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Why Greta Scacchi stripped off again

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Wednesday Jun 17 2009

The award-winning actress, once known as Scorcher Scacchi, talks to Bryony Gordon about her latest passion -- to save the world's fish from extinction.

Greta Scacchi proclaimed a year ago that she was done with taking her clothes off. Having stripped off in the films White Mischief, Heat and Dust and Shattered, a critic once commented that when it came to acting awards "it was a close call who got the best performance nominations -- Greta or her magnificent breasts." She won two Emmys, actually, but enough was enough.

Yet I am sitting at the kitchen table of Scacchi's home, eating biscuits, and though I only met her half an hour ago, she is showing me some recently taken pictures of her...well, of her naked as the day that she was born. The only thing protecting her modesty is a giant Icelandic cod.

"The reason I am giggling is because it [the cod] was freezing cold -- just off the ice of course -- and it was very slippery to hold and something was dribbling down the inside of my thigh." She laughs and takes a bite of her biscuit.

So what exactly could have seduced 49-year-old Scacchi -- Scorcher Scacchi, as she was once referred to -- to slip out of her clothes again? The answer is the cod. She is launching a campaign to save the world's fish stocks.

The half-Italian, half-English actress has also persuaded Emilia Fox to pose as if breast-feeding a cuttlefish; Barry Humphries just called and said that Dame Edna would love to take part "as long as she doesn't have to take her clothes off".

Scacchi was galvanised into action after seeing The End of the Line, a powerful documentary released last week. The film is based on a book about overfishing by journalist Charles Clover, and claims that within 40 years fish will become extinct and the sea will be like some sort of reverse primordial soup. Such is the film's power that the sandwich chain Pret a Manger last week took tuna off the menu.

'By 2048 there will be no life in the sea other than worms. 2048!" She shakes her head. "Now where they got that figure I don't know, but it's a good, juicy figure."

Scacchi is not a scientist, but you can't doubt her passion. She has spent the day talking to "boffins", and has prepared a list of statistics to reel off to me: she is terribly, terribly keen to get them right, and that I put them in the paper.

So, here goes: the oceans absorb half of the carbon we produce, so if they go, the likelihood of us going greatly increases. The world's fish reserves have been declining since 1989, fishing fleets are 250pc larger than the oceans can sustainably support, 80pc of a trawler's catch will be chucked back into the sea, dead, so that quotas aren't exceeded -- quite often these trawlers destroy everything else on the seabed.

Long-line fishing has depleted the albatross population by 40pc. The cod has taken an evolutionary leap; it now reaches maturity and reproduces within five years, instead of eight.

Scallop dredging shakes the seabed which causes decimation to the flora and fauna and causes the scallops to get scared and loosen themselves -- I didn't know scallops had feelings, but I shan't be eating any in the near future.

The producers of the film weren't going to have a premiere -- it isn't really a glitzy, premiere kind of film, I suppose -- but Scacchi held one for them instead.

She hosted it at a Japanese restaurant called Soseki, which refuses to serve the endangered bluefin tuna unlike Nobu, which recently received a petition from the likes of Sienna Miller and Elle MacPherson calling on them to make similar moves. The restaurant argues that as it informs customers on the menu of the bluefin's endangered status, they are free to make up their own minds -- though one imagines that this would only make it more appealing to its clientele.

Anyway, she has spent the last three weeks planning this party, phoning up old celebrity chums, as well as high-profile people she thought would be taken by the cause. Colin Firth, Alan Rickman, Vivienne Westwood and Sir Ian McKellen came...Stephen Fry couldn't make it but sent her a lovely email ("Greta honey...This is certainly the most urgent and momentous problem facing the planet and I've been doing my best to alert twitter followers...to the film and book. So pleased you're involved!").

The problem with campaigns like these is that more often than not, they look like an opportunity for luvvies to jump on a bandwagon to gain publicity -- and you can't help but think that the majority of the country, whose sole encounters with fish are of the battered kind, will struggle to engage with the fate of a rare type of tuna served mostly in celebrity restaurants.

But I don't think that this is a profile-enhancing stunt for Scacchi.

"I do not condone this celebrity-obsessed society that we live in," she says.

"But it's about what the media thinks will make a story, and I wanted this small independent documentary that is absolutely shattering but has no promotion budget to speak of to be seen."

Scacchi is used to hitting the headlines, but usually it isn't because of her work -- a few years ago she caused a stir when she got together with her first cousin, Carlo Mantegazza with whom she has a gorgeous son (Vincent D'Onofrio, the father of her 17-year-old daughter, left her when the baby was just six months old).

Her and Carlo are still together -- he kindly bought the biscuits -- but she's not interested in talking about it, other than to say that he now calls her his "fish wife".

So what are the solutions? She says we should only eat fish approved by the Marine Stewardship Council (its website has a list of approved kinds), and the government must act now.

"At the moment they side with the fishermen instead of the fish, but if they carry on as they are there won't be anything for them to catch, and then they will all be out of jobs.

"The state of the ocean has been peripheral to global warming, but that has to change. Scientists are divided over the extent of the problem of global warming, but everyone is very clear about what the effects of overfishing will be."

She shakes her head.

"They will, I am afraid, be catastrophic."