Young, gifted and veggie
Two young women who believe there is more to life than success explain their reasons to Tony Wardle
Renska Leunke
The moment Renska Leunke stood in front of the camera to model clothes for last year’s Viva! Gifts for Life catalogue she turned into a different person – a consummate, professional model. You could immediately see why she’s worked for some of the world’s biggest model agencies: Select Model Management in London, Diva in New York and Viva (no relation) in Paris.
So why was she posing for Viva! and making no charge for her time? Because Renska is a committed vegetarian – vegan at home – and passionate about animals. Brought up in the open spaces of North Gelderland in eastern Holland, walking her dog gave her intimate contact with the natural world. It led to a fascination with animal and wildlife documentaries and most of her pocket money being sent to the WWF, Greenpeace and Amnesty International. At 15 she made the first moves towards becoming veggie.
A bright student, Renska had her heart set on becoming a psychologist but a chance encounter changed all that.
“I was 17 when I met a woman talent scout who encouraged me to think of becoming a model. Two weeks later the beautiful open spaces of Gelderland were left behind and I was in Paris. I didn’t know it then but I was to stay there for two years.
“I then spent time in Milan, Tokyo, London and Australia and jobs took me to India, Indonesia and South Africa. For three years I lived out of suitcase and for much of the time I was on my own. You walk off the set, go back to your hotel room and then what do you do, week after week in cities where you don’t know a single person?”
In the US, Renske became the face of the lifestyle chain, Abercrombie and Fitch with its 350 stores across the US and Canada and its main outlet on the iconic Fifth Avenue in New York.
But surely the whole process of modelling beautiful clothes, having the status of a top model and appearing on the front cover of world-famous magazines such as Elle and Marie Claire must provide some compensation?
“You’re treated like a piece of meat! The only reason I continued with it as long as I did was simply for the experience of travelling and seeing new countries – an opportunity which I knew would probably never come my way again.
“I found the whole modelling world unethical in so many ways – the wasting of huge amounts of money on trivia, the widespread use of drugs and the lavishing of attention on young girls by old but powerful men with one aim in mind. Money was no object – the best restaurants, expensive wines and promises of future work”.
There was one brief flurry of morality from the modelling world when a gaggle of top models, led by the bad-tempered Naomi Campbell, appeared in adverts proclaiming “I’d rather go naked than wear fur”. Campbell was the first of three to quietly ignore her supposed commitment to animals and stroll down the catwalk swathed from head to toe in the stuff. The ad should, it seems, have carried a sub-heading “Unless, of course, the fee is high enough!”.
Renska didn’t renege on the promise she made to herself never to model fur. And it caused great difficulties:
“When I said I wouldn’t wear fur everyone treated me as though I was mad and then the pressure started – ‘Don’t be a big mouth and ruin your career’, ‘Why cause trouble because no one will thank you for it’, ‘What you’re doing is simply, unprofessional’. On one occasion I turned up at a shoot where I was told I was to model fake fur and it was anything but. That did cause major upheavals when I refused.’
Confident, articulate and deep voiced with clear traces of a Dutch accent, it’s hard to believe that this tall and lanky young woman, who speaks Dutch, English, French and German, is still only 25. Now based in Brighton with her partner Randolph and his four-year-old daughter Star, Renska has shed her modelling contracts one by one. But the looks and skills which originally won them are still evident when she decides you’re worth working for.
If I can make money for charity as a result of the way I look then that’s wonderful but I no longer want a career out of it. My future is in working for people or animals.”
Sarah Jane Honeywell
When I first saw Sarah Jane Honeywell she was popping out of an impossibly small box on stage at the BBC’s Cbeebies show in Cardiff. Trick box maybe, I thought, but when she then performed immaculate cartwheels across the stage, I was doubly impressed.
Then I got to meet this lively, passionate and diminutive little 32-year-old woman with her trademark bunches and discovered she is probably the most bendy presenter and continuity announcer on children’s TV – actually, in the whole of television.
As a kid at dance school, Sarah Jane discovered that she was impossibly supple, with very stretchy skin and ligaments and so began her working life as a contortionist in Malta after seeing the Great Kovaks in Doncaster. Now there’s a conversation stopper if ever I heard one!
“It was too much like hard work”, she says. Perhaps it was fortunate, then, that Sarah Jane went for an audition in a musical – a musical she adored and had always dreamed of appearing in but, because she wanted it so much, believed it could never happen. It did and she became a kitten in the hit West End show Cats, where she remained for three years.
After leaving Cats, Sarah Jane play a variety of roles in theatre, including an acrobatic flying nun in Falstaff at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. Clearly, the mundane has little appeal to Sarah Jane. She returned to Cats for a further 18 months and played Etcetara is the very last performance of the show, something she terms a ‘great privilege’.
It’s satisfying to know that our magazine, It’s Time to Go Veggie, was instrumental in getting Sarah Jane to go vegetarian – and apart from an occasional small piece of cheese and slab or two of chocolate, vegan. Both she and her photographer partner, Tim, made the decision to give up meat at the same time. It was joint cry of: “Let’s go for it!”
Both were already horrified by cruelty and those responsible for it and having the facts set out for them, knew there was no escape. “Because we now had the facts, we knew that if we carried on eating meat we would be the very people we hated”, explains Sarah Jane.
This wasn’t her first stab at going vegetarian, having previously made an attempt at just 13. Unlike so many parents, hers were very supportive and her mum even took a vegetarian cookery course. But beneath it all was a fear that her daughter’s decision to give up meat might simply be a way of cutting down on food and this, combined with the reality of cooking two different meals each day, proved the clincher and meat was back on the menu.
Sarah Jane tried again at the age of 21 – in fact she became vegan and ate a diet that would leave an Indian aesthete crying our for more. The first illness and the first visit to a doctor led to the inevitable : “It’s all because you don’t eat meat”, and so that also ended.
Now, when Sarah Jane talks about her vegetarianism, she bubbles with enthusiasm and is overjoyed that she has
done what she wanted to do 20 years ago. It is clearly a life changing, life-enhancing decision of which she is joyously proud – no doubts, no thought of recanting, just delight that she can now face animals and know that they will not be killed for her.
The family is now totally accepting and last Christmas her mother cooked two meals – one meat, one vegan – but this year Sarah Jane and Tim are staying at home: “We’re so pleased that there won’t be any meat in the house let alone on the table”.
Her sister Sharon isn’t quite so enthusiastic of the whole veggie concept, it has to be said. “When I was visiting, one of my nieces asked why I was vegetarian so I told her it was because I liked animals and didn’t want them to be killed for me … but before I could go on, I looked across the table and Sharon’s raised eyebrow said clearly … ‘don’t even go there!’”
Sarah Jane Honeywell and her trade mark bunches are known to kids everywhere from her children’s TV role in CBeebies Higgledy House and doing the links between programmes. (There’s even a plush doll coming out in her image – www.sarahjane.biz). This Christmas she’s seriously looking forward to playing Peter Pan at Wimbledon with the world famous Henry Winkler (you’re right - The Fonz) and Bobby Davro. But ironically it isn’t fame and fortune she’s seeking:
“I want the second half of my life – after I’ve paid off my mortgage and I’m financially independent – to be spent helping to save animals. In the meantime, I love Viva! and everything it does and I will do anything I can to help it and the animals.”
Thanks for that Sarah Jane. Make no mistake, we’ll take you up on it.