TOP 10 AUTUMN READS
We’re all agog for romance with Poldark returning to our screens tonight. Love, it seems, can never run smooth and actress-turned-writer Talulah Riley proves the point.
The plot of her debut romance novel may have striking similarities to her own on-off relationship, but Talulah insists it’s not based on real life.
As the wife of Silicon Valley tech billionaire Elon Musk, she largely gave up her acting career.
The couple married in 2010, split in 2012 and remarried 18 months later. They are now in the throes of divorce again, although the 30-year-old actress, who starred in the 2005 film Pride & Prejudice and St. Trinian’s, insists it’s all amicable.
“We do see each other and talk nearly every day,” she says. “We’d been together on and off for eight years, so we’re family.”
Hertfordshire-born Riley met 45-year-old Musk – co-founder of PayPal, CEO of the Tesla electric car firm and the entrepreneur behind SpaceX rockets – at a London nightclub. Within weeks, she’d moved to LA to live with him.
They travelled in private jets and attended Obama’s inauguration.
But today Riley’s life is very different. She lives alone in a four-bedroom house in California with her dogs.
And right now she’s focused on launching her career as an author.
Her newly-released debut novel, Acts Of Love, centres on Bernadette, a hard-nosed female journalist who wiles the men she interviews. She has her sights on one particular man, but is wooed by Radley, a charming Silicon Valley billionaire.
So, is the story based on her own relationship?
“Not at all,” Riley insists. “But in classic literary romance, there’s always that power disparity between the male and female characters. Who are the landed gentry of our day? It seems to be Silicon Valley CEOs. A lot of the book is very tongue in cheek.”
After reading Fifty Shades Of Grey she decided to transpose the stereotypical misogynist, making the female character the dominant party.
“In a lot of romance literature, the male characters have characteristics which would be considered quite misogynistic, like ( Jane Eyre’s) Mr Rochester. Yet those guys are considered really attractive to women.
“What if there was a female character that was equally obnoxious, sexually manipulative, conniving and out for herself? That was the genesis of the book.”