Sophie hits refresh
Sophie Anderton did her growing up on the catwalk, but when she became ‘tabloid-famous’, things began to spiral. She tells Niamh Horan about leaving Chelsea for marriage in Glendalough and how she sees the heady Nineties now...
Sophie Anderton, Nineties Itgirl, Noughties nightclub high priestess and beloved cover girl, is now living in Wicklow – and her accommodations, and her husband, are suitably on-brand.
She’s installed at Glendalough Estate and is married to Kaz Balinski, who also goes by the name Count Kazimierz Balinski-Jundzill. (The title, he explains is from “one of my great-grandfathers, who fought the Turks and did very well, being given a title and land.”)
But how did a one-time supermodel end up countess of the manor in the garden county of Ireland?
That is the story she proceeds to tell me over three by turns riotous and sombre hours at their stately home.
It is the story of how a teenager from a comfortable middle-class family in Bristol became a modelling sensation – scoring a lingerie contract that made her tabloid catnip, propelling her overnight to the front pages of the red tops. And how, a decade later, she decided to “take the cash” – do Big Brother – before stepping back from the limelight. (The last part with a limited measure of success.)
She has endured intrusions and addictions, but has lived to tell the tale.
Today, she’s not bitter (and yes, one imagines that 1,400 acres must help). Rather she’s forthcoming, and even effusive, as she makes a full-time return to modelling after a decade-long hiatus. That break came after two decades in which her life was as much under the microscope as it was in front of the lens. And it nearly broke her.
“I lost my anonymity,” she says, reflecting back on the Nineties and Noughties. “I lost the right to be a human being who makes mistakes. Everyone is flawed – and I can guarantee you that if the majority who aren’t in the public eye were forced to tell the truth about themselves, they wouldn’t be so quick to judge other people.
“Just because you’re in the public eye, it doesn’t make you public property.”
Part of those “mistakes” stemmed from the overlap between the end of her recovery from a severe accident and the beginning of her modelling career. In fact, she was still on crutches when her career took off – but that meant she had recently been prescribed morphine as a painkiller for leg injuries she suffered when she was just 11.
She had gone to a local shop with a friend to get milk when a car sent her “flying through the air and landing in the middle of the road”.
A car had swerved, “hit me on my right hip and spun me up in the air. I landed in front of the car, and both wheels went over my ankle”.
She nearly lost her foot, and it took 27 operations to get her back standing.
A friend’s sister was a photographer and entered her in a modelling competition. She won, and after her GCSEs (the UK Junior Cert), she moved to London.
She began catwalk work almost immediately, snagging a (German) Vogue cover, but when she was 19 her career went absolutely stratospheric, after she signed a bra modelling contract and became the face and body of Gossard’s new launch, Glossies.
Thrust into the limelight on the back of a suggestive ‘girl in the grass’ campaign shot by high-end fashion photographer Herb Ritts, the teenager became tabloid-famous and an overnight It-girl.
She remembers the early days of her modelling career, when she was just 16, travelling to Tokyo, Milan and Paris. Despite being lean, she says: “I was never thin enough.”
She didn’t speak any French when she was in Paris – but there is a universal vernacular that transcends language.
“I could understand them perfectly – and the comments were brutal, really vicious and really nasty. Stuff like: ‘She is huge. She is overweight.’ I was a size eight. But they are a business and you are a commodity.
“I was 17. At that age of course I took it to heart. I was destroyed by it.”
Growing up in Bristol with an older group of friends, she admits she wasn’t naive, but “somebody said: ‘If you try this it will keep you thin’ and I was like: ‘OK then.’
“It was a different era. You didn’t have mobile phones. So when I was travelling, most of the time my parents didn’t even know what country I was in.”
She experienced the modelling industry before there was any serious reckoning with what have since been characterised as exploitative practices, and she agrees that there were MeToo moments.
People used say I had ‘a series of failed relationships’. No I haven’t. I’ve had a series of very successful relationships – but I didn’t make the same mistake that every other woman does
“It was a d ifferent era. The same laws weren’t in place. Milan was the only place I was ever scared and that was coming back from a fitting during Milan Fashion Week. It was very late and I was on the underground, and I could feel somebody coming up behind me. There was nobody else around and he pushed me up against the wall – I must have been 17.”
When discussing her historic drugs dependency, she says she loathes the word “addiction”.
“Honestly, addictions come in so many different packages and I hate stereotyping. I know everyone wants to put a label on it because it makes it easier – but it’s fundamentally the product of a deeper-rooted problem. And that is the hardest part to understand.
“People think you’ll be OK the minute you put down the drink or drugs, or stop putting your fingers down your throat and start eating – but that’s when the scary part starts.”
For her, the scary part came in 2007 when she entered rehab. She did a number of reality shows (Celebrity Love Island, I’m a Celebrity), before “cashing in” on 2016’s Celebrity Big Brother when she was 35, after which she says, she “stepped away”.
She knew Kaz from when she was 19, as he’d been good friends with her ex-fiance Robert Hanson (son of multimillion British industrialist James Hanson).
Though nothing happened between them back then, on the eve of her wedding to Kaz, Robert told her he’d noticed chemistry between them, almost 30 years earlier.
“He was like: ‘I knew you two were up to something then.’ And there is a photo which I can show you, I am twiddling my necklace, leaning in, and he is blushing. But neither of us acted on it. He was married, I was engaged – and you can fancy someone and not have to act on it.”
Robert Hanson was 19 years her senior and they made a conspicuously handsome couple. They were engaged for seven years and she cancelled the wedding three times.
“I was nicknamed the runaway bride,” she tells me, adding that she never liked men her own age. “Men are fundamentally more immature than women on a lot of fronts.”
Count Kazimierz Balinski-Jundzill is 56 and was born in London to Krys Balinski and Katrina Johnson. He went to school in St Gerard’s and Brook House in Bray from 1975 to 1979, completing his schooling in Switzerland. After school he started a record company in the UK, and subsequently sold it. By the time he and Sophie reconnected in 2014, he had been married twice, first to chef and model Lorraine Pascale (they divorced in 2000), and then to Vanessa Hart.
(His daughter with Pascale, Ella Balinska starred alongside Kristen Stewart in the 2019 Charlie’s Angel reboot, and is also a successful techno DJ, based in LA.)
His family, he told the Wicklow People in October 2023, were “World War II refugees from Poland who managed to avoid being held in sub-standard camps”.
His mother, the paper reported, bought the property in 1986, and he has been the principal resident for the last two decades.
For years, Kaz worked in the “extractive industry” – mining in iron ore and precious metals and gem stones. Then the recession of 2008 came along and the price of steel collapsed, which brought him back to Co Wicklow.
Kaz says he knew the global economy was turning a year before that, after a phone call with a friend, who was the chairman of the property division in one of the world’s biggest banks.
“He told me that all of their mortgagebacked securities had turned sour. There is not much you can do – because if you have heard about it, then others have too. So you are all in it together.”
In January 2008, he got the call to say his family’s assets – invested in funds and equities – had been decimated.
“I can remember the day. It was on a Friday – of course, everyone wants to deliver bad news on a Friday – and we were trying to sort it out the following week.”
His smile is rueful.
His abiding memory, he says now with a laugh, is of “becoming more and more poor by the day, of being absolutely f**ked and wondering how to offload these assets and get refinanced.”
He says “the family lost over 90pc of its value over the space of 18 months”. But
Kaz recalls how his time living in Liberia through a time of war taught him “an awful lot”. He had lived there when rehabilitating the former Lamco iron ore concession with Arcelor Mittal.
By the time he rekindled his friendship – and ultimately romance – with Sophie, he had been through what he calls “a time of personal self-development”.
He felt he was ready to commit and it was Kaz who initially reached out to Sophie on Facebook in 2014 – to see how she was doing, for old times’ sake. They didn’t go out together until three years later, when they went for dinner.
“Suddenly Kaz started appearing in London every two weeks, and a couple of dinners in, we kissed when walking to the car,” says Sophie .
By her 40th birthday, in 2017, they were in love. After the love, came the logistics.
Sophie was living just off the King’s
Road, Chelsea’s ground zero. And Kaz was in the wilds of Wicklow.
“It was a big decision with a couple of cold-feet moments,” Kaz explains. “She didn’t know many people in Ireland.”
A year later, in 2018, she moved over. They married in 2021 (after a few false starts due to Covid) and their wedding was covered in Hello! magazine. She now has four stepchildren and 16 godchildren.
It’s clear from watching the couple that the relationship between Kaz and Sophie is full of genuine love and warmth.
In a more relaxed moment, when the photographer has finished taking his shots and the group are sitting around having lunch, Sophie casually puts her arms around Kaz and gives him a gentle kiss as she talks about how they are mindful never to become complacent or take one another for granted.
While Sophie is preparing lunch, I have time to grab a few minutes with Kaz, who is incredibly down to earth. Given he was married twice before, I wonder why he decided to tie the knot a third time with Sophie.
“That’s what you do in life, I believe. You’ve got to make something out of your life,” he tells me.
But was he not scared off, after the first two times didn’t work out?
“The first time, I made a bollocks of things. The second time, we came to a point where by we realised we were living apart and it was a natural progression. So I said to myself If I am going to be married again, I wanted to do it properly.”
Now, he says, he and Sophie are together almost “24/7”.
You can fancy someone and you don’t have have to act on it... I never liked men that were my own age. I think men are fundamentally more immature than women on a lot of fronts
Sophie has been very candid about wanting and trying for children, and the pain of miscarriages. She believes women can be at their most unthinking when it comes to other women’s infertility.
She says she once received an email from a friend, telling her she was not getting any younger and maybe she should start thinking about getting pregnant – because she didn’t have much time.
“I replied saying: ‘How do you know I can even effing-well have children?’”
Another similar experience happened in the garden of her Wicklow home. It was at the Beyond the Pale music festival, held on their estate. A group of women she was talking to casually nudged her to think about having children – as there would come a point when it would be too late.
“I remember coming back into the house and my friend Sue, who had been my maid-of-honour, was standing there. I told her I was going to hit somebody, I was so angry. I’ve never felt that kind of loss of control before,” she says. “But it was pain.”
It’s not just her lack of offspring that has drawn unsolicited comment from other women. Her weight and relationship status have been a lightning rod for female commentary too.
“I get comments all the time from women — like ‘The only reason you’re so slim is because you haven’t had children’ and the other one that runs alongside that is ‘Do you not eat?’
“And I’m thinking that’s so stupid. You can’t train the way I do and achieve the physical [tone] without eating. I’m 47 and I would look haggard and withered away if I didn’t eat at the age I am.
“And I used to have people say that I had ‘a series of failed relationships’. No I haven’t. I have had a series of very successful relationships – but I didn’t make the same mistake as every other woman by just thinking: ‘I’ll get married and that is me sorted now’ until I met the right man.
“I don’t believe in divorce. I never wanted to get married and be divorced, because I saw how much my mother and my real father did not like each other. They weren’t meant to be married.
“My mum says the best thing that came out of it was that she had me – and we are really close.”
I pause to clarify that the judgemental comments she is talking about come mainly from women. “Oh, it’s all women,” she exclaims. “Every single one. A man wouldn’t dare say these things.”
She describes the unsolicited advice and judgement as “cruel and nasty”, but says “now I just feel pity for any woman who thinks they can comment on my fertility.
“And it’s not that I can’t have kids. My
husband and I, we matched 99.999pc in every way – bar this. But this whole idea, that past the age of 35... ‘Gasp! Your biological clock is ticking!’ and you’re basically six feet under as a woman... I’m like: ‘Oh no, no. I’m just starting to begin to start my life.’”
What adds vinegar to the wound is that Sophie has had two miscarriages.
“The most recent happened two years ago. We weren’t even trying. I didn’t even know I was pregnant. I had no idea what was happening. I just thought I was haemorrhaging and didn’t know what the hell was happening. Obviously, that left a huge amount of trauma.”
Ironically the miscarriages confirmed to her that she had done the right thing by not going through with IVF, which she had previously considered before the Covid pandemic and lockdowns.
“I really wanted to have a child with Kaz. I didn’t want to have a child with anyone else before, but obviously when we got together I was 40, I was living here in Wicklow but still travelling a huge amount.
“I still had my foot in my old world, travelling around Europe and to the States and in that time we had been going to a clinic, we had gotten through the process of freezing and tests, and then they said they wanted to put me on HRT and I thought hang on a second – this isn’t for me.
“I felt very uncomfortable and I don’t know why, but IVF just wasn’t for me. I think there are clinics out there which are a godsend for women who are desperate for a child – but I was not desperate enough at that point. So we just thought we will just wait a bit longer...”
That’s when the pandemic happened and, as Sophie says, the world stood still for two years. “At the end of it I came out and I thought: ‘Hang on, I am 45. That is a very different matter from my early 40s.’”
For Kaz’s part, she says he told her: “‘I will do whatever you want, because I would love to have a child with you – but also we have got to consider our quality of life and what’s fair.’ And so I realised that when that child is 21, we’re going to be considered ‘old’.”
Was it hard to let go of the dream of having children?
“I came to peace with it, because I felt too many people were playing god in this world – and that was my attitude coming out of Covid. ”
These days, she says, there are times when the idea of a child will momentarily tug at her heart.
“Don’t get me wrong, I still have the odd moment when I see a beautiful picture with a woman and a baby on social media – but let’s face it, none of us put our really shit days up,” she says with a laugh.
“We all pick our best moments. But yes, I do find I get that hankering.”
At the same time, she is aware of her good fortune.
“We are blissfully happy in comparison to many other couples.”
After her most recent miscarriage, she said her husband spoke the words that brought her the most comfort.
“He said: ‘As far as I’m concerned, you are more of a woman because you have made the decision yourself, rather than feeling you have to go through with it.’”
For now, she has new projects keeping her busy.
She has just collaborated on a new underwear collection with designer Helen McAlinden, Helen McAlinden by Sophie X, which launches on September 10, as part of her full-time return to modelling.
“I am finally feeling like I have returned to where I belong – in front of the camera.”
She also has three (undisclosed) projects in the pipeline.
But I wonder if she is afraid she will ever “pick up” again.
“No. Because there is just no option.
And I wouldn’t want to be numb. I love life now. For me, I have the most incredible life with Kaz.”