London – Given the global attention – and the challenge of making a mainstream blockbuster out of a kinky novel – it is just as well that director Sam Taylor-Johnson has great reserves of courage.
Having faced colon cancer when her daughter was an infant, and breast cancer three years later, she is not easily spooked.
‘Surviving cancer does give you a remarkable perspective on life,’ she’s said. ‘You take no ****, take no prisoners, and just do what feels right.’
And now, it seems, what ‘feels right’ is to walk away from the Fifty Shades Of Grey film – and away from its author EL James, with whom she has a ‘toxic’ relationship.
Although she was hired to direct the film with the approval of EL – real name Erika Leonard – it is no secret that the two clashed exhaustingly while bringing the mega-bestselling book to the screen.
They are now said to ‘despise’ each other to such an extent that the director filming the sequels is out of the question.
Rather extraordinarily, Erika attempted to exert control over every aspect of the movie, turning up on set every day to watch filming, rejecting rewrites and trying to keep in as much of the sex as possible.
Sam saw the film as a ‘dark fairy tale’ and Erika viewed it as an erotic epic.
In an interview, Sam conceded: ‘It was difficult, I’m not going to lie. We would have proper on-set barneys and I’m not confrontational.’
The two women even clashed over the final word in the film, with Sam favouring ‘red’, a ‘safe word’ used in the bedroom by the protagonists to tell the other person they have gone too far, and James insisting on ‘stop’.
And so even though she was thought to be in line to direct the two planned sequels to Fifty Shades, and even though the film has defied its critics and proved very successful at the box office, it seems Sam will play no further part in the story of Anastasia Steele and Christian Grey.
But when the dust settles on this outbreak of hostilities surely we will weigh the story of Sam Taylor-Johnson, 47, as more fascinating than anything created by Erika Leonard.
For the woman born as plain Sam Taylor, raised in sleepy Crowborough in Sussex, has had a life which far outshines the plodding boy-meets-girl plot of Fifty Shades.
Her current triumphs - she is beautiful, wealthy, successful and adored by her husband - come after a series of devastating emotional setbacks.
Her story begins in 1967 in Streatham, South London, where Sam and her younger sister Ashley lived with their parents Geraldine and David Taylor.
When she was nine, her father, an accountant - for a chapter of the Hell’s Angels bikers, no less - left to bike around the world and never came back. Her mother moved to Sussex to what Taylor-Johnson describes as a commune, and started to teach yoga and astrology.
In Sam’s words: ‘It started as a fairly ordinary middle-class existence, then I moved into a chaotic hippie world.’
She recalled once asking her mother what religion they were, to which Geraldine replied ‘Hindu’. ‘I remember thinking, “What the f*** does that mean?” She taught yoga at my school, which was highly embarrassing.’
Geraldine remarried but, when Sam was 15, handed her a note to give to her stepfather - saying she was leaving - and walked out, too. Sam said in 2010: ‘My mum has lived in Australia for 22 years, and we have a rocky relationship. But at the same time it’s one I want to maintain.’
After the split, Sam lived with her stepfather, learning self-sufficiency without either parent around.
At school, she felt ‘a total thickie’, and scraped through. She believes she was suffering from undiagnosed attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, which made it impossible for her to concentrate in lessons. ‘I still find it hard to focus on any singular thing,’ she said. ‘It’s why making a film suits me: you always have to answer a million questions.’
However, she re-sat her exams and managed to scrape into Hastings Art College. From there she was accepted to London’s Goldsmiths College – studying alongside other future stars of the Brit Art scene, Damien Hirst, Sarah Lucas and Marcus Harvey. She dated Jake Chapman, later famous for the artworks he makes in partnership with his elder brother, Dinos.
After graduating in 1990, she worked as a dresser at the Royal Opera House and as a manager at a nightclub, but continued to make art. It was her video installation Killing Time – showing four people lip-synching to opera – which brought her to the attention of debonair Jay Jopling, the Old Etonian son of Tory politician Lord Jopling.
He found her work ‘immensely moving’ and invited her to stage a show at his gallery, White Cube. He became Sam’s art dealer, and they married in 1997. The girl who used to queue up for free school dinners now lived in a house off Harley Street with a man worth around £100 million.
‘My life radically altered,’ she said. ‘I had found someone who could provide me with total stability, and I’d not really had that.’
Their happiness was sealed by the birth of daughter Angelica, but eight months later, in 1997, Sam was diagnosed with colon cancer and underwent surgery. She recalled: ‘I’d look at Angelica and say, “There’s no option here. I’ve got to fight through it.”’
By this point she and Jopling were at the epicentre of a glittering if louche social scene, which included supermodel Kate Moss and the late designer Alexander McQueen.
Her lifestyle, Sam said, was ‘drips by day, Prada by night’. The cancer, though, appeared to be beaten.
Nearly three years later, when she was only 32, there was grim news: she discovered a lump in her breast. She had a mastectomy and reconstructive surgery in New York, arranged by her close friend Sir Elton John.
Doctors recommended she take the drug Tamoxifen but she refused, instead giving up dairy products and almost all alcohol, and focusing on having a calmer life instead. ‘I had been punishing my immune system. I was trying to live hard like all of my friends, and I realised that I can’t.’
Despite misgivings from her doctors, she remained cancer-free.
Some of the party crowd drifted away; she had changed. She has spoken of the ‘core of steel’ she developed to deal with the disease. ‘When you’re no longer ill, that core of steel doesn’t go away.’
Her art became ever more successful. She produced an unusual portrait of David Beckham - an hour-long video of him sleeping - for the National Portrait Gallery. In The Crying Men, she took photographs of 28 famous actors weeping.
In 2006, after five cancer-free years, she and Jopling welcomed a second daughter, Jessie. The marriage, though, was over two years later. After their break-up, Jopling was linked to pop’s Lily Allen, 22 years his junior.
Sam fell for a partner even younger - Aaron Johnson, the young actor from Buckinghamshire playing John Lennon in Nowhere Boy, her debut film as a director. She’d been shown the script by a friend and ‘stalked the producers’ to get the job.
At the time they started dating, Aaron was 19, 24 years her junior. They announced plans to marry at the film’s premiere, but had two daughters, Wylda and Romy, before the wedding.
The besotted groom opted to take his wife’s name - so they are now both Taylor-Johnson. He has gladly spent extended periods as a househusband. Now they have a £13 million house (bought for cash) in Primrose Hill, North London, and another place in Los Angeles, and spent most of last year filming Fifty Shades in Vancouver. The family goes with her.
‘My girls have the best woman to look up to,’ Aaron said last year. ‘She’s the strongest woman I know.’
Just don’t mention that age difference. ‘The amount of men I know with the same age gap that we have - how come no one says anything about that?’ Sam has said.
‘I try to ignore it. In my life, I’ve never really listened when people start forming opinions on how you should be doing things.’
Daily Mail