Alex Polizzi, a most unlikely sex bomb

Portraits by Dan Burn-Forti. Styled by Orsolya Szabo. Alex wears jacket, £525, Helmut Lang (020 7985 1184). Shirt, £385, Tibi, at my-wardrobe.com. Trousers, £560, Alexander McQueen at Liberty (liberty.co.uk). Costume ring (right hand), stylist's own. Ring
Annabel Rivkin10 April 2012

Two worlds and two spirits collide in Alex Polizzi. Fierce Italian Forte blood courses through her veins but the inflammatory Latin soul is cloaked in... well... Joyce Grenfell. Or perhaps Nanny McPhee. Strict (in, it must be said, a lively dominatrix way) and funny, she is also sympathetic, alpha and ardent. As we sit in an airy room at Brown's, one of her Uncle Rocco's hotels, I wonder if she will stroke me or spank me at any given moment. I think I'd unquestioningly accept either gesture. Or both. Because despite the sense that violent emotion bubbles beneath the crisp exterior, hers is somehow a soothingly reassuring presence.

Alex has, for the past four years, been fronting Channel 5's The Hotel Inspector, landing on the doorstep of some ailing, failing inn each week and attempting to steer it towards profit. But now she has been poached by the BBC to front a new show, The Fixer, another trouble-shooting reality show but with a broader remit. 'I'd seen a lot of s*** hotels and I was starting to lose my sense of humour about it,' she says, pouring me coffee like a Roman matriarch; all eye contact, tailoring and diamond rings. 'How many times can you say, "Make sure the place is clean"? The fact that I kept having to repeat myself depressed me immeasurably. But The Fixer is different because it is based on the idea that I know about family businesses, so it's not just commercial problems I'm trying to fix. It is about trying to manoeuvre a route between fractious family members.' Seemingly impossible to intimidate, Alex is quite prepared to take on the role of bully and bad guy but always with marvellous manners, even if she does throw in the odd 'f***' - rather thrilling.

Certainly she knows what can happen when family and enterprise collide: that it can be too easy to take your personal problems to work and bring your business problems home; that small adversities can become magnified while huge crises can - if valiantly handled - lead to brave new worlds. Because this Polizzi is also a Forte, granddaughter of the legendary hotelier Charles Forte (later Baron Forte of Ripley), an Italian immigrant who started out with a milk bar on Regent Street in 1935 and built an empire that included the George V in Paris, the Grosvenor House hotel in London and around 800 other hotels around the world, ranging from five-star to Travelodge. Her mother, Olga Polizzi, is the second of his six children, and her uncle Rocco is the only son. Rocco now has his own luxury hotel group spanning Europe, Russia, the Middle East and North Africa. Alex grew up with hotels and has spent her entire working life grafting in them. Oh yes, she knows her eggs.

Lord Forte was much admired as an entrepreneur and as a gentleman. But he had rather old-fashioned ideas about a woman's place in the world. 'It depends what you think of as sexist,' says Alex evenly. 'He believed that a woman could do a job every bit as well as a man, it was just that he somehow pigeonholed women as the ones who worked and who looked after the home. My uncle was treated like the little prince; he would go off to play golf with my grandfather while all the girls would be in the kitchen preparing lunch and then washing up the 6,000 pans afterwards.'

As Rocco was groomed for business, it seems Olga was groomed for marriage. At 16, she met Alessandro Polizzi (usually referred to as either a prince or a count), marrying him soon after she left school. 'He wasn't a prince or a count,' says Alex. 'That is just bollocks. He came from a very middle-class Italian family; his brothers are both lawyers and he worked for Alitalia. He also didn't die in a racing car accident. He died in a car accident when a lorry driver fell asleep at the wheel. I was nine.'

Olga and Alessandro were not happily married but his death nonetheless left her, at 32, with two daughters (Charlie, now married to the restaurateur Oliver Peyton, was six) to bring up by herself. 'I couldn't quite believe he had gone,' says Alex. 'I kept hoping that one day he would just come back and it would all be OK. It was also hard because my mother was a very young woman but I only saw her as a mother, so I wanted her to be always at home with us.'

But Olga transformed her-self from traditional domestic angel into a template for female enterprise, becoming design director for Trusthouse Forte, redecorating No 10 for Margaret Thatcher, being named Britain's highest-paid female executive in 1994, and eventually buying her own pair of perfect rural hotels: Tresanton, a gem on the south Cornish coast in 1998; and Hotel Endsleigh in Devon in 2004, now a favourite of Prince Charles. Not to mention her role as design director for Rocco Forte Hotels. 'Luckily, she met my stepdad [William Shawcross] when I was 16 and married him when I was 21. I adore him,' says Alex. They base themselves between Bayswater and East Sussex where Alex, her husband Marcus Miller and their three-year-old daughter, another Olga, often join them.

The family functioned in the way you would expect from a sprawling Catholic Italian clan. Every Sunday they would go to Mass together and then lunch at Lord and Lady [Irene] Forte's Belgravia house. Holidays were spent on their grandfather's boat or, perhaps, shooting, or in one of his hotels. Alex was sent to prep school at the now defunct but then smart Lady Eden's in Kensington and then boarded at St Mary's School, Ascot, where she was good enough ('Soooo well-behaved, but then I discovered drugs and alcohol and boys in my twenties...') and clever enough to win a place at Oxford reading English. She got a bit of a shock. Her college, St Catherine's, was one of the more left-wing houses. 'I had all the poor little rich girl epithets thrown at me,' she says. 'That first year was tough.'

Keen to go into hotels (although her mother begged her not to, citing long hours and poor pay) but equally keen to swerve the inevitableaccusations of nepotism, she took off to Hong Kong to do a two-year management training course with Mandarin Oriental. It was the beginning of a great romance with hospitality - and Marcus Miller. 'I saw this gorgeous man walk into the staff canteen - he was making chocolates for the hotel - and we started going out.' They split up a couple of years later when Alex returned to London to open the Criterion Brasserie for Marco Pierre White, who she describes as 'really hard to work with. Brilliant at what he does but exhausting.'

In 1996, while she slaved under Marco, with Rocco Forte as CEO of the Trusthouse Forte Group and Lord Forte, by now 88, reigning as Life President, the group was subject to a hostile takeover bid by Granada. 'All of us were pretty devastated,' says Alex. 'It was the beginning of my grandfather's real decline. He couldn't quite grasp it. He kept saying, "But do I not have any hotels left?" '

While Olga and Rocco risked almost everything they had to build a new empire, Alex found herself with a bit of money at her disposal and her ex-boyfriend Marcus banging on the door. Marcus is a fourth-generation master baker and, in 1997, he was a baker in search of a bakery or, at least, funding for a bakery. 'He is really a very clever person,' says Alex. 'He had gone to all the major banks and asked for investment and everyone said no, so he came and gave me this tale of woe.' Olga and Alex each invested £60,000 (Marcus paid them back within a year) and Alex, with customary gusto, dived into the business. 'I wasn't dating him at that point but we kind of fell into going out together during that agonising first year of running the bakery when we had two days off in the whole year. It was a nightmare. We kind of got together because we never saw anyone else.' Millers Bespoke Bakery now supplies the Caprice group, Gordon Ramsay, Brown's Hotel (of course), and most of London's high-end department stores, with the bread churning out from a 20,000sq ft premises in Colliers Wood.

But the romance self-combusted. Again. 'We are both toughies,' she says by way of explanation. 'I left him to open Tresanton for my mother and we had eight years of not speaking. Hatred. We used to have to do a board meeting for the bakery twice a year and my mother would mediate.' In 2007, with Alex now running Endsleigh in Devon, it so happened that some bakery papers needed signing and Olga was not around to nanny
the warring exes. 'Marcus therefore had to come to me to sign the papers,' says Alex. 'Bingo! As usual we fell into bed together. We got married in Sussex that September and I got pregnant on the honeymoon.'

Her television career was born with the baby and she has filmed three or four days a week ever since. She is thinking of slowing down because she wants another baby, as well as wanting to spend time with the one she already has - who is careering around the hotel room during the interview, every inch her mother's daughter: noisy, bossy, good-natured and appallingly charming. How do you think Mummy looks on TV, I ask her. 'SO SLIM!' she shrieks, wisely.

'I never cared about getting married and never really wanted a child,' Alex says. 'But now I'm desperate for another one and it's awful. I've had a disaster for the past four years. I lost a baby at six months, a year and a half ago, and I haven't been able to get pregnant since. I haven't done IVF, though I've got to because I'm 40, but I'm worried it might make me go mad. I mean, I'm already Italian and quite fiery, which is a polite way of putting it. F***ing nuts is a less polite way of putting it.'

So she is taking a bit of time off, for the first time in nearly 20 years. She wants the baby. She wants to be with her daughter. She wants to keep her Clapham house immaculate with the perfectly folded linen and gleaming glasses that she grew up with. She wants to have a go at being a good Italian wife - one who listens and 'strokes my husband's ego'. Just for a bit. I can't see that it will last. I would imagine a bored Alex is much trickier than a fully engaged Alex. And even though everyone thinks she has a bottomless pit of cash to play with, she needs and wants to earn. 'If you believe the rich lists, you'll believe anything,' she says. 'If I was such a huge millionaire I wouldn't have busted a gut my whole life.'

She's rather magnificent. Very screen-friendly. The salivating YouTube tributes to her bosoms alone are testament to her appeal, which captures the erotic imaginations of boys and girls alike. 'They can say what they want as long as they are complimentary,' she says. 'I'll take it where I can get it!' She's direct, combative, full-on. 'Oh, my God, do we row, darling!' she says of her marriage. 'We are both alpha, we both expect to get our own way. We are both incredibly spoilt. But I think we'll be together forever and I don't know if that would have been possible with anyone else. I do just adore him. He asked me to marry him for the first time when I was 22 and I'm so lucky that he still wanted to marry me all those years later. I'm quite glad, as the middle-aged spread sets in, that he has that image of me in his head at 22, all naughty and minxy. It's funny that I find that reassuring. When he's in a good mood he says, "Darling, you are more beautiful now than the day I met you." Bollocks!' ES
The Fixer with Alex Polizzi airs later this month on BBC Two

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