Nancy Dell'Olio on Nigella Lawson, her dread of Google and why Sven-Göran Eriksson was 'such a stupid'
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Version 0 of 1. Should the chance ever arise that you could spend an afternoon with Nancy Dell’Olio, I highly recommend that you seize it. The woman is – and I’m going to use a technical term here – an absolute hoot. Batty as a box of frogs, of course, with a way with the English language reminiscent of an eight-year-old recorder enthusiast attempting to play the jazz flute, and all the more fun for it. We meet at London’s West End Theatre, which turns out, somewhat confusingly, to be underneath a hotel near Green Park. Dell’Olio is making her West End debut in Fashion Victim: The Musical. Dell’Olio will not, sadly, be singing on stage, nor will she be on it for very long: hers is but a cameo appearance and only for three performances. Nonetheless, Dell’Olio has high hopes that this may well be the start of a stage career: “Yes, I see the stage as an extension of what I do, of celebrity,” she says. Does she think she is a fashion victim? “Of course not! Hahahaha! A fashion victim is someone who is caught by fashion, like a prison. I love fashion. I am not in a prison.” Indeed she is not. There was some, shall we say, unpleasantness two years ago when she had to leave the old Belgravia flat she once shared with Sven-Göran Eriksson after various alleged difficulties, and for a time she was living in a hotel. But now, she is back in Belgravia and in a new flat, apparently free from inconveniences such as awkward ex-partners and demanding landlords. She arrives looking what she calls “very, very casual”: tight jeans, brown suede wedge-heeled boots, a gigantic belt embedded with an entire artillery’s worth of metal studs, a blue T-shirt, a blue cashmere wrap, a tiger-print velvet wrap, her signature dragon lady makeup and her even more signature raven-coloured hair tumbling down her back. She is wearing gigantic bangles on her wrist and carrying two Louis Vuitton bags so large she could probably fit inside them. “Accessories are very, very important, no?” she asks. Dell’Olio has just come from one of her several hairdressers – today she opted for her chap at Selfridges because “he very quick” – and her hair is, indeed, a work of art. Does she go to the hairdresser every day? She looks horrified. “Oh, no no! I do not have time! Crazy!” she gasps. Instead, she goes a spartan three times a week. Maybe more, sometimes. Annunziata Dell’Olio describes herself as “a celebrity, an entertainer”. Had she always wanted to be famous? She ponders the question, playing with her extravagant hair. “Ummm, no. If you ask my mother, she’ll say, ‘Oh yes, she always wanted to be famous.’ But I don’t think so because I’m very, very shy. Really!” she says, noting my sceptical expression. “Famous is not the right word but when I was very young at university or school, everyone knew where Nancy was. I was the one you would notice if I was there. If that means being famous, I don’t know. But I like to be, in a way, like a leader, and try to make a difference, and I do. At university everybody knew my name, then I conquered Rome, New York and then London.” With the pleasing image of Dell’Olio conquering nations in both of our minds, we turn to the interview’s matter at hand. Dell’Olio insists she is “very completely a non-technological person”, which surprises me as she is a fairly prolific tweeter and Instagrammer. Nonetheless, despite that cavil, we look at my laptop together to find out what the web says about Nancy Dell’Olio. I assume this will be a safe starting point, seeing as she presumably writes her tweets. But I am proved wrong – sort of. It turns out Dell’Olio has “a person” who does her social media for her. “The person who does the tweets for me, he has a very difficult life,” Dell’Olio adds, a little superfluously. “Sometimes it happens I do it myself, but I have to say one part of me is very against social media. But I do know people want to know what career-wise she is doing and then it’s important.” (Most of dell’Olio’s sentences contain about three self-contradictions.) Her Twitter is largely taken up with glimpses into her glamorous life – photos of her at Stephen Fry’s wedding, say, or hot updates from the GQ Style awards – and exasperation with the British press: “I am very focused on the things that are important to me,” she says solemnly, as we scroll past a tweet in which she tells her followers she saw David Beckham the night before. One issue that exercised her greatly in the past year was, surprisingly, the Scottish referendum. Nancy was very much in the No camp. “Yes, I felt so strong, and I was preparing my show in Edinburgh then,” she says, referring to her one-woman show last summer, Rainbows from Diamonds, which the Guardian’s theatre critic described as “jaw-droppingly bizarre”. “So I thought, yes, there’s some important thing. I’m completely against the separation.” Why? “Because the world is getting closer together!” she explains, Nancy-ish-ly. But this does not mean she is closed-minded on the matter: “But there are some good –” she makes a long pause and a big eye roll – “arguments for it, I guess. But I think being separate would not be an advantage.” Jeremy Paxman famously told Dell’Olio he hadn’t “the faintest idea what you’re talking about” when she appeared on Newsnight in 2008. But despite her surely exaggerated Italian accent, Dell’Olio isn’t hard to understand, just sometimes a little complicated to follow (and to be fair to Paxman, Dell’Olio had answered a question about the credit crunch with a speech about how fantasy should guide morals. Today, Dell’Olio dismisses the incident by saying she “was not prepared for the issues he was talking”.) But it is not surprising that misunderstandings occasionally happen and quite a lot of Dell’Olio’s tweets are taken up with correcting the British press for misquoting her. A typical missive reads: “A mis-quote by the @Telegraph, why on earth would I say Nigella is fat? She is one of the most stunning ladies I know.” Dell’Olio tuts aloud and I assume she is cross about the Telegraph’s error but, once again, I am wrong: “I never said she’s the most stunning lady I know – absolutely not! No!” So who is the most stunning lady she knows? “The most stunning lady I know is me!” she replies. I laugh; Dell’Olio does not. And then, perhaps because she thinks I think she’s joking, she reiterates her point twice over: “Nigella is not the most stunning lady, absolutely not. She’s a nice-looking woman, but she’s not slim – she’s more than curvy, OK?” So did the Telegraph actually misquote her? “That was a misquote when I gave the interview to the Telegraph, and it was to be off the record, but this journalist told her husband and he said, it’s too funny not to put in, and I said, Sorry, this is out of the context.” With that (sort of) settled, we move on to another one of Dell’Olio’s media bugbears: the Daily Mail. In 2011, Dell’Olio sued the Mail for libel after it described her as “a man-eater” when reporting on her then relationship with Sir Trevor Nunn. In the end, her case was thrown out of court by the judge. “The judge said to call a beautiful glamorous woman a man-eater is not an offence, it’s a compliment. You really have to be in that male mentality! I’ve realised I have so much to learn,” she sighs. Does she think the British press is especially hard on women? “I do find the English press can be very sexist, yes, especially the Daily Mail. I never buy the Mail – never! And I do not understand the woman females who buy it.” A lot of woman females do buy it, though, I say. “I know!” She then thinks a little more. “But I know I’m on the Mail Online every day and they are sometimes very nice to me. The important thing is, not to take the Mail too seriously.” Well, except when you need to sue them. “Yes, OK.” Dell’Olio’s Instagram feed is a characteristic mix of photos of holidays, art and celebrity friends (Tracey Emin, mainly – a night out with the two of them, she says, “is very fun because we have a lot in common: she’s a very intelligent woman and a great artist”.) I am particularly taken with a photo of her in Miami wearing more make up than bathing suit. Does she ever go out without makeup? “No! Even on the beach you need to wear protection for the sun, mascara, lip gloss, eye pencil. I wear no makeup in bed.” So she would let a boyfriend see her without makeup then? She holds up a finger, as though I have just caught her out: “Ah! The problem then is, if I don’t wear makeup, he then won’t believe I’m older than 18.” Dell’Olio is 53. Again, I make the mistake of laughing: “You don’t believe me – it’s true! He always say: ‘You look 16!’ The makeup can age you a little bit.” We then spot a photo of her on Instagram wearing a dress that, like her bathing suit, reveals more than it conceals. “Hm! Sometimes I discover that I missed something in my wardrobe. Hahahaha!” Dell’Olio could be a camp icon on a par with Joan Collins. Does she think she is high maintenance? “To be honest, yes. Women, just the fact we’re female, we’re more high maintenance, because we need to do our hair, our makeup, our nails – this is part of our femininity. I can try to reduce, though.” Could she live on a budget? She lets out a shriek and lunges at me, as though trying to put the words back in my mouth. “I don’t know what this word is! My accountant says, You have no relationship with money.” This, I suspect, is true. Dell’Olio, who once worked as a property lawyer, no longer seems to have too much contact with her profession (“When you say do I practise law, in a sense very typical, no”), which poses the question how she pays for all the Vuitton, Belgravia property and hairdressers. She describes her new career path as that of “an entrepreneur” which allows her to “express my creativity. It’s a very different state of mind.” We now turn to the part of our adventures on the web Dell’Olio professes to dread the most: Google. Dell’Olio has been a celebrity in Britain ever since she arrived 2001 as Eriksson’s glamorous girlfriend. Quite a lot of the coverage we find about her is still in relation to Eriksson, even though they broke up eight years ago. Dell’Olio winces and curls up in her chair. “Someone will say, ‘[You’re famous because] you came here with him. I’ll say, ‘Yes, I came here with Eriksson because he was the manager, but the press were interested in him because of me, not because of him!’” she says, which is not entirely accurate. She then adds, “Now they don’t talk about him in years!”, which is, to be fair, pretty accurate. Does she know what he’s up to? “No! It would be too upsetting after all the disaster he did.” The disaster included his notorious chronic infidelity and his profoundly unkind words about Dell’Olio in his autobiography. He was not a gentleman to you, Nancy, I say. “Well, no he wasn’t. I met him like a gentleman and then he acted like a stupid.” Like a what? “Like a stupid.” (She is probably making a direct translation of “uno stupido” – a stupid man in Italian.) “That’s what upsets me – such a stupid. But I never said anything because I was protecting my choices.” Given the intense tabloid coverage around her relationships with Eriksson and Sir Trevor Nunn, has she considered going out with someone not famous? “Ye-es,” she says so slowly that it’s as though the idea pains her. “But sometimes someone who isn’t famous can’t cope with it and find being in the public eye difficult to understand.” What I think a lot of people find difficult to understand is what Dell’Olio is famous for, exactly. What does she think the reason is? “I think it has to be for my personality, and for my kindness. I think,” she adds, bejewelled wrist flicking her hair back. “Most people in Britain know now the kind of deep, intelligent person I am.” |