‘In my 30s, it feels like people are listening’
Poppy Delevingne is reclining on an elegant cream sofa, surrounded by scented candles. The vision of cool calm collection, however, is quickly punctured the second she begins talking, darting from one topic to the next at dizzying speed, waving her hands around and frequently emitting a throaty, unselfconscious laugh.
It’s this combination of her fine-boned, aristocratic beauty and free-spirited, up-for-a-party persona that have made the socialite and sister of supermodel Cara so in-demand as a model in her own right, for brands including Chanel and Burberry.
Today, though, the 31-year-old insists she’s renounced her party girl ways to focus on new priorities. We’re here to discuss her new collaboration with Jo Malone London, but she can’t help talking about her efforts to transition from modelling to acting. Her latest film, King Arthur: Legend of the Sword, has been universally panned, but for Poppy, her small role as the titular hero’s mother is proof she’s finally getting somewhere with her long-held ambition.
“I’ve been acting for five years now and I’ve just started getting the work,” she says, fixing me earnestly with her wide blue eyes. “I’m still trying and learning, auditioning every day and sending off tapes. I’m happy because I’ve always wanted to do it.”
She caught the acting bug at Bedales when she played Queen Gertrude in a production of Hamlet. In her early twenties, she moved to New York to live with her close friend Sienna Miller and take acting lessons.
Initially, she juggled acting with her modelling career, but as 26, she decided to start taking it more seriously, training with a coach and acquiring an agent. Today she says “modelling has taken a huge back seat and I’m really focusing on acting full-time. You have to be humble; you have to show it respect and just work away.”
Luckily, she says, she already knows how to cope with rejection as a result of her years of modelling .“You learn to grow a real thick skin. You learn to accept the rejection and move on. And of course it can become a little grating after a while, but overall it’s taught me that it’s not personal.”
The model-turned-actress path is so well-trodden it’s become a cliché, but Poppy has a rolemodel who’s managed to traverse it with more success than most: her 24-year-old sister Cara, who is currently in Cannes and whose turns in films such as Paper Towns have been well-received by critics. Poppy says: “She’s gone above and beyond and she’s doing so well. She’s a good mentor. She’s taken on the big sister role now, which is amazing.”
Poppy is extremely close to Cara and to her older sister, Chloe, 32, a married mother of two. Their bond was forged by the difficult circumstances of their childhood. Their mother, Pandora, was a personal shopper at Selfridges and a heroin addict in her youth. After the birth of her three daughters, she struggled with depression and medication dependency, and Poppy has previously spoken of how Cara slept in her bed for years for comfort.
Her family’s background is one of pure privilege. Poppy’s late maternal grandfather, Jocelyn Stevens, was publisher of Queen magazine and chairman of English Heritage; her grandmother Jane Sheffield was lady-in-waiting to Princess Margaret; and her father, Charles is a former debs’ delight and now a Belgravia-based property developer. Her childhood was a whirl of international travel and visits to Kensington Palace.
It was her family who inspired her love for Jo Malone London, with whom she’s launched her own collection, called Poptastic. It encapsulates two of her favourite scents, Tuberose Angelica and Orange Blossom, which she wore at her 2014 wedding. “It’s a brand I grew up with,” she says. “I have memories of my mother wafting in wearing Red Roses when she was going somewhere to say goodnight. I’d be in my PJs and I’d think, one day I hope I’m that glamorous.”
From Pandora, Poppy learned “to always be myself, that it’s OK to be a bit weird. Well, not weird, but a little kooky, a little bonkers. When I was a kid I felt that sense of it being good to conform and be like everyone else, but my mum taught me you should do what you want as long as you’re always kind and polite. If you want to go out ina ballet tutu or a leopard print cat suit, just do it .”
Until the age of 12, she was a tomboy, but the Spice Girls transformed her. “I thought, hold on, I’ m going to have to ditch the dungarees. I want to be like Geri Halliwell and wear Buffalo boots and fake eyelashes. Every weekend my friends and I were making up dance routines to their music.”
Poppy credits the band’s girl power message with making her “a girls’ girl” who still loves sleepovers with her closest friends. ‘Nothing in the world makes me happier,’ she says.
She’s embracing her thirties. “Suddenly I’d shed that feeling of, I’ve got to be what everyone expects me to be,” she says. “I thought, ‘Ha, I’m a grown up.’ And then all this confidence that’s been somewhere inside you comes out, and you can say the things you want to say and it feels like people are listening to you.”