From Australia’s Gold Coast to The Wolf of Wall Street, Margot Robbie is the latest girl from nowhere to become a Hollywood star
– From Dinner at Eight (1933)
Jean Harlow was Hollywood’s first ‘blonde bombshell’. Not that there hadn’t been fair-haired actresses in films before, all the way back to Clara Bow. But the star of Platinum Blonde was something else: ‘a glowing white Sєxpot’, according to the great lexicographer of cinema, David Thomson.
Finally a tragic figure, ᴅᴇᴀᴅ at 26, Harlow is by no means Thomson’s favourite Hollywood blonde, nor Martin Scorsese’s, though the latter gallantly chose Gwen Stefani to play her in The Aviator. Much more Thomson and Scorsese’s speed is Carole Lombard, the smart, funny screwball star. Lombard died young too, but unlike poor Harlow, she was nobody’s fool.
Neither, based on an afternoon and an evening spent in her company, is the very latest bombshell to detonate: Margot Robbie, a dazzling 24-year-old Australian who, in her breakthrough as Leonardo DiCaprio’s trophy wife in Scorsese’s priapic epic, The Wolf of Wall Street, as well as in her first lead role, opposite Will Smith in Focus, plays the archetypal blonde on the make: flirty, ambitious and Sєxually available.
I meet Robbie for lunch at the Ham Yard Hotel in central London. She arrives in a hurry – we’ll soon learn she does everything in a hurry – in a vintage Rolling Stones singlet; ripped black jeans from Frame Denim; ankle boots from AllSaints; a Carven coat; and carrying a red Chanel bag.
One doesn’t have to be a professional casting director to recognise that Robbie is as perfect a specimen of young womanhood as a film-maker could hope to find. With her honeyed skin, her mega-watt eyes and her widescreen smile, it’s almost as if she’d arrived pre-CGI’d, a Disney princess sprung to life. Were the makers of Frozen ever to consider a live-action version of their animated phenomenon (as if they aren’t already), they could do worse than cast Robbie as Elsa, the vanilla-haired ice queen, so uniform are her features, so uncomplicated is her appeal.
As a lunch date Robbie is equally fit for purpose. She’s sunny, lively, unpretentious – in a word, Australian – and obviously determined to extract the maximum enjoyment from any situation. But she’s no pushover: as will become clear, Robbie is also driven, dedicated and resolute. There is grit behind the grin.
Robbie’s character, Naomi Lapaglia, was described in the screenplay as ‘the H๏τtest blonde ever’. Along with ‘every other actress in town’, she sent in her video with no expectation that it would even be watched. It was Ellen Lewis, the eminent casting director and veteran Scorsese collaborator, who pᴀssed Robbie’s video along to the director; Lewis it was who put Stefani into Jean Harlow’s shoes for The Aviator and Cameron Diaz into Scorsese’s Gangs of New York. When the call came for an audition, Robbie was in London. She remembers the date – 3 June 2012 – because it was the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee weekend, and she’d been invited to join some fellow Aussies for a picnic: an all-day event that turned into an all-nighter.
Over to Robbie for what happened next: ‘I get home at six in the morning to all these missed phone calls and my team is saying, “You are on a plane in a couple of hours to New York to read with Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio.” So: race to the airport, get to New York, go straight to see Ellen Lewis, she takes one look at me, I’m wearing jeans, flat boots, and she says, “No. Here’s what you’re going to do: SoHo’s right there. Lots of stores. You’re going to get a really tight, short dress and the highest pair of heels you can find.”‘
Next scene. The characters are now married, and mid-argument. Robbie again: ‘In my head I was like, “You have literally 30 seconds left in this room and if you don’t do something impressive nothing will ever come of it. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime chance, just take it.” And so I start screaming at him and he’s yelling back at me. And he’s really scary. I can barely keep up. And he ends it saying, “You should be happy to have a husband like me. Now get over here and kiss me.” So I walk up really close to his face and then I’m like, “Maybe I should kiss him. When else am I ever going to get a chance to kiss Leo DiCaprio, ever?” But another part of my brain clicks and I just go, Whack! I hit him in the face. And then I scream, “ҒUCҜ you!” And that’s not in the script at all. The room just went ᴅᴇᴀᴅ silent and I froze.
‘I’m thinking, “You just hit Leonardo DiCaprio in the face. They’re going to arrest you because that’s ᴀssault. You’re definitely never going to work again, that’s for sure. They’ll probably sue you as well in case there’s a bruise on his face and he needs to film something else.”
‘And then all of a sudden Marty and Leo just burst out laughing. Marty says, “That was great!” Leo’s like, “Hit me again!”‘
That last bit sounds speculative. But I suspect she fully believes she would have got here anyway, eventually, without Marty and Leo and Ellen Lewis and that panicked celebrity face-slap. The way she tells it, she never lacked for self-belief.
Maggot, as she is known by friends and family, is from fruit-farming stock on both sides, the third of four children – girl, boy, girl, boy – raised by a single mother, Sarie. Her childhood was spent shuttling between the mountains near the Gold Coast and a small country town, Dalby, where most of her extended family lives. It was, she says, a relatively simple life, rural and outdoorsy.
Sarie – the spitting image, I’m told, of her famous daughter – is a physiotherapist who worked with the elderly when her children were younger, and now does the same for disabled kids. (‘Heart of gold,’ says her daughter, whose most cherished accomplishment to date is the fact that, on her mother’s 60th birthday last year, Robbie was able to pay off the mortgage on Sarie’s house.)
