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Gemma Ward
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desertrose05
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What I meannt was like, editorial-type pictures. I've pretty much seen all the backstage/runway pics.
desertrose05
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Ah, found one! From herfamedgoodlooks:
Originally posted by tiffany@Nov 7 2004, 09:17 PM
I think it was posted somewhere in this thread, but I'm not sure. You might want to check the SimplyGemmaWard site
[snapback]421906[/snapback]
Such sexy long legs...thank you Tiffany! 
for all the aussies out there, there's a new article about her with a picture, in the australian, in "the magazine" section...worth checking out, jus talks about her time and perth and other stuff...i might type it out later, but only if ppl are going to read it caz i don't like gem and it's a really long article... hehe
twilight fairy
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I always thought Gemma resembled Kate Hudson. I think they are both absoloutely gorgeous and love them to death.
Watch The Face
Perth teenager Gemma Ward may be the supermodel of the moment on international catwalks but her wide eyes are set on bigger things. Natasha Bita reports. Photograph by Justin Smith.
(I don't have a scanner but the captions read...) "Ward "the family clown" (above), and (far right) at 13, with twin brothers Oscar and Henry and sister Sophie; (opposite) "the new Twiggy" at the Cavalli show in Milan last month.
Chiffon asnd curlers are in a whirl backstage at the Burberry Prorsum show in Milan. Make-up artists flit amoung modles preening for their prommendade along the catwalk. As creative director Christopher Bailey fusses over the finished touches, a giggly blonde in frayed denim shorts chomps on a crisp green apple. Just turned 17, Gemma Ward is Australia's most successful model since Elle MacPherson shot to fame 20 years ago.
"I feel like I've been swept up in the tide along the way," she tells The Weekend Australian Magazine. "There are quite a few stages of shock and I think I've been through a lot of them. I am very proud of myself in the way I've handled things because it [the modelling industry] can be tough."
If Elle is The Body, Gemma is The Face. In the flesh, she is the incarnation of innocence. With her baby-blonde hair, pure complextion and wide-eyed expression, she might sprout wings. The sea-green eyes, long neck, high forhead and sinuous 178cm frame produce a look, Uma Thurman-like, that has been described as "ethereal", "extraterrestrial" and, perhaps more enigmatically, "a kewpie doll with the air squeezed out of it."
"I don't know of anyone who's had this type of success right away," says her New York manager, Maja Edmonston, of the IMG model agency. "She has helped inspire a new look, a new crop of girls. Gemma is one of the top models in the world now walking the runway. She's a chameleon; a photographer's dream."
During Milan Fashion Week, Ward blossomed into an English rose for Burberry Prorsum, the revered British fashion house. But she paraded for 17 other designers - slinky in Versace, prim in Prada and a siren in Dolce & Gabbana. At the spring-summer 2005 collections in New York a week earlier, she sashayed for 15 designers, the all-American sophisticate in Calvin Klein and Donna Karen. After Milan, she'll jet to Paris for 19 more shows, parading as John Galliano's rag doll and as a prissy miss for Valentino. Her agent had to knock back 30 other requests.
Giggling one minutre and sagely philosphical the next, Ward is a contradiction of childish demeanour and worldly wisdom. Asked about her favourite catwalk show, she nominates Prada, "because there were Easter eggs and hot cross buns backstage". The best photo shoot was for Balenciaga, when she got to leap on a stage atop a New York skyscraper during a thunderstorm.
In the next breath, she tells how she has "matured and grown and learnt" since she began modelling 18 months ago. "But i definately haven't changed my values or my personality," she insists. "I really believe it doesn't matter what you do or how much you earn or who you marry or what education you have - you have to be comfortable with yourself. You need to find your happiness from people, not money."
If Ward's school friends hadn't forged her mother's signature, the teenager would be cramming for her final exams now at Shenton College, a Perth public school, and babysitting for pocket money. Whan the Ford model agency's televised Search For A Supermodel contest passed through Perth in 2002, Ward tagged along to watch her friends enter. One of the judges spotted her in the audience and insisted she join them. But the 14-year-old needed parental consent to enter - a predicament resolved in the time-honoured fashion by her school friends.
"I had no idea what was going on," her mother, Claire Ward, recalls. "I'd gone to the supermarket and had all this food in the back of the car. I expected Gemma to be waiting outside. I went in and there were cameras everywhere. Gem had her hair done and make-up put on and they'd put her in other clothes, and she was in the final. It was a bit surreal."
Ward didn't win - that prize went to Nicole Trunfio, another Australian teenager treading runways overseas - but a talent scout from Vivian's Model Management handed Mrs Ward a business care. After a month of phone calls, Vivien's convinced the reluctant mother to pay several hundred dollars for test photos of both her daughters. The instant the proofs hit the agent's desk, Ward landed her first job, for Rusty's Surfwear.
A few months later she turned up in Sydney for Fashion Week, where designer Wayne Cooper was launching a range of T-shirts inspired by the big-eyed, baby-faced Blythe Dolls. "Then in comes Gemma Ward, and we're like, 'My God, she looks like that doll!'" Cooper says. "We thought, 'she's the girl on the T-shirt, we have to use her, she has to open our show, she's it!' I think we got her for $AD350."
At 15, Ward signed with IMG, the international talent agency that represents supermodels Kate Moss and Gisele Bundchen. Italian designer Miuccia Prada "discovered" her for last summer's Prada and Miu mIu collections, and Ward graduated from the catwalk to covergirl. US Vogue chose her as the youngest of nine "models of the moment" for the cover of its bumper September issue, and she stars in the latest advertising campagins for Prada, Jil Sander and Yves Saint Laurent.
"Gemma's got a look of her own," says Wayne Cooper. "This youthful, vibrant, innocent thing. She can do grown-up but give it the naive quality that designers are looking for at the moemnt with these soft, flouncy clothes. I think she's the most successful girl who's ever left this country, editorial-wise, by a mile."
Italian designer Roberto Cavalli, the king of bling, marvels at Ward's "extraordinary beauty". "She really knows how to reinterpret the clothes she wears. She managed to express the mood of my collections perfectly."
Gilles Benismon, editorial director of American Elle (perhaps best remembered in Australia as the French photographer who married Elle MacPherson), reckons Ward has "everything to be a star". "But there are son many good-looking girls now, it's amazing," he warns. "So it also depends on her personality - if she is able to express and enjoy what she is doing. Then add a very small part of luck. It's like making a Martini."
Italian Vogue editor Franca Sozzani had no doubt that Ward is a star already. "She's the new Twiggy," she declares, comparing her to the waifish model who symbolised the swinging '60s.
On the phone from New York, Ward seems baffled by all the fuss. "I have no idea," she resonds when asked why sje thinks she is so successful. "I just go about my business and things seem to go weel."
Her manager puts it down to a mix of "amazing beauty and a delightful personality". "She's a trouper," Edmonston says. "She never complains. She doesn't get involved too much in the whole scene. She's so grounded and sure of herself. That's something very, very rare."
Ward credits her Australian upbringing, where "people don't take things extremely seriously; they always take things a bit more humbly".
It's a fair bet that Ward can earn more in a week than most school-leavers will in a year, but her mother insists reports of $20,000 catwalk fees are misleading. Some designers pay in vouchers or clothes, and models usually foot the bill for travel, hotels and chaffeurs. "Gemma's not making insubstatial amounts of money, but she's certainly not a millionairess." Claire Ward says. "I think it's a bit of a misconception that they earn so much." Ward herself is coy about her earnings, joking that "someone wrote that I looked like I was being paid in Kinder Surprises".
Only recently, her parents hired a New York accountant to manage her funds. Rather than splashing out on jewellery or designer clothes, Ward draws a monthly allowance and banks the rest. "She just doesn't wnat to think about the money," says her mother. "She doesn't ever ask anyone how much she earns for anything. She has no idea. We just figured that for the time being the best place to put it is the bank."
The first thing Ward does when she jets back from her modelling assignments is head to the beach with her sister, 19-year-old Sophie - also modelling with Vivien's while she finishes her arts degree - and twin brothers Oscar and Henry, 13. She winds down by rowing with her father, Gary, a former state champion, and sewing or scouring markets for secondhand clothes.
The Wards seem to be having some trouble coming to grips with "Gem's" celebrity status. Henry came home from his first day of high school to report, incredulously, "One of the girls opened her locker and she had a picture of Gemma!" Such fame has made the twins two of the most popular kids at school.
"I think it's really cute," Ward giggles. "They tell me about these really nice girls who come up to them and ask about me, so I hope that I'm helping them a little bit."
The family lives next door to her grandmother in the affluent western suburbs of Perth, where GP Gary Ward has his own clinic and his wife nurses in a veterans' hospital. The couple met in England, where 21-year-old Claire was working in the burns unit of a Cambridge hospital, 22 years ago. "I thought, 'Ooooh, she's pretty cute!" chuckles Dr Ward, ten years her senior, although their relationship was purely platonic at first. Fobbing off approaches from modelling couts ("I thought they were just having me on," Claire Ward says), the pretty young nurse moved to Hong Kong to work in a camp for Vietnamese refugees. When Gary heard Claire was heading to Perth for a holiday, he threw in his job in England and caught the first plane home. After they'd dated for just a week, he proposed over dinner.
Claire's first big purcahse after migrating to Perth in 1983 was a sewing machine, so she could design the fancy-dress costumes Gemma insisted on wearing to preschool. "Whenever she went to kindy, she'd put on the tutu and the clown outfit and the orange socks and green shoes, with no thought to whether or not they matched," her mother recalls. "I gave up trying to dress her."
Despite being the family clown, Ward was a keen student, topping her classes in geography, human biology and drama until her workload forced jer to put her Year 12 studies on hold. "She'd done very well at school and it was something that gave her a lot of self-esteem," her mother says. "To give that up, I think she grieved quite a lot." The Wards never tried to push their daughter towards a career in law or medicine. "We've tried really hard not to have [the children's] jobs be the thing that defines them. We've said to them, 'It's not what you do, it's the type of person you are when you do it.'"
In August, just before Ward left Perth for the international fashion show circuit, her parents enrolled her in a personal development course with Landmark Education. "I wanted to put her in the best possible condition to deal with situations she might find herself in...an adult environment as a child," her mother says. "It did help."
Pretty teenage girls a long way from home can be easy prey in the modelling game, where exploitation is an occupational hazard. "A lot of people ask me is I was worried anput her coming across seedy men," says her father. "But I didn't thing seedy guys would be at that level in the industry. And I just knew she wouldn't get into drugs because she's not that sort of kid. The fact is that she landed riught at the top [and] she never sought it out. I imagine that girls who are desperate to get into the industry and make it might use those standard techniques you hear about. I just knew Gemma wasn't in that kind of game. I really trust Gemma."
Many parents might find it disconcerting to discover that their teenage daughter, dolled up to look a good ten years older, is a pin-up girl. (One of Gary Ward's friends, alarmed to see Gemma's photo on a construction site, rebuked a burly builder. "Oi!" he thundered, "That's my mate's daughter!") "I find it quite weird to think that builders have pictures of my daughter on their tool cupboards," Claire Ward laughs, conceding she had many slepless nights when Gemma took her first steps on the catwalk at the age of 14. "Gemma is very sensible and would never out herself in a difficult situation," she says. "And she is so well looked after."
At first, a parent chaperoned her on all her assignemnts. "I always wanted to be there to check people out myself and to develop some kind of relationship with them so that...Gemma is more [to them] than just a face and a commodity," her mother says. And so the head of IMG's women's division, David Cunningham, flew from New York to join the family at home for dinner. "Now he knows where Gemma lives and he knows her brothers and sisters," Claire Ward reasons. "I feel that's quite important for them to know she's loved and treasured here, and it's kind of an honourfor them to have her. It's not easy for us to have her taken away."
By way of surprise, Claire travelled to New York for Gemma's 17th birthday on November 3 and later accompanied her to the launch of the Hunger Project's campaign, Celebrating the Girl Child. "Hopefully, if she choses to, in the future she can contribute in some way to raising awareness about the number of babies that get killed, just because they're girls, in some Third Worls countries. We've always contributed quite a lot and participated in charity organisations [and] said to her that it's good to be a decent person, and not someone who grabs and thinks only of herself."
As the chill of winter descends on New York, Gemma Ward is starting to put down roots as she prepares to rent her first appartment, in the uber-cool Manhatten precinct of SoHo. "When I came to New York I thought I might model for six months, that I would just kind of try it out," she says. "All of a sudden, now I'm thinking of making it a long-term career."
The accidental model really aspires to be an actress. At the age of eight, she pestered her parents into enrolling her in drama classes. "She was jsut passionate about it and hassled us and hassled us," her mother says. At ten, Gemma was appearing in TV ads and at 13 co-starred in a short film, Pink Pyjamas.
The budding performer is in talks to star in a film, The Black Balloon, produced by Strictly Ballroom's Tristram Miall, as the free-spirited girlfriend of a teenager ashamed of his autistic brother. "Gemma is a very intuitive and instinctive performer," says Australian director Ellisa Down, whose main work has been in short films. "The problem when you become a huge model is that people become all condescending and say, 'Oh, so you want to be an actress, do you love?' and then they get the cute-girl-in-an-action-flick role. But Gemma is a great natural talent."
"I love acting so much," Wards enthuses. "If I get a chance now I would definately take it. But it's quite a cliche, the model-turned-actor." An even bigger cliche is the model-in-the-music-video. Grammy Award-winning singer John Mayer has picked Ward to star in the video for his new single, Daughters. She was thrilled, her mum reports, because she already had a couple of his CD's.
Ward remains refreshingly sanguine about her sudden and spectacular success. "I'm quite content I'm not someone who's desperate to become famous," she says. "I do it because I enjoy it."
At times, she admits, she does fret about what would happen "if it all went away" - the international travel, the moeny, the free designer clothes, the photographers, the fame, the glamour. "But what I've gained is more important," she reasons. "I've already got so much, it wouldn't matter."
Perth teenager Gemma Ward may be the supermodel of the moment on international catwalks but her wide eyes are set on bigger things. Natasha Bita reports. Photograph by Justin Smith.
(I don't have a scanner but the captions read...) "Ward "the family clown" (above), and (far right) at 13, with twin brothers Oscar and Henry and sister Sophie; (opposite) "the new Twiggy" at the Cavalli show in Milan last month.
Chiffon asnd curlers are in a whirl backstage at the Burberry Prorsum show in Milan. Make-up artists flit amoung modles preening for their prommendade along the catwalk. As creative director Christopher Bailey fusses over the finished touches, a giggly blonde in frayed denim shorts chomps on a crisp green apple. Just turned 17, Gemma Ward is Australia's most successful model since Elle MacPherson shot to fame 20 years ago.
"I feel like I've been swept up in the tide along the way," she tells The Weekend Australian Magazine. "There are quite a few stages of shock and I think I've been through a lot of them. I am very proud of myself in the way I've handled things because it [the modelling industry] can be tough."
If Elle is The Body, Gemma is The Face. In the flesh, she is the incarnation of innocence. With her baby-blonde hair, pure complextion and wide-eyed expression, she might sprout wings. The sea-green eyes, long neck, high forhead and sinuous 178cm frame produce a look, Uma Thurman-like, that has been described as "ethereal", "extraterrestrial" and, perhaps more enigmatically, "a kewpie doll with the air squeezed out of it."
"I don't know of anyone who's had this type of success right away," says her New York manager, Maja Edmonston, of the IMG model agency. "She has helped inspire a new look, a new crop of girls. Gemma is one of the top models in the world now walking the runway. She's a chameleon; a photographer's dream."
During Milan Fashion Week, Ward blossomed into an English rose for Burberry Prorsum, the revered British fashion house. But she paraded for 17 other designers - slinky in Versace, prim in Prada and a siren in Dolce & Gabbana. At the spring-summer 2005 collections in New York a week earlier, she sashayed for 15 designers, the all-American sophisticate in Calvin Klein and Donna Karen. After Milan, she'll jet to Paris for 19 more shows, parading as John Galliano's rag doll and as a prissy miss for Valentino. Her agent had to knock back 30 other requests.
Giggling one minutre and sagely philosphical the next, Ward is a contradiction of childish demeanour and worldly wisdom. Asked about her favourite catwalk show, she nominates Prada, "because there were Easter eggs and hot cross buns backstage". The best photo shoot was for Balenciaga, when she got to leap on a stage atop a New York skyscraper during a thunderstorm.
In the next breath, she tells how she has "matured and grown and learnt" since she began modelling 18 months ago. "But i definately haven't changed my values or my personality," she insists. "I really believe it doesn't matter what you do or how much you earn or who you marry or what education you have - you have to be comfortable with yourself. You need to find your happiness from people, not money."
If Ward's school friends hadn't forged her mother's signature, the teenager would be cramming for her final exams now at Shenton College, a Perth public school, and babysitting for pocket money. Whan the Ford model agency's televised Search For A Supermodel contest passed through Perth in 2002, Ward tagged along to watch her friends enter. One of the judges spotted her in the audience and insisted she join them. But the 14-year-old needed parental consent to enter - a predicament resolved in the time-honoured fashion by her school friends.
"I had no idea what was going on," her mother, Claire Ward, recalls. "I'd gone to the supermarket and had all this food in the back of the car. I expected Gemma to be waiting outside. I went in and there were cameras everywhere. Gem had her hair done and make-up put on and they'd put her in other clothes, and she was in the final. It was a bit surreal."
Ward didn't win - that prize went to Nicole Trunfio, another Australian teenager treading runways overseas - but a talent scout from Vivian's Model Management handed Mrs Ward a business care. After a month of phone calls, Vivien's convinced the reluctant mother to pay several hundred dollars for test photos of both her daughters. The instant the proofs hit the agent's desk, Ward landed her first job, for Rusty's Surfwear.
A few months later she turned up in Sydney for Fashion Week, where designer Wayne Cooper was launching a range of T-shirts inspired by the big-eyed, baby-faced Blythe Dolls. "Then in comes Gemma Ward, and we're like, 'My God, she looks like that doll!'" Cooper says. "We thought, 'she's the girl on the T-shirt, we have to use her, she has to open our show, she's it!' I think we got her for $AD350."
At 15, Ward signed with IMG, the international talent agency that represents supermodels Kate Moss and Gisele Bundchen. Italian designer Miuccia Prada "discovered" her for last summer's Prada and Miu mIu collections, and Ward graduated from the catwalk to covergirl. US Vogue chose her as the youngest of nine "models of the moment" for the cover of its bumper September issue, and she stars in the latest advertising campagins for Prada, Jil Sander and Yves Saint Laurent.
"Gemma's got a look of her own," says Wayne Cooper. "This youthful, vibrant, innocent thing. She can do grown-up but give it the naive quality that designers are looking for at the moemnt with these soft, flouncy clothes. I think she's the most successful girl who's ever left this country, editorial-wise, by a mile."
Italian designer Roberto Cavalli, the king of bling, marvels at Ward's "extraordinary beauty". "She really knows how to reinterpret the clothes she wears. She managed to express the mood of my collections perfectly."
Gilles Benismon, editorial director of American Elle (perhaps best remembered in Australia as the French photographer who married Elle MacPherson), reckons Ward has "everything to be a star". "But there are son many good-looking girls now, it's amazing," he warns. "So it also depends on her personality - if she is able to express and enjoy what she is doing. Then add a very small part of luck. It's like making a Martini."
Italian Vogue editor Franca Sozzani had no doubt that Ward is a star already. "She's the new Twiggy," she declares, comparing her to the waifish model who symbolised the swinging '60s.
On the phone from New York, Ward seems baffled by all the fuss. "I have no idea," she resonds when asked why sje thinks she is so successful. "I just go about my business and things seem to go weel."
Her manager puts it down to a mix of "amazing beauty and a delightful personality". "She's a trouper," Edmonston says. "She never complains. She doesn't get involved too much in the whole scene. She's so grounded and sure of herself. That's something very, very rare."
Ward credits her Australian upbringing, where "people don't take things extremely seriously; they always take things a bit more humbly".
It's a fair bet that Ward can earn more in a week than most school-leavers will in a year, but her mother insists reports of $20,000 catwalk fees are misleading. Some designers pay in vouchers or clothes, and models usually foot the bill for travel, hotels and chaffeurs. "Gemma's not making insubstatial amounts of money, but she's certainly not a millionairess." Claire Ward says. "I think it's a bit of a misconception that they earn so much." Ward herself is coy about her earnings, joking that "someone wrote that I looked like I was being paid in Kinder Surprises".
Only recently, her parents hired a New York accountant to manage her funds. Rather than splashing out on jewellery or designer clothes, Ward draws a monthly allowance and banks the rest. "She just doesn't wnat to think about the money," says her mother. "She doesn't ever ask anyone how much she earns for anything. She has no idea. We just figured that for the time being the best place to put it is the bank."
The first thing Ward does when she jets back from her modelling assignments is head to the beach with her sister, 19-year-old Sophie - also modelling with Vivien's while she finishes her arts degree - and twin brothers Oscar and Henry, 13. She winds down by rowing with her father, Gary, a former state champion, and sewing or scouring markets for secondhand clothes.
The Wards seem to be having some trouble coming to grips with "Gem's" celebrity status. Henry came home from his first day of high school to report, incredulously, "One of the girls opened her locker and she had a picture of Gemma!" Such fame has made the twins two of the most popular kids at school.
"I think it's really cute," Ward giggles. "They tell me about these really nice girls who come up to them and ask about me, so I hope that I'm helping them a little bit."
The family lives next door to her grandmother in the affluent western suburbs of Perth, where GP Gary Ward has his own clinic and his wife nurses in a veterans' hospital. The couple met in England, where 21-year-old Claire was working in the burns unit of a Cambridge hospital, 22 years ago. "I thought, 'Ooooh, she's pretty cute!" chuckles Dr Ward, ten years her senior, although their relationship was purely platonic at first. Fobbing off approaches from modelling couts ("I thought they were just having me on," Claire Ward says), the pretty young nurse moved to Hong Kong to work in a camp for Vietnamese refugees. When Gary heard Claire was heading to Perth for a holiday, he threw in his job in England and caught the first plane home. After they'd dated for just a week, he proposed over dinner.
Claire's first big purcahse after migrating to Perth in 1983 was a sewing machine, so she could design the fancy-dress costumes Gemma insisted on wearing to preschool. "Whenever she went to kindy, she'd put on the tutu and the clown outfit and the orange socks and green shoes, with no thought to whether or not they matched," her mother recalls. "I gave up trying to dress her."
Despite being the family clown, Ward was a keen student, topping her classes in geography, human biology and drama until her workload forced jer to put her Year 12 studies on hold. "She'd done very well at school and it was something that gave her a lot of self-esteem," her mother says. "To give that up, I think she grieved quite a lot." The Wards never tried to push their daughter towards a career in law or medicine. "We've tried really hard not to have [the children's] jobs be the thing that defines them. We've said to them, 'It's not what you do, it's the type of person you are when you do it.'"
In August, just before Ward left Perth for the international fashion show circuit, her parents enrolled her in a personal development course with Landmark Education. "I wanted to put her in the best possible condition to deal with situations she might find herself in...an adult environment as a child," her mother says. "It did help."
Pretty teenage girls a long way from home can be easy prey in the modelling game, where exploitation is an occupational hazard. "A lot of people ask me is I was worried anput her coming across seedy men," says her father. "But I didn't thing seedy guys would be at that level in the industry. And I just knew she wouldn't get into drugs because she's not that sort of kid. The fact is that she landed riught at the top [and] she never sought it out. I imagine that girls who are desperate to get into the industry and make it might use those standard techniques you hear about. I just knew Gemma wasn't in that kind of game. I really trust Gemma."
Many parents might find it disconcerting to discover that their teenage daughter, dolled up to look a good ten years older, is a pin-up girl. (One of Gary Ward's friends, alarmed to see Gemma's photo on a construction site, rebuked a burly builder. "Oi!" he thundered, "That's my mate's daughter!") "I find it quite weird to think that builders have pictures of my daughter on their tool cupboards," Claire Ward laughs, conceding she had many slepless nights when Gemma took her first steps on the catwalk at the age of 14. "Gemma is very sensible and would never out herself in a difficult situation," she says. "And she is so well looked after."
At first, a parent chaperoned her on all her assignemnts. "I always wanted to be there to check people out myself and to develop some kind of relationship with them so that...Gemma is more [to them] than just a face and a commodity," her mother says. And so the head of IMG's women's division, David Cunningham, flew from New York to join the family at home for dinner. "Now he knows where Gemma lives and he knows her brothers and sisters," Claire Ward reasons. "I feel that's quite important for them to know she's loved and treasured here, and it's kind of an honourfor them to have her. It's not easy for us to have her taken away."
By way of surprise, Claire travelled to New York for Gemma's 17th birthday on November 3 and later accompanied her to the launch of the Hunger Project's campaign, Celebrating the Girl Child. "Hopefully, if she choses to, in the future she can contribute in some way to raising awareness about the number of babies that get killed, just because they're girls, in some Third Worls countries. We've always contributed quite a lot and participated in charity organisations [and] said to her that it's good to be a decent person, and not someone who grabs and thinks only of herself."
As the chill of winter descends on New York, Gemma Ward is starting to put down roots as she prepares to rent her first appartment, in the uber-cool Manhatten precinct of SoHo. "When I came to New York I thought I might model for six months, that I would just kind of try it out," she says. "All of a sudden, now I'm thinking of making it a long-term career."
The accidental model really aspires to be an actress. At the age of eight, she pestered her parents into enrolling her in drama classes. "She was jsut passionate about it and hassled us and hassled us," her mother says. At ten, Gemma was appearing in TV ads and at 13 co-starred in a short film, Pink Pyjamas.
The budding performer is in talks to star in a film, The Black Balloon, produced by Strictly Ballroom's Tristram Miall, as the free-spirited girlfriend of a teenager ashamed of his autistic brother. "Gemma is a very intuitive and instinctive performer," says Australian director Ellisa Down, whose main work has been in short films. "The problem when you become a huge model is that people become all condescending and say, 'Oh, so you want to be an actress, do you love?' and then they get the cute-girl-in-an-action-flick role. But Gemma is a great natural talent."
"I love acting so much," Wards enthuses. "If I get a chance now I would definately take it. But it's quite a cliche, the model-turned-actor." An even bigger cliche is the model-in-the-music-video. Grammy Award-winning singer John Mayer has picked Ward to star in the video for his new single, Daughters. She was thrilled, her mum reports, because she already had a couple of his CD's.
Ward remains refreshingly sanguine about her sudden and spectacular success. "I'm quite content I'm not someone who's desperate to become famous," she says. "I do it because I enjoy it."
At times, she admits, she does fret about what would happen "if it all went away" - the international travel, the moeny, the free designer clothes, the photographers, the fame, the glamour. "But what I've gained is more important," she reasons. "I've already got so much, it wouldn't matter."
twilight fairy
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Thank you so much Amelie! Fantastic, informative article. Gemma's so humble, love her. 
desertrose05
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Yes, thank you SO much Amelie! Now I finally know her birthday is Nov 3! (I've been wondering that for ages).
Wow, thanks Amelie! She sounds even more delightful than she already seemed to me. This made me giggle:
The Wards seem to be having some trouble coming to grips with "Gem's" celebrity status. Henry came home from his first day of high school to report, incredulously, "One of the girls opened her locker and she had a picture of Gemma!" Such fame has made the twins two of the most popular kids at school.
"I think it's really cute," Ward giggles. "They tell me about these really nice girls who come up to them and ask about me, so I hope that I'm helping them a little bit."
Helping out her brothers.
The Wards seem to be having some trouble coming to grips with "Gem's" celebrity status. Henry came home from his first day of high school to report, incredulously, "One of the girls opened her locker and she had a picture of Gemma!" Such fame has made the twins two of the most popular kids at school.
"I think it's really cute," Ward giggles. "They tell me about these really nice girls who come up to them and ask about me, so I hope that I'm helping them a little bit."
Helping out her brothers.
Thankyou so much Amélie, it was lovely of you to post that Originally posted by shoe-gal@Nov 13 2004, 04:28 AM
Gemma is in John Mayer's new film clip for Daughters
You can see it here
http://mp.aol.com/video.index.adp?mxid=1207312
