'I get a lot of mud slung at me'
“I don’t feel I want to complain about anything that’s said about me,” Trudie Styler says, carefully, with a smile and the slightest hint of a Brummie accent. The film producer, environmental activist, sometime actress and well-connected go-getter is sitting in a private members’ club in central London, poised, bolt upright, shuffling a sheaf of papers. She’s no-nonsense and pin-sharp, but cheerful and somehow relaxed with it.
“I have such a fortunate life that of course I will have my detractors,” she says, still smiling. “I have a very endowed life.”
That she does. The working-class lass with the embryonic acting career who fell in love with Sting more than three decades ago now juggles one rock-star husband, four children aged from 18 to 30, and (as far as one can make out) seven households across the world.
As well as running Maven, the film production company she set up in 2011, she also takes the lead organising the biannual gala concert in aid of the couple’s Rainforest Fund. This year’s event, which falls on Thursday in New York, features performances by a selection of their very starry friends, such as Kevin Spacey and James Taylor, and is a 25th-anniversary spectacular. All proceeds are funnelled into the couple’s long-running fight to help preserve the rights and lifestyles of indigenous peoples in the Amazon.
With Sting and Elton John at a benefit concert, 2010 (Startraks Photo/REX)
Styler and Sting are currently based in New York, calling their Central Park West apartment home for the past four years. There are staff, private jets and personal yoga classes. But for all that, and despite a fortune estimated at £180 million, Sting still gives her a hard time about turning off lights. “I totally respect that. But he is a bit finicky. Like, I have a wardrobe and when I open the door, the light comes on. And if it’s not closed properly, the light stays on and it drives him berserk,” she says with a raucous laugh.
Then there is the view that the couple’s jet-set lifestyle is at odds with their work to protect the Amazonian poor – people whose lives are blighted by, among other things, oil-exploration companies. She’s long used to addressing this: yes, on the one hand, it’s a fair cop. But on the other, what else can she do? “I get a lot of mud slung at me and yes, I do take planes, but I feel that’s my life,” goes her answer. “My life is to travel and also to speak out about the horrors of an environment that is being abused at the hands of an irresponsible oil company. I can’t think of a cleverer answer than that.”
People also think that the lean, trim, 60-year-old Styler and Sting – quite the muscled hunk at 62 – have an eye-wateringly fabulous sex life. The story stemmed from a drunken interview her old man gave 24 years ago, in which he claimed their Tantric training meant orgasm could be delayed by hours. “At the time I thought it was very amusing,” she later admittedto The Telegraph. “But then it sort of became a cause célèbre. The Tantric hours got extended and, suddenly, I was doing it all day long. Well, if only!”
What, though, about those who retain snarky assumptions about the Rock-Star Wife? That she’s the eternal plus-one in the wings while hubby basks in spotlit adulation? That she’s a hanger-on? “Well, strangely, I’ve never felt like I was the woman off to the side of the stage. Because I’ve always had a job. Even in the early days, when I stopped acting, I was busy getting my [first film] production company together. David Puttnam got me started in producing.
If your question is, 'Do I feel subjugated by Sting’s light?’, no, I don’t think so. And I have a huge pride about being Mrs Sumner, Sting’s wife,” she adds, beaming, referring to his real name, Gordon Sumner. “I’m always happy when I hear someone say, 'Mrs Sumner’. My heart starts to beat a bit faster. And anyway, it’s not like we could ever compete. I don’t have a musical bone in my body. I think if he were a very big movie star, and I was an actress who was struggling, that would probably be a bit problematic and challenging. But [it’s] certainly not in the fields in which we separately work.”
Styler with her then boyfriend Sting in 1982 (Richard Young/REX)
It’s film business that has brought Styler to London this week, although, true to multitasking form, she’s already been busy before our meeting: she and Sting have been “doing” their wills. Maybe that explains her business-chic look today: black suede Loro Piana boots, a black cashmere Balmain rollneck (“Mere cash!” she hoots) and skintight G-Star jeans.
Acting was Styler’s first love. It was the dream she hoped would take her from the council estate near Birmingham where she grew up, the middle of three girls. It was a tough childhood. She has described how her school-dinner-lady mother was “immobilised by obesity”, then developed Alzheimer’s. “She didn’t live that long,” she says, quietly.
She thinks the Alzheimer’s stemmed, in part at least, from the obesity. So while Styler doesn’t diet per se, “I do eat very well. And I don’t eat nearly as much as I used to. I want to know what the ground rules are to keep myself well. I don’t think there’s much point in living if my body doesn’t work. If I’m infirm or too big to lumber my body round,” she says baldly, “that wouldn’t make me happy.”
She’s body-conscious for other, more personal reasons, too. Aged two, she was knocked over by a Co-op bakery van. Her injuries required years of hospital treatment, and caused all sorts of trauma at school, where she was nicknamed Scarface.
“The scars on the face have always given me a sense that I’m not a very attractive person,” she admits. “I’m always unsure of myself, of my facial self. I’ve got to like myself, I think, through my relationship with Sting, who pours love over me. So I feel more confident.”
Sting wrote movingly of her scarring in his autobiography, calling her his “damaged angel”.“He did,” she says with a smile. “So through his devotion, and his belief in me in every way, but also telling me he finds me beautiful, I’ve started to heal that wound.”
The injuries didn’t stop her finding work as an actress, however: she was a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company, had a recurring role in the 1970s television series Poldark, and still takes acting jobs from time to time. Last year she was back on stage in a New York production of Chekhov’s The Seagull, and she recently filmed Despite The Falling Snow, a Cold War thriller, with Charles Dance.
Trudie Styler with Peter O’Toole in Macbeth in 1980 (REX)
She has explained that she’s had Botox to help with the scarring. Has she gone further in terms of surgical procedures?
“I haven’t, and I don’t know that I would be talking about it, had I had it,” she says evenly. “Some things are personal, and that’s a decision that will be made when I’m ready to make it. I was operated on facially so much when I was young, and I had massive amounts of stitches. I had operations throughout my childhood, up until I was 18, then revision on my scars to put back my eyebrows.
“So I’ve had a lot of what’s called plastic surgery to my face, to my scars. And I have huge, huge respect for what that is. Now I’m in the fortunate position to be able to do whatever I want to enhance my body, my face, myself. But I think women should really feel empowered – they should feel good about whatever they do for themselves. They shouldn’t be stigmatised: 'Ooh, have you seen so-and-so? She’s had a bit of work.’”
That said, in the industry in which she does most of her work, women are still under huge pressure to look young. Does she think the lot of forty- and fiftysomething actresses will improve?
“If Maven Pictures has anything to do with it, yes!” she declares with a laugh and table-thumping vigour. “But it doesn’t seem to be getting better.” Maven is developing projects with Julia Roberts, Amy Adams and Cate Blanchett.
Styler is committed to making films with good roles for women behind and in front of the camera – though to date, much of her success as a producer has been with very male films, notably Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels, Snatch and Moon. Her most recent success, last year, was Filth, a controversial adaptation of the scabrous Irvine Welsh novel, starring James McAvoy. So extreme was the material it took 37 producers to wrestle the film to the screen, but it went on to be a critical hit. In an interview to promote it, Welsh told me: “I don’t think Filth would have got made if it hadn’t been for Trudie.”
James McAvoy in the Styler-produced Filth (Snap Stills/REX)
It took every ounce of Styler’s inner steel – especially wrangles over a bestiality scene that was finally cut. “Either that had to go or I had to go,” she says, coolly. “I think the point of making these films is, you don’t make them just for guys. So with that scene, I said to the director he’d alienate every woman on the planet. You’re not going to have any oestrogen in the room.”
Did she, I wonder, exercise further Producer Power by positioning her and Sting’s daughter on the soundtrack? Coco, 23, who has released an album under the name I Blame Coco, sings Radiohead’s Creep over the credits.“Ah-ha ha!” she replies with a hesitant laugh. “Well, actually, [the score’s composer] Clint Mansell loves Coco’s work, so he asked for her. So that wasn’t really a hard sell.”
Coco has been recording her second album in Manchester. “I can’t really talk too much about what my daughter does: she’ll kill me. But I really rate her as an artist.” She insists she had no reservations about Coco following her father into the music industry. “She was 17 when she [was] signed. It’s not that I loved the idea of her leaving school, but I ran away from home [at that age], so I can’t speak, and she knew that. I just said, 'Follow your heart, and you can always go back to college one day if you ever feel the need or desire.’ But she’s a musician through to her little pinkie.”
Coco is the biggest repository of Sting’s musical genes, together with Joe, his son with his first wife, the actress Frances Tomelty. Their eldest child, Mickey, 30, is an actress, and has starred in Frances Ha and the television series The Borgias. Jake, 28, is a filmmaker. Giacomo, 18, “wants to be a cop”. I ask how she feels about that. “I always vowed I’ll never get in the way of my children’s dreams. I bear that scar, and I treated my parents pretty rough because I wasn’t listened to. I don’t want to have a bad relationship with my kids.”
Having “two kids who feel like twins, and then two five-year breaks, I feel like I’ve been a mother for a very long time”. She’s not a granny yet, though, is she? “Not technically. But Sting’s eldest, Joe,” she says, “[has] a beautiful baby girl called Juliette, with another one on the way.”
So Trudie Styler is, ah, a step-grandma? She crinkles her nose in fright. “That’s sounds awful, doesn’t it?” And she laughs loudly, again.
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