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“She’s a New Yorker.” The move came shortly
after breaking off her engagement to actor Tom
Sturridge – father to Marlowe and Miller’s
partner since 2011 – and it’s proved the perfect
place to start afresh. “It’s been fantastic,” she says,
genuinely enthused.
Far away from the city where Miller was a
fixture on the party scene in her twenties, she’s
found peace and privacy in New York. “My daugh-
ter was starting school ... I just want to be where I
work for the time being,” she reasons.
Moreover, she has a history with the
city that never sleeps. “I’ve got roots
there.” Miller was born in New York
and lived there as an infant before
her family relocated to London.
Her father Edwin, an investment
banker-turned-art dealer, is still
based in the Big Apple.
Miller’s early years were soaked
in the arts. Her “creative” moth-
er regularly took her to the theatre.
“She even went into labour with me during the
ballet,” she says (no, she’s not joking). A former
model, the South African-born Josephine Miller
set up London’s Lee Strasberg acting school in the
1980s and an institution that specialised in yoga,
ballet and the Alexander Technique. “She taught
Ava Gardner and Albert Finney and all these
wonderful people.”
Miller, who became a yoga junkie (“I love it,
I need it for my head”), saw her parents divorce“I think with
parenthood
there comes
dept h. You
reshape in
some way”when she was six. She went to boarding school
in Ascot before returning to New York when she
was 18. Once there, she studied at the Lee Stras-
berg Theatre and Film Institute before scoring
her first paid gig, a commercial for a German soft
drink. Work has frequently brought her back to
NYC – on Broadway in Cabaret; playing Andy
Warhol muse Edie Sedgwick in Factory Girl.
Today, though, she’s in Europe. We’re sit-
ting together in a ground-floor suite at Berlin’s
Hotel de Rome, where Miller has come to sup-
port her new movie The Lost City of Z. A slight
cold aside, she looks radiant. Petite and trim,
her blonde hair is tumbling over the buttoned-up
collar of her red long-sleeved flower-print dress.
Teamed with a pair of beige flats, it’s a low-
key look – a subtle reminder of the boho chic
style she wears so effortlessly.
In the background sits Tori, her oldest
school friend and publicist, but Miller chats away
merrily. She’s open, friendly and engaged. Savan-
nah, with whom Miller ran a boutique fashion
label, Twenty8Twelve, in Notting Hill, calls her
sibling “very good at having fun” and those blue
eyes of hers still have a life-and-soul-of-the-party
twinkle. But things are different now. “I think
with parenthood there comes a depth,” she
reasons. “You reshape in some way because it’s
such a profound experience.”
Giving birth changed her outlook. “You have
a child and it’s someone that’s more important
to you. At the same time, I’m a working mother,
I love my job and I want her to grow up with that
example. My priorities have changed in that I have
another human to really deeply consider when
I’m making decisions, and so the work I tend to
do is stuff that I love and I’m very drawn to.”
The chance to take on the
story of early-1900s British ex-
plorer Percy Fawcett in The Lost
City of Z was irresistible. Star-
ring alongside Sons of Anarchy’s
Charlie Hunnam, Miller plays Faw-
cett’s wife Nina, left to raise their
two sons alone for years as her
husband ventures into unchart-
ed reaches of the Amazon jungle.
The production took her to Belfast
in Northern Ireland for the second
summer running, after shooting High-Rise with
Tom Hiddleston the previous year.
Seeking out isolation in preparation,
Miller deliberately relocated. “She was quite
lonely, Nina ... So I put myself in the middle
of Bangor which is pretty far from the centre
of Belfast, so it felt melancholic – and I was on my
own. Well, I had my daughter, which was lovely.
And I think it helped the performance and helped
my general mood and state of mind.”