In little more than a
year, Lupita Nyong’o has made the leap from serious student to Oscar-winning
actress and head-turning fashion star. Hamish Bowles catches up with
Hollywood’s newest golden girl.
Marrakech in May is unseasonably tagine-hot. Hapless
tourists are being felled by sunstroke merely from sauntering across the city’s
pulsing medina square, which is all but abandoned by the native food and
trinket traders, snake-charmers, and storytellers who will throng it in the
desert cool of evening.
But in the oasis sanctuary of the Ksar Char-Bagh, all is
balmy dolce far niente. A luxe spa hostelry built in imitation of a castle-like
fort in the middle of the Palmeraie, it has crenellated towers that hide a
private dipping pool and afford views down to a central marbled courtyard
modeled on Granada’s Moorish Alhambra, and across the palm groves to the
distant Atlas Mountains. Guests are lounging poolside in the shade of an allée
of date palms, seemingly oblivious of the Academy Award–winning deity in their
midst, who is the focus of the Vogue cover shoot in full fluster around them.
