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She's a tabloid queen, an actress better known for her lovelife and her fashion sense than her movies. Yet Sienna Miller had hoped that was about to change. The cute, curvaceous 26-year-old, who was flung onto a bed by future James Bond Daniel Craig in Layer Cake and
who pranced around in her undies for Jude Law in Alfie, has leading roles in four high-profile upcoming movies where she is bound to impress with more than her looks.
There's The Edge of Love co-starring Keira Knightley (released in New Zealand on October 2), the action movie G.I. Joe; Hippie Hippie Shake (about Richard Neville and Louise Ferrier at Oz magazine in Swinging Sixties' London) and the big news is her casting in the Ridley Scott blockbuster Nottingham.
"That's a dream project; I'm still in shock," Miller says of the film where she will play Maid Marion to Russell Crowe's sheriff. Why has Hollywood suddenly come running? "I've consciously made the decision to do roles that are challenging," she says, before yet another scandal breaks in her life. "You know, there is a big tabloid perception that's very hard to overcome and I've worked really hard."
Miller has grown up considerably since 2005, when she was tearful after been harangued over her break-up with Law and what has become known as Nannygate because of his affair with his nanny. In London, discussing the aptly titled The Edge of Love, she bears no traces of remorse and is upbeat, even though Rhys Ifans, her actor beau of one year whom she has recently dumped, has been photographed in the tabloids sitting in a gutter drowning his sorrows. As usual, Sienna made the covers.
"Rhys Pines for Lost Love Sienna", the Mirror's headline roared. "Oh Sienna Look what You've Done to Rhys", blasted The Sun.
Making her current situation even more saucy are rumours (apparently false) that she has rekindled her on-set romance of more than a year ago with her Welsh co-star Matthew Rhys, who plays the handsome buttoned-up gay lawyer on TV2's Brothers & Sisters. She had left the Los Angeles-based Rhys for Ifans (best known as Hugh Grant's bare-bottomed flatmate in Notting Hill) after The Edge of Love wrapped, and they moved into her London Maida Vale house where she raved about their cosy existence. Yet Ifans' jealousy bubbled over at the idea of her rejoining Rhys to publicise The Edge of Love, and by June they had broken up. It was widely reported that Ifans said he wanted to beat up his fellow Welshman.
The truth of the matter, as has since come to light, was that Miller has now fallen madly in love with Rhys' Brothers & Sisters co-star, Balthazar Getty, 33, the great-grandson of oil billionaire Jean Paul Getty. Father-of-four Getty was last week forced to release a statement that he and his wife, children's clothes designer, Rosetta Millington, had separated, after two British tabloids printed photos of the topless Hollywood star and her new beau romping on an Italian beach. The images, he said, had caused "great embarrassment". Miller is now suing photo agency Big Pictures and two British tabloids for violation of privacy.
And so the Sienna saga continues. One consolation is that her media exposure pales alongside that of Lindsay Lohan, the actress for whom she was a last-minute replacement as Dylan Thomas' wife Caitlin in The Edge of Love.
"I was on holiday in Mexico and I got a call from John," she says, referring to director John Maybury. "He'd been a great friend of mine for four years and told me to get out of the sun as he'd had problems with casting. But I got a bit of a tan and went back and had two weeks to prepare before shooting which wasn't enough. But I knew John well and Keira was a friend and I'd known Matthew and Cillian [Murphy], so it was this very safe group. I just jumped in really, which suited the part, because Caitlin was quite abandoned."
Set in wartime London and Wales, the film focuses on the relationship Caitlin develops with Vera, Thomas' teenage sweetheart, and it explores the love both women harbour for the heavy-drinking Welsh poet (Rhys). Unsure whether there would be any tomorrow, the trio famously went for it when Vera's husband (Murphy) was sent away to war. Caitlin, a drinking and brawling partner to Thomas in their marriage, had affairs with both women and men.
"I don't think she cared what people thought, that was what was so appealing about her," Miller explains. "She was very honest about what she did. But at the heart of it they were a couple who were madly in love. The film is about friendship, about love and betrayal and all those dark things that we all find fascinating."
The paparazzi were certainly fascinated by the idea of Britain's two first ladies of cinema sharing a lesbian love scene; from the first day of shooting in Wales they were besieged. While it's unknown whether anything happened between Vera and Caitlin - and Maybury admits it's unlikely - their sharing a bath in the film hints that it did.
So why didn't they show lesbian sex on screen? "Yes why not?" Miller retorts, and then watches as I scribble on my pad. "Please don't use that for a headline, 'I'm up for lesbian sex', please don't! Put your pen down right now!"
Miller is such a vivacious personality it's hard not to be charmed by her, as so many men have been in the past. After her brief reunion with Law, she had dalliances with her Factory Girl co-star Hayden Christensen, British musician and model Jamie Burke (not long after his fling with Kate Moss) and there have been flirtations with Orlando Bloom, model Isaac Ferry and Sean Penn (although she sued a newspaper which claimed she broke up his marriage).
Coming from an upper middle-class background, Miller's potentially happy existence was tempered by her parents' divorce when she was 6 and her sister Savannah was 9. She is close to her mother, Josephine, a South African-born former model and personal assistant for David Bowie who ran the Lee Strasberg drama school in London and more recently taught yoga. However, her relationship with her much-married American banker father, Ed Miller, has been fraught.
At the age of 8 Sienna was sent to a posh boarding school, Heathfield in Ascot, where she learned her rebellious ways. She was constantly in trouble for drinking, flirting and smoking, and found she had a natural affinity with the freedom-loving 60s and 70s, an era that influenced her famous sense of style.
If Sienna is carrying a handbag, thousands of girls go and buy one, if she is wrapping herself in scarves and shawls and wearing jangly bangles, she is copied everywhere. Twenty8Twelve, the fashion label Sienna and her designer sister launched last year, has had significant success.
Today, wearing ultra high heels and heavy black eyeliner as the vestiges of her fashionista, Miller otherwise dresses down in tight pencil jeans, a black top, a short black cotton jacket with frayed cuffs and with her hair braided and pinned high. Full of life, she finds it hard to keep still at a press conference and bangs her director's knees with her fists when she gets excited and is touchy-feely alongside Knightley. The publicity for the film is very much hinged around the two women.
At our interview I tell her that when I met Knightley for Pride & Prejudice, she said she wanted to be groovy like Sienna Miller and considered herself a bit of a dork. "Haven't the tables turned!" she responds. "Now I want to be more like her. We're similar in many ways, but you know I've got a big gob," she notes, opening her mouth wide and pointing her finger inside. "She is more diplomatic. She knows how to handle herself but she also knows how to have a good time."
During filming, the women co-habited with their two male co-stars in a house in Wales. They shared meals, drinks and went horseriding. You get the impression that Sienna helped Keira hang loose.
"It was a bucolic Welsh summer and spring. We went to the local pubs and we were living in this mad eccentric house and running around in our pyjamas. I had my dogs, Porgy and Bess, and we'd go for long walks. It was a great time."
Yet she takes her work seriously. In fact, her resolve has been strengthened through the deaths of several of her friends, director Anthony Minghella, musician Tarka Cordell and Heath Ledger.
"I've never had an experience of death before and this year has been like one huge punch in the face after another," she told one interviewer. "When it comes to settling down, I chop and change. I really thought I was ready for it, and then I realised that I wanted to be selfish for a little bit longer. I know that as soon as I have a child it will probably be everything and I don't want to regret not doing more."
Recalling her frolicking time with Ledger around the Venetian canals while making Casanova she says, "Heath was like my brother. We had a laugh and behaved like stupid idiots for four months. He was impossible not to love."
In a sense, she is upholding Ledger's tradition of being bold in her film choices. "Everything's a challenge," she says, noting that her role in G.I. Joe (released in New Zealand next year) will come as a surprise. "I was trying to be this villain with guns. I've never fired a gun so had to do all this training and learn how to fight. Normally I'm there in a corner sobbing with a bottle in my hand and a fag and this was like trying to go to a gym and not go out for a fag. It was horrifying when I arrived but by the end of it I had my MP7 rifles and guns and it was great. There were great girlfights with chains and punching. It's dress-up for me. A lot of it is being able to play and get paid for it."
* The Edge of Love is released in New Zealand on October 2.
