She was just 14 when she was cast as Sleeping Beauty in the first Maleficent.

Now Elle Fanning is 21 and promoting its sequel—and showcasing a very grown-up version of theme-dressing on the red carpet, busting out a custom Gucci ensemble at the LA premiere, complete with a bloodied finger prick (in sequins, naturally).

She’s also the smiling face emblazoned across ELLE Australia’s November 2019, clad in a coral-pink Fendi dress and beaming with the kind of effervescent energy she’s become known for.

She’s renowned for her red-carpet outfits, glowing as a 1970s Barbie for the camp-themed Met Gala in May, sporting a peach Miu Miu coord, elaborate nail art and a waterfalling high pony.

She was crowned (by us) best-dressed at this year’s Cannes Film Festival thanks to her array of glamorous gowns, from ethereal white Reem Acra to shocking pink Vivienne Westwood, but it was a vintage-esque Dior outfit that was her favourite.

“At Cannes, you can go big and that’s what I wanted. I wanted to do separates, and I asked Dior if they would be into a ball skirt and shirt situation, and it morphed into the New Look. We added the hat very last-minute. It was exciting because I’m very nostalgic of the ’50s and ’60s. Old Hollywood glamour is so classic, I wish it would come back.”

It’s the red carpet where she feels most at home, she reveals.

“I dressed really crazy at school. So obviously people weren’t necessarily going to be like, ‘You’re so cool.’ The red carpet was like a home for me—from a young age, the fashion community embraced me. The red carpet felt safe. I don’t feel judged on it—I feel free to express that side of myself. It’s such a creative outlet, something I could really take control of.”

At 21, Elle Fanning is a modern-day princess of Hollywood. From starring alongside Angelina Jolie to being the youngest judge ever at Cannes, it seems the star can’t put a foot wrong. Emma Elwick-Bates discovers the serene secrets of her wild success

The fairytale turrets of the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles provided the perfect backdrop for November cover star Elle Fanning to talk to Emma Elwick-Bates about being a modern-day Hollywood princess. Soon to be reprising her star role as Princess Aurora in Maleficent: Mistress of Evil opposite Angelina Jolie, the 21-year-old radiates regal glamour in the cover shoot, styled in a glamorous Old Hollywood headscarf by Julia Clancey and a silk dress by Carolina Herrera, with piles of rings, necklaces and bracelets befitting Tinseltown royalty.

‘Aurora represents the youth of the generation who is accepting to all, no matter what, and she does it in her own soft way,’ she says of the character, a reimagining of Sleeping Beauty. ‘I think it’s a nice message to tell women, it’s okay to be comfortable in your femininity. Kindness is not weakness – it’s quite the opposite.’

On the current generation of royals, Fanning was very sympathetic to their place in the spotlight, saying: ‘Kate and Meghan are doing royal femininity very differently. I can’t imagine being in the public eye like that. Every single move you make is critiqued.’ And her favourite? ‘I like Harry. Isn’t he the fun one?’ she quips.

Fanning and her elder sister Dakota have taken Hollywood by storm in the last decade, becoming two of the most well-respected and in-demand young actresses in the industry. So how did she end up following her sister into the business?

‘I saw my sister doing it and I was a huge ham growing up,’ she explains. ‘We would constantly put on these scenes around the house. It wasn’t for anyone, only for ourselves, We would do lines, characters, it was very funny. It just felt right at home for us… We weren’t supposed to do this at all. My mom played tennis, my dad played baseball, my mom’s dad was a quarterback in the NFL. We were supposed to play tennis or something. Everyone says Dakota’s Meryl, and I’m Marilyn.’

The Fanning sisters’ impeccable Southern manners are often commented on (they were born in Georgia but moved to Hollywood aged three and six) – with the duo known for sending well-written and thoughtful thank you notes in particular. Does this help them in dog-eat-dog Hollywood? ‘There is a stigma placed on women in any workplace,’ she explains thoughtfully. ‘But especially in Hollywood. You must be super competitive and super jealous. And it’s something that people want to project, but it’s actually not the case.’

For the full interview, read the November issue, on sale Thursday 3rd October. [Source]

Elle Fanning may play a princess in the new Maleficent movie but she says she’d hate to be constantly in the public eye like the real-life royal family.

The 21-year-old admits she’s a fan of the royals and singled out “the fun one” Prince Harry as her favourite.

But she says she couldn’t handle having “every move” of her life analysed like the Duchesses of Cambridge and Sussex.

In an interview with Tatler, Fanning said: “Kate and Meghan are doing royal femininity differently. I can’t imagine being in the public eye like that. Every move you make is critiqued. I like Harry. Isn’t he the fun one?”

Fanning, who plays Princess Aurora in the second instalment, Maleficent: Mistress Of Evil, alongside Angelina Jolie, says her character represents “acceptance”.

“Aurora represents the youth of the generation who is accepting to all, no matter what, and she does it in her own way. I think it’s a nice message to tell women, it’s okay to be comfortable in your femininity,” she said.

She said she and her film star older sister Dakota were “supposed” to have sporting careers — but instead got the acting bug. Their parents Heather and Steven both played sport professionally. Fanning added: “We weren’t supposed to do [acting]. My mom played tennis, my dad played baseball.”

Fanning made her debut as a younger version of Dakota’s character in 2001 hit I Am Sam — and said she had been inspired by her sister.

Speaking in the November issue of Tatler, Fanning said: “We would constantly put on these scenes around the house. It wasn’t for anyone, only ourselves. We would do lines, characters. It just felt right at home for us.”

See the full feature in the November issue of Tatler available via digital download and news stands on October 3, tatler.com [Source]

With a new Miu Miu fragrance campaign and a revelatory vocal performance in the pop-powered movie Teen Spirit, Elle Fanning is on the rise.

In her first movie role at age three, Elle Fanning might have played a younger version of her sister, Dakota’s, character, but she didn’t stay in the shadow of her sibling for long. As she turns 21 this month, Elle has already racked up an impressive array of performances in her young career, variously playing a fairy-tale princess, a punk-rock alien, and a fashion victim in more than 30 films. “At first I would get mistaken for my sister,” she says. “Of course, to us we look nothing alike—we have completely different noses!”

Besides her film roles, Fanning has been garnering a lot of attention of late for her newest career move: In January, she was named the face of Miu Miu’s new fragrance, Twist. The scent combines sweet, effervescent top notes with a sensuous base of pink amber. “It’s hard and soft, which I quite like,” says Fanning.

Somewhat appropriately, part of the campaign for Twist—a short film shot by the artist collective Canada that traces a movie star’s chameleonic routine through multiple roles—plays on her seemingly limitless capacity for reinvention.

On camera she may recede into her roles, but at five foot nine, the statuesque actress is built to stand out. “I feel very comfortable being on the red carpet because Hollywood embraces my quirkiness,” says Fanning. “I always felt like it was a safe place to be—it was actually more like home than high school was.”

As a grade-schooler, Fanning, who still lives with her mother and grandmother in Los Angeles when she’s not working, enrolled at a prep school and did her best to have a normal life. But her daring fashion sense routinely drew stares. “I always felt like an outsider,” she recalls. “I remember once in seventh grade I got a pink shirt at Opening Ceremony that had Big Bird printed all over it, and I wore it with flared pants and wedges even though I was already quite tall.”

“I always had this dream of being a pop star,” says Elle Fanning. Sitting at a corner table at West Hollywood’s Chateau Marmont in a gauzy ivory dress, the 20-year-old actress is so happy to be talking about how her dream finally came true in the new movie Teen Spirit that she lets her mint tea go cold. “That feeling, like I can just let loose and perform, was so attractive.”

In Teen Spirit, Fanning plays Violet Valenski, an introverted but tenacious English teenager who enters a singing competition in the hopes of escaping her dreary home life. Throughout the movie, Fanning sings various pop showpieces, in the end taking the stage in front of a live studio audience to deliver a primal performance of an unexpected song. To anyone familiar with Fanning’s career, her magnetism onscreen is no surprise. Still, watching her as Violet is like witnessing a best new artist Grammy winner at the moment of birth.

Written and directed by first-time filmmaker Max Minghella (perhaps best known as Nick on Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale), Teen Spirit, which LD Entertainment and Bleecker Street will release on April 5, follows Violet from her humble beginnings, half-heartedly singing ballads in a local pub, to the titular televised competition. The role required Fanning not only to cover existing songs like Robyn’s “Dancing on My Own,” but to also record an original track with producer Jack Antonoff, which Fanning calls a “super surreal” experience. “Jack did [Taylor Swift’s] reputation. He recorded [Lorde’s] ‘Green Light,’” she says. “I felt like, ‘Wow — maybe I am good.’”

Teen Spirit joins a rapidly expanding number of recent movies set within the music industry and led by young female actors who portray not pop personas, but real, complicated women. In the 2018 film Vox Lux, Natalie Portman played a school shooting survivor turned pop diva and sang original tracks written by Sia. Alex Ross Perry’s forthcoming Her Smell stars Elisabeth Moss as a messy, troubled, Courtney Love-style rocker. And then, of course, there’s A Star Is Born’s Ally, a character largely inspired by Lady Gaga herself.

“On some level it’s coincidence,” says Teen Spirit producer Fred Berger of this spate of films (Berger also produced 2016’s La La Land). “But music is one of the most manipulative tools we have. The [film] industry has caught up to the fact that, in an environment where people need an excuse to go to the movies, they want to feel something big.”

The face of the newest Miu Miu fragrance, Twist, tells us about her singing prospects, plus what she does in Ubers.

Elle Fanning has seamlessly slipped into characters since she was two years old. In her very first film, she appeared as the younger version of big sister Dakota in I Am Sam. Since then, the now 20-year-old actress has played a princess (Maleficent), a supermodel (Neon Demon), a transgender male teen (3 Generations), a ghost (Twixt), a novelist (Mary Shelley), a twisted schoolgirl (The Beguiled), and an alien (How to Talk to Girls at Parties), among many others.

Off screen, she transitions just as easily into someone else, be it an ice skater or a masseuse—just two of the many personas she’s explored while riding in an Uber (more on that later). Fanning has even boarded a plane in Los Angeles as a regular front-row celeb and gotten off in Paris as a show opener for Miu Miu, a “spur-of-the-moment” casting idea Miuccia Prada came up with for fall 2018. Given the star’s experience on red carpets and big-screen runways (she tackled a treadmill in a dress for Neon Demon), she was a natural—save for having to contain her big, bubbly personality in favor of a cool supermodel smize on the catwalk.

The day of our interview, Fanning is fully committed to her role as the face of Miu Miu’s newest fragrance: Twist, an airy blend of apple blossom, cedarwood, and pink amber inspired by the house’s signature matelassé material. In her bubblegum-colored dress, glitter platform heels, and teal blue eye inspired by Anna Karina, she’s the ultimate Miu Miu ingénue lounging across a settee or posing leisurely on the balcony.

The second the camera isn’t zoomed in on her every movement, however, a big goofy smile breaks out across her face, and she’s polishing a table with a makeup wipe in order to get one of the picture-perfect shots seen here. At this point in her life and career, she’s a pro at playing someone else, but underneath it all, she’s shockingly normal and completely comfortable in her own skin.

Here, Fanning reveals what was going through her head on the runway, the song she’s ready and willing to whip out at karaoke, and the best lies she’s told from the backseat.

When you look at the April cover of Glamour, there’s no question that the three women pictured on it—Elle Fanning, Camila Cabello, and Aja Naomi King—are beautiful. I mean, just look at them. But, like the rest of us, they haven’t always felt confident in their own skin: As a kid (and before her Fifth Harmony days), Camila says she never saw herself—a Cuban-Mexican immigrant—represented in pop culture. When she first started playing with makeup, Aja found that some products just didn’t show up on her dark skin—and that stung. And Elle, who has been in the Hollywood spotlight since age three (yes, three), admitted to feeling pressure to conform to old beauty ideals by straightening her naturally curly hair for her first day at public school.

Isn’t it about time we rewrite this conversation? In honor of International Women’s Day, I spoke with all three of these remarkable women about how our definitions of beauty are finally shifting. As Camila put it: “When you look at the cover with me, Aja, and Elle, you see different body shapes, different skin tones, different backgrounds. It just shows you that beauty looks like everybody, you know?” Yep, we know.

Elle Fanning

Forty-five. That’s how many movies Elle Fanning, at age 20, has under her belt. I wasn’t convinced that was even possible until I counted them myself. You can literally see her grow up onscreen, under the Hollywood spotlight: at age three, playing the younger version of big sister Dakota in I Am Sam. As a dreamy young girl in Sofia Coppola’s Somewhere. And kicking off 2018 with critical favorite I Think We’re Alone Now, a post-apocalyptic love story from buzzy director Reed Morano.

Still, Fanning tells me she’s never felt scrutinized for her appearance by the industry, which has been pretty accepting of her playful makeup looks (just part of the appeal when L’Oréal Paris signed her as a face last year) and quirky fashion sense (frilly Rodarte pants are kind of her thing). It was her ­contemporaries—​kids at school—who made her feel she should conform to a certain mold. So what does she want to say to the world about beauty and feeling good in your skin? Hear it in her words.…

IN IMDB YEARS, ELLE FANNING SHOULD BE APPROACHING her mid forties. She’s taken on 55different roles (with a further seven films coming) since her first acting gig, aged two, in I Am Sam, alongside her older sister, actress Dakota. Of course, in reality, 18-year-old Elle’s long résumé has created a teen with a depth of experience and wisdom.

As Harper Lee wrote, ‘You never really understand a person… until you climb into [her] skin and walk around in it.’ And through her work, Elle has done just that. She played a transgender boy in About Ray, a Disney princess in Maleficent, a politically awakened teen in Trumbo, a lonesome 11 year old in Somewhere, a narcissistic supermodel in The Neon Demon, and a young feminist in this month’s 20th Century Women.

‘When you get these parts, the women become a part of you,’ she tells me over breakfast in her home city of Los Angeles. ‘I was acting while growing up myself, so I’d feel older after each character.’ Who better then to solve some of our life dilemmas?

We asked readers to submit their questions, and it turns out that Elle was born to be an agony aunt. ‘Friends come to me for advice,’ she says. ‘I say it how it is. They know I’ll be honest with them. There’s none of that post-truth stuff with me.’

Elle is, perhaps, the teenager we all wish we’d been: she’s kind (even to grumpy waiters) and looks entirely together at 8.30am in a black cashmere polo, midi skirt and Dr. Martens. She’s the epitome of cool and has Solange’s number in her mobile to prove it – the pair recently met, by chance, in a cafe in New Orleans, and Knowles insisted they hang. But it’s Elle’s spirit that’s most enviable. She throws herself into everything she does with assurance, drive and unadulterated joy, even when that’s plunging into a pool, mid-winter, for our cover shoot.

She’s recently back from six weeks shooting Sofia Coppola’s Civil War remake of The Beguiled in New Orleans alongside Nicole Kidman, with some life advice of her own: ‘Nicole told me, “Find your tribe, and they’ll always be behind you.” I like that.’ So lie back on the couch, Dear Reader, and take heed of Elle’s wisdom.

Before Elle Fanning hits the big screen as Princess Aurora opposite Angelina Jolie in Maleficent, she’s playing a fashion princess in Paris during fashion week. The star of Miu Miu’s spring campaign, the 15-year-old (soon to be 16-year-old!) actress was all smiles in the front row yesterday.

We caught up with her to talk getting older (as in turning 16) and learning to drive.
Hi Elle, do you mind answering a few questions for… ELLE?

Ha, sure, Elle for ELLE!

I know you’re a big fan of the brand…

This is the first Miu Miu show I’ve ever been to. I got to do the campaign, so I’m so excited to be here.
What was the experience like of shooting the campaign?

It was very fun. That collection in particular I loved, it all looked like sherbet. It was so girly, and I’m a fairly girly girl, so I love it.

How would you describe your style– has it evolved?

I’m getting older: I’ll be 16 soon.

Sweet 16!

Yeah, it’s a big deal! And I feel like I’m dressing a bit older, but it’s kinda just how I feel. I haven’t been analyzing it. I just put on what I want to put on. It’s like, ‘I don’t hate that today.’ I’m discovering some things in my closet that I used to wear and bringing them back. I never get rid of anything. I always keep it all.
Are you an organized closet person?

Messy organized. It’s very messy but I know where everything is.
So, any birthday plans?

I might not be in town for my sweet 16 so I had a dinner with my friends already, so now I’m just going to be with my family.
If you could get anything for your birthday…

That’s so hard! I haven’t even thought about what to get. I like really weird gifts. Someone already gave me antique opera glasses made out of pearl. They’re really cool.
And are you driving?

Nooo! I don’t have my permit because I haven’t had time to learn the stuff. I mean, it’s hard. They ask you things, that, like, my mom doesn’t even know the answer. But I’m definitely going to learn. [Source]