“I thought he was one of those guys who has an obsession with red hair”: Sylvia Flote on meeting her prince charming

With hair like Sylvia Flote’s, it’s hard not to get noticed. It’s precisely what caught the eye of model scouts, casting directors and even her husband. Norwegian model-turned-actress Sylvia Flote met Sigmund Oakeshott, son of Lord Oakeshott, at a mutual friend’s birthday. It was a picnic of 25 people at Hampstead Heath in London where, according to Oakeshott, pretty much everyone in attendance was either a socialite or a model or both.

“I immediately saw this beautiful shock of red hair and, you know, went over to introduce myself because she looked so beautiful,” Oakeshott explains. “When you're an art historian, you can find things which you see so much in art that you then get slightly obsessed by. But obviously it was a huge shock of Pre-Raphaelite hair and she was sitting on the grass beneath these amazing trees that looked like an enchanted forest. It just looked like a scene from a painting when I saw her.”

Turns out Flote could see straight through him. “He came over the hill and I saw him walking down and I was sitting there, and bear in mind it was just loads of beautiful models all way prettier than I am,” she says. “And he just clocked me from like, 200 metres away and he sat straight next to me and said, ‘Hi I’m Sigmund’. And I was like, ‘You must be one of those guys who has an obsession with red hair’.”

As it turns out, Flote hit all the right notes; Oakeshott also has a self-confessed obsession with Scandinavian culture. Later, at their wedding in London (more on that later), Oakeshott encouraged his bride to wear a Bunad (a rural Norwegian folk costume). “It's almost like wearing couture,” Oakeshott muses. “Often these things are family heirlooms that have been handed down from grandmother to granddaughter. Once I put a good friend of mine on my shoulders at an event so that she could see better. The heavy woollen skirt was so thick that I almost walked into the King of Sweden, who happened to be at this party.”

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Flote came to be in London, where she would meet Oakeshott and fall in love, through a series of events put into motion when she was scouted as a model. One might even call it fate. Her start as a model came late in life... relatively late, anyway. Whereas many girls begin their careers as teenagers, Flote was ‘discovered’ in Nor way at the age of 25, at Oslo City Shopping Centre, by Heartbreak modelling agency. “I was ‘old’,” she says, with an emphasis on the ridiculousness of that statement. “I was 25, and they didn't ask how old I was.”

A year or so passed before she got a follow up call. “They had forgotten about me, so I never thought about it again,” says Flote. “And then I got a phone call about Oslo Fashion Week, and if I wanted to go.” That same year she came to London for a cover shoot, signed to an agency straight away and simply never left. “They didn't ask my age, which was good.”

On reflection, her “late” arrival to the industry was a blessing. “I find with a lot of models that I've met over the years that when they start out really young and they come to that stage where they're not sure about doing it any more, they feel like they don't have anything else,” she says. She’s seen girls fall into states of depression, unsure of what comes after the jobs dwindle out. Flote, however, approached things with a “I’ll see how it goes” attitude. “I’ve done whatever for so many years, so I’ll just plod along and be lucky for anything I get,” she says.

Plodding along has worked out fine thus far. Better than fine, in fact; now, Flote is poised to make her big screen debut in a major Hollywood film. The story of how Flote landed the movie role set to launch her acting career, is charmingly cliché. She was auditioning for a hair commercial when she was plucked for the role. “It was for Dyson. Dyson hair curlers, I think. Which I use all the time,” she explains.

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The casting director, who had been through hundreds of girls for this particular role, just so happened to be at the studio that day. Upon seeing Flote’s gorgeous red hair, he requested to be put in touch with her agent, who shortly thereafter sent through the audition request. Flote ran home, put her son down for a nap, filmed the audition tapes and sent them off. “Literally two days later they said, ‘Oh, you got the job’,” she says.

I ask the film’s director Todd Field, whose work has received a combined eight Academy Award nominations, what made Flote right for the part. “When somebody really has the ability to hold the frame and have real, meaningful presence in a part, you see it instantly,” he says. “And the second that we saw Sylvia, we said, ‘That's it. That's her’.”

Dubbed TÁR, the film follows the fictional story of Lydia Tár, a genius composer who becomes the first female chief conductor of a major German orchestra. The titular role is played by two-time Academy Award-winner Cate Blanchett – not bad for Flote’s debut big screen appearance. “Being able to see her act, it was incredible. Even in makeup she would sit there, and start to conduct a bit,” says Flote of observing Blanchett on set. “She taught herself to properly conduct. She would sit there and memorise and be in the zone and just go with the music in her head and go straight into the scene.”

Funnily enough, the first film Flote and her husband ever watched together was Elizabeth, (“Which also pretty much reinforced my suspicion that he really likes redheads”) and the first play they ever watched together, in 2019, was When We Have Sufficiently Tortured Each Other, both starring Blanchett.

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This isn’t Flote's first taste of the limelight. She was cast for a small part in Wonder Woman, which was ultimately cut out of the final version of the film, and some years ago she had a brush with the notoriously unforgiving British tabloid culture after dating comedian David Walliams, of Little Britain fame. The relationship was short but long enough to attract the attention of paparazzi. When I touch on this point, Flote responds with a typical Norwegian matter-of-factness.

“I didn't deal with it very well at all,” she explains. “I didn't like it because it was like an invasion of your privacy. You start wondering how and where they got their information from. You start getting paranoid. So yeah, I didn't like it at all, I have to say. But you learn something.”

Midway through filming TÁR in Berlin, Flote was preparing to head back to Norway for another exciting undertaking: her wedding. Friends and family had already travelled far and wide, gathering to celebrate her nuptials with Oakeshott, but their dream wedding was not to be. The bride contracted Covid. Not only would Flote miss her own wedding, she couldn’t even leave the house until she could produce a negative test.

“I was supposed to just do two days of filming,” she explains, “fly to Oslo to have the wedding ceremony with my husband – there were guests from America, Australia, London and even from my hometown – and then just fly back again the day after. But I tested positive for Covid, so I was locked down by the German government. I was absolutely devastated. My whole wedding was down the drain.” “She was away from her child and she was away from her fiance and she missed her wedding, And she did it all with incredible spirit,” says Field about Sylvia’s experience, “She showed up and she worked hard and she was incredibly positive and never once complained.”

Instead, the couple held their Covid-induced micro-wedding at the Mayfair Library in London. Despite its modest size, only six guests allowed, the event was still featured in British society bible Tatler. Even before marrying Flote and becoming a researcher at the Dorotheum auction house in Austria, Oakeshott was well-versed in the fashion industry and even dabbled in modelling himself. A quintessential ‘British eccentric’, he was discovered at 18 by Lotta Volkova, the Russian stylist-turned-designer whose alt-punk aesthetic has seen her style for Burberry, Balenciaga and, most famously, Vetements.

“Just when I'd finally got into a good university and my parents thought I was finally going to be an academic success, I went to a fancy dress party in Café Royal. Lotta came up to me and said I want to scout you and I want to introduce you to my friend. She's a lovely German ex-model, and that was Ellen,” Oakeshott recants.

He’s talking about legendary photographer Ellen von Unwerth, who has since become a close friend of both Oakeshott and Flote, shooting the couple for this very story. “Ellen was meant to photograph our wedding,” explains Oakeshott. “So part of the shoot felt a bit like the wedding photos that Ellen might have taken, if we'd been able to actually have our actual wedding. So that was really special.”

The shoot took place at Oakeshott’s family home, a mediaeval Tudor abode steeped in history, which, according to its new residents, is probably haunted . “Beautiful grounds and lots of history. I think there were two beheadings there,” explains Flote. Oakeshott confirms as much saying, “It's a manor house that was built in 1360, and Sylvia's steely Nordic constitution is what you need for it. Unless there are fires roaring in every grate it is deathly cold.” The couple both get “terrible nightmares” whenever they spend the night there and, allegedly, “supernatural occurrences” are par for the course.

“The night before the shoot, I was actually slightly terrified that some kind of awful disaster was going to befall us and that it wasn't going to happen,” says Oakeshott. Luckily the couple had no such misfortune. Our interview is interrupted by their son, Eilif, who Flote immediately tends to, speaking to him in her mother tongue of Norwegian. “It’s my oldest uncle's name,” she says. “It means immortal. And I just thought that I deserve to have a Norwegian name for my son because he's going to grow up to be very British. At least let him have the name.”