If you’re looking for an easy way to describe Hotel Portofino, “Downton on the Italian Riviera” is probably the simplest description. The period drama follows the trials of a bohemian hotel during the roaring twenties, set against the rise of Mussolini’s fascists.
Of course no drama about that time in history would be complete without a wonderful wardrobe, something which impressed one of its stars, Natascha McElhone. She plays co-proprietor and moving spirit, Bella Ainsworth who, along with the costume designer, made sure her clothes were period appropriate.
“They were wonderful,” said McElhone. “I abandoned the stockings when we decided the postal service between cities and this place would have failed, so all the nylons would be threadbare at this point.
“Louize Nissen, the costume designer, did an incredible job. She was the taste barometer for the whole piece.”
Ainsworth is short of staff and money; her guests, including the imperious Lady Latchmere (Anna Chancellor), are demanding; and she’s being targeted by a corrupt local politician, Signor Danioni (Pasquale Esposito), who threatens to drag her into the political cauldron of Mussolini’s Italy.
The Hotel demands all of Bella’s energy but she’s being pulled in other directions, as she tries to coax her wounded son, Lucian, and her widowed daughter, Alice, towards happiness.
Despite the problems, McElhone was impressed with her character’s attitude and desire to use her hotel as her own personal backdrop.
“The hotel is her canvas and her form of expression,” said McElhone. “She was a painter or an artist at some point, and I wanted to amplify that aspect of her. It’s all about her taste and her abundant generosity – she has quite an egalitarian approach to the staff at the hotel as well. But the hotel is perhaps the only form of self-expression she could really have at that time. If you don’t express that part of you, then it will eat you up.
“This hotel that she’s all but designed, the interior which she would have handpicked, I think she gets a lot out of that when people appreciate it.”
As for her Italian skills, McElhone admitted she struggled.
“Hopeless!” she laughed. “Bella speaking extremely rudimentary Italian came very easily to me. But I live in hope…”
Hotel Portofino, Britbox, streaming from Thursday, will arrive on ITV later in the year.
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