“The second film I did was Alfie, and I met Jude and fell in love with a man who happened to be a very successful, very talented actor. And all the attention I received was only because I happened to fall in love with someone who was famous.”
And that thrust her into the limelight far more quickly than she wanted. “It happened in reverse to the way that I would have liked it or planned it,” she says. In other words, Sienna would have liked to have had the career before the fame. And to her credit, despite the distractions, she is building that career. This week, Casanova, her first film as a leading lady, hit the cinemas in the UK, with Heath Ledger playing the title role.
It’s a romantic comedy in the same vein as Shakespeare in Love (indeed Tom Stoppard, who wrote the latter, was called in to give a sprinkling of magic to the script). It’s fun, pretty and perfectly enjoyable, with Sienna playing the one woman in Venice who won’t fall under the libertine’s spell – and who is consequently the one woman who can teach him all about real love. “It’s a romp, a laugh,” she says. “I loved my character. She’s like an early feminist and she’s not seduced by this man who’s supposed to be the best lover in the world. She doesn’t buy it.”
We met first just over a year ago, on the set for Casanova, when Miller was engaged to Law and obviously happy and in love. She was tired after a long day filming a tricky dance scene at a masked ball in one of Venice’s spectacular palaces. She was dressed in sweat pants and a big baggy T-shirt and puffed on a Marlboro light. “Those bloody corsets! I stupidly said I wanted to wear one exactly like they were back then. My God, you can’t sit down, you can hardly breathe. They kill you.”
She was enthusiastic about her director, Lasse Hallström, about working with Ledger, and playing Francesca. “Francesca is highly intelligent and keeps her corset tightly shut – which is good for all those people who are saying I have a talent for taking my kit off,” she joked.
This was a reference to the fact that in her first film, Layer Cake, a British gangster movie in which she played little more than eye candy opposite Daniel Craig, she scampered across the screen wearing some lingerie, a seductive smile and not much else. Then, in Alfie, she was a needy, self-destructive young woman who does her best to keep hold of the compulsive womaniser, played, ironically, by Law. And in that, too, she was required to disrobe. “As my work demonstrates, I don’t have a problem with it,” she said then. “There are times when you are self-conscious and you would probably not prance around in a G-string and a pair of boots, as I did in Alfie, in front of a crew of men.
“I had one journalist who read me a list of these actresses who won’t do nudity and their reasons why and then sat back waiting for me to say something. I was looking at her and it was like, ‘What? So I’m a crap horrible tart then?’ As an actress I feel that if you start to impose your own inhibitions then you are not doing your job. And I’m fascinated by people who are extrovert, so I guess I’ve got a lot more nudity to come. My breasts will feature again in a few films.”
We met again, at Casanova’s world premiere during the Venice Film Festival. Sienna was appearing in As You Like It in the West End and had taken two days off from the play to attend the premiere – nothing remarkable about that, except that most of us believed she wouldn’t show up. Two weeks earlier the “Jude and the Nanny” story had broken. In July last year, one of the Sunday tabloids described, in lurid detail, how Law had had an affair with his children’s nanny, Daisy Wright, forcing him eventually to make a grovelling public apology to Sienna. The engagement was off. Turning up at a film festival – with hundreds of photographers and journalists present – hardly seemed wise. But she glided up the red carpet wearing a strapless Christian Dior dress and a diamond choker, and was poised and suitably gorgeous as a thousand flashbulbs went off. Inside, she must have been dreading it, to say the least, and yet still she had the guts to sit down in front of the press the very next day.
“Was it daunting? Yes, a bit. But you know, I wanted to be here for the film and for all the guys I worked with because they’re a great bunch.” Miller is not, then, one to hide under the bedclothes when the going gets tough. Indeed, the night after the story first appeared she was back at the Wyndham Theatre, flanked by two bodyguards and minus her £20,000 engagement ring. “It helped going on stage,” she says. “For three hours you inhabit another world and even though things were pretty bad, it meant that I had something else to do, someone else to be.” That determination – she calls it stubbornness – is as much a part of her as that blonde mane or megawatt smile. “I’m a Capricorn. I just don’t budge. I will fight a point and I won’t back down. I do find it hard to admit that I’m wrong sometimes