My Life, My Style: Greta Bellamacina
Greta Bellamacina’s playful wardrobe matches her colourful home
The challenge of poetry is to look at the everyday with new eyes,’ says the film-maker, actress, poet and model Greta Bellamacina, sitting on a red velvet love seat in her dressing-room. Her recent move to Kent with her husband, the Scottish artist-poet Robert Montgomery, and their two sons, Lorca and Lucian, has assisted this process. “Being outside of London, the skies are much more open, the days feel longer, and life appears in hi-res,” she says, “It helps my thoughts to grow.”
Bellamacina was born in Hampstead and raised in Camden. “I loved its independent spirit,” she says. “I spent most of my afternoons as a teenager going from one music venue to another and I’d always meet some-one interesting, filled to the brim with stories. What I like about Camden is that you can be an individual, but you can also be anonymous at the same time.” She spent her afternoons trawling the vintage stores. “I have always been drawn to antique dresses and thought there was something magical within them,” she says.
After discovering an interest in performance at an early age, Bellamacina began to attend drama school on weekends and spent most of her summers with the Hampstead Youth Theatre, writing plays and acting in them. “I always felt more alive when I was performing,” she says. “It’s like your body gets carried away on a boat and comes back as someone else.” At 13 she played a Slytherin schoolgirl in Harry Potter
and the Goblet of Fire—a small part that proved to be the first of many big-screen roles—and simultaneously embarked on a modelling career after being scouted on a bus. She went on to appear in campaigns for Shrimps, Stella McCartney and Mulberry, and on the catwalk for Dolce & Gabbana.
Poetry, on the other hand, was something that Bellamacina initially kept private. “I just scribbled away on my own as a solitary act,” she says. “I found it quite hard to share it until later because it’s essentially an extension of myself.” But influenced by the work of TS Eliot, Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath—“the ones that had a sense of nature and wonder in them”—she published her first book, Kaleidoscope, in 2011 and was subsequently shortlisted as the Young Poet Laureate of London. “I think that poetry is one of the most immediate ways to speak to people,” she says.
Most recently, she was commissioned to write 10 love poems to coincide with Valentino’s A/W ’19 collection that were embroidered on the clothes and printed into a book that was placed on each seat before the show in Paris. “It was so wonderful to work with Pierpaolo [Piccioli] because his couture is really art,” she says. “I’d find it difficult to talk about his work in ordinary language, so poetry somehow felt like the right voice for his designs.”
In the same year, 2019, Bellamacina’s widely acclaimed film about female friendship, Hurt by Paradise—which she co-wrote, directed and starred in—was nominated for Best UK Feature at both Raindance and the Edinburgh Film Festival. “I wanted to bring together all the things I’ve been doing for many years,” she says. “But rather than just me dictating it, I ran the set so that everyone in the crew and all the actors were creatively involved. We let the cameras roll for an extra five minutes at the end of each scene just to see what would come out.” Bellmacina’s husband Robert produced and co-wrote the
film. “We love filmmakers like Cassavetes who have a very collaborative, DIY way of working,” she says. “And when I was acting, Rob was on monitor, and I’d look over and I could almost read his mind when something wasn’t right.” The couple bought their house—a former school—in January this year: “We had been looking for a big property that needed lots of love, where we could house studios in, and almost make it like an artists’ commune.” Inspired by the Luis Barragán House in Mexico City, they decided to use a bold colour palette including red carpets, pink walls and blue tiles. “The house was built like a compass, meaning each wall has perfect geometry to the north, south, east and west,” Bellamacina says. “I was interested in playing with the natural light and seeing how it reflects and glows off strong shades.” She has earmarked the smallest of the rooms as her writing-room. “It has very high ceilings and windows right at the top, so when I sit at my desk all I can see is the tops of branches, and it feels very much like I’m sitting below a tree when I write.”
When she’s not putting pen to paper, Bellamacina is fashion-focused. “I like to wear clothes that feel theatrical but also classic,” she says. “My signature is cream tights with a dress.” She loves the Vampire’s Wife—“the pieces have a secret lining that holds you and makes you feel charged with femininity”— Cecilie Bahnsen’s heavy velvet summer dresses and the “transformative power” of a Simone Rocha gown. “You see them hanging on the rails like strange houses, but when you put them on, they come to life.” For shoes, she favours ballroom Mary-Janes from the dancewear shops Katz and Bloch, and every time she goes to Paris she comes home with a pair of Carels. Accessories are also a way of adding drama to an outfit and you’ll often find her in Theodora Warre’s yellow heart hoops and a vintage star necklace that Robert bought her for her birthday.
The pair got married four years ago; first, legally, at Camden Town Hall (the bride wore a pink Badlands-inspired Gucci dress) followed by a ceremony in Dartmoor. “The way I would describe our wedding was like two children had planned it,” Bellamacina says, laughing. She held a single black rose, wore a custom veil by Dilara Findikoglu adorned with one of her own verses, and Florence Welch performed Leonard Cohen songs at the reception, as “fire poems”—words that had been carved into wood and set alight—burned around them. “It was mad, but it was wonderful,” she says. “For us, it’s always about finding joy in the unexpected.”