From Sophia Loren to Toni Morrison: Legendary interviewer Alain Elkann has talked with them all

Franco-Italian journalist and writer Alain Elkann may not be familiar to some Americans, but in Europe he is a mix of Barbara Walters, Oprah Winfrey and Anderson Cooper. A mind of unlimited inquisitiveness, Elkann has interviewed the world’s leading creatives, politicians and business-leaders over the past three decades. Many appear in Elkann’s new book, “Alain Elkann Interviews  Vol 2″ (Assouline, out Nov 17). Here, Elkann recounts some of the greatest moments of his still-thriving career — including the one great sit-down that got away.

How could I ever choose the most interesting people I have interviewed over the last 30 years. Some of them have sadly died.

Others are still very much alive. Two great actresses, Brigitte Bardot and Sophia Loren, just turned 90, and I interviewed both of them. Brigitte Bardot was nice and polite and we spoke about her passion for dogs and animals. 

I went to interview Sophia Loren for her 60th birthday in 1994 in her elegant Geneva apartment — a big bookshelf full of Oscars. I wrongly thought it would be an exclusive scoop for La Stampa, the newspaper I work for, but I later found out that she did similar birthday interviews with our competitors Il Corriere della Sera and La Repubblica. 

The architects Norman Foster and Renzo Piano are also close to 90 — and Frank Gehry is 95! All three remain impressively active, full of energy, and they talk when interviewed as if age didn’t exist.

Renzo Piano always dresses with pale blue shirts and sweaters, which match his blue eyes.

To reach Renzo’s house above Genova, you have to take a transparent tube-like elevator that moves up a hill to his studio and office — both of which appear like a series of greenhouses. 

Sadly, others I’ve interviewed have left us, but our conversations remain.

I remember my interview with the black writer — as she insisted she be called a ‘black writer’ — Toni Morrison, very ill in her bed just a few weeks before she died in 2019, in her beautiful wooden painted white house perched above the Hudson River.

I was impressed by the lucidity of her mind, as if her illness didn’t exist even as she was succumbing to it. 

Interviews with business people are always fascinating, such as the cosmetics mogul Ronald Lauder, who came to see me in the courtyard of a little hotel in the 7th arrondissement in Paris, where we discussed, during the pandemic, his deep involvement in the challenges facing global Jewry.

I later interviewed François Pinault in the Paris headquarters of his company Kering, and learned how he evolved his family’s wood-trading business into the global luxury giant that now owns Gucci and Yves Saint Laurent. Pinault and Lauder have both become major art philanthropists. 

Interviewing Zambian-born macroeconomist Dambisa Moyo in 2023 was also enlightening. She was made a baroness in the House of Lords, first initiated by Queen Elizabeth II and then, when the queen died, realized by King Charles III.

Moyo is a stunning example of the extraordinary diversity and lack of glass ceiling we now observe in the post-colonial British ruling classes.

Robert Silvers, the former editor of The New York Review of Books, was precise and fussy over every single sentence in our interview in 2017, calling my editor at 2 a.m. to ask if we could change a semicolon.

Easier to handle was English actor Kristin Scott Thomas, who’s impressively able to embody every character as if it were “normal” behavior. She’s married to John Micklethwait, editor in chief of Bloomberg News, another past interview. 

Talking of actors, in Paris, in a café of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, I had breakfast early one morning with the iconic film star Marcello Mastroianni, who was already not well.

After years of asking him for an interview, suddenly, unexpectedly, that morning he said: “Didn’t you want to interview me?” When I answered, “Yes, of course,” he said, “Let’s do it.” I had to borrow a pen and a block of paper from a waiter at the café, and we did it. 

There are unique emotions from visiting the studio of great artists such as Anselm Kiefer, Georg Baselitz, Tracey Emin, Antony Gormley, Marina Abromovic, Julian Schnabel, John Currin and Damien Hirst.

The immense studio of Anselm Kiefer in the Paris suburbs looks more like a factory than the production space of an artist. Kiefer has lots of energy and before our interview asked me to travel to Barjac in the south of France, where he has a second studio.

Here, Kiefer has created a series of cement towers placed into the landscape, and underground there is a huge labyrinth of tunnels: a metaphor for the horror of Nazi concentration camps.

I met Georg Baselitz with his gallerist Thaddaeus Ropac during the Venice Biennale. I asked Baselitz if he would draw a dog for me, and without fuss he took a felt tip pen and drew a dog on a restaurant napkin. It was a beautiful gesture that I was very grateful for.

After visiting with Tracey Emin in East London for an interview I saw her again in New York for a dinner in a Viennese restaurant. I was seated next to a funny and charming young woman who was talking to me about art. Tracey later said, “That was Princess Beatrice, one of the two daughters of Prince Andrew.” 

Also in New York, Julian Schnabel lives in a very big apartment with very big rooms and big paintings on the walls and big furniture and dark colors. It’s a bit like a gothic castle. And then there is Damien Hirst, whom I met in Venice through Pinault.

When he agreed to be interviewed, he asked to come to my house in London. I like that Damien was not in a hurry and just wanted to stick around. I was impressed by the fact that this energetic man with a difficult reputation was actually incredibly sweet and nice and polite in my apartment. 

I met the artist duo Gilbert and George many years ago in a restaurant in Turin and several times I went to see them in their studio in their East London home.

George is very polite, very English in his humor, and Gilbert is from the Italian region of Tyrol. Like George, Gilbert is always dressed in traditional English Harris Tweed. I love that they never eat at home, so the kitchen is useless because they even have breakfast in a local coffee shop. 

In the fashion world, among others, I had the privilege of interviewing everyone from  Miuccia Prada and Diane von Fürstenberg to Vivienne Westwood, Calvin Klein and Oscar de la Renta.

I interviewed Valentino Garavani, who is still alive and with us today. Valentino worked in Rome and was already famous in the ’90s when both the supermodels and the new Milanese kings of fashion like Giorgio Armani and Gianni Versace arrived. 

I have an extraordinary memory of a New Year’s Eve in the Swiss Alps at Valentino’s chalet where Frank Sinatra was a guest. When midnight came, Sinatra started singing “Strangers in the Night.”

Years before I spied Sinatra at the 21 Club in New York and I shook hands with him.

But I didn’t think I would see him again and experience him singing “Strangers in the Night” for New Years. 

Sinatra is among my biggest memories; I am just sad that I wasn’t able to interview him.