In 2005 Sienna Miller was celebrity roadkill.
Sensationally betrayed by a famous fiancé, the British actress was stalked, harassed and surveilled by a tabloid media who saw her not as a person, but as a thing. A pretty little thing that could make them lots and lots of money.
By 2009 another story of infidelity - this time that of her own married lover - saw her career, which had been so promising at points she was hired in multi-million-dollar movies by the biggest of Hollywood big-wigs, in ruins.
“People don’t want to see films with people they don’t approve of in them,” Miller told Esquire Magazine that year.
Listen to the anatomy of Sienna Miller’s tabloid treatment on this episode of Lowbrow. Post continues below.
Hold that thought, flick forward to 2022, and Sienna Miller is having a moment.
She’s the standout star of the standout show Anatomy Of A Scandal, playing the betrayed wife of a Tory toff. She’s unrecognisable and brilliant in the award-winning The Loudest Voice. She’s been on stage in Tennessee Williams productions at London’s impossibly prestigious National Theatre. She’s being cast in projects about climate change alongside Meryl Streep.
Sienna Miller is now 40.
It’s an age when, to follow the traditional wisdom, the roles begin to dry up for actresses once lauded as the Next Big Thing. A time when, the narrative goes, your “fuckability” plunges, along with your box office.
So does the story of Sienna Miller’s second act suggest that maybe - just maybe - for a woman objectified and punished for her youth and beauty throughout her 20s, 40 can be a liberation, not a full-stop?
Image: Anatomy of a Scandal.
There’s a particular type of hatred reserved for young and beautiful women.
It’s a complicated emotion, twinned with fascination and envy. We stare, we worship, we pine. And then we demand punishment. It’s usually not that hard to find.
History is littered with examples - from Marilyn Monroe to Princess Diana to Britney Spears - of famous women we’ve mithered to death, sometimes figuratively, sometimes not.
And there’s a particular type of white-thin-blonde beauty that over-qualifies for this treatment. It attracts and repels us in equal measure. We worship these women for being the standard of beauty to which the rest of us - regardless of our ethnicity, shape or age - are held. We are coached and programmed to gaze upon them, hunting for flaws and finding none. And then comes the hatred, because that bitch is making it very hard for the rest of us to be merely human.
It’s a type of beauty personified by a 22-year-old Sienna Miller in 2005. Then, when the obsession with the thin-white-blonde was at its natural peak, she was everywhere we looked.
Miller was an actress then, too. One with ambition. One with enough hustle and skill to get her cast in Shakespeare on a West End stage. But mostly, she was celebrated for her clothes - she had an innate, unquestionable cool, and looked equally remarkable in the floaty bo-ho smocks or dark-grey skinny jeans or gold mini-dresses that graced her fashionably tiny frame.
And she was celebrated for who she dated. Specifically, Jude Law, in 2005 the hottest English actor on the planet. We followed the It Couple through the lens of a camera to the places they went together - nightclubs and bars and restaurants and hotels in London and New York that none of us would ever get into, never mind stumble out of, as Sienna and Jude often did, wrapped up in each other, shielding their eyes from the barrage of press bulb flashes.
Jude Law and Sienna Miller formed a relationship in 2004. Image: Getty.
If, for a short time at least, being part of an It Couple seems like a glorious place to be, full of possibility and parties, it was also a dangerous place, because couples don’t always last, and the predators of the tabloid press love nothing more than picking over the carcass of a celebrity romance. Leaving, almost always, a broken woman behind.
That’s what happened with Miller and Law. They were on the front of every magazine, stretching across gossip pages, stalking red carpets. Law had an ex-wife and children, Miller had an ambition to be a “serious” actress. Always there was a great outfit, a PDA, a tipsy back-of-a-cab pap pic.
And then Law got busted sleeping with the nanny, the one who flew out to film sets to sit with his three kids wherever she was needed, whenever she was needed. And Sienna, as the young and beautiful woman scorned, was suddenly celebrity roadkill.
What could be a more satisfying story than a woman with everything we all want - beauty and kudos and status and love - being publicly cuckholded?
Law confessed to the affair, publicly apologised to Miller, and went about resurrecting his image. Miller tried to stay and make it work - the couple broke up and got back together several times, but ultimately, she was brought low by her fiancé’s infidelity, and the mocking and chasing, the stalking and the hacking, it was all too much.
At the lowest point, reporters forThe Sun and the News of The World managed to talk her doctor into handing over medical records that proved Miller was pregnant with Law’s child. She has since been part of legal actions to reveal and punish this particularly low moment in tabloid history - saying that the gross scrutiny and invasion caused her to make decisions “about my own body that I have to live with every single day.” She didn’t proceed with the pregnancy.
“They very nearly ruined my life,” Miller said, outside court just last December, after accepting a settlement with News International. “I have certainly seen how they have ruined the lives of others. Their behaviour shattered me, damaged my reputation at times beyond repair, and caused me to accuse my family and friends of selling information.”
Forty-year-old Miller is no longer a tabloid plaything. She is a single mother living in New York City doing the best work of her life and holding those who have bullied and cowed her to account.
The obsessions with her love life - after Law and the nanny scandal there was the equally gripping affair with Balthazar Getty, a very married rockstar American actor and heir to a famous fortune - have moved on to other young players, many of whom (think Jennifer Lawrence, think Emma Stone), have learned to be intensely private in a way that the noughties’ starlets could not.
Metoo has forever changed how we view the currency of youth and beauty in Hollywood, by pulling back the curtain on that perceived powerful privilege to show what was often really going on - intimidation, objectification, and abuse.
Beautiful young women hold the illusion of power. But often, hardly any of it at all.
There is no question Miller still personifies the white-thin-blonde beauty ideal we are all terrorised by - it’s a key part of her Anatomy Of A Scandal role, that she is exactly fits the upper-crust hot-wife ideal. But perhaps, by now, we’ve begun to let go of the complicated feelings we reserved for the 22-year-old Millers of the world. The quiet schadenfreude we felt for their public humiliations. Perhaps the scuffs of age bring us all a little closer, make us a little more humble, a little more empathetic.
Sienna Miller is now free of the curse of being a Hot Young Thing. She’s no longer something to be toyed with and dismissed.
She is now a grown-arse woman, and she’s finally free.
Feature Image: Supplied.
