Christy Turlington's first documentary film opens with alarming footage of the former model just after she has given birth to her first child, Grace, now seven. Her husband, the actor and film-maker Ed Burns, had filmed his daughter being born, but when Turlington started to haemorrhage, he kept the camera rolling: bloodstained sheets and thighs, a palpable sense of growing panic. It is an alarming introduction to the film's subject of maternal mortality: the stark difference between the care Turlington gets in her New York City hospital, and of the hundreds of thousands of women around the world every year who aren't so lucky. "I never planned to put any of myself in it," she says over a pot of Earl Grey in Clarke's, a fashionable restaurant in west London (her choice). "I was going to narrate it. Hopefully people will take my journey with me and people won't be thinking, 'Why her?'"
Turlington has just arrived from New York, here for the London film festival and today's British premiere of her film, No Woman, No Cry, which follows the stories of women in Tanzania, Guatemala, Bangladesh, and women without healthcare in America. She has long had the reputation as the nicest of the supermodels and I'm glad to find she seems unaffected, her face a wonder of perfectly proportioned planes and bare of makeup, and dressed in flats, black sweater and slim cropped trousers.
About 350,000 women are reported to die because of complications – the vast majority preventable – in pregnancy and childbirth each year, though estimates put the figure far higher. About 99% of the deaths in 2008 were in developing countries, with half of those in sub-Saharan Africa. Reducing the rates of maternal mortality became a key topic at the UN summit to review development goals last month, with the aim of reducing rates by three-quarters by 2015.
Turlington's 60-minute film doesn't offer answers; she wanted it to raise awareness. "I wanted people to feel first, and not be telling them what they should think. I felt my role was to get people engaged and then take them to the next level, which is what I'm working on now with the Every Mother Counts campaign."
There will undoubtedly be suspicions about her motives, as always when somebody in the public eye gets involved in a social or political issue. "It's so hard for organisations to get any kind of traction or consistent coverage and if our culture is consumed with celebrity then I guess they have to try it that way. But you set yourself up for criticism."
It has become a cliche for models to get involved in charity work, but healthcare is not something Turlington comes to new. After she helped nurse her father through advanced lung cancer 13 years ago, she threw herself into anti-smoking campaigning; two years ago, she started studying for a master's in public health at Columbia University in New York. "I want to do the best as I can as an advocate," she says. "If I go to Tanzania, I want to be able to talk to the health minister and have some ideas or suggestions. [I have to do everything] I can to be taken seriously."
She describes being a model as "being the silent, one-dimensional creature". There were plenty of good things about her career – "I was treated really well, in an industry that is not always known for that. I made great friends, saw the world" – and she made enough money never to have to work again. But after a while it was never going to fulfil her. How did she feel about the supermodel tag? "It was a media fabrication, a downtime for fashion and they needed that to jumpstart the industry. But it got over the top – we were young women, kids, and it's unfair to put people in that position just to exploit them for the sake of selling clothes. That was the part I liked least and was happiest to stop doing."
At the height of her career, when she was 25, Turlington decided to retire and go back to school, taking a degree in comparative religion at New York University. At 41, she still has the power to land big advertising campaigns and last year US Vogue put her on the cover, but she says she would never go back to doing more modelling than she does now – a couple of days here and there – and almost nothing could tempt her back on the catwalk. What would she say if her daughter wanted to be a model? "I would never encourage it because there is always potential for it to be harmful. For me, it was an opportunity [to get] out. She will, right away, have a better education than I did when I started, and because of her parents she will have exposure to the world in a different way. Education is the thing that I chose so she will hopefully follow that direction."
How is she so sensible? Vogue once described her as "the most beautiful thing that ever lived". Did she never buy into her beauty? "No, but I think I made that conscious choice because that can only be a dangerous thing." Her face may have been her fortune, but she shows no sign of vanity, no hint of Botox and says she would never consider cosmetic surgery. It's refreshing to see small wrinkles on her brow and laughter lines around her eyes. Sometimes you get the sense that her beauty was a burden, a barrier too perfect to get past to the brains beneath, which may make ageing something of a relief. "It's all about experience – the most I can do, the more I can see and feel the better," she says. "If you have that view in mind, the idea of looking as if you have lived those years is all good. I like my face better now. I have a lot going on and I like that I can see it."
No Woman, No Cry is on today at 1pm at the BFI, London. It will be available to watch at brightwide.com from tomorrow
