Natascha McElhone embraces a world of change in 'Hotel Portofino'

Natascha McElhone’s characters in “Hotel Portofino” and “Halo” have one thing in common – a blonde wig.

“That’s where it begins and ends,” the British actress says. Both were shot in the same year – the period piece “Portofino” in the summer and the sci-fi drama “Halo” in the other nine months – but the commitments were quite different.

For “Portofino,” in which she plays a hotel owner in the 1920s, McElhone was in Italy for six weeks, working six days a week. For the futuristic “Halo,” she’d be called in once or so a month for nine months.

“It sounds like a long year but, actually, it wasn’t very arduous,” she says. McElhone’s youngest son came with to Italy, and they had a great time enjoying the sights and staying in a place that was “pretty special.”

The only problem: Bella’s wig. Because it was fitted in London, designers didn’t consider how it might adapt to humidity.

“There was an awful lot of moisture in the air,” McElhone says. That meant the wig “had a life of her own.” While the actress suggested cutting her own hair and dispensing with the wig, “you couldn’t swim, and you had to pin curls to remain in the period.” Flyaway wig hair was a small price to pay to play a character rich in change.

Before the third season, creator Matt Baker asked the actors to share their impressions and suggest what might happen to the characters.

“What’s the point in doing a period drama if you don’t drill into the history of the time?” McElhone says. “So, we looked at the social history and the fashion of the times.” In the new season, Bella shows up in trousers, much to her husband’s dismay. “It was interesting getting into marital law, divorce law, property ownership and how it differed between countries. I thought it was quite good to look at my grandmother’s generation and see what might have happened.”

Bella, who buys a hotel is a bit of a maverick, a “sort of an iconoclast during that time.”

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In addition to the hotel, she dabbles in perfumes and aromatherapy.

“It smelled amazing,” she of the result. “We had someone who specialized in all this, so all the crushed rose petals and lavender and the orange essence were all real. And I got to play with the Bunsen burners.”

While McElhone isn’t quick to say she’s a lot like Bella (“my life is nothing like that because I don’t have the constraints”) she does admit she’s less the social butterfly, more the homebody.

“I’m very happy sitting with a book,” she says. “I am not so into the domestic arts.”

She writes daily (her family is filled with storied journalists) and often reads others’ work to offer suggestions. “I did the judging for the Booker Prize one year and we had to read 159 books. My middle son actually has had a couple of plays at the Edinburgh festival, so he writes as well. Everyone writes, so when you go down in the morning to breakfast, everyone’s got their journals and they’re writing.”

Even though her mother was an acclaimed rock journalist, McElhone was coerced to go into the family business.

Since age 3, she has wanted to be an actress.

“I can never ever remember wanting to do something else,” she says. “And it thrills me every bit as much now as it did them. I’m just so lucky that I get to do what I dreamed of.”

"Hotel Portofino" begins its third season in July on PBS.