Palm Beach star Greta Scacchi on former frenemy Rachel Ward and why women get a bad deal in film

One-time Hollywood sex symbol Greta Scacchi says that getting her first grey wig was a shock to the system and symbolic of the lack of substantial roles for mature actresses.

Greta Scacchi reached a milestone moment earlier this year — she wore her first grey wig for a role.

There was a time when the Italian-born, Australian-raised actor, who turns 60 next year, was best known for steamy roles in Hollywood fare such as Shattered and Presumed Innocent, but though she’s put those days well behind her, the thought that it won’t be her last grey wig was still something of a shock to the system.

Having gone on to forge an eclectic and successful career on stage and screen, mainly in Europe and Australia, it’s not like she misses those sex symbol days, but her current situation is indicative of the dearth of substantial, rewarding mainstream movie roles for woman over 40.

Indeed, she says that since she turned 35, she’s mostly been offered roles as mothers and ex-wives and since she became a mother herself “suddenly the roles went from the adulteress to being the jilted one”.

Greta Scacchi in a scene from the Australian film, Palm Beach

“When an actress reaches my age, which is approaching 60, you might as well get your own grey-haired wig to fit you because you are going to be putting it on so often that you might as well have one there in the wardrobe,” she says.

“And it’s no reflection on how 60 or 70-year-olds really are today, especially women. Women get a really bad deal when it comes to the portrayal of women over a certain age. They have to be frigid, they have to be witches, they have to be mean, money-grabbing ex-wives — there is nothing sexy, or warm, or capable. I think that in this story it is much more true to life and much more true to how women are today but we don’t often get a chance to play that sort of role on film.”

The story to which Scacchi is referring is the new Australian film, Palm Beach, which is produced by and stars veteran Bryan Brown and written and directed by his wife, Rachel

Ward.

Sam Neill and Greta Scacchi at the Sydney Film Festival Opening Night screening of Palm Beach held at the State Theatre in Sydney. Picture: Christian Gilles

In their third film together, and inspired by The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, the couple have specifically crafted a story aimed at audiences their own age, following four couples who gather for a celebration at the picturesque Sydney beach only to find that while their lives might look idyllic from the outside, each is dealing with internal struggles that bubble to the surface during a weekend of fine food and festivities.

In exploring the power of family and friends to heal wounds, Brown and Ward have gathered their own for a passion project that has been more than five years in the making.

The couple’s daughter Matilda appears in the film and long-time mates including Sam Neill and Richard E. Grant are also in the cast. But while Scacchi, who plays Brown’s wife Charlotte, considers Ward a friend now, there was a time when they weren’t so close.

The two first crossed paths in London in the late 1970s when they were both working as models trying to break into acting, and Scacchi found that she and the British-born Ward were often vying for the same roles.

“I was very snobby because I had been a model but unlike her I hadn’t allowed the modelling career to be very successful,” says Scacchi a little sheepishly.

Greta Scacchi with Harrison Ford during her Hollywood sex symbol phase in Presumed Innocent.

“She was a very successful model but I always kind of avoided being recognised as a model because I was only using it to pay my way through drama school and I was being very serious about it. Then I was pretty horrified that she didn’t do drama school but she was getting all these roles — I had this feeling she was getting all the roles I wasn’t getting. So I guess we were wary of each other back then in those early days.”

But the more Scacchi got to know Ward, through mutual friends and their common Australian connection, the more she admired her.

She appeared in one of Ward’s short films and was set to star in a Sydney Theatre Company production of Travelling North with Brown when a vertebra injury ruled her out, so she jumped at the chance to sign on to work with both on Palm Beach.

“I’d already had the pleasure of working with her before and I remember thinking then what a very quick, easy, direct communication that we have had,” she says.

Bryan Brown, Richard E Grant, Greta Scacchi and Heather Mitchell in a scene from Palm Beach.

“Of course in this film I felt very much as if I was playing the kind of Rachel character — she let me have her husband, she let me have her daughter and gave me this great role.”

She says the shoot itself, filmed in and around Palm Beach (also home to long-running soapie Home And Away), was blissful thanks to a spectacular mansion with sweeping ocean views, great food, good tunes between takes and the enduring double act of sparring partners Brown and Neill.

“It was like being at Bryan and Rachel’s for one of their wonderful dinner parties but day after day,” she says.

“Rachel is just so competent. She has got it together — of course on film sets there are always moments of pressure because they have to get a lot in each day but she kept her cool and was very decided about what she wanted.”

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But above all she was thrilled to be able to play a character of her own age who is dealing with real life problems and not pretending to have the world figured out. In the movie as in life, age doesn’t necessarily bring wisdom and Scacchi says the more she learns the less she realises she knows.

“Actors, musicians, people I know, friends that I have — we might be getting older but we still kind of dress the same way that we did and we still don’t believe that we have grown up,” she says. “So we’re just a bunch of overgrown teenagers.

“And if you mean that wisdom brings you the realisation that you know nothing and that there are more grey areas than black and white, then yes, I am wiser. I know nothing, I feel.”

Palm Beach opens on Thursday