INTERVIEW: Sam Taylor-Wood

"A long-faced English beauty of 43 in Marc Jacobs shirt and Christian Louboutain high heels, her speech peppered with “I dunnos”, she is a disarming blend of the immaculate and the chummy — one of those women who always seems emerge, Venus-like, from a dust-cloud of companionable chaos. She is most famous in Britain for her work exploring the soft underbelly of celebrity: her series of photographs showing famous actors, such as Ed Harris, Daniel Craig and Paul Newman, crying; the starkly arresting video she shot for Elton John’s I Want Love, featuring Robert Downey Jr, lip-syncing in a single take around an empty mansion; her 2004 video portrait of soccer superstar David Beckham, commissioned by the National Portrait Gallery, showing him sleeping after a training session in Madrid, his hands tucked sweetly beneath his head, like an 18^th century shephard. Where Andy Warhol coolly anatomised the desire instilled in us by the famous, Taylor-Wood’s work takes in the whole range of emotions — protective, proprietorial, maternal — which fan out around her newly tenderized icons." — From my interview with Sam Taylor-Wood for New York Magazine