Homeless and a drug addict, I became a model then a film-maker

Today, aged 43, Tucker is an acclaimed documentary director and mother of three children who has advised the Prince of Wales and the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, on homelessness. Her story’s virtually unique because so few homeless people go on to flourish, let alone survive. “Of the people I knew from that time, 99 per cent are dead. For someone to get out of that situation, to have a normal life, is really hard.”

She only began talking about her experiences after her first documentary, Westwood: Punk, Icon, Activist, was released in 2018, when someone uncovered a missing persons advert her mother had placed in The Big Issue.

“I had to give an interview myself so no one else could sell my story,” she says. “After that I thought my career was over but it was the opposite of what I expected. Everyone said, ‘I’m so proud of you. You’re amazing.’ It changed everything: for the first time in my life I had confidence.”

Tucker is an acclaimed documentary director

CHRIS MCANDREW FOR THE TIMES. SUIT: BELLA FREUD

She went on to make a documentary about homelessness, Someone’s Daughter, Someone’s Son, and now she’s publishing a memoir, Bare, the first in a planned trilogy about her eventful life that’s been optioned by Colin Firth for Tucker to direct.

Deftly written — astonishingly, since Tucker didn’t learn properly to read or write until she was 26 — and never maudlin, it’s harrowing stuff that makes you reassess the urge (which Tucker understands) to cross the street when you see a beggar.

“Writing it brought out a lot of trauma, loads of things came up I’d forgotten. It helped me heal a lot but it was really painful. When I’m stressed or tired I see images from my past: people walking around me. It meant some mornings I was writing and people were sitting in the room with me. Luckily my publisher got really good therapy in place and so other days I felt really empowered.”

Tall, slender and with dazzling bone structure complemented by a sharp bob, and dressed in a Bella Freud jumper and trousers, and a coat she “stole” from Vivienne Westwood, Tucker looks like a model, which is what she later became in what turned out to be the first step towards her directing career.

The film-maker with Vivienne Westwood on the set of her first documentary, Westwood: Punk, Icon, Activist

“I don’t dress glamorously in real life, quite the opposite, but when I’m in public I have to be the best version of myself because I want people to go, ‘Oh my God, she was that and she’s now there.’ But to get here took a lot of work.”

Chatty, charming and with an air of wanting to please, she also comes across as endearingly younger than her years, in appearance and behaviour. She giggles about how three glasses of prosecco the night before have left her with a hangover (she now occasionally drinks socially but has long been clean of drugs).

• Film maker Lorna Tucker on her new documentary on Dame Vivienne Westwood

She tells me how she educates herself by reading for half an hour every morning (“That’s a non-negotiable”) and at night with her younger children, aged 12 and 9. “I’m discovering books I never read as a kid. It’s great but my kids find it hilarious. I’ll be like, ‘Oh my God, I’ve read The Chronicles of Narnia, it’s amazing.’ They say, ‘Yes, Mum, everybody knows that.’”

Tucker grew up on a council estate in Watford, Hertfordshire, the second of five siblings. Her parents divorced when she was four. Her mother was the daughter of an alcoholic, who’d spent time in a children’s home and who struggled to hold down several jobs and bring up her family. She remarried twice, both times unhappily.

With the fashion designer Bella Freud last year

GETTY IMAGES

Bullied at school, Tucker began drinking at 12 and taking drugs with local tearaways at 13. “Finally I felt part of something.” At 14, she lost her virginity to a twentysomething friend of one of their dealers and she helped their gang with burglaries and car theft. “I was groomed,” she says. When arrested, she gave the police false names and addresses.

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Eventually, they tracked her down and issued a court summons. Terrified she was going to be put in a young offender institution (“The guys who’d been in and out of prison told me I wouldn’t last a minute in there”), she ran away to London, briefly living with her boyfriend’s relatives and in a hostel, but soon was on the streets with other runaways, drug addicts and alcoholics.

Some abused and attacked her, but others looked after her. One introduced her to the National Portrait Gallery, where she’d spend rainy afternoons gawping at the art, while a Big Issue seller checked up on her frequently, urging her to call home.

The book glosses over bits of the timeline; she explains that she returned home on a few occasions, only to run away again. “I was in a very tricky position and I had this weird feeling of finding people that understood me and would protect me on the streets.”

After ending up in hospital through overdosing, she ran away, still in her gown, when nurses called her family. The book’s narrative ends after she is pulled out of the Thames and finds her relieved mother at her bedside. She only alludes to what happened next, which was no happy ending. Tucker continued to struggle with drugs and alcohol and had several more spells of homelessness. “I made a lot of mistakes. There was a lot of pain and suffering trying to be normal.”

Tucker with Sadiq Khan and the campaigner Latoyah Gabbidon at a summit on homelessness

MIRRORPIX/FACUNDO ARRIZABALAGA

At 19 she was working as a stripper when she met a much older man and became pregnant. He left her and she was living in a hostel, her baby in a makeshift cot, and considering joining the army when she was scouted by a model agent while pushing a buggy in Tesco. It took a while to follow through but by the time she was 21 she’d been signed by Storm models.

With her daughter in tow she worked all over the world, starred in a Levi’s campaign and was photographed by Rankin and Steven Klein. Yet she was still riddled with insecurities — having always been mocked for being gangly, now she was told she needed to lose weight and was terrified her bosses would discover her past addictions.

Other models looked at her askance. “Everyone was so perfect, from nice families, and I was absolutely broken, unable to tell them how I was living. They’d all have a drink and I’d start taking things to a dark place, swearing. They’d be disgusted: ‘Is she puking in the corner?’”

Two years in she relapsed into addiction, stopped working and lost custody of her five-year-old to her ex-partner. She got her back aged 11 and, 13 years later, they’re “really close. But it’s taken time”.

Through modelling she met photographers who showed her the possibility of a creative career. “In my world I didn’t know you could be an artist, I thought the only options were footballer’s wife or PA.” Yet Tucker feels guilty, not only that she survived the streets but that her looks allowed her access to this privileged path. “You pull yourself apart: ‘It’s because of the way I look.’ No one else had that opportunity.’”

Aged 26 she finally became clean, helped by mentors and a friend who paid for trauma therapy, and went on to have her younger children with another partner. Her film-making break came when Westwood allowed her to make a documentary about her “activism”.

Westwood became another mentor, teaching her to highlight words she didn’t understand and look them up. Tucker used to speak with her hand over her mouth to conceal her addict’s crumbling teeth. “Vivienne said, ‘Stop mumbling and sort your f***ing teeth out,’ so I did. After a couple of years of filming, I really did hold myself differently and I spoke differently.”

Westwood “taught me to be defiant and to stick to my creative guns”. But when Tucker showed her the finished film, she was furious that it highlighted her fashion work. “She wanted a fluff piece and told me if I didn’t do it her way my career would be over.”

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Tucker stuck to her guns but the night before the film premiered at the Sundance festival, Westwood’s team famously declared it “mediocre” on Twitter (now X). “That was awful!” Tucker exclaims. “It was so childish but then the film sold out in theatres because everyone wanted to see what happened.”

Tucker has made three more documentaries: Amá, about the sterilisation of Native American women; Call Me Kate, about Katharine Hepburn; and Where Did You Go?, about Greta Garbo. Today, she lives with her partner, the cinematographer Seamus McGarvey, who has two Oscar nominations for Atonement and Anna Karenina, in Tuscany — with a base in west London — and is about to start directing her first feature film, a thriller.

With the charity Shelter warning in December that at least 354,000 people are homeless in the UK, a 14 per cent rise in the past year, she’s been advising Prince William and Khan on the importance of getting people off the street as soon as they appear.

“We need to give them 24-hour wraparound care to help train them to lead a normal life,” she says. “With that, I’d have cut out 15 years of addiction and destruction.” She usually doesn’t give money to homeless people, instead advising and donating to grassroots organisations such as soup kitchens.

“I don’t want to sound like a preachy d*** but society needs to be kinder, more empathetic, but also we need to be boundaried, you know, because there is a lot of mental health problems there, so you need to be careful.”

She doesn’t want her younger children to read the book, but her oldest has read it and is “proud”. McGarvey found a proof and read it without her knowledge. “I was like, ‘Oh my God, I’m sorry, you must hate me.’

“He’s like, ‘It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever read, I cried my way through it.’ Just hearing that made me go, ‘Oh, so maybe I’m not that bad.’ I’ve realised I just been self-sabotaging my whole life — when things were good I’d relapse out of a fear of doing well and then people finding out about my past and hating me. Now I feel I don’t have to hide.”

Bare by Lorna Tucker (Octopus £20 pp288). To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members