with it. I said that one day I wanted to live here. I think London actually seemed quite fake to me at first, as it does to many foreigners. Its prettiness seemed unreal, like it was a movie set.’

Bellucci radiates an unearthly beauty. It is an attribute, no doubt, that has helped her scale the heights of not only European cinema but also Hollywood’s oily slopes, but Bellucci is not one of those finely-formed airheads relied on by the film world for confection. Her CV is determinedly edgy, comprised of small budget, independent movies, like Oscar-nominated Sicilian wartime drama Malena or stylish French thriller L’Appartement, and projects so obviously controversial – the grimly violent Irreversible or highly divisive The Passion of The Christ – that most, more sensible starlets wouldn’t touch them with a bargepole.

‘It’s true,’ she admits at one stage. ‘I never do easy things. Actually, I look at my choice of films some days and I think they are quite strange. Maybe, I need a little therapy like everybody else. I guess I make movies instead of therapy. I do dark roles because my life isn’t like that.’

Married to French film star Vincent Cassel, with whom she has a three-year-old daughter, Deva, Bellucci sounds as if she enjoys her life indeed. Along with homes in Paris and Rome, she has a place just off Sloane Square and she relishes the opportunity to sing the virtues of this soigné pocket of South West London.

‘There is a big park, Hyde Park, close to where I live and I take Deva there all the time,’ she says blissfully. ‘And it’s such a nice area, Chelsea, with all its shops and restaurants. Even though London is bigger than Rome, there’s such a good quality of life here.’

Bellucci lists Space NK on the King’s Road as one of her favourite haunts, with its gleaming treasure trove of upmarket beauty products. She also loves eating at the nearby celebrity eateries J Sheeky’s and Nobu. On clothes, however, she admits that ‘you don’t really have to shop a lot if you’re an actor because all these talented people give me beautiful dresses and bags,’ but of course, what she means is, ‘you don’t have to buy clothes if you’re a glamorous film star’. Savvy designers are only too happy to hand out free outfits and dresses to the likes of Bellucci, in the hope they reap the PR rewards from her being photographed wearing them.

Born in Citta di Castello, a small village in Umbria in 1964, Bellucci initially studied to be a lawyer, but ditched it early on, after a Milanese modelling agency signed her, instantly captivated by her pretty face and voluptuous figure. She was soon being whisked away for photo-shoots in foreign climes, but she has no regrets about not sticking to her legal studies by the sound of things.

‘Now, with my work I deal with many different lawyers,’ she says, rolling her eyes, ‘and my god, it’s so boring. I’m much happier doing what I do, thank you.’

As a model coming into the film world, inevitably, Bellucci came with baggage. ‘When I first started, people looked at me in a very different way,’ she says. ‘When you come from the fashion business, people say, ‘OK, here’s another one, another model who wants to be an actress.’ But that’s why I’ve wanted to do strong things. That’s why I’ve done movies like Irreversible or movies like The Passion of The Christ.’The deeply harrowing and bone-crushingly violent Irreversible caused an almighty furore on its 2002 release: even the critics at Cannes booed the film at its first screening, its brutality proving too much for even these well-versed cinephiles. But as things turned out, the waves made by this explosive drama ferried her across the Atlantic to Hollywood, where she took on the role of enigmatic, sultry Persephone in The Matrix Reloaded, then The Matrix Revolution.

Shoot ‘Em Up, released last month, sees Bellucci playing a prostitute ‘whose speciality is something very kinky’ (Bellucci separates each syllable…‘kin–ky’… as she offers me this saucy detail), while Clive Owen plays the gun-toting hero on a mission to save a baby, in the aptly named bullet-fest of comic book proportions, which she sees as her one excursion to the comedy genre.

‘It’s so over-the-top, that it’s quite funny,’ she says. ‘The film is quite violent but in a very playful way. There’s a lot of humour there.’

Bellucci has just finished shooting Le Deuxième Souffle, a French thriller (The Second Wind in English), in which she plays the glamorous but plucky girlfriend of a gangster who has just escaped from jail. The film, due out in the winter, sees Bellucci returning to acting in the French tongue, but she brushes off the suggestion that it’s difficult for her to act in a language that’s not her native one. ‘It’s more relaxing for me to act in Italian, of course, but it’s more interesting for me as an actor to take on French or English roles,’ she says.

She speaks French to her husband, Vincent Cassel, known as the bad boy actor of French cinema, on account of all the gritty, intense roles he’s turned in, as well as to daughter Deva. ‘One of the things that is so great about my job,’ she says, ‘is that I can be with Deva every day. She comes to set with me. How many jobs do you know if where you can bring your baby daughter to work with you?’

What with three homes in three different European cities, the French husband and the frequent trips to Hollywood, I start pondering how Italian she still feels. Does she miss Italy when she’s not there?

‘Of course, it’s my homeland and I love it. That’s why I keep a home in Rome. But, in a sense I get the least privacy there. That’s Italians for you – they like to look at each other a lot more then other nations. If you walk down the street, it’s not just men looking at girls, everyone looks at everyone, there’s lots of eye contact in Italy.’

I’m sure she’s right but the perspective of this Italian-born global object of desire must be so wonderfully skewed. Monica Bellucci has enjoyed a lifetime of turning heads wherever she goes.

Shoot ‘Em Up is currently on general release, Le Deuxième Souffle is released later this year.