CINEMA
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. 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, 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."