Sophie Anderton: How addiction, trauma, and miscarriage led to my Glendalough wellness sanctuary
Anam Kara wellness retreat centre is on the grounds of Glendalough estate in Co.Wicklow. Picture Chani Anderson
“I am just going to take a deep breath,” Sophie Anderton says, and the British supermodel turned wellness entrepreneur takes a micro-moment to herself before we properly begin our interview. The website for her new venture, Anam Kara Wellness, is going live imminently, and she’s up-to-her-eyes-busy finalising all the details and choosing the best photos.
“Anyhow, how are you?” she asks, with a sincerity that suggests she genuinely wants to know, immediately setting herself apart from most celebrities who rarely give a hoot. But then Anderton is not most celebrities.
Born in Bristol on May 14, 1977, Anderton has been working and supporting herself since the age of “14 and a half”. A friend entered her into some modelling competitions to boost her confidence and, having “won all of them”, she was signed to Elite Model Management. (Elite want her back; they’ve asked her four times now, but she’s moved on. “No, can’t do it. Don’t want to do it.”)
Anderton entered modeling’s top-tier during a pivotal era: Fashion and culture were colliding, the word ‘supermodel’ was freshly coined, and models were no longer clothes hangers, they were bona fide celebrities. She recalls the late Alexander McQueen telling her and her fellow supers to “just remember you’re all mythical creatures”.
“It was a bit weird,” she says now, “but I think we were seen that way.” She’s right.
Anderton “loved being an international top model”. Her peers were Kate, Naomi and Christy — “Christy Turlington taught me to walk at a Chanel show in Paris when I was 16”. It was “heady stuff”. She was travelling to five countries a week, often on private planes, earning buckets of cash, but she “wasn’t comfortable with the fame”, a realisation that only came with hindsight.
A couple of years ago, when she did her first Kundalini activation (an emotional release practice), it suddenly made sense why she’d “felt I had to numb certain feelings, this, that, and the other, to be the best performer that I could be”.
Back then, an unhealthy lifestyle was the norm.
“There was no education when it came to mental health … to nutrition, to fitness, to anything. So all of us in the 90s, you just didn’t eat. You smoked copious amounts of Marlboro Lights, and that was perfectly normal. It was seen as cool.”
At 19, renowned lensman Herb Ritts photographed her in her underwear lying supine on a bed of hay for a campaign that fuelled ‘bra wars’ between Gossard and rival Wonderbra. It led to 800 complaints (compared to 53 for Wonderbra’s iconic ‘Hello, boys’) to the Advertising Standards Authority, chiefly because of the tagline’s innuendo: “Who said a woman couldn’t get pleasure from something soft?” It was 1996; the era of lads mags, lager and ladettes was coming into its own as the billboards hit the UK high street, and Anderton, chiming with the post-feminist zeitgeist, became a household name overnight.
The former It girl (the 90s had an obsession with ‘It girls’) has been incredibly open about her past struggles with drugs and alcohol, which were relentlessly documented in the UK tabloids, reaching a nadir in 2007 when a News of the World sting by an undercover reporter (who was later convicted of conspiring to pervert the course of justice after his investigative methods came under intense scrutiny) led to her losing a six-figure brand deal and checking into The Priory for rebab.
On the surface, it seemed like a stunning supermodel had succumbed to the high life and hedonistic pleasures on offer in 90’s London and that was all there was to it. But to understand Anderton at all necessitates rewinding to her childhood.
An only child, she grew up with her mother and stepfather — “they weren’t meant to be together, my mom and my real father” — and at the age of 11 was the victim of a hit-and-run by a drunk driver, in which her “foot was nearly torn off my leg”.
She underwent 27 operations, including an initial 36-hour marathon to relieve pressure on her brain and save her leg. While her bones healed, the skin on her leg did not and Anderton, who was put on a daily dose of morphine, was left with “an open-to-the-bone wound for three years” which she had to clean herself and which became gangrenous on several occasions.
“I can honestly say, it’s the most horrific experience I’ve ever gone through,” she says now, adding that her husband “believes that it changed the course of how I coped or I approached life”.
Anderton has known her husband, Polish aristocrat Count Kaz Balinski-Jundzill, since she was 18 — “If anyone had told me when I was 18 that I was going to marry him, I would have told them they were completely mad” — and he came back into her life at the right time, when she was “much calmer, much more lovable, much more responsible”. Kaz always tells her “I can still see the 18-year-old in you”, she says, and Anderton thinks possibly the reason why she is where she is now — which appears to be a very good place — “is because my husband’s never tried to change me. He has always loved me”.
Her accident isolated her from her family to an extent, and from her peers, who were experiencing all the teenage rites of passage while she was having operations and spending months in hospital. Being at school “on crutches with an open-to-the-bone wound, terrified that someone would bang into me” further set her apart and her comment that “girls can be cruel” quietly speaks to what she endured.
Those years from 11 to 15 “definitely made me grow up a lot, but at the same time I think it emotionally stunted me as well,” she says. “Now, looking back, I can definitely see that.” Going into her teens and 20s, the legacy of her accident meant she “didn’t have a streak of fear” in her, and was incredibly resilient, focused, very independent and “hell-bent on living life to the full”. Not always in the best ways, she admits.
She’s a self-confessed ambivert who, these days, prefers to lean towards the introverted part of her nature, and since 2018, she’s living in the perfect spot to indulge that, on the 1,400-acre grounds of Glendalough Estate, which has glorious views of Djouce and Scarr mountains and the Avonmore river running through it.
Anderton, who swears by a daily avocado and an olive oil shot, but is down-to-earth enough to admit to “a bit of Botox”, now sees herself as “a wellness visionary because I’ve got a vision for my perfect world that I would love” and she’s worked incredibly hard to become Sophie 2.0.
There have been two major catalysts for change in her life. “The first catalyst was a necessity when I was 30. I don’t need to expand on that,” she says, alluding to the NOTW sting. “I was like, ‘Ok, I can either go left and I’m not going to be getting to 49’, ‘or I can go right and I can change my life’.”
She is, she says, an “all-or-nothing character” who “had to hit that wall hard to make those changes”. But make them she did.
"I wouldn’t recommend it. It’s a very lonely, isolating way of doing it, but for me, nothing else worked. I needed to take the Band-Aid off my mental health and cure my mental health. And I do believe, for me, the medicine was within me, I just didn’t know it.”
The second catalyst for change came in 2022, when she had a miscarriage. “I didn’t know I was pregnant,” she recalls now. “I was in the Caribbean in the middle of my friend’s wedding when a hurricane struck, and I started haemorrhaging, and it was the most terrifying experience of my life.” Afterwards, she “fell to pieces” and had “quite bad PTSD”, something she’d also experienced in her 20s. “It went on for a while… Kaz [kept asking] ‘What do I do to help?’, and I was like, ‘There’s nothing. I just need to go through the process’.
And I was lucky, I’ve got incredible friends, friends who are just amazing. Especially since I moved here. I finally made friends who were just friends for me on face value, none of the other crap. But honestly, I’m forever grateful to them because there were a lot of nights of listening to me crying. And then I just woke up one day and I was like, ‘Enough. There has to be a better answer to feeling like this’. I wouldn’t go on any pharmaceuticals like antidepressants for this, because I knew I wasn’t depressed. I knew I was suffering from something deeper than that, and I was going through a whole loss and grieving process.”
Anderton talks a mile a minute, possibly down to the fact she has “a nice healthy dose of ADHD”, and talking to her feels like a heart-to-heart with your closest girlfriend. She has a childlike quality about her, and despite everything she’s been through, seems to retain a genuine sense of wonder at the world, with an endearingly heartfelt desire to seek out truth and healing and share it with like-minded souls. She’s also refreshingly open and unguarded — rare for a celebrity in this day and age — freely sharing the most difficult moments of her life, with, I sense, the hope that her honesty will be treated with respect and understanding.
She brings bucketloads of that zesty enthusiasm to her new enterprise, which is set on the bucolic grounds of Glendalough Estate. “I hoped when I started this journey with Anam Kara Wellness that other people were looking for the same thing, which apparently they are,” she says. The fact AKW “had 42 fully booked out retreats”, prior to the official launch is proof her instincts were right. She’s keen to emphasise that while the retreats are, by their nature, pricier, there’s a range of pocket-friendly options too. “We try and make it so it’s inclusive of everybody.”
On offer at the “beautiful sanctuary” is a mix of Pilates, sound healing, several styles of yoga, breathwork, meditation, trail running, hiking, saunas and ice baths, while therapies such as reflexology, cranial sacral work, deep tissue massage and lymphatic drainage happen in the healing suites.
Anam Kara means ‘soul friend’ — AI came up with the “Viking-Gaelic spelling” with a ‘k’ — and the phrase holds special significance for Anderton, as “it was the blessing that my husband and I were given on our wedding day”. Soul friend, she says, “seemed a really beautiful name, because at the end of the day, your first and foremost relationship should be with yourself. You should be your own soul friend”.
And she is that now. The deep grief Anderton felt after her miscarriage led her to “very sceptically” attend a Kundalini activation retreat held near her Co Wicklow home. During the ceremony, she had an out-of-body emotional release connected to that grief.
“I remember hearing myself screaming and all of this pain coming out”, she says of the experience, which was “so powerful” it led to “a profound change in me on a cellular level”.
In the weeks after, she did “lots of reiki, lots of breathwork, lots of meditation” to reground herself and “realised that I had been really unhappy and I’d been doing all the wrong things for me”. The modelling life, while it was her choice, involved her “being surrounded by people in environments where I had no control” and she realised that was really unhealthy for her. A gradual move away from that life ultimately led to her establishing Anam Kara Wellness, where she’s tried to “create a beautiful sanctuary where [there is] a sense of community, not just for the people who are coming on retreats and workshops, but also the people who are holding space.”
When we speak, she’s especially excited about Anam Kara Wellness’s inclusion in Beyond the Pale, a festival that’s been happening in her “back garden” — aka Glendalough Valley — for years. There’s going to be shamanic drumming, ambient house meditation and a luxury contrast therapy area with saunas, ice baths, medicinal baths and rain showers.
“Come up to us,” she says, “take a little bit of a respite and reground yourself, reset, and find that little bit of peace within the three days of incredible music.”
There’s an integrity to Anderton that shines brighter than her beauty. Tough times haven’t broken her, they’ve made her stronger, and she likens her journey to the London marathon — she’s come a long way, but still has “a bit of a leg to go, but that’s ok”. At times, her new path brings up a lot of emotions, “especially when I hear other people’s stories” and sometimes that’s a lot to take on, and sometimes it makes her feel a little bit uncomfortable. “And I’m like, ‘Ooh, what’s that?’,” she says, “and I realise it’s something within me that I need to address. I’m an ever-evolving version of myself. That’s the way I look at myself now.”
Anderton is living her best life, one that aligns with who she truly is, and Anam Kara Wellness is a physical manifestation of that truth.
“It means more to me seeing the joy that it brings people than any Vogue cover ever did,” she says. I don’t doubt her for a second.
- British supermodel turned wellness entrepreneur Sophie Anderton brings Anam Kara Wellness to Beyond The Pale this June, offering a premium retreat of yoga, breathwork, meditation and sound bath sessions on the Glendalough Estate. Prebooked experiences start from €90. Tickets for wellness experiences and the festival itself available at itsbeyondthepale.ie
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