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Sienna Miller: a sense of theatre
Last Updated:
12:01am BST 07/06/2008
She is known for her turbulent public romances, individual fashion sense and a free-spirit sensibility that infects her films. Yet Sienna Miller's 'naughty', frolicsome side has often obscured a more serious ambition. Murphy Williams finds she has her sights set on credibility
Watch Sienna Miller in the trailer for The Edge of Love At the age of 18, Sienna Miller enrolled for a three-month course at the Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute in New York, fresh out of Heathfield boarding school in Ascot. It proved a baptism of fire. 'On the first day, the teacher was going round the class, asking people what they wanted from the experience,' she remembers. 'I said, "To lose my attachment to what people think." He said, "OK, come up here." So I went up on stage, and he said, "Dance." I said, "No" and he said, "F***ing dance!" So I started to dance, and after two minutes he got this wooden box and started to bongo on it, and I went mad and went for it because I was so mortified, but then afterwards I didn't care what people thought in the room because I'd made such a fool of myself.'
Sienna Miller: 'I really aspire to family relationships, but I don't know if it's my nature to be that grounded. I'm the black sheep'It was a toe-curling but crucial lesson for what followed. In 2004 Miller delivered two dazzlingly sexy, uninhibited performances in her breakthrough films Layer Cake and Alfie, and emerged as the new sweetheart of her Alfie co-star Jude Law, an eventful romance that wrenched her into the glare of long lenses and flashguns. Ever since she has had to shrug off daily abuse from paparazzi lurking near her house and looking for a lucrative reaction, a presence she describes as 'war'.
Now 26, Sienna Rose Miller is a controversial fantasy figure. Vogue covergirl, Bafta nominee and designer's darling, one of a dozen famous women who can multiply sales of a handbag simply by carrying it to the local pub (she could open up a small stall, she says, selling all the bags she gets sent, but instead has many 'happy girlfriends'), she is also pilloried for her untethered, rather eager approach to life, her occasional style blunders ('Sienna, did you get dressed in the dark?' the red-tops snipe) and presumed lack of solid achievement - 'God spare us!' wailed a Daily Mail reader when it was reported that Miller might star in Wuthering Heights.
For the past two years Miller has been quietly choosing roles that could bestow credibility. 'The playgirl socialite thing is a bit of a media construct that people need to get past,' the director John Maybury says. 'It's also part of that British institution, tall poppy syndrome: when people see young, successful, happy beauties, they want to cut them down to size.'
Miller's latest film, Maybury's The Edge of Love, may work wonders for her. Playing Dylan Thomas's wife, Caitlin, Miller gives a rich, enthralling performance as the wild, liberated mother and author, rapturous and wretched by turns. The plot revolves around Caitlin's passionate, real-life, wartime friendship with Dylan's childhood sweetheart, Vera Philips, played by Keira Knightley.
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Miller is a world away from Wales when we meet - in Prague, where she has been filming her first big-bucks action movie, GI Joe, for a week, after a four-month shoot in LA. We meet in her nearest restaurant, where I am soon sprinkled with the Sienna dust I have heard about: 'How are you feeling after the flight?' 'How long can you stay till?' She is in relaxed mode: plimsolls, skinny black jeans, a long white vest over a black one, hair softly thrown up, dangly glass earrings, and a fresh, make-up-free glow despite her 14-hour day.
She notices that the music might be too loud and suggests we go to her place instead. 'Shall we eat some pasta at my house? Would that be better? We can smoke. We'll have a glass. My publicist will be like, "What are you doing?" but f*** it, I love it there.' The ceaseless parade of paparazzi images of Miller, usually caught off-guard in the street with her boyfriend, the actor Rhys Ifans, is impossible to equate with the sparkling, spirited Tinkerbell lugging one of my bags as she sprints the stairs two by two in the dark - having not yet located the hall light - lamenting the old cemetery her bedroom overlooks.
The flat is white, spruce, modern, with a bedroom for her mother's visits, a quilt from home over her own bed, hydrangeas in vases, and a book of Carol Ann Duffy poems on the coffee table. She swiftly prepares our meal, peeling garlic, rinsing tomatoes, chopping herbs, all the while chatting so informally that it doesn't feel like an interview at all.
Getting the part of Caitlin was a stroke of luck. Another tabloid phenomenon, Lindsay Lohan, dropped out weeks before filming and Maybury rang Miller on holiday in Mexico. 'I got this call from him saying, "Stop lying in the sun. Don't get a bloody tan." I said, "What are you talking about?" but I had an inkling.' Normally, Miller admits, 'I go through this complete angst of "What am I going to do? I can't do it!" but this was such a rushed thing, I barely had time to get her Irish lilt right and read a couple of books.'
As the camera rolled on a beach in Wales, the paparazzi were hiding behind walls, resulting in salivating headlines about the photogenic double-act of Miller and Knightley. Yet it was Miller's favourite part of the shoot: 'I just loved being away from London. It was spring, bluebells were out and Wales is the most idyllic place in the world.'
Miller lays our plates on the table with self-deprecation. 'I've made a huge mess. There's not enough tomatoes. I will not be offended at all if you don't want it.'
One of the film's most harrowing scenes shows Caitlin, traumatised by her husband's infidelity, tearfully picking at some fresh stitches on her forehead. The tears are genuine. '[Maybury] knew what to tap into to make me upset. He took me into his trailer and said, "Come in here, I need to talk to you." He gave me a *** and sat me down. He played me a really sad Ed Harcourt song on his iPod that he listened to a lot when he was breaking up with his ex.
Miller as Caitlin MacNamara with Matthew Rhys as Dylan Thomas in The Edge of LoveThen he started to talk to me - "I know that you feel this." It was just very intense. I was like, "John, don't do this." I started sobbing and he said, "Let's go on set now." He had the scene all ready to shoot and he said, "No one talk to her" and, "Action!" I was feeling quite upset doing the scene; I think that's apparent with all the snot. Afterwards he gave me a big hug and a shot.'
Miller's roles thus far have erred on the damaged, and 'destruction' is a term that she returns to often in her stream of thought. I point out that she made a fast leap from small characters to more complex ones… 'meaty, destructive!' she interjects enthusiastically. The woman she would most like to play is F Scott Fitzgerald's wife, Zelda - 'I find all that slightly destructive but mad love alluring.' For someone so drawn to the dark side, Miller has a light vivaciousness about her, a quick wit that makes her neat, pert, Aryan prettiness unintimidatingly by the by: Maybury remembers Miller at her and Law's engagement party, doing cartwheels through a garden sprinkler in the sunshine. 'She's a very complex thinker, but her intelligence doesn't interfere with her ability to have fun.'
From the outside, Miller has had it relatively easy, but there were early cracks. Born in New York in 1981 to Ed, a handsome and charismatic investment banker from Pennsylvania, and Josephine, a South African-born former model and PA for David Bowie, she moved to Chelsea when she was 18 months old. Weekends were spent riding horses and running amok at her godmother's farmhouse in Wiltshire. Her mother ran the Lee Strasberg Institute in London and later taught yoga and the Alexander Technique.
When Sienna was six and her sister, Savannah, nine, their parents divorced and she and Savannah moved to Parsons' Green with their mother. Sienna's relationship with her father was 'volatile', according to her sister, and she was much closer to her mother, who was treated for breast cancer around this time. She was sent to a girls' boarding school two years later. The first month there was lonely - she relied on a pet rabbit for company - but she soon learnt the requisite public school skills of independence and easy assimilation. At Heathfield, Miller played lacrosse, appeared in Annie and Oliver! and was always in trouble for smoking, drinking and flirting, but she was well enough behaved to get a bursary when her parents couldn't afford the full fees. Her father remarried three times and joined a cult along the way. He is now writing a spiritual self-help book from his home in the Virgin Islands.
After training in New York, Miller travelled round central America and fell in love with a yogi in a meditation centre in Guatemala. 'Got an Om tattoo…' she grins. She returned for another term at Lee Strasberg, took on modelling jobs, theatre work, a couple of movie bit parts and then landed a part as Stacey, a flirtatious model with acting aspirations, in the BBC sitcom Bedtime. She was highly watchable, and went on to play Fiona in Keen Eddie, a Fox comedy that was cancelled early, leaving her free of their seven-year option.
Her first appearance in Alfie was shot in slow-motion for the viewer to absorb her full Anita Pallenberg-esque beauty: 'The package was irresistible,' as Jude Law's Alfie put it - 'a show-stopper with a new-school brand of sexiness.' Another scene had her chopping a cucumber in nothing but boots and polka-dot knickers. Sienna Miller was now red-hot property.
It was time to be taken more seriously. She was cast opposite Heath Ledger in Casanova as Francesca Bruni, an 18th-century feminist who refuses Casanova's charms. 'She's a film star, make no mistake,' the director Lasse Hallström gushed. For Miller, Casanova 'was a really exciting thing that didn't turn out to be great'.
In 2005 she starred in a West End production, playing Celia in As You Like It alongside Helen McCrory as Rosalind. Two days after it opened, McCrory was taken ill. Miller overstepped the understudy and texted the director David Lan: 'I know Rosalind's part if you need me to do it. X.' It was an audacious display of ambition that paid off. She only needed two prompts during her performance of Shakespeare's longest female role and it won her a standing ovation.
Why had she learnt the leading role? 'I hadn't tried to, but it had been eight weeks and I've got a weird memory for lines. Also, watching Helen McCrory, who's this incredible actress, every day, I was far more interested in her performance than my own. Then you've got the Tannoy on in your dressing-room so you're hearing these lines. I suddenly realised that I knew it. But I knew Dominic West's part [Orlando] as well.'
In July 2005 a crashing low followed the high when the News of the World exposed Law's fling with his nanny. Miller's lily-white, much-copied 'boho' get-ups, all fair trade ponchos and Navajo silver bracelets, were soon replaced with a harder, more streetwise look.
Miller 'stubbornly' wanted to act for as long as she can remember, but making Factory Girl that year was a turning point for her. 'I don't think I'd had the life experience and I found it really hard to cry in films, but this role resonated with me. It made me realise that I was doing the right thing and could allow myself to be slightly consumed by a role. I couldn't have given it any more.' She is extraordinary as Andy Warhol's messed-up, stylish young muse Edie Sedgwick and she took a while to shake off her persona.
Miller as Edie Sedgwick in Factory Girl (2007)The director George Hickenloper's tale of the audition is another testament to Miller's career-savvy charm: 'We were doing most of the casting in LA. She is supposed to be at the audition at 3pm, I have to fly to New York at six so I had to leave the casting session at four. Three rolls around, 3.15, 3.30. I'm literally about to walk out and dismiss the idea of Sienna Miller altogether when she rushes in and is so wonderful in her discombobulation that I'm completely disarmed.'
The biopic had too shady a story to be a mainstream success, but, Miller says, 'from my point of view, there's no need to be in a film that's well received or really successful, because it's not about the effect on other people - although I would love it if people were moved by it - but it's more about my experience of doing it.
'Woah!' Miller says, surprised at herself and gulping at her glass. 'This may be because I've never had a film that's really well received, but I do it because it's something that I need to do, personally. That's not bad, is it?' She pauses for thought. 'No more wine!'
In November 2006 Miller split up with Law for the last time. She made film after film, mostly low-budget, 'running away from a lot of stuff. I just wanted to work and not be at home.' In Interview, she played a cunning, famous soap star 'more famous for who she sleeps with than anything else' being interviewed by Steve Buscemi's jaded political journalist. The as-yet-unreleased Camille came next, then the epic fantasy Stardust. And then, two weeks into shooting The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, she made a massive gaffe, calling it '****sburgh' to Rolling Stone magazine.
The public outcry was humbling in the extreme. 'Sienna the Witch' posters were put up, and a mob gathered outside her hotel shouting, 'Go home, Sienna.' The film's producers set up a crisis damage control where Miller had to meet the Mayor of Pittsburgh. 'They told me to go into the make-up trailer and come meet the mayor on my way out. But they'd put him two blocks away, so I had to do a walk of shame, and there are five live TV crews, and a life-size cardboard cut-out of me. It was agonising. The mayor introduced himself and I said, "I'm sorry, I really didn't mean anything by it. I come from a country where we have rhyming slang." I asked them about the cut-out and they said, "We've been taking you round Pittsburgh and showing you what's beautiful about it all day."'
Like twin star says, it's probably all rumours..
