With the role of Maria in ‘A doctor in the family‘ Margot Sikabonyi she had won the affection of Italians, becoming “the granddaughter” of a nation, yet she was not happy on that set where she arrived at just 15 years old. The actress herself tells it in an interview with Corriere della Sera on the occasion of the release of her “zen novel” ‘Lara wants to be happy’ and her decision to return to being an actress after a long time.
The impostor syndrome and love with Pietro Sermonti
Sikabonyi explained that he had endured it badly the success of ‘A doctor in the family’. “I didn’t feel up to it – he told ‘Corriere della Sera’ – I had impostor syndrome. And I didn’t always want to be on that set…. My father died while I was there, I was 15 years old, I couldn’t see friends because I didn’t go to school and the teachers came to the dressing room.”
Then she talked about her love with Pietro Sermonti, with whom both her character, Maria, and she were a couple in real life. “Six tormented years, on and off set. I filmed romantic scenes when I wanted to punch him.”
Farewell to the set, motherhood and yoga
Over the years he had left ‘A doctor in the family’ several times and then always returned but when he knew Jacopo Lupi he says enough, gets married and starts a family. “Unfortunately, to leave I had to argue with everyone,” he said.
At that point Sikabonyi changes her life: she stops acting when she becomes pregnant and yoga takes an increasingly bigger part of her life. “The most important path – he explained – was the yogic one, which has to do with breathing and came with the death of my father, until I became a teacher in 2008. In Hawaii I met the first shamans and in Bali I took yoga paths which they intersected with shamanism and meditation in the woods. Then, I did a lot of bioenergetic psychotherapy, which bases its search for truth on the body and breathing. I remember marigold baths in which I had revelations, very strong visions and I felt blocks that yes they broke up. Afterwards, I had to write what I felt, I wrote and cried”
After two children together, the marriage with Lupi and ends Sikabonyi calls divorce ‘the hardest moment of my life’. Just at that moment, however, the angelic vision, which will lead to the inclusion of the figure of the angel in his book too. “In the midst of the trauma of separation – she told Corriere – living alone in a Milan that wasn’t mine with two children, I started going to church, even though I’m not Catholic. I sat in front of the Madonna, I said: you suffered , maybe you understand my suffering. I started to pray without knowing that I was praying, to get on my knees because I no longer knew how to stand It makes me cry to remember it. I felt an angel putting his hands on my shoulders and protecting me. After that I was never the same.”
The future
Today Margot Sikabonyi has made peace with the role of Mia Martini (the daughter of the ‘family doctor’ Giulio Scarpati and the granddaughter of Lino Banfi’s grandfather Libero) which she played from 1998 until 2014. “In the relationship with her – she explained – I went from ‘I’m so hot’ to ‘I want to escape’, then I used it to understand who I was. Now as a divorced mother, after the hell I’ve been through, I love it when a girl tells me ‘I studied medicine inspired by Maria’ I am emotional. Today I only feel gratitude’.
In front of him he sees “happy children, the work of an actress that he resumes and I feel it is deeply mine, managing to stay in that fiction paying attention not to being perfect but to being centered. I see the possibility of using my work to bring light “.
