Even fully dressed, it is immediately obvious why Noémie Lenoir is one of the most commercially successful underwear models ever. Her body is, of course, phenomenal, though quite different in the flesh from how it looks in photographs. She has the kind of long, angular physique – pipe-cleaner legs, big boobs, sharp collarbones – that, on camera, translates into come-hither curves. Her face, too, is breathtakingly lovely, her colouring more unusual in person; her skin darker, her eyes a paler green. Standing patient and still in a floor-length Stella McCartney silk jumpsuit while the hairstylist fluffs her curls, she looks exotic and delicate as a flamingo. But then the camera starts clicking and you realise what makes her special: she goofs around, exaggerating every silhouette, kicking out her limbs in a parody of fizzy energy and, between shots, cracking jokes in her surprisingly low, gravelly voice, hamming up her expressions to make the photographer's assistant giggle. It is a kind of physical comedy; she plays her beauty for maximum laughs, and makes everyone in the room feel included rather than intimidated.
This is exactly what she did, on a meta-scale, for Marks & Spencer, for whom she spent four years as the poster girl for the great British underwear drawer. A working-class mixed-race girl from the Paris banlieues, she became an idealised girl-next-door for modern, multicultural Britain, and one of a small band of models, including Twiggy, who became closely identified with the regeneration of M&S. Stuart Rose, who was at the company's helm during Noémie's time as a model there, describes her as "great fun and very normal and down to earth. She is very beautiful and very sexy, and she had a strong following from the men. Older people didn't seem to find her off-puttingly young and yet the younger customers liked her, too. Everyone loved her."
But nine months ago Lenoir, then aged 30, tried to kill herself and very nearly died. Having taken an overdose at the Paris home of her ex-partner, the footballer Claude Makélélé, she called a friend. Realising that the friend would call an ambulance, she ran into a nearby forest to escape being found. She was discovered, unconscious, by a man walking his dog, who raised the alarm; she was in a coma for a week. The story was a tabloid dream: a lingerie model who was also a young mother, a complicated love life, drugs, alcohol and near tragedy. Lurid reporting of the incident focused, in the British press, on the fact that her M&S contract had ended two months earlier, and on her relationship with the Swiss nightclub-owning millionaire Carl Hirschmann, who had recently been hit by a series of scandals. Reading the reports, there is an unsavoury tang of schadenfreude: these models, footballers and playboys with all this youth and beauty and glamour and money, and look how it screws them up.
Lenoir has not talked to the media before about the attempt to kill herself, and I am still tiptoeing around the subject when she brings it up. "Last May," she says, looking at me levelly, "I did something really, really stupid. I had been living in New York and I moved back to Paris, to try again with the father of my son." Lenoir has a six-year-old son, Kelyan, from her relationship with Makélélé. "It was a big change. I wasn't so healthy in Paris… I couldn't find a gym, and exercise is important to me because I am very hyper." According to people close to her, she was also drinking too much at this point. "I came straight from New York to living in Claude's house, and I really wanted it to work, and it didn't work out. He hurt me… so I decided… I don't know how to say this. It was like a bad, bad depression, a very deep depression. I felt really alone." Kelyan was staying with Lenoir's mother; Lenoir and Makélélé were at his house, in the Paris suburb of La Celle-Saint-Cloud. "It wasn't just like, 'I'm here, don't ignore me.' Nothing like that. I really thought I wanted… I decided to… " Having called the friend, Lenoir left the house. The next thing she remembers is waking up in the hospital.
She says Hirschmann has no relevance to the story. Yes, she dated him briefly a year earlier, before getting back together with Makélélé. "But it was ages ago. And it wasn't a big deal with him. And what they say about him is all bullshit anyway – he is a nice guy."
Was that night the end of her relationship with Makélélé? She laughs wryly. You get the impression she wishes she had realised much earlier that the number was up on that relationship. "After my… after I tried to kill myself, when I woke up, I finally realised: Claude is not the man for me. And I am not the woman for him. I am too independent and he is too independent also." How is your relationship with him now? "Well… sometimes good, sometimes bad. It's OK. It doesn't matter, I know that now. What is important is that he is a really good dad. He takes care of his son really well. Our relationship is fine, we respect each other, we talk on the phone about Kelyan. But we are never going to be friends. It is over between us."
The most painful fact for Lenoir now about her attempt to kill herself, she says, is knowing that one day her son will have to find out and feel hurt. "People say, 'How could she do it, how could she try and kill herself, didn't she think about her son?' But they don't understand. I love my son so much. But I didn't think I was good enough, I thought I was poison. Poison for me and poison for him. When I was depressed I felt like I was poisoning his life by being in it. I thought he would be better with his dad and my mum to look after him. I didn't realise I was hurting anyone, until I woke up in the hospital and saw my mum crying."
Lenoir's mission today is to tell the world that the events of nine months ago are firmly in the past. She has taken the early Eurostar from Paris and arrived a few minutes before our 9am call time, fresh-faced and smiling. The first thing she does is pop out to the M&S down the road to buy a croissant, which she eats standing up in the kitchen, drinking a cup of tea (milk, one sugar). She looks thin, but healthy: she says she weighs 8st 9lb (55kg) now, compared with 7½ stone last May. She is immaculately dressed in thick ribbed leggings, a curvy sweater dress, a fur-trimmed cardigan-coat and high-heeled ankle boots, with delicate gold earrings and a battered, non-monogrammed Louis Vuitton holdall. As a look, it is about halfway on the scale between the dress-down nonchalance of a working model and the peppy glam of a Euro Wag.
Work is very important to Lenoir. It could be because English is not her first language, but she uses the vocabulary of emotion and relationships a great deal when talking about modelling. "It is important to me that people believe in me as a model, trust in me as a model – which they do in London and New York – which is why sometimes I think I'm an Anglo-Saxon woman at heart." She says that working with M&S was "like a big family" and "a very special and close and happy time", but that Next has "been very, very faithful to me." (She is sanguine about the end of her M&S contract last year – "Four years is a long time" – but she twice, rather pointedly, refers to Next as the best client she ever had.)
It is perhaps no wonder she feels deeply about a career that dramatically changed the trajectory of her life. In 1997, she was 17 years old and in a post office on an errand for her mother when she was approached by a Ford booker who asked if she'd considered modelling. "I ran home to tell my mum. We were both so excited. Where I lived – well, in America they'd call it a ghetto. Modelling wasn't something I had thought about at all. We called the number she'd given me, and we met them, and they wanted to sign me up. My mum said, 'Let her finish school first,' so I went back a year later."
She got jobs in Paris, but nothing life-changing in terms of fame or money. Soon, however, she moved to New York, landed a high-profile advertising campaign for Gap, and her career took off. For most of her 20s she moved between New York, Paris and London, securing lucrative work with Victoria's Secret, Tommy Hilfiger, Tiffany & Co, Next and Marks & Spencer. "I was working really hard. I knew I was lucky to have this work. I come from a really poor family, and when I started doing campaigns it changed everything for my family. I am not complaining, I had a beautiful childhood – we didn't have a lot of money, but there was always food on the table, and my parents saved money so that in the holidays we would all get in the car and drive to the mountains. I have amazing parents. They had worked hard all their lives for me, and when I started to make money I wanted to be able to take care of them."
Her parents divorced when Lenoir was in her early 20s and living in London. She bought a house on the Indian Ocean island of Réunion for her mother, who wanted to return to the place she had grown up. It was a happy time for Lenoir: she met Makélélé, and had Kelyan. But before long the relationship had hit the rocks, and Lenoir was living in New York with Kelyan and her mother, who had moved back from Réunion to help look after her grandson. The three of them moved from New York to Paris in January 2010, after which the events of last year began to unfold.
The day before our interview, it is reported in the press that Lenoir is dating an actor. It's not true. "He is a good friend of mine. We are not dating. He is going to sue. Me? I don't care any more. I am over caring about that stuff." In fact, she says, she has been dating a doctor for the past two months. "I met him through a friend," she says proudly. "The normal way! Not in a club." She has exchanged a Ferrari-driving footballer for "a Jewish doctor who doesn't care about money. It is really different for me, because I love money," says Lenoir with disarming directness, "because I grew up with none, and because I have been supporting myself and my family since I was 17. But my boyfriend, he doesn't even have a big watch."
She has embraced normality. "I finally got my driving licence. My son is living with me and he sees his dad a lot and he is happy, and he is doing really well at school. He is bilingual, and he is learning horse riding and Spanish. Everything is normal. I eat normally now. I used to be a bit crazy about what I ate, but now I eat what I want to eat. A croissant for breakfast, pasta for lunch, in the evening fish and salad." Listening to Lenoir tell her story is like watching a ball bearing career around a pinball table. She has the fervour of someone on a huge upswing from an all-time low, and says that in the past nine months she has "changed everything about my life". I ask her if she is still in touch with anyone from her childhood, apart from her parents, and she laughs at the idea. "Why do people ask this? It would be too hard, because we don't have the same life. People can be envious. I don't want to show them up, and I don't want to feel uncomfortable. I'm scared."
When I asked Stuart Rose to describe Lenoir, he said, "She's a fantastic girl, but maybe she's a little bit vulnerable. Be nice to her, won't you?" For all her charm and energy, there is something rather fragile about Lenoir. These days, she goes to church with her mother and grandmother every Sunday. Having lapsed as a Catholic for two years, she began to pray again while in hospital last year, and went to Lourdes last August. It helps, she says, to have refound her faith. "I think if you don't trust in yourself, it helps to trust in something else."