And then I had this healthy, beautiful boy Julian in my arms after the most horrendous few days of my life. Nothing was wrong with him and it had all been worth every minute. I was terrified that Julian would have suffered some brain trauma but he was fine and he nuzzled at my breast, making contented noises.
Before the birth I dreamed that I would have a girl – I’ve always wanted one although I went on to have another three boys. Girlfriends with baby girls had given me some of their old clothes and I was going to call her Isabella or Monique. Now I looked down at Julian and felt overwhelmed with the most intense love I had ever experienced. It was very specific, something quite unlike the love felt for a man, and it made me weep.
It was just as well that I didn’t know in those blissful moments that once the stitches came out I was going to feel unbearable pain all over again. Those days were torture as I waited to heal and looked after Julian at the same time. He would feed and I would love it and try not to disturb him while enduring exquisite suffering as the after-effects of the birth repaired themselves. But I had endless stores of love that made up for it and finally I was able to lie down with Julian next to me and we’d fall asleep together. I felt a very strong bond with him from the outset and even when we have been apart, it’s always been there. I know a lot of women who don’t lie with their babies for fear of somehow rolling over and squashing them – I just think you have reflexes as a mother which won’t allow you to do that.
Then an infection developed in my breast which made feeding very difficult, but we both got through it and it helped that I got a handmade bed from my grandmother. She was Jewish and had originally come from Warsaw. My mother transformed the antique Polish curtains from her old house into sheets and the bed was installed in Julian’s own area of the apartment. It all looked so pretty and I watched him swaddled in family history and memories. He had become a little bigger and he smiled a satisfied smile back up at me. I had my own clan now and it felt as if nothing could touch us.
And if the phone hadn’t rung some three months after his birth perhaps nothing would have done. In the spring of 1984 I believed that my life was heading in one direction only. I certainly didn’t want anything to change, but when something did sneak up on me I would always follow my heart.
CHAPTER 10
RED SONJA
A beautiful summer’s day in Copenhagen and a voice from the life I’d left behind in Italy. David from Elite Models in Milan called me in July 1984. ‘Hey Gitte, how are you doing? How’s Kasper? And Julian? Hope you’re well.’ The pleasantries left me feeling a bit uncomfortable. I didn’t want to get back into that world again and I knew he had to be ringing for a reason. ‘There’s a casting in town and they want to audition you for the lead role in a Hollywood movie. Are you ready for that?’
It was out of the question. For a start I was a model, not an actress and I was a family girl now. He was fine with that. ‘Your choice, but let me know if you change your mind.’ My parents and Kasper were impressed that I’d got the call. Kasper, in particular, had great faith in my talent. ‘Why not?’ was his typically laidback point of view. They thought it could be a good direction as an alternative to university. I began to consider the option seriously: I only needed to take a flight to Milan to give it a try. Within 24 hours I had called David back. ‘Okay,’ I told him, ‘I’ll meet the producer.’
I was agitated on the flight to Milan. What am I doing? I thought to myself. I felt awkward and wondered how I looked in my jeans and white tank top. As it turned out I was given a costume, along with the 90 or so other hopefuls. I had a Viking outfit with a sword that looked as if it had come from a fancy dress shop and I was given six pages of script to memorise in 40 minutes.
I had no idea how to approach an audition and couldn’t decide whether to be angry with myself for having put myself in such an odd situation with all these girls I’d never met or simply to laugh hysterically. I took a couple of minutes to calm down while donning the funky warrior outfit and realised that, despite the pressure, I didn’t have time to learn that much dialogue. Just do what you can, I thought. That helped a bit, but I felt so unprepared. I had the ridiculous costume on but I still felt naked. The giraffe in Viking’s clothing. What the hell – I could be on a plane heading back home to my family within two hours.
We were told the film was to be called Red Sonja, an adaptation of a comic published by Marvel. I’d never heard of either name so that didn’t help me at all. The whole atmosphere of the casting was completely different to anything I’d experienced as a model. I’d been to thousands of calls but here the girls were far more competitive. Everyone wanted that lead role so badly; you could smell the jealousy. Where hopeful models chatted with their rivals, even shared an apartment with them, it was all very bitchy here, very cold. It was quite funny in a way because it wasn’t my world and I knew I wouldn’t see any of them again. The sooner I could get out of that stupid costume, the better: this really wasn’t me.
When my name was finally called out I was introduced to director, Richard Fleischer, who was sitting with two other men behind a long table. ‘Please, go ahead,’ he said. I gave them my most open and honest Danish smile and told them I couldn’t remember anything of their script, not one word: ‘I’m not an actress, I’m so sorry.’ About the only thing I could do was raise the sword aloft – so I did that.
‘Stop, stop, stop,’ said Richard. ‘Okay, don’t worry about the script, we’ll coach you through what we need you to do.’ He asked me to look as if I were really happy. Then I was to look confused – no problem there. Seductive was also pretty easy. I had to follow that by looking as if I was about to give up on everything and saving the hardest for last, I had to cry on request. Somehow I managed it all, though there was some laughter in the crying.
‘Thank you very much,’ said Richard in time-honoured directorial fashion. ‘We’ll be in touch.’ I felt very silly as I trudged out in my Viking gear. What the fuck am I doing here? That director must have thought I was a moron, I thought. I convinced myself that I had never wanted to be in a movie anyway.
I was in the dressing room when a plump little Italian woman summoned me back – ‘Mr Fleischer wants to see you.’
The film’s producer was the legendary Dino De Laurentiis and he was in his office with Richard when I arrived. There was a desk with two sets of papers. De Laurentiis was a small man with a deep voice and a dominating presence. I seized the opportunity to drop the very few random Italian words I knew.
‘You speak Italian?’ he said. I laughed and told him I’d picked up some while modelling. ‘You did very well,’ he continued. ‘There’s the script and the contract. The part is yours. Whaddya want to do?’ There was a pause in which his words failed to sink in. This was like a Hollywood film in itself and I really couldn’t believe it.
So what I said was what I always said when faced with great moments in my life. ‘I don’t know – I’m not an actress. I’ll have to phone my dad.’ Unfazed, De Laurentiis turned the telephone on the desk to face me and slid it my way.
‘Hi Dad,’ I said and told him what I’d been offered.
‘Well… what do you want to do?’
‘I don’t know, Dad. They say I’m very good.’
‘Why don’t you go for it?’
We ended up agreeing that my dad would look over the paperwork for me. The director added that I would be starring opposite Arnold Schwarzenegger, a name which meant absolutely nothing to me: ‘The guy with the muscles.’ I said that it still didn’t sound familiar and anyway I don’t like big muscles. They laughed at me, the Danish backwoods girl, and it was all rather embarrassing. Arnold had already made The Terminator and Conan the Barbarian, though he was still known as the bodybuilding superstar – I really should have had some idea of who he was.
Filming was to begin at the end of September in and around Rome and was preceded by stunt training in London. I did riding – which I already knew well – and how to fight on
horseback. I did my own stunts, including falling off a horse properly. For two months I lived in an apartment in London and trained on The Armstrong Farm outside London and with a Japanese fight specialist. Slowly I became Red Sonja. I was totally dedicated to the role and as always, completely professional in my work.
Leaving Julian was hard. I’d just stopped breastfeeding him before I came over and that process was tough enough. Now I had to go away, but when training began he came over with my mum; Kasper too. I was very busy but he shared my excitement at my new role. Shooting was to take seven months and I combined this with taking care of the baby with the help of my family, but I could have done with just another couple of months of being with Julian full-time. The adjustment was one more major thing to take on when there was so much else to learn. Evenings were often spent with a language coach, who helped me turn a very heavy Danish accent into something that could pass for the speech of warrior Sonja.
The trainers were very impressed with how much I already knew about horses and how quickly I took to the physical side of things, choreographing the fighting and the sword play. I would go on to do my own stunts for years to come almost as if I had become a real Viking. Just four months since giving birth and I had become very strong. I threw myself into discovering who Sonja was and learning the dialogue. It came very easily to me and I fell in love with her. She had two sides – the fearsome superhero you see at first and the sweet, intelligent and fair woman you get to know after a while.
Fantasy characters present particular difficulties for an actor in constructing a framework for their role and bringing it out of the realm of the cartoon, but the more I got to know Sonja, I found a mirror for aspects of myself as a woman. Having a baby made it easier for me to identify with her and how she had to balance love with power; the private with the public – that was really what it was all about for me.
Red Sonja saw me typecast as the emotionless super-villain character and that was just too bad. I guess my height and those icy Scandinavian features made it inevitable, but I always look back on Sonja herself, even though she was just a fantasy character, with great fondness and warmth: it was a good time. I was proud of what I’d created in that training period in London and ready to take on the shooting when the production got up to speed in Rome.
Being on set was a great experience. The crew had a way of working which suited me perfectly. I could see how this could become a passion for me in a way which modelling never was. There was a magic to movie making which was meant for me. I was encouraged to create character and express feeling where as a model I was only ever told to be blank-faced. Looking pretty and having a good body were just physical attributes that I only had limited control over. On set none of that mattered if I couldn’t turn in a convincing performance – there was so much more creativity.
Even when the cameras weren’t rolling I wasn’t just Gitte. Everyone called me ‘Miss Nielsen’. I was a star! One assistant would be manning the coffee machine, another tasked with making sure I had enough to eat. The attention alone was pretty cool and the life more than made up for the poor pay. I got just $15,000 for seven months work, nothing compared to the sort of fee I could command as a model and probably less than the multi-million dollar production would spend on a secretary, but it didn’t matter: I was learning so much and having so much fun I would have done it for free. Everyone had to pull together as a team to make it work – from the director down to the guy sweeping the set. We all needed to make a huge effort to ensure the film happened and I loved that.
I soon learned the movie-making expression ‘hurry up and wait’. Indeed, I spent most of my time hanging around for that moment when I would be deposited in front of the cameras and everyone would be ready. In that precise second everything would be silent and as the scene started I had to remember all the lines, all the moves – and to bring them to life. Sometimes there were explosions going off and the set would be filled with fighting and fire but I still had to concentrate on my small section. It took a lot of getting used to but I felt I was coming home and at 21, I knew this was what I wanted to do. I still love that feeling and always have done, whatever film I’ve been on.
On a set there’s always a sense of barely contained chaos and insanity; directors often work themselves into a fury making their ideas work. Everyone on set forms such intense relationships over the course of shooting and the sheer volume of different people working on individual tasks makes every day a constant turmoil of creativity. And then somehow it works out at the end – it has to work out. I soaked up the atmosphere and when shooting finished, I was very quiet and usually returned to my apartment. I lived near the coast outside Rome and Kasper and Julian stayed with me for a while, but it just wasn’t practical with me working long hours and six-day weeks, and so they just ended up hanging around for no real reason. Julian was too small to have such constant upheaval in his young life and back home Kasper could get on with his music.
We took turns to visit and when we weren’t together I called every evening to find out how everyone was doing, but something had changed. The days with Sonja seemed to be longer and my conversations with Kasper shorter; we talked without actually saying anything. While we never failed to discuss how Julian was doing, we gradually stopped finding out how the two of us were doing. Before long we weren’t saying ‘I love you’. Our chats were those of close friends, respectful but increasingly distant. Passion had been replaced by trust and routine; there was no longer any chemistry. It was quite a shock for me to realise that I couldn’t love him as I had and this was heartbreaking: I had been so sure that my feelings could withstand anything. As the months on location went by, I became increasingly upset about my personal situation – it was clear that we couldn’t go on.
It was mostly my fault. As things became more difficult with Kasper, I began spending more time with Arnold. Today, with the distance of time, I can see the tension stretched between life on a movie set and a home life hundreds of miles away but I wasn’t capable of managing the situations simultaneously and so I chose the nearest one. I thought that I had a big opportunity to make it in this new world and I gave it everything; there was nothing left of my creativity after working on dialogue, costumes and in the acting itself. I didn’t leave enough to maintain a relationship, let alone a family. Always tired, I didn’t have the wisdom to balance out the personal and the professional. When I was with Kasper and Julian I did really want to be with them, but there didn’t seem to be a workable compromise. My young head was filled with dreams I’d had since I was a kid, and so I went for it.
The crew had become a 143-strong ‘family’. Groups of us would go out after our 16-hour days and Arnold sometimes came along. I was naturally very flirty and maybe there was already something there because of our roles in the movie, I don’t know: we were supposed to be in love on screen. Away from the cameras, superstar Arnold was charming, kind and confident in himself. Very down-to-earth, though his body always seemed impossible – you couldn’t ignore it when we were running around half-naked in our battle gear! He was so out of proportion, it was crazy. I can’t say that the look did much for me but he was an incredible sight.
The two of us had energy between us, not only as actors but also as two real people. What started as fictional characters became part of us. It was also hardly news in Hollywood that two people working in the charged atmosphere of a film set might get into some inappropriate situation; that was the way it was. You could be briefly thrown together with someone you found attractive and then, unfortunately, you had to go back to reality. It wasn’t any different with Arnold and me.
It started with long conversations about everything and anything. Work was tiring and the intensity didn’t just evaporate as shooting finished. At length it channelled itself into an outrageous affair, and we both knew that when the film was finished, so were we. Time was limited so we didn’t hold back – we really made the most of it. The set lights would barely be off before we disap
peared to do our thing: we wanted time to ourselves and we wanted to try everything. And when we were alone, that’s exactly what we did. Afterwards, I would be back as the rookie actress and he was back to thinking about his dreams, his goal – a long way down the road – of being Governor of California. Even then.
‘I love making movies,’ he said, ‘and I love being an actor. One day I’m going to make it in politics.’ I didn’t doubt his sincerity or his belief in his own ability, though I have to say I wasn’t entirely sure that he would do it, though he was politically engaged: he really wanted to spend his life making things better. He was already world-famous, but it would take years of slogging away in politics to get what he wanted.
‘Is that realistic? Don’t you think that sounds a little fantastic?’ I asked.
‘I think anyone can get what they want if they work at it,’ he told me with total seriousness, ‘if they dedicate their life to it.’ When Arnold wanted to convince you of what he was saying he did it in a way that made sure you believed him and actually I was not that surprised when he did go on to do exactly what he said he would. Both he and Ronald Reagan made bad movies and then had huge success in politics. I’m also sure that when Arnold’s done with his Californian work he’ll come back and do movies again. He never needs to work again in his life, but I know that acting is a big part of who he is as a person and he won’t be able to let it be.
You Only Get One Life Page 8
