THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, April 17, 1995 TAG: 9504150034
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E5 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Interview
SOURCE: BY MAL VINCENT, ENTERTAINMENT WRITER
LENGTH: Medium: 86 lines
THE TWO WOMEN in Thomas Jefferson's life are speaking publicly about his so-called ``affairs'' - at least his Hollywood affairs.
Greta Scacchi, who plays Maria Cosway, the Italian-English aristocrat who was Jefferson's pen pal for years after his visit to Paris, and Thandie Newton, who plays Sally Hemings, the slave whom the film claims bore Jefforson six (or perhaps seven?) children, both met for interviews.
Both have backed down on the filmmaker's early claims that these peccadillos are documented. Both admit that ``dramatic license'' has been taken.
The two actresses, however, are as different as the women they portray.
Greta Scacchi comes to her role with a good deal of femme fatale baggage. From ``White Mischief'' to ``Presumed Innocent'' with Harrison Ford, she's portrayed mostly man-destroying vixens. She isn't armed with high heels this time, but she does wear a bevy of astoundingly ornate wigs, gowns and hats.
``I have been in roles in which one half of my job is to look beautiful,'' she said. ``It's very unnerving when you don't feel like it. She had to have a magnetism that would attract Jefferson, but I think her attraction was somewhat of the intellect. She was a very intelligent woman. In researching her, it surprised me the way she flitted around Europe, like a jet setter. She was somewhat a liberated woman.''
Like Maria Cosway, Scacchi is of Italian and English heritage.
``I was born in Italy, but raised in England. I can identify very easily with her mixed feelings. I have a love-hate relationship with England. I can reject England at any moment.'' Scacchi points out that Cosway ``was a woman very much in a man's world. Her family was impoverished at one point and she, in effect, made the best deal she could with the husband she got.''
As pictured in the film, her husband is foppish in the extreme but Scacchi points out ``the two had a child after Jefferson left France.''
Unlike the more controversial Sally Hemings affair, documentation of the Maria Cosway infatuation is present.
``They wrote to each other for the next 40 years,'' the actress said. She wrote perhaps three times a year. He wrote maybe once a year. His letters were always so full of love and hope. You might even call them passionate.''
On the other hand, Thandie Newton, who plays Sally Hemings, has only the most sketchy research upon which to base her character. Critics have denounced her interpretation of Sally as ``flighty'' and ``stereotyped'' - some comparing her to Butterfly McQueen's portrayal of Prissy in ``Gone With the Wind.''
``She was 14. I'm 22,'' Newton said. ``I had doubts about the part, but the very fact that James Ivory and Ishmail Merchant chose me was enough. I felt tremendously motivated by their trust.''
Born in Zambia of a Zimbabweanmother and an English father, she studied, at England's Arts Educational School, to be a dancer.
``I never wanted to be an actress,'' she said.
Things changed when, at age 16, she was chosen for the lead role in the independent film ``Flirting,'' playing a Ugandan girl at an Australian school, involved in a romance with a teenage boy at a nearby school. The film got favorable reviews and was a hit on the art-film circuit.
She is currently reading anthropology at Cambridge University and will be quite content if she is left to her studies for some time.
``Perhaps this subject will be of help in studying the Hollywood species of humans,'' she laughed. ``I'm not interested in any kind of image, except for the image of the character I play.''
She gets riled, though, when critics claim that she presented Sally as a passive character. ``I don't believe that she was helpless at all,'' Newton pointed out. ``She was not spineless, but she was vulnerable. The way I play her is exactly the way I wanted to play her. She had no education nor political insight. I had to play her as a person of the time - not of the 20th century. How could the role be `politically correct' in today's terms? But she was not a passive character. She saw herself being promoted. Jefferson had a preference for her. She wanted more promotion. She sacrificed her body, perhaps, to help herself. She was by no means the first woman who did this - nor the last.''
Newton had just returned from Wilmington, N.C., where she filmed ``The Journey of August King'' with Jason Patric.
Newton squirms when she is reminded that black audiences will identify with her work here, and in other roles. ``That is an enormous responsiblity,'' she said, ``and one that I don't welcome. Before I became an actress, I never thought of myself as being black or white.'' MEMO: [For a related story, see page E1 for this date.]
by CNB