RAISED IN A COUNCIL FLAT BY A SINGLE MUM, NOW NAOMIE’S TIPPED FOR A GONG
Ahow many more times will she make the short trip from her North London home for an audience with the Queen at Buckingham Palace?
Yet there was no time to linger over her OBe, awarded for services to drama, with a private jet idling on the runway to whisk her to LA for the Oscars. As she is feted on both sides of the Atlantic, this is unquestionably the week that Naomie, 40, finally arrived.
And whether or not she picks up an Oscar tomorrow night, the nomination alone is a huge step for an actress previously best known for playing Miss Moneypenny opposite Daniel Craig’s Bond.
how fitting, then, that the role which has won so many plaudits was the result of pure hard work, rather than good looks or fortuitous casting.
Rarely in the history of the silver screen can an actor’s personality have been so completely at odds with the character they play.
Paula is an abusive mother addicted to crack and heroin, and Naomie’s portrayal of her in Moonlight is terrifyingly believable in its execution.
But watch her closely at the Oscars, however, and you will not see her take even a sip of champagne, let alone anything stronger.
she’s a self-confessed health freak who has been teetotal all her life and never smoked a cigarette. she once made herself ill by trying to subsist on a diet of raw carrots.
While that was a temporary blip in an otherwise impeccably led life, today Naomie can allow herself a quiet smile of satisfaction in the knowledge that all her hard work has paid off. Not only for herself, but for her entire family. Indeed, when I spoke to the actress’s mother, Carmen, 58, this week there was no mistaking the broad smile of pride adorning her delicate features (she and Naomie look uncannily alike). While the family are under a strict omerta when it comes to the Press (hollywood publicists are militant about image protection), the debt owed to Carmen in this instance is undeniable.
It was Naomie’s mother who set her on the path to success at the Anna scher Theatre school at the tender age of seven. By the time she was ten, Naomie was landing plum roles on children’s television shows and, after an unhappy spell at Cambridge where she read social and Political sciences, seamlessly graduated to movies with a role in Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later.
THIS all sounds so easy, yet when Carmen fell pregnant with Naomie at 19 — while studying for her final school exams — the future did not look so rosy. her boyfriend of three years promptly dumped her, and it was left to Carmen to find a job at the Post Office and bring up their daughter alone in a two-bedroom council flat in Finsbury Park.
It was at this point the famous harris drive came to the fore. Once Naomie was at primary school, Carmen put herself through a sociology degree and landed a career as a screenwriter. she wrote her own BBC sitcom, Us Girls, in the early Nineties, then worked for eastenders and Grange hill, among others.
Along the way she met her husband, Richard Tharp, a 58-yearold teacher, and they had two more children, Maxwell and Joely.
It is hardly surprising that Naomie is lost in admiration of her remarkable mother. she is understood to be especially close to her half-siblings.
Maxwell, an aspiring director who is at film school, has been excitedly telling the world his sister is nominated for an Oscar. ( One suspects he will not struggle to land work experience placements.)
Given the example set by the strong women in his life, however, he will be left in no doubt of the importance of hard work, coupled with a very distinct sense of spiritualism.
Naomie is as obsessed with health as ever. she is a keen exponent of a fitness fad called Gyrotonics (a blend of yoga, Pilates and chi gung, a form of gentle exercise). At home, she has a Gyrotonics machine — not unlike an old-fashioned rack.
But this is as nothing compared with her distinctly quirky mother, who says Naomie was ‘ born a Buddha, a shining example, and whose grace continually throws a light on my human imperfections’.
Describing herself as ‘a seeker since childhood’, Carmen professes to have discovered her ‘true path’ when a terminally ill young woman rose out of a coma after she placed her hand on the woman’s abdomen. Today, Carmen is a faith healer, charging £80 for a 90-minute session of ‘energy psychology’.
she has written books on the subject, the most recent of which has the cumbersome title, Dear Friend . . . escape Your Poverty Consciousness Box: A speak-Aloud energetic Meditation To Usher In Financial Abundance.
small wonder Naomie, too, has ploughed a distinctly individualistic furrow. Nowhere is this more apparent than in her love life, which she guards jealously.
Down the years she has, inevitably, been ‘linked’ to plenty of eligible men, from Orlando Bloom to Chiwetel ejiofor, British star of 12 Years A slave.
PERHAPS the most enduring of her relationships has been with banker Peter Legler, with whom she has been photographed on a number of occasions (even kissing him in public), but of late that appears to have fizzled out.
In conversation, she repeatedly returns to the core principle of choosing her own path.
This has been evident since school, when she says she was bullied because children were jealous of her television roles. At Cambridge she did not fit in with the privileged public schoolboys who spent their nights getting drunk.
Three years ago, however, there seemed to be a chink in her armour when she said in an interview she was ready to have children.
she has admitted to suffering ‘tremendous pain’ from the lack of a father figure in her life, and fears it ‘ has the potential to affect other relationships’.
Thanks to daily meditation and a career on the rise — she insists that growing older will not limit the roles available to her — she is living a blessed life.
And it is a life she loves, living just down the road from her mother and siblings. her favourite thing, she says, is travelling around London ‘with no make-up, with my hair back in a scrunchie, and no one recognising me.
‘For years it’s been like that, and I don’t ever relish it changing.’
Any more weeks like this, and she will have to get used to a different level of fame. s she looks back on her career in years to come, Naomie harris will do well to find a more significant week than this.