I never want to be as insecure as Olivier

Tim Walker talks to Greta Scacchi about her new role in The Deep Blue Sea, the gaucheness of Bill Murray — and being offered the lead in Basic Instinct

Greta Scacchi is lying in bed beside Laurence Olivier. His head is resting against her shoulder. Suddenly it feels damp. She looks at the old man and sees that he is crying. ‘What’s wrong?’ she asks. He looks back at her imploringly. ‘Oh, Greta, I haven’t got any more work after this for six months. Nobody wants me any more…’.

The bedroom scene in the television drama The Ebony Tower took a whole day to shoot and so there was plenty of time for confidences with the man she always addressed as ‘Sir’. Miss Scacchi was then 23, and Olivier 78, but he was looking older and frailer after a bout of pleurisy. ‘Here was this man who was acknowledged as the greatest actor of his day and yet he was riddled with insecurities,’ says Miss Scacchi. ‘I decided there and then that I would never allow myself to get like that. There has to be a point when you can say, “Look, this is who I am — take me or leave me.”’

Miss Scacchi is now nudging 50 but has a youthful, luminous complexion and bright, intelligent eyes that still seem to be full of wonder. She is talking to me in a restaurant around the corner from the Vaudeville Theatre, where she opens this week in Terence Rattigan’s The Deep Blue Sea. This woman has always had more than her share of confidence — perhaps sometimes, she concedes, too much. It enabled her to disrobe in films such as Heat and Dust and White Mischief, to go on Film 85 and tell Barry Norman quite what a disaster she felt The Coca-Cola Kid had been for her, and unhesitatingly to turn down the part that made Sharon Stone a star in Basic Instinct.