THE SOCIALITE, MODEL AND REALITY TV STAR – WHO WAS BEST FRIENDS WITH KATE MOSS, EX WIFE OF BANKER NAT ROTHSCHILD AND MUSE OF THE LATE ALEXANDER MCQUEEN – GAVE A WIDE-RANGING INTERVIEW TO THE DAILY MAIL IN 2015. HERE, SHE DESCRIBES THE HIGHS AND LOWS OF HER COLORFUL LIFE.
On best friend Alexander [Lee] McQueen, whom she met in the early 1990s while modeling.
Annabelle with ‘soul mate’ Alexander ‘Lee’ McQueen in 2009
‘Issie [late Tatler fashion editor Isabella Blow] brought me to Lee as a model. She presented me to him as his new girl. Lee loved me immediately and it felt like we knew each other straight away.
‘We were so alike. He was also dyslexic; he mirrored me in so many ways.
‘I remember our first shoot together when Lee had made me this exquisite torn lace navy dress that fitted perfectly.
‘When it turned up on the day of the shoot he’d sprayed it silver and it had shrunk. I had to be gaffer-taped into it.’
‘He was my brother, my boyfriend, my soulmate. Most of the time people called me Mrs McQueen. Quite often we were sharing a bed.’
‘The truth is I was happier with Lee than with anyone else. He asked me to marry him towards the end and I said no. I wish now that I had said yes.’
On being part of the infamous Primrose Hill set with Kate Moss, where all-night parties at Noel Gallagher and Meg Mathews’ Supernova Heights mansion were the norm.
Annabelle with ‘bestie’ Kate Moss in 2015
‘I don’t know why I’m always called a wild child because I wasn’t a child at the time.
‘The truth is I’ve lived an amazing life. I was working with Lee [Alexander McQueen], Kate, Naomi and [John] Galliano.
‘It was a big time in my life and it was great fun. I was working with beautiful creative people.’
‘Kate is my best mate and I love her like a sister. Yes, she’s an icon but to me she’s just Kate.
‘We fight over stupid things, then we kiss and make up. We share clothes, we share everything and her fame has never been an issue.
‘She always looks out for me and I look out for her. We’ve got each other’s backs.
On getting together with Nat Rothschild, scion of the banking dynasty and the future fifth Baron Rothschild. (Their marriage broke down three years later in the Dominican Republic, a turn of events Annabelle was legally not allowed to talk about.)
‘Nat and I had been together for four years and I was 26 when I married him. He first asked me to marry him half an hour after we met and then every day afterwards. Finally, we decided to do it.’
On how a gap year attack by a man who later went on to kill three women in Australia lead her heroin addiction at 16.
‘The attack lasted for two hours. I was tied to a tree and continually beaten. I looked like the elephant girl by the end of it.
‘I managed to escape with my life but I needed reconstructive surgery because my face was so disfigured.
‘After that, I fell into a serious depression and became a heroin addict because it provided an escape bubble and was the only way I could cope.
‘In a way, heroin saved me because otherwise I would have killed myself.’
On being thrown from the saddle of her racehorse while galloping around a training track in Sussex in June 2013. She endured a long recovery and the accident left her with chronic pain.
The equestrian broke her back and pelvis after being thrown from her racehorse in 2013
‘I remember seeing the glint of a silver car and the horse getting spooked and jumping.
‘The next second I was flat on my back in the mud,’ she recalled. ‘The pain was horrendous and I started having convulsions. Worst of all, I couldn’t move my legs and I thought, “This is it, I’m paralysed.”’
‘I was lying on the hospital bed with a broken back and pelvis. I just said to myself, “You have to get up,” so I did.
‘The nerves down my right leg and hip were very badly damaged, but I got up, with help, and discharged myself.
‘The pain was so bad, but I was scared that if I didn’t get up there and then I might never walk again.’