I had to wait until I was 15 to see Dad’s ‘sex and drugs’role

THE languid glamour of the pose is a million miles from the urban squalor of the film that made her father famous. Yet 20-year-old Clara McGregor is the beautiful daughter of actor Ewan – who shot to fame as the drugaddled star of Trainspotting and is in the sequel, T2 Trainspotting, released this week. Clara, a budding model and filmmaker, has already done a photoshoot with 1980s supermodel Helena Christensen, is about to appear in fashion ‘bible’ W magazine and has been tipped by Vogue as ‘one to watch’ for 2017.

She says her father banned her from watching the original Trainspotting, with its graphic scenes of addiction, sex and violence, until she was mentally ‘able to cope’ with it at 15. ‘I was thrilled when he finally allowed me to see it,’ says Clara, who is in her final year of a cinema studies degree at New York University. ‘When I finally watched it, I was thrilled and so proud of dad’s performance. He’s brilliant.’

She was born in February 1996, the same year as her father’s breakthrough role as Mark Renton in Danny Boyle’s cult black comedy, which follows a group of junkies through the underbelly of 1980s Edinburgh. She is the eldest of McGregor’s four daughters with wife Eva from a 21year marriage. Her sisters are 14-yearolds Esther and Jamyan, who was adopted from Mongolia, and five-year-old Anouk.

Clara grew up in London’s St John’s Wood, before the family moved to LA eight years ago. She shot her first low-budget independent film, Groove, last summer and recently signed with Wilhelmina Models.

Yet she remains refreshingly down to earth and says her father refused to give her everything she wanted, despite his reported £35 m wealth.

‘I always had to work for my own money,’ she says. ‘I worked in a clothes shop, as a waitress, doing babysitting. He wanted to teach me the value of money.’