Muck & Class: Elizabeth Hurley, the world's most glamorous farmer
31st October 2009
She may have swapped her Manolos for wellies, but don't be fooled into thinking that it’s all mud and mucking out for Elizabeth Hurley. She has converted her 400-acre farm in Gloucestershire to organic status, is about to launch a range of high-end snacks, and has even teamed up with the Prince of Wales's Duchy Originals brand. And despite the rural idyll, she isn’t ruling out a return to the bright lights.
Elizabeth Hurley has a voice that is so deep, dark and commanding that she can make a conversation about root crops and the Soil Association sound like erotic poetry. After five minutes of listening, spellbound, to her talking about the joys of country life, it’s easy to understand why – seven years after she last appeared in a film – she remains so internationally famous.
It doesn’t matter that none of us remembers her in a significant role (apart from her appearance, 15 years ago, in that Versace safety-pin dress and her portrayal of Vanessa Kensington in Austin Powers), because Elizabeth Hurley possesses the glamour, presence and charisma of the kind of old-fashioned Hollywood stars who only ever really played themselves.
Beautiful – at 44 she is arguably lovelier than she was when she first emerged as the monobrowed girlfriend of Hugh Grant in 1994 – charming and just a little regal, she has the power to fascinate, whatever she is saying. We meet to talk about her new range of organic snacks on a rare day when Elizabeth (on no account must anyone call her Liz) is in London, and she can’t wait to get back to the 400-acre farm in Gloucestershire that she has owned for six years but which has been her full-time home for just over a year.
These days, she insists with a radiant smile, she is much more comfortable in wellington boots than a bikini. Living in her rural idyll with Arun Nayar, her husband of two years, and her seven-year-old son Damian is so ‘divine’, she doesn’t know why she stayed in London for so long.
‘For the last couple of years I was finding it harder and harder to live in London. I had got to the point where it was making me ill, and I couldn’t control my rage at being followed by the paparazzi. It’s a very primal thing in humans: we don’t like being preyed on like animals. Five mornings a week there would be photographers following me to my car when I took Damian to school. I’d been able to put up with it when it was just me, but I couldn’t bear exposing him. I thought, “This is unhealthy; I can’t have my son in this environment,”’ she says.
Photo opportunities, Elizabeth is the first to admit, are the lifeblood of a celebrity’s existence, but the way in which the paparazzi intruded on her family life made her totally rethink the way she was living.
‘I would be bursting into tears and just be so angry. There is something about motherhood that makes you very protective of anyone coming too near your child, and the paparazzi did things like take pictures of him nude on the beach and put
them online. It was disgusting, disgraceful,’ she says with evident emotion.
‘For the last couple of years I was finding it harder and harder to live in London. I had got to the point where it was making me ill’
Motherhood has had, it would seem, a far more profound effect on Elizabeth’s behaviour than her ex-boyfriend Hugh Grant could have imagined back in the 90s, when he once joked that she had so little maternal instinct that she couldn’t be trusted with a pet rabbit. Damian is at the centre of her life – he is not just the reason she left London but also the reason she gave up acting.
‘I gave up movies when I had Damian because I didn’t want to be absent and neither did I want to disturb and disrupt his routine by having him on the road with me. I couldn’t have given Damian that life; it would have been impossible. I know a lot of people do that successfully, but mine wouldn’t have been successful. He would have been an insane child if I had given him that lifestyle.’
The new Hurley venture – producing her own range of low-calorie, low-fat organic snacks – has much to do with Elizabeth’s calmer country life as a, well, civilian (years ago she referred to anyone who wasn’t a celebrity as a civilian).
As a hands-on mum (she has no childcare apart from her mother, who is looking after Damian today) living on a working farm (managed by her brother Michael), it made sense to turn her dual passions – food and organic farming – into a business that, along with her well-established line of beachwear, would fill the gap left by movies.
There was, she decided, a distinct opening in the organic food market – nutritious snacks that weren’t ‘hellishly fattening’. As someone who has had to spend most of her adult life watching her weight (she looks enviably svelte in her trademark white jeans, although she claims she is seven pounds heavier than when she was a working actress), she is something of an expert on careful snacking.
Her first organic products – oat and fruit snack bars and beef jerky (sourced in part from her own cattle) – are all approved by the Soil Association and are just under 100 calories each.
‘I have never eaten six raisins a day with a child’s knife and fork, or any of the other ridiculous things I have read about myself, but I am heavier than in my movie years. There is a huge change in your metabolism after 40 and for the first time ever I am having to watch what I eat because I’m quite greedy by nature,’ she says with a long, low self-deprecating laugh.
She laughs again, seconds later, when I tell her she looks closer to 24 than 44 and very gently ask if she has had surgery.
‘Don’t be ridiculous, I look so much more than that and, no, no surgery, not yet. I really don’t have a beauty regime. The only thing I do – obviously – is pluck my eyebrows because I would look like Denis Healey if I didn’t.
'I don’t have time. I have two businesses that I run and there is no question of taking time out of the day now because I like to do the school run as well and be with Damian when he is not at school. It would be impossible to find time to have a facial or a massage.’
