Walker Sets Sights on Italy After ‘Patriot Games,’ ‘Enchanted April’

Polly Walker, in a shapeless print sun dress, turns men’s heads just walking across a hotel lobby.

The raven-haired, gray-eyed, 26-year-old British beauty, who calls herself a “lounge lizard,” seems indifferent to the effect she has on the opposite sex.

After all, she’s engaged to be married to the scion of an Italian industrialist. “He doesn’t speak any English at all, except ‘I love you,’ ‘turn the lights off,’ that sort of thing,” she says, adding that they’ll be wed “as soon as I’ve transformed his bachelor house from a discotheque into a home.” Moreover, she’s traveling about the States with her father, a ruddy, squireish English hotelier, who, just back from shopping at the Beverly Center, eyes his daughter’s visitor with proper parental circumspection.

Audiences first saw Walker in “Patriot Games,” in which she played a red-wigged IRA assassin. She’s now appearing in the charming British period piece “Enchanted April,” in which she plays a bored and spoiled Flapper Era aristocrat.

As for acting, Walker says, while it “does fulfill some basic need that I have . . . I hate being away from my family, I hate the loneliness, the hotel rooms, I hate the politics, I hate the pressures.”

So then, does she plan to retire to her intended’s Italian country villa? “Go home and make fettuccine for my industrialist?” she counters with a musical laugh. “No, I don’t think so.”

“I’d like to work (in movies) in Italy. That’s my aim. I’m going to try and organize that.” Sounds like a plan.