The family spent lockdown in Los Angeles. (There were
nine of them in total: including her daughters from her first
marriage — Jessie, 16, and Angelica, 24, with her boyfriend
and her best friend — and three dogs.) Aaron appointed
himself cook and headmaster. “He was on breakfast, lunch
and dinner. He’s a brilliantly inventive cook, one of those
people who can make a big meal out of nothing.” For the
role of teacher he set up a classroom in a spare room,
complete with maps and charts on the walls and even
dressed the part. Like Dumbledore, I ask. “No, he was
f ***ing Tom Ford.” They spent their days hiking (they live
near a trail) and their evenings playing games, dressing up as
different characters. One night while she was working on
Humanity the rest of the family decided to watch an Anna
Wintour MasterClass on YouTube. “The next day Aaron
comes down wearing a suit and tie, smart shoes, really
super-sharply dressed, and he did that every day for months.
So did Angelica.” She looks at me and with a sly grin, dead-
pans: “They obviously took something from her wisdom.”
She has had to get used to the Americanisation of her
children. “I remember the first card I got from one of them
and I was called ‘Mom!’ I am now a mom,” she laughs. “I kind
of like it.” You’re quite adaptable, I say. “Yes,” she agrees. “It’s
the only way to get through life.”
Being a fighter is a lesson she learnt young. She lived in
London until her father (a chartered surveyor who became a
treasurer for the Hell’s Angels) left home when she was nine.
Then she was raised in Sussex by her hippy mother (a yoga
instructor and astrologer) and stepfather, who didn’t believe
in giving their children any boundaries. “Having such an
unorthodox upbringing was troubling as a child,” she told
me seven years ago. “I wanted my parents to work for British
Telecom and be like everyone else’s.” Her mother then left
out of the blue one day, leaving Sam, her younger sister and
half-brother with her stepdad. They didn’t have a clue where
she was for six months, later finding out that she’d moved to
Spain. She then didn’t see her mother for another six years,
and when she next did it was by accident, catching sight of
her in the window of a house across the street. There has
been a rapprochement and they are now on good terms. “Mydysfunctional childhood sent me to a part of my mind that
was an escapist place,” she told me. “Being an artist gave me
the opportunity to be who I wanted to be.”
She went to art college in Hastings, where she met
Jake Chapman (still one of her best friends), followed by
Goldsmiths in London. She drifted through her early
twenties, jumping from job to job, eventually creating the
multiscreen video works that brought her recognition and
winning the most promising artist of the year prize at the
Venice Biennale in 1997.
The award coincided with her marriage to the art dealer Jay
Jopling, founder of White Cube, the London gallery that
fast-tracked the careers of Damien Hirst among others,
which propelled her into a world of endless parties and art
fairs. Their eventual split in September 2008 surprised many.
“The pressure to be a social butterfly was so enormous,”
she said when I last interviewed her, “it literally made me
buckle under the weight of it.”
So what she tells me next about a recent trip to the Frieze
art fair in LA makes sense. “I hate art festivals,” she says. “I
hated every second of it. It made me think I hate art, at least in
this context.” But wasn’t Frieze in a sense the platform, or at
least one of them, that enabled her success? “Look, I love the
people who started Frieze, but they are no longer involved.
This one was a soulless f ***ing nightmare, like going into
Sainsbury’s and walking past aisles and aisles of stuff.”
An exhibition of new work — her first for 12 years — will‘I learnt a lot from making Fifty
Shades of Grey. Not necessarily
lessons I needed to learn’
Above Self-Portrait in Single-Breasted Suit with Hare, 2001,
by Sam Taylor-Johnson. Below left Dakota Johnson and Jamie
Dornan in Fifty Shades of Grey. Opposite, top Taylor-Johnson
with her first husband, Jay Jopling, 2007. Opposite Escape
Artist (Pink and Red), 2008, by Sam Taylor-JohnsonCourtesy of Citizens of Humanity, © Sam Taylor-Johnson, Getty Images18 • The Sunday Times Style