Scacchi – happier with her clothes on

Greta Scacchi no longer has any desire to take her clothes off on screen. As a young actress, she recalled, she was quickly pigeonholed after a couple of early films in which she removed her underwear.

“It was a token thing that producers wanted in any film in the 1980s. I don’t think I was doing it more than others. Maybe I was just more memorable,” she said.

In 1984, she finally turned down a script because it required nudity. Then she discovered that Kathleen Turner had taken the role even though she had refused to undress. “I didn’t have the confidence to do that. I’m just a bit like that. I don’t let people down,” Scacchi told Elizabeth Grice of The Daily Telegraph.

In 1992, the actress plucked up the courage to say to the film director Robert Altman: “I cannot once again play the part of the blonde sex bomb who’s going to take her clothes off.” But after she started shooting her role in The Player, Altman told her: “You get your ass on that set, take your knickers off and do what you’re paid to do.” She refused – and the same year, she turned down the lead in Basic Instinct – the film that made Sharon Stone world-fa-mous because of a scene in which she appeared to have forgotten to put on her knickers.

The following years were tough for Scacchi, now aged 48. A relationship with the American actor Vincent D’Onofrio ended in a custody battle: he walked away when their daughter Leila was just six months old. Scacchi bought a cottage in Sussex and didn’t work for 18 months, devoting herself instead to being a single mother. But then her first cousin, Carlo Mantegazza, came to stay and they fell in love. Today, they have a son of eight, Mat-teo, but are not married. “I learnt that if you got married, as my parents did, then you’d have to get divorced and that was a huge rigmarole,” said Scacchi.

As for her professional life – well, she’s no longer worried about being typecast as a sexy actress who does nude scenes. After she became a mother at the age of 32, “Nobody ever asked me to take my clothes off again. It was a relief.”

Blunkett revives the class war

Former Labour cabinet minister David Blunkett last week reignited Labour’s attack on Oxford and Cambridge. Despite making the right noises about taking more state pupils, both universities were filling around half their places with applicants from private schools, he said. Because of this “bias”, poor children from council estates were unlikely to land the top jobs.

“We need to change society, so that if you have the talent, you don’t get knocked out of being a senior civil servant, judge or medic because of your background. At the moment, you do. You are trumped by the old system,” he told Fabian Review. “Call it class if you want, but you’re still trumped by it.”

On the wrong side of the tracks

With a brother who has been in prison and a childhood largely spent in care, drum’n’bass DJ Goldie – born Clifford Price – has seen the tough side of life. Last year, his 19-year-old son, who lives on the Wolverhampton estate where Goldie grew up, was shot. He survived, the DJ told the New Statesman. But Goldie, 42, who now lives in Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire, worries about today’s violent teen culture.

“Youth have become so used to not having any help, they’ve turned their backs, ” he said – adding that he didn’t think the Tories had any answers.

“If David Cameron puts his hand out to youth, he’s going to get it bitten off. Guaranteed,” he said.

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