THE SKY'S THE LIMIT

Let your imagination take flight with ours, as we explore the shared spaces of British landscape, style and art, with fashion shoots at Henry Moore’s sculpture studio, Scotland’s ancient stone circles and the stately splendour of Syon House. Meanwhile,

Ijust like the idea that you come to New York and you do something,’ says Sienna Miller, curled up in a chair in the dining-room of the Greenwich Hotel in Manhattan’s Tribeca. She is wearing a blue Isabel Marant shirt, black jeans and grubby Stan Smith trainers; ‘nothing to set the world on fire,’ as she puts it, but perfectly in keeping with the new life she has carved out for herself in the city since moving here last August from Queen’s Park in London. ‘I just felt like it was so easy and all my friends are there, and we’d probably drink too much wine and go to the country for the weekend,’ she says of her London life. ‘It was all gorgeous and great, but I’m really trying to kick myself up the ass in some way, and New York is very good at doing that.’

When talking about her plans, Miller’s tone takes on the slight crossness of a parent making a charming, unruly child do their maths homework. Gorgeous and great but in need of a kick up the ass could equally well apply to the actress herself, whose career in her twenties, when she was catapulted to fame on Jude Law’s arm after playing his lover in Alfie, teetered on the line between frivolity and self-sabotage. ‘I was a fashionable girlfriend before I was an actor,’ she says. ‘And then, I think, without enough sense of self to really hold onto whoever I might actually be, I just sort of drifted.’ Add a pack of paparazzi, baying on the heels of this boho It girl as she dodged their flashbulbs, or made out with her friends at the Vanity Fair Oscar Party, and the die was cast. ‘I was a 23-year-old, and was rebellious. I’m inherently a little bit rebellious. I wasn’t just going to hide away, so I fought back, and that perpetuated it. It was a vicious cycle and it started to feed itself.’

She’s a lot smarter and more self-aware than you might think. Talking about her younger self — which is almost the first thing she does upon sitting down, perhaps to set the record straight — she mixes fondness with slight exasperation, as if the task of managing the glowing, golden girl that was Sienna Miller was more than one person

could manage, something requiring a small army of handlers, wranglers, fixers and minders. But there’s a sense of responsibility in there, too, and a feeling of regret for opportunities missed. She is 35 now and no stranger to New York; she was born here and her father is American. She enrolled at the Stella Adler Studio of Acting when she was 18, then quit after three months, ‘because at that age I couldn’t commit to anything’. But she moved for good last summer, with her four-year-old daughter Marlowe, whom she has decided to bring up in Manhattan with her ex-fiancé Tom Sturridge even though the couple split up in 2015.

‘We still love each other,’ she explains. ‘I think in a break-up somebody has to be a little bit cruel in order for it to be traditional, but it’s not been acrimonious in a way where you would choose to not be around that person. We don’t live together, as has been reported recently, but we do half the time. Everybody will stay over or we’ll all go on holiday and that’s because we genuinely want to be around each other. It’s great for our daughter that she has two parents who love each other and are friends. He’s definitely my best friend in the entire world.’

It all sounds very modern and mature and a million miles from the high-profile betrayals and bust-ups with the likes of Jude Law and Balthazar Getty that so entranced the tabloids in the past. ‘Mum and Dad Create a Stable, Loving Environment To Raise Their Four-Year-Old!’ isn’t quite the click-bait BuzzFeed is looking for. In her career, too, Miller has hit her stride these days, alternating sparkling stage performances in As You Like It and Cabaret with appearances in acclaimed films such as Bennett Miller’s Foxcatcher and Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper that have critics doing double takes, as if to say, ‘So that’s Sienna Miller? But she’s really good!’ The one advantage to being underestimated is the element of surprise.

‘I’m guilty of that, I underestimated her, even right up to the point when we started shooting,’ says James Gray, the director of Miller’s new movie, The Lost City of Z. She plays the wife of the British explorer Percy Fawcett (Charlie Hunnam) engaged in an obsessive, lifelong attempt to find a lost Incan city. ‘He liked me, and thought I was smarter than I appeared, a bit of an underdog,’ she says of her first meeting with Gray (who has directed lauded indie films including Two Lovers and We Own the Night ). She was initially reluctant about taking on another wife-at-home role so soon after American Sniper. ‘ The one thing I was determined on was never to ask for pity, no matter how pitiful,’ she says. When she first met with Gray in London, she told him: ‘I’d like to do your film, but first, I’m not going to play “the wife”.’

Gray worked carefully, drawing on original diaries and biographies of Fawcett (who disappeared in the Amazon with his eldest son in 1925), reworking scenes until they struck a chord with Miller’s own struggles. ‘She was really on me,’ he says. ‘The subtext, which she understood completely, is “I want you at least to acknowledge me as a person.” It remains a sad truth that she was harmed, I think, by the kind of gossip mill in the beginning. Her self-confidence as an artist was harmed.’ He traces her professional renaissance to a 2015 Broadway production of Cabaret, in which she took on the part of Sally Bowles. ‘It’s a show role but also a demanding one, and she was brilliant in it. And I mean brilliant. That set the tone: OK, you’re over 30 years old, you’re entering a moment in your life when it’s “put up or shut up” time, and I think that’s part of what really focused her on the craft of the work. And there’s also this sense of history and loss. You can see all this crap she had to deal with, the travails she’s been through, also the break-up with Mr Sturridge, which must have been very painful because he’s a terrific guy — to see all that reflected in the work itself, that is a real victory. I just thought it was the most beautiful work.’

It took Miller a while to settle into a job she says she was pretty much groomed for from childhood. She grew up in leafy Parsons Green. Her mother was an exercise trainer who ran one of the first Alexander Technique-type schools in the 1970s, and told her from an early age that she was destined to be an actress. ‘I didn’t realise I actually was an actress until later,’ she says. ‘I was totally pretending. Which is clear from my early work.’ Her father, an American banker who now divides his time between New York and the Virgin Islands, divorced Miller’s mother when she was six, a rupture she felt was coming long before it happened. ‘I think the rebelliousness had something to do with how I handled adversity,’ she says. ‘You’re either defeated and wounded or you respond. I was like the entertainer. I think being really sensitive, I could feel the tension and I’d be like, “da

‘I’m inherently rebellious. I wasn’t just going to hide away, so I fought back. It was a vicious cycle and it started to feed itself’

da daa, da da daa,”’ — she dances a quick Charleston with her hands — ‘and that was, like, my role, and it worked. It fit. I could lighten a mood.’

This goes some way to explaining the extended fecklessness to her girl-can’t-help-it phase, when she partied with defiant frivolity. ‘I was young, and probably drunk a lot of the time,’ she says. ‘I had grown up watching people in the Nineties do whatever they wanted. My idols were Liam Gallagher, and people who were just like, “Fuck off.” I didn’t really know that actresses are supposed to be demure and elegant. I didn’t know you weren’t supposed to be running around the Vanity Fair party with your best friend chain-smoking, going “bleaaaargh”’ – she pulls a party-animal-infull-flow face. ‘Hollywood parties are not supposed to be fun. They’re work. I definitely ended up sabotaging myself at certain points. I think if I had had the head on my shoulders that I have now I probably could have been a lot more successful than…’ she trails off. ‘I did have fun and make some work that I’m proud of and was supported. I think that people were rooting for me because I wasn’t an asshole. They say, “Oh God, she’s trouble, but we love her. Come on, get your shit together.”’

If you were plotting the movie of Sienna Miller’s life, and looking for the big second-act conflict, in which our heroine finally slays the dragon, it would probably be her decision to testify at the Leveson Inquiry into the phone-hacking scandal that brought down the News of the World. ‘It doesn’t surprise me that she fought,’ says the playwright Patrick Marber, who first met the actress when she was dating Jude Law, and who later cast her in his play After Miss Julie. ‘She’s always been brave. She was brave in handling the intrusions into her relationship with Jude, brave to play Miss Julie on Broadway. She has that mixture of toughness and vulnerability that the most interesting actors have, whether it’s Meryl Streep or Cate Blanchett or Ruth Wilson. You don’t come across it that often.’

She demurs when I bring this up. ‘But that’s what’s constantly at odds,’ she says. ‘It depends on the version I am that day, you know? I have brave days and then the total opposite. I don’t know…’ She’s still conflicted about her participation in the inquiry, which ended up going over some of the very details she had been trying to protect, ‘terribly personal information about incredibly personal things, and subsequent to that, emails between all of [the reporters], saying things like “stupid little bitch [about me]” or whatever’. But she says: ‘There’s something incredibly empowering about making that decision, and standing up for yourself. I’m not particularly good at doing that for myself on my own. There was a sense of peace that I got from that and from becoming a mother.’

She found out she was pregnant the day before she first testified at Leveson. ‘Afterwards, there was a serenity and a kind of maturity — I was just focused in a way that I hadn’t been before. It’s probably the thing I’m proudest of besides my child.’

She took a year off after having Marlowe, partly to raise her but also because she hadn’t read any scripts that were ‘really worthy in my mind’. She doesn’t audition any more; she does tapes instead. That was how she was cast in Foxcatcher. ‘That really shifted things too,’ she says. ‘I crumble in an audition room.’ She’s also learnt, against all her diffident English instincts, that it’s OK to want roles and to make one’s interest known in a way she used to mock other actresses for doing. She’s about to start work on a film in Atlanta, then might star in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in the West End. There’s also a Clint Eastwood film she’d be ‘perfect’ for. ‘I’m being encouraged to phone him and just say… maybe not mention the project but just, like, check it out. I think it’s an English thing. There’s an essential way of being in this industry that I lack. You have to aggressively pursue and you have to seduce, and not in a sexual way but you know, schmooze. I just never used to think in those terms. Life just sort of happened and it was great. The ability to contemplate, and actually reflect, and strategise to some degree, that probably came once I had a child.’

She recently took Marlowe to her first day at school. ‘I don’t want to do ballet, I want to do martial arts,’ Marlowe told her mother, which delighted her. ‘I always try to be really careful about [what I tell] my daughter, with “you’re this” or “you’re that”, because I think it can really shape someone. I do think children who grow up in New York are grounded and cool in a way they’re not elsewhere. She’s a little warrior.’ She pauses, thinks. ‘Being a mother and navigating that and carving out the time for work, not just reacting to things that are coming, but finding novels and optioning them and developing things – I’d love to be able to do that.’ She smiles but looks down, as if making a promise to herself she intends to keep.

‘The Lost City of Z’ is released nationwide on 24 March.

‘It’s great for our daughter that she has two parents who love each

other. He’s definitely my best friend in the world’