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Cara Delevingne
Getty Images
British model Cara Delevingne has retired from the runway, and no one is happier than Cara Delevingne.
2015-08-08
The London-born beauty always dreamt of making it big on the silver screen, but was roped into fashion when a classmate's parent scouted her at boarding school.
In light of Delevingne's box office-queue — which includes "Paper Towns," "Pan," and "Suicide Squad" — we're taking a look at how the socialite became a Hollywood star.
Cara Jocelyn Delevingne was born 22 years ago — a brooding little girl immersed in the high-society lifestyle of London's Belgravia neighborhood.
She escaped her troubles by watching thrillers and action movies, and singing. "I just wanted to be like J.Lo when I started" in the business, Cara says. "The last thing I want to be is a model-slash-actress,” she says. “But I love actress-slash-musicians.”
A 10-year-old Cara made her modeling debut in Italian Vogue, with legendary fashion photographer Bruce Weber behind the camera. She recalls it being a bit "odd."
At Bedales, an English co-ed liberal boarding school with a wild reputation, she threw herself into drama. Cara almost landed the titular role in Tim Burton's "Alice in Wonderland," when Sarah Doukas, the head of Storm modeling agency and a Bedales parent, discovered her.
In order to make enough money to put herself through drama school, she dropped out of Bedales and signed with Storm in 2009. Cara worked for a year before booking a paid job.
"The first time I walked into Burberry," Cara says, "the woman just said, 'Turn around, go away.'" Finally, Burberry's Christopher Bailey — who succeeded Angela Ahrendts as CEO — hired her for the brand's spring 2011 campaign.
Bailey was reportedly "so seduced by her energy that he thought that she would be the perfect person to represent the brand." Seemingly overnight, she became the face of the British luxury fashion house.
Her success in modeling put acting on the back-burner. "I used to always be so angry about modeling," Cara says. "I was always like, 'F**k, I'm never going to able to act because I'm a model.'"
A photo posted by Cara Delevingne (@caradelevingne) on
Her fuzzy friend Cecil served as a prop on set at a Topshop shoot, and Cara fell in love. She brought him home and now documents their relationship on Instagram.
In between work hours, she partied. Hard. "I had to be doing things with people at all times," she says. "The life of the party is an easy part for me to play. It rots your insides, though."
In 2012, the runway guru made her way to the big screen in the Academy Award-nominated "Anna Karenina," starring Keira Knightley. She played a lower-billed character, Princess Sorokina.
She snagged small roles in a handful of movies and TV series, including "The Face of an Angel" alongside Kate Beckinsale and the Sky Arts drama "Playhouse Presents: Timeless."
Cara will appear in no less than five movies in 2015, starting with July's indie drama based on a young adult novel of the same name, "Paper Towns."
Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty
Director Jake Schreier said it was love at first sight. "I had her improvise with Nat [Wolff], who had already been cast, and it was gripping," he says. 'She won the part in the room that day."
Author John Green and actors Nat Wolff and Cara Delevingne goof off at a "Paper Towns" event in London.John Phillips/Getty
She was recently lambasted on a morning talk show for appearing grumpy and joking about never having read John Green's "Paper Towns." She took to Instagram to laugh it off.
None of these movies, however, can touch the hype surrounding Warner Brothers' "Suicide Squad." Based on a comic book starring the most infamous supervillains in the DC Comics universe, "Suicide Squad" stars Jared Leto as the Joker, Will Smith as Deadshot, Margot Robbie as Harley Quinn, and others.
Warner Bros.
In the comics, Cara's character, Enchantress, lived an ordinary life until she stumbled on something she wasn't supposed to see. Her snooping endowed her with magical powers, including healing and teleportation.
"I'm actually playing two different parts," Delevingne says of the role. "I'm playing opposites, a mousey kind of scientist and a crazy, feral witch, which is great. Both sides of my personality."
Though the actress' chances of crossover-fame grow stronger every day, Cara says she still has to prove herself. "People say to me, 'The money's probably not enough, it's not the amount of money you usually get paid [for modeling],'" she says. "And I sit there going, 'No, that's not the point, I would pay to do this film because I care about it so much.'"
While the model says she hasn't quit fashion, acting is enough for now. “Being on set was like getting to relive school again, but happy,” Cara says. “Trying to be an adult and be mature for so long, I’d kind of forgotten how young I was.”
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Melia Robinson is a reporter at Business Insider covering how lawyers are changing how they work and bill in the age of artificial intelligence — and about the tech companies racing to serve them.Melia first joined Business Insider in 2013. She lives in New York City.
