Daniela through the looking glass

With the BBC preparing to show all 32 episodes of This Life again, Daniela Nardini may never shake off the image of feisty Anna. But the Scots actress who won't shy away from controversial roles still craves a part that would relegate the loud-mouthed lawyer further down her CV

ANIELA Nardini is doing her best to look comfortable as she is fussed over, preened, poured into successive outfits and paraded for the camera. For a change, the Scottish actress has no lines to articulate as the lens focuses on her distinctive deep brown eyes and their "don't push me" gaze. After copious amounts of pleading from her publicist, she has agreed to do a rare photo shoot. But that doesn't mean to say she likes it.

Following a five-hour ordeal at the hands of a stylist, make-up artist and photographer on location in a clinical-looking east London apartment, she puts her own clothes back on and buries herself in an oversized jacket belonging to someone else. Pulling it round her as she sinks into a sofa, she crams a long-awaited sandwich into her mouth. Then she is ready to face her second least favourite part of the job - talking about herself to a complete stranger.

Nardini has agreed to speak about ITV drama Rough Trade, in which she plays Eve, an army officer who is raped by two male colleagues and then tries to get her revenge. It might have been billed as the role to eclipse her BAFTA award-winning performance as lawyer Anna in This Life, but for one small detail. This summer, the BBC is repeating all 32 episodes of the cult drama that captured the nation's imagination four years ago, no doubt refuelling This Life fervour. Unless Rough Treatment fires up the viewing public the way sex-loving, cocaine-snorting Anna did, Nardini is likely to find her unshakeable alterego shadowing her for a while yet.

The actress shrugs her shoulders and explains there is little she can do to bulldoze the lingering memory of Anna - presuming she even wants to. The character transformed her from a little known actress into a British television star. Until This Life, Nardini's biggest role in life was her part in her family's ice-cream dynasty, centred on their legendary cafe in the west coast seaside town of Largs. "I'm reminded of Anna constantly because people still go, 'That's Anna from This Life,'" she says. "They say things like, 'Oh, you look much nicer in real life.' I don't know whether to take that as a compliment or not."

However tolerant Nardini is of Anna's enduring presence in her life, she must crave the elusive part that would relegate the motormouthed lawyer further down her CV. It remains to be seen whether Eve is that role, but Nardini herself sounds doubtful. "I'm always looking for a role that is as well written, rounded and interesting as Anna," she says carefully.

"The character had everything going for her in terms of ... Oh God, I'm tying myself up in knots here." She starts again: "I played the part of Anna for over 30 episodes, whereas Rough Treatment is a two hour piece and it's a more self-contained story about a woman seeking revenge. It's a completely different thing."

While there is little comparison between Rough Treatment and the BBC2 drama that dominated twentysomethings' lives for two series, there is more than a hint of Anna in Eve. The ambitious army officer who would literally die for her career is every bit as feisty as Anna and she likes sex just as much, providing she feels utterly in control. There is one important difference, though - while Anna was immensely likeable despite all her flaws, Eve is difficult to warm to. She is arrogant, without having Anna's charm and competitive to the point of being positively obnoxious. That, and the fact she is having drunken sex in a sauna with another officer just before her double rape, makes the story of her downfall all the more challenging.

Nardini was determined the rape scene would be filmed properly, avoiding any danger of titillation. While the story blurs the issues of guilt in the same way Jodie Foster's powerful and controversial movie The Accused did, Rough Treatment's rape scene is less graphic, not just because of broadcasting codes, but because Nardini was concerned it might seem even remotely erotic to some viewers.

She laughs as she explains she is hardly one to shy away from nudity on screen - she bared all for the notorious living room dancing scene in Channel 4 drama Big Women - but she didn't want too much flesh showing this time. After long discussions with the drama's director, Nardini felt comfortable enough to film the sequence, which was shot on a closed set in a London school.

She chooses her words carefully as she explains her concerns about what is always a contentious issue. "You had to see a little bit of the rape because you had to see the men's reactions, what made them do it," she says. "That it was all kind of in the heat of the moment. You had to see that one man actually believes he hasn't done anything wrong and the other guy just gets completely carried away with himself and angry. If you had just kind of cut it out, you wouldn't have seen that. The scene wasn't particularly long, but it was kind of necessary.

"I felt ... I was hoping that ..." She takes a deep breath before continuing. "I was afraid it would look in any way titillating. And I think that unfortunately the minute you see a woman naked, that's a possibility. I was just worried it might look in some way erotic and that would be completely the wrong thing. It was also filmed by a woman director, so that makes it doubly sensitive. We were both completely agreed on how we wanted it to be."

If Nardini had sorted out in her own mind how she felt about the rape scene, the actors who played Eve's rapists had not. She tells of how she had to reassure Edward Atterton and Gregor Truter about the drama's toughest shoot, even though she was the one wrapped in only a towel and cowering before the camera in the corner of a makeshift sauna.

"Everybody was quite subdued on the day," she says. "One of the actors was actually very upset - I'm not telling you who. It's fair to say they both were quite shaken by it. I don't know what it must be like, when it's something that horrible. They had kind of been worried about it the week building up to it and they'd probably worked themselves up into quite a state.

"I was very touched by the fact they were so affected. There's one thing for sure, there's no rapist inside them." She laughs, unsure whether she is sounding too dramatic, before continuing. "If it's just a sex scene, everyone jokes about it, but because it's a rape scene, it's harder to do that."

Nardini is perhaps remembered most fondly by This Life fans for the scene in which Anna and housemate Miles - played by friend Jack Davenport - have sex on the couch while his girlfriend sleeps upstairs. Since then, she has given memorable performances in everything she has tackled, including Big Women and Undercover Heart, in which she played a vice squad policewoman, but you can't help feeling she has been denied the powerful role she deserves.

Although she won critical acclaim at the Edinburgh Film Festival in Elephant Juice, she is intensely aware of failing to crack the movie world like her male contemporaries Robert Carlyle, Ewan McGregor, Alan Cumming and Dougray Scott. "They say Scottish actors are like the sun dried tomato of the acting world, that they're so trendy at the moment, it's hot to be Scots, that sort of thing," says Nardini. "But it's definitely the men that have made it. You don't really have film stars that are Scottish women." Asked what the boys have that the girls don't and she spits back a truly Anna-esque reply. "Penises."

If it was controversy she wanted in her latest television role, she has found it. Besides the rape scene, Rough Treatment touches on the thorny issue of gun culture. Eve treats her weapon like a friend - when she is driven to revenge, she reaches for it. Nardini thought she knew how she felt about guns until she began taking one home to familiarise herself with it for the role of Eve. Having a weapon lying around her house, to pick up whenever she felt like it, forced her to reassess her stance. She is still unsure how she feels.

"They let me take the gun home and I would just basically pick it up every now and again and have a wee go with it," she says. "It's like anything, you just feel like a bit of a Nancy with your gun to begin with, but I got quite comfortable with it. The director used to say, 'Oh God, the minute she gets that gun, she comes alive.' It's quite, oh how would I describe it?"

You liked your gun?

"Yes," she says, laughing nervously. "It's a kind of the seductive, em, tool." She stops and reconsiders. "Oh, I can't say that."

It wasn't the first time Nardini had held a gun. While she was growing up, she would accompany her father on clay pigeon shoots. "My dad qualified for the Olympic team as a clay pigeon shooter a long long time ago, when he was a young man," she says. "I've been on various days with him, but it never really appealed to me. It's quite sore when the gun slams back on your shoulder. So I wasn't completely unfamiliar with guns." She smiles wryly and adds: "And I mean, obviously I've got one myself, under my bed."

Asked if she understood Eve's desire to wreak a bloody revenge for the rapes, Nardini says she can imagine how it feels to want to make someone pay for their actions.

"I can relate to feelings of that strength," she says. "I think it's a primal basic instinct in everybody that if someone hurts someone you love, or hurts you, unless you are a saint you are going to harbour some negative feelings towards them. Eve really does become obsessive and craves revenge, but at the end of the day, there's enough people around me to throw water on my fire - there's always someone there to say, think of it another way."

She looks up through her dark eyelashes and snorts - a sign she is about to mock herself, one of her most endearing habits. "I don't imagine I would do what Eve does. I'm not in the army. I could go after them and try and Shakespeare them to death or something."

The most important part of her life, besides her work and a relatively new relationship, is her family. Although she has found it increasingly difficult to return to Largs to see them since moving to London three years ago, she is fiercely loyal to the family who created the famous ice cream empire. Besides her parents Sandra and Aldo, she has a younger brother named after her father, and an older brother, Nicky, who owns a cafe in Edinburgh. Another older brother, Pietro, died in a car accident when she was a teenager, but Nardini refuses to be drawn on the subject, saying only that people adapt to huge losses more easily when they are younger.

The actress is protective of her private life - she says she was hurt when a tabloid newspaper recently ran an interview with her aunt in Italy, alongside photographs of Nardini as a child, taken while she was visiting her Tuscan relatives. She says the Scottish wing of the family knew nothing of the piece until it was printed. "Can you imagine how my mum felt seeing that?" she says.

After talking for a while, though, she cagily admits she is living with someone who works in the production side of television. She is very obviously in love, but is nervous about opening up, presumably because her break-up with her last long-term partner, Glasgow restaurateur Derek Sutherland, was newspaper fodder for months after it happened.

Describing how quickly she realised that her new relationship was serious, she says: "We moved in with each other after a few months. I suppose you get to a certain age where you think, well, I can kind of do the whole dating game, or ... We just met each other and thought, 'Yeah, we definitely want a future together.' He was always staying over with me anyway."

She bursts into infectious laughter before telling how soon after her boyfriend moved in, they gave the neighbours something almost as shocking as Anna and Miles's escapades to talk about. "My boyfriend was fixing the ceiling light and he and his friend were sitting wiring up fuses," she says. "I had on my combat jacket and I was practising with my pretend rifle. We had no blinds at the time, so there were people walking past, peering in and going, 'It looks like they are making bombs or something.'" She pauses and adds: "We've got some blinds now."

Asked whether she wants children soon, she says: "It's definitely there as a plan for the future, but not right away. That is something we do need a bit more time together to consider." The question doesn't surprise her. During the last round of press interviews she faced, she delighted in goading a pack of journalists huddled round a table after one of them, who Nardini describes as a "nosey cow", asked her persistently about her biological clock. The actress declared that in the absence of Mr Right, she might consider using a gay friend to help her get pregnant. Inevitably, the story made headlines, all the way to Largs. "Mum was a bit like: 'Oh God, that girl' but she quite likes it that I'm outspoken," says Nardini. "She certainly prefers it to the reverse."

Nardini's words provoked one letter from an Edinburgh-Italian woman, who accused her of betraying her family by flaunting her "outrageous" beliefs in the press. The actress tells of how she was so infuriated by the letter that she wrote a reply, castigating the woman for assuming she knew her parents' beliefs better than she did.

"She said, 'You obviously have very good parents and they must be so shocked.' In the letter I wrote back, I said, 'Yeah, they are good parents, but that's because they're very open and broad-minded and they've taught me to be like that.' In the end I didn't send the letter because I thought, what's the point?"

Nardini will no doubt go on infuriating and inspiring many viewers who presume to know her because of her strong television profile and tendency to speak her mind occasionally. Her hope is that at the very least, she will carry on working as an actress, and that maybe she will find the elusive role that will finally put Anna firmly in her place

Copyright 2000
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