His response was to come to see me in my tiny house in the Montanare di Cortona. Within hours I was writing to Fellini that he couldn't reduce the Marquise du Chatelet to a huge-breasted nurse for the senile Rousseau. He wanted to know what I thought of it, and if I would consider the part of Madame Chatelet, in a scene in which Casanova meets Rousseau. Instead he gave me the script, a work very much in progress. Fellini kept watching me as I chatted with the crew, moving his head slightly as if he was studying the planes of my face, narrowing his eyes.
By the time I got there, my flimsy dress was stuck to my otherwise naked body and my hair was plastered to my skull. I was a fan from way back, so, though I didn't want the part, and it was the hottest day of the year, I took off down the Autostrada del Sole in time for lunch with the crew at Cinecittà. In the summer of 1975, Paola Roli, one of the casting directors for Fellini's Casanova, suggested that he try me for the part of the giantess. I will not have my Fellini rewritten by Arthur Kopit, who wrote the musical, or Anthony Minghella or Michael Tolkin, who wrote the screenplay. As I flicked back and forth through the menu, I caught glimpses of Penélope Cruz in a flounced red baby-doll nightie with a built-in push-up bra – could we have worn such things in the 1960s? – and Sophia Loren looking like an Aztec mask, and Daniel Day-Lewis getting in and out of bed with his trousers on, but I was not tempted. Among the movies available during the long hours of my flight from London to Sydney was Rob Marshall's Nine, a reworking of Fellini's 8½.
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