Great Ormond

By Lina Das. Photographs by Patrick Fraser. Styled by Deborah Ferguson 02.03.09

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There can be few more disheartening or disconcerting experiences for a celebrity than being stuck on a plane in which all your fellow passengers are engrossed in reading a profile of you that isn't, shall we say, entirely flattering. Julia Ormond can laugh about the experience now, but when it happened to her a few years ago, 'It was really hurtful - I can't deny it.'

From being a relative unknown, Julia had catapulted to the top of the pile in the mid-Nineties with starring roles in three huge Hollywood movies - Legends of the Fall (opposite Brad Pitt), Sabrina (opposite Harrison Ford) and First Knight (in 1995, opposite Sean Connery and Richard Gere) - and shortly thereafter it was decided that the then 29-year-old from Surrey needed taking down a peg or two.

'I was on this flight coming back from Africa and the in-flight magazine had this hilarious article about me, which basically amounted to three whole pages of vitriol. As I was walking back from the toilet, people were literally looking up from the magazine and doing a double take when they saw me. When I finally got back to my seat, the producer I was with was going: "Don't read it. Please don't read it," so, of course, I read it.' Julia suppresses a giggle. 'The amount of bile in it was slightly staggering, but you know what? The woman who wrote it wasn't entirely wrong, although in my defence, what happened in my career wasn't entirely my fault either. But at the time it did hurt. It really wasn't the best plane journey I've ever had in my life.'

The magazine article was but one component of the backlash that hit Julia after her incredible box-office run. Despite having had a successful decade-long career on the British stage, as well as on screen in TV dramas such as Traffik and in Peter Greenaway's controversial movie The Baby of Mâcon, critics took umbrage at the fact that Julia's Hollywood rise seemingly materialised from nowhere and sought to cut down the actress who was being hailed as 'the new Julia Roberts'.

'As the hype about me went up, I kind of had a sinking feeling,' says Julia now. 'I just thought: "What goes up must come down," and it was obvious to me that the backlash was going to happen. There was a lot of hype and I don't think I was at all ready for it. I don't think anyone who undergoes that hype really enjoys it because you know it's all such a crapshoot in this business and you never know how things are going to turn out. It's frightening going through that backlash, though, because you worry that the people who give you your jobs will start to look at you differently and that's going to limit your choices. But as problems go, it's a very high-end one. You just have to accept that this is the career you chose and carry on doing the best you can.'

Certainly the Julia Ormond who breezes into the coffee shop today looks far from ruffled. We're in Brentwood, an affluent neighbourhood of West Los Angeles, at the unseemly hour of 7.30am. Russell Simmons, co-founder of the Def Jam record label, is yammering away on his mobile, while Maria Shriver, wife of Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, jogs in and has a brief chat with Julia before jogging out again with her soy latte.

Now 44, Julia is the picture of slightly dishevelled, natural beauty in jeans and a sweater - long locks falling about her un-made-up, made-up face - but bats away compliments about her looks with a typically self-deprecating yarn. 'I had this hilarious encounter in a coffee shop recently. This guy was checking out my butt and I thought to myself: "Yeah!" He then turned to me and said: "Is that the new look then?" and I said: "What?" and he went: "Wearing your G-string outside your trousers with your T-shirt tucked into it?" I was so embarrassed, I answered, "Yes," and then kind of skulked off.' She laughs. 'I don't really do that whole glamour thing very well.'

Recently, though, she has had to get more and more acquainted with the whole glamour thing as her star is once again in the ascendancy. After that initially bruising brush with celebrity, Julia admits she felt 'wiped out, exhausted. I'd got a little bit lost and so I just stepped back for a while. I didn't walk away from Hollywood - it was nothing quite as deliberate or conscious as that - but I wanted to find roles where those creative juices could come back and they have.'

The only downside comes in the shape of the red-carpet appearances she has had to put in of late. 'I think I'd rather have my bikini line waxed or ten shots in my bum than do the whole red-carpet thing because I'm so bad at it. But to be honest, I feel really grateful to be working at all, especially on stuff that I'm proud of.'

Last year Julia starred in the acclaimed Steven Soderbergh movie Che (with Guevara played by Benicio Del Toro) as Lisa Howard, the American reporter who made a documentary about the Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, and her latest role is in the film Surveillance, starring opposite Bill Pullman (The Last Seduction and Independence Day) as an FBI agent on the trail of a serial killer in the Sante Fe desert.
Surveillance is directed by Jennifer Chambers Lynch, whose previous directorial outing was the critically panned Boxing Helena. Chambers Lynch is the daughter of avant-garde director David Lynch (Blue Velvet and Wild at Heart). Surveillance has already garnered mixed reviews for its heavy violence quotient. 'Well, it's not everyone's cup of tea,' says Julia with a slight transatlantic twang (she has lived in the States for almost a decade). 'I think people watching it will have very strong feelings about it, either for or against. It has the same sort of colour as Reservoir Dogs in that it's a violent movie that pushes you to respond in a way that makes you feel uncomfortable and when I watched it, I did laugh at certain points and I think it's through that mechanism of humour that the viewer gets sucked in.'

This month also saw the release of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, which reunited Julia with her Legends of the Fall co-star Brad Pitt. Unlike Legends where the two got to share a rather steamy love scene, which sparked rumours of an off-screen affair (which Julia, unfortunately, categorically denies), in Benjamin Button Julia plays Caroline, the daughter of Daisy (Cate Blanchett) who has an affair with Pitt's titular hero, 'and so, no, there was absolutely no kissing this time around. It was so lovely that after having taken a bit of time off, one of the first things I came back to was a film starring Brad, and it had an odd but nice cyclical feel to it. Just seeing him at press events and parties for the movie has been really interesting because even though his life has obviously changed a lot [in 14 years], I still see someone who hasn't essentially changed to be honest. I've never seen him have an even slightly fractious moment with anyone and he's nothing but sweet and generous with the people around him.' Ah, but doesn't he look completely shagged out, having to look after his six-and-counting kids with Angelina? 'Well, that's not how I'd choose to say it, if at all,' Julia grins, 'but I honestly don't know how they do it.'

Julia is a United Nations Goodwill Ambassador and her work has focused on the still widespread practice-of human trafficking. She was appointed to the role in 2005, after being presented with a Crystal Award at the World Economic Forum at Davos for her contribution to humanitarian causes. One wonders if her work for the UN has prompted Julia, like Angelina Jolie, a UNHCR Goodwill Ambassador, to consider adopting from abroad. After thinking over the question for several moments, she replies: 'The stuff that I work on is very hard to witness and then walk away from. You see some really horrific stuff and yes, there are kids I want to go back and help out and there's a really guilty side to walking away.' Julia stops again and tries, unsuccessfully, to stem a sudden flood of tears. 'I'm sorry,' she says. 'I should really have my shit together a bit better than this as an ambassador. I saw a 17-year-old in Africa who had already had four different "masters", as he put it, and who stayed with them because he was told that the money was going to help his mother. I don't have a big enough house for all the children I'd want to help out, but I try to channel those feelings of guilt into finding ways to help.'

Julia has a four-year-old daughter, Sophie, and you wonder how seeing children being so harshly treated has affected the way the actress raises her own child. 'It's probably made me a little overprotective, if I'm being honest, and I'll come back from these trips and squeeze her way too tight, although I do try to remember that she's happy and OK. But it's made me very conscious of wanting to preserve her innocence and protect her childhood, while at the same time trying to give her a life that isn't indulgent or spoilt. But already, she's very aware. She's totally into recycling and is constantly telling me to turn the tap off when I'm brushing my teeth.'

Sophie is Julia's daughter by her second husband, Jon Rubin, an advertising executive and entrepreneur whose most significant role is as co-founder of America's Rock the Vote initiative, which seeks to encourage the younger generation to take a more active role in political issues. Rubin and Sophie were both present at the inauguration of President Obama last month in Washington and, says Julia, 'She totally believes that she helped get Obama in. They were watching the inauguration in the freezing cold when Sophie went: "Papa, are we going to get to speak to him?" and was a little disappointed when Jon said she could write him a letter instead. So she wrote the President a letter saying: "Drink lots of water and take care of the world," which, if you're going to give advice to a president, sounds pretty helpful to me.'

Julia admits that she would love to have another child, but after revealing that she and Rubin have split up after nine years of marriage, says, 'I probably have to face the reality that it's not going to happen and in any case, I'm delighted with my one. I'm loath to try to encapsulate what caused us to separate, but I think it was the right decision for both of us and no one else was involved. But that's not to say that it was a decision that was made lightly. Whether you have kids or not, divorce is heart-wrenching, but there are moments in your life when you have to make those difficult decisions. But as a parent, you have a lot of responsibility to give your kid the best life you can - not materialistically, but emotionally - and giving Sophie a balanced life is all we want to do.'

Julia's parents divorced when she was the same age as Sophie. The second of five children, Julia grew up in Guildford, Surrey, with her mother Josephine, a lab technician, and would visit her stockbroker father John at the weekends. She has spoken previously of how being raised by a single woman in the late Sixties 'was still quite unusual', but also imbued her with a sense of independence and the ability to take care of herself. 'Teachers at school were both horrified and impressed when I could change a plug in my physics lesson, and one of the great things about my childhood was that I never felt limited by being female. But divorce is a double-edged sword and depends a lot on the way the two parents handle it. It might be easy for me to say this now, but my parents dealt with it in a very dignified way and clearly did their very best, and so I got a lot out of the situation that was positive. But obviously the impact on a child can't be underestimated.'

Julia admits that being the only child in her class who had divorced parents meant that she was 'slightly pigeonholed' - an experience she found isolating - but in acting, she found a salvation of sorts. Having appeared in school productions at Guildford High School and Cranleigh, she went on to graduate from the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art.

She subsequently appeared in stage productions of Christopher Hampton's Faith, Hope and Charity, for which she won The Critics' Circle Drama Award for Most Promising Newcomer at the age of 24, and Wuthering Heights at the Crucible in Sheffield, playing Cathy to a young Heathcliff by the name of Rory Edwards. The couple fell in love off stage as well as on, but their subsequent marriage ended after six years in 1994, around the time that Julia's career was going through its swift upward trajectory.

After playing an upper-class junkie in the highly acclaimed TV drama Traffik, Julia starred in the 1993 film The Baby of Mâcon - most notable for the scene in which Julia's character is raped by 200 men ('It was a difficult scene to do and it took me a long time to get my head around it afterwards'). It did, however, make casting directors and producers take notice and, a year later, Julia was off to Hollywood to film Legends of the Fall.

After working on a trio of Hollywood movies and suffering that 'inevitable backlash', she changed tack entirely by filming the European arthouse movie Smilla's Sense of Snow, and then The Barber of Siberia with Richard Harris, for which she disappeared to Russia and Prague for a year and basically reassessed her life. 'My dream of becoming an actress had kind of been handed to me on a plate, but I was really unhappy at some deep level,' she says, 'so I decided to shake things up a little. I made a documentary [about Bosnian women in Serbian detention camps] and also worked with Harold Pinter on a Karen Blixen short story.' The big screen roles that catapulted Julia to fame ironically also seemed too small for her, diminishing as they did her intelligence. As she says now: 'Those big roles were largely ingénue parts which I found to be quite limiting. I'd always wanted to get beyond the age of 35 because I knew then that there would be more character-driven roles as I got older and I love the fact that I'm now doing roles where I can develop a character much more.'

While actresses are put under increasing pressure these days to look firmer/skinnier/more devoid of expression, Ormond's laughter lines are testimony to the fact that you don't have to be Botoxed to the armpits to look thunderously sexy. 'Not that I'd be judgemental about people who do that or go off for surgery and, of course, I'm tempted, but I can't find the down time required to go around with a tomato-red face. I wish women weren't held to a certain uniform standard, but I think women have somehow got trapped into doing it to ourselves and judging ourselves too harshly because I've never met a man yet who was unhappy with my flabby bits.'

Is she seeing anyone at the moment? 'Maybe,' she grins, probably meaning: 'Yes'. 'People say it's hard to find someone when you live in LA, but I think it's hard wherever you are in the world. I think internet dating is wonderful because you can fill in a form and someone will find you a suitable person. As fabulous and expansive as it is, though, there's always the worry that you're going to end up as a storyline on CSI. But I suppose it is hard when you're in this town and especially hard if you have zero fashion sense,' she adds, gazing forlornly at her jeans and jumper ensemble. She is, however, fooling no one. Even with her T-shirt tucked into her G-string, she's as gorgeous as they come. •

Surveillance is out on 6 March

Hair by Tony Chavez at Frank Reps using Shu Uemura Art of Hair.
Make-up by Kela Wong for GOSH Cosmetics at Urban Siren Agency.
Shot on location at Four Seasons Beverly Hills, Los Angeles (00 1 310 289 4777; www.fourseasons.com)