Love, politics and dreams

Liza Foreman

• Last Updated: November 18. 2009 3:07PM UAE / November 18. 2009 11:07AM GMT

Margareth Madè as Sophia Loren early in her career with Loren playing her own mother in La Mia Casa è Piena di Specchi (My House Is Full of Mirrors). WENN.com

Imagine a young Lauren Bacall, circa The Big Sleep, wearing the most luminous bronzer money can buy, and you probably have a fair idea of the beauty and look of the Sicilian model-turned-actress Margareth Madè.

Madè, 27, came to the attention of the international film world recently through Baarìa, Giuseppe Tornatore’s Sicilian epic which opened the Venice Film Festival this autumn. At €40 million (Dh220m) Baarìa is said to be the most expensive Italian film ever.

Madè, meanwhile, has been turning heads in Los Angeles at the US premiere of the film, which is playing as the opening-night feature at this month’s Cinema Italian Style film series.

“It is like a dream,” she says, standing tall in a figure-hugging white cocktail dress, while answering questions in an animated style in her broken English. “Before Baarìa I had not made any films,” she explains.

Madè, whose modelling career has been going strong ever since she won the New Model Today Contest in 2000, was also known in Italy, pre-Baarìa, from a series of popular advertisements. But she can be said to have been discovered for the big screen by Tornatore, a native of Sicily, after he saw a photograph of her.

Now, she says, modelling can take a back seat: “When I was a young girl I dreamt of acting. I loved Billy Wilder, Italian neo-realism. My idol was Marlene Dietrich. This is incredible to work with Tornatore and now Sophia Loren, to realise that dream. Modelling can wait.”

With Loren, she is referring to her current project, a RAI television film about Sophia Loren in which she plays the veteran Italian actress between the ages of 16 and 24. Loren plays her own mother in the production.

“Sophia is fantastic and gentle and like a mother with me,” she says. “It is important for me to have some guidance from someone like her.”

To prepare for the part, she says that she watched Loren in action and tried to learn about her.

“It is a big honour. She is the best-known Italian actress in the world.”

In Baarìa, Madè had quite a challenge on her hands for a first-timer. She plays the female lead, Mannina, a Sicilian peasant who ages from 16 to 45 during the two-hour-plus film. She looks fittingly ragged and natural on screen and does a convincing job.

“I play a girl and then a mother with five children,” she says. “It was a great experience for me, not just for the film but also for my life.”

In order to audition for the part – she stops here and makes a scraping movement with her hand over her arm, not knowing the word she wants in English. I suggest shaving, and she says “yes” – Tornatore asked her to try out looking entirely unshaven and natural. She makes a comic frown using her perfectly styled, thick-set eye brows. “He saw a picture and said, ‘OK, I don’t promise nothing,’” she recalls.

Baarìa is the nickname of Bagheria, the town in Sicily where Tornatore comes from. Today it is known as a mafia stronghold and it was once a playground of the rich and famous.

In the film, Baarìa is a one-street town of peasants struggling through with humour. The life of the main character, Peppino, is followed in this rough and tumble world, from his childhood in the 1930s, through the tumult of post-war Baarìa and beyond.

The film is this year’s official Italian entry for the Best Foreign-Language film in the Academy Awards.

“There are many big themes of love, politics, dreams,” says Madè.