The Moment Of Ruth

An Oscar nomination catapulted Ruth Negga into the A-list, but it’s taking on ‘Hamlet for our times’ that will really test the Irish actress’s mettle. Jude Rogers meets an extraordinary star and an accidental fashion icon.

There are fabulous hotels and then there’s the Hotel Du Cap-Eden-Roc, a breathtaking chateau on its own forested peninsula in Antibes on the French Riviera. American author F Scott Fitzgerald used it as the inspiration for the Hôtel des Etrangers in his 1934 novel Tender Is The Night. Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor honeymooned here. Picasso designed the restaurant menu in 1955. Fast forward to 2018, and one of Hollywood’s most exciting talents – and newly crowned Louis Vuitton ambassador – the Academy Award-nominated Ruth Negga, is sitting on a window seat in the ground-floor bar, yachts glistening in the bright blue Mediterranean sea behind her. ‘This isn’t too shabby, is it?,’ she says, in a soft Irish accent that makes every word she says bounce with life. Her silent-movie star eyes are round like saucers; an Alexander McQueen skull T-shirt hugs her neat, fine-boned frame. ‘Honestly, there was a yacht this morning outside my window that emerged from the sea. Have you seen it? It was so huge I thought the apocalypse had come!’

At last night’s Louis Vuitton Cruise 2019 show at the Fondation Maeght art gallery, Negga, 36, took her place on the front row next to Emma Stone, and shimmered in photos with Sienna Miller and Sophie Turner. And anyone who recalls her bold, vintage dash on the red carpet for 2016’s Loving (in which she played one half of the first interracial couple to have their marriage recognised by the American Supreme Court) won’t be surprised to learn her stylist is Karla Welch. But it’s how she encountered Welch (whose clients include Karlie Kloss, Lorde and Elisabeth Moss) that reveals Negga’s true devil-may-care nature. ‘I googled “top 25 stylists in the world”,’ she smiles.