Lily Cole: Angry young mannequin

Posted by mija on Jan 25, 2010 in News | 0 comments

She has millions in the bank, and a film career and knitwear label ready for take-off. So why then is it, Judy Rumbold wonders, that Lily Cole can’t just lighten up a bit?
With all that mad red hair, the liberal smattering of freckles and a face that looks almost as if it were computer-generated in its comic, other-worldly strangeness, Lily Cole must surely possess a streak of irrepressible ginger mischief. As I wait for her to turn up, images of other famously cheeky redheads come to mind, with their grins and ringlets and pink-faced goofing. In no time at all I have cast her as a sort of unholy amalgam of Ron Weasley and Bonnie Langford with, perhaps, the added frisson of contested paternity on the part of Simon Pegg. The fact that she played the role of Polly, a bespectacled schoolgirl geek in St Trinian’s, only adds to the feeling that she may, on arrival, hurl a stink bomb across the room using the business end of a lacrosse stick.
But there is no flame-haired tomfoolery from Lily Cole. She sits down beside me, the tiny china-doll’s mouth locked in a solemn pout, and, with an unnervingly level gaze, she looks at me as if I have just crawled out of a bog.
I am the mother of two teenagers, so am well used to my every utterance being greeted like the incoherent ramblings of a primordial halfwit. The difference between home and the Oyster Bar at London’s St Pancras station is that I can’t yell at Lily Cole. It becomes clear from the shrugs, sighs and impatient denials that quite a few subjects are off limits. Her accommodation in Cambridge, where she is studying for a BA in history of art: “Don’t put that in.” The actor boyfriend in Los Angeles, Enrique Murciano, star of the CBS television series Without a Trace: “I don’t like to talk about him.” Heath Ledger, who died when they were both filming Terry Gilliam’s The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus: “I’m not in a position to comment.” She seems anxious to make it crystal clear that she is a studious woman to be taken seriously.
Is now a good time to ask her about posing for the 2010 Pirelli calendar, where she is pictured buck naked in the Brazilian rainforest, cuddling a sloth?
But, like I say, I’m used to knock-backs from stroppy youngsters. And anyway, I feel for her. She’s only 21 and yet she has been everywhere, done everything, met everyone. It must be hard to tolerate the little folk once you’ve mixed it up with the top talent. And she’s missed out on the crucial duvet years; the period in which adolescents are required by law to retreat inside a hoodie and wait for the sebum to disperse. While other, less evolved teenagers were throwing up Cinzano in the cat litter, she was posing for Irving Penn and shooting Vogue covers. While her contemporaries were wallowing in the hedonistic freedom of studenthood, she was flying round the world modelling for the likes of Chanel, Versace and Louis Vuitton.
“I’m used to juggling,” she says, of her crammed workload. She studies on planes, backstage at shows, in the hairdressing chair. She’s focused and smart, gaining straight As at A-level at Latymer Upper School in Hammersmith, west London, and top marks in her first-year exams at Cambridge. “There’s no point being half-hearted,” she says. She was originally going to study politics, but changed her mind. “Politics is so heavy, but I love art. I’m always inspired by it; one of the interesting things about my course is discovering artists I wouldn’t have known about otherwise.” She doesn’t regret interrupting a lucrative modelling career for university. “The decision came from the vague notion that it might be a wise thing to do, that when I was 50, 60, 70, I’d look back and be glad I did it.”
But the world of modelling is certainly more interesting for having Lily Cole in it, even intermittently. To not celebrate her unique face or marvel at the way she has rewritten the rule book on unconventional beauty would be like keeping a snow leopard under lock and key, away from the public eye. She never saw herself as being extraordinary looking. “I only think I look unusual now because lots of people have told me so,” she says. “At primary school in London I was taller than the average girl and had red hair, but I grew up with people from lots of different backgrounds, with different kinds of faces, so I was comfortable in my own physicality.”
Cole was 14 when she was discovered outside a Covent Garden burger bar by a talent scout, who handed her a business card and told her to ask her mother to call him. “I was cynical enough to think it wouldn’t come to much,” she says.
Her trajectory since has been rapid and stellar. In the era of size zero and mindless celebrity, she’s an impressive role model. The owner of a proper set of grown-up curves, she is eloquent, articulate and keenly involved in rainforest and wildlife charities. (Although, with endearing candour, she says: “I don’t actually do anything; I just help generate awareness.”)
In order to keep topping up the ?6m fortune she has already amassed, Cole has a schedule that is exhausting just to listen to. The evening before our meeting she was star attraction at the opening of the Somerset House ice rink in London. The next day saw the launch of the Pirelli calendar and, soon after, the Damien Hirst opening at the White Cube gallery in London. In between, she travels to and from Cambridge to attend lectures, while also finding time to promote her films and undertake editorial and advertising assignments.
And let’s not forget her love life. Murciano is based in Los Angeles, which means gruelling transatlantic flights that further choke up her diary. She says only: “I have built a gold fence around him. I obviously adore him, or I wouldn’t be with him.”
Cole has also now lent her support to the North Circular. No, not the road, but an online knitwear company — slogan: “Knitted by grannies. Supported by supermodels” – dreamt up “originally as a kind of joke” by her and some friends, one of whom owns a farm in Yorkshire and keeps endangered Wensleydale sheep rescued from the slaughterhouse.
By now, I am glazing over. May God strike me down with a shepherd’s crook hewn from sustainably harvested bamboo, but ethical fashion? Yawn. I am thinking formless calico and scratchy wool. “It’s not itchy!” exclaims Cole, handing me the knitted cowl from round her neck. She’s right, it’s soft and lovely (“There’s no kemp in their wool”) and all the more desirable for having Lily Cole endorsing it.
Of having to spend so much time in Los Angeles, she says: ‘There’s more for me to do there than there is for [Enrique] to do here.” She found the place alien at first — “I felt like I was on a boat adrift in the sea, not being able to find the island, metaphorically speaking” — but now feels more acclimatised. “The weather’s amazing.” But how does she cope in the sun, with skin like that? She looks aghast at the idea that she, a famously pale-skinned redhead, might burn easily. She rolls up her sleeve to show me an arm that, OK, doesn’t look especially pasty.
I apologise for recklessly misjudging her skin tone. ”I burnt once in Miami, but that was the only time,” she says, with a look that signals this whole shallow, silly subject is well and truly closed.
Although she appreciates her time modelling (“The fashion industry is actually quite interesting. I’ve learnt as much from [the fashion industry] as I’ve learnt from books. And all the travel; there’s a real wealth to it,”) after seven years, she says, “I find it a bit empty — the act of walking down a runway or standing in front of a camera.”
With four films under her belt, she says that acting is where her ambitions now lie. As a young girl she used to stage concerts and plays with her older sister, Elvie, now a primary-school teacher doing voluntary work in Thailand, to whom she is very close. “She’s got a big heart,” says Cole, with an affectionate smile. The girls were, for a time, bullied at school for their red hair but their mother told them they “were the most beautiful girls in the world. I don’t think either of us believed her. It was just Mum being Mum.”
Cole was born in Devon but grew up in London — “Half the time adorable, half the time a monster. I used to throw tantrums to try and get Mum to buy me clothes in Portobello Road.” Her mother, Patience Owen, is an artist and writer, and her father, Chris, a fisherman and boat-builder who lives in Spain. He left home when Cole was a baby and she has no contact with him. Aged six, she spent two terms at the Sylvia Young stage school but found it “too competitive, too strict”, and later attended St Marylebone School for girls. There she played Nancy in Oliver! “My breakthrough moment,” she says with a smile.
I can see her being a great Nancy, I tell her, all petticoats and freckles and bawdy cockney banter. Would she like to reprise the role, perhaps for the West End stage? The smile freezes. Her ambitions now, she implies, are somewhat loftier. Let’s draw a veil over St Trinian’s too; not heavyweight enough for Miss Cole: “It’s not the kind of film I gravitate towards.” She admires Cate Blanchett, Samantha Morton and Marion Cotillard, and is reluctant to accept parts that would be purely decorative. “I’m trying to avoid the curse of the Model-Turned-Actress.”
Does she act at Cambridge? It has, after all, been the launching pad for many a glittering stage career. “Something scares me about that idea,” she says. “Maybe I feel intimidated by intellectual thespians.” How can she be cowed by a few amateur stage boffins after the big-name bunch she worked with in her latest film? St Trinian’s was a small part, as are her roles in Sally Potter’s Rage and the forthcoming There be Dragons, directed by Roland Joffe. But playing the central character of Valentina, Dr Parnassus’s daughter, alongside Christopher Plummer, Tom Waits and Heath Ledger was a big step up, professionally.
“I don’t think it struck me until we did a read-through and I met the other actors. They’re all so brilliant and talented and much more experienced than I was. It was, like, ‘Oh, my God! What am I going to have to perform against and be part of?”‘
People ask if there’s anything the talented Lily Cole can’t do. Well, she’s rubbish at ice skating. I know this because on the day I see her the Evening Standard runs a photograph of her coming a tremendous cropper on the rink at Somerset House, posh coat all over the place and convulsed with laughter; there’s none of the detached poise and froideur normally present in her pictures and in person. She hasn’t seen the paper herself, but immediately starts going through the motions of being outraged at the puerility of newspaper photographers — “They were just waiting for me to fall over!” Then she softens and giggles and says she wouldn’t have dreamt of getting on the ice if she hadn’t downed three glasses of mulled wine first. “The last time I skated was eight years ago,” she says, laughing. “I was shit at it then and I’m shit at it now.” For a moment she forgets herself and looks every bit as carefree and irresponsible as all students have a right to be. She should try it more often — it suits her.
source: independent.ie