'I never
questioned why I was here'
July 26, 2005
One-time 'Neighbours'
star turned singer-songwriter Natalie Imbruglia tells Elizabeth Grice that she
knew she would be a star
Some small children carry comfort blankets. Natalie Imbruglia is sustained by a
one-and-a-half litre bottle of foul-looking green liquid that goes everywhere
with her. Swamp-water, it has been unkindly called. She prefers to explain it as
a substance made from dehydrated green leaves.
To a tiny scoop of green powder,
she adds some pH drops and tops it up with water. "Supergreens," she says,
swigging it through possibly the most extravagant pair of lips in showbusiness.
"To alkalise your body. It's living food."
Imbruglia, 30, is the sort of
person who responds well to regimes, whether it's drinking vegetables, making
egg-white omelettes, meditating or writing songs. Regimes are reassuring. They
require self-discipline, and she has plenty of that. They seem to control her
tendency to worry. "I'm a stresshead," she admits. "I got that from my mum. You
learn your coping mechanisms from your parents and you have to reprogramme them
if they're not necessarily healthy. I am quite highly strung."
Superficially, this isn't apparent.
In fact, she seems barely strung at all. She had to be up at three to appear on
GMTV but appears as serene and drifty as a swan. Maybe it's the powdered greens.
Though it is a summer's day, her tiny frame is enclosed in dark trousers,
spangly scarf, long sleeves and heavy boots. Since her much-hated "bikini days"
as a teenage actress on Neighbours, she has had an aversion to exposing much
flesh.
"I think it's sad that women feel
pressure to strip off just to get on the cover of a magazine," she says, aware
of sounding prim but not bothered about it. "I don't want to be on the cover of
a magazine if I have to take my clothes off. I don't think it's more sexy,
either. When you see so many cleavages and women with their legs spread, it
desensitises you and it just becomes quite vulgar. If I was more confident of
myself in that way, maybe I'd flaunt it. But it's not who I am."
It is impossible to see her and
not be reminded of classic beauties such as Loren, Hepburn, Rossellini. If she
has "insecurities" about her body, whatever can they be? "I don't think it's
important to say. That will only make my insecurity worse."
The day we were due to meet,
London erupted. Imbruglia was down at her house on White Lilies Island near
Windsor with her husband, Australian rock singer Daniel Johns. They were coming
to the end of an unusually long phase of togetherness in their long-distance
relationship, about to enjoy a final week on Richard Branson's Necker Island,
when the bombs went off.
"I know it's selfish but I was
glad to be going away the next day," she says. "I was in shock because I do take
things on, you know. But you have to get on with your life. If you read too much
news, you feel sick. You feel helpless. All you can do is pray." And she doesn't
say that (or anything else) lightly. Imbruglia regards herself as "a very
spiritual person", into meditation, into Eastern philosophies, into prayer and
into self-improvement. "We are all work in progress," she announces.
Things don't come easy to her -
whether it's preserving her karma or writing songs. Her third and most recent
album, Counting Down the Days, has taken her three years to finish. She makes it
sound like climbing the North Face of the Eiger in a blizzard. "It's the hardest,
most confronting thing I do. And the most character-building. I wasn't born with
a natural talent for songwriting. It makes success all the sweeter when you've
had to work extra hard.
"I have to find it within myself
to keep going, even when I've written some terrible songs. It's so much easier
to give up. So much easier to sing other people's songs for the whole album. If
I did that, I'd have an album out every year."
Counting Down the Days went
straight to No 1 in the UK album charts. "It was my greatest moment," she says.
"I put everything into it."
From her Australian mother, who
refused to let her give up tap dancing because of a spat with her teacher,
Imbruglia learned that application and routine are what get you through when
creativity is low. "She has taught me you don't quit because you've had a hard
day. She instilled discipline from a young age - we all had our chores and got
our rewards for doing things."
She was brought up in Berkeley
Vale, two hours north of Sydney, the second of four daughters. Her mother,
Maxene, was an assistant head teacher and her Italian father, Eliot, was an
opera-loving horticulturalist who would break into song on car journeys. "He
takes the credit for the fact that I sing, which I think is cute. He is
passionate but open-hearted and gentle, qualities I admire in a man."
From an early age, she knew she
was going to be a star. She did that child star thing of singing into a
hairbrush in front of a mirror and putting on shows. With saucer-eyed
seriousness, she says she had a very strong sense of destiny. "I never
questioned why I was here or what I was meant to do." First dancing, then
singing and acting, then songwriting, Imbruglia was born to entertain. "I never
dabbled with anything else - except hairdressing."
At 16, she won a scholarship to a
performing arts school in Sydney and, although she didn't stick it - a rare
departure from the Maxene school of personal growth - the experience was enough
to get her into television commercials and then on to Neighbours. By the time
she arrived in Britain, aged 20, with no job and an instinct to party, she was a
minor celebrity. Eventually her money ran out and she turned to singing and
songwriting. Her 1997 album, Left of the Middle sold an astonishing seven
million copies worldwide.
Life was a bit more complicated by
the time her much less successful second album, White Lilies Island, came out.
She'd had two shortish relationships - with Lenny Kravitz and David Schwimmer -
and a bout of depression that cannot have been helped by isolating herself on a
quasi-island in the Thames.
Then she met Daniel Johns, of the
rock band Silverchair - a soulmate who almost matched her own degree of angst.
They dated, parted and then came together again and married, despite the fact
that by now she couldn't work anywhere but Britain and he couldn't work outside
Australia.
"The heart knows no geography,"
she said in a pre-nuptial interview. Soon after they got back together, Johns
became seriously ill with reactive arthritis and at times was in a wheelchair.
For a rocky 12 months, she helped him through. "Both of us are really
comfortable with time apart," she says.
"We recognise the benefits. When
your relationship starts that way, you appreciate each other so much more than
couples who are in each other's pockets. It's perfect. I recommend it. Isolation
is a big part of songwriting. If you spend too much time together, it can be a
strain on that side of things." But being apart has its strains: "I spend more
on phones than I do on clothes."
Getting married and getting older,
she says, have helped her "chill out" - but she is not as perfectly chilled as
she would like to be before starting a family. "I would love a family but it
won't be for a few years. I worry about the fact that I'm a stresshead and
imposing that on someone else. Of being over-loving or over-controlling. I am
not very laidback. Friends with children seem so relaxed and comfortable..." The
work in progress may have some way to go.
Telegraph