Kate Moss has confessed she had a “nervous breakdown” at the start of her fashion career.
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The supermodel from Croydon was discovered at 14 and made her major breakthrough at 16 in a Corinne Day shoot for The Face, but she admits her meteoric rise to the top of the modelling world had a negative effect on her health.
Moss was left bedridden with anxiety after completing the famous 1992 Calvin Klein campaign which featured her topless and straddling Mark Wahlberg – then known as Marky Mark – and made her a global star.
In a revealing interview with Vanity Fair, she said: “I had a nervous breakdown when I was 17 or 18, when I had to go and work with Marky Mark and Herb Ritts. It didn’t feel like me at all. I felt really bad straddling this buff guy. I didn’t like it.
“I couldn’t get out of bed for two weeks. I thought I was going to die. I went to the doctor and he said, ‘I’ll give you some Valium,’ and Francesca Sorrenti [Kate’s friend], thank God, said, ‘You’re not taking that.’
“It was just anxiety. Nobody takes care of you mentally. There’s a massive pressure to do what you have to do.
“It was just really weird – a stretch limo coming to pick you up from work. I didn’t like it. But it was work and I had to do it.”
Moss also opened up about her relationship with ex-fiance Johnny Depp – who she was with from 1994 to 1998 – and admits she was devastated when the romance ended because she relied on the actor so much.
She explained: “There’s nobody that’s ever really been able to take care of me. Johnny did for a bit. I believed what he said. Like if I said, ‘What do I do?’ – he’d tell me. And that’s what I missed when I left. I really lost that gauge of somebody I could trust.
“Nightmare. Years and years of crying. Oh, the tears…”
Moss – who is now married to The Kills musician Jamie Hince and has a nine-year-old daughter Lila Grace from a previous relationship – still relies on a piece of advice the Hollywood heartthrob gave her to deal with pressures of fame.
She said: “I was lucky to be with Johnny… he taught me a lot about fame. He told me, ‘never complain, never explain’. That’s why I don’t use Twitter and things like that. I don’t want people to know what is true all the time and that’s what keeps the mystery.”
