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The unstoppable Beyoncé has transcended the music scene to become one of the world’s most powerful women. STEPHANIE THEOBALD meets the icon to talk about about Glastonbury, her sisterhood with Gwyneth and Gaga, and life with Jay-Z

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Photographs by ALEXI LUBOMIRSKI Styled by FRANCK BENHAMOU

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ven before Beyoncé Knowles enters the Imperial Suite at the Ritz in Paris for her final shot, there are epic overtones to the scene: the mishmash of Louis XIV opulence and Napoleonic swagger adorned with sphinxes, griffons and winged chimeras under a ceiling six metres high. But when she finally makes her entrance, over six foot tall in Louboutins and Gucci, far from being dwarfed by such grandeur, Beyoncé looks terrifying. She sashays towards the balcony, pausing at a mirror to stare unflinchingly at what she sees; she steps out onto the balcony, revealing herself to the awe-struck people in the Place Vendôme below. One arm punches the sky in Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People mode (one of the dance moves for her single ‘Run the World (Girls)’, from 4, her fourth album), as if inciting all her female fans to world domination. A signal met with both impassioned wails – ‘Bey-on-say: on vous adore!’ ‘Bey-on-say: s’ il vous plaît! ’ – and courteous applause. For a moment, she holds her iconic statue pose, then tumbles giggling back into the room, tugging at her heels. ‘Oh, my gosh,’ she exclaims as she pulls them off. ‘They are so polite in Paris.’

The term ‘iconic’ circles the global phenomenon that is Beyoncé Knowles: the most successful US artist of the Noughties (since going solo in 2003) and one of the bestselling female artists of all time. Singer, songwriter, producer, actress, philanthropist, multitasking being; she is less performer than quasi-religious force, named by Forbes this year as one of the World’s 10 Most Powerful Women; and she is only just now turning 30. ‘This is such a pivotal moment in my life,’ she tells me excitedly when we adjourn to

She no longer needs to invoke her fearless alter ego, Sasha Fierce, to help her combat stage fright. Beyoncé has never been more confident or in control of her own destiny.

That destiny today comprises a raft of business and creative ventures, from her recently released album, 4, to the launch of her fashion line House of Deréon in the UK, as well as a third fragrance, Pulse (bottling Beyoncé’s essence has proved to be liquid gold); and a new lead role in Clint Eastwood’s adaptation of the musical film A Star Is Born. The part holds a special significance for Beyoncé; her mother introduced her to the 1954 version, starring Judy Garland and James Mason, when she was a child, and Beyoncé is to fill an American legend’s shoes: ‘To play the Judy Garland role is such a huge honour,’ she says, her face radiant.

She should be smiling. It’s not unfeasible that the film will rocket her acting career to new heights, given Eastwood’s ability to attract the attention of the Academy Awards, and her own genuine thespian talents. In both Dreamgirls and Cadillac Records, the latter of which she also executive-produced, Beyoncé’s turns shine, aided by her face’s natural expressiveness (those shining eyes, the quivering lips…) and an endless capacity for compassion.

It is these qualities, in addition to her attitudinal dance tunes, warbling melisma and bodacious warrior moves, that elevate the singer’s performances to a higher realm. At her headlining gig on the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury this year, clad in a gold sequin jacket and towering ankle boots, she was part super-diva, part supernatural being, leaving us in no doubt as to who ruled the world. It was a show that will surely enter the almanacs of musical legend at the level of Jimi Hendrix’s 1969 Isle of Wight Festival gig, or Michael Jackson’s 1983 appearance, moonwalking on Motown 25: Yesterday, Today, Forever.

Surrounded by a triumphant orgy of fireworks, lasers, a giant pyramid and her all-female band – shaking her crimped mane, strutting defiantly, gyrating lithely – she emitted back-to-back power anthems, from ‘Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)’ (a song whose accompanying dance has famous fans from Barack Obama to Justin Timberlake) to ‘Survivor’ and Etta James’ ‘At Last’, in front of a female-heavy audience – all in the name of woman power.

‘A woman has not headlined in 20 years, so this is history for me,’ she cried. The empowerment she dispensed on the crowd was palpable; as always, tinged with reciprocal empathies. ‘Right now, you are witnessing my dream. I always wanted to be a rock star. Tonight, we are all rock stars. Forget about your worries, your troubles, get lost in this music tonight,’ leaving the audience infused with feelgood messages of love and self-worth.

‘When Beyoncé sings about female empowerment, it works because it is genuine,’ says close friend Gwyneth Paltrow after the performance. ‘She loves women, she respects women, she leans on women.

And she understands the power it is to be a woman. It translates and inspires because she means it, she is on our side, it’s real.’

For Beyoncé is a woman with magnetic people power – a fact not lost on some of the world’s most influential players. There could be no more concrete proof of the force and range of Beyoncé’s influence than her performance at President Obama’s inauguration in 2009, nor her position as a role model in her recent enlisting

by Michelle Obama (now a close friend, as too is Oprah Winfrey) for her ‘Let’s Move!’ anti-childhood-obesity campaign.

In fashion, Tom Ford bade her model his debut womenswear collection for S/S 11, alongside Julianne Moore and Lauren

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another elaborate room of the Ritz, this one a replica of Marie Antoinette’s bedroom in Versailles. ‘I’m transitioning as a woman, and I’m finally able to express myself as I am.’

By now, Beyoncé has reappeared in her more mortal incarnation: barefoot in a pair of short cut-offs and a baggy T-shirt. The daunting Beyoncé of half an hour ago has all but disappeared, but even in such off-duty attire she is inescapably regal. Her physique is as sculpted as a Renaissance statue, and her skin has an almost supernatural glow. She has recently learned about the ‘Saturn return’, the supposed astrological wake-up call during the often-traumatic jump from 29 to 30. (She turns 30 on 4 September, and is thinking of an intimate TriBeCa dinner with her husband Shawn Carter, aka Jay-Z, and her closest friends.) ‘I read about it recently, and it was chilling because I’m becoming even more of myself, and I can’t wait to start the next chapter…’

Things in Beyoncé-world are already changing. She has recently relieved her father, Mathew Knowles, of his long-held duties as her manager, and has founded her own artist-development company, Parkwood Music Entertainment. For the first time in her life, the full force of her power is placed firmly in her own hands.

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‘When Beyoncé sings about empowerment, it is genuine. She understands the power it is to be a woman’ – GWYNETH PALTROW

TURN IT ON OFRitz DREAMS Beyoncé atFIELD the Hôtel Paris. Silk gown with ostrich andEmma leatherwears jacket,silk £3,260, Hermès. £7,909, Calf-skinfeathers, and crystal heels,Versace. £1,070, Previous pages, embroidered muslin Lanvin.

White gold,left: onyx and diamond dress, £7,335, Yves Saint Laurent. necklace from a selection, Cartier.

Previous pages, right: wool,Hermès. lace and elastane Silver bracelet, £2,790, dress, £1,380, Antonio Berardi.dress, Patent leather Previous page: silk organza heels, £445, Christian Louboutin from a selection, Armani Privé www.harpersbazaar.co.uk

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QUEEN OF THE NIGHT Silk and crystal dress, from a selection, Azzaro. Leather heels, about £445, Cesare Paciotti. Rhodium-plated metal and crystal bracelet, £750, Dior

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Hutton. ‘I have always found her one of the most inspirational women in the world,’ he says. ‘Her allure is that of a strong, powerful and extremely sexy woman, but her appeal is also in her incredible warmth and humanity.’ (Ford was seen at Beyoncé’s post-Glastonbury gig singing enthusiastically along to ‘Irreplaceable’ – ‘To the left, to the left!’ – complete with accompanying arm gestures.) She has been the face of fragrance campaigns for Tommy Hilfiger and Emporio Armani. ‘There is no one who transcends music, film and fashion in the way that Beyoncé does,’ Giorgio Armani tells me.

In philanthropy, the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund called on her to join forces with Bono and George Clooney. And, in popular culture, she is worshipped by Lady Gaga: their collaboration ‘Telephone’, along with its notorious video, caused global furore, receiving 18 million YouTube views in four days. (‘She nailed the dance routine and the dialogue in the car in just an hour,’ the video’s director Jonas Akerlund tells me. ‘She showed up in the middle of the desert, rehearsed in a parking lot, and then just went in and killed it.’)

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ut as her self-penned anthems testify, despite her teenage struggles for fame and recognition, the adult Beyoncé is not beyond recognising her own self-worth. Alongside her fragrance and entertainment companies, she has signed endorsement deals with some of the world’s biggest brands – including Pepsi, Nintendo and L’Oréal – and recently sold House of Deréon to an American company, while remaining joint creative director with her mother Tina. She and her husband, global hip-hop icon Jay-Z, are, according to Forbes, ‘one of the most influential couples in the world’; and when they entered Guinness World Records last year as the ‘highest earning power couple’, it was Beyoncé who held the majority $87 million stake in their combined annual $112 million income.

Meanwhile, conjoining with Paltrow and Chris Martin as official ‘best friends’ has made them one of the most beguiling foursomes in the industry (with a starfascination ratio that, even by showbiz standards, is tantalisingly off-the-scale). Note the artists’ mutual support at Glastonbury, Martin (along with Bono) giving advice to Beyoncé on her setlist; he and Paltrow huddled in the VIP arena to support ‘Queen B’ (nicknamed ‘Auntie B’ by their offspring), in return for Beyoncé’s wild cheers of encouragement at the Coldplay gig the previous night.

It’s a transatlantic friendship that has strengthened in recent years. ‘We have very similar values,’ Paltrow tells me. ‘We have also been able to become each other’s support systems over the years, as none of us needs anything from the other.’ The PaltrowMartin clan now often fly to visit the couple in New York, and vice versa, with Beyoncé and Jay-Z preferring to stay at their friends’ Belsize Park home rather than at a glitzy hotel when in our own fair capital. It is hard, but thrilling, to imagine the laid-back king of hip-hop and his queen strolling, shades on, among the coffee shops of North London with the Martins in tow. Though one suspects that the eyes of some Belsize Park mums have popped a few times, clocking Paltrow’s driving companion – Queen B Beyoncé – on the morning school run (‘People flip out when they see her,’ cries Paltrow. ‘It’s Beyoncé, for God’s sake!’).

Paltrow’s burgeoning singing career, including her musical role in Country Strong, was helped by observing Beyoncé onstage. ‘She is what it means to be a superstar. No one else can sing and dance like that, while having humour and genuine, bursting sweetness.

She has her own recipe for it… I wanted my character to have some of that mega-wattage. So I studied B. She was my homework.’

Meanwhile, Beyoncé is equally in awe of her friend’s musical forays – ‘She pushes her boundaries all the time’ – and her homemaking: ‘You go to her house and she makes you feel like you never want to go home. She is what I strive to be one day.’

If that sounds like the patter of tiny Knowles-Carter feet, it may be (one day). For, despite rumours that things have been rocky between Beyoncé and Jay-Z in recent weeks, the pair appear to be well on track here in Paris, though they have been hunted mercilessly by the press. At one point during the shoot, Beyoncé confides to a member of her entourage that ‘he was out last night until two in the morning’. But it is said in the indulgent tone of someone admitting they spent too much money on their lover’s birthday present (she bought him a $2 million Bugatti Veyron Grand Sport car for his 41st, while he reportedly bought her $350,000 worth of designer handbags last Christmas); and with the broad grin of someone still very much in love.

Relations with her father Mathew, meanwhile, have been not so smooth of late. The former Xerox salesman from Houston, Texas, who quit his job when Beyoncé was 12 in order to nurture his daughters’ musical ambitions (and the group that would eventually become Destiny’s Child, one of the most successful girl bands of all time) has been removed from his duties by Beyoncé. Stories abound of his obsessive management style and the bootcamp-like training that he devised for the young hopefuls. Whether these are true or not, Beyoncé was for a long time happy to submit to her father’s often-unrelenting strictures.

But no more. Letting go of Mathew was ‘a business decision’, she

‘Her allure is that of a strong and extremely sexy woman, but her appeal is also in her incredible warmth and humanity’ – TOM FORD

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BORN FOR THIS Silk and wool dress, £1,980; calf-skin and metal cut-out wedges, £850, both Lanvin.

Yellow gold, onyx, diamond and emerald bracelet, from a selection, Cartier.

Yellow gold ring ( just seen), £3,400, Dior

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tells me, in as matter-of-fact a tone as possible, although rumours suggest that friction arose as the result of his recently revealed affair with actor Alexsandra Wright (who, a year and a half ago, gave birth to Beyoncé’s half-brother, Nixon). Her mother, the long-suffering Tina Knowles, is filing for divorce; Mathew has undergone treatment for sex addiction in the past. Beyoncé’s face tightens visibly when I bring up her father. A new reticence appears, and with it, an obvious sadness. Her pupils seem larger, deeper, easier to fall into.

I witness that hypnotic Beyoncé empathy first-hand. ‘Everything is being tested right now, everything is changing,’ she says, shaking her head, though her eyes speak of things unsaid.

Meanwhile, her relationship with her mother – who is of French, African, Spanish and Native American descent – is as strong as ever, and one feels the importance of female bonds in her family: ‘Beyoncé’ is her mother’s maiden name, and her fashion label House of Deréon is named after her maternal grandmother. Beyoncé’s allegiance to women has always been fierce, right back to the days when, as a child, she hung out at her mother’s beauty salon in Houston, where she swept up hair and ‘eavesdropped on conversations’.

‘I loved listening to people’s problems. It was like a sanctuary for those women. It was a place you didn’t bring your children, and your husbands weren’t there.’ (‘I’m afraid when women never hang around other women,’ she says later with a shrug. ‘That’s a little scary to me – why is that?’) It was Tina who took Beyoncé – ‘this

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big, strong, kind of chubby kid who wanted to be on the sidelines’, says Tina – to dancing lessons when she was seven, to cure her of shyness.

It was here that her dream was born, beginning the decade-long struggle for the Knowles family (as well as a period of low selfesteem for the young teenager), who fought hard for their daughters, Beyoncé and her younger sister Solange, now 25, and their ascent to stardom: as the sassy Supremes of the new millennium.

There could be no more emblematic anthems for career women in the early 2000s than Destiny’s Child’s ‘Survivor’ and ‘Independent Women Part I’, and this sense of feminine pride and solidarity has never waned, even after the break-up of the band, when Beyoncé went solo. But she wouldn’t really go so far as to call herself a feminist, she says. ‘I don’t really feel that it’s necessary to define it.

It’s just something that’s kind of natural for me, and I feel like… you know… it’s, like, what I live for.’ She pauses thoughtfully, then jokes: ‘I need to find a catchy new word for “feminism”, right? Like “bootylicious”…’ (which is, of course, the title of one of the many hits she wrote and produced while in Destiny’s Child).

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et the fact that Beyoncé is non-confrontational does not mean that she is not also slyly seditionary. Take her allfemale backing band, Suga Mama, the idea for which came to her in a dream. ‘What a great dream! We were all just rocking it and we felt connected.’

When she told her all-male band about it the next day (‘Guys, I’m sorry, but I had a dream that I had a female band’), they were sceptical to say the least. ‘They’re like, “You’ll never ever find them…”’

Thanks to Beyoncé, you now have crowds watching in awe as tattooed black girls in bondage trousers (never previously offered up as possible role models) tear into guitar and sax solos, under the teasing entreaties of their Queen B: ‘Crystal! Tia! You bad girl!’

Back in the Ritz, she chuckles as she recalls how her pro-woman stance got her into trouble recently during a concert in Egypt.

‘There were a lot of women in the audience in burkas. They were singing along to “Irreplaceable” – it was amazing!’ Rows of black-cloth-draped women were punching their fists into the air and lip-synching to the paean to ditching complacent boyfriends: ‘I could have another you by tomorrow/So don’t

her skin darkened, provoked stern criticism from certain quarters): ‘I never want to be preachy,’ she says almost bashfully.

For all her wholesomeness, Beyoncé has never been afraid of a little controversy, especially in the name of independent women.

What better display of contemporary feminine power than her duet with Lady Gaga, a collaboration that has been dissected not only in the international music press, but in broadsheet columns?

The pair clicked immediately when they met at a charity event.

Gaga struck Beyoncé as ‘compassionate’ and ‘fearless’. ‘She’s not afraid. I love that.’ When Gaga called Beyoncé to invite her to perform on ‘Telephone’, and appear in the video, ‘she wanted me to do something crazy, and so I just rolled with it’. Beyoncé’s idea of something really transgressive was to eat a famous American variety of sticky doughnut called a honey bun. ‘I told Gaga I thought I should have a honey bun. It’s the worst food you could eat, but it is the best thing for me because I hadn’t had one since I was a kid.’

She adds: ‘My concept in the video is that I kill people with honey.

Kind of like killing people with kindness… I’m a nice murderer.’

A nice murderer with an all-too-human side: the only moment when Beyoncé looks a little guilty during our conversation is when she talks about her love of ‘all that stuff you’re not supposed to eat, such as cheeseburgers, fries and honey buns’. Of course, the fact that Beyoncé loves food so publicly, and admits to embarking on crash diets, only makes her more appealing to our collective psyche.

During the filming of Dreamgirls, she underwent a 10-day liquid diet consisting of water mixed with maple syrup, lemon and cayenne pepper, during which she dropped 20 pounds.

‘I ate 12 cupcakes in one go the minute we finished!’ she says, with such a rich laugh that the enjoyment of that act is almost palpable. It’s something any woman can empathise with.

It is this touch of humanity, in a woman who, onstage, appears almost super-human in her powerful invulnerability, that is the magic ingredient in the Beyoncé Effect. She has suffered like the rest of us, and sometimes you feel that she still might suffer; just a little, at least.

There’s a telling moment at the end of her recent I Am… Tour DVD when a washed-out-looking Beyoncé seems about to break down.

‘Why did God give me this life?’ she asks the camera, her lip wobbling like a novitiate nun having doubts about her calling.

‘Sometimes it’s overwhelming…’

One gets the impression that it can be exhausting being Beyoncé all the time, but the singer insists that the only way forward is to keep on pushing boundaries, to overcome every fear. In the video for ‘Run the World (Girls)’, she rides around like a warrior queen on the back of a stallion, chanting for feminine power, despite being utterly petrified that the horse would gallop out of control: ‘He was huge and intimidating. And there was smoke and loud sounds and fire and he was getting a bit freaked out. But the camera was on, so I pretended I was OK…’ With that, Beyoncé flashes me a quick grin and tells me not to worry, because ‘as terrified as I am in the inside, I’m very good at pretending’.

It is an image that extends beyond mere pop culture to capture the essence of Beyoncé Knowles: self-governing woman, unwitting feminist idol and empowering role model for the people. She is our very own, very sexy, Boudicca of our age.

Beyoncé’s latest album ‘4’ is out now; Pulse goes on sale in September.

‘In Egypt there were a lot of women in the audience in burkas. They were singing along to “Irreplaceable” – it was amazing!’

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To see an exclusive behind-the-scenes video of Beyoncé’s ultra-glamorous shoot at the Ritz in Paris, visit harpersbazaar.co.uk www.harpersbazaar.co.uk

RAPPED SOUL IN THINE EYES Viscose and lamé dress, about £3,270, Azzedine Alaïa. Rhodium-plated metal and crystal bracelet, £750, Dior.

See Stockists for details. Hair by Neal Farinah at Balan Inc. Make-up by Francesca Tolot at Cloutier/Remix.

Manicure by Cristina Conrad at Calliste. With special thanks to the Hôtel Ritz Paris

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you ever for a second get to thinking you’re irreplaceable…’

Suddenly, men started dragging their wives out. ‘Some of them got really upset! They were like, “We have to get you out of here!”’

In Egypt, Beyoncé’s powers are potentially revolutionary. But what about in the West? Do men feel threatened by her shows?

‘Yeah, I guess some of them do get annoyed.’ But she adds that she never wanted to do ‘the banner thing’.

As with feminism, Beyoncé says she never wanted to overtly push the black-rights agenda, and yet her success, like that of the Obamas, represents how those movements have radically changed the world. When MTV launched in 1981 (the year Beyoncé was born), you’d have been hard-pressed to find many music videos by black artists other than Michael Jackson. Thankfully, things have come a long way since then (though her recent cover of French magazine L’Officiel, in which she wore tribal make-up and had

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WOMENOF THEYEAR EXTRAORDINARY WORLD Cindy Crawford, Helena Christensen, Naomi Campbell, Eva Herzigova and Yasmin Le Bon on the Duran Duran shoot at the Savoy. For fashion details, read on…

In a once-in-a-lifetime moment, Bazaar brought together the Supers – Cindy, Helena, Naomi, Eva and Yasmin – to star in a new Duran Duran short film as the group themselves. Joining the Supers, the band, top video director Jonas Akerlund and Bazaar’s stylists in the Savoy Ballroom, JESSICA BRINTON tells the eventful story of this unforgettable two-day shoot Photographs by JONAS AKERLUND Styled by VANESSA COYLE

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GIRLS ON FILM FASHION ICONS

In a lift in the north wing of the recently refurbished hotel, things are getting steamy. The doors have jammed, and for the past 20 minutes Duran Duran’s Roger Taylor has been stuck inside the metal box with only two supermodels for company. He has had to endure – for almost half an hour – both a restricted oxygen supply and the combination of Cindy Crawford and Yasmin Le Bon (swathed in flesh-exposing attire) in claustrophobic proximity.

When the doors are finally prised open, before a welcoming committee of politely panicked staff, Taylor emerges, decidedly wan and shaken.

‘His whole demeanour changed in there.

He kept repeating, “I’m fine, I’m fine…”’ says Yasmin, giggling, upon their liberation. Cindy flicks her mane and looks amused. She is used to making grown men swoon.

WOMENOF THEYEAR This page: Naomi wears velvet suit with satin braid, £4,800, Edward Sexton. Cotton shirt, from £480, Angelo Galasso. Right arm: sterling silver bracelet, £1,570, Chrome Hearts. Crystal ring, £85, Crystal Evolution at Swarovski Crystallized. Left hand: gold-coated bronze ring, £330, Imogen Belfield.

On opening pages: leather shoes, about £800, Azzedine Alaïa.

Opposite: satin body, about £565, Dolce & Gabbana. Fur sleeves, £2,708, Thierry Mugler.

Suede and fur shoes, £995, Christian Louboutin.

Crystal bracelets, £115 each, Swarovski Crystallized

by Rodrigo Otazu

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SIMON LE BON

WOMENOF THEYEAR feat: scattered across the globe, now in their early forties, juggling offspring, with high-powered business projects, and still commanding lucrative fashion campaigns, they have hardly slackened their hectic schedules. But for Yasmin Le Bon there was added motivation for the project: ‘It’s an excuse for a social, really.’

It was she who introduced the girls to Duran Duran, soon after she married Simon at the height of their mutual fame in 1985. After all, it was inevitable that the It boys of the Eighties would mingle with female icons of the era. ‘I remember a dinner in London when Naomi was a teenager,’ says Rhodes. ‘She came with Yazzy. She was very wide-eyed. Full of personality and determination.’

The lithe forms of many famous models were immortalised in THE LE BON HOUSEHOLD, NOVEMBER 2010, SUPPERTIME A cosy evening around the Le Bon table – one that has seen a Duran celluloid during the heyday of Duran Duran’s opus: Christy Turlmoment or two – involving the breaking of bread and a brainstorm ington in ‘Notorious’; Grace Jones and Gail Elliott in ‘A View to a for the visuals to ‘Girl Panic!’, a single from the re-formed band’s Kill’; Tatjana Patitz in ‘Skin Trade’; the beguiling Reema Ruspoli painted all over in ‘Rio’… ‘But it was a house rule that girlfriends new album, the Mark Ronson-produced All You Need Is Now. and wives didn’t appear in Duran The old hellraisers are together videos,’ says Yasmin drily. again (‘Less of the “old”,’ they might That is, until now. Perhaps there say): the pop sensation of the is even a hint of good-natured marearly 1980s, famed for their sexy ital payback in the mix. A quarter girl-action videos. Remember the of a century later, the trademark slippery sexual boxing-ring maykitsch remains, the glamour, the hem of 1981’s ‘Girls on Film’? The eroticism. But this is 2011 – Duran kitsch underwater cocktails, pink Duran’s ‘Girl Panic!’ will star, for telephones and saxophonist-on-athe first time, Naomi Campbell, raft in 1982’s ‘Rio’? The ‘Girl Panic!’

Cindy Crawford, Helena Chrisfilm must evoke such extravagantensen and Yasmin Le Bon, who zas and yet be more, more, more. will each play an original member At the table are Nick Rhodes, of the band – with a large dollop of now 49, Simon Le Bon, 53, and his tongue-in-cheek humour. But wife Yasmin, 47 (mother of Amber, there is still a question mark over Saffron and Tallulah, and one of Simon Le Bon plays photographer for who will be the fifth member, the the original supermodels along the shoot, wearing black satin dinner suit, from a selection, David Chambers. blonde who will play Nick Rhodes. with Naomi Campbell, Claudia White cotton poplin shirt, £230, Yves Schiffer and Cindy Crawford).

Saint Laurent. Watch, his own Glancing in the direction of the SEVEN MONTHS LATER, THE lead singer’s wife, Rhodes ventures ROYAL SUITE, THE SAVOY, 11AM casually between mouthfuls: ‘Of Rails of Gucci, McQueen, Giles, course, we have to get all the girls Balenciaga and Dolce & Gabbana back together again. It could be a clothes, and the frayed, adrenalinreunion.’ It’s an idea he has been hyped Bazaar styling team who quietly incubating for over a year. haven’t had a day off in a fortnight, are waiting at the Savoy hotel for the supermodel fittings.

TWO MONTHS LATER, Yasmin is here, her luscious SCOTT’S RESTAURANT, 1PM chocolate locks newly bleached Yasmin Le Bon divulges the masfrom the ends, her eyes defined by terplan to friend and Bazaar editor Lucy Yeomans over sips of champagne and mouthfuls of smoked black kohl. Naomi is still in her suite at the Mandarin Oriental, having salmon. By the time coffee arrives, Bazaar is onboard and Yeomans a a fitting (she is to appear later in feathered slippers, corset and fur key conspirator in a troupe that includes Swedish provocateur Aker- sleeves for the video’s opening bedroom scene). Helena is due to lund, director of such controversial videos as Lady Gaga’s ‘Telephone’. arrive late tonight from New York. Cindy, who has flown over from LA, is being driven from the airport. There is a hushed silence ‘I went back to my office at the magazine and told everyone the plan. They said, “Five supermodels together? In one room, at the same among the styling team as they repeatedly straighten the endless time? Jonas Akerlund? That is so not going to happen,”’ says Yeomans. rails of feathered and sequinned attire and eye the door nervously.

Jonas’ PA bursts into the room, looking flustered; there is still But the combined determination of a supermodel, the editor of an international fashion magazine and Duran’s steely manager no one to play Rhodes. The team starts throwing around names. ‘Kristen McMenamy!’ ‘Karen Mulder!’ ‘What about Eva Wendy Laister should never be underestimated.

Herzigova?’ someone ventures.

‘Me, Naomi, Cindy, Helena and Eva, that would just rock my Assembling a reunion of the supermodels – arguably the most fêted, desired women of their generation – would of course be no easy world,’ screams Yasmin. She goes off to make the appropriate calls.

If this isn’t already the quintessential male fantasy, then perhaps further details should be revealed. The episode in the Savoy lifts is made all the more provocative by Taylor’s role play as submissive ‘Lift Boy’, and Cindy and Yasmin aggressively grinding electric guitars.

This scenario could only have sprung from the depths of the male psyche – the psyches of the members of Duran Duran, more precisely – with the help of director Jonas Akerlund. The lift journey is a splitsecond scene in a short film featuring their new single, ‘Girl Panic!’ The irony is not lost on Cindy and Yasmin, both the epitome of composure, who sashay cooly off in monster heels past the quaking Taylor.

Naomi’s WORLD

What was your highlight of 2011?

‘It’s not over for me yet! I live for the moment.

Every day is a blessing.’

What makes you feel as if you could rule the world?

‘Feeling positive within myself.’

What is your enduring motto?

‘Trying to erase stress from my life as much as possible. I’m reading an amazing book called Brilliant Stress Management by Mike Clayton.’

Who is your woman of the year?

‘Michelle Obama, for her initiatives on food and wellbeing in America.’

The Duran boys are disguised as ‘The Waiter’, ‘The Chauffeur’, ‘The Bellboy’, and ‘The Liftboy’. ‘Did one of the girls ring for service?’ asks Simon

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Satin body, about £565, Dolce & Gabbana.

Fur sleeves, £2,708, Thierry Mugler

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WOMENOF THEYEAR This page: Cindy wears vintage leather jacket, from a selection, Thierry Mugler at Rellik. Leather trousers, £950, Balenciaga by Nicolas Ghesquière at Harrods. Silver-coated bronze and porcelain ring, £450, Imogen Belfield. Band ring, her own.

Opposite: wool cashmere waistcoat and trousers (sold as part of suit), £4,300, Edward Sexton.

Scarf, stylist’s own. Sterling silver bracelet, £1,570, Chrome Hearts. Sterling silver ring ( just seen), £305, the Great Frog. On opening pages: Swarovski-crystal-embellished suede shoes, from a selection, Christian Louboutin

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JOHN TAYLOR

SLUG

WOMENOF THEYEAR NEXT-DOOR IN THE MASTER BEDROOM

ANOTHER HALF AN HOUR LATER

‘Cindy’s here,’ whispers a Bazaar stylist, as casually as she can.

It isn’t very casual.

Indeed. Cindy Crawford, the athletic supermodel, fitness guru, international businesswoman, mother of two, unchanged at 45, has sauntered into the dressing room to a small collective gasp. Within minutes she is standing in front of the styling team, undressed, her body California-brown, toned, a thing to behold.

You could put anything on that body. For example, a studded skin-tight McQueen dress, or a tailored leather trouser suit. ‘I think you need those in your life, Cindy,’ Yasmin says with a giggle, appearing at the doorway. ‘How was your flight?’ She gives a giant embrace. ‘Paul McCartney was on it, and he sang me a song,’ Cindy deadpans. It’s the sort of thing that only happens to supermodels.

…and here come the boys, now newly attired as a team of staff in box-fresh uniform. The fortysomething Duran Duran – Le Bon, John Taylor, Rhodes and Roger Taylor – are disguised respectively as ‘The Waiter’, ‘The Chauffeur’, ‘The Bellboy’ and ‘The Lift Boy’. ‘Did one of the girls ring for service?’ Simon asks haughtily, with a convincing stoop. Only his velvet-studded Louboutin loafers give him away. His wife lets out a hoot: the supermodels are suitably amused.

The corridor outside the ballroom is a three-lane motorway cluttered with four film units and a roaming camera crew.

In the ballroom, someone is spangling a sofa and a microphone with Swarovski crystals. By the door, comedian Matt Lucas, who has dropped by to say hello to Jonas, is talking to the towering, leather-clad Cindy Crawford. ‘Hi Cindy,’ chimes Lucas merrily, proffering a reverential hand. ‘We met in LA once. I’m a friend of David’s…’

It’s the sort of thing that only happens to people who know people who know supermodels.

A BASEMENT ROOM AT THE SAVOY, 11:30AM

Danish/Peruvian model-turnedphotographer Helena Christensen is hopping about in tights. Her eyeliner masterfully smudged, she is practising her hungoverrock-chick look. Yasmin and Cindy are present and correct. Where is Naomi? Runners sprint off for news. Much kerfuffle. A ragged woman with a clipboard confirms Naomi is in the building. She has moved her entourage from the Mandarin Oriental to a suite upstairs. Eva Herzigova is due to arrive any moment – she has flown from the South of France by private jet. Nick Rhodes pops his head in: ‘It’s OK because Yazzy came cheap: she only needed a bus ticket from Putney.’

What was your highlight of 2011?

‘My first trip to Venice, for the Film Festival – so glamorous arriving at the black-tie premiere of The Ides of March with my husband and George Clooney by boat.’

What makes you feel as if you could rule the world?

‘The way my husband and kids look at me – my kids even believed me when I said I was thinking of running for president! And a good blow-dry never hurt.’

What is your secret weapon?

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NEXT SCENE, 2PM

By now a crowd has gathered. Cindy Crawford, clad in a green Gucci fur and a snip of a dress, is standing at full height in the back of a Rolls-Royce, blowing kisses at passers-by as she is driven down the Strand by none other than her loyal ‘Chauffeur’, John Taylor. Outside the Savoy, she disembarks through a lightning storm of phoney paparazzi.

THE SAVOY CORRIDORS, 3PM

John Taylor as ‘The Chauffeur’, wearing black wool suit, £695, Burberry London. White cotton poplin shirt, £230, Yves Saint Laurent. Black satin tie, about £90, Dolce & Gabbana.

Sunglasses, his own

Cindy is standing at full height in the back of a Rolls-Royce, blowing kisses at passers-by as she is driven down the Strand by John Taylor

Cindy’s WORLD

HALF AN HOUR LATER

Velvet studded dress, to order, Alexander McQueen www.harpersbazaar.co.uk

PHOTOGRAPH: XXXXXX

‘Sunglasses and a smile.’

What do you hope for in 2012?

‘Each year I try to say “no” to more things that aren’t meaningful to my life or my family’s. I constantly try to maintain balance – family, work, health, friends.’

Eva is stopping traffic again, despite the hapless efforts of the British Transport Police. Resplendent in an Ann Demeulemeester fur cape and bronze sequin leggings, she is seducing a lamppost in front of Akerlund and his crew. Tour buses slow; tourists’ cameras go into overdrive; horns hoot; jaws drop. It’s the famous Herzigova Effect.

She hasn’t lost it, even after giving birth just three months earlier.

…and now there are five. The 5’11” traffic-jam-causing onetime Wonderbra girl, now 38 and a mother-of-two, appears from nowhere.

‘Eva!’ ‘Cindy!’

‘Helena!’ www.harpersbazaar.co.uk

With a faux rock ’n’ roll hangover, Helena Christensen is sprawled across a bed of Louis Vuitton cases on a luggage trolley being pushed with some urgency by her bleached-haired ‘Bellboy’ Rhodes.

He is having difficulty navigating the corners (these vehicles weren’t made for leggy supermodels). His passenger is having fashion issues: ‘We have to cut. I think I heard the zip go on my dress!’

MEANWHILE, INSIDE THE ROYAL SUITE

It’s a scene of textbook Eighties excess. Empty champagne bottles and upended glass flutes litter the tables and sofas. Dissolute young women in bondagewear lounge around in the master bedroom, looking as if they’re waiting for trouble.

‘Don’t touch anything, this is a hot set!’ barks the assistant director, a terrifying man in a baseball cap with a walkie-talkie.

‘I need Naomi up here in less than five minutes.’

Five, four, three, two, one… and as if by magic, right on cue, a corset-clad Naomi Campbell swans into the room, floating on feathered slippers. It is the morning after the night before. She sprawls decadently – with impressive authenticity – across the giant bed, next to a jumble of wanton groupies.

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THE SAVOY BALLROOM, DAY OF THE SHOOT, 11AM

VICTORIA EMBANKMENT OUTSIDE THE SAVOY, 1PM

WOMENOF THEYEAR

The girls with designers Domenico Dolce (above) and Stefano Gabbana. Cindy wears satin dress, about £800, Dolce & Gabbana. Leather boots, £890, Gianmarco Lorenzi. Pate de verre necklace, £510, Tom Ford. Helena wears satin body, about £565, Dolce & Gabbana. Leather ankle-boots, £800, Marios Schwab. Crystal necklace, £130, Ted Rossi Made With Swarovski Elements. Bracelets, from £110, all Swarovski Crystallized by Philippe Audibert. Eva wears velvet jacket, about £850; satin knickers, £200, both Dolce & Gabbana. Leather booties, about £895, Azzedine Alaïa. Crystal necklace, as before. Smaller necklace; bangles, all her own. Palladium plated ring, £110, Philippe Ferrandis Made With Swarovski Elements. Naomi wears satin body, about £740, Dolce & Gabbana. Velvet boots, £750, Gina. Crystal and leather bracelets (worn as necklaces), £92 each, Swarovski Crystallized by Hely. Yasmin wears wool jacket, from a selection; satin knickers, £200, both Dolce & Gabbana.

Crocodile boots, £1,350, Tom Ford. Necklace, as before.

Dolce and Gabbana wear their own clothes

WOMENOF THEYEAR

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NICK RHODES This page: Eva wears beaded silk top, £2,240, Roberto Cavalli. Goat-hair and silk cape, about £3,015, Ann Demeulemeester. Leather shoes, about £640; pate de verre necklace with cross, £2,350, both Tom Ford. Brass harness with Swarovski-crystal detail, £230, Fannie Schiavoni.

Opposite: wool suit with grosgrain braid, £4,600, Edward Sexton. Sequin silk shirt, £780, Angelo Galasso. Crystal epaulette (worn as brooch), £498 a pair, Butler & Wilson. Palladium plated ring, £200, Atelier Swarovski by Michael Kaplan. On opening pages: satin shoes, £605, Salvatore Ferragamo

WOMENOF THEYEAR Embroidered metal trousers, £5,615; beaded silk top, £2,240, both Roberto Cavalli. Goat-hair and silk cape, about £3,015, Ann Demeulemeester. Pate de verre necklace with cross, £2,350, Tom Ford. Metal bracelet, about £400, Versace. Pearl bracelet, Eva’s own

BACK IN THE DRESSING ROOM, 5PM

After their individual scenes, the supermodels regroup to prepare for the film’s denouement. The look is vintage Edward Sexton trouser suits. Eva, louche in a white one with heavy make-up, practises her ironic rock-star drawl. Cindy wears a pinstripe with glam-rock detail; Helena (in Ralph Lauren) and Yasmin smoulder in black. But where is Naomi? In 15 minutes the supermodels need to be on set.

John Taylor wanders off with Helena to talk about Aldous Huxley, her favourite writer. Le Bon helps his wife tune a guitar.

‘Simon’s the worst teacher on the planet. He taught me about contraception,’ she declares to the girls. Simon fires back: ‘Never work with children, animals… or your wife.’

In the nick of time, Naomi saunters in, a flurry of white fur and spiked heels. She’s late, but so abundantly charming that no one seems to mind. ‘Hi, Bubba!’ she trills to Rhodes. ‘Hi, Naomi,’ he answers. He has known her for 24 years.

In a minute she has donned her red velvet Edward Sexton suit.

‘Take a picture, take a picture!’ she urges anyone who will listen, twirling around the room as if no one else is in it.

THE SAVOY BALLROOM, BAND SCENE, 7PM

The crew are at their stations. Akerlund is pacing the stage in an oversize felt hat, looking like a rock ’n’ roll wizard.

‘I must admit that it’s been a personal fantasy to have a supermodel play my keyboard’ NICK RHODES

scream into everybody’s face that said, “Don’t limit me!”’

Beauty is... ‘…delicate imperfection.’

Who is your woman of the year?

‘My nanny.’

December 2011 |

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Eva’s WORLD

What was your highlight of 2011?

‘The birth of my second child. It was so easy, and the first one was very hard, so among other joys it was healing the wounds.’

Which career moment do you look back on most fondly?

‘I was the Marilyn Monroe of the 1990s, but I was fed up with being categorised like that. I didn’t manage to get rid of that image until I shot a story for The Face with Mario Testino called “The butcher”. I had dark hair, I looked masculine, I barely had any make-up on. It was a

Enter the new improved Duran Duran. Naomi Campbell, sporting a convincing cropped wig, breezes in as Simon. Eva Herzigova is Nick Rhodes on keyboard; Cindy Crawford is John Taylor on bass; Helena Christensen is Roger Taylor on drums; and finally, Yasmin is ‘The Guitarist’ (perhaps she could make a claim for the real-life role, which is something of a revolving door in the band). In 2011, Duran Duran are sexier and leggier than they have ever been.

A press interview. ‘Hi, I’m Simon,’ coos Naomi. ‘I’m John,’ adds Cindy. ‘I’m Roger, I’m the drummer and drummers are cool,’ says Helena. ‘It’s rock ’n’ roll,’ drawls Eva, with a nonchalant hair flick.

Finally, the band take up their positions. Eva, all fluffy blonde hair and scarlet pout, stands nonchalantly behind the keyboard.

‘I must admit that it’s been a personal fantasy to have a supermodel play my keyboard,’ says Rhodes.

It’s the first take. Action!

The opening chords of ‘Girl Panic!’ rip through the speakers.

Yasmin grinds her guitar, a wind machine blowing her locks raunchily across her face. Naomi – born to be a rock star – growls into the camera. Cindy gyrates. Eva is ice-cool. Helena air-drums.

Cut. The boys pep-talk their supermodel alter egos like boxing trainers. Then there’s another take, a feistier performance. Eva throws her head back. Cindy’s hair is wild. Naomi looks ready to explode.

Akerlund cries: ‘Cut!’ Helena strides over to Roger Taylor. ‘Am I doing it all right? Or in some ways, is it cooler when I don’t?’

Another take. And another. Then one more. For the final round, something clicks. The girls let go. The sex-appeal quotient is about

WOMENOF THEYEAR This page: Helena wears tulle and Swarovski-crystal dress, £1,750, Giles. Bracelet; ring, both her own.

Opposite: silk jacket, £2,745; silk trousers, £1,230, both Ralph Lauren Collection. Rings, her own.

Palladium plated cuff, £400, Atelier Swarovski

by Michael Kaplan. On opening pages: leather brogues, from about £370, Dolce & Gabbana

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ROGER TAYLOR

WOMENOF THEYEAR to blow the Savoy Ballroom roof off; the supermodels make Robert Palmer’s ‘Addicted to Love’ backing band look like schoolgirls.

‘Cut!’ yells Akerlund. ‘It’s a wrap!’

The girls cheer, and collapse into a fit of giggles.

‘We were always more rock ’n’ roll than the boys,’ declares Yasmin, as they stride off the stage.

BACK IN THE DRESSING ROOM, MIDNIGHT

It’s 17 hours into the shoot, and a much-needed drink is being proffered. Le Bon, ‘The Waiter’, is carrying a tray shoulder-height, handing out glasses of champagne with immaculate deference.

Stefano Gabbana and Domenico Dolce have just blown in from Milan for dinner. ‘Ciao! Star dressing! Come stai? ’ shouts Gabbana, a vision of Italian manhood in ripped jeans and a dinner jacket.

‘Hello Nick! How are you? And you…?’ says Stefano, stroking Naomi’s forehead. ‘I missed you.’

Naomi and Cindy step out of their masculine suits into black Dolce & Gabbana corsets and towering heels. At once, the designers dip into their pockets, producing chic little sewing kits: ‘Mamma mia! Che bella! ’ they coo. ‘We need more pins!’

All nipped-in waist and sleek, muscular legs, Naomi looks sensational. Now Eva, who gave birth three months before, wants to wear a corset too. ‘Why not?’ There isn’t one available. Bazaar’s stylist panics. Urgent calls are made, couriers sent out into the night.

It’s the sort of thing that only happens to supermodels.

Helena’s WORLD

Most valuable advice you’ve ever been given?

‘My parents instilled a good sense of self-confidence in me – and a big portion of self-irony at the same time.’

Beauty is... ‘…the sight, the smell, the feeling – anything related to my son. I have to fly back to New York tomorrow because that’s where he’s at school, and he’s in a band and it’s the last performance of his school. He’s 11.’

Who is your woman of the year?

‘I work with Oxfam, and it amazes me how hard these women work and what they achieve.’

A corset appears, but it’s very, very small. ‘I’ll get into it,’ says Eva – and she does. ‘Holy moly,’ says John Taylor. ‘This is going to be one hot shoot’ A corset is speeded on a motorbike across London. But it’s very, very small. ‘She’ll never squeeze into it,’ says the look on everyone’s face. ‘I’ll get into it,’ she says – and she does. ‘Holy moly…’ says John Taylor, blowing out a stream of air. ‘This is going to be one hot shoot.’

THE SAVOY BASEMENT, BAZAAR COVER SHOOT, 1:30AM

Under the studio lights, one, two, three, four, five supermodels standing in a row – all wind-machine hair and billion-dollar smiles.

An hour passes. Camera angles are discussed. Lighting adjusted.

The make-up artist hovers with a lip brush, retouching gloss, like a moth to five flames.

Simon Le Bon and Nick Rhodes stand with Dolce and Gabbana deep in conversation. ‘They looked so great next to the younger girls, didn’t they?’ says Le Bon. ‘In our generation, they allowed models to be personalities. That era won’t happen again in fashion.

Women that strong won’t happen again.’

It’s getting on for 3am. ‘OK,’ declares Cindy, now in her 20th hour on the go. ‘Everybody! Time to work! If people don’t start working, I’m going to leave.’

In an instant, the crew leap to their positions. Akerlund’s hat disappears behind the camera.

Flash!

Twenty minutes later, the Bazaar December-issue cover is in the bag. The moment – and it was a moment – is over.

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Helena wears black leather waistcoat, about £1,640, Ann Demeulemeester. White vintage cotton T-shirt, from a selection, Rokit. Black leather trousers, £1,025, Dsquared. Black leather shoes with spikes, £695, Christian Louboutin. Black rhodium necklace, £310, Hannah Warner. Crystal bracelet, £110, Swarovski Crystallized by Philippe Audibert.

Nick Rhodes, as ‘The Bellboy’, wears costume, to hire, National Theatre Costume & Props Hire

WOMENOF THEYEAR This page: Yasmin wears wool suit, £4,300, Edward Sexton. Scarf, stylist’s own. Right hand, from left: crystal bracelet, £170, Swarovski Crystallized by Philippe Audibert. Crystal bracelet, £160, Swarovski Crystallized by Rodrigo Otazu. Crystal ring, from a selection, Atelier Swarovski by Prabal Gurung.

Left hand: crystal ring, £130, Swarovski. On opening pages: Swarovski-encrusted suede courts, £1,500, Gianmarco Lorenzi.

Opposite: lamb-skin dress with Swarovski-crystal detail, from a selection, Balmain. See Stockists for details. Hair by Johnnie Sapong at Jed Root, using John Frieda. Make-up by Kristin Piggott at Jed Root, using Estée Lauder. Manicure by Leighton Denny.

Naomi Campbell’s hair by Daniel Dyer, make-up by Alex Babsky and manicure by Hannah Rowland.

Photographed at the Savoy, London. With thanks to Helen Potter, Svana Gisla, Camilla Pole, James McNaught, Nick at Numerique, Yan at Jed Root and Hempstead May. With special thanks to Oliver Holms

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THE GUITARIST Yasmin’s WORLD

What was your highlight of 2011?

‘Getting my Boston Terrier, Cecil; and seeing Duran Duran at Coachella.

What makes you feel as if you could rule the world?

‘A vitamin B12 shot or, failing that, Berocca.’

What is your secret weapon?

‘It changes, depending on the target, but generally it is Simon.’

Who is your woman of the year?

‘Camila Batmanghelidjh from Kids Company, for defining why social responsibility and kindness work on humans.’

Since winning Designer Brand of the Year at the British Fashion Awards, Victoria Beckham has truly cemented her reputation as a major force in fashion.

The jet-setting supermum tells SARAH BAILEY about Harper’s style, her new line, her changing attitude to her body and fame, and the prospect of more children Photographs by CAMILLA AKRANS Styled by SISSY VIAN

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arper has some Bonpoint jeans and a Bonpoint blouse on,’ says Victoria Beckham, eyebrow arched with knowing drollery regarding the pop-cultural obsession with the sartorial stylings of her tiny daughter. (Heaven knows, my manicurist just told me that everyone is asking for grey nails in homage to Harper’s impeccable neutral wardrobe.)

Beckham, dressed today in a skin-tight navy and black dress of her own design and sky-high Louboutin covered platforms (the ones she wore to the royal wedding, in fact) – having just spooned a bowl of banana mush into her appreciatively gurgling youngest – is showing me round her newly expanded Battersea atelier. Her own office is dominated by a rather intimidating mirrored wall and acres of black carpet, and features a just-installed soft-play corner in distinctly non-Harper Fruittella shades: ‘She was in the studio before, but she kept banging into the felts and the brocades,’ Beckham explains. It’s January and the Victoria Beckham collection is running uncharacteristically late; so while David and the boys have just returned to LA, Victoria has been left behind in London to finish. ‘Hopefully we’ll get a lot of work done… oh Harper, you’ve got banana over your face.’

It has been an intense and heady few months for the designer, supermum, businesswoman and British icon: the birth of her fourth child in July (the span of her brood now stretching from nine months to 13 years); the launch of her adorable and more affordable dress line Victoria Victoria Beckham (all scallop hems, sweet A-line silhouettes and print whimsy); and scooping Designer Brand of the Year at the British Fashion Awards ahead of power labels Burberry and Stella McCartney – an accolade that has racheted up the pressure of expectation for this next collection. ‘People aren’t going to be turning round saying, “Oh, the ex-Spice Girl, we’re surprised we like it.”

I will be judged differently, and I’m realistic about that. I’m my own worst enemy, constantly wanting to better myself. I’m very ambitious and a perfectionist, and we’re a small team trying to do a lot.’

Flashback to the evening of the BFAs. I remember stopping by the Beckham table to congratulate Victoria and finding her sitting quietly with her parents, looking her most Audrey Hepburn-elegant in her long gown, but with teardrops still wet on her mascara (despite her tabloid reputation for a poker face, she seems to have no problem accessing her emotions). ‘When they read my name, I was genuinely not expecting it. It was an out-of-body experience.

It was like my heart was going to jump out of my body. I came offstage and said, “I cried three times, I didn’t thank the people I wanted to thank, I was really rubbish.”’ Later that night, Marc Jacobs,

DRIVEN TO DISTRACTION These pages: Victoria Beckham wears embroidered crepe jumpsuit, £1,655, Yves Saint Laurent. Cartier ring, her own.

Previous pages: satin bra, £305; matching knickers, £115, both Ermanno Scervino. Gold, emerald and diamond ring, from a selection, Harry Winston

who presented her award, would tell her: ‘I would have gone to the other side of the world to give you this, because you really deserve it.’

‘I was overwhelmed,’ she says now simply. ‘But I think people saw the real me… and the truth is, I would have felt much more comfortable in my pyjamas with the kids and David in a hotel room watching it on TV.’ Beckham’s journey from ex-pop-star wannabe to bona fide catwalk designer in just eight seasons is, of course, a remarkable story.

Since that astonishingly mature first collection of 10 demurely sexy dresses with miraculous internal corsetry was first received by a handful of initially grudging fashion press in September 2008, her

fabric over myself. It was very hard when I didn’t have my body.’

Now, one may argue that Beckham is in a very enviable position to be her own muse; there are those who may scoff into their double macchiato at the notion that her slinky physique represents any kind of ‘real’ body shape. But as Beckham is quick to point out, as she hits 38, her relationship with her own body is changing, and while she is perfectly happy to drape fabric on her frame and, indeed, strip to her undies in her mission for a perfect fit, a continual thread in her conversation is not wanting to hide behind what she does exactly, but an increasing desire to let the work take centre-stage. ‘I don’t feel the need to stand on the red carpet and say, “Hey, look at me.”

I’m not about that any more. I love the fact that I can come to work and no one can get a photo of me leaving my hotel and coming to my studio. I can do what I love to do.

I don’t want to be such a public figure, because I’m happier when I’m not.

‘In clothes I feel I look OK.’ She shoots me a look, because she’s savvy enough to know we’re entering territory where every comment can be picked over by internet trolls. ‘I did work out after the baby, but it got to the stage where I was working on the collection and I didn’t have the energy to be up all night with the baby and then go to the gym for an hour.

‘Of course, getting into bed with David Beckham every night after having four kids, you know… [cue an eye-roll of resigned selfdeprecation] – but I’ve come to the conclusion that David is getting older as well. I’m not going to try and fight it. Maybe my tummy isn’t as tight as it used to be, but I’ve got four amazing kids, and that’s what really matters.’

‘I don’t feel the need to stand on the red carpet and say, “Hey, look at me.” I’m not about that any more. I don’t want to be such a public figure’ lines have been virtual sellouts. She’s dressed Madonna and become a red-carpet staple for the va-va-voom curves of Jennifer Lopez; the gamine crop-haired Michelle Williams was among the first to wear one of the cloud-print Victoria Victoria Beckham dresses (going some way to show the range of the brand, backed by the Beckhams’ redoubtable business partner Simon Fuller, that turned over £27 million last year and includes denim, accessories and sunglasses lines – all recipients of the eponymous designer’s laser-focus). ‘She just gets what women need and want,’ says her friend, accessories guru Katie Hillier, who consults on the incredibly successful Victoria Beckham bags (including this season’s sure-to-be-cult two-frontpocket ‘Harper’). ‘Her desire for fashion is unbelievable.’

I

had my first conversations with Beckham about her serious fashion aspirations some six summers ago. Then billeted in the Beckhams’ Hertfordshire manse – all Kelly Hoppen neutrals, substantial Schnabels on the wall and framed family photos clustering on every surface – she was cutting her fashion teeth on jeans at the time and, as befits an immensely rigorous, no-nonsense nature, she’d hired a girl from the local hairdressers to be her fit model. ‘I can live with other people’s mistakes, I just can’t live with my own’ is her oft-repeated mantra.

Her methods are similarly unflinchingly practical today. Hillier recounts the nail-biting review meetings when immaculate factoryfresh bag samples are proudly presented and Beckham’s invariable response is to take a pair of shears and start scissoring into them.

‘After those meetings, the studio looks like some crazy kids’ workshop, as if some giant monster has crashed and started attacking the bags. But really she just knows what she wants.’

Ditto with the clothes collection. ‘I am a consumer, and I think that’s partly why I’ve done as well as I have,’ muses Beckham. ‘I put a dress on yesterday and I said, “We need to change this,” because the line was above the boob and jutted out. We always joke that we have this fabulously gorgeous 17-year-old model who is six-foot-whatever and then I say, “OK, I’m going to put it on.

I stand for the general public here.” It’s how I work. I found it really difficult when I was pregnant and I couldn’t do that. It’s part of the process – I’ll stand here in my knickers and start draping

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he heavy, man-size Rolex encircling Beckham’s wrist today is engraved with the inscription ‘To Mummy, Happy 36th Birthday, love your boys,’ a gift from David, and an ever-present reminder of filial love. Her friend Christian Louboutin, who creates the sexy heels that stalk her runways, says he is agog at Beckham’s talent for compartmentalisation. ‘She can split herself.

There is definitely a business side, a wife side,’ he observes, ‘but most of all she is such a caring mother.’

The lengths to which she must go to maintain the gravity-defying balancing act of catwalk designer/celebrity/soccer wife/hands-on mum have been well documented: the grinding LA-London transatlantic commute; the Skype conversations with her studio in the middle of the night…

‘I’ve never told anybody before, but before Christmas I wasn’t sure how to cope with it all. I was finding it very overwhelming.

I was being pulled in lots of different directions. The more successful the business is, the more stress I feel.’

The prospect of David’s move to Paris Saint-Germain and a potential relocation to the French capital must have been very tempting.

‘Moving there would have been great career-wise, but these things are thrown at you and you learn a lot about yourself when these kinds of situations arise. The kids are really happy in LA, they go to good schools, academically they’re doing well. When the idea of Paris came up, I didn’t think about how it would be for me, because it would be great; the truth is that it wouldn’t be right for the children.’ www.harpersbazaar.co.uk

As poster girl for high-achieving working mothers, does she think it’s possible for women to have it all? ‘I do think as a woman you can have it all, but as a woman you’re going to beat yourself up about it. It’s hard, because you want to be the best mother you can be, the best wife you can be and the best professional you can be.’ She pauses and flashes me a smile. ‘And it’s bloody hard work.’

L

unch arrives: sushi. Beckham helps herself to what can only be described as a super-size portion of edamame with extra salt. ‘Salt,’ she grins. ‘It’s my guilty pleasure. Well, I like a bit of Gossip Girl… and red wine. David and I belong to a wine reserve in Napa Valley. We make our own red wine and go wine-tasting.’ Relaxed prandial chat flits from make-up-bag essentials (Stila lipgloss and undereye concealer, ‘because I spend half the night awake’) to who she’d most like to be trapped in a lift with (‘I’m quite obsessed with Tilda Swinton. I find her very intriguing, very stylish, she clearly understands fashion’), the designer who most astounds her (‘Prada. I’m always absolutely blown away. Everything she does is genius. I’ve never met her, but everything she does – not just the clothes, but the hair, the make-up, the shows – everything about the brand impresses me’), and another exercise in meticulous brand identity (Beckham Bodywear, aka David’s pants project). ‘David created it, we own it and H&M does the distribution,’ Victoria informs me keenly, explaining that the Beckhams developed the project in its entirety, down to shooting the campaign images with Alasdair McLellan, before H&M came on board as distributor, with its 1,800 global stores. ‘It makes sense business-wise and it has integrity, because David has designed it all himself. I remember we had this model at the house, and David said to me, “Can you come and look at the underwear?” and there’s this dude standing there in his pants. I’m quite aware that I don’t want to come in and stifle someone creatively, but I felt so embarrassed! I felt like a child, because really I’m not a boy person, I’m a girl person.’

Her friends all attest to her girlieness (Hillier says, notwithstanding exacting product-review meetings, their relationship has developed into something akin to ‘a best best friend, or a sister’). ‘All my friends are women,’ says Beckham. ‘I don’t have any straight male friends at all really, other than the one I married. I enjoy women’s company.’ So what a joy it must have been, after playing the soccer mom so diligently to her three rambunctious boys, to finally have an ally in all things female at Casa Beckham. ‘With a girl it is very different,’ she says. ‘Harper’s a very, very easy baby, and she looks at you so knowingly. She’s a real old soul. The three boys – obviously they love us equally, but they love football and they really look up to David. Romeo sleeps in a football shirt – with football boots, literally in boots – and they love to go on the pitch and celebrate with him. For me to have someone who is hopefully going to love what I do is great.

I love bringing her to work with me.’

It’s interesting to learn that Beckham aspires for all her children to be as driven in life as their parents have been. ‘I would like all the children to use the fame they have – which they don’t have through choice, they have it through us – to make a difference. As much as

it sounds cheesy, I hope they use the voices they have. I don’t want them to think they don’t have to get a job because of what Mummy and Daddy do.’ She confides a bit of LA-parenting lore she picked up from Lionel Richie, father of her friend Nicole. ‘He told me he said to his kids, “Yes, I have money, but I’m going to spend all my money and if there’s any left you can have some, but there might not be!”

He’s a good dad,’ she says with a smile, ‘and he makes a lot of sense.

‘Our kids aren’t spoilt, they are happy kids and they work hard.

They aren’t kids who find everything super-super-easy; they have to really work at it. They’re disciplined and really well-mannered, and that’s very important to us. I don’t want them to feel they have to grow up too quickly, because you never get that time back.’

S

pring. By the time this magazine hits the stand, we will already know that Beckham scored another hit with a strong, military-inflected collection for A/W 12 on the New York catwalks; that David made his front-row debut as spousal cheerleader, sitting alongside Anna Wintour. And we will know, too, the cute references to Beckham family life featured in the collection: Brooklyn’s bright baseball collars on the body-hugging dresses, and the beanies that Mr Beckham is apt to wear around the house, reinterpreted in the natty Stephen Jones-designed headwear. The sophomore outing for the Victoria Victoria Beckham line was similarly well-received (a slightly narrower silhouette this time and a soupçon less whimsy), moving the doyenne Suzy Menkes to comment: ‘The way that Ms Beckham has so speedily developed a clear fashion identity could teach many aspiring American designers a thing or two.’ Praise indeed.

The next time I speak to Victoria, she is back home in LA. ‘I am very, very happy,’ she tells me over the phone. ‘New York was a real whirlwind, but it’s all worth it. Everything I put out there, everything I’ve ever put out there I would wear myself, and I’m excited because I wore one of the dresses last night’ (a sky-blue figuresucking shift, to her friend Eva Longoria’s pre-Oscars bash). We chat about the future. ‘My aim is really to empower women and make them feel good. In 10 years time, hopefully I will be able to reach a lot of women and make them feel good about themselves.’

Of course, her fans are constantly asking her when she will do

‘Getting into bed with David Beckham every night after having four kids, you know… but he is getting older as well. I’m not going to fight it’

www.harpersbazaar.co.uk

lingerie, when she will do shoes – but she’s quite adamant: ‘I don’t want to put out anything unless it’s perfect and I can’t find it out there already. I don’t want to run before I can walk. Everything I do, I do very strategically.’

And what about David telling Jonathan Ross on primetime TV that he would like to expand their family? ‘I know!’ she laughs. ‘Now every time I get a bit of water retention, people are going to say I’m pregnant. I consider myself so blessed and lucky to have the children that I have. Would I have more? I wouldn’t be against the idea, but the more children you have, the more difficult it is to focus individually on each one… But look, I would never say never.’

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ROCHAS’ SEXY LINES EVOKE THE POOLSIDE SIRENS OF HOLLYWOOD LEGEND White cotton body, £535; grey leather belt, £353, both Rochas. Nude mesh heels, £474, Jimmy Choo. Diamond and platinum earrings, from a selection, Harry Winston. Cartier ring, her own

BETWIXT THE BLOSSOM AND THE BOUGH Embroidered crepe jumpsuit ( just seen), £1,655, Yves Saint Laurent.

Platinum, sapphire and diamond earrings ( just seen); platinum and diamond bracelet, both from a selection, Harry Winston. See Stockists for details. Hair by Alain Pichon at Streeters, using L’Oréal Paris Hair Expertise. Make-up by Yumi Mori for Chanel Beauté for Frank Reps.

Manicure by Tom Bachik for Cloutier Remix. Produced by Alicia Zumback for 3 Star Productions

P L AY I N G T HE G A ME PHOTOGRAPHS BY BEN HASSETT STYLED BY JULIA VON BOEHM

Jennifer Lawrence’s raw talent bagged her an Oscar, and her gauche frankness wins her friends, but it is her surprising star quality that makes her unforgettable

BY TOM SHONE

THIS PAGE: Jennifer Lawrence wears black velvet, faille and satin cape, Christian Lacroix for Schiaparelli. PREVIOUS PAGE: silk top; pleated silk skirts, all to order, Dior Haute Couture. Right hand: gold, sapphire and coral ring, £11,000; left hand, from left: gold and tourmaline ring, from a selection; gold and diamond ring, about £3,390, all Dior Joaillerie

J

My one worry, in advance of meeting Jennifer Lawrence, is that someone has told her to clean up her act. Sure, it was OK for the young ingénue to go on the Late Show with David Letterman and compare herself to a cat peeing on the red carpet. It was endearing when, upon ascending the podium to collect her Oscar for Silver Linings Playbook, she tripped over her dress, recovering with pointblank honesty – ‘You guys are only standing up because I fell and you feel bad’ – and then gave everyone in the press room the finger.

But it felt too good to last. Somehow, the forces of PR-regulated piety would have descended on the poor girl and drummed all that out of her.

Indeed, in preparation for The Hunger Games, she was given media training — how to make more eye contact, regulate the volume of her voice and rein in the nervous laughter — and during the Oscars someone (she won’t say who) told her to tone it down. ‘“Other people are getting up and owning the stage and you sound like a stuttering idiot.

Pull it together.” And I said, “I’m not doing it on purpose, I’m uncomfortable and when people get uncomfortable they resort to their shit. I make awkward jokes and stutter.”’

She winces a little. ‘That was actually a moment when I really wanted it to be special.

That was not the time I wanted to be the Down-home Girl. I wanted to be graceful.’

Actually, she’s very graceful, like a cat.

The girl who emerges from the lift in the lobby of the Hotel Casa del Mar in Santa Monica wearing Robert Clergerie flats and some seriously distressed Ralph Lauren

jeans is much finer-featured in person than on screen, with long, long limbs that she throws about the place with the carelessness of a teenager. The first thing she does is lie down on the sofa, straight out — ‘I’m finding it difficult waking up these days,’ she says — and in the course of our interview, drapes herself over the arms of a sofa and two chairs, her legs hoisted up over the side. She’s one of the most naturally supine people I’ve ever met. ‘Your tape recorder is pointed at my vagina,’ she announces. Something tells me that isn’t to be found in The Hunger Games media-training manual.

I needn’t have worried. At 23, Jennifer Lawrence is a testament to the globe-conquering power that flows from her mixture of a) fame, b) raw talent and c) not giving too much of a hoot about either a) or b). She got $10 million to reprise the role of Katniss Everdeen in the second Hunger Games movie, Catching Fire: enough money that her lawyers got her to write out a will — it all goes to her family and favourite charities. She hasn’t had a chance to spend any of it. She used to have an apartment in Santa Monica, but that got infested with paparazzi, so now it’s hotels and couch-surfing with friends.

She spent last night managing to convince her best friend Justine that the lift of the Casa del Mar was haunted. That’s her biggest fear: ghosts. Not acting opposite Robert De Niro. Or tripping over her dress in front of 40 million people. The undead.

‘I’ll lay in bed and hear a noise and imagine the scariest possible scenario, and then my adrenalin starts going and then I tell myself that because my adrenalin is going, the spirit is feeding off my adrenalin! Or if there’s a spider. I try to kill it and I miss it. Great. Now it knows what I look like. It can’t just be, “Oh no, the spider’s still on the loose.” No, it’s, “That spider knows what you look like and knows you tried to kill it.”’

Psychopaths, on the other hand, don’t worry her so much. ‘At least that makes sense. It’s here. I sleep with a bow and arrow under my bed. I have pink mace in my bag. I’m like, “You just wait, you’re walking into a world of pain.”’

Today her handbag has no mace — she has a bodyguard these days — but it does contain a bottle of perfume, an iPhone, some multi-vitamins (unopened), a silicone bra insert from a recent photo-shoot and her diary, the first entry of which reads: ‘Keeping journals always makes me nervous people are going to find it, so if you’re reading this, just stop. Don’t be a journal reader. Those people suck.’ The picture on her iPhone is of her nephew. ‘Are you in for a world of cute?’ she asks. ‘Isn’t he precious? Do you want to see him count really fast?’ and shows me a video of a curly-haired toddler counting from one to 10.

Ten seconds also happens to be the rough length of time it takes for an average human being to fall in with Jennifer Lawrence like she’s your sister. She’s very funny, with something of the compulsive honesty and ability to warm up a room of the great comedians — Seth Rogen, only prettier.

BEN HASSETT

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She drapes herself over the arms of the sofa, legs hoisted over the side. She’s one of the most naturally supine people I’ve ever met

THIS PAGE: black silk gown, to order, Alexis Mabille Haute Couture.

Gold and diamond choker, from a selection, Cathy Waterman. Right hand, from left: gold and diamond ring ( just seen), about ÂŁ3,460, Dior Joaillerie. Gold, spectrolite and diamond ring, ÂŁ13,830, Noor Fares.

OPPOSITE: satin dress, to order, Valentino Haute Couture

BEN HASSETT

When I ask her what she most likes about her new life, she doesn’t miss a beat. ‘The money,’ she says, in her husky, Bacall-esque voice.

Pause.

‘I’m joking. The work, the work…’

She puts so little store by the usual pieties that prop up the celebrity interview — the love of the work, the importance of craft, the dedication to one’s art, the method behind one’s madness — that at times the whole structure threatens to come crashing down with one push. She could be the most radical talent currently working in Hollywood — a pure natural, a slob genius in the tradition of great slob geniuses that includes the young Elizabeth Taylor and Elvis, with the same hold on the audience’s emotions, the same ruby-like glint of trashiness in her soul.

She never even intended to be an actress, but her first break in the business came when she was spotted in New York’s Union Square.

‘I was offered a number of modelling contracts soon after but turned them down. I was like, “Actually, I think I’m going to be an actor.” That was an incredibly dumb thing to do at 14 but was probably the one time when my self-assuredness paid off.’ She has never had an acting lesson. She doesn’t rehearse or research her roles and only commits her lines to memory the night before. Before each take, she is normally to be found eating crisps and joking around with the crew.

‘It’s normally chips. My bodyguard Gilbert, right before they call “action”, I’m like, “If there aren’t Cheez-Its here by the time they call “cut”, just go home.” And he’ll start running. It cracks me up how seriously he takes it. I’m just lazy.

Whenever DPs [directors of photography] are like, “I’m so sorry to do this, but would you mind not saying that one line?” I’m like, “Dude, I don’t want to say any of it. Whatever is easiest. Believe me.

It’s not my performance that is motivating me. I want to get the on-set catering.”’

And then, just when her director is starting to sweat a little, she knocks it out of the park. ‘She’s one of the least neurotic people I’ve ever met,’ says David O Russell, who directed her to her Oscar in Silver Linings Playbook. ‘She came onto the set like some gee-whiz

kid, “What’s it like to have people ask for your autograph, Mr De Niro?” And then she jumped in and took over the whole scene from every actor in the room. De Niro turned to me and nodded, like: “Wow, this kid is really bringing it.” He loved it. She’s like Michael Jordan. Her jaw doesn’t get set. That’s how top sportsmen can go in under pressure, because they’re so loose.’

If you want the moment when Lawrence won her Oscar, that scene with De Niro – reversing the flow of his superstitious sports ju-ju with one magnificently delivered speech — was it. She says she didn’t understand a word of what she was saying. For her new film with Russell, American Hustle, about a famous FBI sting operation in the 1970s, she plays the hard-drinking wife of a conman, played by Christian Bale. She got to dress up in boob tube, furs and acrylic nails — playing it big and crazy, ‘but this hilarious kind of crazy that just cracks me up’, she says. ‘I had the most fun I have ever had as an actor doing it. Ever. It would get so out of hand so fast that when David called “cut” it was like waking up out of a dream. That was exactly how it felt: like waking up. Now if there is a movie I’m looking at, I’m like, “Can I do it with Christian Bale? Christian Bale? Christian? Christian? Christian? ”’ Suddenly she sounds all of seven years old — the little sister nagging her big brothers to let her play with them. One of the reasons her work with Russell rings so true is the fidelity with which it recreates the boisterous, fond dynamic of her family back in Kentucky. ‘We’re very loud, but as soon as one of us calls you an asshole, we like you,’ she says of her family, who still run a children’s camp with barns and horses. She was always trying to hang out with her two older brothers, spying on them, hiding under their beds, ‘to jump out and mess with them’ or pouring their cologne down the sink when they refused to play. They would sometimes fight over ‘who could bully me. So if Blaine beat me up, Ben would beat Blaine up and then come and mess with me. It was fun. It was a good deal that we had’.

The relations she had with her female cousins were another matter — ‘because the insults are so much deeper. Ben and Blaine and I would do really fucked-up stuff but we knew never to take it to the parents, but the first thing girls do, because they want to make your life as miserable as possible, is instantly bring the parents in — long emotional letters that the parents read, painting this person as the victim, a really wellthought-out war strategy. With the brothers it was like, “I hate you and I hope that you rot but I don’t want you to get in trouble.” We would punish each other.’

She’s very observant, particularly of her fellow females. At one point, she stops me to gaze at a teenage girl on the other side of the lobby: hair down to her waist, in full Eighties gear, about 13. Lawrence is mesmerised. ‘To be that bold at that age,’ she wonders. ‘You can’t just grow hair like that overnight. She’s been

Black embroidered tulle and rhinestone jacket, to order, Armani Privé. Black jersey knickers ( just seen), £80, Eres. Gold, spectrolite and diamond ring, £13,830, Noor Fares

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www.harpersbazaar.co.uk

▼

Before each take, she’s eating crisps.

‘It’s not my performance that is motivating me.

I want to get the on-set catering’

BEN HASSETT

committed to that look for a really long time. That’s how adults are dressing when they’re trying to dress, like, unique and different, and she’s like 12.’

I ask if there’s an element of self-recognition there.

‘No,’ she says. ‘Admiration.’

I am reminded of something Francis Lawrence, the director of The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, told me. ‘She picks up on the nuances of people’s body language instantly — in a blink or a wink.

While we were filming, she knew in a second when I was anxious or upset. And I don’t show emotion that easily. There’s no fooling her. The Jen that went into the machine is pretty much the Jen who came out of it.’

The biggest sacrifice she has had to make in the last year, at least for such a student of naturalism, is this: people acting naturally around her. Or, as she puts it: ‘My bullshit detector is going off all the time.’ Her agent and publicist know not to try any of the ‘You’re wonderful’ stuff, and when I try to compliment her acting she cuts me short.

She can hear dead air in an instant. The only thing she can’t pick up on is passive hostility.

‘I’m totally blind to it,’ she says. ‘Somebody could be totally hostile and I’m like, “Great!

See you later!” It’s not until someone is really blatant that I notice, “Wow, you hate me.”’

I ask her the last time someone made her cry. She thinks for a bit, then tells me about something that happened right at the beginning of her career. ‘I was young. It was just the kind of shit that actresses have to go through. Somebody told me I was fat, that I was going to get fired if I didn’t lose a certain amount of weight. They brought in pictures of me where I was basically naked, and told me to use them as motivation for my diet. It was just that.’ Someone brought it up recently. ‘They thought that because of the way my career had gone, it wouldn’t still hurt me. That somehow, after I won an Oscar, I’m above it all. “You really still care about that?” Yeah. I was a little girl. I was hurt. It doesn’t matter what accolades you get.’

She pauses. ‘I know it’ll never happen to me again. If anybody even tries to whisper the word “diet”, I’m like, “You can go fuck yourself.”’

‘Just whip out your Oscar,’ I tell her.

‘Yeah, right. Is he too fat, motherfuckers?’ She folds in laughter.

I’ve been interviewing Hollywood actresses for almost 20 years and I’ve never met anyone who seems as resolutely normal as Lawrence, and yet so obviously a star. You’d think the two would cancel each other out, but such is the magic of her personality that her ordinariness and her charisma seem to pass in and out of one another, like twinned but opposing waves. As our allotted hour turns into two, and our two comes up fast on three, we get hungry and I remember something I had promised my wife, who is four months pregnant: that I would eat a banana in honour of the size of our baby.

‘That’s some weird-ass shit,’ says Lawrence. ‘I support that.’ The

only problem: there are no bananas on the menu at the Casa del Mar. ‘Just tell them I’m super-famous,’ she says.

I get the waiter’s attention.

‘Hi,’ says Jen, taking over, ‘Do you have any bananas in the kitchen? His wife is pregnant and the baby is the size of a banana so he wants to eat a banana in celebration.’

The waiter looks a little thrown. ‘Yeah…

I think we got ice-cream, we got bananas.

You want a banana split? I can have him make you one.’

‘Awesome,’ she says. ‘People do weird stuff when they procreate. I’ll have the beet salad and the lobster club. Jeez. I’m more normal than him.’

The waiter departs. ‘I knew that I was selling you down the river because I knew it would get you what you want. What is weird is if you go, “I wanna banana,” they’d be like, “Well, I don’t make the rules around here.” But if there’s a baby involved…’

‘You don’t think it was the Oscar?’

‘Either way, you’re welcome.’

Five minutes later, the waiter arrives back with a lobster club, a beet salad and a banana split. ‘Was it the baby or the Oscar?’ I ask him.

‘My girlfriend’s five weeks,’ he says, and pulls out an ultrasound scan of his baby. We coo over it, an impromptu little gang, and then he leaves.

‘Phew,’ says Lawrence.

‘What is it?’

‘I just really saved myself from something pretty bad. There was, like, a thing.’

‘What thing?’

‘On her uterus. There was a thing. I started looking around her organs and was like, “What’s that white orb in there? Is that like a cyst? Is that normal? Should she go back to the doctor? Oh and congratulations. Be paranoid.” But I didn’t say it.’

‘You’re getting better.’

‘I’m getting better,’ she says. ‘Can I eat your cherry?’

At which point, I realise something with a pang: I’m going to miss this girl.

‘The Hunger Games: Catching Fire’ is released nationwide on 11 November.

‘Somebody told me I was fat, that I was going to get fired if I didn’t lose weight… If anyone says the word “diet”, I’m like, “You can go f*** yourself”’

Silk gown, to order, Alexis Mabille Haute Couture.

Gold and diamond choker, from a selection, Cathy Waterman. See Stockists for details. Hair by Adir Abergel at Starworksartists.com.

Make-up by Monika Blunder at the Wall Group. Manicure

by Marissa Carmichael at Streeters BEN HASSETT

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OF WOMENTHE YEAR

INTERNATIONAL ACTOR OF THE YEAR

Marion Cotillard It is obscenely early on the terrace at Chateau Marmont. Songbirds, perched in a lofty palm over the restaurant umbrellas, are still chattering after daybreak, while a gardener gently prunes the last of the summer bougainvillea. Marmonzettes (the legendary LA hotel’s resident waiters) zip around laying breakfast tables. In the midst of this morning activity, normally unseen by Chateau guests, sits a lone figure in a brown Borselino fedora, face obscured in shadow. The tilt of the hat’s brim itself is suggestive, its angle recalling a wartime FBI agent or cabaret chanteuse.

Which is, of course, the kind of elusive first impression that one would expect from Marion Cotillard. On the short drive from my LA home to the hotel, I have been mulling over random facts about the 37-year-old French actor who, since she morphed into decrepit, drug-addicted Edith Piaf and swiped the Best Actress Oscar in 2008, has come to be considered one of the most talented film stars of our time. Cotillard likes karaoke (signature tune: ‘Proud Mary’) and white-truffle oil (she loves to cook – especially for her son Marcel – though not with truffles); she reads Krishnamurti, admires Modigliani, Giacometti and early Dubuffet and sings with an artist called Yodélice as her alter ego, Simone.

Despite subsequent more ‘straightforward’ Hollywood roles – in Michael Mann’s Public Enemies, Christopher Nolan’s Inception and, most recently, in the latter director’s third Batman film, The Dark Knight Rises – Cotillard has hitherto retained an air of mystery.

She is intellectual, quirky, uncompromising, dedicatedly thespian and fiercely private, with an innate sense of style (her fedora today is twinned with a pair of red Chloé ankleboots) that is much admired by fashion houses. Galliano fell in love with her at the 2008 Oscars, and, despite his departure, she is a still an ambassador for Dior. But when one considers Cotillard in all her aspects, two and two don’t necessarily make four.

It is likely this off beat sensibility that has led Cotillard to her next Oscar-tipped project.

Rust and Bone – the work of lauded French director Jacques Audiard (A Prophet) – is a return

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With her first acting role since becoming a mother, the star has produced a surely award-winning performance of visceral emotion in Rust and Bone.

So why is she putting her career on hold? LORIEN HAYES meets an actor less ordinary. Portraits by BEN HASSETT Styled by JULIA VON BOEHM

FIRE AND KOHL Marion Cotillard wears silk muslin dress, about £15,275; veil, made for the shoot, both Giambattista Valli.

Platinum brooch with diamonds and sapphires, £7,125, Tiffany & Co

OF WOMENTHE YEAR

to award-winning form for Cotillard: a starkly honest, visceral and fearless portrayal of a woman who loses her legs in an accident, and her subsequent battle to embrace love, life and sex – even at its most gritty. Indeed, Cotillard herself is fearless, if a little fearsome, on first meeting. After observing her for some time on the terrace, I approach as she returns her lipstick-smeared glass to a rather mortified waiter. ‘There have been many lips on this glass,’ she declares (her own mouth lipstick-free). This is the first thing I learn about Cotillard: she is critically observant, direct and glaringly honest – in person as in her performances.

That isn’t to say that Cotillard is not charming, it’s just that she is not necessarily willing to humour others for the sake of it. As we settle down, she chats amiably about the Bazaar shoot. ‘Couture is art,’ she says while consuming a plate of pancakes with bacon, maple syrup and extra butter with considerable enthusiasm. She continues on the subject of what she calls ‘le style Anglais’, including a rapture on Britishness. ‘I think of England as music with fashion. You mix rock ’n’ roll with everything, from royalty to punk to the bourgeoisie.

Music-wise, you’re the best. David Bowie, the Rolling Stones, Radiohead, the Beatles…’

Fedora now removed, Cotillard is more relaxed and playful. Under her coat is an unpretentious cream sloppy sweater (she doesn’t know or care who by). But when I introduce the subject of Rust and Bone, her demeanour shifts. A gravitas descends on our breakfast. It’s not that she is haughty; just passionate and deeply serious about her work. Being an actor, she tells me, is ‘like you’re this tightrope walker. Even if you know how to do it, you never know if you’re going to make it to the other side’.

After La Vie en Rose, for which she underwent almost masochistic preparation, including shaving off her eyebrows and hairline, Cotillard famously felt haunted by Piaf. Her role in Rust and Bone is fictional, but her performance was still emotionally arduous. She plays whale trainer Stéphanie, who develops a relationship with bare-knuckle boxer Alain (Matthias Schoenaerts).

The film is unflinching in its portrayal of disabled sex and violence, but strangely life-affirming.

Technically, she lost her legs not to a killer whale but to ‘green screen, or rather long green socks’, says Cotillard. I wince, preparing to hear the extreme emotional and physical preparation she endured for the role. After her intense immersion in the character of Piaf, she spent time in Menominee Indian Reservation to perfect a Cajun Bayou twang for Public Enemies. Rob Marshall, who directed her in Nine, says she has ‘an extraordinary work ethic. Even Daniel Day-Lewis was astounded’.

‘Well, I mean, I love my job, but I’m not cutting my legs off,’ she says wryly. In fact, for this role, it was more important to appear fundamentally unprepared. ‘Stéphanie loses her legs. It’s a shock,’ she says. ‘If she’d been without them for years, I would have worked differently. But I had to learn with her how it felt – that loss. How it changes her.’

Cotillard’s performance is doubtless Oscar-worthy. She has what Marshall describes as ‘see-through skin. You can feel what she’s feeling. I’m hard pressed to think of an actress with her range, her vulnerability’. Public Enemies director Michael Mann, who has seen a preview of Rust and Bone, raves: ‘She is fantastic. What she is doing in that film is beyond acting.’

Her experience of shooting with director Audiard was as visceral as some of the scenes themselves. ‘When I saw Matthias do his first fight, my whole body, was – well, it was kind of orgasmic,’ says Cotillard. ‘I was enjoying the violence of the flesh. It’s why the sex [in the film] works so well. It’s all about physicality, feeling that you’re alive.’ Some may find the brutality that saturates each frame overwhelming, but Cotillard is clear that she is not condoning violence, explaining carefully that in the context of this story she feels it is the crucial counterpoint to a woman feeling physically disabled, redundant and deadened.

The shoot for Rust and Bone was the first since Cotillard became a mother, to 18-monthold Marcel, her son with French director and actor Guillaume Canet. Like nothing else,

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‘Being an actor is like you’re this tightrope walker. You never know if you’re going to make it to the other side’

SHINING STAR Silk and velvet dress embroidered with sequins and Swarovski crystals, to order, Giorgio Armani Privé

OF WOMENTHE YEAR

Marion’s WORLD

Your highlight of 2012 ‘The return of Absolutely Fabulous. I am a huge fan.’

Who is your woman of the year? ‘If we count the school year, it would be Wangari Maathai – she passed away last September. She was the Kenyan woman who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004 for her work in the reforestation of Africa. She was one of my heroes.’

Biggest British inspiration this year

‘Clive Owen. He’s amazing.’

Secret weapon ‘I am always travelling in

my head, thinking, cooking – not sleeping.’

A strong woman is… ‘a woman who has found what she is here for and whose faith will never be put down by anyone or anything. I’m thinking of Burmese politician Aung San Suu Kyi.’ What does the Queen mean to you?

‘You never know what is going to happen next with the Royal Family.

They are really entertaining.’

LA FILLE EN ROSE Embroidered hand-draped taffeta dress, from a selection, Marchesa

OF WOMENTHE YEAR

Marcel has changed Cotillard’s life. She worked right up until the birth, with Nolan organising the $250 million Dark Knight shooting schedule around her delivery dates.

‘Since having Marcel, every day of my life has been alight with him,’ says Cotillard.

‘Of course, I expected the biggest change, but I didn’t expect to fall in love.’

When I ask what she likes to do with him, she says she wants to take him to the park and teach him the name of every tree (‘I am a tree geek. Everywhere I go, I Google trees.

My dream would be an app like Shazam – a tree app to give you the whole history’).

She wants to sing him lullabies at night: ‘I turn stories into song.’ And right now, as tears well up in her eyes, she says she doesn’t want to go to the Toronto Film Festival later today, she wants ‘to swim back to France to be with him… I miss my son. We have not been separated like this before. I have been so lucky to take him everywhere with me,’ she almost wails. ‘I was in Whole Foods yesterday and there was this mother in line, kissing her boy, and it was unbearable for me to watch.’ Her eyes cloud over again. ‘Do you want to see some pictures of him?’ She gets out her phone and shows me Marcel – blond and divine, with his father’s eyes, and on the back of a pony.

‘I was a very, very sad child,’ she says. ‘Not as a little child, because when I see pictures of me at my son’s age, I can see I was happy. But I did lose that.’ The source of this angst, however, she does not identify. ‘My childhood was perfect. My parents were amazing parents, they gave us all the love we needed.’ They also gave Cotillard her artistic sensibility: her mother Monique Theillaud was an actor, and her father Jean-Claude a mime artist. They lived a bohemian existence in a tower block in suburban Paris, where she and her younger twin brothers, Quentin and Guillaume, scaled 18 flights of stairs dodging hypodermic needles. The children ‘were allowed to paint and draw on every wall in the house’, she says. One twin is now a writer, the other a sculptor.

Cotillard studied acting at the Orléans Conservatorie d’Art Dramatique, and made 26 films before she hit the big time with La Vie en Rose at the age of 31. Since then, she has had Hollywood directors vying to work with her. ‘She is a character actress in a leading actress’ body,’ says Nine director Rob Marshall, ‘as she proved with Piaf. That truth, humour and clarity are extraordinarily hard to achieve, and actresses who can do it: the list is very small.’

As a result, it’s impossible to doubt that many more Oscar-worthy roles lie ahead for Cotillard, but at the moment she is guided by another consideration: keeping her family together. Her latest project, the aptly named Blood Ties, which is set in 1970s Brooklyn and co-stars Mila Kunis and Clive Owen, is directed by her… ‘husband?’

(I say this because she has a huge diamond ring on her engagement finger). ‘No, yes, well,’ she mutters, before gathering herself and venturing: ‘I’m very private about my personal life, but Guillaume is my inspiration. He is a brilliant director. I love working with him, and when you find that perfect balance – it’s heaven.’

After a whirlwind of projects post-Oscar, Cotillard wants to put the brakes on for a while, and has just pulled out of a film for exactly this reason. ‘I don’t know what’s next,’ she says, ‘because I don’t want to know. I need to have a break. I don’t want to have anyone else to think about, apart from myself and my family.’ So, after Toronto, Cotillard is going back to France, to Canet and Marcel and their home in Paris. ‘I need to lie in bed and listen to the rain. I want to do whatever I want to do when I wake up in the morning.

‘One of the things I have learned recently is that I have the ability to be happy.’ She smiles, donning her fedora, tilting it just-so, at the right angle, so that her face is hidden once again. ‘I have found that in my family. And that is a new thing. And that hasn’t always been the case for me – so I know how lucky I am.’

‘Rust and Bone’ is out now nationwide.

‘Since having my son, every day of my life has been alight with him.

I expected the biggest change, but I didn’t expect to fall in love’

POWER PLAYER Crepe, lace and satin dress, from a selection, Alexis Mabille. Right arm, from left: diamond and platinum bracelet, from a selection; white gold and diamond watch, £8,240; diamond and platinum bracelet, £6,575; diamond and platinum bracelet, £12,600, all Tiffany & Co. Diamond and platinum ring, from a selection, Chopard Haute Joaillerie.

See Stockists for details. Hair by Robert Vetica for Moroccanoil at the Magnet Agency. Make-up by Kara Yoshimoto Bua at Traceymattingly.com, using Estée Lauder. Manicure by Miwa Kobayashi, using Estée Lauder

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We all know about Scarlett Johansson’s bombshell beauty, formidable acting talent and creative versatility.

But what is perhaps less well known is her ardent political conviction.

AVRIL MAIR meets the surprising Hollywood star 216 |

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There’s no way around it: Scarlett Johansson is in a bad mood. This being Scarlett Johansson, though – a 28-yearold who has, over the past decade, redefined the blonde-bombshell ideal for the big screen – she somehow manages to be in a bad mood and still look fabulous.

With skin the colour of spoiled milk, hair bleached honey-gold and those statement curves erupting from a Dolce & Gabbana dress, she strides through the studio on her way from dressing-room to set with what your mother would describe as ‘a face on’. She’s had better Saturdays.

And no wonder, really: it’s Memorial Day weekend in America, but rather than being back home in New York with her family, or in Paris with her boyfriend, Scarlett is still in Ohio, where she has lived for the past five months while filming Captain America: The Winter Soldier, a high-octane blockbuster that calls for a black leather catsuit and all the self-discipline necessary to wear it. So while the rest of her country was sleeping in, she got up in her rented bungalow in a Cleveland suburb at 5am (an hour later than the usual call time) and completed a sweaty workout before eating something insubstantial provided by a polite man called Bobby, who accompanies her to the studio to prepare another sugar-free, gluten-free, low-fat, low-carb snack. ‘Your body becomes a machine,’ she says. It doesn’t take much time in her company to realise Scarlett is, basically, tired and hungry. You’d be in a bad mood too.

Still, after almost 20 years in the industry – with a Bafta, a Tony Award and numerous Golden Globe nominations to show for it – she’s quite used to this sort of thing. So Johansson smiles for the camera, then walks off set, hitches up her skirt to sit on a high stool in the studio kitchen and gamely forks up the handful of artfully arranged vegetables that have been presented to her by way of lunch. ‘It’s not a diet,’ she says, sarcastically. ‘It’s a lifestyle choice.’

Serious and articulate, charismatic but also reluctant, selfdeprecating and droll, there’s little about Johansson that squares with your preconceptions: she is, surely, the most interesting, intelligent and complex actress of her generation. Who else could star in a billiondollar action franchise, take the lead in the Arthur Miller play A View from the Bridge on Broadway, then do it all over again in Tennessee Williams’ Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, release an album of Tom Waits H A R P E R’ S B A Z A A R

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‘Hillary Clinton would make a wonderful president. We could only benefit from having someone in office who has been a mother’

Black and white wool coat, £1,695; matching dress, £730; red satin embellished shoes, from a selection, all Dolce & Gabbana

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covers, visit famine zones with Oxfam, campaign for women’s healthcare and also adapt a Truman Capote story as a screenplay? Her drive and ambition are remarkable; it’s an almost obstinate diversity. ‘My goal is always to work on projects that stretch me,’ she says later.

‘That’s it. That’s been my MO from the start.’

That her looks are the first thing you notice – that anybody can help noticing – is a shame, really. Though Johansson is often reduced to the physical – Katy Perry reportedly wrote ‘I Kissed a Girl’ about her lips, and those exaggerated features seem designed with the big screen in mind – she has, surprisingly, no ego when it comes to her personal appearance. In Cameron Crowe’s sweet 2011 indie flick We Bought a Zoo, she refused to wear any make-up because she didn’t think her character would, and off-screen she has never sought the spotlight, even though her uncommon beauty demands it. That hers is a life less ordinary is something she can’t help, but doesn’t seem to play up to. She behaves like someone for whom celebrity is merely the slightly annoying side effect of a busy, creatively productive life.

‘Luckily, I’m relatively uninteresting,’ she says.

‘I’ve always tried, as much as possible, to keep the prying eye at arm’s length, which doesn’t always work in my favour – but I think if you establish that early on, you remain relatively unscathed.

As I get older, I realise what an incredible waste of time it is to scurry around like some kind of urchin. I want to enjoy things, like just walking round my city.’

Despite having worked successfully as a child actress since the age of eight, appearing in a film every year, including Robert Redford’s The Horse Whisperer, Johansson shot to fame in 2003 via a picture of her bottom in sheer pink knickers – cropped in and blown up – which served as the poster and opening shot for Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation. This was a defining moment for both actress and director: Coppola won an Oscar for her screenplay while Johansson, aged just 18, won a Bafta for her portrayal of a sullen wife stranded in Tokyo, but also found herself cast as Hollywood’s newest, youngest siren.

That her next film was Girl with a Pearl Earring, a period drama set in the studio of Johannes Vermeer, in which she could hardly have been more covered up – and for which she was also nominated for a Bafta – now seems ironic. She has talked about feeling ‘super-sexualised’ as a teenager, something that was hard to accept at the time: ‘Maybe it’s because I am curvy and confident about it. I think that no matter who I play, people hone in on that somehow.’ A cursory Google search for the words ‘Scarlett Johansson hot’ throws up almost 21 million hits (her bum gets a disappointing 625,000). In many ways, everything she has done since has been an attempt to shift that focus.

And this, here, is where you find the real Scarlett Johansson.

Rather than capitalise on her sex-bomb status, she became a Woody Allen muse, signing up to three of his films in quick succession: Match Point (2005), Scoop (2006) and Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008).

The director was hooked, saying: ‘She has the acting ability to be not just a passing pin-up girl but a genuinely meaningful actress… I was enchanted with her the minute I met her, and I’ve never stopped.’

Johansson, even now, is still overwhelmed by the experience. ‘Not only do I adore working with Woody, I just adore Woody. I’m fascinated by him. He knows I’m at his beck and call.’ It’s easier said than done, though. ‘He has very particular habits and requirements,’ she

Crocheted coat, £910, Dolce & Gabbana.

Velvet kitten heels, £585, Tabitha Simmons

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explains. ‘He only works in the summertime. He’s absolutely dedicated to his family and being with them during all those kid months when they have to be home. But if by some miracle, one summer, we both have the opportunity, we will work together again for sure.’

That Johansson would be rescued by Woody Allen makes sense, of course; they’re both native New Yorkers, for whom the city exerts an almost primal pull. Born in 1984, the daughter of Karsten Johansson, a Danish architect, and Melanie Sloan, a film producer, Scarlett grew up in Greenwich Village with two older siblings and a twin brother, Hunter, who now works in city politics. The family was educated and liberal, but neither rich nor privileged; speaking at the Democratic Party’s National Convention last year, Johansson discussed the need for welfare from a very personal perspective: ‘My father barely made enough to get by. We moved every year and we finally settled in a housing development for lower-middle-income families. We went to public schools and depended on programmes for school transport and lunches.’ This, perhaps, explains her appetite for work; since she first persuaded her mother to take her to auditions, she has barely stopped. ‘I’m happy when I’m working,’ she says, detailing a 10-month schedule with scarcely a day off. We have left Ohio by this point – not a great disappointment to either of us – and Johansson has since finished another film, Jon Favreau’s Chef, alongside Robert Downey Jnr and Sofía Vergara. Next year she will star in Luc Besson’s new action movie, Lucy. For now, she’s back in New York and we’re talking on the phone, the transatlantic gap filled by that familiar husky voice, unerringly polite but given to hiccuping chuckles.

‘Eventually I want to have a family, and that would be my focus, but right now I’m having fun with it. There have been times in my career where I’ve struggled to find…’ she pauses, tries to find the words. ‘I was stuck for a while. It was more difficult, maybe, to find the right thing to do. Now I’m enjoying a really productive, creative period.’

Though avoiding the usual pitfalls of child stardom – no rehab or unfortunate nightclub incidents for Johansson – she has endured some troublesome years. But when personal aspects of her life have become public, she has managed things with grace.

After her three-year marriage to the actor Ryan Reynolds came to an end in 2011, their divorce was announced with a dignified statement that concluded: ‘While privacy isn’t expected, it’s certainly appreciated.’

Neither has discussed the relationship since.

Reynolds married the actress Blake Lively some 12 months later, and Johansson is now dating a French journalist, Romain Dauriac; and though she may be spending downtime with him in Paris, the only thing she’ll talk about is her love of that city.

There is one man she’s happy to discuss, though, and that is Barack Obama. An active and ardent supporter, she campaigned for him in both presidential elections, visiting swing states and calling undecided voters. ‘It would be irresponsible not to,’ she says. ‘I come from a politically active family. To be an active member of the community, to be a responsible citizen and to engage politically have always been part of my awareness and part of my life. More than anything else, I believe that if everyone exercised the right to vote, the right choice would be made by the nation as a whole.’ Putting her public profile

to use is something Johansson seems to see as the bargain of fame.

When the next American election comes in 2016, Johansson knows who she will support. ‘I think Hillary Clinton would make a wonderful president. I think we could only benefit from having someone in office who has been a mother; women have a different perspective and appreciation of humanity because of that maternal instinct. It can only be a step forward.’ While her continued political engagement is assured, she won’t be drawn on future plans. ‘Do I imagine myself having a full-on political career? That seems like a stretch. But who knows? I don’t limit the possibilities. If I have more time, I may be able to lend a bigger voice to politics. I never close the door on those kinds of things.’

In the meantime, Johansson’s will to work has found another outlet. At the 2013 Cannes Film Festival, it was announced that the actress was seeking funding for her directorial debut, an adaptation of the Truman Capote story Summer Crossing. It was the author’s first novel, unpublished and lost – Capote actually threw his manuscript in the trash – but it resurfaced at an auction in 2004 and finally made it into print. Johansson has collaborated with the writer Tristine Skyler on the screenplay. ‘I’ve been daydreaming about this for years,’ she says, explaining how she’d been reading scripts and searching fruitlessly for the right story to film. ‘I found the book in an airport shop. I thought it seemed like a good size for a flight and I’d never heard of it before, though I love Capote. I just instantly knew that it was the material I’d been waiting for.’ The novel tells the story of a privileged New York teenager who embarks on an affair with a Jewish parking attendant while her family holidays in Paris during the long, hot summer of 1945. Johansson won’t be acting in it: ‘I’m too old! It would have been a dream role for me.’ The film hasn’t been cast yet, but Johansson plans to do this early in 2014, before starting to shoot in July. ‘The film takes place in the summer – it has to, it’s a character in itself. It’s important to me to be accurate and to capture New York in all its sweaty, steamy glory.’

So will this love letter to her city also signal the end of Johansson’s career as an actress? It’s unlikely. ‘I’ll be working on Summer Crossing for at least a year after filming, so that will limit my in-front-of-camera time significantly,’ she says. ‘But you’ll never find me making any grand statement about a goodbye tour. I find my job to be endlessly inspiring and I’m going to carry on throwing myself into it with reckless abandon.’

Back in New York where she belongs – and, presumably, eating normally again – it’s this zest for life that makes Johansson such an engaging character. Forget the bad mood. She’s nothing but a joy.

‘If I have more time, I may be able to lend a bigger voice to politics. I never close the door on those kinds of things’

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Cashmere coat, £1,595, Burberry Prorsum. Satin embellished shoes, £495, Dolce & Gabbana.

See Stockists for details. Hair

by Duffy at Tim Howard Management. Make-up by Maud Laceppe at Streeters, using Dolce & Gabbana.

Production by Jessica Hafford.

Stylist’s assistant: Nicole Deutsch. Scarlett Johansson is the face of Dolce & Gabbana Passioneyes Mascara and Desire Fragrance

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stony-faced women of fashion stared and applauded as yet another McQueen show wrapped.

In the beginning, he gave his required front-man interviews. It was a given that it was part of the way he had to place himself to face this tirade of questions and controversy. Then he began to feel the strain; to achieve all these shows, one after another, he found things that made him feel he could cope. He felt the need to distance himself from others, who would suck all of his energy – some things he began to repel away from.

Lee was standing at the bottom of So we would escape at the end of each show, bundled into the the stairs in his studio. At that time – 18 back of his car, where we would vanish into our world – one that was years ago, as I remember it – there were free of painted faces. That’s when I would see Lee slowly become just a couple of workbenches with two old sewing machines. For himself, only for a little while – he always knew it would begin again Lee, it was quite a step up in the world. Before then, he’d been spraying – but this was how it was. To have stopped would have been imposclothes in friends’ gardens, littering their living rooms with pieces sible, although many times he would talk about it – he needed and of yet to be hand-stitched creations by the future master himself. loved this world. What he may have Of course, this meeting was down wished he could let go of made him who to Isabella Blow. She changed the he was. He loved fashion, he loved his course of so many of our lives – in my life; no one should believe that Lee didn’t case, the next 18 years. I was there as love the life he’d been given, the talent one of Issy’s new discoveries; the funny How did you first meet McQueen? ‘It was all a bit of thing was that I was to discover a much a blur – I was doing a lot of shows at the time. I can’t even and gift that he shared with you all.

There was always humour, and Lee greater gift than to become a model or remember the first show I did for him, but I remember the had a catchphrase for us all. For his a muse. I had met not only the greatest first show he did in New York. It was raining, everyone right-hand, Sarah Burton, it was ‘Don’t genius of our time in the world of fashwas outside, and I said, “Lee, you’ve got to get Anna freak out, it’s only fashion.’ And for me, ion, but a man who saw far ahead what Wintour in!” He didn’t care. It was all chaos.’ it was ‘It’s not always about you,’ which, fashion would become – and my jourWhat was your favourite show? ‘The one based on of course, meant it was all about him. ney beside him had only just begun. “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?” Michael Clark [the Lee could never stay still; so often However odd we may have been to choreographer] is a friend of mine, and I couldn’t believe there were bets on how long one of our those who looked at us, we worked. they didn’t ask me to do it. I said, “Lee, how could you do holidays would last. I knew if we could East End gay boy meets skinny, posh that to me?” That’s why he asked me to do the American stay for just a little time, maybe then he English bird with a naughty streak.

Express show and I danced with Michael in the skull dress.’ would be able to stop. We would talk Honestly, that chunky boy in a white What is your favourite piece? ‘There are a few he gave about religion, love, our equal lack of T-shirt, blue jeans, black boots or trainme before he died. I went to give him his Christmas it and where we always seemed to go ers (the gay man’s clothing anthem of present and he gave me a lot of stuff. He was saying, wrong, then we would laugh – neither the time), with Lee’s little twist of a “You’ve got to have this.” He gave me a black dress and of us was too sweet on self-pity. blue-check shirt, is how I will always a fur that I wore to his funeral. Before the funeral, I was We would make plans to move to remember him. Issy was happy. As she going through my wardrobe thinking, “What am I going different parts of the globe; our last had predicted, she had found a new to wear?” It’s weird, now that I think about it – almost great idea was a small island somedouble act that might work for one of like he kind of knew.’ where in the Caribbean, but neither her shoots. The dress that Lee would How do his clothes make you feel? ‘It’s like he of us thought the Gucci Group [his make for me was one that was based on gave women power, while letting them be fragile and label’s owners] would be on board for the ‘Highland Rape’ show. vulnerable at the same time. You always feel powerful. this. We thought six months of the I was stripped of my clothes there People always used to say he was a misogynist, but it took year spent kitesurfing, our new sport, and then, Lee exclaiming at that point: me a while to realise that he was actually empowering seemed more than reasonable.

‘Oh you are skinny, aren’t you?’ I’d women and not the other way round.’

I think, though, that at some stage I received my 10 out of 10 for lack of ass, What do you think his legacy will be? ‘There’s never, pointed out that there might be a thighs, tits and hips. One of the things ever going to be anybody like him. His was the most shortage of young, blue-eyed skinheads I think people never really understood exciting show to see ever, even if you weren’t there. I roaming the beach, and the idea was about Lee was that he was totally would hear about it on the phone, and hear Lee and hear quickly put on the now ever-growing body-dysmorphic, it was always a sureveryone. There was so much tension, but we had the best geographical outbox. It seemed that prise to me as I think it was so obvious laughs. He was a dear friend of mine. I miss him terribly.’ the Englishman would stay firmly in his clothes and in his own personal embedded in the roots and history of his own country. struggles that I would see paralleled over the next two decades.

There is one place that was Lee’s real love, a cottage by the sea These troubles would be mirrored in his public victories, and in this, in Hastings with a giant tree, a monolithic living sculpture. I always it was a heavy burden. It cost him personally, as well as those who called it the witch’s cottage, and it was where he imagined the 2008 loved him. The two characteristics my friend valued most were show ‘The Girl who lived in the Tree.’ loyalty and truthfulness. In choosing to write this, I will try to stay He asked me to write a book based around a magical girl who within the confines of being loyal to him and truthful to our story. travelled, like his shows, to the end of the world. We would spend Lee was one of the most analysed, greedily awaited and our time with his three dogs, Minta, Juice (who now lives in my bed) watched artists, designers and creative minds of our time. The ne year has passed. I believe we should all have the time to say goodbye to those we have loved and been loved by. History will judge my friend, it will idolise him, as it should; others will write themselves into this history, others will be written out.

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INTRICATE EMBROIDERY AND SEQUIN EMBELLISHMENT REFLECT A MASTER CRAFTSMAN’S EYE FOR DETAIL This page: Annabelle Neilson wears cream patchwork and silver sequin dress from Alexander McQueen’s S/S 04 ‘Deliverance’ show. Kate Moss wears black crystal-beaded chiffon dress made for a charity fashion show co-hosted by McQueen and American Express in 2004.

Previous pages: Kate wears ruffled organza dress made specially for her, in which she appeared as a hologram in the A/W 06 ‘Widows of Culloden’ show

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NEVER LESS THAN FABULOUSLY DRAMATIC, MCQUEEN CONJURED A VISION OF FANTASY IN BILLOWING SILK Daphne Guinness wears black silk highwaymanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s cape from the A/W 03 â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Scannersâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; show. Black beaded all-in-one suit from the S/S 03 show.

Black sequin platforms, Alexander McQueen archive. Glove and jewellery, her own

From left: an ensemble from ‘It’s a Jungle Out There’ A/W 97 in the new A ‘ lexander McQueen: Savage Beauty’ exhibition. An ensemble from ‘Voss’ S/S 01

From left: a dress from ‘Voss’ S/S 01.

A dress from ‘Irere’ S/S 03. A dress from ‘Widows of Culloden’ A/W 06

immortalised. A few months had passed, and I had been invited by and Calum – they were his children. Lee would cook. It was one of a great friend to St Paul’s Cathedral, for the opening of a sculpture his great passions, and time was spent watching cookery programmes, called Flare II by Antony Gormley. I realised later, though, that my the History Channel and National Geographic – the latter often real purpose for going was because Lee’s memorial had to be held inspired many of his shows. All his family and friends who spent there. I climbed up the stairs to the Whispering Gallery, and walked time there saw Lee at his happiest then. straight into Canon Giles Fraser. I introduced myself, told him that With Lee, his love of women was most transparent in his love I had just understood why I was standfor his mother Joyce and three sisters. ing in front of him, and explained that So many women inspired him, from my friend had died and I wanted his Isabella to Sarah Burton, who had all memorial to be held at St Paul’s. He the right and talent to continue in his wasn’t going to make it easy for me – name – the correct choice was made How did you first meet McQueen? ‘Issy [Blow] he wanted me to show how much I at the worst of times. Lee believed had tried lots of times to get me to meet him, and I was McQueen would continue after he just like, “Forget it – I don’t do that.” I’m not someone who loved Lee, and told me to sing a song out into the gallery. So I sang the was gone, he said as much in one of likes to know designers, and then we met by pure chance lines from Patsy Cline’s ‘Walkin’ After his last interviews. in 2000. He said, “You are wearing my coat,” and I said, Midnight’. ‘I stop to see a weeping wilThere have been many great and “Oh my God!” Then we went to the pub!’ low/Cryin’ on his pillow/Maybe he’s beautiful women who have walked What was your favourite show? ‘The one with the wind cryin’ for me/And as the skies turn down the McQueen catwalk, and their tunnel – although all of them were incredible pieces of gloomy/Night winds whisper to passion for him was reflected in theatre. The one where people were looking at themselves me/I’m lonesome as I can be.’ their eyes when I saw Lee corseting or in the glass cube – that was incredible, fantastic.’

It wasn’t enough. He wanted to fitting these beautiful creatures.

What is your favourite piece? ‘I treasure them all. What understand the emotions that had The last week I spent with Lee, if was so incredible about him was he could do the simplest brought me there. I knew I was almost I’m honest, is one I’ve tried hard to put things and the most complicated things. He was a proper to the back of my mind. If you have ever genius, and that is a very overused word. If he’ d done art, asking the impossible, but Lee always made the impossible possible. We all lost someone you loved and shared so he would have been the best; if he’ d done architecture, he wanted to leave the world with the much with, you will understand. The would have been the best. He was a perfectionist.’ memory that Lee would have wanted loss of his mother was a shock, even How do his clothes make you feel? ‘That is very and deserved; it was put together by so though he had been expecting it. difficult to answer, because I just put on clothes. I suppose many amazing people. I didn’t realise Before our last Christmas together, it’s structure – he was streets ahead of anyone else. He how incredible it was until after the his mother was taken to hospital. Lee spent two years making suits on Savile Row, and in order memorial, when I stood in front of St had been preparing a special Christmas to deconstruct anything, you have to understand structure Paul’s, when the pipers were playing on lunch for his parents when his brother in the first place. He was very aware of the human form.’ the steps and everyone was standing phoned him. I believe he called me What do you think his legacy will be? ‘He was a in silence with their own moment of thinking the meal wouldn’t happen and shooting star. His legacy should be that if you really want personal respect, which echoed around he’d always known that holiday would to get creative, go and do the hours and hours and hours the domes of the cathedral. be his last with his beloved mother. and hours that it takes. It’s not just about headlines.

As Kate, Daphne and I were shooting I think, knowing this, Joyce refused to Everything else feels like we are going backwards – this story, I started to think of all the be kept in hospital, and Lee was able Lee was always the one going forward into the future.’ wonderful and amazing team of people to spend his last Christmas with the and friends he had in his life. They followed him willingly on his woman who he was so like in strength and determination. We met journey; his close friends who’ll always remember a larger-than-life, later, as usual, to share what would also be our last Christmas. The happy, brilliant man. At the worst of times and the best of times, silence that came to my friend on his mother’s death was so intense, there was only one Alexander McQueen. it was hard to find a way to reach him. He had retreated inside himself.

After Lee’s funeral, the people who worked with him were focused ‘Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty’ is at the Metropolitan Museum of on saving the McQueen name. I wanted him to be remembered and Art’s Costume Institute in New York (www.metmuseum.org) from 4 May. 116 |

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PHOTOGRAPHS: SOLVE SUNDSBO, COURTESY OF THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART

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RICH CREAM LACE IS TAILORED INTO A STRIKING, FIGURE-HUGGING CONFECTION Annabelle wears lace sheath dress, made for her wedding and based on a dress in the A/W 95 ‘Highland Rape’ show

THE DARK YET DELICATE IMAGERY OF THE SKULL MOTIF HAS BECOME AN ICONIC TRADEMARK OF THE DESIGNERâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S WORK Kate wears crystal-beaded chiffon dress made for a 2004 charity fashion show. Patent leather peep-toe heels, Alexander McQueen archive. Sittings editor: Nathalie Riddle. Hair by James Brown for Photo Fabulous. Make-up by Miranda Joyce at Streeters, using Dior. Nails by Lorraine Griffin, using Chanel. Models: Kate Moss at Storm Model Management, Annabelle Neilson and Daphne Guinness. With thanks to Verien at Spring Studios

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Oscar-winning actor and lifestyle guru Gwyneth Paltrow dazzles as a washed-up country star, with a singing role in her latest film. She tells ALISON PRATO about her love of food, winning a standing ovation at the Country Music Awards and doing the school run with BeyoncĂŠ

GWYNETH Photographs by ALEXI LUBOMIRSKI Styled by SOPHIA NEOPHITOU-APOSTOLOU

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LOUIS VUITTON’S SPARKLING ZEBRA-PRINT JUMPSUIT GIVES THE SEVENTIES SILHOUETTE A VERY MODERN MAKEOVER This page: Lurex embroidered jumpsuit, from a selection, Louis Vuitton. Leather belt with brass buckle, £935, Gucci. Yellow gold cuffs, £5,225 each, Elsa Peretti for Tiffany & Co. Gold-plated and silver necklace, £235, Hannah Warner. Suede peep-toes with brass heels, £710, Sergio Rossi. Ring ( just seen; worn throughout), her own.

Previous page: silk leopard-print dress with lace detail, about £2,050, Dolce & Gabbana.

Metal collar, about £90, Kenneth Jay Lane

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wyneth Paltrow is belting out the Seventies rock song ‘Wheels in the Sky’ by American band Journey, and the people around her are beginning to stare. She’s sitting at a corner booth in a tiny Italian deli in New York City’s SoHo neighbourhood, and Paltrow has spontaneously burst into song between bites of food.

‘The wheeeeels in the skyyyyy keep on turning,’ she sings, eyes closed, head bobbing, fists pumping exaggeratedly into the air like she’s sitting front-row at a rock concert. ‘Don’t know where I’ll be tomorrooow…’ She opens her eyes and breaks into a huge, toothy grin.

‘Such a good song!’ she says, and then she takes another huge bite of a chicken parmigiana sandwich from the plate in front of her.

This impromptu rendition of pure Americana, in the middle of a busy lunchtime shift, leaves me slightly discombobulated. I had not anticipated this from the 38-year-old actor and wife of Coldplay’s Chris Martin, partly because of her famed aura of composure (a perfectionism which, in the past, has been mistaken for glaciality), but mainly because of her eight-year or so residency in Belsize Park, which has naturalised Paltrow into a fellow Londoner. By now, her presence in our capital has stretched beyond just a passing Hollywood Anglophile phase or fleeting stopover. After almost a decade in our midst (socialising with friend Stella McCartney, ferrying her two children – Apple, six, and Moses, four – to the local school gates, jogging along Camden’s streets with trainer and business partner Tracy Anderson…), Paltrow has become an honorary Brit. I half expect her to greet me with the lazy consonants of a North London twang, or at least the cutglass British accent she carried off so flawlessly in Jane Austen’s Emma, Shakespeare in Love (for which she won an Oscar in 2006) and Sylvia as our literary heroine Sylvia Plath (whose former Chalcot Square home in Primrose Hill is a short stroll from her own). But for Paltrow’s return in Country Strong, her first lead role since Proof in 2005, for which she decamped her family to Nashville, she is channelling her American side, as a wreckless, ex-drugaddicted country-and-western singer struggling to make a comeback (think Dolly Parton meets Britney – post-head-shaving-incident).

Today, Paltrow is certainly in jovial spirits and far from the haughty, poised characters she has interpreted in the past (from the icy Estella in Great Expectations to a chain-smoking depressive in The Royal Tenenbaums) – or the immaculate lifestyle guru who proliferates chic advice on her website Goop. On arrival at our rendezvous point, she swerves her giant silver Lincoln Navigator half onto the pavement, slides out of the car – smirking when I laugh at her haphazard parking job – and exclaims with a wry expression: ‘What are you gonna do?’ She emerges from the car seat with a hearty grin, a mass of blonde hair still damp from the shower, and a tiny plaster half-hanging off her forehead (which I’m not even sure

she knows is there), though this touch of dishevelment in no way detracts from her beauty. She is radiant (her limpid eyes and creamy complexion as youthful as when she first moved to our shores). She is affable. And she swears like a trooper.

‘My back is fucked! And I’m starving,’ she says inside the café, taking off a black coat and sunglasses to reveal a grey Burberry cardigan over a white, ruffled Givenchy blouse, dark blue jeans and black YSL boots, an ensemble of characteristic Paltrow elegance.

Cut to 30 minutes, some amiable chat and a panini later, and she is mid-croon, passionately beating time to the rock anthem, with an invisible air drum kit.

With a recent live stage appearance at the Country Music Awards, and a brilliant cameo role as sexy substitute teacher Holly Holliday in hit show Glee – performing a ‘mash-up’ of ‘Singin’ In The Rain’ and Rihanna’s ‘Umbrella’ – which recently sparked a global sensation (there are rumours of a duet of ‘Forget You’ with Cee-Lo Green in the offing), Paltrow has undoubtedly unleashed her inner chanteuse since filming Country Strong.

‘I had the best time doing it,’ she tells me, grabbing a lock of damp hair and twisting it around her finger. ‘It’s rare that you read a role that’s so juicy and complicated, and also so sweet and human. Kelly has a good heart. I just loved how real she is.’

To prepare for the role, Paltrow immersed herself in Nashville’s food and music scenes. She spent months learning to sing country and play guitar (though she does not comment on how involved Martin was in her training). She raved about the fried chicken at local fast-food eatery Swett’s in her Goop newsletter, where her good friend and Nashville resident Karen Elson proffered advice on children’s activities and great local spas.

Paltrow even stopped working out – or tried to – because director Shana Feste wanted her to look a little more ‘worn and torn’.

‘I snuck a few dance-aerobics workouts in, but I stopped doing all the muscle work,’ Paltrow says. ‘But – and this is a testament to Tracy’s method – [my body] didn’t fall apart until six weeks later, which was annoying!’

Paltrow also sought advice from some of her Hollywood friends, including her Iron Man co-star Robert Downey Jnr (a recovering addict), on how to tackle the role.

‘Alcoholism is such a vicious cycle, and Robert really helped me understand it,’ she says. ‘I understand how you can do something bad for you, because I smoked for ever. I smoked when my dad had throat cancer. I was like, “I know this is probably going to kill me, but I’m going to smoke it anyway.” But I didn’t understand wrecking other people’s lives, and then kind of just waking up the next day and tying your shoes. So he helped me figure that out.’

(Paltrow gave up smoking when she found out she was pregnant with Apple, in 2003. ‘But I still miss it,’ she says. ‘I would kill for a cigarette right now. It sucks that they’re so terrible for you.’)

‘The two of us have a kind of sibling banter thing going on,’ Downey Jnr says of Paltrow. ‘My life is enhanced by working with her. There have been some actresses recently who have really redefined themselves, and she’s in that mould. This year, she’s made a strong impression both in the US and in the UK. Country Strong is an amazing vehicle for that. She first really sang in Duets [in 2000, directed by her father, Bruce]. She’s always had this talent (for singing).’

When it came to nailing the live performances, she turned to

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SEXY CUT-OUTS AND EXOTIC SNAKE-SKIN PRINT MAKE FOR A HIGHLY CHARGED COMBINATION Printed silk dress, £3,000; silver and crystal ‘panther’ bracelet, £830, both Roberto Cavalli. Metal necklace with horn pendant, about £275, Blumarine. Yellow gold cuff, £5,225, Elsa Peretti for Tiffany & Co

PHOTOGRAPH: XXXXXX

Paltrow sang live at the Country Music Awards last November. ‘Before I did it, I was dying. I couldn’t sleep.

I couldn’t eat. I was like, “Why would I say yes to this? What is wrong with me? What kind of maniac would agree to do this?”’

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SPRING’S GOLD ACCESSORIES ADD EXTRA ALLURE BOTH TO A BOLD PRINT AND TO SIMPLER, CLEAN WHITE LOOKS This page: silk leopard-print dress with lace detail, about £2,050, Dolce & Gabbana.

Metal collar, about £90, Kenneth Jay Lane.

Right arm, from left: metal bangle, about £290, Blumarine. Yellow gold bangle, £3,680, Gucci. Gold hinged cuff, about £85, Kenneth Jay Lane. Left arm: brass cuff, £344, Vionnet. Suede heels, £495, Christian Louboutin. Earrings, her own. Opposite: viscose dress, £595, Calvin Klein Collection.

Gold, diamond, opal and moonstone necklace, to order, Chopard. Earrings, as before

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global phenomenon Beyoncé (performance advice doesn’t come much better than that). ‘It’s one thing to play someone in a movie who sings and plays guitar and is trying to make it, but how do you play a superstar?’ says Paltrow. ‘Beyoncé is the most talented human being on the planet. She has so much mastery over what she does.

It’s not even confidence – it’s on a whole other level. It’s mindblowing. I watched her [perform] a lot to see how she did it, and I was like, “Shit! I can’t do that!”’

But Paltrow proved that she could when she performed the single ‘Country Strong’ live at the Country Music Awards last November.

‘They really milked it,’ she says with a laugh, referring to how the awards’ producers hyped up her appearance on the show for weeks in advance. ‘Two weeks before I did it, I was dying. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t eat. I was like, “Why would I say yes to this? What is wrong with me? What kind of maniac would agree to do this?”’

Despite her understandable nerves, she nailed the performance and earned a standing ovation. ‘It was one of those nights I’ll look back on and think, “Wow, I can’t believe I actually pulled that off.”’

While she received rapturous applause for the rendition, her perfectly sculpted physique – clad in a black metallic Lanvin minidress and sky-high Brian Atwood heels – did not go unnoticed. Her return to expertly toned form, was the lauded work of fitness trainer Tracy Anderson, of whom Paltrow has been number-one exponent.

The pair co-own gyms in New York and Los Angeles, as well as the imminent opening of a private training facility in London (which has sparked quasi-religious hysteria among North London mums, eager to replicate Paltrow’s miraculous post-Moses figure recovery).

‘It’s the only form of fitness that works,’ says Paltrow. ‘Whereas a normal trainer might say, “You have stomach fat, let’s do sit-ups or run on the treadmill,” Tracy is like, “Don’t ever run on the treadmill or do the elliptical, because it makes your thighs big and your butt a bad shape.” Tracy is literally a genius. She’ll look at your body and say, “You’re this type, this is what you need.” It’s hard, I know. But it works so well.’

At this point, it’s worth noting that people in the restaurant have begun to stare again. Not because Paltrow is now singing, but because of the amount of food that has accumulated on the table, including fresh mozzarella, roasted peppers, broccoli rabe, Brussels sprouts and three different types of sandwiches. ‘Yummm.

This is so exciting. Awesome!’ Paltrow says each time a new dish arrives. She moans with pleasure when she takes bites.

‘Mmmmmmmm! Oh my god, how good is this food?’

Though once famed for her macrobiotic diet, Paltrow has lately been vocal about her passion for good cuisine – both through Goop and her new cookery book, My Father’s Daughter (with recipes ranging from ‘Bruce Paltrow’s World Famous Perfect Pancakes’ to ‘Seasonal Crumble’), which is dedicated to her late father, and goes on sale in April. (In 2007, she publicly sampled culinary delights with friend and chef Mario Batali in TV documentary series Spain…On the Road Again.) Predictably, skeptics have lined up to shoot her down, but in person, her enthusiasm for food is as convincing as it is charming.

As Paltrow said earlier, it is a true testament to Anderson’s method – and the actor’s dedication to said method – that she is able to eat like this one day, and wear Stella McCartney’s skin-baring dresses

TOM FORD’S ÜBER-LUXE TAKE ON LEOPARD-PRINT SHIMMERS WITH SEQUINNED BODY-CON SEXINESS Leopard-print sequin and lace dress, about £10,360, Tom Ford. Metal necklace with horn pendant, about £275, Blumarine.

See Stockists for details. Sittings editor: Vanessa Coyle. Hair by Serge Normant for Sergenormant.com. Make-up by Leslie Lopez at the Wall Group. Manicure

by Roseann Singleton at Art Department.

Set design by Gille Mills at the Wall Group

or body-conscious Valentino gowns the next (her taut physique was no better showcased than in the jaw-droppingly saucy, sideless Pucci dress she wore to the LA premiere of Country Strong). ‘I try to work out five or six days a week,’ she says. ‘I really work my ass off. I mean, I eat like this – I eat whatever I want – so I don’t have a choice. But it’s worth it. You can’t eat whatever you want and be 38 and have two kids and look really good unless you just put the time in and do it.’

‘Are you guys hungry?’ a gawking man at the next table asks.

‘I’m kind of an eater,’ Paltrow says with a sweet smile, which transforms her for a second into a cheeky 10-year-old girl.

B

orn in Los Angeles in 1972 to Blythe Danner, a renowned stage and screen actress, and Bruce Paltrow, a TV director and producer, Paltrow landed her first role as the young Wendy in her godfather Steven Spielberg’s movie Hook in 1991, and went on to star in a chain of well-respected films, from David Fincher’s Se7en in 1995 (with co-star and then boyfriend Brad Pitt) to the WASPish Marge in The Talented Mr Ripley, to Sylvia in 2003. It was in 2002 that she met her lifelong partner, shy Coldplay frontman Chris Martin, when they got talking backstage at his gig. The pair married the following year, settling in London – where they live for the entire school year – although they still maintain homes in Manhattan and Long Island.

‘I live in London because someone wanted to marry me and he’s British and he works there,’ Paltrow says with a laugh. It was here that she met some of her closest friends, who now make up part of her life, from Stella McCartney to TV producer and owner of Princess Productions Henrietta Conrad. ‘In England, people are cool. They’re really laid-back and calm. Beyoncé did the school run with me once, and everyone was fine.

They also have really good anti-paparazzi rules. If you’re driving in a car and they make you feel freaked out, that’s against the law. They can’t put you in a magazine unless they pixellate the kids’ faces. I miss America, but I love living in the UK. Moses said to me today in Manhattan, “Why don’t we have a garden here?” I was like, “Because we’re in New York City!” We have, like, a one-foot Juliette balcony. But in England, we grow our own vegetables, we have a swing set, there’s grass where the kids can play soccer.’

One of our most-high profile couples, Paltrow and Martin are conspicuous only by their absence in the daily outpourings of British tabloid tattle. They have upheld their pact not to talk about each other in the press, or to even be photographed together, for almost a decade. ‘We’re just not – it’s just not us,’ she says of their anti-tabloid spirit. ‘We’ll go somewhere and he’ll go in, and then I’ll go in a few minutes later. Some people really make [posing together] work for them – it’s part of their thing, but I don’t know.

It’s not our thing.’

Rather than flaunting their power liaison publicly, Martin and Paltrow prefer to socialise at home in Belsize Park (actually, two conjoined houses, one formerly owned by Kate Winslet, as well as some extra garden from next-door) with both their London group and incoming friends from LA and New York, in particular Beyoncé and Jay-Z. ‘They’re our best couple friends,’ she says, leaning in close. ‘We laugh really hard. They are so CONTINUED ON PAGE 352

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‘In England, people are cool. They’re really laid-back and calm.

Beyoncé did the school run with me once and everyone was fine.

I miss America, but I love living in the UK’

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‘GWYNETH’

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funny, we have a really good time.’

So what exactly happens on such intimate soirées with the four of them, when the red wine is flowing? ‘One time, we played this really random game for the children, where we took a puppet and we were all making up these crazy characters with it. It was really funny. You don’t really think about it, but then sometimes you’re all together and someone will say something and you’re like, “Whoa, this is a crazily talented group! Jesus!”’

Aside from such cosy gatherings, Paltrow is often spotted sipping martinis with friends at the Connaught Bar, supping on antipasti at Pizza East or even at organic butcher C Lidgate, which she recommends on Goop.

‘Gwyneth knows about everything that is modern and cool,’ says friend and designer Valentino. ‘Fashion, food, training, movies, music, style… she is an encyclopaedia of modern luxury.’

This is not to say there aren’t Goop haters. ‘Any time you do anything with any degree of sincerity, people make fun of you,’ she says. ‘That’s totally fine. I don’t care. I don’t read any of it. My thing with Goop has always been, if you don’t like it, then don’t log onto it. There were a couple of times when I thought, “I’m just gonna stop doing it. People are so mean to me, I don’t want to do it.” But then I was like, “Who cares what some lame person out there says?” I was in Italy once, and this old man came up to me and said, “I had the best time in Nashville because of Goop.” And that is so worth it to me.’

And that’s why we respect Paltrow, because, despite her Hollywood status, she is also one of us, with experiences like our own; from momentary worries over the feedback to her projects, suffering with grief or postnatal depression (after Moses), to battling with postpartum weight gain, to juggling her family with her career – she is happy to share it with us. Not through the tabloids, but always in her own intelligent, elegant way.

She orders a latte made with heavy cream and glances down at her white BlackBerry, which, refreshingly, she has not looked at during the entire meal. So what’s next for the multi-tasking actress and lifestyle guru? Apart from the imminent publication of My Father’s Daughter, she’s working on a project she ‘can’t talk about yet’ for HBO (rumored to be a Marlene Dietrich biopic), and later this year, she’ll appear in Contagion, alongside Matt Damon, Jude Law and Marion Cotillard. In the meantime, she says, she’s going to take some time off to spend with her family.

‘I’ve been travelling so much, and my son has just had it with me.’ She points to a tiny scrape on her forehead. ‘Look! Moses scratched my face.’

She grins like a proud mother. The scrape is yet another tiny part of herself that she is ready to share with the world. It’s a tiny flaw, technically, but it doesn’t make her any less beautiful.

‘Country Strong’ is released nationwide on 25 March. ‘My Father’s Daughter’ (£19.31, Grand Central Publishing) is published on 13 April.

‘DIAMOND GENT’

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new generation – appeared arm-in-arm at the Brits and front-row at London Fashion Week shows, sparking gasps of envy and admiration. After they split up, Ronson briefly dated Tennessee Thomas (the English drummer of American indie band the Like), before stepping out with 26-year-old de la Baume, the smoky-eyed actor with a Bardot mane, whose quirky, quintessentially French style perfectly counters his insouciant dandyism.

Their relationship has thrilled the fashion world, which has been quick to pick up on the off-the-scale sexiness of their combined louche appeal, with the pair starring in campaigns for French clothing label Zadig & Voltaire. It is not the first time that Ronson has been lauded by the fashion quarter – Gucci’s Frida Giannini was so excited by his look that she enlisted him to design a deck shoe for the brand. Style comes easily to him, as though it were merely an expression of his instinct for retro referencing. ‘I care about fashion.

I love the way that Alain Delon dressed in those Sixties French New Wave films, but I also like John Taylor in the 1980s wearing a weird pirate costume.’

However genuine his love of fashion and his delight at having de la Baume in his life, Ronson is still cautious about the implications for his musical credibility of becoming the latest fashion It couple. ‘A couple of years ago, it felt like I was in the tabloids all the time. It gets to the point where you are more celebrity than musician,’ he says, ‘and that tends to alienate people.’ What is of paramount importance to him is to be judged solely

on his music. ‘I’m really proud of Record Collection. If I had to sit in a room and Daft Punk walked in, I wouldn’t be embarrassed to play them a song.’

His third album is all his own material, as if to counter past criticism of his production of cover tracks. Its triumphant highlight is ‘Somebody to Love Me’, on which Ronson persuaded Boy George to sing the chorus – the results are moving and somehow timeless. ‘Sometimes when you are writing a song you get this lightbulb moment,’ Ronson says. ‘That’s what I got with “Somebody to Love Me”. I had become convinced that the song’s spiritual godfather was somehow “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me”. George got into the studio, and I don’t know if I was expecting him to have his 1983 falsetto or what, but he started singing and suddenly there was this beautiful, burnt, broken, warm operatic voice. It was just one of those perfect collaborations.’

One other such perfect collaboration masterminded by Ronson was his work with Duran Duran. ‘When they first asked me [to produce the album], I thought that I was the wrong man for the job because I’d never done a rock-synth-dance record before, but then I realised that I was just being a coward,’ he says with a laugh. ‘I had an inbred streak in my DNA that knew Duran Duran like the back of my hand. I’d been listening to them since I was seven years old.’ The resulting deliciously euphoric pop is electric.

Ronson now stretches his legs and courteously makes his excuses. He has a DJ gig to go to (he still gets as scared as he did when he was young). And so the superstar DJ, Gucci designer and dapper man makes his exit. ‘I think,’ he says with a cheeky smile, ‘on my epitaph it would say, “Record producer.”’

‘GAGA FOR THE BOY’

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 294

(shot by Nick Knight) for her latest album, Born This Way. ‘I was always against working with celebrities,’ says Formichetti, who met Gaga while styling a V magazine shoot in mid 2009. ‘Celebrities have their look, so why do they need me? I’m not interested in being a wardrobe person. Gaga really intrigued me. At the beginning we were doing standard stylistmusician work. There was a performance and we planned a concept. She was the artist; I was the fashion. But for the new album, we worked on [the look] at an early stage, when she was still making the music. The fashion became part of the music, because her fashion is as important as her music.’

Drawing on his years working for leading titles including Dazed & Confused, V and US Harper’s Bazaar, Formichetti has distilled Gaga’s freak theatricality into some of the most inventive high-concept fashion and couture: at its most sublime, a custom-made McQueen dress with a gilt feather mohawk by Philip Treacy that she wore to the 2010 MTV Video Music Awards; at its most provocative, a meat dress made out of 50lb of Argentine sirloin beef for the same event. ‘Gaga told me it was the most comfortable dress she ever wore,’ Formichetti says, smiling. His collaborations with Gaga, on top of years of exemplary styling, led to his winning the Isabella Blow Award for Fashion Creator at last year’s British Fashion Awards, a special honour, he says, given his affection for Blow. ‘I loved Issy. She was always supportive of what I was doing. When I first moved to London, I tried to sneak into McQueen shows but never managed to. When Isabella arrived, I just saw this creature with this hat. For me she was the fashion show. I was really inspired by her, because she was helping others but she wasn’t a designer.’

The afternoon after the gig, outside the Lanesborough Hotel on Hyde Park Corner, where the singer’s ‘Haus of Gaga’ entourage is installed, Formichetti is dragging on a cigarette and talking fashion with two eager little monsters.

‘I always talk to the fans,’ says the stylist, who makes a point of reading every fan mail posted on his blog. ‘When you hear a teenager speak about fashion, they’re so passionate. I never got that doing editorial work.’

In a few days, Formichetti flies to Tokyo on a job for Uniqlo, one of many brands, including Prada, D&G and Missoni, that he consults for. Wherever he is, he speaks to Gaga constantly by phone, emailing approved sketches to design teams around the world. ‘You don’t have to be in one place, in an atelier, to be a designer or a stylist,’ he says. ‘With Gaga, everything is mobile, which I love.’ Looking ahead to the cover-art shoot, he says: ‘The new album is taken to a whole new level. You see more of her, what’s inside.

It’s how she was born.’ Does that mean the real Gaga? He laughs. ‘Everyone is always asking who the real Gaga is, what she’s like behind it all. I’m like, “that’s her”. She has not been created by someone. She is how she seems.

That’s why she can go on for ever.’

INSPIRATION of the YEAR

NATALIA Supermodel, mother and multi-million-pound charity fundraiser, NATALIA VODIANOVA is an unstoppable force of nature. Here, artist DINOS CHAPMAN casts the fearless campaigner as Joan of Arc, as close friend DIANE VON FURSTENBERG interviews her exclusively for Bazaar Photographs by MICHELANGELO DI BATTISTA. Styled by SOPHIA NEOPHITOU-APOSTOLOU

‘Before the shoot, Natalia and I talked about Russia, and the photography used for propaganda purposes by the regime in the 1930s. It portrayed powerful people from ordinary backgrounds as part of the communist iconography that represented an ideal. It is in the same way that Joan of Arc represents an ideal; she is the archetypal strong woman. In France they often nominate a beautiful woman to be their national figure, and I think Natalia would be that person in Russia. She is a female symbol of might and resilience, working for the good of her country.

‘Luc Besson made his film about Joan of Arc in 1997.

Like Leeloo in ‘The Fifth Element’, she possesses an ethereal strength. I wanted the shoot to be like a science-fiction film between takes. In her golden armour, Natalia is almost robotic; she is beyond- or post-human.

‘We shot at Battersea Power Station because I wanted the landscape to be futuristic, an apocalyptic wasteland (in some ways, it represents the ruins of post-Soviet Russia).

We used mirrors to distort the background and heighten the sense of menace. The reflection looks like a heat ripple, as if she’s just stepped out of a force field. She is the post-apocalyptic avenging angel.’

DINOS CHAPMAN

HEADY METAL Natalia Vodianova wears embroidered sequin dress, from a selection, Armani Privé.

Previous page: metal armour; corset; embroidered net dress, all from a selection, Dior Haute Couture. Metal and perspex belt, from a selection, Scott Wilson for Peter Pilotto

Diane von Furstenberg: I’m so pleased you’ve been awarded Inspiration of the Year. Congratulations. And you’ve done a shoot for the cover of this issue inspired by Joan of Arc? But she gets burned. I think you’ve a more hopeful future than she did [laughs].

Natalia Vodianova: I was a very contemporary Joan of Arc… DVF: You are a warrior like her.

NV: I am a warrior of light! [laughs]. Joan of Arc is an icon of female strength, but in Luc Besson’s film, Milla Jovovich’s Joan was fragile at the same time. Besson has a great vision of women.

DVF: But what I find extraordinary about you, Natalia, is your strength. You are one of the strongest, if not the strongest, women I have ever known.

Do you remember when we first met? It was in 2002, when you opened and closed the show at my headquarters on 12th Street in New York. From the moment I first saw you, I glimpsed this incredible positive energy and freshness. You were like a new shoot of bamboo, all fresh and green, but very strong. When we got to know each other better a few years later, we completely identified with each other on every level.

NV: Yes, that was after I came to you in the aftermath of the Beslan school siege in Russia. I’d sat in front of the TV in Moscow for two days watching all this uncensored footage. It was very painful. I was flying from Moscow to New York, and on that plane journey I decided I had to do something. I wanted to increase awareness of what had happened, but also help raise funds to build a play park for the children who had survived. I was thinking about who could help me – someone who could relate to Russian children and who I knew and could trust. I immediately thought of you, though I didn’t even know you that well. I knew that, when we’d met, there had been a real connection, and I had such admiration for you, not only as a strong woman but someone who is compassionate.

DVF: When you came to me and asked me for help, I said: ‘OK. I’ll help, but I’m not quite sure what to do. You can do anything you want to at 12th Street though.’ So, with a little help, you

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H A R P E R’ S B A Z A A R

| December 2010

quickly pulled together this extraordinary party with ice sculptures and beautiful people and paparazzi. It was pretty amazing. It raised $350,000. Since then, we’ve shared so many intimate life moments and adventures. We even climbed a volcano together last year.

NV: That trip was one of the most beautiful journeys I’ve ever experienced, going around Indonesia on your boat, seeing the Komodo Islands, climbing volcanoes and diving. But also it felt like a family trip, with you and Barry [Diller, von Furstenberg’s husband], your children Alex and Tatiana, and me and Justin [Portman, Vodianova’s husband].

DVF: That’s when I mentioned that I was going to Russia to do publicity for my two stores, and you came up with the idea of doing a retrospective show of my life there. It was such a big success and, since then, that show has gone to Sao Paulo and to China. I owe you for that idea. Then of course there was the Love Ball in London last February. You were so anxious beforehand.

NV: It was really nerve-racking. I’m always really nervous right before I do something, but then I just do it.

DVF: You were so proud that you’d spent all day preparing a speech for the evening, but then I told you to just throw it out and speak from the heart. And you did, and it was very good!

NV: It’s true that when you speak with your heart you are living in the moment. The Naked Heart Foundation is very personal to me.

I was nervous because, with my job as a model, I don’t have to ask anything of anyone, but when I have to ask people to support the charity, it’s terrifying.

DVF: But you raised £1.2 million. And the Love Ball in Moscow last year raised £4.3 million. It’s incredible what you have achieved.

You had this vision to create playgrounds for children in Russia, and now they actually exist.

NV: By the end of this year we’ll have spent all the money we raised, but we’ll have built 56 playgrounds and play parks.

DVF: So what are your plans for Naked Heart next?

NV: We’re working on something new – an important document we want to present to the government that might change the lives of a lot of people in Russia. But I can’t say any more. And we’re organising fundraising events in Abu Dhabi at the end of the year.

DVF: And you also have a new film project. I always wanted you to become an actress.

NV: I’m about to start filming. It’s an adaptation of Belle du Seigneur by Albert Cohen, one of the best known and best loved novels in France.

DVF: I think it’s fantastic, and I know you’ll make a wonderful actress because you’re not afraid.

NV: A good actor has to be in touch with their emotional side, and I think I am quite in touch with mine. When I read my lines, it all just comes to the surface. It’s a love story of a very strong girl.

DVF: You are young, but you’ve had a big life. You have experienced so many things. Everything.

NV: I wouldn’t change anything in my past. Even though there were things that were difficult in my childhood, I believe that if you change one little event it changes the whole flow of your destiny.

DVF: All you have to do is scratch a little bit beneath the surface and the emotion is there. That’s why you have always been such an interesting model – not just because you are beautiful, but because you can bring out emotion. I have incredible belief in you. You are still very young, you’ve done so much already, but I know you will continue to move mountains.

See an exclusive behind-the-scenes interview with Natalia and Dinos Chapman at the shoot at harpersbazaar.co.uk www.harpersbazaar.co.uk

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atalia Vodianova’s considerable achievements over the years confirm one essential truth: her child-like beauty belies a highly honed determination to succeed. The 28-year-old surmounted her impoverished childhood in an industrial city in Russia to become one the world’s top models, juggling her career with the demands of being a mother of three and starring in her first major screen role, as Jonathan Rhys Meyers’ aristocratic lover in the upcoming 1930s thriller Belle de Seigneur.

Even more inspiring are her achievements as a campaigner. In response to the Beslan school siege, Vodianova set up the Naked Heart Foundation in 2005, raising millions to provide safe playgrounds for deprived children across Russia. This year, she brought her annual Love Ball to London, where she raised £1.2 million.

Among the guests was Vodianova’s close friend, the designer Diane von Furstenberg, herself an ardent charity campaigner and a woman as accomplished and resilient as the supermodel. Who better to interview Bazaar’s Inspiration of the Year about the difficulties and rewards of giving back, and much more besides.

SHIMMER OF LIGHT Sequin silk gown, from a selection, Balmain.

Metal and perspex belt, from a selection, Scott Wilson for Peter Pilotto. Feathered ankle boots, from a selection, Alexander McQueen.

Previous page: tulle and silk skirt; feather jacket, both vintage Alexander McQueen

GOLD GLORY Silk corseted body; sequin and crystal embroidered jacket; metal belt, all from a selection, Givenchy Haute Couture by Riccardo Tisci. Snakeskin boots, from a selection, Alexander McQueen.

Opposite: embroidered sequin dress, from a selection, Armani PrivĂŠ. Metal cuff, from a selection, Scott Wilson for Peter Pilotto

NATALIA’S WORLD

What was the highlight of 2010 for you?

‘The Love Ball in London.’

Biggest challenge of the year?

‘Finding time for myself.’

What was the most invaluable advice you've ever been given?

‘Morning brings wisdom.’

What is your enduring philosophy?

‘It too shall pass.’

Success is...

‘living in the now.’

What is your secret weapon

‘Forgiveness.’

GILTY SPLENDOUR Embroidered lace dress; sequin and crystal embroidered jacket, both from a selection, Givenchy Haute Couture by Riccardo Tisci. Gold-plated brass necklaces, £320 each, Maria Francesca Pepe. Feathered ankle boots, from a selection, Alexander McQueen. See Stockists for details.

Hair by Nicolas Jurnjack at Management+Artists for www.styleforhair.com. Manicure by Lucie Pickavance at Caren, using Chanel Spring 11. All make-up, Guerlain.

Set design by David White at the Magnet Agency

Nata lia Vodianova wears mesh swea ter, £685 ; toile de laine trousers, about £415 , both Balencia ga.

Trainers, £85, Nike

V

PHOTOGRAPHS BY JEAN-BAPTISTE MONDINO

STYLED BY CATHY KASTERINE

It is a rare woman who can switch from mother to marathon runner to model in the space of a few hours. But Natalia Vodianova’s fragile beauty belies her inner strength. By SARA PARKER BOWLES

here is an obscure Russian video provider on the internet called Ochevidets.ru which, by its own definition, ‘offers video clips of celebrities, animals, crime and humour’. Sandwiched between a short film of a parrot attacking an Alsatian and a drunkdriving young man trying to make a phone call with a packet of Belomorkanal cigarettes is, inexplicably, a mesmerising picture of an eight-year-old Natalia Vodianova. Of course, modelling is what Natalia V (or ‘Super Nova’ or ‘Natural V’, as she’s known in the fashion industry) does for a living, but this picture is different. This grainy black and white portrait of Vodianova’s now world-famous face comes complete with all the hallmarks of a Soviet state mugshot: she is dressed in a white shirt with a starched collar, hair scraped back in a regulation bun, against a background of ugly institutional curtains, the only concession to a personal touch being a pair of cheap little plastic button earrings. Her exquisite baby face looks tired and wan – even a little haunted – and the look in those lioness eyes, framed by untamed eyebrows, is more determined and fierce than the look in an eight-year-old’s eyes ever should be.

Vodianova’s remarkable rags-to-riches story has been well documented, but this photograph is perhaps a gateway to understanding what life must have really been like for the little Russian girl and what it took, first to survive, and then to triumph. A quick recap: Natalia Mikhailovna Vodianova was born on 28 February 1982 in the industrial city of Nizhny Novgorod, aka ‘the Detroit of Russia’ (formerly Gorky, in the Soviet era, 250 miles east of Moscow). Hers was a poor,

Vodianova became the family’s main breadwinner with her precocious business sense, setting up her own fruit stall aged 15

Tulle dress, £2,135, Proenza Schouler.

Diamond earrings, £3,800, Tiffany & Co. Trainers, £80, Nike

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T

struggling single-parent family; she is the eldest of three sisters, one of whom, Oksana, is severely disabled. At the age of seven, Vodianova started working on her mother’s fruit stall, in addition to being her sister’s sole caretaker. She eventually became the family’s main breadwinner when she showed a precocious nose for business, setting up a stall of her own aged 15. Unsurprisingly, her education suffered and she dropped out of school altogether when, that same year, she was hired by a modelling agency and brought to Paris.

By the time she was 17, Vodianova had been signed to Viva Model Management, and she went on to open shows for every significant fashion designer, and secure game-changing advertising contracts from Calvin Klein, Louis Vuitton, Chanel, Stella McCartney and Etam. Today, she is a globally recognised fashion powerhouse, ranked third in the model world, according to earnings, by Forbes magazine. She currently lives in a beautiful apartment on the Left Bank of Paris with her three children and her boyfriend of two years, Antoine Arnault, the CEO of the French luxury menswear brand Berluti and son of Bernard, the owner of the luxury conglomerate LVMH and the 10th-richest man in the world.

‘I grew up in Russia in the late Eighties and Nineties, and that meant serious food shortages for all,’ says Vodianova. ‘Our family life was tough for various reasons: my father left my mother when I was still a baby.’ Her mother remarried, but husband number two also left, when Natalia was six, after the arrival of Oksana, who has cerebral palsy and autism. The one boyfriend who did end up staying was a heavy drinker whom Vodianova hated. ‘My sister and I shared a bed until I was 15,’ she says. ‘And the whole family shared one room.’ School proved a constant challenge: on the rare occasions when Natalia wasn’t in charge of the market stall and did have time to do her schoolwork, Oksana would destroy her books. ‘She would eat them or smear something on them and so I never had any proper homework and my books were always in a state.’ Of her father’s absence, she says: ‘At the time I didn’t really understand, it wasn’t really something I questioned. Lots of my friends had absent parents or horrible parents or alcoholic parents, but of course today I realise that I missed out on having a father to be a little girl with.’

Vodianova’s grandparents were her saviours: ‘When things got really tough at home, they took me away.’ She relished the life they provided. It is Vodianova’s loving grandmother, Larisa, whom she credits with her success, and it is also from her grandmother that Vodianova learned to love and appreciate beautiful things. ‘Everything had to be perfect with my grandmother – she always dressed immaculately and everyone had to behave. She had bright red hair down to her hips that she’d put in a huge chignon, and wore bright red lipstick. She had about three pairs of shoes that she polished and took great care of.

‘My grandparents had a very different life to ours,’ she continues. ‘They weren’t rich, by any means – they both worked in the same factory all their lives – but there was consistency and they just made their home nice.

They always had friends around for dinner and my grandmother was a superwoman who made everything clean and beautiful. It was a really funny contrast; my mother left me to my own devices and let me live my life

matching skirt, £950 Viscose and polyester top, £1,140;

JEAN-BAP TISTE MONDINO

, both Céline. Trainers, £90, Nike

her very best in pictures where the hair and make-up are minimal.

She is also fast – photographers get the pictures they want in very few takes. There are a lot of pretty girls in this industry, but Natalia’s drive, professionalism and natural beauty give her the edge. To me, Natalia looked at her most beautiful immediately after she’d finished the Paris half-marathon. If you can look that good after completing a marathon, you are a true beauty.’

Vodianova’s magical baby-woman appeal has led her to work with some of the world’s most celebrated photographers, including Paolo Roversi, Bruce Weber, Mario Testino, Mert and Marcus and, more recently, Jean-Baptiste Mondino, for this story.

‘The first time I saw Natalia was the end of a long day of casting,’ says Cathy Kasterine, Bazaar ’s fashion director-at-large. ‘But when she walked in, we were blown away and knew we were looking at something special.’

Diane von Furstenberg, a close friend, adds: ‘Natalia is sincere and has a joie de vivre that comes through in everything she does… she is the definition of a natural.’

As for Vodianova’s own definition of her personal style, she describes it as ‘bohemian’ – fashion as reinvention and fun. And it works like a charm: she can pull off almost anything, from extravagant red frothy Valentino Haute Couture cocktail dresses to sporty, sleek white Céline trousers and rock ’n’ roll black Givenchy; and she also looks great in jeans and diamonds.

Today she is wearing white wool Fendi trousers, a yellow knit top from a charity shop in LA and some pretty pink flats, ‘which I bought from India for £4’. She has just returned from Jaipur, where she was shooting the Shalimar campaign for Guerlain. We are sitting in Vodianova’s Paris office, where she works on the Naked Heart Foundation, a non-profit organisation she founded in 2004. The immediate inspiration for its creation was the Beslan school siege that year, which made her question the psychology behind her own childhood and success. The initial idea was simple yet lovely: to provide playgrounds for children in deprived areas so that even the poorest have somewhere fun to go. Almost 10 years on, the Naked Heart Foundation has operations in Moscow, Nizhny Novgorod, London and Paris. With the help of several glamorous fundraisers and Love Balls (held at the Tsaritsyno Palace in Moscow; in the French town of Crespières; at Valentino’s eight-bedroom Louis XIII castle just outside Paris; at the Roundhouse in London; and, most recently, at the magnificent Opéra in Monte Carlo), it has built more than 100 playgrounds around Russia.

‘Since I established Naked Heart, I have thought of modelling as my fun “day job”,’ says Vodianova. ‘I love it because it’s such a contrast to what I really do in life, but I only really give my head and my gut to the work I do for charity. Fashion provides a kind of relief, and as a woman, of course, I love to dress up. I love beautiful things and I love creative people and it was such a fun experience for me in the beginning, but I always knew there had to be something more. With Naked Heart, I found that something more.’

‘Natalia looked at her most beautiful immediately after she’d finished the Paris half-marathon.

A sign of true beauty’

05, both Alpaca top, £602 ; wool skirt, £1,5 earrings, Calv in Klein Collection. Diamond Nike £85, , ners Trai Co. & ny £3,800, Tiffa

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as I wanted, because I had so many responsibilities at home, so she kind of treated me like an adult. My granny would do completely the opposite: I would be able to be a child. She would buy and make me clothes that I only wore with her, like beautiful nightgowns – I was her little doll. At their house, I would be woken up with pancakes in the mornings and taken care of – she was like a god to me.’

Had it not been for Larisa’s encouragement and involvement, Vodianova might never have left Nizhny Novgorod. Most of her weekends involved going to the local disco dressed in Adidas leggings and crop tops and dancing to the Pet Shop Boys. ‘For a few years in a row, from 15 years old until I left when I was 17, I went to this one local nightclub every Friday, Saturday and Sunday,’ she says.

‘I would sometimes dance until 5am and then work all day on the fruit stall, not sleeping for days in a row.’ It was her boyfriend at the time – a 15-year-old parttime model and debt collector called Sergei – who first suggested that Vodianova go to an international casting at the local Russian version of a finishing school. ‘It was a hideous cattle-market process, but they noticed me and that made me happy,’ she says. But it was her grandmother who actually filled in all the forms and kept in contact with the international scout. ‘She was a very modern woman,’ says Natalia.

Once in Paris, Vodianova went for a viewing at Viva Model Management, with whom she has been ever since. From the moment she walked into the agency’s offices, their excitement was palpable: ‘My scout had taken me there with another girl and it was actually her who they were meant to see, but as I sat there waiting, people kept popping their heads around the corner and looking at me and saying to each other, “You’ve got to come and see this girl.”

It was such a nice feeling, and probably the first time that I believed something significant might happen for me.’

The Viva founder Cyril Brule remembers the day well. ‘The moment Natalia walked into my office, I knew she had everything required to make it big,’ he says. ‘I could see that right away, and that doesn’t happen often. She was obviously beautiful – she reminded me of Romy Schneider – but there was also something so winningly childlike about her. She has this natural beauty, and I think she looks

JEAN-BAP TISTE MONDINO

Jacquard top; matching trousers, both from a selection, Stella McCartn

ey. Trainers, £150, Puma. Diamond earrings, £3,800, Tiffany & Co

JEAN-BAP TISTE MONDINO

‘The Naked Heart Foundation is spectacular,’ says her long-time friend Stella McCartney. ‘The work she has done has changed so many lives. Natalia is a smart cookie, she knows how to get what she wants for a cause that deserves all she has to give.’

Up close, Vodianova is less strangely beautiful and more naturally pretty than I expected. Make-up-free and youthful – she regularly plays with her hair, tying it up in a knot and letting it go again – her long, slim limbs are crossed neatly beneath her and those lithe dancer’s arms rest elegantly across her body as she speaks.

At 31, she still has the foal-like body of a teenager; although, like everything else in her life, she came to marriage and motherhood early. In 2001, Vodianova was just 19 when she married her first husband, the Honourable Justin Portman, the third son of the late Ninth Viscount Portman (whose family own more than 100 acres of central London, including Portman Square, Marylebone and part of Oxford Street). That same year, she gave birth to their first son, Lucas (now 11); their daughter, Neva (now seven) followed, and soon after came their third child, Viktor (now five). In June 2011, Vodianova and Portman announced they were separating. ‘I was incredibly young and naive when I married Justin,’ she says. ‘I was just at that stage of my life when I believed I knew everything already. Motherhood has been everything I wanted it to be, but at the beginning it was hard. I hated the idea of anyone looking after my child – I’m a very proud person – so I did it all on my own at first. But then I started getting work again, so I had to look for professional help. Poor Lucas – in the first three months of his life I went through about 30 nannies. I hated the idea of a stranger looking after my child. I was lonely and I was sleep-deprived.

It’s only now that I understand how important it is to have help – just to get some sleep and regain a sense of normality.’ I ask how, if she was lonely, their marriage survived over nine years. ‘By then, I had a fully fledged family with him, I had lots of things in place.’ How is your relationship today? ‘OK,’ she says. When does he see the kids? ‘We split holidays and he gets to take them away when they aren’t on holiday with me.’

Two years ago, Vodianova fell in love with Antoine Arnault (they had known each other slightly through her Louis Vuitton campaigns) and she and her children relocated to Paris to live with him. ‘Of course, coming to Paris was a difficult decision,’ says Vodianova. ‘It was hard for me to leave my idyllic country-bumpkin set-up [the converted Sussex millhouse she bought with Portman] to come to a city, but in the end it was the right thing to do, for me and Antoine above all, but just for all of us, to get out of that sleepy environment in which we were completely protected from the world in a little bubble. It was the right decision for the children, too; they were ready to get into a city environment. We do miss the countryside, but Antoine’s mummy has a beautiful place in Roubaix. It’s two hours outside Paris, but we try to go there as often as possible.’

When they’re not in the French countryside, Vodianova and Arnault ‘never talk about work’ and seem to have created an

sers, Cotton top, £1,040; matching trou ok Reeb £55, , ners Trai i.

Fend both , £610

‘Coming to Paris was a difficult decision. It was hard to leave my idyllic countrybumpkin set-up to come to a city’

effortless, fun family life together, going out for dinner with the kids: ‘We love L’Entrecôte on Rue Marbeuf in the Eighth Arrondissement – it’s all very democratic and you have to queue for ages, but it’s one of our favourites.’ Nights spent at home involve devouring dulce de leche ice-cream and Downton Abbey box sets. They are clearly very much in love: over lunch at the Harper’s Bazaar shoot, Natalia flushes with pleasure every time his name is mentioned, and Arnault’s message of support on her Facebook page after she successfully completed the Paris half-marathon, for the third year in a row, speaks volumes: ‘So impressed!

Fantastic race, baby! I testify 100 per cent to no training before! Only ice-cream and good French food.’

Vodianova may be fashion’s quintessential poster girl, and it doesn’t look like the French are going to relinquish her any time soon, but Russia remains in her soul. Larisa frequently comes to stay with her in Paris for long stretches of time, and watched her granddaughter open (and close) the Givenchy show earlier this year (a few hours after she so effortlessly finished that Paris half-marathon).

Although she has never been able to persuade her mother to leave Nizhny Novgorod, they holiday together every year with Vodianova’s children and Natalia has revolutionised the lives of her family: her youngest sister is at an English boarding school and currently excelling in her GCSEs; her mother has a new apartment, a bodyguard and driver and full-time help with Oksana. Even Natalia’s absent father, who made a reappearance once she became successful, gets some help and time from her. ‘He’s not really in my life – I think being courteous is just enough for him,’ she says, with a slightly steely look in her eyes. ‘But for the rest of my life I will always invest in my family, because they invested in me when I was a little girl.’ All of which takes me back to the photograph of Vodianova that I can’t erase from my mind: the determined little girl with such fierce eyes… And I wonder if there has ever been a better return on an investment.

JEAN-BAP TISTE MONDINO

Mesh vest, £120, Luca s Hugh. Satin skirt, £685, Ports 1961. Diamond earri ngs, £3,800, Tiffa ny & Co. Trainers for deta ils. Hair by Odile Gilbert at , £85, Nike. See Stockists L’Atelier 68. Make-up by Carole Colo mba ni at Jed Root, using Guerlain . Set desig n by Hervé Sauvage.

Stylist’s assistant: Benjamin Cana res.

Model: Nata lia Vodianova at Viva London

JEAN-BAP TISTE MONDINO

KATE

The past year has not been easy for Britainâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s peerless queen of Hollywood. But now, emerging from heartbreak with a new film and a new relationship, Kate Winslet is once again at her straight-talking, world-conquering best. The Oscar-winning beauty tells JUSTINE PICARDIE about family harmony, fighting for causes and getting her power back Photographs by TOM MUNRO Styled by CATHY KASTERINE

he last thing you want to do in an interview is make someone cry; and yet here we are, five minutes into the conversation, and Kate Winslet is in tears. She’s not the weeping type – I’ve seen her on and off, over the years, and always been struck by her good humour and stoicism – but something I’ve said has just touched a nerve. It was along the lines of how the end of a marriage is another form of bereavement, with every loss a reminder of a previous grief; at which point her lovely face crumpled.

For at this time in her life – on the eve of turning 36, twice divorced, and the mother of two children – Winslet knows what it means to suffer such losses, of the kind that are also entwined with great love.

Her first love, Stephen Tredre, an actor and screenwriter, died of bone cancer in 1997 (she missed the premiere of Titanic to be at his funeral), and her divorce from Sam Mendes, though publicly amicable, is sufficiently recent to be raw. ‘As a woman, especially when you have children, one gets so good at soldiering on – almost too good,’ she says, wiping her eyes, and visibly pulling herself together again. ‘I realise that I probably had very few moments of allowing that sadness to emerge – I kept pushing it away, not even really sharing it a huge amount with friends. Because you know what it’s like – as soon as you open that can of worms, it’s so fucking big, you wish you’d never taken the goddamn lid off.’

I’m so sorry, I say, putting my hand on her arm, trying to apologise; because apart from anything else, she’s got to be photographed straight after this interview, and there’s a team of people in the adjoining room, waiting for her to emerge looking like a movie star.

‘It’s OK,’ she says, suddenly overcome with sobs again, ‘but you see what I mean, when someone is kind… Clearly, I don’t do this often enough.’ She clears her throat and tries again. ‘I’ve had to remind myself to have those moments of being able to have a fucking good cry, but it did take someone putting their hand on me – a gay male friend, actually, who put his hand on my shoulder, and said, “It’s OK, you can cry about this, and maybe you should.”’

By ‘this’, she means her separation from Mendes last year, which was conducted with dignity (no accusations, no recriminations), despite widespread media speculation that Mendes was ‘close’ to British actress Rebecca Hall, who was part of his Bridge Project theatre company in 2009. As it turns out, a friendship between Hall and Mendes continues, albeit managed with a similar regard for discretion. Of course, the unhappy reality of any divorce is always messier and more devastatingly painful on the inside than can ever be conveyed by an outside view. For all that, Kate and Sam had seemed such a golden couple – married for seven years, in a loving romance that began after her separation from her first husband (director Jim Threapleton, father of her soon-to-be 11-year-old daughter Mia); a wonderfully British success story, negotiating the minefield that is Hollywood celebrity with graceful

dexterity. They had a son together – Joe, born at the end of 2003 – and joint professional success in the Oscar-nominated Revolutionary Road, which portrayed the traumatic unravelling of a marriage while also reuniting Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio for the first time since the colossal success of Titanic. But it was for The Reader that Winslet won her Academy Award for best actress, in a demanding role as a former Nazi concentration-camp guard – competing against herself, as it were, in her husband’s film (although in the event, she also won a Golden Globe for Revolutionary Road ). It remains unclear what, if any, part this potential conflict of interests might have played in destabilising the partnership between Winslet and Mendes; suffice to say, theirs are equally flourishing careers, with all the attendant expectations, tensions and rewards.

Eighteen months after the agonising end of her marriage, Winslet is on remarkably good form, despite her unexpected tears (unlike most of us, she seems not to get snotty or swollenfaced). She’s been up since 6am with the kids, and then Mia was sick in the car on the way to the shoot, so in all the circumstances, you’d expect a touch of exhaustion to be evident. But no, her blue eyes are clear, and she is looking sexier than I’ve ever seen her, golden legs stretching from beneath little black shorts. In the flesh, she is curvy, while also toned (her lean muscles the result of ‘a bit of Pilates and running’, she says); rather thinner than she was as a girl in her early Hollywood outings, or as a teenager, when school bullies called her ‘Blubber’, but not too skinny either. Her outfit is low-key – characteristic of her generally monochrome wardrobe: a grey Helmut Lang jacket over a black Topshop vest, Lanvin flats on her feet (‘I only ever wear black or white, with a few neutrals’) – but her acces-

‘I’ve had to remind myself to have moments to have a fucking good cry. A friend said, “It’s OK to cry about this, and maybe you should”’

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www.harpersbazaar.co.uk

21ST-CENTURY BOMBSHELL This page: Kate Winslet wears black sheer chiffon blouse, £246, Diane von Furstenberg. Black bra, her own.

Previous page: lace dress, about £1,160; bra, about £230, both Dolce & Gabbana ▼

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sories provide clues to her A-list status. Her belt is by St John, for whom she is starring in the current autumn/winter campaign (sultry in sweater-dresses that cling in all the right places); her watch is vintage Longines (she is a brand ambassador); she wears an Hermès strap around her wrist, and a rose-gold necklace by New York artist-turned-jeweller James Colarusso.

It’s the first time I’ve seen Winslet since she was in London in February 2010, and the strain was evident back then; although she was too discreet to discuss the crisis engulfing her marriage, she did confess to being hugely stressed. The difference in her now is significant: she is more relaxed, and has the glow of a woman who is desired and prized. Her boyfriend, Louis Dowler, is not up for discussion, but he does arrive towards the end of the Bazaar shoot – and yes, he is every bit as chiselled and handsome as in his modelling portfolio, evidently intelligent and well-mannered; their chemistry is instantly apparent to anyone in the room. According to the photographer Tom Munro, who has worked with Winslet on a number of previous occasions, ‘she’s been through a lot in the last couple of years’, but has emerged with more confidence than before. ‘She seems to be very in touch with her femininity and sexuality, and enjoying it.’

‘I do truly feel that I’m back, I do actually have that feeling very strongly. I think it will probably shift and change, as these things do – because it does take a long time to get your power back’

IN THE SPOT LIGHT Sheer cotton blouse, £900, Stella McCartney

Or in her own, more uncertain words – a little further into our conversation – ‘I do truly feel that I’m back, I do actually have that feeling very strongly. I think it will probably shift and change, as these things do – because it does take a long time to get your power back.’ As a mother (‘an incredibly good hands-on mother’, according to Thandie Newton, who has known her since Mia was a baby), she seems more than able to put her children above the sense of grievance that can be so toxic in the fall-out from any divorce. ‘One focuses so much on making sure that the kids are all right, and they really truly are,’ she says. ‘The thing that I am very grateful for in this situation, weirdly, is that I have been through it before, and somehow, we did OK. Everybody’s fine, Mia’s fantastic; she couldn’t be better. My situation isn’t what I could ever have imagined it would be – but [it means] I am capable of understanding that family is a group of people, all of whom love each other… and all that matters is that the children know where their home is, and who loves and supports them, and that is it.’

Mia’s father has remarried, with another baby, and relationships within the blended, extended family appear to be good. As Winslet observes: ‘Those days of every child having a mummy and daddy who lived at home – Daddy went to work, and Mummy stayed at home and took care of everyone – those days have almost gone, and it’s so much more unconventional now.’ She no longer wears the diamond eternity wedding ring from Sam, but his photographs remain in the apartment they shared in New York, and he was there

Paltrow, Matt Damon and Jude Law), Winslet remains the consummate professional, while also drawing on ‘the emotional intensity of the last year’. ‘She wouldn’t dream of burdening you with anything of her personal life, but there is an emotionality that is right in front of you, and very accessible, which is wonderful for a director. She’s also funny and bright, and she absolutely recognises the humour in any situation. So when we were filming Contagion, we’ve got her lying in a trench – a mass grave that’s been dug in the middle of the city – and it’s December, it’s cold, and we’re panning towards her face. Suddenly, she says, “Do I look thin in this shot?” Everyone starts laughing – and that’s classic Kate.’

Soderbergh clearly admires her intelligence – ‘It’s hard to fake smart on screen’ – and her remarkable fearlessness. ‘She will jump off the cliff, if that’s part of the job description, but she’s also unafraid of the ageing process, which means that she is available to filmmakers in a way that many other actresses aren’t. She’s never started a sentence with “I don’t want to play… ” or “I don’t think people want to see me as…”’ In this, she has much in common with her longstanding friend Emma Thompson (whose sister she played in Sense and Sensibility) or Judi Dench (with whom she shared the role of Iris Murdoch in Iris), which may in turn suggest a link with her own family’s rather British theatrical tradition – both her parents were jobbing actors, and her maternal grandparents founded the Reading Repertory Theatre – rather than the glossier Hollywood model.

Dougray Scott, her co-star in Enigma, makes a similar point: ‘She has no fear, no vanity, so she was able to play a dowdy, bespectacled character and really inhabit the part.’ Which is not to say that Winslet can’t do full-on glamour – just look at her ads for Lancôme; although the brand’s president, Youcef Nabi, observes that an element of her charm is her ability to convey accessibility, rather than unattainable otherness. ‘I believe it’s precisely because she doesn’t fit the Hollywood stereotype that Kate is so appealing to the public. She is extremely feminine, and perfectly at ease with her shape, and radiates with confidence, authenticity and passion. Women can identify with her.’

A similar sense of authenticity is evident in her narration of a moving documentary about autism (A Mother’s Courage: Talking Back to Autism, a project that inspired Winslet to set up a charity, the Golden Hat Foundation, which aims to improve the lives of people living with autism around the world). It’s a big leap from selling beauty products to charitable campaigns – but if anyone can bridge the two, it’s Winslet; indeed, she has already collaborated with Lancôme on a Golden Hat cosmetics range in aid of the foundation. She will doubtless bring an equally deft touch to her promotion of Carnage, Roman Polanski’s new movie (an adaptation of an award-winning stage play about two New York couples brought together by a playground fight between their children, and the subsequent breakdowns of their marriages).

‘One thing I will say about Sam and me is that it’s fine, it’s really fine. I’m not going to shit-fling; there’s no point. It’s been equally hard for him’

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Appearances can be deceptive, of course, especially in the movie industry, but it nevertheless looks as though Kate Winslet is in a pretty good place right now. She was on magnificent form in Mildred Pierce – the acclaimed HBO television series with 22 Emmy nominations – in scenes that she readily admits drew on her own recent experience of marital breakdown, and life as a newly single woman.

‘There are some things that you act, and there are some things that you just know, and you revisit in order to convey a certain emotion,’ she says. ‘There’s a scene where Mildred and CONTINUED ON PAGE 280 www.harpersbazaar.co.uk

TAKE THE PLUNGE Satin charmeuse bodysuit dress (tucked in), £450, Michael Kors. Wool skirt, £349, St John at Harrods. Bra, her own.

White gold and diamond bracelets, from a selection, De Beers. See Stockists for details. Hair by Nicola Clarke at Clarkey Productions for John Frieda. Make-up by Miranda Joyce at Streeters London, using Lancôme. Manicure by Trish Lomax at Premier Hair and Make-Up. Set design: Vincent Olivieri at the Magnet Agency.

Stylist’s assistant: Benjamin Canares

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with Kate and the children on Christmas Day last year (always the mark of a cordial understanding between ex-partners). Both have remained as discreet as they were on the day that their separation was announced last year – an agreement they reached together.

‘One thing I will say about me and Sam is that it’s fine, it’s really fine.

I’m not going to shit-fling, there’s no point in even going there.

It is what it is… We’re grown-ups at the end of the day, and however hard it’s been for me, it’s been equally hard for him. And we have a child together who we both love – and raising him together, jointly and without any conflict, is absolutely key. It’s the only way to do it, and I’ve really learnt that with Mia.’ When she talks like this, there is none of the subliminal subtext that can emerge from between the lines of a high-profile divorce; instead, she is as straightforward as it is possible to be in the circumstances: ‘I have always wanted my children’s dads to be involved in their lives. Not just the day-to-day aspect, but the emotional shifts that they go through, when little things pop up – they need to be included, absolutely, and for the children to feel that they are. That’s the way it’s always been with Mia, and it’s the way it is now with Joe. There’s no way that I’m going to allow my children to be fucked up because my marriages haven’t worked out.

I so wish that that wasn’t the case – that that hadn’t happened in my life – but it has, so I will make the best of it – and I am.’

Where one can see evidence of her heartbreak, however, is in her work, which has deepening resonance – and this for a woman already regarded by many as the finest actress of her generation.

According to Steven Soderbergh, who directed Winslet in his latest thriller, Contagion (alongside a stellar cast that includes Gwyneth

‘KATE’

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Bert are getting divorced and they sit down together, because they’ve got to settle on a cause. The first stage of my divorce with Sam came through on that day – on the very day that we were shooting. So that scene is nothing to do with acting.’ It is an immensely powerful and touching episode – redolent of grief and regret, with an unexpected glance of mutual understanding – as is the first passionate encounter between Mildred Pierce and her new lover, played by Guy Pearce. ‘I was nervous before shooting the love scene, because it’s such a profoundly bizarre thing to do with one’s life,’ says Winslet.

‘But I knew it had the potential to be a very revealing moment for Mildred, because she realises in that instant that she is a woman, she can be touched, she is capable of revealing herself to someone else – she can take off her clothes, and remove the smell of chicken grease, and there’s a woman with a heart, a soul, and a genuine capacity for emotion, having not been truly touched for years. I can really relate to that scene, and I hope other women can, as well – because it’s part of life – sex, love-making, those glorious moments of passion between two people.’

As she speaks, her face is alive, and her voice more urgent than ever before. ‘To be beautiful, in those moments – that’s the power of genuine longing and intensity, and I crave those feelings in life, those experiences. That’s why I’ve never needed drugs; I’ve avoided druggy, boozy circles of people; I don’t need anything synthetic to get that sense of elation.’ She pauses, just for a few seconds, and then says: ‘I feel I’m just at the beginning of a new narrative, and it’s incredibly exciting. It’s complicated, I know, and uncertain – but it’s where life happens, between the cracks. It can be a painful process, but I truly hope that never stops for me.’

‘Contagion’ is released nationwide on 21 October. Kate Winslet’s Golden Hat charity collection for Lancôme is available in Selfridges nationwide (0800 123400; www.selfridges.com) from 15 October.

‘DESIGN FOR LIFE’

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everything with a critical eye… He sees a kettle, and it upsets him.

You wouldn’t believe the torture over the kid’s things, like the Bugaboo.

‘Marc and I are both total gypsies, and find it very hard to stay in one place for more than five days,’ she continues. ‘Lucienne has flown, like, 20 times since she’s been born.’ They also have a house in Corfu – ‘A really sweet, rambling holiday house with a lovely pool,’ says Grand. Later this year, work will start on a big family house in Ithaca, where Newson has land. (His family originally came from this part of Greece.) Such an accumulation of property was far from intentional: ‘Everything doubled when Charlotte and I got married,’ says Newson. For Stockdale, the house on Ithaca will finally give her a chance to exert her own style again. ‘I need one traditional house in my life,’ she says. ‘I’ve got London and Paris and they’re really super-modern, but now I need some curtains and lampshades.’

‘Just when we thought it would all calm down, it’s all taken off,’ says Newson, as conversation turns to the near future. He currently has projects all over the world – working with a bathroom company in Australia, phones and cameras in Japan and private planes everywhere; a massive book by Taschen is being published in January.

Stockdale, meanwhile, has just taken her first ever full-time job, as fashion director of i-D. ‘I’m sure a part of Charlotte is torn and would like to be with the kids. But we’re too good at taking off,’ says Newson.

‘We’ll often get home to find the other one isn’t there and we’d just forgotten to say where we were going. But that’s the best thing about Charlotte. We still lead very independent lives. I don’t think either of us could be in a relationship that was any other way.’

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‘GOING IN FOR THE KILLS’

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then there’s this gaggle of people taking pictures of your meltdown.

It’s just nuts.’ Hince has been one of the media’s prime targets since he began dating Moss in 2007, after being introduced to her backstage at a Kills gig by mutual friend Sadie Frost (‘Jamie is an old-fashioned guy, a bit of a throwback,’ Frost tells me. ‘He’s rock ’n’ roll on the outside, but inside, a bit of a pussycat.’) In the lenses of the paparazzi, with whom he has been known to have a scuffle or two, his face is always tense, visibly uncomfortable – by now a familiar expression, but one that does no justice to his good looks or his laid-back demeanour in the flesh. That is, except on one sole occasion: ‘At the wedding he was very comfortable, he was ultracool with this Cheshire-cat grin,’ Frost adds. ‘It was beautiful to see.’

The constant press glare has been an affliction that has permeated even his music, as he finds himself less free than Mosshart to write from the heart (Blood Pressures was originally titled Sex Tapes, but Hince was aware of the furore such a provocative title would ignite). ‘I’m definitely a huge romantic; I’m a sucker for all of that stuff. That’s what I’ve always concentrated on, in literature, in film, in writing and in music. Something that has beauty and sadness about it – those are always the things that make my heart race.’ He lights up another cigarette. ‘My romanticism has got a lot stronger as I’ve got older but because of my circumstance it’s harder, because I think to really explore that in music and a lyric, you have to be open and honest – and that’s something I struggle with, given the situation I’m in,’ he says, obliquely referring to Moss.

It is hard to believe that the line in ‘DNA’, a song on the new album – ‘Fate, with a single blow, has custard-pied me now’ – took shape in Hince’s cerebral cortex, given the serendipity of his amorous existence (there are some out there who would consider him one of the most fortunate men in the world).

But that was not always the case – at least musically. It has taken the Kills a while to gain the full musical recognition they deserve, regardless of the media attention surrounding their personal lives.

Although they have always had a die-hard underground following, they have deliberately avoided signing to bigger labels, preferring to take the slower route that some like to call ‘integrity’. ‘There seems to be a formula: the more mainstream and popular you get, the more rubbish you become – it doesn’t seem as if you can keep that little spark that you started with. I mean, the most popular newspapers, or books or films, they are always shite,’ Hince says.

‘Sometimes it’s been hard to see friends of ours in bands taking off.

One minute they’re supporting you, the next minute they are enormous. And you think, “This is weird, are we doing the right thing?”’ Now in their early thirties and forties, it seems that their patience has finally come to fruition, with the music press conjecturing that, with the advent of Blood Pressures, the Kills have reached a new zenith of musical maturity.

Certainly, Mosshart has recently fine-tuned her raw, resounding rock vocals, a development attributed to her tour with Jack White last year – she also sings lead vocals for his ‘other band’, the Dead Weather. This, along with her explosive, primal stage presence and her wild glam-rock outfits, has made her one of the most electrifying frontwomen of her generation, in the tradition of Joan Jett or Patti Smith: ‘She’s a grenade missing a pin,’ says White.

It is hard to reconcile such swaggering might with the gentle, befreckled girl who, offstage, hides behind her raven fringe. But music has always been Mosshart’s primitive, cathartic realm – a response to innate introversion – since, as an audacious 14-yearold, she left smalltown Vero Beach, Florida, during her summer www.harpersbazaar.co.uk

G GISELE

Supermodel, businesswoman and eco-campaigner Gisele Bündchen is back after having her baby – and intent on adding ‘supermum’ to her already-impressive resumé. She talks to MELISSA WHITWORTH about childbirth, getting her body back and her dreams of family life on a farm

Photographs by CEDRIC BUCHET. Styled by SOPHIA NEOPHITOU-APOSTOLOU

THE BOLD AND THE BEAUTIFUL: A STRONG STATEMENT WATCH IS THE PERFECT COMPLEMENT TO LOUIS VUITTON’S DELICATE DRESS Lace dress, £3,800, Louis Vuitton.

Classic Sport watch with diamond bezel on stainless-steel bracelet, £3,600, Ebel.

Gold bangles and cuffs, from £165, all Tom Binns. Necklace; ring, Gisele’s own.

Previous pages: wool jacket, about £1,030, Dolce & Gabbana. Silk garter belt, £50; nylon stockings, £35, both Agent Provocateur. Classic Sport watch with stainless-steel bracelet, £1,150, Ebel. Gold bangles and cuffs, as before. Ring, as before

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little?”’ She waves one arm passionately as she cradles Benjamin with the other. ‘There should be a worldwide law, in my opinion, that mothers should breastfeed their babies for six months.’

In person, Bündchen is engaging, earthy and nurturing – wholly different from the bombshell she evokes on the catwalk. There are, of course, those familiar wide, high cheekbones and her gazelle-like limbs, but it is her Brazilian joie de vivre and ebullience that are most intoxicating in the flesh.

She listens to questions intently, her blue eyes darkening slightly, before a rush of excited words tumbles out. ‘Look at that munchkin.

He’s all love. He’s all happiness and calmness.’ Benjamin’s smile erupts into a giggle, and his mother reciprocates with a squeak of delight. ‘How can I not be the happiest woman in the world?’

Bündchen has always been talked about in superlatives: she is the highest-paid model with the highest number of covers in fashion history; Claudia Schiffer anointed her ‘the last of the supermodels’; and she surely possesses the most obsessedabout body in the world.

It was her Amazonian athleticism bursting onto the catwalk of Alexander McQueen’s S/S 96 show that heralded ‘the return of the sexy model’ in the midst of the prevailing androgyny of grunge. In just one show, the 16-year-old Brazilian’s body caused a sensation. ‘The reason she was so incredible when she first started out was that her proportions and looks were so different from the aesthetic of that fashion moment. She was so perfectly proportioned,’ says photographer Mario Testino, who championed Bündchen’s early career. In a sea of faceless, shapeless Eastern European girls, she quickly rose to global stardom, surpassing the swaggering footsteps of the original ‘supers’. ‘She is unique because she is always Gisele,’ says Valentino of her appeal. ‘She does not change according to photographers. She is always her. She is always brilliant and fresh.’ By 1999, Gisele mania had exploded, and in 2004 she topped the Forbes Supermodel Rich List, a position of fashion supremacy that she still holds.

But Bündchen’s success has been as much down to her astute business sense as to her preternatural physique. She has amassed lucrative campaigns with Dior, Balenciaga, Dolce & Gabbana, Versace, Givenchy, Bulgari, Lanvin, Guerlain, Chloé, Louis Vuitton, Valentino, Apple and Victoria’s Secret, as well as launching a Brazilian flip-flop brand that outsells even Havaianas; her own hotel in southern Brazil; and – most recently – Sejaa, a naturalskincare range. But since her marriage in 2009 to New England Patriots quarterback Brady, Bündchen has shifted her attention www.harpersbazaar.co.uk

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ands on hips, wrists encased in the metal cuffs of a superheroine, the world’s highest-paid model leans defiantly against the railings of a Manhattan rooftop, as monolithic as the Empire State Building. Standing six-footthree in stilettos and suspenders, beneath a sleek tuxedo jacket, Gisele Bündchen stretches out her endless limbs, then lowers her gaze to the camera. ‘I am ready for you,’ she purrs through cascades of golden mane, lifting an exquisitely taut stocking-clad leg, in a pose reminiscent of those struck for her Victoria’s Secret campaigns.

Behold: perhaps the most coveted postpartum body on earth.

At the time of writing, it is just five months since Bündchen gave birth to Benjamin Rein, her son with American-football player Tom Brady; her elastic physique bounced back within weeks. If the fashion world ever suspected Bündchen was beyond human, there could be no greater proof than her jaw-dropping appearance on this roof terrace today.

But although apparently physically unaltered, when the justturned-30-year-old arrives on the Bazaar set earlier that morning, she exudes a new aura of maternal calm and a softness at odds with her sexually charged image. In a laid-back ensemble of plaid shirt and cropped denim shorts (showing off those infamous fecund curves), she cradles a neatly swathed bundle – which turns out, on closer inspection, to be five-month-old Benjamin. The baby gurgles and coos away as his mother settles him on her lap, tenderly murmuring to him in Portuguese.

‘I am so lucky that I can bring him everywhere,’ she tells me in her lilting Brazilian accent. ‘I don’t do anything without him. The maximum he has been without me in his life is three hours.’

Bündchen is still breastfeeding, and pauses during hair and make-up to tend to Benjamin amid the rails of new-season tailoring; next to a tray of gleaming Ebel watches (she has been the face of the brand since 2006), a security escort loiters bashfully.

‘I think breastfeeding really helped [me keep my figure]. Some people here think they don’t have to breastfeed, and I think, “Are you going to give chemical food to your child, when they are so

CONCEAL AND REVEAL: BÜNDCHEN WORKS THE SEASON’S LACE TREND WITH ALLURING APLOMB Black silk and lace gown, £4,413, Antonio Berardi. Black silk and lace bodysuit, about £450, Dolce & Gabbana. Classic Hexagon stainless-steel watch on leather strap, £1,625, Ebel. Gold bangles and cuffs, from £165, all Tom Binns.

Earrings; ring, both Gisele’s own

She waves one arm passionately as she cradles Benjamin in the other. ‘There should be a worldwide law, in my opinion, that mothers should breastfeed their babies for six months’

increasingly towards domestic life, first with her move from New York to Brady’s league’s headquarters in Boston, and now with her wholehearted embracing of natural birth and motherhood – an experience she has approached with characteristic Brazilian verve.

‘Not for one second did it cross my mind that I was not going to have my baby at home,’ Bündchen says. Despite America’s trend for medicalised births (and a predilection for elective Caesareans among celebrity models), Benjamin was born at home in Boston.

Only Brady, her mother, and Mayra, a close friend and midwife, were present. ‘I am not the first person to give birth naturally,’ she continues. ‘Billions of other women have come before me and have done this – so why can’t I do it?’

The birth was a life-changing moment for Bündchen, and one in which she felt both empowered and vulnerable. ‘I am not going to say it wasn’t an intense feeling, but I could not describe it as painful,’ she says. ‘The mind is more powerful than anything. So during the birth’ – she was in active labour for just eight hours – ‘I wasn’t thinking about the pain. I was in a meditation state. I was concentrating the whole time, thinking, “Oh my God, it’s time. I am going to get to meet my baby.

What is he going to look like?” With each contraction, the closer I knew he was, the more excited I got. And, because I didn’t have any painkillers, I could feel him coming through my body. I had a wonderful birth.’

Benjamin Rein (named after Reinoldo, Bündchen’s father) was born at 8am. ‘I was in bed that day, and then the next day I was up making pancakes for everyone for breakfast.’

Just six weeks later, she had lost 30 pounds – her pre-natal weight gain – and was modelling swimwear for a Brazilian sportswear line. Bündchen puts her body’s astonishing recovery down to discipline and steely willpower. She practised kung fu until two weeks before the birth, yoga three times a week throughout, and meditated every day.

‘It prepared me mentally and physically. It’s called “labour”, not “holiday”, for a reason, and I knew that.’ She smiles. ‘You want to go into the most intense physical experience of your life unprepared?

That doesn’t make any sense to me. Then I was ready and I thought, “Okay, let’s get to work.” I wasn’t expecting someone else to get the baby out of me. I had to do it together with him.’

Since the birth, Bündchen’s body has created more media furore than ever, with countless headlines marvelling at her bullet-proof physique. (She is snapped by paparazzi arriving with Benjamin on the morning of our shoot, and the photo is promptly posted on an internet best-dressed list.) ‘I haven’t weighed myself in a few months, but I am fitting into all my old clothes,’ she says, pointing to her cut-offs. ‘I was eating lots of vegetables and fruit every day during my pregnancy – my baby needed the best of the best, so it was the opposite of over-eating. I had this being inside of me, and I was responsible for everything he got.’

Bündchen always had her sights set on having a family. She grew up in Horizontina, a farming town in southern Brazil, with five sisters including Patricia, her fraternal twin. Her sun-soaked childhood was happy; her mother Vania, a bank clerk, and father Valdir, a university professor, created a solid family unit (the pair are still together after 37 years). Motherhood has deepened Bündchen’s understanding of her parents’ sacrifices. ‘My mother is a hero. I have never appreciated my mother more. I was like, “Mom, you are my

hero. How did you raise six kids in the countryside?” My mother worked all the time, too.’ She muses. ‘The neighbours all helped; you know they say it takes a village to raise a child. With all the neighbours in my town, it was like a big happy family; that doesn’t really exist any more. People have forgotten to help each other, and that it’s all about community. You can’t live in a bubble.’

It was to that home community that Bündchen returned as a supermodel in 2008 to launch Agua Limpa (Clean Water), which aims to protect local forests, vegetation and water supplies. In 2003, she spent time in the Amazon, establishing flip-flop brand Ipanema Gisele Bündchen – profits from which help support reforestation.

Bündchen’s concern for the environment was fostered during her four-year relationship with actor Leonardo DiCaprio. The couple – so often photographed frolicking together in the Californian surf – shared a deep ecological commitment, but rumours leaked of DiCaprio’s womanising antics, and in 2005 the pair split. By the end of 2006, Bündchen had met and fallen for Brady; a few months later, it emerged that Brady’s former girlfriend, actress Bridget Moynahan, was pregnant with his child.

Bündchen primed her maternal instincts as a devoted stepmother to Brady’s first child, John, who was born in 2007. The couple now spend four months of the year in Boston, four months in LA (where John lives with his mother) and two months at her home in a remote part of Costa Rica.

Her house is ‘in the middle of the jungle.

There are monkeys, all kinds of birds and butterflies. You realise in a place like that, because you have time to stop, how connected we are to everything, and how beautiful everything is’. Bündchen’s early steps into motherhood have strengthened her outdoorsy spirit and environmental resolve. In September last year she was named a Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP); she also campaigns for the World Wildlife Fund and is working on her educational animated series for the web, GiGi & the Green Team.

Between global initiatives and selective modelling contracts, Bündchen daydreams of her future with Brady and Benjamin.

‘I want to get a farm where I am going to live for the rest of my life. I like the idea of a secluded place.’ She pauses. ‘I will have horses, my kids will be riding, and there will be chickens and ducks.

I don’t know where it will be, but I have the vision of trees and a lake, and mountains in the background.’

But in the meantime, the world’s most successful supermodel counts her many blessings. ‘Being grateful is the secret to happiness.

You can choose to see what you have in life, or what you don’t have – and I choose to see what I have.’ Ultimately, it is this philosophy – twinned with that incredible body – that is Gisele’s secret weapon, and the driving force behind all she has accomplished. For the real measurement of achievement in her life now, she says, will have nothing to do with rich lists, or contracts, or covers. ‘I will be successful if my kid becomes a well-behaved, kind human being, who helps other people and has integrity and good values.’ And she smiles with that unmistakable Brazilian warmth. ‘Then I can say I have done a good job.’

Meditation prepared Bündchen for giving birth.

‘It’s called “labour”, not “holiday”, for a reason,’ she says. ‘You want to go into the most intense physical experience of your life unprepared? That doesn’t make sense to me’

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From Dior couture to Dolce & Gabbana, discover Gisele Bündchen’s top 10 catwalk highs at harpersbazaar.co.uk www.harpersbazaar.co.uk

TOWERING INFERNO: SEXY AND STATUESQUE, BÜNDCHEN SIZZLES IN PROENZA SCHOULER’S DARK DESIGNS Black silk shirt, £370; navy flannel skirt, £1,150, both Proenza Schouler. Black cotton bra, £15, American Apparel. Black silk garter belt, £50; black nylon stockings, £35, both Agent Provocateur. See Stockists for details. Hair by David von Cannon at Bryan Bantry. Make-up by Frank B at the Wall Group. Manicure by Alicia Torello at De Facto. Model: Gisele Bündchen at IMG. With thanks to the Pierre Hotel, New York (www.tajhotels.com)

Carey Mulligan wears satin skirt, £1,095; satin coat, £2,450, both Prada.

Wellies, £65, Hunter

THERE’S SO MET H I N G

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PHOTOGRAPHS BY TOM ALLEN

STYLED BY CATHY KASTERINE

Carey Mulligan’s beguiling combination of fragility and drive has seen her progress from low-budget British films to a lavish Hollywood production of The Great Gatsby.

She talks to AJESH PATALAY about the ambition that fires her and the relationship with Marcus Mumford that keeps her feet on the ground

C

arey Mulligan is running late. She sends me a text. ‘Hi! It’s Carey!’ it starts, full of zing. She’s stuck in traffic but on her way, ‘so sorry – see you soon’. Twenty-five minutes later, still no sign of her. A second text arrives, vexed but upbeat: ‘This taxi driver is honestly doing the most infuriating things – not far now!’

When Mulligan finally arrives at Soho House, where we’ve arranged to meet for breakfast, she is 40 minutes late. She appears in the doorway, zigzags hurriedly across the room to our window table and greets me in flustered distress.

Amid profuse apology comes her explanation. She would have just taken the Tube, she says, like she normally does. But the past few days she’s not been feeling well; in fact, she’s been unable to hold down food.

So she decided to take a taxi. ‘Then I was like, “What am I doing getting a taxi in rush hour?” And it was a really smelly cab, very smoky. And there was one point when he went round Cavendish Square three times and he wouldn’t take an exit and I was like, “Take an exit.” It just turned into a complete nightmare.’ At her wits’ end, Mulligan jumped out and ran the last couple of blocks to keep me from waiting even longer.

It’s quite the gesture. How many Oscarnominated, Bafta-winning actresses would break into a sweat for a complete stranger, let alone a journalist?

But as Mulligan settles herself over a pot of ginger tea, it becomes clear that this 27-year-old isn’t the least bit grand or actressy, despite the drama attending her arrival. She is dressed smartly but unfussily: a navy Twenty8Twelve blazer with a Tory Burch jumper, Helmut Lang trousers and Marni lace-ups, all in black. Her Balenciaga purse, also black, sits beside her. There’s not a scrap of make-up on her face, and her soft blonde hair, longer than it has been for years, falls forward in mussy wayward strands.

‘Today is the first day I’ve woken up completely normal,’ she says when I ask how she’s feeling. She does look wan and frankly a little frail. ‘Yesterday I was like, “I’m fine,” and then I started eating and I was like –’ She discreetly mimes a heave.

This immediately rings alarm bells. I can’t help but suspect morning sickness, and not just because pregnancy rumours have previously surfaced on the internet – admittedly in tandem with other spurious reports, including one that misidentified a girl in Lycra running shorts as her, under the headline ‘Mulligan looks unrecognisable’. (‘She looked great,’ Mulligan says, ‘the most amazing thighs; so I was like, “I’ll take that.”’) Since she married the musician Marcus Mumford of Mumford & Sons in April 2012, there’s been a succession of paparazzi shots showing the couple in marital bliss.

A baby rumour might seem the logical next step in the tabloid

version of their lives. ‘Oh, of course,’ she says, rolling her eyes when I finally broach the subject. ‘I had a meeting with some producers in LA and they actually congratulated me on my baby.’ She laughs and sips her tea, leaving me to marvel at her blithe non-denial.

I don’t have the heart to press the matter, because by this point Mulligan has made herself so pleasantly amenable. She is eager to engage, down-to-earth, even low-key. It doesn’t surprise me that she rarely gets recognised, or that when she is stopped, passers-by tend to mistake her for a member of their family. ‘They ask me if I’m related to their aunt, something I quite like,’ she says. ‘No one ever thinks you’re you.’ In the past she has described her looks as ‘forgettable’: the round face, button nose and dimpled cheeks that seem to embody girlishness; all in marked contrast to her voice, deep and melodious like a cello, more suggestive of a woman twice her age.

That combination perfectly suited Mulligan’s breakthrough role in An Education as Jenny Mellor, the naive but spirited 1960s schoolgirl desperate to escape the conventional moulds that others had in store for her. Mulligan’s best performances since have showcased the extraordinary translucence she has as an actress, able to project so much with so little. Even in her least demonstrative roles, such as the quietly despairing Kathy in Never Let Me Go or the sweetly restrained Irene in Drive, the viewer divines a torrent of emotion coursing beneath the surface.

She had a ‘low, thrilling voice. It was the kind of voice that the ear follows up and down, as if each speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again. Her face was sad and lovely with bright things in it, bright eyes and a bright passionate mouth…’ F Scott Fitzgerald’s description of Daisy Buchanan from The Great Gatsby could have been written of Mulligan, who is now playing the role of Daisy in Baz Luhrmann’s 3-D film version opposite Leonardo DiCaprio as Gatsby, the mysterious tycoon who follows her from Louisville to Long Island in order to win her back.

‘Daisy was difficult to work out,’ says Mulligan, ‘but so fun to play.’ Having been cast in October 2010, a year before shooting began in Sydney, Mulligan had plenty of time to excavate the character, widely thought to be an amalgam of two women from Fitzgerald’s life, his wife Zelda and a debutante he had a relationship with before Zelda, called Ginevra King. Mulligan took a road trip to Princeton to examine the Fitzgerald archives and attended a rehearsal week in New York, where the cast was given huge research folders on the 1920s and iPods containing music and documentary clips. ‘Baz also gave me about seven biographies of Zelda and a stack of love letters from Ginevra,’ says Mulligan. ‘You can so easily see where Fitzgerald has taken Daisy from. Just the way Zelda and Ginevra wrote – there were lines we stole for the script.’

To prepare for any role, Mulligan keeps a notebook teeming with visual triggers. Her notebook for Gatsby was less pictorial than usual.

‘We already had so many visual references. If you walked into the make-up room it was floor-to-ceiling pictures of 1920s flapper girls.

Baz had a little house on the lot which he operated out of. You walked in and the walls were covered with architectural and historical drawings.’ Mulligan’s Gatsby notebook was filled with quotations from Zelda and Ginevra, notes on conversations with Luhrmann and the occasional billet-doux from her ‘sweet’ co-star: ‘Leo had given me a

THE SWEETEST THING Multicoloured crepe dress, £2,295, Erdem. Gold necklace, £120, Laura Lee Jewellery TOM ALLEN

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‘Her face was sad and lovely with bright things in it, bright eyes and a brıght passionate mouth…’

Embroidered metallic lace dress, £6,860, Erdem. Leather ballet flats, £190, Repetto. Sterling silver and gold ring, £149, Phoebe Coleman TOM ALLEN

SECTION

SUBJECT OF DESIRE THIS PAGE: peach silk dress, £2,010; leather belt, £440, both Fendi. Black leather ballet flats, £190, Repetto. Gold necklace, £120, Laura Lee Jewellery. OPPOSITE: georgette dress, £4,515; suede, leather and silk belt, £470, both Saint Laurent by Hedi Slimane

the exact length he wanted. I just handed that over to him.’

Mulligan feels more anxious now, partly out of fear of the Gatsby traditionalists (‘people are so easily offended’) and partly because this is the biggest film of her career, and with that comes the added pressure of promotion. The day before we meet, it has been announced that Gatsby will open the Cannes Film Festival. ‘That is crazy pressure,’ Mulligan says. ‘My agent said last night that it’s actually quite empty at Cannes right at the beginning –’ I must look surprised by this, because she suddenly breaks off. ‘Is that not true? I bet you he’s just trying to make me feel better… I’m terrified. I used to cry when I got to the end of red carpets. It would build up as I was standing there. I’d be at the first bank of photographers, then move to the next and everyone would be shouting, “No, no, over here.” By the end my publicist would have to wipe the tears away from under my eyes.’

The weight of expectation has always pressed heavily on Mulligan. Her earliest (‘terrible’) memory from the age of five, after her hotel-manager father had moved the family to Düsseldorf, is of a boy from her mixed international school leaving a Valentine on her desk. ‘I was so embarrassed.

Everybody could see it was there. I took it, ripped it up and threw it down the drain in the courtyard. Then I felt so guilty.’ Not being kind was cause for self-castigation.

Her childhood was generally happy and she had lots of ‘good influences’, including her parents and older brother Owain, who excelled at school, got a double first at Oxford and went on to join the army.

But, says Mulligan, ‘I don’t know if I was that good.’ She recalls once snapping at a girl at her school sports day and being ‘completely mortified by how awful I’d been’.

The guilt perhaps sprang from her religious upbringing (she used to attend church every week when she was younger).

In her early teens she went to a church summer camp with her best friend, Celia (who now works for a Catholic charity and remains close to Mulligan). ‘I did what she did. I always had a faith and I always thought of myself as a Christian. But I never became a Catholic. She suggested we go to this camp, so we went. It was quite innocent, good fun.’ Mulligan sees its influence in some of her ‘weirdest’ teenage behaviour, such as putting up posters of decayed lungs at Woldingham, the girls’ boarding school in Surrey where she was enrolled at 14 when her family moved to Vienna. ‘I thought smoking was the worst thing so I plastered these pictures all over the notice board to advise people against it. People just laughed at me. Maybe they hated me, I don’t know. I put up this thing about

present, something his assistant had gotten him, some health food I thought was so cool.

He’d left it in my dressing-room and written a note, “Dear Daisy…” signed off “Gatsby”, and he’d drawn daisies on it.’ She frowns.

‘That makes him sound so… But he’s a real man,’ she adds, laughing.

Knowing that Mulligan was once a huge fan of Titanic, I ask about DiCaprio. ‘Well, he wasn’t my pin-up,’ she says, ‘but he was for a lot of my girlfriends.’ Who was her pin-up?

‘Michael Schumacher. I used to watch Formula 1 with my dad when I was little. I didn’t really have actors or musicians as idols in that respect.’ She circles back: ‘When I did the audition with Leo in New York I walked away grinning. Just the idea that if I never got any further, I had just spent an hour and a half acting with Leonardo DiCaprio.’ She tells the story of him jumping about in her audition, playing three different roles and improvising off camera. ‘Most people would just sit and read the script… I’m his biggest fan.’

One of the major challenges for Mulligan was ‘playing someone who is written to be desirable. I’d never played that, a character who ensnares people that easily, with abandon’. For someone who once said she ‘never felt like a sexy person’, you can imagine the leap.

She slimmed down with Pilates to fit the Twenties dresses created

by Miuccia Prada and the costume designer Catherine Martin.

Otherwise, she was grateful to submit to Luhrmann’s Svengali-like touch. ‘Baz would come into every single make-up test, take photos from 17 different angles and decide everything. He chose which way my hair was parted. He was there when they cut my wig to 148 |

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‘Leo left me a gift and wrote me a note, “Dear Daisy…” signed off “Gatsby”, and he’d drawn daisies on it’

TOM ALLEN

Silk embroidered dress, £5,330, Bottega Veneta. Leather ballet flats, £18.95, Bloch. See Stockists for details. Hair

by Jenny Cho for Suave Professionals at the Wall Group. Make-up by Georgie Eisdell at the Wall Group, using Crème de la Mer. Manicure by Zarra Celik at CLM, using Max Factor.

Stylist’s assistants: Benjamin Canares and Maria Castellanos. Retouching by Stella Digital. Digital capture

by Nick Dehadray at Numerique. Prop stylist: Helen Macintyre. Florist: Kitty Arden. With thanks to Avington Park

bulimia too, because there were a couple of bulimics in our year.’

If those early years were underscored by anxiety (‘I would stay up at night worrying about everything. I was really sensitive’), acting was the one constant at consecutive schools that didn’t make her nervous. It started with a production of The King and I when she was six. ‘It was really intense. All the blonde kids had their hair dyed.

We looked very sweet.’ By 15 Mulligan was serious about acting and begged her parents to send her to performing-arts school. They refused. So at 17 she ‘rebelled for the first time in [her] life’ and applied to three drama schools in secret. All three turned her down.

When no university acceptance letters arrived, her mother insisted on checking her UCAS form online. ‘All hell broke loose. By that point I couldn’t lie so I gave her the UCAS password, left a note saying “I’m sorry” and went to my church at the end of the street and sat outside crying for 45 minutes. Then I walked home and she was so disappointed because I had just lied my arse off for a good six months.’

Through sheer tenacity and with a helping hand from Julian Fellowes, who had once spoken at her school, Mulligan secured herself an audition for Joe Wright’s Pride & Prejudice and made her professional debut as Kitty Bennet alongside Keira Knightley and Judi Dench. TV parts followed, but it was being cast as Nina in Ian Rickson’s 2007 revival of The Seagull at the Royal Court and then on Broadway that made a lasting impression on her and with the critics.

‘She captures the raw hunger within Nina’s ambition, the ravening vitality as well as vulnerability,’ judged The New York Times.

‘That sort of contrast in a performer is very special,’ says Rickson. ‘The fragility can beckon an audience in, while the robust determination can drive a character towards their quest. That part was so important for Carey, because the transference of character into actor was so dynamic.

Nina is determined to be an actress and yet ends up valuing the deeper human qualities of endurance and faith. Sometimes actors attract the parts they play to allow them to grow and develop survival skills.’ The wish to endure has informed Mulligan’s career choices ever since. She won’t pursue a role unless it marks a new challenge and she feels passionately about it. ‘A lot of the things I was offered after An Education were precocious 16-year-olds. The American version of that is the quirky girl in a Ramones T-shirt smoking cigarettes. After Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, I stopped working for a year, because that wasn’t the kind of stuff I wanted to do.’

The angst of her early twenties, when she was phoning her agent ‘several times a day’ and would freak out if, say, someone spilt red wine on her carpet, has largely dissipated. ‘In the last couple of years,’ says Mulligan, ‘I probably feel more clear than I did before.’ I can’t help attributing this, at least in part, to her relationship with 26-yearold Mumford, whose Grammy-award-winning English folk-rock band Mumford & Sons plays to packed stadiums around the world.

She started dating him two years ago but has known him since

childhood. Like Tom Buchanan for Daisy in The Great Gatsby, ‘there [is] a wholesome bulkiness about his person and his position’. For their Somerset wedding, Mulligan asked Miuccia Prada to design her ivory wedding dress. ‘I have worn a lot of Prada and always loved their clothes. I always felt very comfortable. They were the first designer house that ever lent me anything; I wore Prada to the Oscars. The people who work there are so lovely and really just non-scary fashion people.’

Mulligan won’t talk directly about her husband and politely steers me away: ‘If that’s OK. I know that’s so boring.’ Part of her reticence comes from not wanting to court the wrong attention. ‘We went to the Brit Awards,’ she explains. ‘We got in the car at the end of the night. Photographers catch you as you’re blinking and it makes you look like you’re drunk. Then the headline is “Drunk and tired”. That stuff is awful. Then you think about your family seeing that…’ That’s part of the reason she likes getting out of London to ‘dramatic’ places like Dartmoor: ‘The further out you get, the further away you get from that,’ she says. ‘And I really like rural, farmy places.

When my parents moved to Vienna they bought a little place in the mountains and we always went walking, so now I like marching through the English countryside.’

The couple’s shared faith is another source of interest. Mulligan’s in-laws are national leaders of the Vineyard Church, a ‘neo-charismatic’ evangelical church with its own burgeoning music scene, from which Marcus Mumford emerged. Religion clearly plays a part in Mulligan’s life (she talks gleefully about singing in the church choir and helping out with the Nativity play). But she seems more inspired by her husband’s creativity and his band’s sense of community than by his faith. ‘There is something really enviable. A bunch of musicians can get together, start playing music and make something. There is a bonding familial vibe about it that I am really drawn to.’ As an actress she can’t generate work in the same way. ‘For the first 10 months of this last year off I was pretty content not working,’ says Mulligan. ‘Now I’m going crazy. I just wish I was doing something while I was doing all this press so my whole focus wasn’t on wearing dresses and walking down red carpets. I’d have something else to occupy my mind.’

A bit of actorly tomfoolery might at least distract her from the publicity at Cannes. She recalls filming a montage sequence with DiCaprio when Daisy and Gatsby meet again. ‘Leo and I were in this car and we had to be grossly involved with one another. There was no sound. Just us doing stuff. We got talking about the 27 Club, the bizarre phenomenon of people who die when they’re 27. So I’m like, “James Dean.” And Leo’s like, “He’s not in the club. How much do you want to bet on it? If I win, when we get to Cannes” – that was very presumptuous – “you have to interrupt someone at the press conference and say, I just want to say Leonardo DiCaprio is hands down the finest actor of his generation. If you’re right, I will say it about you.” Well, I lost. So I assume he’ll hold me to it.’

Mulligan laughs. ‘All that silliness was so fun. I said to Leo, “If you’re right, I can legitimately say that about you. But if you said that the other way round, people would be horrified.”’ Well, actually, I wouldn’t be so sure.

‘The Great Gatsby’ is in cinemas nationwide on 17 May.

‘Photographers catch you blinking and it makes you look drunk. Then the headline is “Drunk and tired”’

TOM ALLEN

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Since her potent voice first stormed the charts three years ago, Florence Welch – ethereal singer and Pre-Raphaelite beauty – has been unstoppable, with two number-one albums and an Oscars performance, not to mention a starring role at a Chanel show. VASSI CHAMBERLAIN meets her to discover just what it is about Florence that has us all in her thrall Photographs by CAMILLA AKRANS Styled by SISSY VIAN

BEHIND THE VEIL Florence Welch wears pink chiffon dress, about £3,330; pink chiffon and lace cape, about £2,180, both Dolce & Gabbana. On right arm: gold-plated snake cuff, about £350; gold-plated and turquoise cuff, about £500, both Aurélie Bidermann.

On left arm: gold cuff, £745, Ina Beissner at Kabiri. Brass, rose gold and Swarovski-crystal bracelet, about £250, Ca & Lou. Rings, her own.

Previous page: organza dress, from a selection, Valentino Couture. Silk garland, about £560, Maison Guillet.

Brass, rose gold and Swarovski-crystal bracelet, about £505, Ca & Lou. Gold-plated triangle bracelet, £230, Zoe & Morgan. Small rose gold and diamond ring, £321, Jada. Other rings, her own

M

aking a lunch date with Florence Welch, the 25-year-old party-loving superstar of Florence + the Machine, the day after her sell-out gig at Alexandra Palace was surely asking for trouble. Still, here I am waiting for her in the sunlit dining room of the Empress gastropub in Victoria Park a mere 14 hours after her last encore. Twenty minutes pass. My phone rings. Florence is very sorry she’s late, but she’s seconds away now.

Then I turn and spot her through the window: tall and thin like spaghetti, glowstick-red hair a brilliant explosion against the trees, gambolling through the traffic like a schoolgirl late for class.

So it is surprising when a classically elegant woman sits down opposite me, hair braided into a low chignon. Florence Leontine Mary Welch shakes my hand with her long skinny white one. ‘So, how was the after-party?’ I ask. ‘I didn’t go,’ she says, in her unexpectedly high-pitched voice. ‘I did a run-off – I’ve never done one before, but I was so tired from all the touring, I had to go to bed. I left the stage, put my slippers on and ran through the carpark in my catsuit with my cape flying behind me, screaming, “Go-ooooooooooo!”’

That’s Florence Welch, the unconventional superstar we have come to love ever since she first exploded into the public consciousness three years ago on a perfect summer’s evening on the John Peel Stage at Glastonbury. The then-22-year-old performed barefoot and in floor-length diaphanous chiffon, looking like a translucent Tolkien princess transported from Middle Earth. It was a few days before the launch of her first album, Lungs, and there couldn’t have been a more fitting backdrop for her debut: the rolling green fields of England filled with thousands of followers singing along to the anthemic ‘You’ve Got the Love’. After that, it was like shooting fish in a barrel: Lungs went platinum and won the best album award at the 2010 Brits. Far from the contrived eccentricity of some modern-day musicians, it was like Kate Bush all over again, albeit the 21st- century version: a homegrown, unadulterated creative British talent with a voice like a choir of male angels waking up the dead.

If the British public fell in love, the fashion world fell further.

Welch was embraced like a musical Tilda Swinton: a vintage-clad Titian beauty, with a Virginia Woolf countenance and model figure for couture. A flurry of tributes ensued as she was courted by fashion’s most exclusive houses, among them Mulberry (its S/S 11 show, a paean to her aesthetic, was showcased by a fleet of doppelgangers); Frida Giannini at Gucci (who, in 2011, cited her as inspiration for the autumn/winter show); Sarah Burton at Alexander McQueen; and Karl Lagerfeld at Chanel. Thus launched on the international stage, dressed now in vintage Valentino and Givenchy

Haute Couture, Welch went on to conquer America (with Giannini designing the stage costumes for her US tour). So, when she sang at both the Oscars and the Grammys last year (for the latter, she was nominated Best New Artist), it was as our national heroine, with all the glory and authenticity of a true British eccentric.

It seems fitting that the Olympic Stadium is only a stone’s throw from where we are sitting because Welch, with her British reserve and quirky aesthetic, could be a symbol for modern Britain, like Marianne is to France. ‘I am definitely growing into my Britishness,’ she says, tickled by the thought. ‘The more I grow up, the more British I become.’ During last year’s Royal Wedding, she ran the streets of London looking for the one with the most bunting. ‘I had the best day ever,’ she says, jumping round to sit next to me, scrolling through photos of the day on her phone. ‘I dressed up and put a crown on and watched it with my mother and sister. We were shouting at the television, “Kiss her, kiss her again! ”’ She’d quite like, she adds, to have tea with the Queen. ‘I feel she’d know the answer to all sorts of questions,’ she says. Like what? ‘Oh, you know, the best words to use at Scrabble.’

What makes Welch so authentic is that she has the feel of a true bohemian – even though sceptics might argue that, educated at London private schools Thomas’s and Alleyn’s, she couldn’t be more middle-class. Her aesthetic is endlessly compared to a Dante Gabriel Rossetti Pre-Raphaelite beauty but today, as is often the case, she has cut the look with something original and modern, something strong. ‘I have a masculine energy,’ she offers by way of explanation. Last night’s Ziggy Stardust vamp in her Alex Noble catsuit has been replaced by a sleek greyhound in fitted black Anna Sui flares with appliqué flowers, a vintage nude silk pussy-bow blouse (lace bra showing) and a vintage black silk trench. ‘It only cost me a couple of quid,’ she announces, pointing at the coat. She’s carrying a ladylike black and brown Versace handbag, and a pair of

At last year’s Royal Wedding, ‘I had the best day ever,’ Welch says. ‘I put a crown on, and we were shouting at the television, “Kiss her again!”’

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Roger Vivier classic black pumps cover her often-bare feet. She’s what the French call a jolie laide: not a classic beauty, but a striking one. I tell her she looks like a chic Parisienne from the 16th arrondissement meeting her lover for lunch. She laughs like an ecstatic teenager and takes a dainty sip from a cup of English Breakfast tea.

‘I like to wear clothes that I will wear when I’m an old lady,’ she says.

It’s only then that I notice her raggedy fingernails, Celtic-cross tattoo along a knuckle, and eight vintage rings. Her chignon looks remarkably similar to last night’s concert up-do.

Still, Welch’s skin is perfection, as Karl Lagerfeld recently observed. The Chanel creative director chose her to sing at his underwater-inspired S/S 12 collection, emerging from a giant shell at the side of the catwalk. She talks about him with affection and comical reverence, detailing their collaboration on a limited-edition vinyl for her single ‘Shake It Out’, with a photographic sleeve by

FREE SPIRIT Muslin dress and trousers (sold together), £8,280, Chanel. Metal cameo-pendant necklace, £1,635, Salvatore Ferragamo.

FREE SPIRIT Silver, gold-plate and lapis lazuli Muslin dress£261, and trousers together), necklace, Zoe & (sold Morgan.

Small £8,280, Tkmaterial necklace, rose gold Chanel. and diamond ring, £321, Jada. £TK, Tktktktk.

Rings, Florence’s Other rings, Florence’s ownown

Lagerfeld. She reels off a list of other names of friends to whom she plays muse. ‘Riccardo – I just love Riccardo,’ she says of Givenchy’s Tisci. ‘Pier Paolo and Maria Grazia and Stefano and Frida …’ (respectively: Piccioli and Chiuri of Valentino; Pilati, formerly of Yves Saint Laurent, with whom she attended the Met Ball in New York that honoured the late Alexander McQueen in 2011, Welch clad in a languid white YSL gown; and Giannini of Gucci).

Then suddenly she bursts out: ‘Sarah Burton! Sarah, I love you, you’re the best.’ Welch recently attended the Met Ball wearing one of Burton’s McQueen designs. ‘I sang at that ball last year,’ she says, rolling her eyes. ‘I was dressed as David Bowie with bleached eyebrows, dancing a mad jig in the Temple of Dendur with Paul McCartney. I was like, “This has got really weird.”’

It is surprising, given such global acclaim, that Welch appears not yet tarnished by the contemporary poisoned chalice of fame.

She tells me that regularly seeing her family is a way to keep herself grounded. Her parents divorced when she was 13, but she is close to both, as well as to her younger brother and sister, JJ and Grace.

Her former-ad-man father Nick Welch (now the owner of an organic restaurant and campsite) used to ferry her between gigs when she started out. ‘My dad is amazing,’ she says dreamily. ‘He’s the maître d’ of a campsite.’ When the touring gets too much, she retreats to her American mother Evelyn’s (a Renaissance scholar) house in Camberwell, ‘to cry, eat, sleep’.

She calls her mother the Moracle (‘mum oracle’, because she ‘knows everything’), so it must have been a wrench to finally move out of her home a month ago. ‘We’re going to have to take photos of my old bedroom,’ she says, ‘the little shrine, the art piece, the vignettes – it’s 10 years of collecting.’ They should put a blue plaque outside her mother’s house, I suggest. ‘It will have to be a paisley plaque,’ she says, laughing, and then drums her fingers on her face.

Even though she laughs easily, Welch seems nervous, jumpy.

‘I get the fear,’ she says. ‘I have done since I was a kid, I’m quite prone to the heebie-jeebies. I’m in love with life. I want to be able to see things in 360 – my eyes aren’t big enough to fit everything in; my peripheries get in the way.’

‘I’m quite prone to the heebie-jeebies. I’m in love with life. I want to be able to see things in 360; my peripheries get in the way’

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FIRE AND ICE Silk blouse, £1,300, Dior

Her quirky view of the world and melancholic nature inform her work, and both her albums are tinged with the anger and heartbreak of her lost love: her ex, Stuart Hammond, the books editor of Dazed & Confused magazine. ‘It was hard,’ she says, looking suddenly young and sad. But her emotional highs and lows are driven by more than just heartbreak. She was diagnosed with dyslexia and dyspraxia as a child and has suffered from depression.

I witnessed this melancholia first-hand a few weeks before, at the Bazaar shoot, on location in a beautiful but old and threadbare house on a drizzly and misty grey day in the Berkshire countryside.

SOFT FOCUS Viscose dress, £1,750, Chloé. Leather and metal belt, £1,076, Balmain at Stylebop. com. Felt hat, £99, James Lock & Co. Gold, silver and yellow gold-plated necklace, £1,650, Tom Ford. Metal cameo-pendant necklace, £1,635, Salvatore Ferragamo. Small rose gold and diamond ring, £321, Jada. Other rings, Florence’s own. See Stockists for details.

Hair by Ali Pirzadeh at CLM, using Moroccanoil. Make-up by Fredrik Stambro at Streeters, using L’Oréal. Manicure by Mike Pocock at Streeters, using Nail Rock.

Stylist’s assistant: Olimpia Pitacco

Welch’s mood matched the weather, and when she hauntingly sang Kate Bush’s ‘Wuthering Heights’ a cappella while getting her make-up done, her piercing voice and maudlin spirit seemed to take over the cold, damp house. ‘I like this house,’ she said at the time, ‘the faded beauty of it, the big spaces and the huge ceilings. I’ve been imagining myself wandering around, a sort of drunk and lonely countess in a Miss Havisham kind of way, echoing through the halls alone in my ballgowns.’

She had accepted a drink to steady her nerves that day, and I wonder now if her unease at being the centre of attention is the reason she has given up drinking on tour — although last night on stage, she told the audience she was feeling jittery and needed a sip of her ‘special water’. Has she already stumbled? ‘That sip of special water was my first of the whole tour,’ she says indignantly. ‘If you’re thinking too much about stuff, you have to get yourself back into a state where you’re doing things naturally. A sip of vodka can usually help me.’

Fame and the 24-hour scrutiny that goes with it is a tough business, as is being alone on tour in anonymous hotel bedrooms.

It’s something she has often said she finds hard. ‘Adele got it right,’ says Welch of her fellow chart-topping singer/songwriter. ‘She described it as being like living in a bubble, how you’re away for so long and then you come back and everything has gone on without you. It’s so true. You can have a few drinks, but then what? That makes things hard as well; or you cannot, and that’s hard too. But it’s not the answer. I’m trying to find a balance.’

Equally difficult is finding what she calls ‘the life stuff, that perfect love, you know – marriage and babies’. She was recently photographed kissing event organiser James Nesbitt on a Brazilian beach, albeit demurely, in an old-fashioned high-waist bikini. Is she in love now? ‘I couldn’t really talk about it,’ she says when I ask her, sounding not unreasonably hard for the first time. I change the subject. But she ignores me. ‘Speaking of love,’ she says, ‘I am in love, but I fall in love with everyone all at once. I’m very prone to euphoria and big feelings and the malaise that comes with that as well.’

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It would be easy to sit talking to Welch for hours but she’s done talking for today, her mind preoccupied by a trip to LA to shoot a video with photographer David LaChapelle. It’s an intriguing partnership: the hyper-modern psychedelic artist and the British bohemian princess. ‘His brief was so eccentric and insane,’ she says as we get ready to leave. ‘He told me how he’d found this abandoned city in an empty lot round the back of Universal Studios. I loved the idea of him just stumbling on this abandoned city.’ What will they make of our 21st-century Miss Havisham in Hollywood, wandering barefoot in chiffon, clutching her cup of ‘special water’? Another great British eccentric. Long may they live. www.harpersbazaar.co.uk

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‘If you’re thinking too much, you have to get back into a state where you’re doing things naturally. A sip of vodka can usually help’

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As she casts off her Harry Potter cloak, Emma Watson is on the cusp of her adult career.

Is she also about to throw off that good-girl image and let loose her wicked side?

Here, the beguiling beauty plays the innocent and the vamp in autumnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s hottest looks, and reveals her fear of Hollywood and her plans for the future. By JUSTINE PICARDIE Photographs by ALEXI LUBOMIRSKI. Styled by CATHY KASTERINE

GOOD GIRL GONE BAD?

mma Watson is walking through a field of buttercups and daisies, dappled in sunlight and dressed in white, on a glorious day in early English summer. ‘You’re a dandelion head!’ says one of the team that surround her for the fashion shoot, as if in encouragement.

‘Hello, flower!’ says photographer Alexi Lubomirski, from the top of his stepladder.

Watson smiles beatifically, big eyes luminous beneath her gamine auburn crop, but as any conversation with her swiftly reveals, her head isn’t filled with dandelion fluff at all. In the quick breaks from the shoot – wherein she has transformed herself for the camera from the picture of innocence to a raven-haired vamp-siren – she talks about fair-trade fashion, feminism, Kazuo Ishiguro and Catherine of Aragon. For, at 21, Watson – once upon a time the most instantly recognisable little girl in the world – is a force to be reckoned with, and if not quite all grown up, then well on her way to adult maturity.

Still, it’s hard not to feel maternal towards her, at least for anyone like me with children of the same age who has watched her grow up on camera as Hermione Granger in the Harry Potter films. Hermione was always my favourite – the cleverest girl in Hogwarts, brave and loyal, yet also, in the words of author JK Rowling (who has identified her younger self with her heroine), hiding ‘a lot of insecurity and a great fear of failure’. Cast at the age of nine, Watson has starred in the series for the past decade, with the final instalment released this July; her life is so inextricably linked with the making of the movies that it’s hard to separate where Hermione ends and Emma begins.

‘I was thinking about this the other day,’ she says, when we finally sit down with a cup of tea at the end of the shoot on a bench in the garden of Petersham House. ‘I was wondering about the exchange, about how much of her went into me, and how much of me went into her.’ Watson doesn’t have a conclusive answer, but it’s a question that goes to the heart of where she has come from, and who she becomes next.

Three days before our meeting, she issued an emphatic denial via her website that her recent decision to take time off from her studies at the American university Brown had anything ‘to do with bullying, as the media have been suggesting recently. I have never been bullied in my life…’ She reiterates this to me, with quiet indignation, and repeats that she still hasn’t decided what to do in September. ‘Like a lot of other students at Brown, I might spend my third year abroad.’ Until then, Watson has a packed schedule: promoting the last Harry Potter film (Harry Potter and the Deathly

Hallows: Part 2); a supporting part in My Week with Marilyn (playing a wardrobe assistant to Michelle Williams’ Monroe); being the new Lancôme ambassador (she’s the face of the brand’s latest fragrance, Trésor Midnight Rose, with a campaign shot by Mario Testino); and filming her most recent role in an adaptation of The Perks of Being a Wallflower (The Catcher in the Rye for the MTV generation, to be directed by the novel’s author Stephen Chbosky in Pittsburgh).

She is clearly fired up by the new film, which deals with, among other things, child abuse and suicidal depression. ‘I think it is unbelievably important that this film is made. Stephen receives letters regularly that say that reading The Perks of Being a Wallflower literally saved their life. I read the whole script in one sitting and it made me cry… It deals with the issues that teenagers go through, the real ones, the scary ones that no one really wants to talk about.’ Describing the character she plays as apparently ‘much more of an extrovert than I am – she’s very good at having fun’, Watson is also able to identify the darker streak of ‘low self-worth’ that lies beneath the veneer of the party girl.

But she has not yet left Harry Potter behind, and Hermione remains part of her, which is hardly surprising. Consider, for example, that Watson’s own childhood photographs were used in a key scene in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1, in which Hermione casts a spell to obliterate her parents’ memory to protect them from evil and loss. ‘All the pictures dissolve, which was horrifying – it’s almost worse than dying, in a way, because your parents are still alive, but they have no awareness of you.’

As she speaks, it’s in Hermione’s voice: light, polite, but occasionally intense. Her manners are impeccable; she says thank you to everyone, and there’s a modesty in her demeanour, as well as her dress sense. Today she is wearing flat black ballet pumps from Zadig & Voltaire (‘The most comfortable shoes, but these are on their last legs’); cropped black Gap trousers (‘They fit so nicely that I bought three pairs’); and a white sleeveless broderie anglaise top by Equipment (‘This I bought in New York a few days ago’).

With her pale skin, dark defined eyebrows and short cap of hair, she has a look of Audrey Hepburn and Jean Seberg, but all the while recognisably herself – as she was in Mario Testino’s Burberry campaign. You can see why the fashion and beauty industries adore her; Testino enthuses about her ability to convey ‘a mixture of qualities that are very rare – freshness due to her youth, stardom and current relevance… the real woman of today’.

Christopher Bailey, Burberry’s chief creative director, is equally fulsome. ‘She has a classic, effortless beauty, and a modernity that is a perfect fit for the brand,’ he says. ‘But more than that, she’s also charming and intelligent.’ And Alberta Ferretti, who has known Watson since dressing her for the first Harry Potter promotional tour, speaks of her ‘reliability’, ‘strong character’ and ‘perseverance’.

‘For me, Emma represents freshness, intelligence, seriousness,

‘I was wondering about the exchange, about how much of Hermione went into me, and how much of me went into her’

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FIELD OF DREAMS This page: Emma Watson wears silk gown with ostrich feathers, £7,909, Versace.

Previous pages, left: embroidered muslin dress, £7,335, Yves Saint Laurent.

Previous pages, right: wool, lace and elastane dress, £1,380, Antonio Berardi. Patent heels, £445, Christian Louboutin

ANGELS AND DEMONS This page: silk dress, £1,290, Hakaan.

Wool and leather hat, £820, Louis Vuitton. Leather and suede ankle boots, £645, Rupert Sanderson.

Opposite: embroidered silk chiffon dress with feather skirt, £1,846, Oscar de la Renta. Leather shoes ( just seen), £395, Rupert Sanderson

femininity… She’s such a great role model for all today’s girls.’

Watson herself returns all the compliments, though she’s too clever to fall for the idea of fashion as being benevolent. ‘It can be savage,’ she says, ‘and cruel, in that it’s prescriptive – you have to look a certain way and fit a certain mould – but also in the way it’s made.’ Her commitment to ethical fashion is manifest in her collaborations with the fair-trade-pioneering label People Tree, and an environmentally friendly collection for Alberta Ferretti, displaying a level of involvement that goes beyond simply putting her name to a brand. People Tree’s Antony Waller describes her as having ‘attended absolutely every meeting and being involved in every decision’, as well as making a trip to the slums of Dhaka to investigate working conditions. ‘When I went out to Bangladesh, to a factory where the clothes are made [for mass-market labels], it was horrifying,’ she says. ‘There is a cost to cheap clothes – if people could see the inhumane way they’re made, they would never in a million years buy them…’

It’s a balancing act, of course, between having the courage to speak out and at the same time increasing her involvement not only with the fashion industry, but the business of being a celebrity brand. Given her great wealth – she is now worth £24 million, according to The Sunday Times Rich List – Watson need never work again, a fact she tacitly acknowledges when discussing her decision about whether or not to continue at Brown. ‘The only reason to go to university is to do what I love, and learn about what I’m interested in.’ That said, she seems unlikely to swerve away from her capacity for juggling different tasks and self-set targets for high achievement; this is, after all, the girl who got top marks for her A-levels and a place to read English at Cambridge (which she turned down in favour of Brown), while maintaining a gruelling filming schedule.

By her own admission, there has never been the space in her life to be badly behaved: her parents – both successful, Oxford-educated lawyers – split up when she was five, so she learnt to divide her time between two different households. Born and brought up in Paris, Watson and her younger brother Alex moved with their mother Jacqueline to Oxford. Her father remarried and lives with his second wife, a former nanny, in north London; they have a boy and twin girls (who were cast as younger versions of Emma in the BBC adaptation of Ballet Shoes). Watson is scrupulously loyal to both parents – and their extended families (her mother’s partner has two sons) – but also remains guarded; not only to maintain their privacy, but as a consequence, perhaps, of adhering to the traditional English etiquette of hiding emotion. ‘When I was growing up, my family, particularly my father, were very stoic,’ she says. ‘I learnt that young, very young…’ She cites Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day as one of her favourite books for its expression of the consequences of discretion. ‘Part of me is very resentful of this British mentality that it’s not good to express feelings of any kind – that it’s not proper or brave. But I also appreciate it. There’s another book that I read when I was very young – The Constant Princess by Philippa Gregory, about Catherine of Aragon – and I know it sounds silly, but I thought, “I’ve got to be just like her.” She was the first wife of Henry VIII and she survived, having been cruelly divorced. I remember being really inspired by that.’

Despite Watson’s previous lack of professional acting experience, you can see why she was picked out of thousands of young

hopefuls to play Hermione. ‘She was more beautiful than Hermione in the book,’ says David Heyman, the producer of Harry Potter, ‘but she was so focused and self-possessed and fiercely intelligent, just like Hermione – she was always Hermione.’ Determined to get the role, even before her first audition (which took place at her school, the Dragon School in Oxford, one of the most prestigious in the country), Watson, it seems, had no question in her mind that she might be anything other than good, just like Hermione.

‘There has never been room in my life for that – I couldn’t imagine giving my family any more trouble, it’s already been complicated enough.’ At the risk of being reductive, you sense that she inherited her ambition from her father – ‘My dad is one of the top international-communications lawyers in the country, and trying to argue with him was a nightmare, so I learnt quite quickly to be good with words’ – while she is more protective of her mother.

‘My mum is an incredible woman. She moved back from Paris with my brother and me after the divorce, and worked full-time, supporting both of us. But I felt I wanted to take care of her, I wanted to be there for her – I didn’t want to give her a hard time.’

Instead, she seems to have been more willing to be hard on herself; pushing herself through exams, revising in a rented flat in Hampstead in the middle of the night after filming from dawn at Leavesden Studios in Hertfordshire. The expectation was she would go to Cambridge, but in the end, she decided she needed to get away from the UK. ‘I felt suddenly very claustrophobic… I thought, “I can’t stay here, I won’t be able to concentrate, I won’t be left alone.”’

She won’t be drawn on exactly why she has felt the need to escape Brown – at least for now – other than the difficulty of combining her academic studies with her work commitments. But there are some indications that she is now beginning to value the chance to be happy as an alternative to overachievement. ‘My mother has been reminding me that happiness is important.’ She is rightly cautious about the demands of Hollywood: ‘LA scares the crap out of me. I feel if I have to work out four hours a day, and count the calories of everything I put in my mouth, and have Botox at 22, and obsess about how I look the whole time, I will go mad, I will absolutely lose it.’

But what might be toughest of all is for her to let herself go – to be free to make mistakes or experience the normal failures of life or reveal any form of aggression. Which isn’t surprising, having devoted her career so far to being Hermione, for whom the cause of goodness is a matter of life and death. Watson admits to having felt ‘a bit uncomfortable and awkward’ while portraying the role of bad girl for the Bazaar shoot – ‘It didn’t come naturally at all’ – and to a similar unease during a course of drama lessons when asked to show fury. ‘My acting tutor said the hardest thing for me was to get angry. I almost broke down in tears when they tried to get me to be angry. I said, “I can’t do it, I just can’t do it.” I keep all of that really bottled up somewhere and I feel unleashing it would be the scariest thing – and to let myself be powerful, sexy, all those things, it’s scary for me.’

Yet of one thing we can be certain; like Hermione, Emma Watson is brave enough to meet the most daunting of challenges. Not that I want to see her being good at being bad; rather, for her to allow herself to experience the risk of disenchantment, while keeping her own particular magic intact.

‘Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2’ is out on 15 July.

‘LA scares the crap out of me. I feel if I have to work out four hours a day, and obsess about how I look the whole time, I will go mad’

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GARDEN OF EDEN Velvet and lace dress, from a selection, Emilio Pucci

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FLAMING LIPS This page: silk dress, £1,290, Hakaan. Wool and leather hat, £820, Louis Vuitton.

Opposite: silk dress, £1,600, Dior. Leather shoes, £395, Rupert Sanderson. See Stockists for details.

Hair by Kerry Warn at the Milton Agency, using John Frieda. Make-up by Petros Petrohilos at Streeters, using Lancôme. Manicure by Trish Lomax at Premier, using Lancôme. Photographed at Petersham House. With thanks to Francesco and Gael Boglione and Petersham Nurseries

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h my God! Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve been given the crazy horse,â&#x20AC;&#x2122; says Emily Blunt, her limpid blue eyes wide, as piebald Diva bolts across the stable yard at Sunset Ranch high up in the Hollywood Hills. â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Why did I say I was an experienced rider?â&#x20AC;&#x2122; â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Because you clearly like a challenge,â&#x20AC;&#x2122; I reply, as she tucks her cascading brown curls into a hard hat. Not content to latte her way through a demure sit-down interview, Blunt, an experienced equestrian, has asked that we canter through Griffith Park at the crack of dawn. It is here, away from Hollywoodâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s bustle, that the 27-year-old British actress and new LA resident escapes to unwind.

We saddle up. The stables, recommended by Blunt, offer three speeds of horse to riders: fast, medium and slow. Being an amateur, I chose the latter. She hoots as my steed is led into the yard. â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Your horse, on the other hand,â&#x20AC;&#x2122; she screams, looking at a creature that can only be described as a decrepit armchair, â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;is almost decomposing.â&#x20AC;&#x2122; Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s all a far cry from the Bazaar cover shoot, the day before, with Blunt resplendent in Tom Ford, Gucci and Yves Saint Laurent.

She is all Seventies glamour. In Fordâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s gown, her torso sheathed in electric-blue silk, her giant kohl-rimmed eyes bore into the photographerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s lens, exuding an enigmatic, Mona Lisa allure.

This morning, Blunt retains her inherent elegance, her beauty this time bare-faced as she scuffs through the muck, stroking dogs on the way, and mounts Diva. When I comment on her fetching riding ensemble, she yells from her saddle: â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;These are ancient All Saints boots and the shirt is by Eliot, with one â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;lâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;, like TS Eliot.â&#x20AC;&#x2122; Such feistiness and genuine rapport are not what one expects from the star of two new major releases, adventure blockbuster Gulliverâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Travels, a Jack Black escapade, and The Adjustment Bureau, a thriller by The Bourne Ultimatum writer George Nolfi â&#x20AC;&#x201C; both with serious box-office pulling power. But then, Emily Blunt is a new breed of Hollywood star: self-deprecating, multi-talented and smart, who doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t buy into the hype.

Since the beginning of her career, Blunt has refused to be confined by stereotype. From her breakthrough role as the manipulative, sapphic teen in British arthouse film My Summer of Love in 2004, to the caustic, self-starved fashionista in The Devil Wears Prada (2006) â&#x20AC;&#x201C; a part which brought her Hollywood notoriety and a Golden Globe nomination â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Blunt has successfully alternated between serious and comic roles. She has worked alongside Hollywood giants Meryl Streep (who named her one of the most talented young actresses she has ever worked with), Tom Hanks (in political satire Charlie Wilsonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s War) and Anthony Hopkins (of whom she does a mean impression) in lycanthropic horror The Wolfman. She even won a Golden Globe for her part in the TV film Gideonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Daughter (â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;I looked down at the audience and Jack Nicholson was staring up at me, and I couldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t even remember what my bloody name was,â&#x20AC;&#x2122; she says).

Above all, it was her debut lead in The Young Victoria in 2009, to which she brought humanity and depth to the notion of our most austere monarch (â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Emily wanted to make her a human being as well as a historical icon,â&#x20AC;&#x2122; says co-star Rupert Friend) that cemented her

status (as well as winning another Golden Globe nomination). â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;I shy away from roles that are one-dimensional and the reactionary parts to the male simply there to facilitate or carry â&#x20AC;&#x153;himâ&#x20AC;?,â&#x20AC;&#x2122; she says, now seated back in the safety of Chateau Marmont and ordering a hearty croque-madame. â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Those parts drive me insane. And at the end of the day, all I have as an actress are my choices. And itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s difficult to find the gems â&#x20AC;&#x201C; the unique scripts, the great female characters.â&#x20AC;&#x2122; Her role as the wide-eyed Princess of Lilliputia in a new family adventure comedy version of Swiftâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Gulliverâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Travels is â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;the frothiest youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll ever see meâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;, she says. â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Look at me, Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m an innate tomboy. But I actually thought it would be great to play someone 10 paces behind the jokeâ&#x20AC;Ś My mum read the book to us when we were kids,â&#x20AC;&#x2122; she says. â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;And it was dark and epic; so many metaphors. This version will make true Swiftians roll their eyes and put Jack Blackâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s face on a target.â&#x20AC;&#x2122; But the film was fun to make. â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Jack is so laidback heâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s lying down,â&#x20AC;&#x2122; she says, laughing and sliding down in her chair to almost horizontal, her voice mimicking his raspy whisper.

Her next release sees a trademark switch of genre, from comedy to thriller this time, in The Adjustment Bureau. In it, she plays a dancer opposite Matt Damonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s aspiring senator; the pair fall in love and then fall foul of the omniscient political machine that is trying to separate them. â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Matt?â&#x20AC;&#x2122; she says grinning. â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;He is so willing to play around, and we genuinely loved being around each other off set; we found a secret language as friends that translates into our scenes.â&#x20AC;&#x2122; Blunt, who had never danced in her life, underwent two months of intensive training. â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;We did four and a half hours dance a day â&#x20AC;&#x201C; and it was hell,â&#x20AC;&#x2122; she says. Similarly hellish was the strict diet imposed to create her dancerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s silhouette. â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Chicken and salad daily was also the pits, because I love to eat. And Matt looked on, so relieved it wasnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t him having to go to the gym. Can you imagine Matt Damon in a deep pliĂŠ?â&#x20AC;&#x2122; I ask Blunt if she ever imagined being at this juncture: starring in two multimillion-dollar blockbusters simultaneously? â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Where Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m at is radically different from anything Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d expected,â&#x20AC;&#x2122; she says. â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;As a child, I had this fantasy that Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d read modern languages and be an interpreter for the UN.â&#x20AC;&#x2122; Brought up in a leafy suburb of Roehampton, her mother an English teacher, her father a criminal barrister, Blunt overcame a terrible stutter as a child, aged 12, when her teacher suggested she perform with a northern accent in a school play. â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;My teacher was brilliant, because I distanced myself from my speech problem by doing a character in another voice.â&#x20AC;&#x2122; Later, she went up to the Edinburgh Festival and was signed by an agent on the spot, aged 17. â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;So I feel acting found me,â&#x20AC;&#x2122; she says. â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;And early in my career, I was apprehensive. I really didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t want to do it. Now I look back and think, â&#x20AC;&#x153;What an idiot. Of course this is what I should be doing. I love it.â&#x20AC;?â&#x20AC;&#x2122; Bluntâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s innate acting ability is praised by Bill Nighy, her everwitty co-star in Wild Target, a comedy in which his ageing assassin falls for Rose (Blunt), a victim on his hit list. â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;It wouldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t occur to Emily to resort to cute,â&#x20AC;&#x2122; he said. â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;She is allergic to sentimentality.

Her intelligence is formidable, and she is deeply gifted. She has access to real seriousness and is properly funny.â&#x20AC;&#x2122; But Blunt measures her success today with a healthy dose of cynicism. â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;The business is all about gush and hype. You never have a bad meeting in LA. They always say, â&#x20AC;&#x153;Youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re amazing, youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re so funny.â&#x20AC;? You always walk out going, â&#x20AC;&#x153;I nailed that part,â&#x20AC;? but theyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re

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A PLUNGING NECKLINE AND SEDUCTIVE RED LIPS CHANNEL THE ALLURE OF THE CLASSIC SCREEN GODDESS This page: silk wrap dress, ÂŁ1,420; leather belt, ÂŁ805, both Gucci. Yellow gold ring (worn throughout), ÂŁ2,190, Boucheron.

Previous pages: embroidered silk dress, about ÂŁ11,430, Tom Ford www.harpersbazaar.co.uk

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THE STRIKING BLOCK COLOUR OF THESE FIGURE-HUGGING SILK CREATIONS IS A MAJOR LOOK FOR S/S 11 Silk skirt, £1,654; silk top, £533, both Haider Ackermann www.harpersbazaar.co.uk

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probably saying behind your back, â&#x20AC;&#x153;Sheâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s definitely not rightâ&#x20AC;Śâ&#x20AC;?â&#x20AC;&#x2122; Blunt is one of a host of British actors that has decamped to Los Angeles. Does she think her nationality is part of her appeal to American producers? â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;I donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t think it comes down to my Britishness at all. I had a director say to me, â&#x20AC;&#x153;Can you say that a little more British?â&#x20AC;? And he said, â&#x20AC;&#x153;Try and do it a little more cold. Like how you are.â&#x20AC;? And I said, â&#x20AC;&#x153;Not only is that a confusing note, but itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s an offensive one.â&#x20AC;? Weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re all frigid obviously.â&#x20AC;&#x2122; At this point, a very petite brunette interrupts our breakfast, introducing herself as Eva (Longoria). â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve been riding up at Sunset Ranch,â&#x20AC;&#x2122; says Blunt, after embracing her friend. â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Would you do it with me? I need to find fellow horse-riders.â&#x20AC;&#x2122; â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;I would totally do it. Oh my God, Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m going to go with you,â&#x20AC;&#x2122; Longoria replies, before saying her goodbyes. â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Sheâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s so cute,â&#x20AC;&#x2122; Blunt says after she has gone. â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Put her in your pocket. Little mini-me.â&#x20AC;&#x2122; The pair are clearly friends, but I feel surprised by the encounter. Blunt has been so self-deprecating all morning that I had all but forgotten her Hollywood standing.

I recollect hearing about Bluntâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s very intimate Lake Como wedding to actor John Krasinski, star of Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Complicated, Away We Go and NBCâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s The Office, last year. George Clooney, Billy Crudup, Matt Damon and Meryl Streep were among the guests (â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Yes, the wedding was beautiful â&#x20AC;&#x201C; there were no frilly napkinsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;), a sign that Blunt now belongs to the Hollywood elite. â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;No I donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t,â&#x20AC;&#x2122; she insists, taking a bite of croque-madame. â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;After this interview, Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m going to immigration to try and sort out my Green Card, like any other normal person. Then Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m being a wife; flying to Alaska to see John on set.â&#x20AC;&#x2122; Blunt is joining Krasinski as he shoots Everybody Loves Whales with Drew Barrymore. The couple have promised to never spend more than two weeks apart. â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;And believe me, Alaska is not glamorous, itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s cold. Last time I went, I started doing bikram yoga because itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s the only place where Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m not fucking freezing.â&#x20AC;&#x2122; â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Ah, married lifeâ&#x20AC;Śâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; I joke. â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Yes, heâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s the funniest man in the world,â&#x20AC;&#x2122; she says. â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;To most, but especially to me. And, andâ&#x20AC;Śâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; And Blunt starts, for the first time, to look reticent.

She is clearly not comfortable talking about her private life. After she separated from Canadian singer Michael BublĂŠ, who she lived with for three years before she met Krasinski, she regretted being so open about their relationship. â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s why I donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t ever talk about John,â&#x20AC;&#x2122; she explains. She was introduced to him by friend and Devil Wears Prada co-star Anne Hathaway. â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;When youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re in love, youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re so happy that you want to tell people about it. But now I have to censor myself. You need to protect the happiness you have.â&#x20AC;&#x2122; She is happy, however, to divulge that she and Krasinski have settled in West Hollywood with their golden retriever Huck â&#x20AC;&#x201C; she shows me a picture of the dog on top of her, and heâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s bigger than her. â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;And we find dens in LA,â&#x20AC;&#x2122; she continues. â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;People wonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t hang out where we hang out. They want to hang out where Angelina hangs out.â&#x20AC;&#x2122; â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;I love it here,â&#x20AC;&#x2122; she says of living in Los Angeles, clearly a little surprised at her own response. â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;It always feels like quite a hug when I come back. I think itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s because I have a great group of friends â&#x20AC;&#x201C; mainly Brits. But I do miss London too; the vibrancy of it,â&#x20AC;&#x2122; she says wistfully. â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;I have a very visceral reaction to being in London. I have my place in the world there. And I miss my sister

making me boiled egg and marmite toast at our flat in Notting Hill.â&#x20AC;&#x2122; While in LA, Blunt still manages to retain her fundamental Britishness, eschewing the excesses of Californian botox culture and New Age flakiness. â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Omâ&#x20AC;Ś No, I do not meditate or do anything like that,â&#x20AC;&#x2122; she says. â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;The most tense and fucked up people in the world are people who meditate. In my downtime, I cook a mean roast chicken, and if I need to let off steam, I go dancing. I went to this fantastic restaurant the other night where you get whisked around by a short enthusiastic Brazilian man. I went with my friends and we ate so much chicken, we almost threw up when we salsa-ed it off.â&#x20AC;&#x2122; With worldwide premieres of both her films coming up, Blunt is psyching herself up for a whirlwind press tour, though she is still suspicious of the red-carpet circus. â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;I used to look like a deer in headlights. You step out of the car and itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s bedlam. Everyoneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s got crazy eyes â&#x20AC;&#x201C; elbowing people out of the way.â&#x20AC;&#x2122; She admits, though, that she is slowly acclimatising to it. â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Now, I have a martini before I leave â&#x20AC;&#x201C; just to take the edge off it. And I end up laughing my way through. You shouldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t work those events. Whatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s the point?â&#x20AC;&#x2122; As to her sartorial choices, Blunt is far from being one of the celebrity clothes horses weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve become accustomed to. â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;I never have any idea [about what Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m wearing],â&#x20AC;&#x2122; she confesses. â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll look at several things and make a choice. But Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m much more excited by fashion than I was before The Devil Wears Prada.â&#x20AC;&#x2122; Working with stylist and designer Patricia Field, she says, changed her perception. â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;I could finally see how artistic and an extension of someoneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s personality fashion can be.â&#x20AC;&#x2122; This new playful sense of style is sure to be useful in Bluntâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s future career, which shows no sign of waning. She has just finished shooting Lasse HallstrĂśmâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Salmon Fishing in the Yemen with Ewan McGregor, and has two new projects lined up including live animation Gnomeo and Juliet (starring James McAvoy) and Looper, a futurist thriller with Bruce Willis, in which she plays â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;a kick-arse girl from who wields an axe and a gunâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;, she says with a smile. â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Something Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve always wanted to do.â&#x20AC;&#x2122; And with that Blunt looks at my watch and says: â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Dude, Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m late for immigration.â&#x20AC;&#x2122; I realise that weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve overrun our scheduled time by hours, and no clipped publicist has intervened. Blunt is an unusual animal for Hollywood â&#x20AC;&#x201C; extremely generous, without a semblance of narcissism or steely eyed ambition. At 27, she has a formidable path ahead of her, with a level-headedness and a dramatic range that might suggest a career in the mould of Streep or Susan Sarandon, her former co-stars.

As she gathers her coat I ask where she thinks sheâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll be in 10 years time. She definitely wants a family, though not just yet. â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;I know our life will get harder when we have kids; just the logistics of seeing each other and working.â&#x20AC;&#x2122; As to her future career, she says: â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;I would like to be more forthright in initiating ideas, develop my own projects, create work for myself. There arenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t enough women out there doing it on the developmental side. But ultimately, in 10 years time, I will hopefully be employedâ&#x20AC;Ś I donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t know what else to anticipate. What I do know is,â&#x20AC;&#x2122; she says taking a final swig of coffee, â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;a lack of desperation helps. A lack of desperation really helps.â&#x20AC;&#x2122; â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;The Adjustment Bureauâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; is released nationwide 4 March 2011.

FRINGE BENEFITS: TOM FORDâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S EYE-CATCHING DETAIL CREATES A LOOK OF PURE SOPHISTICATED ELEGANCE Silk dress with hand-embroidered and hand-painted detail, about ÂŁ14,950, Tom Ford

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From Marchesa to Dior, discover Emily Bluntâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s hottest red-carpet hits at harpersbazaar.co.uk www.harpersbazaar.co.uk

PHOTOGRAPH: XXXXXX

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FULL LENGTH EQUALS HIGH GLAMOUR IN YSL’S ELECTRIFYING JUMPSUIT Silk-cotton mix jumpsuit, £2,820, Yves Saint Laurent. Pink gold necklace, £2,190, Boucheron. See Stockists for details.

Hair by Laini Reeves at Tracey Mattingly.

Make-up by Jenn Streicher at Solo Artists.

Manicure by Ashlie Johnson at the Wall Group. Production by Peter McClafferty www.harpersbazaar.co.uk

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The wisecracking all-American blonde bombshell who charmed us in The Mask, Thereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Something About Mary and Being John Malkovich is back and looking incredible. On the cusp of 40, she opens up to Bazaar about motherhood, loving London and feeling stronger than ever.

MELISSA WHITWORTH meets the one and only

Cameron Diaz Photographs by TOM MUNRO Styled by CATHY KASTERINE

C

ameron Diaz’s cup is literally running over as she sits in a laid-back Italian bistro in New York.

Dropping cubes of ice into her glass of rosé while simultaneously speed-talking about everything from pregnancy bumps to British men, the actress’ lust for life is clearly undiminished by 18 years at the top of the Hollywood game.

From yesterday’s wet-look shoot for Bazaar, all white minimalism and classic Diaz sex appeal (she eagerly shows me a photo edit on her iPhone), to her dresseddown look today, wearing jeans with lace-up ankle boots, Diaz is refreshingly at ease and low-key. But now seated and engaged in conversation, her speech punctuated with mouthfuls of olives as she grazes on antipasti (or ‘pickety plates’ as she calls them), she reveals herself a dynamo of enthusiasm, one so infectious that I find myself perched precariously at the edge of my seat. Giggling, she chronicles the range of prosthetic ‘tummies’ she paraded for her new film What to Expect When You’re Expecting, in which she plays one of a group of pre-natal women.

‘You have to do a body cast, where they cover you with plaster strips. Then they fill it and create a body, and then the sculptors build the two-month, three-month, nine-month bump.’ She pops another olive. ‘We had bumps you hooked on under clothes, and then there are ones that are exposed and painted to match your skin tone. They’re weighted to make them feel as natural as possible.

The only thing that is similar to actually being pregnant is that it’s hard to sit down.’ Cue that million-dollar grin.

And thus is the charm of Cameron Diaz. Her heady combination of effervescent candour, Californian beach-grown looks (Pacificblue eyes, surf-toned limbs, tousled hair and a mouth made for laughing), comic timing and likeability factor (part tomboy, part sex bomb, part best friend) has appealed to audiences – male and female alike – for almost 20 years, from her debut in The Mask in 1994 to There’s Something About Mary, Being John Malkovich and Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York. Diaz is one of the world’s highest-paid actresses, and one of the all-time ruling queens of the romantic comedy (alongside such greats as Marilyn Monroe, Lucille Ball, and her contemporaries Sandra Bullock and Jennifer Aniston). Diaz has always been the film industry’s unashamedly sunny good-time girl – but as she prepares to turn 40 this August, she appears to be on the crest of a new wave.

It is a wave that, it appears, will not easily be quashed. With her latest film, which co-stars Jennifer Lopez and Glee’s Matthew Morrison, Diaz will have to endure the inevitable roll-call of questions about the maternal urges of a woman in her late thirties, particularly triggered by the scene in which she goes into labour – ‘The girl who played the doctor delivering was all up in my bits, you had your legs up in stirrups, I mean I had 30 layers of spandex on.

I’m there with my legs up and she’s pretending to pull a baby out of me. There was this live baby at one point…’ – but Diaz assures me brightly that playing pregnant only roused a type of abstract vanity: ‘I mean, you look at yourself and think, “Oh, I’d be cute as a pregnant woman,” in an “Oh! Look at you!” way.’ Scooping more ice into her wine glass, she jokes that she hopes she’d have a ‘bigger bootie’ than the one she was given in the film if the situation ever did arise.

Diaz is relentlessly upbeat about her single status, but it would be impossible to be entirely immune to the press obsession with her childless state, painting her as lonely and unfulfilled. ‘The media is highly chauvinistic. It’s really juicy for them to have a woman, single, who is about to turn 40,’ she says. ‘They will make up really anything that they can.’ She rolls her eyes. ‘We’ve come a long way, but women still get told what our lives are supposed to look like.

People want to put you inside a box because it makes them feel comfortable. When someone lives outside of the box, it makes others uncomfortable about their own decisions… There have been women like myself throughout history, and they have always made people feel threatened.’

She is, however, happy to discuss her reasons for refraining thus far from trying for a baby. ‘It’s just not where I am right now,’ she announces simply, dipping a piece of ham in some olive oil. Diaz split with baseball star Alex Rodriguez in September 2011, though the pair remain friends (her claim that she is on amicable terms with all her exes – which include Matt Dillon, Jared Leto and British model Paul Sculfor – appeared to be true when she teamed up with ex Justin Timberlake in Bad Teacher last year). She doesn’t dwell on what is missing in her world, she tells me, because she is ‘fully engaged’ in her present life. ‘I’m not sitting there going, “Oh my God, when am I going to get married? When am I going to have a baby?” I would be remiss if I was living my life wishing I had something other than what I have. If one day I am blessed with the experience of having a child, I would be overjoyed, but I am not sitting here feeling empty because I haven’t yet, or that I may not.’

‘The media is highly chauvinistic.

It’s really juicy for them to have a woman, single, who is about to turn 40’

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Anyway, Diaz argues that nurturing is a quality that is not purely reserved for those raising children. ‘I am a nurturer to all of my friends. I don’t feel alone in the world. I have so many friends, more friends who are like me [without children] than not. I also have girlfriends who have kids, and I have strong relationships with their children and my nieces and nephew. My happiest moments are when I’m with my friends – I consider them and my family to be my greatest wealth. They are my crown jewels.’

One of those friends is fellow actor Gwyneth Paltrow. ‘We became very close after my dad’s death,’ reflects Diaz, now in a softer tone. In 2008, when she was filming My Sister’s Keeper, in which she plays a mother whose child is dying from leukaemia, her father Emilio died suddenly from pneumonia at the age of 58. Paltrow, who had been devastated by the death of her own June 2012 |

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WHITE SPIRIT: DIAZ SHINES IN MINIMALIST S/S 12 CHIC FROM BALENCIAGA AND DONNA KARAN This page: Cameron Diaz wears jersey top, £545; cotton mix trousers, £1,625, both Balenciaga by Nicolas Ghesquière. Sterling silver bangle, £575, Georg Jensen.

Previous page: cupro body, from £900; silk skirt, from £3,120, both Donna Karan. Silver necklace, £550, Assya

‘I am the most satisfied I’ve ever been with the way I look, because I am so much happier. I would never want to be 25 again’

BODY HEAT Muslin swimsuit, £391, Michael Kors.

Sterling silver necklace, £2,700; sterling silver bangle, £575, both Georg Jensen.

Ring, Diaz’s own

‘I love London. I love the Brits – I always have. I have a weak spot for them. I grew up on Monty Python and love Little Britain’

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BE COOL Crepe de chine shirt, £260, DKNY. White diamond and white gold necklace, from a selection, De Beers

father from cancer in 2002, was an absolute rock, says Diaz.

‘She reached out and it was very sweet. We bonded on that.’ She brightens again, adding, more playfully, that Paltrow is now seen as an information guru to women on the Hollywood circuit.

‘She is the person that all of our friends call when they need something: “I am going to this city, where should I eat?” And now she has the Goop website…’

Paltrow recently had the opportunity to show Diaz the newest highlights of her adopted city. The pair were spotted together in February sipping wine at Mayfair’s Arts Club (with mutual friend Stella McCartney – Diaz is an enthusiastic green campaigner) and out in the environs of the Martin-Paltrow household in Belsize Park. ‘They are exceptional people,’ she says of the latter couple. ‘We have known each other because we have been in the business for the same amount of time.’ Diaz is also close friends with supermodel Naomi Campbell – with whom she makes the occasional foray, when she is in town, to the club Whisky Mist.

However, our capital city’s nightlife is not its main attraction for Diaz. ‘What I love about London is all the green spaces – you know how every little neighbourhood will have a little park or a square…’

She adds that she loves walking in Hyde Park: ‘I like to get walking in a city. I always find myself in very interesting places.’ She gives a cheeky wink. ‘I love London. I love the Brits – I always have.

I have a weak spot for them. I grew up on Monty Python. I love Little Britain. My grandfather used to watch Benny Hill all the time…’ She explodes into a fit of giggles so magnetic, they threaten to pull me straight off my chair.

Last year, Diaz enjoyed a prolonged British sojourn due to the filming of her next project, art-heist film Gambit – a Coen brothers remake of the 1966 Michael Caine film of the same name – alongside Colin Firth. ‘He’s the perfect Englishman,’ she muses, sipping from her glass with a touch of flirtatiousness: ‘Just enough of the self-effacing to a point that it’s comfortable for other people, but also totally charming and engaging to where he makes you feel special. He’s got that British honesty.’ She continues on an animated riff about British men, her glass circling the air. ‘I love their sense of humour and the sense of chivalry and charm.

It’s something that is innately a part of the culture – we don’t have that over here, it’s not the same in America.’

Diaz’s penchant for the Brits perhaps stems from her own genetic make-up: her mother Billie, an import-export agent, is of mixed English, German and Cherokee descent; her father Emilio’s family came from Spain. From an early age the young Diaz was conditioned not to take life for granted. ‘One of the first things my mum taught me was that nothing is for free. I pulled a toy out of a cereal box and said, “Look what we got,” and she said, “Honey, that’s not free, we had to buy that box of cereal to get that.”’ As a child, Diaz liked to skateboard and listen to heavy-metal music. She was never a daddy’s girl – ‘My dad’s son, more like,’ she once said. The

family lived first in sunny San Diego and then in Long Beach, perhaps the root of Diaz’s optimistic disposition: she evolved into the epitome of the Californian surfer girl – a new Farrah Fawcett – all teeth, smile and legs. By 16, she was signed to Elite, modelling bikinis all around the globe, and by 20, she’d bluffed her way into an audition for The Mask with Jim Carrey. (It is typical of Diaz’s straight-talking style that she has attributed this initial break to the bra she bought for the screen test.) She was the perfect foil to Carrey’s grandiose exhibitionism, a purring bombshell with the ability to deliver a killer comic line.

It was not long before Diaz’s sex appeal caused a celluloid sensation, sparking virtual seizures in the male population. There’s Something About Mary was so successful because it revolved around Diaz’s real-life appeal. (‘She has an incredible energy both onand off-screen, which inspires everyone around her,’ says Kirk Jones, the director of What to Expect When You’re Expecting.) Diaz was Monroe-level sexy, but she was also willing to frump up (an attitude always appreciated by women), sporting a mousy wig in Being John Malkovich; to pastiche her own ‘blondeness’; or to tackle serious films, such as Gangs of New York.

Off-screen, Diaz’s world appears filled with a certain wanderlust and joie de vivre – both in the string of leading men that she has dated (where it hasn’t worked out, it’s hard to see Diaz as ever either desperate or a victim) – and in her tomboyish passions for surfing and travelling the globe. (‘I get to go to Brazil with my girlfriends on a press trip, and we get taken on a helicopter to the tip of the Cristo [Christ the Redeemer], or I take my parents to the Vatican to see the Sistine Chapel…’)

From childhood, Diaz was blessed with a boundless physical energy that saw her excel at track and field events at school. Athletics remains a passion, and she is characteristically enthusiastic about the Olympics: ‘I am in awe of the speed and the endurance. These athletes, the way they train, I think it’s unbelievable. What you have

It was relentless: eight hours a day, seven days a week for three months.’ She misses that level of fitness now. ‘I could do anything back then,’ she says with a wry smile. ‘I could climb a wall in two seconds. I thought, “I will never not feel this way again.”’

When I comment on her enduring athletic physique, she teases: ‘Wanna see my arms?’ She pulls a tanned arm from the sleeve of her slouchy grey sweater and flexes an impressive bicep. I’m unsure if she is modestly implying that she is out of shape (she is not). Looking at the pictures on her iPhone, Diaz’s athletic body has barely changed since her late twenties.

This she puts down to working out, which she professes to enjoy. ‘I love the energy of the gym, I love that everybody is there to work hard and push themselves. I love that dynamic.’

But rather than the Hollywood tendency to wage a desperate (and sometimes unbecoming) war on the ravages of time, Diaz has chosen to embrace her future. ‘People have been watching me on-screen for 18 years. I turned 21 on the set of The Mask, and 39 on the set of What to Expect When You’re Expecting. People say, “Oh, it looks like she’s getting older.” Duh! Guess what – I am. Very good observation!’ Yet Diaz insists: ‘I feel stronger, and I feel like I look better than ever. I am the most satisfied I’ve ever been with the way I look, because I am so much happier. I would never want to be 25 again – I still stand by that.’

Her guiding philosophy appears to be simple: ‘the best is yet to come’. ‘In my twenties I was such a fatalist… The thirties are so amazing, and 40 is awesome. Our society is so disconnected from the things that are really important… I always loved my elders because they had a life before me. They show you how to do things, how to think about things, how the world worked, and I loved that.’

She has also gained confidence from a select number of peers who have acquired new depth as they’ve got older – most specifically her good friend Drew Barrymore. ‘She works her ass off.

She’s a writer, a director and an actor. That’s authentic to who she is. It’s amazing to know somebody for so long and watch that grow,’ Diaz says in a crescendo of gusto. ‘That’s the beauty of getting older: you learn all the lessons from life and you can apply them, and it gets richer and you get more capable. You become more fulfilled; you don’t repeat the same things over and over again. Every time you stumble on something, you are going to remember, “Oh, I have done this before, I know how to do this.” For me, getting older is honing those skills, and by doing so, my life has become so much more enjoyable.’

And has her approach to dating similarly matured? Is she looking for something different in her forties, a new type of man to share her next decade with? She once admitted to favouring men who exhibit a caveman-like approach to love. ‘“Bonk me over the head and throw me over your shoulder?” Oh, I still love that,’ she says with a chuckle, her grin expanding to its full breadth, before popping an olive in her mouth and adding: ‘Well, every once in a while… You just have to remember that’s not the one to get into a relationship with.’ She waves an ironic finger. ‘That’s the one to have fun with for maybe a week.’

‘What to Expect When You’re Expecting’ is released nationwide on 23 May.

Off-screen, Diaz’s world appears filled with a certain joie de vivre, in her tomboyish passions for surfing and travelling the globe to endure physically and mentally to be the best in the world…

Fifteen seconds or a minute to do everything they have trained their entire life for: the machine they have built of their bodies. I think that’s why it’s so captivating to people.’

Diaz, too, enjoys pushing herself ‘to the limits and building my own strength… I’ve always been athletic. But I didn’t have the discipline [at school] to really push myself. It’s not one thing alone: you have to be strong in your mind, your spirit and your body’.

Then came the training for Charlie’s Angels. ‘When we showed up for our first day, they said, “You are going to learn to love and embrace and be with your new best friend: pain.” They were not kidding. It was literally the most painful thing I have ever done.’ She sighs. ‘I had an eight-pack by the time I had finished. We would punch and kick thousands and thousands of times during the day.

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TOP OF THE CROP Cotton jacket, £490, MaxMara.

See Stockists for details. Hair by Shay Ashual for Tim Howard Management.

Make-up by Gucci Westman for Revlon.

Manicure by Elisa Ferri for Sensational at See Management. Stylist’s assistant: Benjamin Canares

Julianne Moore’s desire to tackle the most demanding roles has given her an acting CV of wildly diverse characters; at 49, she has yet to be typecast. With a typically potent performance about to hit cinemas, she chats to GLENN O’BRIEN about working with Tom Ford, and why she’ll always choose the complex and extreme over a Hollywood happy ending Photographs by PAOLA KUDACKI. Styled by SOPHIA NEOPHITOU-APOSTOLOU

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ulianne Moore’s redheadedness is what draws my attention every time I see her around Manhattan – and one does see her around Manhattan, especially downtown.

I’ve seen her at art-world events and on the street. I saw her once at the Apple Store. I don’t notice her because she looks like a famous movie star; I notice her because she’s the beautiful redhead, kids in tow, acting normal… and because I notice red hair – I can’t help it.

When we meet for brunch at one of her favourite bistros, Cafe Cluny in the West Village, the first thing that draws my attention is, again, her red hair. It is long and natural and baroquely sculptural. The second thing is that she doesn’t look anywhere near 49, though neither artifice nor intervention appears to be responsible for her youthful appearance. She’s slim and has beautiful bones, and though only 5’3”, she seems pretty tall when you’re sitting down and she’s standing up. So you stand up. She’s tall on film. And she’s so beautiful, you don’t even notice what she’s wearing.

‘The camera loves her,’ declares Tom Ford, who cast her opposite Colin Firth in his forthcoming (and remarkable) directorial debut A Single Man, based on the 1964 novel by Christopher Isherwood. Moore plays Charlotte (or Charley), a fantastic Englishwoman and fortysomething widow stranded in Los Angeles in 1962 who is also the best friend – and former lover – of George (Firth), a reconfirmed bachelor grieving for his male lover of 16 years who has recently died in an accident. It’s such a perfect character – an ageing beauty struggling to retain her verve and gaiety with the bleak prospects of being single and 50 just as the Sixties are about to swing. Moore is extraordinary.

‘She absolutely inhabited the character,’ says Ford, who first met Moore fitting her for the 1998 Academy Awards. Moore remembers the meeting with great fondness. ‘I went to a fitting at the Beverly Hills Hotel, and I brought my son Cal, who was a few months old,’ she says. ‘Tom is utterly charming and so handsome. I was completely swept off my feet. He was so sweet to my baby and me. And I wasn’t feeling all that attractive – I’d just had a child and my boobs were all big… anyway, he made a dress for me, which I subsequently did not wear because it felt too revealing at the time, but he was really great about it and told me not to worry.’ (Ford later dressed her for the 2003 Academy Awards in ‘this great green dress’ of silk

georgette and ruffles that secured her status as his flame-haired muse while at Yves Saint Laurent.) After Ford retired from womenswear in 2004 with talk of making movies, Moore ran into him at the Metropolitan Museum Costume Institute Gala with his partner Richard Buckley. Moore recalls asking: ‘“What’s going on with your movie?” They both lit up, and Tom said, “Funny you should ask.”’ Funny because Ford had written the part of Charley with Moore in mind. Ford sent her the script, and Moore said yes right away: ‘I loved the character and what Tom had to say about it.’

In conceiving the film, Ford was incredibly specific about what he wanted, particularly about Charley’s look. ‘She’s based on Tom’s grandmother,’ Moore reveals. ‘In the book, she’s kind of butchlooking. A drab haircut and hairy legs. Tom was insistent that my character be a blonde – that was a wig – and he had a whole thing with that elaborate eye make-up. Tom’s grandmother, whom he idolised, was very glamorous, and my character is someone who would spend all day doing her make-up. The dress I wore was from a vintage shop in Santa Fe [New Mexico], which is where his grandmother was from. I loved that the character is a sort of loving homage to someone he really cared about. It’s nice to have that amount of care and detail lavished on a character.

‘What I also love,’ she goes on, ‘is the warmth of the relationship between Charley and George; the longevity and love and dependability there. Tom loves women. He wants you to look as beautiful as possible and be as desirable as possible. And George is a character who’s like Tom, who can appreciate a woman, her beauty and her desirability, although he might not want it romantically.

I liked that complexity.’

Firth, who admits to having wanted to work with Moore for years, remarks of her methods that ‘in acting, if you are relaxed and the person opposite you is completely convincing, you get a lot of your performance for nothing’. He adds: ‘It was a bit hard to stay gay when she tried to kiss me, though.’ Off-camera, the pair quickly hit it off. Firth recalls: ‘Julianne and I had three intensive night-shoots together in the middle of – for me – a five-week shoot. They were the highlight. We didn’t manage to shut up for a minute. To be honest, the actual business of doing a take was a bit of an interruption.’

‘What a great guy,’ Moore raves, when I ask her about her very English co-star. ‘Colin is so charming and easy and funny and engaging, and incredibly self-deprecating and normal and terrific.

And he looks amazing. So dashing.’

Ford remembers that ‘she would be talking away with Colin until we called “action”, and just immediately go into her British accent and become Charley. She did it so smoothly that it seemed effortless. When I looked at her through the lens, it was startling: she was actually luminous, and I instantly understood what star quality really was’.

Colin Firth remarks of Moore’s methods that ‘in acting, if you are relaxed and the person opposite you is completely convincing, you get a lot of your performance for nothıng. It was a bit hard to stay gay when she tried to kıss me, though’

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SIREN CALL: RAMP UP THE GLAMOUR OF SLEEK DRESSING WITH SEXY AVANT-GARDE CUTS This page: silk and tulle jacket, £776, Antonio Berardi.

Previous pages: black crepe gown with harness detail, £2,720, Gucci.

White gold and diamond earrings (throughout), from £2,350, Shaun Leane.

Ring (throughout), her own

‘When I looked at her through the lens, it was startling: she was actually luminous, and I instantly understood what star quality really was’

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TOM FORD

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Star quality, certainly, but Moore is also a genuine actor. She’s not herself in every film. Firth identifies her great talent for being ‘frivolous, tragic, silly, sexy, mysterious or approachable with equal commitment’. She is no blank canvas, but she could be described as the sort French playwright and director Antonin Artaud was referring to when he said that ‘an actor is an athlete of the heart’.

During her 20-year film career, Moore has played a coke-snorting porn star (Amber Waves in Boogie Nights), a fragile omniphobic (Carol White in Safe) and a super-brazen artiste (Maude in The Big Lebowski ); she’s escaped dinosaurs, aliens, Pablo Picasso, Hannibal Lecter and Norman Bates. She has been involved in many failing marriages and numerous promising affairs, and been murdered by her son, all the while resisting typecasting – except that she’s (almost) always a redhead, often with freckles. (Interestingly, she went blonde as Charley and also, by her own insistence, to play Cathy Whitaker in Todd Haynes’ Far From Heaven. ‘The iconic American heroine was a blonde,’ she said at the time, ‘and I wanted the audience to reference that Lana Turner blonde.’)

Of course, A Single Man’s Charley is just the latest of several Englishwomen Moore has played for stage and screen, most memorably the scheming Mrs Cheveley in An Ideal Husband and the adulterous Sarah Miles in The End of the Affair. Before I leave to meet her, my wife asks me what I might ask her. ‘Maybe why she plays these Englishwomen,’ I say. ‘Well that’s a dumb question,’ my wife replies. ‘It’s because she has red hair.’ ‘Shouldn’t that mean she plays a lot of Irish and Scots?’ ‘No,’ says my wife, ‘there aren’t any good Irish or Scots parts.’ Moore laughs. ‘Your wife is probably right. I do think red hair has something to do with it.’

Moore is actually of Scottish, not English, descent. ‘My mother is from Scotland,’ she tells me. ‘She came to the United States when she was 10, and went to high school in New Jersey with my father, who is an American. I think I look very much like my mother. I just lost her six months ago. It was a pretty painful thing.

She was only 68, and it was very unexpected.

It was shocking. I thought I’d be 68 when she died, not that she would be 68. It’s been dreadful. She died of septic shock. She hadn’t been in the hospital or anything; she just felt sick and thought she had a sinus infection, so she stayed at home in bed and she was feeling better and went back to work and collapsed. She went to the hospital, they stabilised her and the next morning she died of an embolism. I can only talk about it like it was an accident, like a car accident or a building falling on someone. It was terrible… but I think that’s where my “UK” comes from.’

Talking about her mother, she tears up slightly. Nothing rolls down her cheek, but I see the moisture in her eyes and I feel a little guilty; a little intrusive. But she moves on. Maybe that’s one of the things that make a great actor – a heightened sensitivity and emotions close to the surface, but a trouper mentality.

Ford calls her ‘fearless’ as an actor. David Hare, who wrote the screenplay for The Hours, points to her unique ‘emotional expressiveness’. He says: ‘She likes parts that are demanding or extreme; women who are in terrible trouble. That’s what drew her to The Hours. She plays a woman who leaves her family and walks out when her son is very young. In Hollywood, that is

not sympathetic, not something actresses are queuing up to play.’

That willingness to tackle challenging, even dangerous, roles informs another upcoming part, in Canadian director Atom Egoyan’s Chloe, out in March. It’s a movie about middle-aged marriage. Moore explains: ‘My character thinks her husband [Liam Neeson] is having affairs, so she hires a young prostitute [Amanda Seyfried] to set him up. It’s her way of finding out what her husband is doing and what he wants, and she keeps pushing the girl further and further and the girl keeps reporting back to her. It’s really about what happens in a long-term relationship, the distance that happens in a long-term relationship. So many movies are, “Hey, I want to get married. I want to get married! Hey, look, I got married!” When in fact, for most of us, you get married and it’s a really long and complicated period in your life. Leading up to it becomes incidental after a while, but that’s the part that is consistently dramatised.’

I

n real life, Moore’s marriage, her second, is an undramatic, relatively unpublicised and by all accounts successful union with writer-director Bart Freundlich, who is 10 years her junior, and whom she met in 1996 on the set of his directorial debut The Myth of Fingerprints. They have two children: Caleb, 12, and Liv, seven.

‘When you meet her as a person,’ says Hare, ‘she’s very sweet, very sympathetic, very domestic, she loves her family, she can talk for hours about the best sofa to buy. When you need to know where to buy an egg timer, call up Julianne.’ Not perhaps what you expect from an actress best known for turning in such potent, simmering, highly wrought performances.

‘In person she is wildly, wildly funny,’ says Egoyan. ‘I think she’s aware of the type of roles she usually performs, and she pokes fun at herself from that point of view.’ Playing to this wildly funny side, she has just started filming a guest-starring role in Comedy Central series 30 Rock, with Tina Fey and Alec Baldwin. It takes her back to her roots, in a sense, in that she laboured on TV (on soap opera As The World Turns) through the early years of her career. ‘I play someone who went to high school with Alec Baldwin and finds him on Facebook. But I just started, and I really don’t know where it’s going. I have a little arc. It’s not permanent.

But they are so funny, and the bar is set so high in terms of comedy. I don’t really watch television, but I buy it and download it.’

It will be interesting to see how Moore’s starriness translates back to the small screen, and small-screen comedy at that.

After brunch, we go for a walk through the Village. It’s one of those perfect bright New York days. Looking around the changeless neighbourhood, it strikes me that if you ignored the cars and the store windows, it could still be 1962, the year her character from A Single Man inhabits. We talk easily about kids and schools and, passing some closed shops, the ailing economy, before, saying goodbye, I turn east and she walks south. Crossing a street, I look back and see her, a few blocks away now, entirely unnoticed by passers-by, her red hair momentarily catching the sun.

‘A Single Man’ is out on 12 February. ‘Chloe’ is out on 5 March.

Tom Ford calls her ‘fearless’.

David Hare points to her ‘unique emotional expressıveness. She likes parts that are extreme; women who are in terrible trouble. In Hollywood, that is not sympathetic, not something actresses are queuing up to play’

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VINTAGE-INSPIRED CORSETRY AND AN ULTRA-MODERN SILHOUETTE CHANNEL A SILVER-SCREEN VIXEN Tulle and crystal dress, from a selection, Antonio Berardi. Mesh bra, £10, American Apparel

She could be described as the sort Antonin Artaud was referring to when he said that ‘an actor is an athlete of the heart’

NEW-SEASON NUDE AND COUTURE CUTS DELIVER A FLAWLESS PERFORMANCE This page: net dress, £900, RM by Roland Mouret.

Opposite: velvet jacket; velvet trousers, both from a selection, Givenchy Haute Couture by Riccardo Tisci. See Stockists for details. Hair by Serge Normant at Serge Normant at John Frieda Salon.

Make-up by Gucci Westman for Revlon. Manicure

by Alicia Torello at Defacto, using Chanel

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y anyoneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s reckoning, it was going to be a momentous occasion. The woman known popularly as the â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;queen of taupeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;, interior designer Kelly Hoppen, was to encounter Her Majesty proper. â&#x20AC;&#x153;I was wearing killer suede Louboutin shoes and my feet felt like theyĂ­d shrunk inside them because I was so nervousĂ&#x2013;Ă­ That day in March, Kelly Hoppen went to the palace to collect her MBE for her services to interior design. For Hoppen Ăą undoubtedly a social animal, whose personal life has at times garnered more press attention than her considerable professional achievements Ăą it was a resounding recognition of her formidable business skills. Now 50, she has built a multifaceted creative enterprise since starting out in the late 1970s; her company brought in ÂŁ18 million revenue last year. In her career, she has created thousands of sumptuous Zen interiors, for clients including David and Victoria Beckham and Elton John, as well as countless product lines for her own brand, and past collaborations with household names including British Airways, BHS and Debenhams. While she is synonymous with creating astoundingly luxe interiors in multiples shades of mushroom, putty, ecru and cream, she says the variety of her designs can surprise people. ĂŤMy style is very eclectic,Ă­ she insists. In the homes she has created for herself, buddhas have rubbed shoulders with Peter Blakes.

Inevitably, the occasion of HoppenĂ­s honour did not pass without a party. Her 26-year-old daughter Natasha (from her first marriage, to restaurateur Graham Corrett), and former stepdaughters Savannah and Sienna Miller (from her 11-year marriage to banker-turnedart-dealer Ed Miller) gathered family and friends including Stephen Webster and Ronni Ancona, to a private room at Notting Hill club Beach Blanket Babylon. She roared with laughter at Rory BremnerĂ­s speech Ăą he jested that her honour was for ĂŤMaking Beige ExcitingĂ­ Ăą and danced to bongo players, all the while with her award pinned to her black strapless gown. ĂŤI love the actual medal,Ă­ she says. ĂŤIt looks like it was designed by Vivienne Westwood!Ă­ When we meet up several months later, she is no longer sporting this most prestigious of accessories (although she does occasionally pin it onto her denim jacket). Today, her diminutive frame is draped elegantly in Prada as we sit either side of a glossy, solidblack-oak, trestle-legged desk of her own design.

WeĂ­re in the Yard, the Notting Hill retail space she opened in April, surrounded by distressed white metal furniture, antique Union Jack cushions and black glass vases three ndoubtedly a social animal, whose personal life has at times garnered more press attention than her considerable professional achievements Ăą it was a resounding recognition of her formidable business skills. Now 50, she has built a multi-faceted creative enterprise since starting out in the late 1970s; her company brought in ÂŁ18 million revenue last year. In her career, she has created thousands of sumptuous Zen interiors, for clients including David and Victoria Beckham and Elton John, as well as countless product lines for her own brand, and past collaborations with household names including British Airways, BHS and Debenhams. While she is synonymous with

creating astoundingly luxe interiors in multiples shades of mushroom, putty, ecru and cream, she says the variety of her designs can surprise people. ĂŤMy style is very eclectic,Ă­ she insists. In the homes she has created for herself, buddhas have rubbed shoulders with Peter Blakes.

Inevitably, the occasion of HoppenĂ­s honour did not pass without a party. Her 26-year-old daughter Natasha (from her first marriage, to restaurateur Graham Corrett), and former stepdaughters Savannah and Sienna Miller (from her 11-year marriage to bankerturned-art-dealer Ed Miller) gathered family and friends including Stephen Webster and Ronni Ancona, to a private room at Notting Hill club Beach Blanket Babylon. She roared with laughter at Rory BremnerĂ­s speech Ăą he jested that her honour was for ĂŤMaking Beige ExcitingĂ­ ndoubtedly a social animal, whose personal life has at times garnered more press attention than her considerable professional achievements Ăą it was a resounding recognition of her formidable business skills. Now 50, she has built a multi-faceted creative enterprise since starting out in the late 1970s; her company brought in ÂŁ18 million revenue last year. In her career, she has created thousands of sumptuous Zen interiors, for clients including David and Victoria Beckham and Elton John, as well as countless product lines for her own brand, and past collaborations with household names including British Airways, BHS and Debenhams. While she is synonymous with creating astoundingly luxe interiors in multiples shades of mushroom, putty, ecru and cream, she says the variety of her designs can surprise people. ĂŤMy style is very eclectic,Ă­ she insists. In the homes she has created for herself, buddhas have rubbed shoulders with Peter Blakes.

Inevitably, the occasion of HoppenĂ­s honour did not pass without a party. Her 26-year-old daughter Natasha (from her first marriage, to restaurateur Graham Corrett), and former stepdaughters Savannah and Sienna Miller (from her 11-year marriage to banker-turned-artdealer Ed Miller) gathered family and friends including Stephen Webster and Ronni Ancona, to a private room at Notting Hill club Beach Blanket Babylon. She roared with laughter at Rory BremnerĂ­s speech Ăą he jested that her honour was for ĂŤMaking Beige ExcitingĂ­ ndoubtedly a social animal, whose personal life has at times garnered more press attention than her considerable professional achievements Ăą it was a resounding recognition of her formidable business skills. Now 50, she has built a multi-faceted creative enterprise since starting out in the late 1970s; her company brought in ÂŁ18 million revenue last year. In her career, she has created thousands of sumptuous Zen interiors, for clients including David and Victoria Beckham and Elton John, as well as countless product lines for her own brand, and past collaborations with household names including British Airways, BHS and Debenhams. While she is synonymous with creating astoundingly luxe interiors in multiples shades of mushroom, putty, ecru and cream, she says the variety of her designs can surprise people. ĂŤMy style is very eclectic,Ă­ she insists. In the homes she has created for herself, buddhas have rubbed shoulders with Peter Blakes.

Inevitably, the occasion of HoppenĂ­s honour did not pass with-

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out a party. Her 26-year-old daughter Natasha (from her first marriage, to restaurateur Graham Corrett), and former stepdaughters Savannah and Sienna Miller (from her 11-year marriage to bankerturned-art-dealer Ed Miller) gathered family and friends including Stephen Webster and Ronni Ancona, to a private room at Notting Hill club Beach Blanket Babylon. She roared with laughter at Rory BremnerĂ­s speech Ăą he jested that her honour was for ĂŤMaking Beige ExcitingĂ­ ndoubtedly a social animal, whose personal life has at times garnered more press attention than her considerable professional achievements Ăą it was a resounding recognition of her formidable business skills. Now 50, she has built a multi-faceted creative enterprise since starting out in the late 1970s; her company brought in ÂŁ18 million revenue last year. In her career, she has created thousands of sumptuous Zen interiors, for clients including David and Victoria Beckham and Elton John, as well as countless product lines for her own brand, and past collaborations with household names including British Airways, BHS and Debenhams.

While she is synonymous with creating astoundingly luxe interiors in multiples shades of mushroom, putty, ecru and cream, she says the variety of her designs can surprise people. ĂŤMy style is very eclectic,Ă­ she insists. In the homes she has created for herself, buddhas have rubbed shoulders with Peter Blakes.

Inevitably, the occasion of HoppenĂ­s honour did not pass without a party. Her 26-year-old daughter Natasha (from her first marriage, to restaurateur Graham Corrett), and former stepdaughters Savannah and Sienna Miller (from her 11-year marriage to banker-turned-art-dealer Ed Miller) gathered family and friends including Stephen Webster and Ronni Ancona, to a private room at Notting Hill club Beach Blanket Babylon.

She roared with laughter at Rory BremnerĂ­s speech Ăą he jested that her honour was for ĂŤMaking Beige ExcitingĂ­ ndoubtedly a social animal, whose personal life has at times garnered more press attention than her considerable professional achievements Ăą it was a resounding recognition of her formidable business skills. Now 50, she has built a multi-faceted creative enterprise since starting out in the late 1970s; her company brought in ÂŁ18 million revenue last year. In her career, she has created thousands of sumptuous Zen interiors, for clients including David and Victoria Beckham and Elton John, as well as countless product lines for her own brand, and past collaborations with household names including British Airways, BHS and Debenhams.

While she is synonymous with creating astoundingly luxe interiors in multiples shades of mushroom, putty, ecru and cream, she says the variety of her designs can surprise people. ĂŤMy style is very eclectic,Ă­ she insists. In the homes she has created for herself, buddhas have rubbed shoulders with Peter Blakes.

Inevitably, the occasion of HoppenĂ­s honour did not pass without a party. Her 26-year-old daughter Natasha (from her first marriage, to restaurateur Graham Corrett), and former stepdaughters Savannah and Sienna Miller (from her 11-year marriage to bankerturned-art-dealer Ed Miller) gathered family and friends including Stephen Webster and Ronni Ancona, to a private room at Notting

fessional achievements Ăą it was a resounding recognition of her formidable business skills. Now 50, she has built a multi-faceted creative enterprise since starting out in the late 1970s; her company brought in ÂŁ18 million revenue last year. In her career, she has created thousands of sumptuous Zen interiors, for clients including David and Victoria Beckham and Elton John, as well as countless product lines for her own brand, and past collaborations with household names including British Airways, BHS and Debenhams.

While she is synonymous with creating astoundingly luxe interiors in multiples shades of mushroom, putty, ecru and cream, she says the variety of her designs can surprise people. ĂŤMy style is very eclectic,Ă­ she insists. In the homes she has created for herself, buddhas have rubbed shoulders with Peter Blakes.

Inevitably, the occasion of HoppenĂ­s honour did not pass without a party. Her 26-year-old daughter Natasha (from her first marriage, to restaurateur Graham Corrett), and former stepdaughters Savannah and Sienna Miller (from her 11-year marriage to bankerturned-art-dealer Ed Miller) gathered family and friends including Stephen Webster and Ronni Ancona, to a private room at Notting Hill club Beach Blanket Babylon. She roared with laughter at Rory BremnerĂ­s speech Ăą he jested that her honour was for ĂŤMaking Beige ExcitingĂ­ ndoubtedly a social animal, whose personal life has at times garnered more press attention than her considerable professional achievements Ăą it was a resounding recognition of her formidable business skills. Now 50, she has built a multifaceted creative enterprise since starting out in the late 1970s; her company brought in ÂŁ18 million revenue last year. In her career, she has created thousands of sumptuous Zen interiors, for clients including David and Victoria Beckham and Elton John, as well as countless product lines for her own brand, and past collaborations with household names including British Airways, BHS and Debenhams. While she is synonymous with creating astoundingly luxe interiors in multiples shades of mushroom, putty, ecru and cream, she says the variety of her designs can surprise people. ĂŤMy style is very eclectic,Ă­ she insists. In the homes she has created for herself, buddhas have rubbed shoulders with Peter Blakes.

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Hill club Beach Blanket Babylon. She roared with laughter at Rory BremnerĂ­s speech Ăą he jested that her honour was for ĂŤMaking Beige ExcitingĂ­ ndoubtedly a social animal, whose personal life has at times garnered more press attention than her considerable prowww.harpersbazaar.co.uk

Inevitably, the occasion of HoppenĂ­s honour did not pass without a party. Her 26-year-old daughter Natasha (from her first marriage, to restaurateur Graham Corrett), and former stepdaughters Savannah and Sienna Miller (from her 11-year marriage to bankerturned-art-dealer Ed Miller) gathered family and friends including Stephen Webster and Ronni Ancona, to a private room at Notting Hill club Beach Blanket Babylon. She roared with laughter at Rory BremnerĂ­s speech Ăą he jested that her honour was for ĂŤMaking Beige ExcitingĂ­ ndoubtedly a social animal, whose personal life has at times garnered more press attention than her considerable professional achievements Ăą it was a resounding recognition of her formidable business skills. Now 50, she has built a multi-faceted creative enterprise since starting out in the late 1970s; her company brought in ÂŁ18 million revenue last year. In her career, she has created thousands of sumptuous Zen interiors, for clients including David and Victoria Beckham and Elton John, as well as countless product lines for her own brand, and past collaborations with household names including British Airways, BHS and Debenhams.

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LAYERS OF TRANSPARENT TULLE CREATE A COQUETTISH AURA OF JE NE SAIS QUOI This page: silk tulle dress, £6,880, Chanel.

Fishnet body (worn throughout), stylistâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s own.

Previous pages: cotton dress, about £1,870, Chanel www.harpersbazaar.co.uk

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f one ever had any doubts as to the lauded status of Vanessa Paradis in France, these would be quickly dispelled by the staff at Parisâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; HĂ´tel de Crillon, where I arrive to meet the countryâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s most famous pop chanteuse, an awarding-winning actor, Chanel ambassador and 12-year partner of Johnny Depp.

On the mere mention of her name, the entire lobby suddenly falls silent as everyone from bell hop to managing director of staff thoroughly inspects me, before two porters â&#x20AC;&#x201C; suitably impressed after itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s confirmed that I do indeed have an audience with Mademoiselle Paradis â&#x20AC;&#x201C; escort me to the penthouse Leonard Bernstein suite, bowing deeply at the entrance.

I wait in the suiteâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s belle ĂŠpoque bedroom until Paradis â&#x20AC;&#x201C; in scruffy jeans, a slinky wee V-neck sweater and hair in curlers â&#x20AC;&#x201C; strolls in, running her knowing eye across me and, after a couple of secondsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; appraisal, snaps: â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Ă&#x2021;a marche! â&#x20AC;&#x2122; which could best be colloquially translated as, I suppose: â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll do.â&#x20AC;&#x2122; Even so simply dressed, the famously anti-conformist Paradis is exquisitely chic. She radiates a certain pizzazz from every inch of her petite frame as she curls up on a Louis XV armchair, looking me straight in the eye with all the aplomb of someone who became a star at the age of 14, when her first single â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Joe Le Taxiâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; became a global hit in 1987.

At 37, she still possesses the same otherworldly, Lolita-esque beauty â&#x20AC;&#x201C; exquisite rosebud lips, feline jade eyes, all presided over by the high forehead of a porcelain doll â&#x20AC;&#x201C; that won her her first Chanel campaign at the age of 19, and her latest as the face of both Chanelâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s new Coco Cocoon bag and Rouge Coco lipstick. Paradis still reigns as Franceâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s coolest rock chick (three of her albums have topped the French charts).

She has starred in 12 films alongside some of the countryâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s finest actors â&#x20AC;&#x201C; from GĂŠrard Depardieu to Daniel Auteuil â&#x20AC;&#x201C; including Noce Blanche, which won her a CĂŠsar (the French-language Oscar) at the age of 17 for playing a promiscuous teenager who falls in love with her school philosophy teacher.

Now, her most recent film, Lâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;Arnacoeur (â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Heartbreakerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;), a witty rom-com co-starring Brit actor Andrew Lincoln, is set to be the hit comedy of the summer. No wonder the staff at Crillon usher me into Paradisâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s presence with such awe.

In Lâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;Arnacoeur, Paradis plays Juliette, a chic heiress who appears in scene after scene as the picture of Riviera finesse, from her louche Chanel sunglasses-and-headscarf ensemble to the embroidered cocktail dresses she wears to the opera. Juliette is the target of professional lothario Alex (played by smouldering French actor Romain Duris), whose mission statement is to â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;open womenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s

CARTE BLANCHE: PARADIS ROCKS CHANEL COUTURE WITH UNDONE BUTTONS, PUSHED-UP SLEEVES AND PUNK-CHIC FISHNET White and pink silk dress, from a selection, Chanel Haute Couture

hearts, not their legsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;; he is hired as a â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;heartbreakerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; by Julietteâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s father to prevent her forthcoming marriage to tight-lipped billionaire Jonathan (Lincoln). â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Juliette is a rather stiff, very rigid, stubborn person but with a volcano inside!â&#x20AC;&#x2122; says Paradis, chortling through the sensual gap in her front teeth, which somehow looks larger in real life. â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Sheâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s not like me; I donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t want to give people a bad idea of the film, as she turns out to be a lot nicer at the end. But most of the time, she listens to her head. I like to listen to my heart!â&#x20AC;&#x2122; In her own love life, Paradis describes her union with piratical lothario Johnny Depp â&#x20AC;&#x201C; something of a heartbreaker himself â&#x20AC;&#x201C; as the mutual taming of two kindred rebel spirits. â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;I didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t tame [ Johnny],â&#x20AC;&#x2122; she has insisted. â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;We tamed each other.â&#x20AC;&#x2122; Depp and Paradis now have two children, Lily-Rose, 11, and Jack, eight, and live a gilded existence together: the couple own four homes and a Caribbean island.

Paradisâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s life with the formerly renegade Depp is one of the most globally coveted; she has certainly come a long way since first appearing in 1981, aged eight, as a contestant on the European TV show Lâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;Ecole des Fans. But the precocious successes of her early career did not come without personal pain and pitfalls. When I ask her how big a role ambition has played in her life, she winces. â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;I think the word â&#x20AC;&#x153;ambitionâ&#x20AC;? means different things in English or in French. Somehow it seems more pejorative in English; it means, â&#x20AC;&#x153;Sheâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s ready to kill to get everything!â&#x20AC;? But in French, it means wanting to do lots of things â&#x20AC;&#x201C; not wanting to have it all.â&#x20AC;&#x2122; She growls. â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;After â&#x20AC;&#x153;Joe Le Taxiâ&#x20AC;?, people seemed to think, â&#x20AC;&#x153;Oh my God! This 14-year-old is so ambitious, she must have parents pushing their little child like a puppet.â&#x20AC;? But it was more than that. When I was little, I discovered that I loved to sing, and I loved to be onstage.â&#x20AC;&#x2122; She was vilified as a teenager in France for her sexually suggestive performance in the â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Joe Le Taxiâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; video: â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;puteâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; â&#x20AC;&#x201C; or whore â&#x20AC;&#x201C; was graffitied near her family home in the Paris suburbs (where her happily married parents, both interior designers, lived), and she was repeatedly spat at in the street. â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;I was a bit, em, provocative,â&#x20AC;&#x2122; she concedes. â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;They used to call me Lolita. I was 14, I was really made up, wearing very short dresses, dancing in a certain way. Definitely when I was 14, I wanted to be a woman. I wanted to look like a woman, though not really have the life of a woman. People did react strangely, in that epoch, to the way I acted. Chez nous in France, any success always has to be teased.â&#x20AC;&#x2122; But that very impertinence is exactly what Karl Lagerfeld found so enticing, famously casting Paradis in the 1992 Jean-Paul Goude-directed ad as a beautiful Tweety Pie â&#x20AC;&#x201C; dressed in fishnets with a flamboyant feather tail â&#x20AC;&#x201C; perched inside a cage, and fed on dishes of Coco perfume by Mademoiselle Chanel herself. As a result, Paradis was heralded as Franceâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s new Bardot, and her status as muse to Lagerfeld was cemented for the next two decades: she was the face of Chanelâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Cambon handbag in 2004 and New Mademoiselle bag the following year, and performed at the Chanel runway show in Shanghai in 2009.

Explains Lagerfeld: â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;She is extremely photogenic. She has a very particular magic. She understands how to communicate something that the naked eye doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t see but you discover on screen. I love to

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PARADIS CARRIES OFF LAGERFELD’S MONOCHROME CREATION WITH A NONCHALANCE MADEMOISELLE CHANEL WOULD HAVE APPROVED OF Muslin dress, £5,265, Chanel

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say that I adore working with her. I have often photographed her for magazines, advertising campaigns, and it is a joy every time she comes to the studio. Her way of being, her charm, she seduces everyone.â&#x20AC;&#x2122; Along with the allure of such high-fashion connections, there has always been a frisson of the naughty demi-mondaine about Paradis â&#x20AC;&#x201C; heightened by her collaborations with legendary satyr Serge Gainsbourg at the age of 17 on her album Variations sur le MĂŞme Tâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;Aime, and later with one-time boyfriend Lenny Kravitz, producer of her English-language album, Vanessa Paradis. â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Working with Serge Gainsbourg was a wonderful dream come true,â&#x20AC;&#x2122; she says. â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;He was such a gentleman, such a dandy, so attentive.

So different from the image we have of him, as a provocative womaniser! He had more of a protective parental affection for me.â&#x20AC;&#x2122; In film, Paradis has been equally provocative, frequently playing the sexually adventurous sĂŠductrice; her part in Noce Blanche was made only more resonant by the subsequent scandal of Paradisâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s mother accusing the filmâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s director, Jean-Claude Brisseau, of improper advances towards her teenage daughter. Her other roles have included a sex-starved femme in the charming black and white tale La Fille sur le Pont (1999), and a warmhearted prostitute in Mon Ange (2004). But Paradis vehemently rejects suggestions she may have been typecast as provocative, saying with a sniff: â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;You have not seen enough of my movies.â&#x20AC;&#x2122; Certainly, Paradis is irresistibly seductive â&#x20AC;&#x201C; even in heavy, pre-shoot make-up, with her hair pulled tight in curlers â&#x20AC;&#x201C; and almost preternaturally preserved. When I compliment her youthful air, she scoffs: â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;How can you tell, under all this?â&#x20AC;&#x2122; pointing to the curlers. But I ask for her anti-ageing secrets, and she responds: â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;I quit smoking roll-ups, which helps enormously; thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s it. I do drink lots of water, though I like wine â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Bordeaux.â&#x20AC;&#x2122; (Her favourites hail from two of the worldâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s best wine cellars: Vieux Château Certan and Château Haut-Brion.)

Thereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s something about her throaty Gallic accent, faintly mocking green eyes and sartorial panache that is still very alluring: she oozes French je ne sais quoi with every breath. â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;I donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t think French women have more style,â&#x20AC;&#x2122; she says. â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Maybe itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s because Paris is a city where you walk. In America, everyone drives, and you cannot see what anyone is wearing when they are locked in a car. Here, everyone checks out each other. We communicate with clothes here more and, as a result, inspire one another.â&#x20AC;&#x2122; Everyone at Chanel clearly worships Paradis â&#x20AC;&#x201C; including Amanda Harlech, Lagerfeldâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s closest cohort. â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;For me she is like sunlight,â&#x20AC;&#x2122; she says. â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;She has a natural elegance, and her radiance is captivating.â&#x20AC;&#x2122; Paradisâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s own inspiration comes from her heroines, especially Marilyn Monroe. â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Marilyn has always touched me. I adore her as a singer, as an actress and a woman,â&#x20AC;&#x2122; she purrs. â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;There is something just divine about her.â&#x20AC;&#x2122; A heart locket once owned by Monroe, a present from Depp, is one of her most prized possessions. One of the charms of Paradisâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s unique style is her amalgamation of gamine, leftfield rock-chic with the enigmatic sophistication of an oldschool Hollywood star. Though her wardrobe is a mix of Chanel, Betsey Johnson, Isabel Marant and Sonia Rykiel, she gets far more animated discussing vintage stores, mentioning Decades in LA, and the side streets of Brusselsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; antiques quarter, near Place du Jeu

de Balle. â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;When you become famous, you get spoiled with gifts,â&#x20AC;&#x2122; she says. â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;But I still always shopped for vintage. I was so excited at 14, buying my first old Perfecto [biker jacket], or finding a leather hatbox in a London fleamarket that became my suitcase.â&#x20AC;&#x2122; For her rare public appearances on Deppâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s arm, Paradisâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s preferred attire is vintage Chanel; on the red carpet, the pair often cut an idiosyncratic dash, like icons from the silver screen. But for such a high-wattage celebrity power couple â&#x20AC;&#x201C; among the ranks of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Depp and Paradis live a relatively under-the-radar existence. â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Our jobs make us do extraordinary things, and we travel and see lots, but the rest of the time weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re quite quiet. We are apart a lot, but talk every day. We donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t go to many parties or do a lot of red carpet.

I prefer to be at home or working, and we can work anywhere.

Nowadays with technology, you can record pretty much any place,â&#x20AC;&#x2122; she stresses, adding that she mainly communicates in English with Depp, even as she insists, â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;but his French is very goodâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;.

Both of them recall their first meeting at a party in 1994, when Depp was dating Kate Moss (an encounter which Paradis describes as a coup de foudre); but the pair only got together in 1998; Paradis fell pregnant three months later.

When asked about how she brings up her children, she says with a sniff: â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;They are not in the public domain.â&#x20AC;&#x2122; The pair are notoriously protective of their children, helped by French vie privĂŠe laws that essentially prevent gossip magazines from publishing photos of the famous offspring.

Whereas other celebrity couples make high-profile excursions across the globe to rescue African orphans, Depp and Paradis prefer the simpler pleasures in life â&#x20AC;&#x201C; hanging out with Lily-Rose and Jack at their country villa and vineyards in Plan-de-la-Tour near Saint-Tropez, where they make their own wine; and revelling in their shared love of music.

Depp painted the cover image for Paradisâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s 2007 album Divineidylle, and has directed four of her music videos, including â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Lâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;Incendieâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;, in which Paradis is dressed head-to-toe in Chanel, and Depp appears Hitchcock-like as the object of her romance. â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;[ Johnny] is a very special guy, he has so many talents. He is a wonderful father and does so many different things so well,â&#x20AC;&#x2122; says Paradis with a smile; she pauses, then adds that he can also play a mean guitar. (A YouTube clip of Paradis playing back-up singer and Depp lead guitar in a band fronted by Iggy Pop, no less, pays testament to this.)

The couple have yet to work on a film together, although Paradis and Depp are currently in talks to play Simone de Beauvoir and her lover Nelson Algren in Chocolat director Lasse HallstrĂśmâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s latest â&#x20AC;&#x201C; and much anticipated â&#x20AC;&#x201C; feature film, My American Lover.

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As well as Saint-Tropez and their Caribbean island, the pair keep homes in Paris, New York and Los Angeles â&#x20AC;&#x201C; but not, she is adamant, a house in Timsbury, Somerset, despite web chatter to the contrary. â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Apparently, we are buying a house every year,â&#x20AC;&#x2122; she says with a snort. â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;I surely dream of a house in England, but it has not happened yet.â&#x20AC;&#x2122; But, judging from her voice, her favoured home is the 40-acre Little Hallâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Pond Cay, the island Depp bought back in 2005, reportedly for $3 million, where heâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s installed a solar hydrogen system for all energy needs, and named its half-dozen CONTINUED ON PAGE 147 www.harpersbazaar.co.uk

WITH HER TOUSLED HAIR AND INSOUCIANT POUT, PARADIS IS THE EMBODIMENT OF EFFORTLESS PARISIAN CHIC Red viscose dress, ÂŁ1,225, Chanel. See Stockists for details. Hair by Marc Lopez at Artlist. Make-up by Sharon Dowsett at CLM, using Chanel. Manicure

by Elsa Durrens at Artlist, using Chanel. With thanks to Elodie Tavares and HĂ´tel de Crillon, Paris (www.crillon.com)

Renée Zellweger is one of Hollywood’s greatest chameleons – a versatile, witty actor who has put her own charismatic stamp on a host of movies – and now has a new career as a producer. EMMA BROCKES meets the down-to-earth star to discuss fashion, missing London, and the rumours of a new Bridget Jones film Photographs by ALEXI LUBOMIRSKI. Styled by VANESSA COYLE

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for three weeks. It is still among her favourite films, one that left an indelible impression on her. ‘Even last week I missed London. I feel at home in Britain. It’s familiar. Good food. I had a lot of it.’ She smiles wryly. Her accent is peppered with Dixie vowels, but it is just as likely to slip eastwards toward London, as South to her home state of Texas. She loves roasts on a Sunday, she says, and more broadly the combination of dirt and glamour, which she identifies more with Brighton than the capital. ‘Brighton is not a sleepy little seaside town! It’s a dirty town! You discover that if you go to the beach at the wrong time. I guess a better word than dirty is “progressive”. I love it.’

Fortunately, Zellweger looks set to return to our shores imminently. There is talk of a third Bridget Jones film (alongside a musical adaptation, written by the character’s original creator, Helen Fielding, with rumours of a score by Lily Allen), though when I ask Zellweger to divulge more information, she simply wrinkles her nose and says: ‘I confess, the prospect of revisiting the character makes me smile. I laughed every day on set. As Helen’s fan, I would be excited to read about her latest life chapter as told through the adventures of lovely Bridget.’

Talk turns to her new burgeoning role as a producer – she has recently acquired the rights to Brantly Martin’s novel Pillage, about a group of decadent New Yorkers – following in the footsteps of her friend Clooney, a self-assured move and part of her transition into her forties that sees her, as she puts it, becoming ‘a proper grownup.’ Though, for someone who can earn up to $10 million a film, she is still mystifyingly unpushy. ‘Oh, I can’t bear it: making that phone call when you ask for something.’ She grimaces. ‘But it’s a big part of being a producer.’ However, she is always scared before every role: ‘Scared because there are people I could let down. Scared because: can I still do this?’

On the red carpet, she gains confidence by wearing Carolina Herrera, to whom Zellweger is something of a muse. The actress finds her designs soothing in their simplicity. ‘It’s classic. It’s beautifully tailored. No surprises,’ she says. ‘I can’t have 90 people making things for me that I might not wear. It’s gluttonous and disgusting. And it’s just not right. To have so many people expend so much effort potentially for nothing – I wouldn’t sleep at night.’

This frugality (her flat on the Upper East Side is practically onebedroom ‘with a bathroom about the size of this table’, and she has ‘a tiny house by the beach’ in LA) is a product of her ‘waste not, want not’ upbringing in the small town of Katy in Texas. Her father, a Swiss German who grew up in Australia, was an engineer and ran an efficient household with Republican leanings. ‘He’s an immigrant, so he’s very conservative. He’s not about social services.

He’s about: “I get up at 4am and I take care of my family.” I’m so much more of a liberal thinker than my parents.’ But it was a very northern-European household, says Zellweger – they went on regular holidays to Norway, her mother’s birthplace, and watched episodes of Monty Python on TV, one of the reasons, she assumes, that she found the British humour in Bridget Jones such an easy fit.

After studying English at the University of Texas in Austin, she turned to acting, winning minor roles in Reality Bites, Dazed and Confused and the sequel to Texas Chainsaw Massacre in 1994. Twentyfour and broke, she headed west to Hollywood, where, shortly after arriving, she was called in by her agent to audition with Tom Cruise

‘Even last week I missed London. I feel at home in Britain. It’s familiar. Good food. I had a lot of it.’ She smiles wryly. Her accent is peppered wıth Dixie vowels, but it is just as likely to slip eastwards toward London

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Previous pages: lace bra, about £320, Dolce & Gabbana. Wool and silk trousers, £730; patent heels, £550, both Yves Saint Laurent. Rings throughout, from a selection, Solange Azagury-Partridge ▼

I

hear Renée Zellweger before I can see her.

She bursts giggling into the dining room of the Carlyle Hotel in New York, dressed down in black jeans, black T-shirt, Converse trainers and carrying a crash helmet. If it weren’t for the Tom Ford sunglasses pushed up on her head, she would look like a 12-year-old skateboarder.

Zellweger arrived on the back of a Vespa driven by her assistant, Jason – ‘ just like Roman Holiday!’ she says – and is on skittish form after a conversation with the waiter (who, as I look back, is still reeling from her charm). She always gets caught in conversations she can’t get out of, the 41-year-old tells me, grinning ruefully.

She has a hard time saying no, she says.

It is only in person that one can truly appreciate Zellweger’s unique irresistibility, which has fascinated a legion of Hollywood’s leading men (George Clooney and Colin Firth are both close friends, and she is currently in a year-long relationship with Bradley Cooper, her co-star in thriller Case 39). She radiates charisma with every quizzical facial expression, animated gesture and cerebrally flirtatious one-liner, drawing her subject inexorably in.

It is this natural air of Thirties screwball, sharp in conversation, quick to selfdeprecate and with a talent for slapstick (she was compared to Lucille Ball by Sharon Maguire, her director in 2001’s Bridget Jones, and to Shirley MacLaine by Jerry Maguire’s creator Cameron Crowe), seen most obviously in her turns in Chicago and Down With Love, that has enraptured audiences time and time again. This quirky allure is accentuated today by her newly cropped blonde mane, which perfectly frames her pale-blue doe eyes, and that famous magnetic smirk.

But Zellweger has never been limited by her innate gifts as a comedian, and she remains a versatile actress with a capacity for transformation in front of the lens. At the Bazaar shoot, the day before our interview, dressed as a noir heroine in dramatic black feathers and palazzo pants, Zellweger transports herself from the realm of the ordinary into the shadowy world of arch-femme fatale.

With the twitch of a cheekbone, the faint raise of an eyebrow and the sweep of a palm to the face, she is Louise Brooks, Jean Harlow, Bette Davis, Greta Garbo… Zellweger is, above all, an actor in the tradition of old-school Hollywood’s iconic leading ladies.

With Zellweger’s range, no serious role is beyond her. She won an Academy Award in 2003 for Best Supporting Actress in Anthony Minghella’s Cold Mountain, and portrayed British literary heroine Beatrix Potter in 2006’s Miss Potter, with a cut-glass pre-war accent.

Next she is working with Olivier Dahan – who directed Marion Cotillard’s Oscar-winning performance in La Vie En Rose – as a paralysed singer in My Own Love Song.

It is now 10 years since Zellweger’s most famous method performance, when she morphed De Niro-style into dumpy, sardonic singleton Miss Jones (‘wanton sex goddess’), which the actress prepared for by interning incognito in London publishing house Picador

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PHOTOGRAPH: XXXXXX

WOMAN IN BLACK: THE WICKED SEDUCTION OF UNCOMPROMISINGLY SEXY BODY-CON Wool and elastane mix jumper (worn as dress), £195, Wolford. Suede courts, £475, Christian Louboutin.

Yellow gold and enamel necklace, from £5,800, Solange Azagury-Partridge

for a part in Jerry Maguire. She assumed the call was a prank, and ignored it. When she finally got into the room with him, she was so in awe she could barely speak. Cruise cast her, and the mousey secretary with the heart of a lion became Zellweger’s breakthrough role (her infamous line ‘You had me at hello’ was delivered with such conviction that it has entered universal parlance).

By 2000, she had joined the upper echelons of Hollywood’s leading ladies, making films such as Me, Myself and Irene, in which she fell in love with co-star Jim Carrey. There followed romances with the White Stripes’ Jack White and country singer Kenny Chesney – who she married in 2005, only to call for an annulment four months later.

Given the tumultuous state of Zellweger’s personal life in the past, the Bridget Jones label has been an easy press jibe. Until her recent liaison with Cooper, she had been off the dating scene.

‘I didn’t date,’ she says. ‘I just didn’t. And it didn’t seem to matter. I used to say, “I’m not single, I’m just busy.”’ Was she resentful of that?

‘No, but I was aware that because these two things – being professionally on-the-go and having a personal life – just can’t co-exist, I needed to make a choice. Then last summer I just decided, “I’m going to be still for a minute and see if I can nurture my personal life.”’

During her single years, however, her male friends were around to support her – a swoonsome roll-call including Clooney and the boys from Bridget Jones. I wonder who is more engaging in conversation, Hugh Grant or Firth. ‘On a par. But it’s different. They’re both very funny, and smart. Both cutting, sharp, self-deprecating. Different kinds of wit. Nice to be around.’ She asks how they’re viewed in Britain; I say Grant is seen as naughty and Firth as nice. Zellweger’s eyebrows shoot up. ‘Conversely, on set, Hugh was great with all of his friends’ kids. He spent so much time with his family, his father, brother. And Colin…’ She laughs wickedly. Not so much? ‘Sure.’

She was thrilled for Firth over the success of A Single Man: ‘I’ve seen it a few times now. It makes me weep. To make your mark as this iconic fictional figure that women internationally swooned over – and to move away from that… He’s a wonderful person.’

It is fellow Liberal Clooney, however, who Zellweger looks to for inspiration both in her film career and her political persuasions. She is a fellow Bush hater and Obama supporter, and Clooney has, she says, taught her the importance of ‘fearlessness’, hard work and ‘of being motivated by the right things’. Is it a solid friendship? ‘No, I don’t really like him at all,’ she says, sarcastically.

No, I mean, could she ring him randomly for a chat?

‘Want me to ring him now?’ She laughs, making a playful gesture for her phone, and seems about to dial, but hesitates. ‘Maybe not.’

Another of her role models is Meryl Streep, whose attributes she rattles off like a wish-list for her own career: ‘She lets her work speak for her. She’s highly political and elegant. She’s supremely intelligent and she does so much humanitarian work you never hear about.’

Given how chauvinistic Hollywood is, isn’t passing 40 a big deal for an actress? ‘Is it? Or does it get more interesting, like Helen Mirren’s career? You get more self-aware, more sure of what you’re hoping for.’

She muses, then grins. ‘I’ll let you know if something bad comes of it.’

If she does play Bridget Jones in her fifth decade, Zellweger will do so with the same winning combination of vulnerability, selfdeprecation, charisma and comic timing as in the first two films, but perhaps with the self-assurance of a woman who has come to know what she wants. As she gets up to leave, Zellweger pushes her sunglasses to the top of her head and, economical to the last, suggests we take the coffee to go. Jason arrives to collect her for the ride back uptown on the back of the Vespa and, after a final exchange of cheerful banter with the waiter, Zellweger exits into autumnal sunshine.

BACK TO MONO: MINIMAL BLACK AND EXQUISITELY DETAILED WHITE OFFER TWO STATEMENT TAKES ON AUTUMN MONOCHROME This page: wool and silk gabardine vest, £625, Yves Saint Laurent.

Opposite: lace shirt, £730, Céline.

See Stockists for details. Hair by Ben Skervin at Themagnetagency.com, using Bumble and Bumble. Make-up

by Kristofer Buckle at the Wall Group. Manicure by Bernadette Thompson for Bernadettethompson.com at Art Department

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ma and Arki. If you want to give a roomful of people whiplash, try walking into London’s Cipriani restaurant some evening and repeating those words. Uma and Arki…

Immediately heads swivel.

Waiters jostle for a glimpse.

It may not yet have reached a ‘Charles and Diana during the engagement’ level of madness, but they’ve eclipsed Gwyneth and Chris, and are more than filling the void left by Madonna and Guy. We are talking, of course, about Uma Thurman and Arpad ‘Arki’ Busson – London’s hottest couple, and a match made in paparazzi heaven. For the past two years, the world has watched with bated breath as the Hollywood goddess of Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill and London’s most eligible tycoon/philanthropist have courted each other in grand jet-set style: sitting front-row at a Diane von Furstenberg fashion show, frolicking on a yacht in Sardinia, locking lips on a park bench and raising millions together for Busson’s children’s charity ARK. This June, they will be centre-stage at ARK’s annual fundraiser – the hot-ticket event that, last year, raised £25 million in a single night, with the help of friends like Elton John and Tony Blair.

Uma-watching is becoming a favourite London pastime – and it’s not just because we will be soon able to claim the star, when she marries Busson, as an icon of our own.

There’s something else about her that makes her an endless source of fascination.

It’s not that she is a conventional beauty. The nose is too long, the eyes too wide, the feet and hands too big – yet somehow the overall combination is splendid beyond description. ‘Her beauty depends on the angle you’re looking from,’ director Terry Gilliam (who filmed a 17-year-old Thurman in 1988 as Botticelli’s Venus in The Adventures of Baron Munchausen) has said. ‘From certain angles, it falls apart very quickly – you see the ugly duckling lingering; but from some angles, she appears the most stunning thing on the planet.’

It is this beauty that has won her countless ad campaigns – this August, she becomes the face of Givenchy’s new perfume, Le Secret. Certainly, Thurman radiates a remarkable allure during the Bazaar shoot on a Manhattan rooftop. Sheathed in silver silk, she glides over to Busson when he appears on-set, curling herself around him like a cat; he grins like a schoolboy. The pair then pose together cheerfully for a few minutes – Busson covered in red lipstick kisses.

The 46-year-old tycoon (who was previously involved with Elle Macpherson, with whom he has two children) made his romance with Thurman official last summer with an ice-cube-size engagement ring and a party at his Chelsea mansion. A year on, their wedding plans remain a mystery. For months now, the tabloids have reported that the couple have secretly married (with rumours reaching fever pitch while they were in the Bahamas the weekend before this interview). But when I ask her about this over lunch, she smiles and says only: ‘I’m not married, no. I am engaged, yes.’

We are sitting at the chef ’s table in New York eatery Patroon, and

the willowy, six-foot-tall Thurman is glowing; she’s clearly not the kind of woman who finds being engaged stressful. Dressed in baggy cuffed jeans, espadrilles, Indian diamonds and a cashmere blazer, her dishevelled hair framing her astonishing Cubist face, she looks not so much like a movie star as a mysterious bohemian aristocrat just back from sailing around the Greek Islands. A black dress becomes something else entirely on her – both drop-dead chic and supremely effortless; part of a mythical life.

Of her forthcoming wedding, she smiles and says airily: ‘Isn’t life amazing? Isn’t life full of surprises? When it comes to things like marriage, you just never know… I find that growing up has been all about realising that life gets more serious, and that it’s also really important to increase your sense of humour…’ This sort of gauzy non-answer, it turns out, is typical Thurman-speak. For all her obvious intelligence, she is impossibly vague in conversation – so much so that, after a while, it all begins to seem like a brilliant defence strategy to keep her from revealing the intimate details of her life.

When I ask her to be more specific about the marriage and the seriousness of life and the need for a sense of humour, she waves a long golden hand and says ‘Oh, you know…’ Beaming up at our waiter, she orders oysters and Little Neck clams; when they arrive, she swoons with pleasure. ‘These are the greatest things I’ve ever tasted in my life!’ she says. The fact that she once emerged from a gigantic clamshell (as the aforementioned Venus) wearing only her long golden tresses is lost on no one.

Very quickly, more shellfish arrive.

It’s almost eerie how mesmerising she is at nearly 40. Her golden skin looks free of Botox. Her lips are succulent as a plum. Her eyes are set almost on either side of her head, like a sexy goldfish. She isn’t just beautiful; she’s ungraspable. There’s something about her that you can’t quite put your finger on, which makes it hard to stop looking at her.

This is what Quentin Tarantino meant when he said: ‘She’s up there with Garbo and Dietrich in goddess territory.’ And it’s one of the reasons that Thurman has dodged the slings and arrows of the box office. Despite a career that has meandered through a range of genres – from costume dramas (remember her gasping, white-breasted virgin in Dangerous Liaisons) to romantic comedies, Tarantino’s action rhapsodies and, more recently, serious dramas like The Life Before Her Eyes (about a woman haunted by a highschool shooting) – Thurman’s reviews are almost unfailingly terrific.

In some ways, her mercurial career seems to be a product of a singular childhood. Her father, Robert, is an eminent Buddhist scholar. Her mother, Nena von Schlebrügge, is a Swedish-born model turned psychoanalyst, whose own father was a baron with a monocle, and whose first husband was pioneering LSD advocate Timothy Leary. Uma (which means ‘the middle way’ in Tibetan and ‘mother goddess’ in Hindi) and her three brothers grew up between Amherst, Massachusetts, and hippie idyll Woodstock, New York.

The Dalai Lama was a regular guest, as was Richard Gere. Twice during her childhood, the family upped sticks to India for a year.

A ‘gawky’ child, she was teased at school for her height and big feet, and found solace in acting. At 15, she convinced her parents to let her go to New York to pursue a career. Asked if acting was a way of rebelling against her hyper-intellectual family, Thurman – who is not a Buddhist, and describes herself as ‘so open-minded, my brains

DRESSED TO THRILL Uma Thurman wears viscose and rayon long-sleeve dress, £3,402, Donna Karan. Gold-plate heart ring, £150, Versace. Gold-plate cuffs, from £5,200 each, Jacqueline Rabun.

Previous pages: organza, lace and crystal-embroidered dress, from £2,980; Lycra swimsuit, £270; leather heels, from £1,100, all Givenchy by Riccardo Tisci.

Diamond ring, from a selection, H Stern.

Gold-plate cuff, £320, Eddie Borgo.

Ear studs; anklet, both Uma’s own 94 |

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HIGH-WIRE ACT Metallic silk diamantĂŠ-embroidered dress, from a selection, Nina Ricci. Metallic leather sandals, ÂŁ270, Marios Schwab.

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have fallen outâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; â&#x20AC;&#x201C; has said: â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;My family is completely disconnected from entertainment; [acting] was unexplored territory, a place in which I found some strength and some confidence.â&#x20AC;&#x2122; But for all her efforts to set herself apart from her family, she will acknowledge the influence of Buddhism â&#x20AC;&#x201C; with its central goal of selflessness, or a lack of attachment to any kind of fixed identity â&#x20AC;&#x201C; on her life. â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve tried not to be pigeonholed,â&#x20AC;&#x2122; she says. â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve made very schizophrenic career choices, and as a result have blocked myself having a sort of direct, kind of cachet, stardom. I havenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t gotten to corner a market, but instead Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve gotten to be in every corner.â&#x20AC;&#x2122; Nothing testifies to this better than Thurmanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s current schedule.

In June, sheâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll play Medusa in Chris Columbusâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; big-budget family film Percy Jackson; after that, thereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a play sheâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s thinking about in New York. Then thereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a drama set in Africa (though she will say no more than that). Do she and Tarantino have any plans to work together again? â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Quentin and Iâ&#x20AC;Ś of course weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d work together,â&#x20AC;&#x2122; she says. â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re in communication. We had a big blow-up, a big battle, but we got over it.â&#x20AC;&#x2122; I ask if she minded not being included in Tarantinoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s upcoming film Inglourious Basterds: â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Umâ&#x20AC;Ś I didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t mind, no. I mean, I think the movie is mainly about men, so barring a sex changeâ&#x20AC;Śâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; she laughs. â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;I know thereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a role for a girl in it, but it wasnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t for me. If it had been, I probably would have done it.â&#x20AC;&#x2122; But Thurman doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t seem overly concerned about her status as a film star these days. Indeed, she seems happier and calmer than ever; the past few years have not been easy. She and second husband Ethan Hawke split up in 2003 (her first husband was actor Gary Oldman, who she married at 19 and divorced after 18 months); they now share custody of their children (Maya, 11, and Levon, seven).

A three-year relationship with hotelier AndrĂŠ Balazs ended in 2007, and in 2008, she had to testify in court against a mentally ill stalker whoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d been terrorising her for years. Then, this spring, Natasha Richardson, one of her closest friends, died in a skiing accident.

The tragedy is still raw. When, earlier, I asked Thurman about her favourite places in London, she was completely at a loss, saying: â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;I wish I was like a friend of mine who would always find the best things, and would always know where to go.â&#x20AC;&#x2122; She tells me now, sadly: â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;I was talking about Natasha. Sheâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d have a plan on arrival anywhere, and would be carving the best out of life and every situation and every person. She wasnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t as much a passenger as I am, which made us great companions in lifeâ&#x20AC;Ś because every driver needs a passengerâ&#x20AC;Ś and every passenger needs a driver. So itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a big loss in my life.â&#x20AC;&#x2122; Thurman has Busson by her side, however: one has only to look at pictures of him shielding her from the paparazzi at Richardsonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s funeral to see that he has a deeply calming influence on her.

As for where the couple will settle, Thurman says they will most likely continue to spend two weeks of the month in New York and two in London. â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;I love it in London,â&#x20AC;&#x2122; she says. â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;I wish I could be there more often. I meet more people in London in one weekend than I do in maybe 10 years in New York. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a place where not only do people seem funnier and more entertaining to you, but you seem funnier and more entertaining to yourself.â&#x20AC;&#x2122; Rumours have been flying about Thurman and Busson being on the market for a country pile in the English countryside, but she will only confirm that sheâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;a complete real-estate addictâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;. â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;I would buy a country house in virtually every country in the world if I could. I also want a country house in Italy, France, Switzerland; I have aspirations in Mexicoâ&#x20AC;Ś virtually all coastal regions,â&#x20AC;&#x2122; she says with a laugh. â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;I just have this constant curiosity to open a clam in every country and eat the squirming things from every shore.â&#x20AC;&#x2122; â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;The Life Before Her Eyesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; is out on DVD on 10 August.

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| July 2009

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LONDON CALLING Satin dress, ÂŁ2,136; metal and crystal necklace, ÂŁ1,243, both Lanvin. Diamond ring ( just seen), from a selection, H Stern. See Stockists for details. Hair by David Babaii, using David Babaii for WildAid. Make-up by Jeanine Lobell for Magnet NY. Manicure by Roseann Singleton for Art Department