With a nod and a wink at her glamourous image, Elizabeth Hurley is pretty in pink as she carries on with her life’s mission – breast cancer awareness
We are used to seeing this woman in so many guises. As a glorious vamp in a Versace gown, barely contained by gold safety pins, on then-boyfriend Hugh Grant’s arm. As a demure bride in a pink-and-gold wedding sari in the pages of Hello magazine. As the fictional Queen of England in the new television show The Royals, all smiling menace and softly draped furs.
So who is this creature, then, wearing a white bathrobe you’d find on the back of the door in any hotel room? Never mind that she’s also got a plate of chocolate cake in one hand. “Don’t mind the bathrobe,” says Elizabeth Hurley with a smile at once arch and conspiratorial. “I greet everyone this way.”
I somehow doubt that. A woman with this many plates in the air has little time for lounging on the sofa, bare feet tucked under her, forking chocolate cake into impressively glossed lips. But that is precisely what she’s doing on this afternoon in Toronto, taking a brief break from a tornado schedule of appearances on behalf of Estée Lauder’s Breast Cancer Awareness campaign. She has been its celebrity ambassador for 20 years now, meeting survivors and their loved ones, giving pep talks to Estée Lauder employees, smiling for endless photos in a succession of snug dresses, one foot placed just so in front of the other.
She is a particular sort of chameleon, this Liz Hurley, changing her careers to suit the changing times, while maintaining a kind of glamour impervious to fashion: smoky-shaded blue eyes, needle-heeled stilettos, glossy waves of dark hair. She is a Jilly Cooper heroine sprung to life, all long limbs and posh vowels and lust for life.
I mention Jilly Cooper because whatever other labels you might apply to Hurley – survivor, entrepreneur, celebrity girlfriend, permanent fixture in the tabloids she loathes – she is, above all, English. She embodies the cherished trait central to that most English expression “mustn’t grumble.” She does not wallow. There is pluck at her core.
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