Valeria Golino rolls into her Cannes hotel late, trailing cigarette smoke and apologies. She hasn’t even had time to check in when a publicist steers her into the garden and plumps her beneath an awning. She’s being rained on a little and has to reposition her chair. “Let us sit very close together,” she says, which is lovely when she is still and faintly alarming when she’s not. Her emphatic hand gestures almost take my nose off.
Golino won the best actress prize at Venice (for Francesco Maselli’s A Tale of Love) when she was still a teenager. She has appeared in arthouse European films and Hollywood spectaculars alike. These days she’s primarily known as a film-maker, having played in Cannes with her first two features (Miele, Euforia). I last saw her on screen in Portrait of a Lady on Fire; she’ll next appear in Pablo Larraín’s Maria Callas biopic, opposite Angelina Jolie. In between those films she’s been working. “Mostly three years on one project.”
Have I seen her big project? I assure her that I have. The Art of Joy is a handsome, involving six-part drama for Sky Original, based on the posthumously published novel by Goliarda Sapienza. It charts the life of the dynamic Modesta, abused by her father and almost saved by the nuns, who goes about the world freestyle, like a proto-feminist Augie March. Golino explains that she loves Modesta because she has agency and is unburdened by guilt – all of which make her a freak in Italian literature. “She sidesteps all the archetypes. She’s not a femme fatale, she’s pansexual, she’s not a man-hater.” She reaches for a cigarette. “I’m not a man-hater either,” she says. “I am a lover of men.”
In a sense her career has come full-circle. Golina made her screen debut acting for the great Lina Wertmüller. Now here she is, at 58, making female-focused tales of her own. “I adored Lina, she was like an aunt to me. The problem with Lina was that on set she was ferocious. I was in my first movie and didn’t know anything and she was like: ‘You, bitch, come here!’” Different times, she shrugs. “Lina was like, what, one of three female directors on the planet. She had to show that she was more tough, more violent than the men.”
In her first flush of success, Golina lit out for Hollywood. She played Tom Cruise’s girlfriend in Rain Man; co-starred in Hot Shots! and its sequel. She had a great time, by and large, but says she couldn’t square a blockbuster career with her auteurist early leanings. “It was like, do you want to do a movie with Arnold Schwarzenegger and James Cameron, or do you want to do a mini-movie in Greece with a Cypriot director for no money? ‘Oh, I think that I’ll do the little movie in Greece.’ I made some mistakes based on an ideological idea.” In hindsight she feels she should have gone with Cameron.
I’ve read she also auditioned for Pretty Woman; almost played the part of the Los Angeles sex worker that would eventually send Julia Roberts stratospheric. Jennifer Jason Leigh read for the same role. Leigh would later recall the film’s director, Garry Marshall, telling her to give the sex worker more “twinkle”. He said: “She’s only been in the job a few weeks. It’s still fun for her.”
Golino hoots. She had never heard this story before. “There are a lot of things you can’t say today,” she says. “But I would also say that there are things you might say on a film that you would not say in real life, because we are exploring the character and all its possibilities. So for him to say that she’s having fun is maybe OK. Maybe! Because we need to take some liberties and have that creative friction when we are exploring the world of a film.”
Sure, 1980s Hollywood could be an exploitative place. So, too, was 1980s Italy. “It was everywhere,” she says. “Not just Hollywood. And I was 21, 22, a pretty European girl, I had to look after myself. So I had situations with all the people we know. No need to name names at this point. Me too, me too.” She waves a hand in dismissal.
Once again, different times. There were upsides and downsides. Here’s a story, she says. “When I was 19 I fell in love with an Italian director I worked with who was 43. We had relations for three or four years. He didn’t even want to, poor guy, I was the one who chased him! Now it would be strange, a scandal. Back then it’s OK.”
At the age of 12, Golino had scoliosis. She spent six months in bed in a hospital in Chicago; returned for another few months when she turned 17. That’s where she learned French and English, lying on her back in Chicago. “I also read Proust. All seven volumes of In Search of Lost Time.”
I ask if she sees anything of herself in Modesta, the Sicilian urchin who knows how to take care of herself, and she swears she does not. She lacks Modesta’s courage, plus her ability to spin situations to her advantage. If she were Modesta she wouldn’t be stuck outside in the rain. She says: “If I were Modesta I’d be a Monte Carlo princess.”