Coralie Rose

Gorgeous up-and-coming Notting Hill actress Coralie Rose is as unpredictable as the flower she is named after. Philippa Ronald trails behind

Above: Actress Coralie Rose photographed by Vicky Dawe at Westbourne Studios

I’ve never cancelled an interview before, but figured because Coralie Rose had already cancelled on me twice, I was allowed to suffer my flu in self-pitying isolation. So, imagine my croaky surprise, when the phone rings. It’s Coralie. ‘I’m in Golborne Road. I’ve got a present for you. What number are you?’ I was half-way through her new film Rise of the Footsoldier (watch the trailer below) about a violent criminal underworld, so in my Solpadeine fog I wouldn’t have been surprised to see her at my door with an AK-47 or some such.

But, think about it – these days Notting Hill is more yard-sales than yardies, more goujons than guns. So what did she bring me? A giant box of fairy cakes from Portobello Road’s fashionable Hummingbird Bakery to cheer/fatten me up and, in a cloud of vanilla sugar, she disappeared off back into Coralie-world. Leaving me to eat the cakes.

I finally meet her in Lucky Seven on Westbourne Park Road in Notting Hill for milkshakes. Even though Coralie, 23, is a West London girl at heart, she’s just in the neighbourhood for a short while before jetting back to New York. She’s previously done acting courses there, and decided to up sticks after falling in love with the city at her film’s recent premiere.

‘I’m completely passionate about acting. I’m just not very good at being myself,’ she tells me. But who she is, as far as I can fathom, has proven rather handy for her chosen career.

Her mother Michelle, is a former model, half Belgian, half black-African from Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) and owns Manguette, a stylish jewellery boutique in Kensington. Her father, Jeremy Rose, is English, but discovered he was adopted and half-Jewish. An entrepreneur, he also founded the Feng Sushi restaurant chain. Coralie promises me a discount there… More food bribery. I predict a diet.

Onto health issues and we talk about yoga, meditation, mantras and psychic healing – Coralie is into her spiritual stuff, suffering horribly from depression, which has proved to be a big set back, but she is adamant to discuss what she has gone through and what she has done about it. ‘This year was awful. After a break up, I had a serious breakdown and that’s when I realised I needed to do something. The definition of insanity is doing something over and over again and expecting a different result – that’s why New York is great for me. I’m not running away – I’m moving on.’

This self-analysis, her exciting globe-trotting upbringing and her looks, as exotic as they are conventionally pretty, have clearly been instrumental in Coralie’s acting career so far and are sure to in the future.

But it’s not all career. Extra-curricular activities include diving in Venezuela, camping trips, long walks in Richmond Park and most recently a trek to Macchu Picchu in Peru with friend and former EastEnders star Charlie Brooks to raise money for Help a London Child. From the outside, it seems depression hasn’t forced Coralie to scale back her life.
Because of her mum’s Belgian roots, she attended the French Lycée in South Kensington. For all the school’s virtues, Coralie found few artistic ones and went to the Chelsea College of Art, which didn’t quite seem to be right either.

It was only when she enrolled in acting classes at the Kensington & Chelsea Education College in Portobello that she realised that she wanted to ‘turn up early, stay late and learn for once!’ An agent spotted her in a play and suddenly a respectable TV career was in full swing – Sea of Souls, Holby City, Waking the Dead, William & Mary. And for a fledgling actor, she was actually working.

‘I have friends from the best drama schools who don’t get work so I’m lucky. I won’t turn my back on British TV and cinema, though. It’s made me who I am,’ she reflects. ‘But, in the States, there are many more channels and commercials. It’s not necessarily better, it’s just bigger.’

But, for now, Coralie’s promoting a Brit flick, Rise of the Footsoldier, in which she plays the female lead – ‘genuinely the film role I’ve always wanted to play’. She’d auditioned for the first film from the same makers of Rollin’ with the Nines, a London gangster rap offering, for which director Julian Gilbey won a Bafta nomination, and was determined to be in the next.

Coralie found herself intensely researching the film, which tells the true story of Carlton Leach, a football hooligan, who finds infamy as an East End bouncer before subscribing to a notorious gang of criminals, which wreaked havoc in the 80s and 90s. The film culminates with the brutal shooting of three gangsters at Rettenden. I’m told a lot of big names wanted to play Denny, one of Leach’s molls, but the producers held out for Coralie. If it’s possible, most critics were as vicious about the film as the gangland killings it portrays, chastising the makers for glamorising gun crime. Coralie explains her view: ‘I looked more into the story and came across horrific images on the internet of the crime scene – the heads blown off, eyes blown out. I certainly don’t support glamourising gun crime, but this stuff happened – and violently.’

The première was in September 2007, but the film has since developed a cult status among fans of the new British gangster film genre and the Boxing Day DVD release is being hyped and has, I’m told, a huge 250,000 unit pre-sale. With a gangster film under her belt, all the auspices point to a growing profile in the States and there’s a role in the new Notorious B.I.G. film, produced by rapper P. Diddy, on the cards. But, as one might expect for a girl with such a diverse background, she doesn’t want to pigeon-hole herself. ‘I’d quite like to do a romantic comedy next, not something cheesy but perhaps a little less violent!’

Coralie stresses she’s not in the acting game for fame, unlike her sister Emily Rose, an up-and-coming TV presenter, who specialises in the urban music scene. When Coralie’s in London, she prefers the retreat of her parents’ home in Shepherd’s Bush to jam-packed Portobello: ‘I’ve always loved the Portobello street vibe, the community and mix of cultures, new businesses and talent, but I could never live here. It’d drive me potty to walk out of my house and see people I know. I like my privacy.’

But surely New York’s a little more high-profile than sleepy West London? ‘It just isn’t that insane,’ she explains. ‘It’s not that far, it’s not that hard, it’s not that crazy to think I can make my life somewhere else.’
This girl likes to have her cake and eat it. And why ever not?

Watch the trailer for Coralie Rose's film Rise of the Footsoldier: