Trudie Styler makes a name for herself with environmental benefits
April 21, 1996
Web posted at: 1:00 a.m. EDTFrom Correspondent Janine Sharell
NEW YORK (CNN) -- This Earth Day, everyone from advocates for the ozone layer to protectors of whales has a banner to fly. But the rain forest remains the devoted cause of the music community -- because of just one woman.
Trudie Styler regularly organizes fund-raisers like one last week that raised $1.5 million for the Rainforest Foundation. Sting was the public draw to the benefit, but behind the scenes his wife, Trudie, really ran the show.
"Trudie, she's my better half you know, she advises me to do things I should do," Sting said.
It was Styler's idea to start the foundation seven years ago, recruiting support from music superstars and turning rain forest preservation into one of the most fashionable causes of the late 1980s.
"I think we really rode the green wave back in 1989, and I think since then enormous other issues have come along that we compete with," Styler said. Yet Styler has kept the public's attention focused on her cause. She has produced six concerts at Carnegie Hall to support the Rainforest Foundation, and judging from the turnout at her sixth, there is no sign of what activists call "compassion fatigue."
Styler's compassion never seems to wane either. In recent years, she's become a human rights documentarian, producing two films. One, "Boys from Brazil," is about prostitution in that country. The other, "Moving the Mountain," took a look back at the student uprising in China's Tiananmen Square.
Styler is a former actress with London's Royal Shakespeare Company. But for years, she let her own career take a back seat to her husband's -- a move she said caused her to be taken less seriously as a professional.
"My career wasn't going so great, and I was fighting for my own little bit of turf and felt that I was losing my own personality," she said.
Life as an open book didn't help. Even the intimacy of childbirth was captured in a 1985 Sting rockumentary, "Bring on the Night." Styler said of the filming, "I did notice they were there. The guy with the boom was crying -- I felt I had to be strong for them."
Now there's a brand new addition to the family, Giacomo Luke Sumner, born December 17. Styler says the enthusiasm her own children show for environmental issues gives her hope for the future.
"I think it's a natural backlash of our generation, if you like, being the ultimate consumers," she said.
Styler's career as an activist and filmmaker makes it clear that she is more than just window dressing to her famous husband, a fact not lost on him. As he puts it himself, "She's the strong one in the relationship. I'm the dizzy blond."
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