29.12.08
Labels: Hollywood
Scarlett Johansson is relaxing, legs stretched out before her on a sofa in one of London’s most luxurious hotels, and pondering the strange phenomenon that is life as a modern-day sex symbol. Think Marilyn Monroe or Sophia Loren transported through time – the hour-glass figure and sprayed-on frocks – and you have some idea of the cinematic heritage of Ms J, a woman who, at just 24, has men young and old (including Woody Allen and just about every other director she’s worked with), praising her as a siren, a muse and a pin-up for our times. Women, too, can appreciate La Johansson. According to one glossy, she possesses the body that most admire.
“Oh yeah, that stuff,” she drawls in that unmistakable, husky voice, raising a pencil-thin eyebrow. “Well, I never expected that kind of thing, to be honest. I think that comes with my age, the whole sex-symbol thing. I’ll grow out of that. It’s a phase. And people want to turn you into merchandise in some way, don’t they?”
If it’s an image that she hasn’t particularly courted, it’s also one that she’s not afraid to exploit. In one of her two new films about to be released in the UK, The Spirit, a visually striking adaptation of a comic book, she’s a femme fatale with the kind of plunging neckline that will ensure teenage boys flock to the multiplexes in their droves, while their girlfriends weigh up the merits of a Wonderbra. “I was inspired by those actresses from the Forties and Fifties, and all that movie-star glamour… you know, that Golden Age of Hollywood. I like that look,” she admits.
Today, her look is more Pippi-Longstocking-meets-Gap: her hair is piled up in plaits, and she’s wearing blue jeans, white and green trainers and a grey slip over a matching cardigan (which is covering a recently acquired tattoo, of a sunrise, on her right forearm). In person, she’s friendly, bright, articulate and supremely composed. If anything, she appears even younger than she is. Indeed, the casually dressed, tiny (she’s 5ft 4in) woman who walked past me in the corridor – followed by a minder twice her size – a few minutes earlier didn’t attract so much as a second glance.
But put Johansson in front of a camera and you see genuine screen presence. She commands the eye in a way that few of her contemporaries do – she was luminous in Girl With a Pearl Earring (playing the maid who inspires Vermeer to his greatest work), and drop-dead sexy in the Forties-set noir thriller The Black Dahlia.
“I think it’s hard to have any kind of perspective on the image that builds up around you,” she says. “It’s funny because I live a quiet life. I do. I turn up for a premiere or a charity event, and then I have my life. And, really, it’s a relatively normal life.”
Johansson has been in the spotlight since she was a teenager. She was born in New York and has a twin brother and an older sister and brother. Her mother, Melanie, is a film and TV producer, and her father, Karsten, a Danish-born architect. Johansson loved acting and singing as a child, and from school plays graduated to TV appearances and minor film roles. Her breakthrough came with The Horse Whisperer, playing an awkward young girl traumatised by a riding accident. Directed by Robert Redford, it announced her as a talented actress with huge potential. But even though she earned good reviews, not even Johansson herself could have predicted the meteoric rise that would follow. She looks back on that performance with a mix of fascination for her younger self and pride.
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