By common consent Johansson, 21, has just about the sexiest voice in the movies. I would buy a cinema ticket just to hear her reciting the alphabet, and today she’s sitting next to me at the Venice film festival, reporting where she’s gone wrong with cars.
The first mistake, she says, was being allowed to choose her first car last year. She picked a BMW Z4, a car she describes as “too fast and too wild”. “Someone should have said, ‘Don’t do it!’” she says.
The result? “I wrecked it. It was in a million pieces and the only reason I walked away was because of the airbags. They saved me.”
Within months she had a minor prang in a friend’s Mercedes, caused, she says, by paparazzi chasing her. She has now gone for something reassuringly sensible, a Jaguar XJ6. “It is an old man’s car,” she says. “But it gives me protection.”
Johansson is the sort of girl who can usually look after herself. It’s a quality that has driven her career for more than half of her life, including her role as a 14-year-old in The Horse Whisperer in 1998, playing opposite Robert Redford.
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She is just about the hottest young actress in Hollywood, following a grown-up role with Bill Murray in Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation in 2003 and roles in Match Point and Scoop, both directed by Woody Allen, in the past 12 months.
Her latest film, The Black Dahlia, puts her in the sort of role for which she’s custom-made. It is the late 1940s and she emerges with blonde hair and a slash of red for lips. Playing good-time girl Kay Lake, she appears at one point in short-sleeved sweater, pearls and antique hairpins in a street full of polished Buicks and Chevrolets. “How can you not feel like a sexy dish in all that?” she reflects, sounding like something from Mae West’s era rather than the It girl of 2006.
Johansson is never short of a quip. She also talks a lot of sense rather than actressy rubbish. She’s dating one of the film’s co-stars, Josh Hartnett, 28, but sensibly sees no long-term future.
“Actors are always having to go away and work,” she says. “And there are a lot of sex scenes in films these days. So it does not make any sense to make promises about what might or what might not happen. I am only 21.
“It is a fact of life that in my business it is almost impossible to keep a relationship permanent. I get upset at the thought, because I know that it can lead to loneliness. But another part of me has to accept that is the way things are going to be.”
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Johansson, who has described herself as a “woman trapped in a girl’s body”, also admits that she could fall for the sort of older man who would happily drive a Jag. “When you are around guys in their fifties, like Bill (Murray) and Dennis (Quaid, her co-star in 2004’s In Good Company), I can definitely see why young girls go for older men,” she says. “It rarely lasts, of course. But that does not mean that it would not be worth it.”
Johansson’s experience with the old boys has made her scathing about men of her own age. “They don’t know what to say and I don’t know how to react when they eventually say something,” she says. “I’ve actually had someone come up and say, ‘Nice tits.’ Do they actually think that is going to be the start of a wonderful conversation that is going to lead anywhere?” She brushes aside rumours of bad behaviour. Was it true she tried to take Jake Gyllenhaal from Kirsten Dunst, his then girlfriend? “False,” she says. Was it true that she had sex in a lift with Benicio Del Toro, the 39-year-old actor? “That is what is so crazy about these rumours,” she says. “Has anyone tried to have sex in an elevator? It would have to be over in 10 seconds.”
Johansson’s parents — a Danish father and New York-born mother with a Polish background — separated when she was 13. Her mother Melanie acts as her manager.
“There were quite a few rules,” she says. “She not only told me not to go out with actors, but not even to go out. But we all look after each other pretty well in my family and that gives me a feeling of security. I am still young and dorky, after all.”
Johansson has just treated herself to a two-bedroom flat in Los Angeles and insists she spends most of her nights watching television. “I like silly things, like cheesy shows,” she says. “I was the biggest fan of Jerry Springer at one point and I watched virtually every film by Arnold Schwarzenegger. Between the work, it’s all TV dinners with me.”
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She will soon be coming to a TV near you. Her next film, The Other Boleyn Girl, starts filming in England later this year.
On her CD changer
Anything by Bob Dylan