Last December, when Lily Cole was appointed creative partner of the Brontë Society for 2018, it caused a brouhaha. Brontë expert Nick Holland resigned from the society, describing the decision as “a disgrace” and “rank farce”. Yes, Cole might have a double first in history of art from Cambridge University, but what concerned him was that she had chosen to make her living as a model. “The central question,” Holland huffed, “should be, ‘What would Emily Brontë think if she found that the role of chief ‘artist’ and organiser in her celebratory year was a supermodel?’ We all know the answer to that, and anyone who doesn’t isn’t fit to make the decision or have any role in the governance of the Brontë Society.”
Today Cole says she was not shocked by Holland’s fury, but by the fact that it became a global story. “It’s not surprising when you get people with negative behaviour and attitudes. I was definitely more surprised by the shit-storm that followed. I just thought it was a nice little project to support. I was surprised by the media’s attention.”
Perhaps she shouldn’t have been. After all, it came in the midst of #MeToo. Women were calling men out for inappropriate behaviour and, in this case, Holland had happily outed himself as a snob deluxe. Cole refers to him as “He who shall not be named” and laughs. Does she genuinely not like naming Holland? “I don’t like giving it more attention than it’s due. It’s actually really easy to join a society and leave a society. That’s how the story read, right? ‘Man leaves society’ – as if it’s a big deal.”
Well no, I say. It read more like: “Man attacks woman for being model.” She nods. “Totally. In the zeitgeist of the moment, the seeming prejudice was what enlisted such a counterargument.” She looks at me. “Does that make sense?” Cole tends towards the wordy. “I was quite warmed by people’s intolerance of what was seen as prejudicial.” Which is her way of saying she appreciated the support she got.
Now – and Holland may not like this – she has had the temerity to make a short film inspired by Heathcliff, the character in Brontë’s only novel, Wuthering Heights. To celebrate the writer’s bicentenary, it will be screened this weekend at the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth, Yorkshire, where the family lived.
After three short documentaries, this is the first fictional film Cole has directed. Called Balls, it’s a moving, elliptical reimagining of Heathcliff’s first few months. His black Liverpudlian single mother takes him to the Foundling Hospital to see if they will accept him because she cannot bring him up by herself. The title refers to the fact that, initially, the hospital accepted children on a lottery basis: mothers who picked white balls from a bag were accepted, those who picked black balls were turned away, and reds meant the reserve list.
In the film, the hospital is governed by a board of stern, moralistic men dedicated to helping the deserving poor. So we see Heathcliff’s mother asked whether she was raped (no), whether she had sex with the man more than once (yes), how she has supported the child (through selling everything she owns), and whether it is a child of colour (“Are you kidding?” she replies). Another character, a white mother, is regarded more sympathetically – because she went to Sunday school, her baby is a product of rape, and she was supported by a family friend.
It is 16 years – more than half her lifetime – since Cole was whisked away from school on the sly at the age of 14 and transformed into a supermodel (by 21, she was worth at least £4m, according to the Sunday Times Rich List). At 30, she is little changed: tall with a small, doll-like face, startling blue eyes and a tiny buttercup mouth. What makes her such a fascinating model is her ability to shape-shift, segueing from plain to beautiful, angelic to creepy, little girl to old hag, sex bomb to Victorian prude. This chameleon-like quality has served her well in her acting career, where she is equally at home playing Elizabeth I, a teenage temptress in the Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus, and Polly the geek in St Trinian’s.
We meet at Impossible, the social enterprise she runs with her partner Kwame Ferreira. It’s an apt name because the business is as impossible to pigeonhole as she is. Cole variously calls it a “Tinder for favours”, a skills swap-shop, and an “innovator and incubator”. Impossible, like Cole, aims high. “We are a group of people,” says its website, “who have come together to help solve meaningful problems and guide global change.”
The office, situated at London Bridge, is painted electric blue on the outside and looks like a cross between an art gallery and a dream playroom inside. In the kitchen area, two plates are piled high with onions. The charming Ferreira tells me it’s an art installation called Don’t Cry For Me. He’s joking – but I don’t think the onions are there for the eating.
Over the past year, Cole has also researched the life of Brontë and the world of Wuthering Heights. She talks about how everything has changed over the past 200 years, largely for the better. “We have developed cures for diseases and doubled our lifespans. In the last few decades alone, global hunger has dropped 20% and maternal mortality by 44%.” Yes, she says, there are still huge problems – “I was shocked to learn that one to two women die every week in the UK because of domestic violence” – but it is too easy to accentuate the negative.
Cole likes to have “data” to hand for every issue she discusses. And, true to form, she pulls out a fact to prove her point about negativity. “In his book Enlightenment Now,” she says, “Steven Pinker shows that bad news travels faster than good news.”
Cole’s university thesis was called Impossible Utopias. It argued that, just because utopia is an impossibility, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t strive for it. It’s funny, I say, so many people think of you as serious-minded, forever banging on about environmental catastrophe or the refugee crisis, yet at heart you are relentlessly ... She finishes off the sentence for me: “Optimistic.” She smiles. “Look at multiple data points. We have made such huge progress over the last however many hundreds of years. It’s important to recognise that trajectory because it’s inspiring.”
Her own trajectory is inspiring, too. Cole and her sister were brought up in London by her mother, an artist called Patience Owen. Her parents split up when she was seven weeks old. Cole’s early life was tough, though she doesn’t like to talk about it. Her mother struggled with a rare genetic tissues disorder that required many operations. Young Lily was farmed out to relations and went from school to school.
Between the ages of six and eight, she attended the Sylvia Young Theatre School in London and hated it. “It felt very competitive and Fame-y and I was bullied a bit.” I ask why. She looks at me and says it’s a boring question that she’s answered many times. “I was bullied for having red hair. It’s still an issue in schools.” She pauses. “This is not related to Wuthering Heights. This is deeply personal.” Cole guards her privacy ferociously.
At the age of eight, she returned to a regular state school, joined the football team, formed a band, acted in plays, made great friends, and loved it. It was at school that she first read Wuthering Heights – and it made a huge impact. “I had a really strong reaction to Heathcliff.” In what way? She looks embarrassed. “It was, unfortunately, positive. I fell for the really bad thing, like people do. I found him attractive. But the more I read it, the less I like him, the more I see how violent and awful he is. ”
There’s no need to apologise, I say. “I’m not apologising, but it’s interesting to recognise it, right? It’s interesting how polarising he is. I asked a lot of ordinary people about Heathcliff. Half the women find him a violent domestic abuser and can’t understand why he has been painted as a romantic figure. Others still paint him as a romantic figure.” The genius of the novel, she says, lies in the characters being so flawed. By the time you get to see what a monster Heathcliff is, you already love him for his passion and pity him for the abuse he suffered as a child.
At 14, Cole started modelling and began to live a double life: schoolgirl and international star. She loved her state school, but it did not love her trotting off around the world during term-time. “I had to pretend I was sick to go and do jobs, which was quite stressful. There was one job where they cut my hair and dyed it. I was in tears because I had to hide it under hair clips and try to pretend I’d been ill.” She left for the prestigious selective grammar school Latymer, which was more tolerant.
We hear so many horror stories about the modelling world – the abuse, the pressure to lose weight and take drugs – but Cole says it transformed her life. “It can be a horrible industry. But it was a massive escapism for me. I was a kid on the streets of London and I could suddenly travel the world.”
By the time she got to Cambridge, she was a renowned supermodel. What was it like being well known as a student? Did it change the way people interracted with you? She gives me a forbidding look. “Oh, these questions are so boring! Come on, Simon, do better than that. I’ve been asked it so many times .” Look, I say, few students are famous. “I did feel slightly alienated because I had paparazzi there occasionally, which is a weird thing, right? Walking out of a lecture hall – to paparazzi. There are lots of dodgy pictures of me poorly dressed on a bicycle going around Cambridge. But everybody has crazy stories.”
Not everybody has stories like that, I say. Your experience was hardly the norm. “Cool. Great. I’ve found my therapist,” she says sarcastically. “You gave me permission to not be normal.”
Ferreira walks into the room with Wylde, their gorgeous two-year-old daughter who is named after Oscar, albeit with an exotic twist. “He’s digging so deep,” she says. “You need to rescue me.” It’s unclear whether she’s talking to Ferreira or Wylde.
Cole is lovely and natural with Wylde, who is wearing a T-shirt that says B is for Bob alongside a picture of Bob Marley. “Do you like her T-shirt?” says Cole. “That’s how we teach the alphabet.” She giggles. Despite her data-driven answers and her displeasure at having her personal space invaded, there is something warm and coltish about Cole. It’s great to go through life with such a desire to do good, and the absolute conviction that you can make a positive difference.
Did she ever consider resigning from the Brontë Society after Holland’s attack? She looks aghast. “No. I had a commitment. That would have made no sense at all. It would have suggested there was credence to what he was saying.” What she particularly disliked about his comments were how proscriptive they were. “There was definitely a judgment of what modelling represents – how once you’ve made that choice, it limits your choice in later life. We all do lots of jobs, right?”
She mentions Andrea Arnold, a film-maker she adores who also made a Wuthering Heights film. “She used to present a kids’ TV show. We all have a history of doing different jobs when we’re younger. That shouldn’t colour our options in later life.” If she had to restrict herself to one one job, what would it be? “Film-making, because it’s the thing I’m most excited by. I don’t really model any more.” Does she regard that as her former life? “Yes.”
Anyway, she says, there was nothing new about what Holland said. She’d heard it all before and continues to do so today. “If I put a political opinion on Twitter, I’ll often find people replying saying, ‘You’re a model – how can you have an opinion about what the government should do?’”
In 1850, Charlotte Brontë explained why she and her sisters Emily and Anne all used pseudonyms. “We did not like to declare ourselves women,” she wrote, “because we had a vague impression that authoresses are liable to be looked on with prejudice.” When Cole first reacted to Holland’s onslaught, she said she was considering using a pseudonym for her film as an act of solidarity with the Brontë sisters. Was she being serious?
“I did genuinely consider it,” she says. “It would be nice to see people’s responses disassociated from whatever they might expect from me. But in reality, it wasn’t feasible.” More importantly, she decided it was inappropriate. “My producer said, ‘Own it. Be proud.’” She has done – and she is.
- Balls premieres at the Brontë Parsonage Museum, Haworth, on 29 July. It will be presented at the Foundling Museum, London, 31 July-2 December. Lily Cole and Bonnie Greer will be in conversation after a screening at FACT, Liverpool, on 2 August.
