There are voices and there are voices. And then there's the voice of Scarlett Johansson.
Once serious, hoarse, penetrating, and deep, in the style of Lauren Bacall or Kathleen Turner. A smoky voice, like Scotch whiskeys, from someone who has lived through a lot in just thirty years: the responsibility of being a child prodigy, the separation of her parents when she was a teenager, two marriages (the first of them brief, and turbulent), the motherhood, fame, loss of anonymity and freedom.
Scarlett, perhaps because of her Scandinavian genes (her father is a Danish architect), always keeps a certain distance. Calling her cold may be a bit excessive, but she is not always warm, and if she insists she can be downright cutting, like other actresses who have reached the top very young, with almost no time for her stomach to digest the success. .. Punctuality is not her forte, and she is often late for both rehearsals and interviews. She is aware of her attractiveness, and of the power she wields over her. Her colleagues consider her bright, ambitious, competitive, and bossy, always surrounded by a certain aura of mystery.
She has a very strong and very defined personality, the result of the cross between the Nordic and the Jewish, every New Yorker, perhaps hence her empathy with Woody Allen, one of her directors, a lot of hers. Or with the Coen brothers. She is not the typical skinny, porcelain actress, obsessed with being a noodle. Voluptuous, with full lips, blonde hair, and cold, crystalline blue eyes, like the waters of the Baltic Sea, she has her curves and likes to show them off, like the great divas of the forties and fifties, the golden age of cinema. But above all, she is her voice. A voice capable of sustaining a film on its own, as was the case with Her, a mobile operating system with which Joaquin Phoenix falls in love. And not just Phoenix. A system that anyone could fall in love with.
It is already known that progressives dominate in Hollywood (although within the canons of political correctness, without messing with the State of Israel and without challenging according to what interests), but Johansson is among the group of actors and actresses most involved in the cause Democrat, along with Sean Penn, Martin Sheen, Susan Sarandon, George Clooney or Tim Robbins. She has actively campaigned for Barak Obama and refuses to view his presidency as a failure, or even a disappointment. The Republicans, and especially the Tea Party, disgust him. "If they win, I'll emigrate to New Zealand", she threatens herself even though it's not true. In the face of the next elections, she puts her money on Hillary Clinton.
She is not the only actress (or actor) trying to exercise tight control over what is known, written, and said about her, but Scarlett Johansson pursues that goal with a Taliban zeal, and during her pregnancy, it was forbidden to ask her about it. under danger of being severely repressed or summarily expelled. But despite this -no one can have everything tied up and well tied up- she has been the protagonist of two affairs that she would have liked to avoid. The first is the appearance on the internet of some photos that she had taken with her mobile phone to send to her first husband, Ryan Reynolds (the hacker was arrested in Florida and is serving a ten-year prison sentence). And the second is the sponsorship of the Sodastream drink, produced by an Israeli company that has a factory in the occupied territories (as a consequence, the charity Oxfam cut its long-standing ties to the star as an ambassador).
Scarlett has a face that is a close-up friend, a gift for an actress. And the camera, which is not easy to fool, shows a complex soul and an enigmatic beauty. The protagonist of Under The Skin, Her of Her, or The Girl with the Pearl can be tender or sarcastic, with an internal balance or a contagious sadness, happy or melancholic, sophisticated or cool. "She's a subtle girl, who can convey emotion without moving a muscle in her face," says Sofia Coppola, who directed her in Lost in Translation, and catapulted her to stardom.
Churchill said that Russia was "a riddle wrapped within a mystery and embedded within an enigma", and the same could be said of Johansson. You never know which Scarlett you're going to find, whether the sweet one or the grown-up one, the velvet doll or the almost fanatical guardian of your privacy (she refuses to discuss her romances with Sean Penn. Jared Letto and Josh Harnett, and her current marriage to Romain Dauriac, father of her daughter), the one with the frank smile or the one with the frown and slightly cynical humor that looks over her shoulder, the one she wears in an evening dress and high-heeled shoes, or with jeans and sneakers, the one with the look of a movie star or the singer of an indie band, the sensitive or the neurotic, the spoiled girl or the generous donor of her time and money, the Frenchwoman who lives in Paris or the one who feels at home in the Bronx in New York, the one who goes to the studio in a limousine or the one who travels in the back of a scooter as if she were the mistress of any French president. Best of all, none of those Scarletts are fake. They are all authentic. And then there's that voice.
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