She may have swapped her Manolos for wellies, but don't be fooled into thinking that it’s all mud and mucking out for Elizabeth Hurley. She has converted her 400-acre farm in Gloucestershire to organic status, is about to launch a range of high-end snacks, and has even teamed up with the Prince of Wales's Duchy Originals brand. And despite the rural idyll, she isn’t ruling out a return to the bright lights
To the Glamour Born:
Elizabeth Hurley
Elizabeth Hurley has a voice that is so deep, dark and commanding that she can make a conversation about root crops and the Soil Association sound like erotic poetry. After five minutes of listening, spellbound, to her talking about the joys of country life, it’s easy to understand why – seven years after she last appeared in a film – she remains so internationally famous.
It doesn’t matter that none of us remembers her in a significant role (apart from her appearance, 15 years ago, in that Versace safety-pin dress and her portrayal of Vanessa Kensington in Austin Powers), because
Elizabeth Hurley possesses the glamour, presence and charisma of the kind of old-fashioned Hollywood stars who only ever really played themselves.
Beautiful – at 44 she is arguably lovelier than she was when she first emerged as the monobrowed girlfriend of
Hugh Grant in 1994 – charming and just a little regal, she has the power to fascinate, whatever she is saying. We meet to talk about her new range of organic snacks on a rare day when Elizabeth (on no account must anyone call her Liz) is in London, and she can’t wait to get back to the 400-acre farm in Gloucestershire that she has owned for six years but which has been her full-time home for just over a year.
These days, she insists with a radiant smile, she is much more comfortable in wellington boots than a bikini. Living in her rural idyll with Arun Nayar, her husband of two years, and her seven-year-old son Damian is so ‘divine’, she doesn’t know why she stayed in London for so long.
'It's a very different life I have now,' says Elizabeth
‘For the last couple of years I was finding it harder and harder to live in London. I had got to the point where it was making me ill, and I couldn’t control my rage at being followed by the paparazzi. It’s a very primal thing in humans: we don’t like being preyed on like animals.
Five mornings a week there would be photographers following me to my car when I took Damian to school. I’d been able to put up with it when it was just me, but I couldn’t bear exposing him. I thought, “This is unhealthy; I can’t have my son in this environment,”’ she says.
Photo opportunities, Elizabeth is the first to admit, are the lifeblood of a celebrity’s existence, but the way in which the paparazzi intruded on her family life made her totally rethink the way she was living.
‘I would be bursting into tears and just be so angry. There is something about motherhood that makes you very protective of anyone coming too near your child, and the paparazzi did things like take pictures of him nude on the beach and put
them online. It was disgusting, disgraceful,’ she says with evident emotion.
‘For the last couple of years I was finding it harder and harder to live in London. I had got to the point where it was making me ill’
Motherhood has had, it would seem, a far more profound effect on Elizabeth’s behaviour than her ex-boyfriend
Hugh Grant could have imagined back in the 90s, when he once joked that she had so little maternal instinct that she couldn’t be trusted with a pet rabbit. Damian is at the centre of her life – he is not just the reason she left London but also the reason
she gave up acting.
‘I gave up movies when I had Damian because I didn’t want to be absent and neither did I want to disturb and disrupt his routine by having him on the road with me. I couldn’t have given Damian that life; it would have been impossible. I know a lot of people do that successfully, but mine wouldn’t have been successful. He would have been an insane child if I had given him that lifestyle.’
The new Hurley venture – producing her own range of low-calorie, low-fat organic snacks – has much to do with Elizabeth’s calmer country life as a, well, civilian (years ago she referred to anyone who wasn’t a celebrity as a civilian).
Elizabeth and Arun at their Hindu wedding ceremony in Rajasthan,
India in March 2007, with her son Damian
As a hands-on mum (she has no childcare apart from her mother, who is looking after Damian today) living on a working farm (managed by her brother Michael), it made sense to turn her dual passions – food and organic farming – into a business that, along with her well-established line of beachwear, would fill the gap left by movies.
There was, she decided, a distinct opening in the organic food market – nutritious snacks that weren’t ‘hellishly fattening’. As someone who has had to spend most of her adult life watching her weight (she looks enviably svelte in her trademark white jeans, although she claims she is seven pounds heavier than when she was a working actress), she is something of an expert on careful snacking.
Her first organic products – oat and fruit snack bars and beef jerky (sourced in part from her own cattle) – are all approved by the Soil Association and are just under 100 calories each.
‘I have never eaten six raisins a day with a child’s knife and fork, or any of the other ridiculous things I have read about myself, but I am heavier than in my movie years. There is a huge change in your metabolism after 40 and for the first time ever I am having to watch what I eat because I’m quite greedy by nature,’ she says with a long, low self-deprecating laugh.
She laughs again, seconds later, when I tell her she looks closer to 24 than 44 and very gently ask if she has had surgery.
‘Don’t be ridiculous, I look so much more than that and, no, no surgery, not yet. I really don’t have a beauty regime. The only thing I do – obviously – is pluck my eyebrows because I would look like Denis Healey if I didn’t.
'I don’t have time. I have two businesses that I run and there is no question of taking time out of the day now because I like to do the school run as well and be with Damian when he is not at school. It would be impossible to find time to have a facial or a massage.’
With their labradors Raja, Emily and Lucy at their organic farm in Gloucestershire
It is to Elizabeth’s credit that she has managed to create such a tight family unit with Damian and Arun, whom she met shortly after her son’s birth and married two years ago.
It cannot have been easy, eight years ago, to find herself pregnant by a man – the American billionaire Steve Bing – who insisted that their relationship had not been ‘exclusive’ and subsequently demanded a DNA test. Elizabeth has a disarming way of ignoring questions about any of the previous men in her life – in particular
Hugh Grant and Steve Bing – and offering answers that reference only Arun.
When asked if Damian saw his father – recently in the news when he loaned his private plane to Bill Clinton for his trip to North Korea to negotiate the release of two American journalists – she quickly brings the subject back to her husband.
‘I made the decision long ago not to comment on that part of Damian’s life. But anyway, Arun is totally his dad. Damian was seven months old when he first met him and one of his favourite stories in the world is, “Tell me again how I met Daddy?” We know exactly when it was because we took my sister out for her birthday – it was 20 January 2003 and we went to the Lanesborough Hotel in London for tea.
'So I tell him and he says, “What was I wearing, Mummy?” And I say, “I dressed you in your best blue romper suit.” Then he says, “And was I sweet?” And I reply, “Yes, you were so sweet.” It’s part of his history and thank goodness we have had a happy ending to that story,’ she says with a slightly rueful smile.
‘I think Arun has had a big grounding effect. He is much less nervy and hyper than I am’
Arun is clearly a hugely positive influence in her life (he rings at one point during our interview and her face lights up as she takes the call and calls him ‘baby’ and ‘sweetie’). The wealthy half-German (on his mother’s side), half-
Indian textile heir – who runs his own software company from their Gloucestershire home – has taken to English country life with surprising ease.
Clever and accomplished – he has a physics degree from Oxford and an MA from Imperial College – he has become the perfect consort for his wife.
‘I think Arun has had a big grounding effect. He is much less nervy and hyper than I am. He is brilliant with Damian.
At first he was resistant to us moving full time to the country, but now I think he loves it more than me. He shoots, he barbecues, he does some of the topping in the field – it’s unbelievable. And he is obsessed with our labradors and they are obsessed with him. Lucy, Emily and Raj are totally daddy’s; they follow him everywhere and sit in armchairs in his study all day long while he works.’
If Arun has adjusted to certain aspects of country life, he has found some things difficult – he is not a fan of her wearing muddy Barbour jackets and wellington boots (he thought she was joking the first time he saw her in them) – and sometimes he is rather more squeamish than his wife about the realities of life on a farm.
‘The other day Arun came into my office and said, “A couple of lambs are about to be sent for slaughter and they are so beautiful, I can’t bear it. Can’t we keep them?”
And we went and looked at them and they were gorgeous, but then I said, “We have known them for every day of their lives; we know they have eaten the best food; they have never travelled or been cooped up or scared. They have had the best life they possibly could and they are going to an organic abattoir where they won’t see other animals lined up and they won’t feel any fear. It’s the best it can be, but real life in the country can be brutal,”’ she says with a resigned expression on her lovely face.
Elizabeth may have had to harden her heart when it comes to animal husbandry (she has just taken delivery of 100 ‘adorable’ geese that will be slaughtered and sold through the
Prince of Wales’s Duchy Originals brand this Christmas), but she takes a very soft approach to parenting. Damian will not be sent away to boarding school until he is at least 13 and perhaps not even then.
‘I think I would just miss him so much. I can quite see that if you have got six children it might be a blessed relief to have a quiet house, but I have only one,’ she says in the regretful tones of someone who would have loved more children but is now (although she won’t comment on it) apparently resigned to the fact that her family is complete.
As we part – she has arranged to meet Arun in Harrods to buy Damian a surprise present – I tell her that she seems to be in her absolute prime and ask her if she has ever been happier.
She pauses for a moment, considering the question.
‘Probably. It’s a very different life I have now,’ she says.
Her hesitation makes me think that perhaps she misses the glamour and clamour of her movie years; that maybe sometime soon she might resume the career that made her famous. ‘I miss movies a lot. When I gave up acting I said I didn’t want to do anything that would take me away until Damian was seven. I was totally intolerant to the idea until then. But yeah, maybe I am more open to it now. It would be completely different because I would be playing a different generation. Maybe if it was something interesting…’ she pauses again and then adds with a laugh, ‘maybe there is a Mrs Robinson mature role for me. We will see…’
Elizabeth Hurley Organic Fruit Bars, 59p, Organic Oat Bars, 75p, and Organic Beef Jerky, £1.95, are available at elizabethhurley.com and Harrods.
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