View to a thrill - actress Elizabeth Hurley - Interview

EH: It was out of control. I had photographers with longlenses peering into my bathroom window when I was trying to go to the loo. It put me off living in England a lot, and that's really bad because I love England and I love English people. I feel very sad about that. I actually feel much more comfortable in America.

GF: Was that whole eruption something you learned from?

EH: To be quite honest, I'm not sure what you learn from something like that, except who your friends are in a time of crisis, which is invaluable. Beyond that, I couldn't say it was a learning experience for me. I don't know if I learned to be harder; I hope not.

GF: If you'd have lust decided to lay low, I think people would have understood, but you went out there and did some outrageous photo shoots. You didn't hide your light under a bushel.

EH: They were quite naughty, some of those photo shoots, weren't they? I don't know why. I think it might have been because I'd been doing so many beauty shots - nice, pretty shots with puppies and so on. I'd never done modeling before I started the Estee Lauder job and it was high pressure having to learn to do everything on day one. So those other shoots came as a bit of a release. Some people found them quite offensive, which I feel awful about, but I thought they were fun.

Going back to your question about whether I learned anything or not, I think you learn just how strong you can become by yourself. You also learn what's important to you. We [Simian Films, the film production company she runs with Hugh Grant] had a signed-and-sealed deal for a project [Extreme Measures, 1996] that we did end up producing, but for a year it was a big question whether I wanted to carry on and do that or not. A big part of me didn't really want to, but I didn't want to let down the studio that had invested so much money and given us so much help toward greenlighting the film. Nor did I want to let the Estee Lauder people down by saying I wasn't going to be available for the next year. In the end, none of these were big decisions because I knew I would go ahead with everything.

GF: Let's talk about your acting. You played the South African stripper in Dangerous Ground, which came out in February . . .

EH: Yes. It was quite nice, but I look awful in it.

GF: I hear twelve and a half million dollars is the going rate for playing strippers in movies these days.

EH: Sadly, I didn't get twelve and a half million dollars and neither did I strip in it. What I did was wiggle about for ten seconds in a skirt and that's it.

GF: Does acting answer a need in you?

EH: I don't know. I normally like watching people on screen when they show a lot of themselves. I think the more you do it - acting - the easier it is to let go and not put up anything to hide behind, and you can learn quite a bit about yourself that way. Actually, in Dangerous Ground, it was nice to play this wild, fucked-up girl who didn't have nice manners and didn't make the slightest effort to put anyone else at ease, whereas that's a quality so ingrained in me it's just second nature. It was also nice to play Delilah [in TNT's Samson and Delilah, 1996] because she's so wicked. I cried buckets when I read the Samson script [by Allan Scott] because Delilah knows she is destroying herself when she destroys Samson. On the other hand, it's very campy because you've got Dennis Hopper and Michael Gambon charging around in short skirts, and there's me in my seductress mode.