How Sienna Miller went from privacy campaigner to revealing all

More than a million people follow Sienna Miller on Instagram. On the face of it, this isn’t entirely surprising – Miller is, after all, a Bafta- and Golden Globe-nominated actress; a model-cum-designer-cum-fashion icon; and judging by interviews, both searingly honest and game for a laugh, making her ideal social media material. 

So no, it’s not remarkable that millions of people are interested in Miller. The remarkable thing is that she’s only ever posted on Instagram once, and that was a welcome message published more than six years ago. Other than that, followers are left with just her pithy, two-word biography: “Former child”.

Miller has grown up. That much has been obvious for a while, as she stepped away from the glare of press scrutiny after the birth of her now 11-year-old daughter, Marlowe, before embarking on an impressive career revival (she has resisted that notion, but not for nothing does she have a “Resurgence” section on her Wikipedia page) that’s seen her take on weightier roles and deliver critically lauded performances in recent years.

But a striking new cover shoot and interview for Vogue portrays a woman finally comfortable meeting the media on her own terms, too. Two years ago she accused The Sun of forcing her to make a decision about her body “that I have to live with every single day” after leaking news of her pregnancy in 2005, when she was in a relationship with Jude Law. She claimed The Sun “stole” her medical records at the time.

Now, on the cover of Vogue, there is Miller, 41, on a beach in just a navy Gabriela Hearst sweater and black briefs, hair loose and windswept, and at the centre of it all, her pregnancy bump on full show. “New beginnings”, reads the headline. A magazine profile cliché, but not inaccurate.

Miller is 28 weeks pregnant with her second child, a girl, with her boyfriend of two years, the actor Oliver Green. (Marlowe’s father is the actor Tom Sturridge; after four years together, Miller and Sturridge broke up in 2015.) The Vogue shoot, by the renowned US photographer Annie Liebovitz, alternates between intimate and simple family portraits and uber-glamorous shots of Miller in the family way.

The interview marks the first time Miller has spoken publicly about her pregnancy, having given a hint about it in an interview with The Telegraph in September. “I am on the lookout for elasticated trousers and really baggy jumpers,” she replied, when asked what was on her autumn shopping list. At the time, launching her new collection with Marks & Spencer, questions about her pregnancy were off limits.

Yet the Vogue cover is not the first time she has involved her bump in an internet-breaking fashion moment. She wore a cream two-piece Schiaparelli ensemble at the Vogue World event in September in London.

“I was nervous about the idea of it,” she said of the Schiaparelli, “but once I had it on, everything else felt boring. I was like, ‘I’ll have that photo for the rest of my baby’s life.’ It’s kind of fascinating to fight your own prejudice against yourself. I’m constantly doing that.”

What Miller’s “prejudice against herself” involved is perhaps one for her, but there’s been plenty of prejudice from other people over the years. They say celebrities are frozen at the age they first become famous. In Miller’s case, that is almost exactly two decades ago. 

The daughter of an American banker-turned-art-dealer father and South African-born British drama teacher mother who once worked as a PA to David Bowie, Miller and her elder sister, Savannah, boarded at Heathfield School in Ascot from the age of eight. Miller then fell into modelling, signing for Select Model Management after school, before moving into acting. 

Yet this was the early Noughties: the tabloids were on the hunt for new It-girls. So while Miller rifled into the public eye as an actress, starring opposite Daniel Craig in the British crime thriller Layer Cake, she also became an instant red-top fixture thanks to her new relationship with Jude Law, her co-star in the 2004 remake of Alfie.

With that relationship, the paparazzi camera flashes began. And didn’t stop. “I’m not very happy about it, to be honest,” Miller said in an interview at the time. “It makes me uncomfortable because […] I think it’s as a result of being scrutinised because of the relationship I’m in. If it was because of work, I think I’d feel more justified and more comfortable with it, so I can’t wait for the film to come out.”

Only, those films did come out, received a critical panning (“surprisingly unerotic and rarely amusing” one review of Alfie put it; “a new ‘It Girl’ who barely registers on screen despite wearing little more than lacey filaments that make her look like a gift meant to be unwrapped very quickly” was a notice for Layer Cake), and Miller was even more of a paparazzi target. “Hanging out with the girl of the year” read the Vogue cover line two decades ago, in December 2004, the first time she appeared on the magazine’s cover. Not actor of the year, not even model of the year, just girl. It-girl. 

“Once they’ve been formed, people’s perceptions are really hard to change,” Miller told The Telegraph in 2007. “I’ve always been an actor first and foremost, but the tabloid media don’t want me to be good at that – that’s not an interesting story for them.”

These started in 2005, when Law had to issue a public apology for having an affair with the nanny of his children. Miller then had a relationship with the married actor Balthazar Getty, causing another flurry of invasion that saw her every bit as relentlessly pursued as Amy Winehouse, Kate Moss and Lily Allen. 

At the time, she got into the habit of being cast as under-pressure celebrities, first as 1960s It-girl Edie Sedgwick in Factory Girl (Harvey Weinstein, with whom she worked on that film, called her “the next big thing”; to draw a boundary with him, she has said, she made sure to call him “Pops”), then as a soap star in Interview. In the latter, she based her performance on an unnamed actress she admires who is “very comfortable with the power of being a celebrity”. Miller admired that, “but I’d rather chew wasps than become that person,” she said.

“Acting is all I remember ever wanting to do, but I don’t think I understood exactly what fame was until I experienced it. You think it’s something it’s not. I wanted Martin Scorsese to call me up and ask me to be in his film. I didn’t want to be pictured on the cover of Heat magazine coming out of a nightclub, looking rough.” 

So in 2008 she fought back, becoming a trailblazer among the generation of famous women hounded by the red tops. Using human rights laws rarely applied in such cases before, she successfully sued Darryn Lyons and his Big Pictures photo agency for $80,000 (£63,000). As well as pay the money, Lyons had to pay Miller’s court costs and cease from photographing her at home or “make any effort to pursue her for pictures”.

Earlier, the High Court had heard that Miller was chased while driving, confronted outside her home, pursued all the way to Heathrow Airport, and followed in the park with her mother. It was the first time anti-harassment legislation had been used by a celebrity against the press; the laws had generally been designed to stop animal rights protestors and stalkers.

It was a time when scrutiny of the tabloid media was building, as investigations into the behaviour of actions by News of the World and other newspapers owned by Rupert Murdoch had started. Miller, whose phone had been hacked by News of the World, joined the fight along with the likes of Hugh Grant and JK Rowling. By the time of the Leveson Inquiry in 2011, she became the first person to accept the paper’s apology, as well as £100,000 in compensation.

During the inquiry itself, Miller described being chased down a dark alleyway at midnight by “10 big men” carrying cameras, and being spat at to provoke a reaction. On a daily basis, she said, around 15 men had followed her since the age of 21. “It’s very intimidating, [but] because they have cameras, it’s legal.” 

Just this week, speaking on The News Agents podcast, Olivia Colman cited Miller’s testimony during that inquiry. “She spoke so beautifully,” Colman said, admiringly, before revealing she has moved her own family out of London to escape the same kind of pressure Miller faced. Miller would later tell an interviewer that she watched Amy, the documentary about Winehouse, and shook. “Because I remembered what it was like. I was exposed to that level of pursuit. It was that aggressive.”

Miller had taken a screen break during those years, briefly reuniting with Law before splitting with him again in 2011. Then, with a new confidence, having taken on her tormentors and largely won, she could focus on the thing she always wanted to: acting. Playing Alfred Hitchcock’s muse, Tippi Hedren, in the BBC film The Girl brought awards attention on both sides of the Atlantic. “[A] better choice [to play Hedren] could not have been made than Sienna Miller,” Clive James wrote in this paper. 

Next came Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper, Bennett Miller’s Foxcatcher, a well-reviewed Broadway revival of Cabaret and even a jury place at the Cannes Film Festival. “Everyone talks about that, as if they’re surprised that they can finally see me as an actor. But I think what they’re actually talking about is a shift in their own perceptions rather than the fact that I’m suddenly doing good work,” she said. “Once important and respected filmmakers started putting faith in me, things began to change.”

The period coincided with Miller having Marlowe, settling with Sturridge, and buying a cottage in the country. She and Sturridge broke up (amicably, though), while her career success, which has since included the dramas American Woman and the Netflix series Anatomy of a Scandal, continued to operate at a consistent high quality. She’ll soon be seen in Kevin Costner’s Horizon: An American Saga, a two-part Civil War epic.

She met Green, an actor who plays “Finchey”, the young Kate Middleton’s first boyfriend in the St Andrews episode of The Crown, at a Hallowe’en party a few years ago. He is 27 years old, 14 years her junior, but as she told Vogue, “I don’t think you can legislate on matters of the heart. I certainly have never been able to.” 

The point has been made that if the age difference were reversed, there would be no eyebrows raised whatsoever. On the day that Miller is back in the tabloids for her pregnancy shoot, it’s notable that Leonardo DiCaprio, 49, is also there, for partying in London with Lottie Moss, 25. He dated her half-sister, Kate, 30 years ago. 

“I don’t do well when life is prescribed,” Miller said, and she’s certainly beaten her own path, even if it’s come at occasional cost. Once hounded into hiding by the media, she’s now entirely in control of her image, and back on the front pages – but this time entirely as she wants it. A million people might be following Miller, but they’ll only see her if she wants them to.