Editor’s note: Since I wrote this profile of Alessandro Nivola and Emily Mortimer in 2016, the couple has soared professionally and personally. Mortimer co-wrote the excellent Noah Baumbach movie, “Jay Kelly” and has appeared in countless movies such as “Mary Poppins.” She’s currrently in “Ladies First” with Sacha Baron Cohen on Netflix.
Nivola won the 2017 Tribeca Film Festival Best Actor Award and has gone on to hit after hit on TV and in the movies. He’s an Emmy contender for his portrayal of Calvin Klein in FX’s “Love Story,” about JFK Jr and Carolyn Bessette. He really studied the designer, and is more Klein than Klein! If Ryan Murphy is smart, he’ll spin Nivola off into a whole series about Calvin, Donna Karan, et al. An Emmy nom should be in his future. He stars next in Netflix’s “The 99ers.” (PS And yes, their son Sam is now a star, too, from “The White Lotus.” Daughter May is next.)
Here’s the story from 2016:
One day a long time ago, the famed artist Jackson Pollock gave a painting to his friend, the famed artist Costantino Nivola, in Springs, just north of East Hampton. This was a time in the early Fifties when the Hamptons were an enclave for artists and writers, before the country roads were lined with limos and paved with gold.
Nivola hung the painting in his modest living room, and sat on a couch facing it with his family. A photograph was taken of them studying the Pollock the way people stare at flat screen TVs nowadays.
“They used to give each other art all the time,” Costantino’s actor grandson Alessandro Nivola, recalled for me recently. “Pollock was experimenting with the splatter paintings, and he gave my grandfather one. Apparently it stayed on the wall for about a week, at the end of which he called Pollock and said he had to take it back.”
Sandro imitates his late grandfather’s Italian accent. “He said, “Jackson, I cannot keep your painting. It makes me nervous.”
The grandson, known to family and friends as Sandro, gets a good laugh from this. “He gave the painting back. Years later I was at MoMA for the big Pollock retrospective and saw the painting. When I went home I looked it up and sure enough, it had been purchased from a Sotheby’s auction for something like $25 million!”
That was the world Alessandro Nivola came from in 1999 when he met actress Emily Mortimer on the set of Kenneth Branagh’s musical version of Love’s Labours Lost. She was the fetching, sexy and intelligent daughter of staggeringly famous British writer John Mortimer. “I was going to London,” Nivola says, “and Leonard Cohen’s son Adam said I want to give you the number of the most beautiful girl in London. You have to call her.” It turned out, when Nivola arrived, that the girl whose name was scribbled on a crumpled piece of paper was already cast in the movie, too. Sandro says, “On the first day of rehearsal, I said ‘I already have your number!’”
Almost seventeen years later, the Nivola-Mortimers are one of New York’s hip, wildly talented premier acting couples. Along with Maggie Gyllenhaal and Peter Sarsgaard, and Matthew Broderick and Sarah Jessica Parker, they’re to our generation what Eli Wallach and Ann Jackson or Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy were to a golden era. She made her mark with Woody Allen’s Match Point and more recently Aaron Sorkin’s The Newsroom. He hit his stride in Mansfield Park and Janie Jones, and is now on a tear with films like American Hustle and Selma.
You wouldn’t know it — unless you asked– that boyishly handsome Sandro is a Yale graduate and accomplished soccer player, the son of artist Virginia and a senior fellow from the Brookings Institute. Pietro Nivola is himself the product of an extraordinary couple: a world famous Italian born sculptor and his wife, a Jewish emigre from Germany who met in Milan art school before World War II.
And then there’s Mortimer, the product of her father’s second marriage late in life. Sir John was a legendary barrister, novelist and screenwriter beloved and celebrated in the UK as the defender of the Sex Pistols in their 1977 obscenity trial was well as creator of The Rumpole of the Bailey, the very popular BBC TV series, and wrote the equally beloved series of Brideshead Revisited (with Charles Sturridge).
Bringing together two families with staggering pedigrees, merging the Nivolas with the Mortimers wasn’t simple. They didn’t have that much in common, as it turns out.
The Nivolas, Mortimer says, “are much more refined than mine. Mine were vulgarians in comparison. The Nivolas are all very aesthetic, ascetic, spare and refined and beautiful and elegant. My lot are a bit more chaotic. I remember we are all renting a house on Long Island one Christmas –because there wasn’t enough room in the Nivola house for everyone– and we realized there wasn’t any alcohol in the house. And Ruth—[Sandro’s late German Jewish grandmother] said ‘That’s okay, that’s all right.’ And my mom said, ‘Speak for yourself! We’re all alcoholics!’”
“My dad,” Emily recalls, “liked the idea of Italian blood coursing through our blood,” Emily says.
There’s a story about the Nivola house, which is now occupied by Sandro’s father, a Brookings Institute fellow. Several years ago it had to be moved as the water table rose in Springs. This wasn’t so easy because the house is not only filled with historic art, but it’s made of it, too.
After Pollock’s painting left, the French artist and architect Le Corbusier – the great artist Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris—arrived with a mission.
“He said,” Sandro recalls, “this house needs murals.” Le Corbusier created two gigantic murals on different walls—one was the wall where the Pollock had hung. The Nivolas have lived with them for half a century. When the move was contemplated, advisers had to come in from MoMA and elsewhere to give opinions. Museums are still vying for them, but they’re part of the family.
Now Sandro and Em, as they are called, are parents to twelve year old Sam and six year old May Rose, racking up acting credits working with the likes of Woody Allen, Martin Scorsese, Sally Potter, Aaron Sorkin, David O. Russell, Darren Aronofsky etc. They are ‘in demand’ and working, I say to Mortimer, it seems, all the time.
She laughs. “It just seems that way because that’s when you see us,” she says. “In reality, it’s like waiting for a bus. None comes, and then four come in a row. There’s a lot of down time.”
The company started with a mini-series for HBO called Doll & Em, written by Mortimer and her best pal Dolly wells. It was such a hit a second season was ordered and shown. A third is now a possibility. In the meantime, Mortimer and Wells have a new series they’re negotiating for streaming in which the couple may act, both Mortimer and Nivola are literally shooting movies back to back to back. Emily is shooting Darren Aronofsky’s untitled and secret film with Jennifer Lawrence this month. Sandro has films in the can including Barry Levinson’s Madoff for HBO in which he plays Bernie’s tragic son Mark (who committed suicide) opposite Robert DeNiro.
I ask Sandro to name his favorite Emily Mortimer performance (she’s probably best known for HBO’s The Newsroom, but we’re talking movies). Bright Young Things, he says of the Evelyn Waugh adaption by Stephen Fry . “She was born to be in an Evelyn Waugh novel. She has the perfect combination of romantic longing and acidic intelligence.”
Mortimer tells me she’s in awe of her husband’s ability to do stage plays—something she hasn’t attempted yet. Sandro was nominated for a Tony in 2015 opposite Bradley Cooper and Patricia Clarkson in The Elephant Man. “It’s so amazing to me the guts it takes to stand up on a Broadway stage and fill the theater with your voice and not just vomit and run off!”
Nivola’s Broadway turn was just the latest in a series of successes—his last several films, all hits, have been made by some of the directors in the business including David O. Russell, Ava Duvernay, and JC Chandor. “ It took me a while to realize movies were all about directors. I never cared about the director before, just the role.”
He says he’s very choosy now. “It’s not like a director has to have made a million brilliant movies. I just have to have an instinct they’re unique and potential to be great.” He names Paul Thomas Anderson among those he’s aiming to work with.
Would he like to direct? There’s a hesitation. “The more I work with better directors I see it’s an overwhelming job.”
This month during a rare break, the couple will help Sandro’s brother, Adrian Nivola, the sculptor, launch a new show at the Drawing Room gallery in East Hampton on Newtown Lane. A similar show two years ago caused a sensation and sold out immediately. It was followed by a charming, cozy dinner for friends at the same house in Springs where Jackson Pollock’s painting made Costantino nervous. Adrian, who thought he’d be a painter, has bloomed with a series of highly imaginative and winning wood and wire constructions that can’t be made fast enough.
“He’s really the real deal,” Mortimer says of her brother-in-law, who counted his grandfather and family friend Saul Steinberg among his influences. “He’s been reticent about coming forward because he’s an incredible perfectionist. It’s taken him until now to show the world his stuff which I think is a really good sign.”
But then it’s back to work. In August the couple heads to Spain with their family to shoot Isabelle Coixet’s adaptation of the Penelope Fitzgerald novel The Bookshop with pal Patricia Clarkson and Bill Nighy. But before they head to Europe, there’s a big art opening to preside over. (They hosted the Parrish Museum’s annual summer gala earlier in July.)
They will take the kids, of course. The Mortimer-Nivolas – wrought from great families–are the paradigm of the modern show biz clan. Times have changed since actors parked their little ones with staff. “My dad always told this story about John Gielgud when I was a baby,” Mortimer says. “My parents brought me to a party. And Gielgud said, ‘Why did you bring your baby to the party? Why didn’t you leave her at home? Are you frightened of burglars?’”
