Who Is Cara Jocelyn Delevingne? She is an English model and actress. She signed with Storm Management after leaving school in 2009. Delevingne won Model of the Year at the British Fashion Awards in 2012 and 2014. Delevingne started her acting career with a minor role in the 2012 film adaptation of Anna Karenina by Joe Wright.
Few could have anticipated Delevingne’s all-too-public unraveling shortly after her 30th birthday when she was photographed looking disheveled and distressed at the Van Nuys Airport in Los Angeles. The tabloids were quick to draw comparisons to Delevingne’s 63-year-old mother, Pandora, who has talked about her struggles with bipolar disorder and heroin addiction. Then, just weeks later, defying all expectations, Delevingne appeared at a Paris Fashion Week event for a collaboration honoring her friend the late Karl Lagerfeld, looking coiffed and radiant. Fans were left wondering: Had the headlines about Delevingne’s so-called downward spiral been blown out of proportion? Was Cara okay or was she not?
The narrative of Delevingne’s interior life begins when she was a child born into a wealthy family—her father, Charles, a property developer, her socialite mother the daughter of Jocelyn Stevens, a Fleet Street executive, and Jane Sheffield, a lady-in-waiting to Princess Margaret. “In a way, a lot of people have looked at my childhood or my family and thought, She’s spoiled, there’s nepotism, she grew up extremely privileged, which I did, don’t get me wrong,” she says. “But life wasn’t all that easy for other reasons,” Delevingne admits she’s still grappling with the history of addiction her mother has talked openly about. In 2017, Cara co-wrote a young adult novel, Mirror, Mirror, that was informed by her teenage years. It is no accident that the protagonist’s mother was an alcoholic. “For a long time, I didn’t really put myself in her shoes,” Delevingne says. “I just needed someone to be angry at and I was angry at her, but it wasn’t her fault…. The way that addiction took my mother from me was brutal, and it was brutal for her too.”
