|
|
|
Captivating Claudia
She is gorgeous. More than gorgeous. She takes me aside and says, “Don’t I know you? Haven’t we met before?” We haven’t, but I tell her I used to be friendly with her husband Matthew Vaughn, the director, who before that was Guy Ritchie’s producing partner on Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Snatch and Swept Away. Claudia Schiffer is nothing if not surprising. I had heard about her colour-coded collection of shoes, her love of Prada. She’s catwalked for Valentino, Chanel and Versace. But now she is the new face for a high-street chain, the Spanish clothes store Mango.
You wonder whether you are being introduced to the new Claudia. As well as appearing in Love Actually, she also got involved in Live8. But she doesn’t want the conversation to go this way — it would create a false impression. “No, no, what I love is to buy clothes, it’s terrible. I get sent the look-books of every designer and I reserve my outfits. I love wearing flat shoes, but I am not one of those girls who walks around in sweat pants and sneakers.”
Yes, she’s German. Yes, she’s Virgo. And yes, it’s been said that she can remember the date, month and year of every cover shoot she’s ever done. She collects insects and paints them because she loves to attend to detail. All of this would seem off-putting if it didn’t come tied up in extremism and scattiness. For instance, when you ask her how motherhood has changed her fashion style, she says, “I used to wear a lot of angora sweaters and that’s an absolute no-no because the fluffiness gets everywhere and your kids might inhale it. Also you can’t wear anything with embroidery in case it scratches the baby.”
She talks about her shifted priorities. “I used to work every single day and travel round the world. I worked weekends, I never took one second off. When I met my husband I said, ‘You know what, this is important. I’m not going to work weekends any more.’ And when I had kids, I became even more careful. Modelling work is fine because you can do one day here, two days there, you’re never long gone.” She still has a very lucrative deal with L’Oreal and a contract with Ebel watches.
When she talks about Matthew, every part of her softens. It’s almost a chemical thing, which is exactly the kind of transformation that happened when they met. Matthew gave her something to feel alive for. She had been engaged to stage magician David Copperfield for a couple of years, and blamed their break-up on the fact they hardly ever saw each other. What was it about Matthew that was different?
“I’d never found anyone that perfect and I just thought, oh, there’s no perfect man out there. Then I met him. He had everything I wanted in a man. He completely swept me off my feet. We are so similar in many ways. We got on like a house on fire from the minute we met. It was really natural.”
‘Natural’ is a word she uses a lot to describe him. He bought her a tortoise instead of an engagement ring, which was natural to her. Knowing him a little, I know that they are similar about odd things. They are both embarrassed by their love of their dogs, hers a German shepherd, his an Irish wolfhound. They both seem placid, but have got ‘no compromise’ etched at their core. “You know, you can’t define it, that clicking straightaway, it just felt natural to be his girlfriend.”
‘When I met my husband I said, You know what, this is important. I’m not going to work weekends any more. And when I had kids, I became even more careful,’ says Claudia Schiffer
They have just bought a place in Las Vegas, in the newly refurbished Hard Rock Cafe, which conjures up cheap margaritas and chips. “I don’t like gambling at all. I once gambled $50 and when that ran out I stopped. I felt sick. I thought, ‘You could have bought something with that cash.’ ”
It’s not so much that she doesn’t have excesses, she just has wholesome excesses; she reveals, without a trace of sending herself up, how excited she got when she found a supplier of organic tea.
“With food I can be excessive, but I’ve never taken drugs. I’m totally against drugs. Matthew and I are both non-party people. When we first met he said to me, ‘Me too, I’ve never smoked a joint,’ and I said, ‘Yeh, sure.’ And he must have thought the same. ‘Yeh, sure, a supermodel totally against drugs.’ But in fact we really don’t party. We have friends who come to our house near Cambridge at weekends and we play games. At the weekend we had a chef do three-course meals. Organic cooking.”
You suspect she is very extreme; passionate and loyal to those in her close circle. Anyone else is not going to get a look in. She’s unexpected in many ways. What does she think is the biggest misconception about her? “That I’m cold. That I don’t eat.” What about being a boring German? “Disciplined and professional at all times — I am that way. I am super-organized and tidy. Matthew is very untidy, although he is organized in his work.”
I read he was all signed up for a huge amount of money to do X-Men 3, but turned it down because it would mean spending too much time in LA and on location away from her and the children.
“Actually, there were several reasons he turned it down,” she says, casting aside an opportunity for a happy family moment, which I appreciate. “We would have all travelled together and lived wherever was necessary. We would have made it work if he had loved everything else about that project, but he didn’t.”
At this point the agent, the PR and a couple of others come over and pull up chairs. You don’t want to tell them to go away, but it changes the pace and makes both of us self-conscious. I pluck out a stock modelly question from my back catalogue of clichés. Are you insecure about any part of your body?
“I always wanted to be less tall.” Hence the obsession for the flat shoes. “When I was at school I was the same height as all of my girlfriends and then suddenly I was turning 12 and almost overnight I got really tall.”
She is shy anyway, so you get to see that the childhood that’s glossed over as being sweet and undramatic in every way did have this one alienating experience from which she literally grew to be who she is now.
She’s done a little bit of acting. Apart from Love Actually there was a role in The Blackout, where she was directed by Abel Ferrara, an unlikely pairing as his movies dwell on themes of self-destruction. They are exploitative, shocking and subversive. She had to cry a lot in that movie and Ferrara said afterwards, ‘The first goat that came down the road could have played the part better.’
As I leave we embrace goodbye and it’s not professional cold or disciplined. It’s amused and warm.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service
|
|
|
|
