PERFECT PARTNERSHIP
Sam’s grey days are over
The mum-of-four has made no secret of the fact she failed to bond with the book’s author, E.L. James. “I was really confused by E,L, James,” admits Sam. “I don’t understand when I can’t navigate a person, when there’s no synergy.”
The opposite is true of her second husband. “We’re in such sync,” she says of Aaron, who she met in 2008 when she directed him in the John Lennon biopic Nowhere Boy. He was
18; she was 42.
According to Sam, Aaron did all the chasing – “he was very intense” – and despite her reservations about the age gap, he told her, “Have no fear.”
The couple announced their engagement at the film’s 2009 premiere. They had their first daughter Wylda Rae (6) in 2010 and a second daughter Romy Hero (5) in 2012.
That summer, they married, changed both surnames to Taylor-Johnson, and now live between the States and London. Sam says Aaron is an “old soul”. He doesn’t like parties, preferring to be at home and cooking for the family, walking the dogs and feeding the chickens.
After nine years together, the couple still appear madly in love in their frequent Instagram posts, one of which shows them naked and entwined , matching tattoos across their hips bearing the words In Spite of All the Danger, a lyric that features in Nowhere Boy.
The unconventional union has ruffled a few feathers among Sam’s friends. “I could predict who was going to take a step back and who was going to say, ‘Are you happy? Great,’” she says. “I didn’t care. I never care about anything anyone says. I’ve always been fearless in work and relationships.”
Sam’s gutsy attitude can be traced to her childhood. When she was nine, her father, an accountant for the Hell’s Angels, left to bike around the world. Mum Geraldine took Sam, her younger sister Ashley and her new husband to an
East Sussex hippy commune called Sunny Villa, which Sam nicknamed “Dark-as-Hell-Villa”.
One day, Geraldine handed 15-year-old Sam a “Dear John” letter to give to her stepfather. She took Sam’s half-brother Kristian, then 14, but left the girls behind.
The bewildered teen moved into a bedsit, living on state hand-outs, and completed high school. After graduating, she drifted for a while, working as a dresser at the Royal Opera House and a manager at the Camden Palace nightclub, which she hated. Her feeling about the job prompted her to wear a T-shirt bearing an extremely lewd slogan.
“I took a photograph of myself in it,” she recalls, “and suddenly the whole world opened up.” In 1997, she was awarded the Most Promising Young Artist at the prestigious Venice Biennale.
The success propelled her headfirst into the hedonistic Brit art scene, where she met and married wealthy art collector
Jay Jopling, 12 years her senior. But Sam remembers little of those years because she was battling alcohol addiction.
“I would drink to black out most nights,” she tells. “I thought I was a cool British artist but I was a mess. I was an alcoholic. I put myself in dangerous
situations.”
‘ I never care about anything anyone says. I’ve always been fearless in relationships’
More darkness came that year when, aged 30 and soon after giving birth to her daughter Angelica, she was diagnosed with colon cancer.
She had abdominal surgery on Christmas Eve, went straight back to work and was shortlisted for the Tate Gallery’s Turner Prize in 1998. Three years later, she was diagnosed with breast cancer and underwent a mastectomy and six months of chemotherapy. She gave birth to a second daughter Jessie in 2007 and the following year, she and Jay divorced amicably.
Sam says her next project will be a movie adaptation of another best-selling book and it will star
Aaron. “It’s a really good partnership,” she concludes. “When you’re solid with someone in your own love, you don’t think about it. It’s just the outside world that feels they have to remark. And you can’t listen to it.”