A Star, Reborn

New York, LA, London and now Dubai. Lindsay Lohan is a woman on the move, and on a mission. Here, she opens up about her new life in the Middle East, faith, media fallouts, and her grand plans for the future

- Emma Day

“Are you ready to go to Lebanon?”

It’s not the question I’m expecting as I stand, passport-less, at the pre-arranged meeting spot on a dock in Dubai’s Jumeirah Fishing Harbour. Even less so from Lindsay Lohan, the former child star turned Hollywood tearaway (if you believe the hyperbolic headlines).

She is a woman who’s spent the majority of her life on cinema screens, TV sets, magazine covers and, yes, splashed across tabloids all over the world. Everything from her legal troubles to her nights out with Paris Hilton and Britney Spears and even a stint in rehab have been bandied about the papers, paraded as the fall from grace of a teen movie queen. After more than a decade of such media attention, you feel as if you know her, without having met. But the Lindsay Lohan of today is not the Lindsay Lohan of then.

Although stood there, on a rickety wooden dock, with her hair back to a burning-ember red, she looks little unchanged from her Mean Girls days. Indeed, a dusting of freckles across her face, uncovered by makeup, makes her look younger than her 31 years. She now lives in Dubai and I’ve spent months pursuing her for an interview, desperate to quiz her on her move to the Middle East, her much-touted new businesses and those stories about converting to Islam.

She’s a face that sells, a divisive topic of conversation, an icon of a generation - but don’t call her a party girl, she detests that title.

“What does it even mean?” she questions, bristling, as we bumpily coast across Dubai’s waters on a hazy May afternoon. (For, with a broad grin, Lindsay had revealed she meant Lebanon in the World Islands, the man-made archipelago off the city’s coast, rather than the nation a three-hour flight away).