italia

By David Gritten. From the Desk of Esther Cohen-Hamilton. /WACJ.Telegraph News Report/Europe

Valeria Golino is Italian cinema's dream come true - a star with the allure of the young Sophia Loren. She talks to David Gritten

Now this is what you call a star entrance. Italian actress Valeria Golino strides through the door of a London hotel suite and bears down on me with a purposeful if amused look in her cobalt blue eyes. As she walks, her mane of wavy, reddish-brown hair flies every which way, and her hips swing meaningfully. Tall and slim, she is swathed in grey; her sweater and tailored slacks do little to dispel hints of curves beneath. Informed that Golino is suffering from a cold, I murmur sympathy as I extend a greeting. She clasps both hands around mine and ostentatiously shrugs. "Day-veed," she says, fixing me with her gaze. "Thees cold . . . eet is nothing. I can think. I can talk. But today, Day-veed, I cannot look beautiful for you."

Memorable role: Valeria Golino rebels against small-town life in Respiro

She looks ravishing, so all this is preposterous. Still, full marks to her for getting this Italian diva business down pat; it's as if she learned it at the knee of such compatriots as Loren, Lollobrigida and Cardinale in their pomp. In terms of prerequisites for stardom, Golino, 36, has it all: the walk, the talk, the look, the attitude. Everything, that is, except the career. For 15 years she has alternated between Hollywood movies and films in her native Italy, amassing en route a remarkably eccentric CV. How eccentric? Start with her American debut in Big Top Pee-Wee, playing a circus trapeze artist who becomes Pee-Wee Herman's main squeeze. Her next Hollywood outing, as Tom Cruise's girl-friend in Rain Man, could hardly have been more different. She has reveled in the wild variety of roles offered her, telling me with relish she went straight from Sean Penn's sombre 1991 mood piece Indian Runner to the wacky Top Gun-spoof Hot Shots! opposite Charlie Sheen. "People said to me, how can you do a drama, then Hot Shots!?" Golino recalls, rolling her eyes in disgust. "I adore Sean Penn, but I liked the Hot Shots! people too. If a movie is what it sets out to be, what's wrong with that?" In fact she liked it so much, she signed on for Hot Shots Part Deux.

She has enjoyed a busy, lucrative career, making decent films in Italy, at times reduced to playing sinister, vaguely foreign characters in America. Recently several people thought her the best thing in Frida, playing Lupe Marin, ex-wife of artist Diego Rivera. Long ago, her Italian accent lost her the Pretty Woman role that made Julia Roberts a star. That one great defining role has always eluded her. Until now, that is. Golino is the undisputed lead in Respiro, a charming, strikingly beautiful Italian film. She plays Grazia, an affectionate young mother of three children. A notably free spirit, she swims topless in the sea with them, sings along lustily with pop tunes on the radio and generally acts rebellious.

They all live with her husband Pietro on Lampedusa, a remote island so far off the Sicilian coast that Libya is nearer than Italy. In this low-income backwater, men go to sea to fish and their wives work in a sardine-packing plant (a job Grazia hates passionately). But the sun always shines, the sea is the exquisite cobalt of Golino's eyes, and people ride three to a moped and eat meals at long tables in big, sociable, noisy groups. Yet beneath its languid charm Lampedusa is an intolerant place, and curtain-twitching gossips start a whispering campaign against Grazia. Is she just a rebel, or unstable and in need of psychiatric treatment? "This was a wonderful script," says Golino. "Emmanuele Crialese, the director, lived in New York for years, so he sees Italy fresh. He wanted to evoke something familiar to him that he had left behind. It's great to have a story with that distance." Crialese badly wanted her for the role, and sent his producer to meet her: "He just said: 'Here's a script. It's not much money.”

"Despite this unpromising start, Respiro has given Golino the role of her career. It opened last year in Italy and did substantial business; but then in January it also became a surprising top 10 hit in France. Now re-released in Italy, it has featured on the box-office charts for almost a year. What gave Golino the hunch this little film could have such an impact? "It was a wonderful story about this woman," she says simply. "I really liked the relationship between Grazia and her three kids.

It's volatile, sensual, with a lot of touching, which I find completely natural in a mother-son relationship - even though I don't have kids myself." Valeria was born in Naples; her father is a scholar, her Greek mother a painter, and her uncle Enzo a celebrated Italian journalist. When her bohemian parents split, she grew up in both Rome and Athens, and was a glamour model by age 16 - albeit one who had already read Proust. Currently single, she does not discuss her private life. Intriguingly, Respiro is set in what could be termed the recent present.

It looks faintly contemporary, though there's not a mobile phone, video game or wide-screen TV in sight. Yet it could also be set back in the 1950s, the heyday of Italian cinema neo-realism; Golino, in a cheap cotton print frock, playing fierce and assertive as well as playful and sensual, recalls such Italian screen icons as Anna Magnani, Silvana Mangano and the young Loren. She might be a heroine in an old classic by de Sica or Rossellini. It's no accident, she insists, that she looks this way on screen. "I feel Respiro is hyper-realistic," she muses. "Superficially it looks like a neo-realist film. Pasolini and de Sica are Emmanuele's masters. Italian cinema has gone through a bad period. "Everyone's been afraid for a long time. Our young directors have lacked confidence. Our cinema was so strong in the 1950s, they were like sons who suffered from dominating father figures. Now it's finally time to revisit that era to make it even more vivid.

"There's no big splashy renaissance in Italian films. We have good young actors and directors. What we lack are screenwriters. It's hard to write about Italy. At the moment, it's uninspiring." She finds the Berlusconi era materialistic and dull: "It's such an unpoetic time. We aren't even having difficulties. It's a wealthy, middle-class era. When I think of Italy now, I think of accessories, possessions, bad TV, fake boobs, BMWs." Ironically, Golino's big break has come now she has left Hollywood, after commuting between there and Rome for 12 years: "I had a house high up on Mulholland Drive. The Hollywood dream wasn't mine as much as the people who represented me. "They wanted me to behave like a film star. I was working to maintain a certain amount of luxury, which wasn't why I went to America.

I just respected certain American film-makers." She worked with good ones: Penn, Quentin Tarantino (Four Rooms), Mike Figgis (Leaving Las Vegas) and John Frankenheimer (Year of the Gun), as well as Barry Levinson in Rain Man. "I had hoped to work with people like that, not be a star. There was this dichotomy between what I wanted and what was happening. Finally I sold my house. I didn't want any more managers, business managers or publicists. At a certain point I said 'enough'. Not because individually they weren't nice people. I just felt I was supporting them all."

Now she returns to Hollywood for two months a year, rooms with friends and takes small but satisfying roles, as she did in Frida. "I'm proud of that work," she says. "I work less, but as I don't live in LA and spend $20,000 a month I can make little films I think are good.

And I don't have to play an exotic Italian spy!" Nor, now she's in her mid-thirties, does she compete for Hollywood glamour roles: "It's easier when you're younger to get parts that if I got them now, I'd do better.

I know I'm better looking now than I was but . . ." She shrugs. "You know how it is with youth in cinema. Still, there are so many pretty girls, young girls, they'll be using them for that kind of thing." She throws back her head and laughs. "Thank God for that!". Report Art Telegraph.