all about abbey

She was the face people knew, but didn’t know much about – and though her acting career requires she take on other personas, there’s much more of the real Abbey Lee on show than ever before. By Alice Birrell

Otherworldly”. That’s the stock word for Abbey Lee. It’s bandied about like a persistent halo, along with “ethereal”. ‘Abbey Lee in an ethereal exclusive’ reads a story, another: ‘the otherworldly Australian’, and now, with a fully formed acting career she’s playing ‘otherworldly figures’. It’s been inescapable for the actor, who at her modelling peak in the late aughts, fitted neatly into the homogenous aesthetic that dominated the scene: mainly Eastern-European, and definitely predominately white, models who wafted down the runways on a tangle of legs with faraway stares. And that was how, for many years, Abbey Lee passed through the collective consciousness: waif-like, a no doubt one-of-a-kind evanescent beauty, with an edge of flighty fragility.

Except that of course she’s very much of this world, and she always was. At 33, she retains a doleful innocence, the look that took her through a decade of modelling, but it’s in appearance only. “Oh yeah, I’ve got dozens of stories,” she says drolly over the phone from New York. If you ever wondered what was going through her head in the images from that time – aloof on a motorbike captured by Richard Prince or floating down the runway as a Chanel bride – well, there was a lot, like a loop track as she