Does Sienna Miller owe her rave reviews for TV divorce drama to her traumatic split from cheating Jude Law?

Flashbulbs erupt. A glamorous Hollywood actress walks out of a London courtroom, her face set in a determined expression as photographers jostle for a glimpse of her.

Caught in the middle of a bitter divorce from her wealthy and powerful husband, she refuses to buckle under the glare of the cameras – even as paparazzi pursue her limousine all the way to her home.

It sounds like another day in the tumultuous world of celebrity scandal.

But this is fiction, the opening episode of Sky’s sizzling new drama War. The first episode aired on Friday night and it has already attracted rave reviews, with one critic even comparing it to the award-winning Succession.

Yet for its leading lady Sienna Miller, 44, the drama comes with some distinctly uncomfortable echoes of her past.

In the eight-part series, Sienna plays Carla Duval, a Hollywood A-lister whose marriage to tech billionaire Moran Henderson, played by Dominic West, 56, is thrown into turmoil when the womaniser enjoys a one-night stand with a beautiful stranger he meets in a bar. 

What follows is a spectacularly acrimonious, high-profile divorce, played out for the world to watch. And while the storyline may have been dreamed up by screenwriter George Kay (who also wrote Lupin, Hijack and Killing Eve), it bears more than a passing resemblance to the very public heartbreak Sienna experienced almost two decades ago.

Yet today, the actress appears to have found her happy ending.

Engaged to actor and model Oli Green (15 years her junior at 29) she enjoys a relatively quiet family life in London with him and their two young children, alongside her 14-year-old daughter Marlowe, whom she shares with her former partner, actor Tom Sturridge.

Marlowe joined her mother on the red carpet for the London premiere of War, which unexpectedly went viral on social media because Marlowe so closely resembles her mother.

Sienna later expressed regret over the attention the event placed on her eldest daughter, saying: ‘She’s beautiful but that’s the least interesting thing about her. She’s the most clever, funny, amazing girl.

‘She came with her friend. I was doing the red carpet and, for five seconds, at the end, she kind of came and gave me a hug.

‘I don’t think any one of us anticipated what would happen but I felt, I think, like it was not a great thing for her at this point in her life,’ she added.

If anyone knows about the dark side of fame it is Sienna.

Back in the mid-2000s she found herself at the centre of one of the decade’s most explosive celebrity cheating scandals when her then-fiancé Jude Law was discovered to have been unfaithful with Daisy Wright, his children’s nanny.

He and Sienna had first met on the set of the 2004 film Alfie, becoming engaged on Christmas Day that year. But just months later their seemingly picture- perfect romance spectacularly unravelled when news of his cheating went public.

Law issued a grovelling public apology and they attempted to salvage things.

But despite their efforts, the romance was over by the end of 2006. They reconciled three years on, but it ended for good in 2011.

Fast forward 15 years and Sienna is earning the best reviews of her career as a woman whose relationship has been destroyed by her lover’s infidelity.

One man who understands just how closely the actress’s latest role resonates with her own extraordinary life story is Robert Dupont, producer of the 2006 film Factory Girl.

The film starred Sienna as artist Andy Warhol’s troubled muse Edie Sedgwick, who died of a drugs overdose aged just 28.

Dupont told The Mail on Sunday: ‘Sienna and I were close friends. Back then she was being hounded by the paparazzi and on the front pages of magazines around the world. She was the “It” girl of the moment.

‘We filmed Factory Girl while all the drama was going on with Jude Law. I’m not surprised Sienna is getting great reviews because it’s very much art imitating life. When Jude cheated on her it caused a tabloid sensation. But to her credit it never affected her performance. She was always professional on set. But privately she must have been going through hell.’

Trying to shoot a film, though, when your leading lady was in the eye of a global media storm proved a challenge for Dupont.

‘We filmed Factory Girl in Louisiana and New York and we had to smuggle her in and out of the set and into parties because she was the most hounded woman in the world. It was overwhelming,’ he said.

‘She was on the cover of Vogue and other fashion magazines but also on the cover of every tabloid on both sides of the Atlantic.

‘I’m glad she’s finally getting to use that negative experience to create something positive.’

Sienna has spoken about the tumult of the Jude Law break-up. When she finished filming Factory Girl she starred in a production of Shakespeare’s As You Like It, in the West End.

Her co-star in that play was her TV husband in War, Dominic West, who, according to one person who knew Sienna well back then, ‘was a rock solid support’.

The source said: ‘Sienna was very young. She has talked about how awful the whole Jude Law thing was.

‘Dominic was very supportive so it’s lovely that they are back working together again when she is in a much more positive place.’

Sienna told The Daily Beast news site: ‘The play was one of the most challenging moments I hope I’ll ever have to experience because with that level of public heartbreak, to have to get out of bed, let alone stand in front of 800 people every night, it’s just the last thing you want to do.’

She called it a ‘surreal’ experience and said she was so traumatised by the paparazzi she felt as if she was ‘going mad’. She likened the ‘mess’ to an ‘ouroboros’ – an ancient symbol of a snake or dragon eating its own tail. ‘I think everything fed into itself and it just became this very unmanageable energy,’ she said.

‘And I see other people who went through it and didn’t kind of come out the other side as well, so I’m quite proud.’

Sienna was later linked with actors Leonardo DiCaprio and Matthew Rhys (a romance with either was never confirmed) before settling down with Marlowe’s father Tom Sturridge in 2011. The pair split amicably in 2015 and she dated art gallery owner Lucas Zwirner from 2018 to 2020 before meeting ‘love of my life’ Oli Green in 2021.

She and Oli welcomed their first child, a daughter, in late 2023 and a boy this May.

Sienna’s War co-star Dominic West has, of course, been through his own share of marital drama. West, who played Prince Charles in The Crown, was linked with co-star Lily James while they were in Rome filming the BBC mini-series The Pursuit of Love, in October 2020.

The married father-of-four was rocked by allegations of an affair when he was photographed riding an electric scooter with James, then 31. The two were even captured kissing, with West notably not wearing his wedding ring.

He and his aristocratic landscape gardener wife Catherine FitzGerald, 55 – whom he married in 2010 – appeared side by side outside their Cotswolds home and released a handwritten note that said: ‘Our marriage is strong and we’re very much still together. Thank you.’

West, who also played an errant husband in The Affair, on Netflix, later said it was a ‘deeply stressful’ time, adding: ‘I hesitate to speak on my wife’s behalf because it was obviously horrible, particularly for her.

‘But we do joke about it sometimes. It was deeply stressful for my wife and my kids but there were lighter moments. That was the best that came out of it, really.’

In an interview with The Times, he said: ‘Whenever we went out together the papers would always say we were “putting on a show of unity”… so when we go out, we do sort of say, “Shall we go and have a show of unity up in London?”.’

The casting of West and Sienna Miller in a marital drama, therefore, can be seen as a mischievous stroke of genius. One critic has already described War as ‘must-see TV’.

The New York Times said Sienna delivers a ‘deeply charismatic, complicated and sympathetic performance’, while Hollywood bible Variety added the two actors ‘shine’ in the ‘captivating divorce thriller’.

Sienna told People magazine: ‘The more you love someone off-screen, the more fun it is to hate them on-screen.’

The show’s creator George Kay got the idea for the story when he was standing in an airport queue and a woman nearby suddenly screamed ‘Yes!’ into her phone.

Intrigued, Kay asked her what had happened and she revealed her bitter divorce, which had dragged on for years, was finally over and she had secured a massive financial settlement.

It was a moment that gave Kay the idea for a drama exploring the extraordinary sums of money, power struggles and emotional warfare that can accompany the break-up of the super-rich.

And where better to set it than London?The capital has become a magnet for high-net-worth divorces, thanks in part to British law, which recognises wives as equal partners in a marriage even if they have spent years raising children while their husbands amassed enormous fortunes.

The eye-watering settlements speak for themselves. Russian billionaire Mikhail Kroupeev shelled out £100million last year while hedge fund billionaire Sir Chris Hohn had to pay his wife £337million in 2014.

Kay said the inspiration for one crucial scene in War – when divorce papers are served on a Hollywood red carpet – was inspired by a real event.

In 2022, actress Olivia Wilde was on stage at the CinemaCon convention in Las Vegas when she was served with child custody papers from her then-husband, Ted Lasso star Jason Sudeikis. He said he had no prior knowledge of the timing or manner of the delivery. Ms Wilde called the incident ‘vicious’ and ‘traumatising’ – the perfect grist to the mill of Kay’s drama.

After years of heartbreak and headlines, Sienna Miller must surely be happy the only emotional wringer she has to survive these days is on the small screen.