KEY POINTS:
Sprinting down a New York street in an evening gown, a young woman is screeching at two men who have just snatched her handbag. "I just want the purse. You can have my cash," she shouts. The men, perhaps bemused by her persistence, eventually run out of puff and stop in an alley.
Bella Vendramini races up behind them, recruiting every grain of bossiness in her body to insist, again, that she wants her possessions back. They've already stashed the bag in a niche in the wall. Bella Vendramini snatches it back and gives the robbers her cash, still pretending to be righteously enraged instead of terrified. The men walk off and she's alone, standing in the alley with trembling hands and the dim realisation that chasing two muggers, probably armed and definitely dangerous, might not have been the wisest choice. Thank God for drama classes.
Having just spent two years studying method acting at New York's Lee Strasberg Institute, Vendramini might not yet be famous for her acting - but she's convincing enough to get her handbag back.
Vendramini is a New Zealand-born, Australian-raised actress who appears on the cover of her first book stepping through the grimy canyons of Manhattan with an expression of hope and an implausibly big, mint-green satin ballgown. The ballgown isn't hers. She bought it from a shop, wore it for the photo shoot and then returned it to the shop for a refund.
Acting, as yet, hasn't delivered fame, fortune or couture hand-deliveries. All that may be to come for Vendramini, who plans to move to Los Angeles in the new year. In the meantime, she is launching herself into the public consciousness with a book about the adventures she's had so far.
The book, Biting the Big Apple, is sub-titled "A Memoir of Life, Love (okay and sex) in New York City". It's an unashamed appeal to the Carrie Bradshaw zeitgeist, from the cover picture to the literary imagery.
The story goes like this: after some years doing theatre and screen work in Sydney, and a series of unglamorous and depressing joblets, Vendramini moves to New York hoping to make it, whatever "it" might be. She meets a rich and handsome fellow, whom her publicity material will later refer to, inevitably, as Mr Big. They drink cocktails. He has a chauffeur-driven car. He turns out to have a dark side. They break each other's hearts for a while. She takes up with a young hottie or two and along the way learns about life, love and two-minute noodles (the Sex And The City metaphor doesn't extend to a catering budget).
The book was commissioned by the Sydney office of French publishing house Hachette Livre on the strength of a newspaper interview Vendramini did a few years ago. Publisher Bernadette Foley thought Vendramini sounded fiery and unpredictable and offered her the chance to write a book about her adventures - so Vendramini began keeping a diary. The diary became the book, which, Vendramini hopes, will be the first instalment in a series of books about her continuing adventures. "If anyone wants to read them, that is," she says.
Vendramini does a nice line in self-deprecation but in the early chapters, the book is breathless, with little to lift it out of the mould of so many of the "my big adventure" books that are so fashionable in publishing these days - home-town character sets off for Western Botswana and finds love, laughs and literature along the way. "I was excited as hell to be there but also sleep-deprived and somewhat terrified.
Images of American serial-killer TV shows flashed through my half-awake mind." But Vendramini's book finds its dramatic weight and, ultimately, becomes something much more interesting than high-end chick-lit. It's a literary cliche, but in this case it's also true: the best of Vendramini's writing comes from suffering. Although the basis of the tale is her developing acting career, fuelled by study at the renowned Strasberg Institute, alma mater of everyone from Marilyn Monroe to Dennis Hopper, the book is most interesting for its examination of Vendramini's personal life - and she is relentlessly honest. It turns out Mr Big is more than just a debonair rogue in a hand-stitched suit.
James, as she calls him, is alcoholic, violent and deliberately cruel emotionally. Vendramini, instead of being swept from cocktail party to premiere, is stuck in an abusive relationship with a jealous, raging man-child. In one scene, Vendramini returns to their apartment to find him slumped at the table. "He looked up at me as I entered. His eyes had that vicious, drunken look again. I figured we were in for a long night. I asked him fearfully if he still intended to check into the rehab clinic. His face turned dark and he sneered. 'It has nothing to do with you. You call me a monster and I'm supposed to just accept that? You drive me to drink. Look at you, your face all ugly and stupid-looking like a slave. Who are you to ask this of me?"' So why does she stay with him? It's the old story. She loves him and when he's not drinking he is sweet and vulnerable and needs her.
Eventually, Vendramini tires of it and leaves him - albeit temporarily. In the book, she describes the arc of their relationship with a tone that characterises her writing; self-deprecation that matures into real frankness as the book goes on. "At the beginning of it all, I made a decision that I had to be brave," Vendramini says now, "brave in the sense of being honest. It was tough sometimes, I have to admit, but I had to keep coming back to that because the books I've enjoyed have been honest. It's a bit like acting - there's no reason to hide.
Humanity is humiliating, it is funny, it is sad and, like my work in acting, there's often a pressure for actors to look good and practise their vacant look. That will definitely get you work to a certain degree - but the actors I aspire to be like are the ones that are real. You see the fear and the humiliation and the sadness and it makes you empathise."
After she finished writing the book, Vendramini married James, but they are no longer together. That, too, is clearly still raw - and it's the sort of detail that brings home the danger of being so nakedly honest in an autobiographical book.
On the page, Vendramini is quite brutally truthful about her opinion of another lover, Axel, whom she describes as gorgeous and kind, but irretrievably thick. "I don't know if he'll read it," she says. "The thing is, he's not that bright - but he has so many other wonderful qualities that I think it's fair to be honest about that. It's the truth." It is as if we find Vendramini maturing on the page - and that mirrors her growth as an actor while studying in New York, says Robert Castle, who taught her at the Lee Strasberg Institute and is artistic director of the International Theatre New York. "When she started, Bella was one of those wildly talented students who nearly exploded with passion and creativity on stage," says Castle, "but it wasn't always real, sometimes it was performing tricks." That was never going to fly at Strasberg, where the discipline - the famous Method - is about using one's own real emotional memories to make a character authentic.
In her first class with Castle, he stopped her in the middle of a scene and told her to stop trying to be so passionate; "to start over doing it more simply, so she could feel more of the subtleties of the character and situation".
Eventually, says Castle, she harnessed her industry and intelligence "to make her acting organic and real and still very exciting and creative".
In one class, Vendramini was performing a role from Edward Allan Baker's play Rosemary with Ginger, Castle recalls. "Though otherwise terrific, she kept repeating this Aussie-sounding 'eh' sound every other line. I think we went through the scene three times before she completely stopped doing it. It was interesting because the whole class knew she was a great actress doing a very tough part, and using this 'eh?' sound as a kind of crutch, so after a while everyone laughed with her whenever she did it. It was like everyone was trying to help her get rid of the habit in a supportive but funny way. It was a great group of actors in that way, everyone supporting the other's work. She got big applause when she did the whole scene finally without the sound. And then it was a really tremendous scene."
Another teacher, Mauricio Busta-mante, says she was "curious, eager, and always a rebel, which was fun. When you watched Bella work in those days, you could see her getting clear confirmation that all her sensitivity and emotional power did belong in her work in front of the camera. She could do things that others had to work very hard to achieve, and was much more insightful than the majority of the actors who worked with us."
After leaving Strasberg, Vendramini took a crack at Hollywood, moving to Los Angeles and stumbling when the writers' strike caused a total work-drought. She'll return in the new year, and says her real acting dream, apart from moving out of the romantic leads in which she usually finds herself cast, is to work with "a director who's truly collaborative, who really knows actors. That's the dream, for me." Both teachers think highly of Vendramini's prospects; Castle says she should try to establish herself on the stage "so film people can see with their own eyes what she can accomplish, and then offer her the high level of roles in films that she's capable of shining in."
Bustamante thinks the key, as for all young actors, is to work as much as she possibly can in a diversity of roles. "She has the world in the palms of her hands by virtue of her talent, her intelligence and her stunning beauty," Bustamante says.
Vendramini's book is dedicated to her parents, Australian film director Danny Vendramini and writer Rosie Scott, a New Zealander. They're an intimidatingly creative pair; Danny Vendramini has lately turned to biology, composing his own theory of evolution that challenges some aspects of Charles Darwin's work.
Scott has published poems, plays, short stories and novels. Their influence is strong with their daughter - indeed, she puts her mugger-chasing tendencies down to her father's influence. "My father always told me that rapists and attackers go for people who they think will go along quietly, who won't put up a struggle," she says.
"So I've always thought to myself if I'm in a situation like that, I've got to walk confidently, to never give away the impression that I'm scared, always behave as though I'd scream and make a huge fuss and be a real handful if anyone took me on." It worked on the small-time hoods of New York, and it's an approach she also takes to acting, bolstered by her Strasberg skills: don't let anyone see the fear.
"In an audition, you're going there to be judged, so it's a really intimidating situation," she says. "But once you work out that you don't need to lie or bluff, that you can be honest and be yourself, and that you've got these incredible resources inside you, the fear dissolves a bit."
The mother-daughter bond is strong, too. Vendramini describes in her book an evening she spends with Scott and two of her friends, including Marilyn French, author of the ground-breaking 1977 novel The Women's Room. It's a formidable crowd; the middle-aged radicals meet the blase X-generation.
Vendramini finds herself inarticulate in her efforts to impress. "My generation of women were raised by trailblazers like you guys and now we are probably the sexist ones," she tells French and the other women. "We have it all: career, the confidence to change the world, economic freedom and, last on the list, we can have a little fluff on the side."
Vendramini tries to explain herself, fails and spends the rest of the evening trying to keep her mouth shut. It is a classic encounter of old and young feminism, with Vendramini deeply conscious of what these women must think of her - is this what we stormed the barricades for? "I was trying to impress them and I did a really woeful job of it,"
Vendramini tells me in a Sydney cafe. "I just think they're such amazing women, that generation of feminists. They speak with such humanity and heart. They're my image of the matriarch, the professional women who were tough, kind and incredibly feminine; maternal." Feminine friendship runs through the core of Vendramini's book - big, honest relationships with other women.
"There's an amazing kind of intimacy between women; a real bonding, real sharing," she says. "I think women talking about intimate things is the fabric of society. It's honest, it's real. And I think we lose sight sometimes of the importance of the matriarch - those women who have so much wisdom to help the world; value judgments, morality, wisdom."
One of Vendramini's own confidantes is New Zealand stuntwoman and actress Zoe Bell, who introduced her to director Quentin Tarantino. Vendramini auditioned for Tarantino's people, failed to get the part but formed a genuine friendship with Tarantino, whom she's soon off to "hang out with" in Germany, where he's shooting a World War II film called Inglorious Bastards.
Throughout the book, she's unashamed about finding "QT" sexy. When I ask her about it, she blushes madly.
"I was just being honest," she says. "I've no idea what he'll think when he reads it. I'm blushing a lot when I think about all the stuff I've said in this book."
* Biting the Big Apple, by Bella Vendramini Hachette $39.99
