Lily Cole picks her three favourite movies
Lily Cole has enjoyed an extraordinary career. After landing her first acting role at the age of six, the English actor didn’t return to screen acting until she was 16 when she landed a role in Marilyn Manson’s Phantasmagoria: The Visions Of Lewis Carroll, which was later shut down due to public backlash. Cole went on to land the lead role in Terry Gilliam’s 2009 fantasy The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus. Since then, she has worked with several esteemed directors, including Sally Potter, Shekhar Kapur, Roland Joffe, Mary Harron and Rian Johnson. Here, the model, actress, writer and director names her three favourite films.
In her ‘My Cultural Fix’ interview for The Sunday Times, Cole discussed everything from the poetry of T.S. Eliot to Vladimir Nabokov and The Handmaid’s Tale, the latter of which she confessed to being hooked to at the time. “I recently made a short film, Balls, and people kept comparing the script (a historic story set in the present) to The Handmaid’s Tale,” she said, “So I felt obliged to watch some of it — which turned into a temporary addiction while I was jet-lagged in Korea.”
Cole certainly has eclectic taste. On being asked to name her favourite film of all time, she struggled to pick just one, lumping with “Pierrot le Fou by Godard”. Released in 1965, Pierrot La Fou, the tenth film by revered French new wave director Jean-Luc Godard, is based on Lionel White’s 1962 novel Obsession and stars Jean-Paul Belmondo as Ferdinand Griffon, a married man disillusioned with his rather plain and unfulfilling life. When he meets the sensual Marianne Renoir, played by Anna Karina, he quickly falls in love and decides to abandon his family. As it turns out, Renoir is not the coquettish innocent he had imagined, and the pair set off on a crime spree, driving from the French countryside to the shores of the Mediterranean.
Cole struggled to pick just one favourite, adding two other films to her top three, one of which, Mulan, is a completely different kettle of fish, though no less playful. A traditional Chinese folk tale retold by Disney, it tells the story of a young woman who decides to join the army in place of her elderly father. When the ancestors hear of this, they send a disgraced dragon called Mushu to convince Mulan to abandon her endeavour. Of course, things don’t go quite as planned.
Cole’s third pick is 1988’s Coming To America, which the actress picked purely for its sauciness (“that bath scene!). Starring Eddie Murphy as Akeem, it tells the story of a wealthy African Prince who has everything apart from the love of a woman who really cares for him. In an effort to escape the arranged marriage set up by his father, Akeem travels to America with his friend Semmi in search of his queen.
Lily Cole’s three favourite movies:
- Pierrot le Fou (Jean-Luc Godard, 1965)
- Mulan (Tony Bancroft, Barry Cook, 1998)
- Coming To America (John Landis, 1988)
