Natascha McElhone (Ronin, Californication, Halo) leads the cast as Bella Ainsworth, the daughter of a wealthy industrialist who moves to Italy to set up a quintessentially British hotel in the breathtaking beautiful town of Portofino. Mark Umbers (Home Fires) plays her charming but dangerous aristocratic husband, Cecil, and Anna Chancellor (Four Weddings and a Funeral, The Hour) plays the hotel’s most influential but hard-to-please guest, Lady Latchmere.
Hotel Portofino is a family drama full of emotional highs and lows, with a classic ‘whodunit’ mystery woven throughout and building to a dramatic climax. Created and written by Matt Baker, the series captures the long-established literary tradition of comic and idiosyncratic British ‘innocents abroad’, but also reveals darker more serious storylines, set against the historical backdrop of the rise of Fascism in Mussolini’s Italy. Embracing themes of sexual and social liberation, Hotel Portofino will deliver a heady cocktail of subplots in a breathtaking Italian setting.