The Female Lead Read online

  Vian: Until now nobody has helped these girls, but they can help if they want – they can. I am speaking about the international community, as well as the Iraqi government: if they work together they can defeat ISIS and liberate those girls.

  Deelan: My mother was always the biggest influence in my life. She sacrificed herself to make me the person I am now. She was understanding and encouraging, and supported me the whole way. But my courage comes from my people. I was taught courage by a five-year-old child who had to walk for three days without food or water to survive. I was taught courage by each girl I sat with as I heard her story. I never saw the girls as victims: I saw heroes. Every time I had the chance to help them and saw their innocent smiles, I felt confident. And I never forget the people around me who believe in me, who never let me fight alone, and who support me. When you don’t feel you are alone, it gives you more strength.

  I have adopted a 16-year-old girl who was sold five times from soldier to soldier. She has started going to school and studying and I wish her a better future. All these girls are our sisters and daughters. When I see all these girls with all these sad stories and I see such fear in their eyes, it gives me the strength to deliver their voices to the whole world. We cannot keep quiet. We have to tell the whole world.

  Deelan’s Object

  I don’t have an object so much as an objective, and the one that is precious for me is helping my people. Since I heard the first stories from the girls who have been assaulted and tortured, I felt those girls are my responsibility and I have to deliver their voices to the whole world. My objective is to deliver their message.

  VIAN & DR DEELAN DAKHIL SAEED

  Yazidi member, Council of Representatives of Iraq Doctor at the Sinjar Foundation for Human Development

  SHEILA NEVINS

  Sheila Nevins, president of HBO Documentary Films, was born in New York and studied to be an actress at Yale School of Drama. During the early 1970s, she began to work behind the camera, as a producer for CBS and ABC television stations. She went on to join HBO and has been head of the network’s documentary production for 36 years. She has received 31 Primetime Emmy Awards, 34 News and Documentary Emmys and 40 Peabody Awards and, during her tenure, HBO documentaries have won 25 Academy Awards. Nevins’s work includes the 1996 film Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills, which exposed the wrongful conviction of three men known as the West Memphis Three and led to their release; Real Sex, a series about sexual trends; and the multipart project, Addiction, which was inspired by her son’s struggle with substance abuse.

  * * *

  We didn’t have any money and I had a rough childhood. My father worked in a post office and was also a bookie. Being a bookie in New York was against the law then, so we were always bailing him out. My mother had Raynaud’s disease and scleroderma and, in her late 40s, she was wheelchair-bound because she’d had a leg amputation. She was a tough cookie. She had four brothers and she was the only one who went to college, where she majored in physics. My father wasn’t home much and she was a hard mom. She wanted me to take over the world, to get As, to get into good schools, to be thin, to have long hair, to not pierce my ears – I did pierce my ears, but I didn’t tell her.

  It was the feminist Gloria Steinem who made me realise that I could be, at the very least, as good as a guy.

  The need to earn a salary was the single most important factor in my life, because it made me want to be good at everything so that I could get a job. So if I didn’t like calculus, I worked harder at calculus. I took the first job I could get. Nothing was ever beneath me – it still isn’t!

  I had an unsuccessful first marriage. I wanted to go to Europe and, in the 60s, a woman couldn’t travel alone, so I married this guy from Yale Law School and, later, we wound up in Washington. I wanted to work in theatre but he wanted me to shop and cook and be home at night and on weekends, and I thought that was what I was supposed to do if I was married. The only daytime work I could think of that was close to theatre, was television. I got the part of a secretary in Adventures in English, programmes that were produced by the United States Information Agency and sent all over the world to teach people English.

  I want to give ageing a kick in the ass. I want to keep doing what I do as well, if not better, than anybody else.

  When I divorced, I came back to New York. I didn’t want to be on camera any more, so I produced short pieces on subjects such as dog hotels for ABC News. Then I heard about a job at HBO, making this thing called ‘documentary’, which paid better than the job I had. Every job that I ever moved to paid more than the one before – that was the criterion rather than the job itself.

  It was the feminist Gloria Steinem who made me realise that I could be, at the very least, as good as a guy; and that there was something inherent in the relationship between men and women that made it harder for women to succeed. Forty years ago there was a lot of flirting and laughing at things that I didn’t think were funny just because some guy said them. I was pretty, skinny and tall and there were proposals and suggestions of infidelity that didn’t interest me. The great advantage to ageing is that nobody pinches your ass – I don’t know if men do that any more. They certainly don’t do it to me! The nice thing about getting older is that people think you might have something to say. It kicks in with wrinkles, dental caps and bags under your eyes. People think, ‘She must have something to say – she’s still here!’

  I am most proud of allowing anonymous people’s voices to be heard, of making you care about a cause at dinner that you didn’t know about at breakfast.

  I am most proud of allowing anonymous people’s voices to be heard, of making you care about a cause at dinner that you didn’t know about at breakfast. I love the film Paradise Lost, and I’d like to be able to say that I made it to free three men – I did not. I saw a tiny article in the New York Times about ritualistic devil killing in Arkansas and my initial instincts were quite base – it was a good story and I thought I could get a rating. So I sent film-makers Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky down there and, after a few days, they called and said, ‘We don’t think these kids are devil worshippers. We think they’re being framed.’ So I said, ‘Keep filming,’ and then it became a cause.

  There is always something that hurts somebody somewhere that needs to be told.

  The Addiction project changed my life – and hopefully other people’s lives, too. Before I made it, I thought addiction was a choice because I am not an addictive person (although I may be addicted to work). Then I saw that my son David was not responsible for his problems. It was just as if he was diabetic or had polio. Everybody had said you were supposed to let somebody hit rock bottom and then they would either die or come back a new, improved person; but the project made my husband and I decide that saving David would be the focus of our lives, and I think we succeeded.

  I won’t retire. I want to give ageing a kick in the ass. I want to keep doing what I do as well, if not better, than anybody else. There is always something that hurts somebody somewhere that needs to be told, whether it’s cancer or depression or homelessness, or the freedom to have a certain kind of sexuality or the right to be gay. There is always something that someone is getting beaten up for.

  Sheila’s Object

  The little boxes containing my first, second and third dogs’ ashes – Hamburger, Foxy and Corny. Euthanising Corny in 2005 was probably one of the hardest moments of my life. He got cancer and I had to give him up so that he didn’t suffer. How I bury my dogs depends on how much money I am earning at the time, so the boxes are a sign of my success. Hamburger is in a wooden box, Foxy is in an urn and half Corny’s ashes are in an expensive marble box and half are buried near the swimming pool where there is a plaque that says, ‘If love could keep you alive, you would be here today.’

  When I married for the second time, I kept my name and my own bank account. To this day, I’ll say, ‘That’s my chair. I bought it,’ or, ‘That’s my painting. I boug
ht it.’ I sound awful, but the distinction is clear in my mind – that I can afford to do something that I couldn’t have done when I was younger.

  SHEILA NEVINS

  Television producer and president, HBO Documentary Films

  CLARE SMYTH

  Clare Smyth is the first female British chef to hold and retain three Michelin stars. Born in Northern Ireland, she grew up on a farm in County Antrim. The day after she left school at the age of 16, she moved to England to go to catering college in Portsmouth. After working in Australia, America and Monaco, she took up her current post as head chef at Restaurant Gordon Ramsay in Royal Hospital Road in London. She was awarded an MBE in 2013.

  * * *

  I knew from the age of 14 that I wanted to be a chef. Teenagers get very into things and I was very into food, but there wasn’t much of a culinary scene in Northern Ireland. In the restaurant where I was working, the chefs came over from England, so I decided that was where I had to go. I always knew what kind of cooking I wanted to do, and I wanted to be world class. I was pretty headstrong and, looking back, I can see why my parents were worried about me setting off on my own at 16. But at that age you have no fear. It’s only afterwards that you think you were naïve and stupid.

  I was pretty headstrong and, looking back, I can see why my parents were worried about me setting off on my own at 16.

  I went to catering college in Portsmouth. Catering college doesn’t really prepare you for working at the top of the industry, so I got an apprenticeship at Grayshott Hall [the hotel and spa restaurant in Hampshire] and worked there for four days a week as well. I had already read everything by all the top chefs, recipe books and other food writing. I’m quite an arty person and it’s the creative side of food that appeals to me – the detail, glamour and beauty of it.

  I love simple food too, but the kind of thing we do here, the creativity and plating, is a different thing. At home I’d never be able to cook in the way we do here at Royal Hospital Road. We have 18 chefs and 44 seats. It’s quite rarefied. It’s not just about eating. People come to have an extraordinary experience.

  Once I had my qualification, I got a job at Bibendum in London, which was quite tough. I was 17 and I had no money, so I had to walk quite a long way to work. But I loved that restaurant. The produce they use is phenomenal. At that time I was the only female chef in the kitchen and I felt I had to be better than everyone else to prove myself. I couldn’t ever say I was tired or that I’d cut myself, things that the guys were able to admit freely. I didn’t think at the time that I was like that because I was different. It never really occurred to me that there was any barrier. I was tough on myself – needlessly, I now think – but that was mainly about doing a good job. If you do a good job, then everyone wants you on their team.

  I joined some friends who were opening a hotel restaurant in Cornwall with an emphasis on Pacific Rim cooking, and then I went to Australia to immerse myself more deeply in that style of food. By the time I was 21 I was back in Cornwall at the same hotel, in Rock, as head chef, doing 60 or 70 covers, baking bread and changing the menu every day. After cooking at a couple more places – Michael Caines’s restaurant at Gidleigh Park, and Heston Blumenthal’s Fat Duck – I came here the first time round, to Royal Hospital Road, which had just won its third Michelin star. It was the very toughest kitchen I could find.

  Some of the people here thought I’d last about a week. They weren’t used to a girl coming into the kitchen.

  Initially, some of the people here thought I’d last about a week. They weren’t used to a girl coming into the kitchen. In the past, girls hadn’t lasted or they hadn’t come at all. But in fact that period was pretty short-lived. Now women come in and thrive. I’ve got 7 women out of 18 in the kitchen here and this is one of the hardest kitchens in the UK, maybe even the world. Do women do things differently? Perhaps. We laugh and joke, but we get the job done.

  I really wanted to cook at Alain Ducasse’s Louis XV restaurant in Monaco but I couldn’t speak French. So I lived in France for three months, having saved up to pay for tuition, and then I did an intensive one-month course in the language. It was exhausting to have to concentrate so hard, but communication is absolutely vital in a kitchen and a degree of fluency essential because everything goes on at a hundred miles an hour, people talking really fast in lots of different accents.

  What really counts is to have the best team, which means everyone having the right attitude to work, with the professionalism and determination to do it well.

  I was at Louis XV for 18 months. Alain Ducasse was a great influence because of his respect for the produce and the producers, his belief that the ingredients should be of the highest quality and reflect the locality. That means the producers have to be treated very seriously, and very well. The other big influence has been Gordon, for his work ethic, discipline and strong management.

  I work 15 hours a day. I don’t think it’s a lot because in that time I can be doing many different things. In some periods of my life I’ve done 18-hour days. We have two services a day, which can mean up to nine hours. I pop up to Pétrus [Gordon Ramsay’s modern French restaurant] most days. There are always tastings. I’m working with Gordon on opening a new restaurant in Bordeaux.

  Restaurant kitchens are all about people and I really believe in looking after the team. Everyone’s treated in the same way. You can learn technique but what really counts is to have the best team, which means everyone having the right attitude to work, with the professionalism and determination to do it well. The hours are long but we have weekends off and nowadays the staff have a night off during the week. Most of the senior team are married – I was one of the last ones, but I’ve just got married too – so work must be compatible with a personal life!

  I have always had a fear of failure but, at the same time, I think you have to put yourself out there to fail.

  I have always had a fear of failure but, at the same time, I think you have to put yourself out there to fail. Whenever I’ve gone into a kitchen, I have always wanted to be not just the best person at what I’m doing, but the best person they’ve ever had doing it.

  Clare’s Object

  A little turning knife. It’s tiny and there’s barely any metal left on it. After I left the kitchen at Louis XV I went back for lunch a few weeks later. I’d left this knife – which had cost about £2 – and the sous chef had got it sharpened, wrapped it up in paper and string and put it in a vacuum package to present to me. It says a lot about him and the respect there was in that kitchen. Respect is really important to me.

  The knife has been with me all through my career. It stays in my little pot with spoons beside the pass. Everyone knows not to touch it. It’s chef’s.

  CLARE SMYTH

  First female British chef to hold and retain three Michelin stars

  MICHAELA DEPRINCE

  Michaela DePrince is a Sierra Leonean-American ballet dancer. Born Mabinty Bangura to a Muslim family, she was orphaned at the age of three and sent to an orphanage where the ‘aunties’ who cared for the children believed that her skin condition, vitiligo, was a curse and called her the ‘devil’s child’. In 1999, she and another girl from the orphanage were adopted by a Jewish American couple who had 11 children, 9 of them adopted. Inspired by a picture of a ballerina she had seen on a magazine cover in Sierra Leone, Michaela trained as a ballet dancer, winning a scholarship to study at the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis School at the American Ballet Theatre. In 2013, she joined the Dutch National Ballet; in 2015, MGM acquired the film rights to the book she wrote with her mother about her life, Taking Flight: From War Orphan to Star Ballerina.

  * * *

  My uncle took me to the orphanage after my father was shot and my mother starved to death. He knew he’d never be able to get a bride price for me, because of my vitiligo. There were 27 children in the orphanage and we were numbered. Number 1 got the biggest portion of food and the best choice of clothes. Number 27 got the smallest portion
of food and the leftover clothes. The aunties thought I was unlucky and evil because of my vitiligo. I was number 27.

  I was always dirty. They used to braid my hair too tightly because they wanted me to be in pain and they told me I’d never be adopted. The only moments I was happy were because of my friend, who was also called Mabinty. We slept on the same mat and she used to sing to me and tell me stories when I couldn’t sleep. She was number 26.

  I was walking with this teacher one day when some rebels came towards us. A boy was following them and another truck full of them around the corner.

  I thought nothing good would ever happen to me and then, one day, I found a magazine outside the gate of the orphanage. On the cover was a picture of a ballerina in a tutu.

  I thought she was a fairy on her tippy toes in her beautiful pink costume. But what struck me most was that she looked so happy. I hadn’t been happy in a long time. I ripped off the picture and hid it in my underwear.

  We had a teacher who came to give us English lessons and I showed it to her. She explained to me that the girl was a dancer. I was walking with this teacher one day when some rebels came towards us. A boy was following them and another truck full of them around the corner. They had been drinking, I think. They saw Teacher Sarah was pregnant and started betting whether she was having a girl or a boy. So then they thought they’d find out and they got their machetes and cut her open. Her baby was a girl. They killed her and my teacher in front of me. The small boy thought he should imitate the older ones and he cut my stomach.