Australian film star Greta Scacchi will be president of the international jury of the 36th Montreal World Film Festival, it was announced. “Ms. Scacchi has marked the international cinema with her talent and we are honoured to have her as the president of our jury,” said Festival President Serge Losique.
Born in Milan to an English mother and Italian father, Greta Scacchi was raised in England and Australia and received her early theatrical training as at the Bristol Old Vic theatre school. After several noticed appearances on stage a couple of minor screen parts, she gained attention as the spirited grandmother in the flashback sequence of the Merchant-Ivory production, Heat and Dust (1982). Scacchi was also memorable as the daffy secretary in Dusan Makavejev's The Coca Cola Kid" (1985). By the late 1980s, after such high-profile projects as White Mischief (1987) and Presumed Innocent (1990), she seemed destined for typecasting as a femme fatale. But a standout performance in Robert Altman's The Player (1992) gave her career a renewed critical boost, and she excelled in several period films, notably Country Life (1994), Michael Blakemore's adaptation of Chekhov's "Uncle Vanya". She then reteamed with Merchant-Ivory to portray Maria Cosway who entrances the future US president in "Jefferson in Paris (1995) and followed that with Douglas McGrath's adaptation of Jane Austen's "Emma" (1996).
In 1984, Scacchi stepped into one of Garbo's signature roles, playing the consumptive Marguerite Gauthier in a TV-movie remake of Camille (CBS). She appeared as the object of affection of an older Englishman (James Mason) in Doctor Fischer of Geneva (BBC, 1984; PBS, 1985) and was one of two nubile young woman living with an elderly artist (Laurence Olivier) in The Ebony Tower (BBC, 1986; PBS, 1987). For her performance as the Czarina Alexandra in Rasputin (HBO, 1996), Scacchi won a Supporting Actress Emmy. She followed with a turn as Penelope, the patient wife of Odysseus, in the NBC miniseries The Odyssey (1997).
More recently she has appeared in a wide variety of international films including Kevin Spacey's Beyond the Sea (2004),The Book of Revelation by Ana Kokkinos (2006) and, opposite Isabelle Huppert, in Alessandro Capone's Hidden Love (2007). In 2010 she returned to the stage to play Desiree Armfeldt in A Little Night Music by Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler at the Théâtre du Chatelet in Paris.
