Text: Dmitry Konstantinov THE MOST STYLISH AND PHOTOGENIC LAWYER IN THE WORLD - AMAL CLUNI - THE EFFECTIVE OF OTHERS IS DESTROYED BY THE STEREOTYPE, ACCORDING TO WHICH SECOND HUMAN BEAUTIES ARE EXCLUSIVELY EXCEPTED SCANDAL GLORY. HERE OF LEBANON'S ORIGIN IS ONLY STRENGTHENING THE GUESS: A NEW GENERATION OF WOMEN HARMONIALLY COMBINING CREATIVE ACTIVITY AND LIFE SUCCESS GETS FORCE IN THE WORLD. AND THE STAR OF THIS GENERATION RISES IN THE EAST. Amal Alamuddin was born on February 3, 1978 in Beirut in an aristocratic family, leading her family tree from the XIV century.
The girl was not even two years old when they started shooting and blowing up outside the windows of the family estate. At the height of the civil war in Lebanon, the Amal family emigrated to the UK, where they settled in Buckinghamshire. The parents of the future Mrs. Clooney were educated and energetic people. Father, Ramsey Alam Uddin, received an MBA from the University of Beirut in 1972, and opened the travel company Comet in England. Barium's mother, who was called Lebanese Elizabeth Taylor, graduated from the same university, edited the Al-Hayat newspaper, interviewed Fidel Castro, and led a concierge agency serving world famous celebrities. In addition to Amal, her sister Tale and two half-brothers from her father's first marriage, Samir and Ziyad, had to get used to oatmeal.
After studying at a female gymnasium in the suburbs of London Little Chalfont, Amal Alamuddin entered Oxford for law. In 2000, she received a bachelor's degree there and a year later went to America to continue her education at the School of Law at New York University. There, in Greenwich Village, she received a master's degree and an internship at the Federal Court of Appeals under the direction of Sonya Sotomayor, the same that President Obama would later serve on as a member of the US Supreme Court.
Witnesses and Judges
Like most lawyers, Amal Alamuddin began her career with criminal cases, but with their scale the girl was clearly lucky. While still a student, working in the New York office of Sullivan and Cromwell, Amal got her first clients - the bankrupt energy company Enron in 2001 and the audit firm Arthur Andersen, “interested” in it. The court considered a lawsuit for corporate fraud in the amount of $ 101 billion, the largest in the history of world jurisdiction. The defense in the “people versus opaque companies” process was purely symbolic, but, as Bernard Shaw used to say, the reputation of a lawyer is made not by winning the case, but by the seriousness of the litigation.
Even at the university, Amal Alamuddin was awarded the Jack Katz Prize for successes in international law. And having received a diploma in 2004, she went to the distribution not somewhere, but to The Hague, to the UN International Court of Justice, as one of the two best students of the course. There she worked as an assistant to the judge from Russia, Vladlen Vereshchetin, and the judge from Egypt, the future secretary general of the League of Arab States, Nabil Al Arabi, and participated in the activities of the International Criminal Tribunals to investigate crimes in Lebanon and the former Yugoslavia.
In 2010, Amal again moved to the UK and began working at the London-based law firm Doughty Street Chambers. Like all lawyers serving here, she becomes a barrister - a senior defender with the power to defend the interests of the client in any of the courts of the United Kingdom.
If we take into account that London by that time had become a kind of refuge for disgraced oligarchs, then the new work turned out to be very exciting: confiscation of assets, extradition, wanted by Interpol. Here, one of her clients is the founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, for whom Amal seeks release in December 2010 from arrest on bail of 240 thousand pounds, but the Supreme Court rejects all her numerous appeals about the abolition of extradition to Sweden. In 2012, she “remotely” defends the interests of former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko imprisoned in a Ukrainian prison.
"Amal is not just a promising lawyer, she is like a friend who will go with you to the end, not afraid to get involved in either corruption scandals or politicized processes," Julian Assange spoke of his lawyer in an interview with Evening Standard.
Contrary, and possibly due to a successful career, Amal remains unmarried until she is 36 years old. University friend Je Kim believed that the oriental beauty puts her Ideal too high a rider list, and was seriously worried about her. The ubiquitous English Evening Standard reporters once hinted at a roam with 58-year-old Eric Schmidt, head of the Google’s board of directors, proving a joint press tour to Myanmar and a joint banquet at the Lu-Lu nightclub in Mayfair, where Princess Beatrice of York and brother Kate Middleton James were also present. But these rumors did not receive either official confirmation or further development.
In this regard, the statement of Amal Baria’s mother from an interview in 1987 seems extremely curious: “I constantly inspired both my daughters: try to more objectively perceive your beauty and spiritual development, try to defeat the complexes inherent in women of the Middle East. The reason for these complexes is the exhausting internal the struggle every woman is exposed to: allow herself casual contacts or keep her name clean in the eyes of a conservative society, parents, future husband. "
Personal life at gunpoint
In the fall of 2013 in Syria, Amal Alamuddin met with George Clooney. The Hollywood bachelor-record-holder was looking for romance adventures in hot spots in the style of Hemingway and Montan (he was even once arrested for this in Sudan), simultaneously helping the local population with their participation in humanitarian projects.
She, as an adviser to the former UN Secretary General, and now Special Envoy to Syria, Kofi Annan, dealt with the legal justification of the legality of the use of drones against terrorist groups.
When Clooney was subsequently asked what first attracted him to his future wife, he replied: "Amal is an amazing person, perhaps one of the smartest that I met in my life. In addition, she is very caring and has a great sense of humor." At the same time, the actor noted that he had to stand on his knees for 28 seconds, before an fluent darling who spoke fluent in three languages (English, French, Arabic) agreed to transfer the relationship from a business plane to a romantic one.
Before announcing the engagement (which, according to him, the movie actor Edward Norton was the first to know), the couple went on a safari to Tanzania, took a break in the Seychelles and then went to meet their parents - in New York to Nick and Nina Clooney and after that to Dubai - to Ramsay and Baria Alamuddin. The version that Clooney also represented the bride to the US president is not valid. Most likely, he simply looked after him nicely - he invited to the cinema for the premiere of his film “Treasure Hunters” in the White House, presented a ring with a seven-carat diamond, made according to his own sketch. The future Mrs. Clooney quit smoking in response.
“Fortunately, Amal has nothing to do with show business,” Nina Clooney described the potential daughter-in-law. “George has something to talk about with her - they are on the same intellectual level.” Refuting the rumors that Amal’s mother was originally against marriage for religious reasons, George Clooney thoroughly quarreled with the English tabloid Daily Mail and subsequently did not accept an official apology from the publication. The origin of the rumors was based on the Druze religion, professed by Amal's parents - allowing for the possibility of reincarnation of the monotheistic branch of Islam, categorically not accepting the expansion of its community, as well as “outside” marriages. The recent visit of the Clooney couple to Beirut confirmed that there is a place of tolerance in this faith: everyone liked George: both new relatives and their neighbors. But in any case, contrary to parental traditions, Amal’s decision to associate fate with a person of a different faith deserves special respect.
“George and I wanted everything at our wedding to be romantic and elegant,” Amal told Vogue magazine correspondent. “I could not imagine a designer who could convey this mood in a wedding dress better than Oscar de la Renta. He a very nice person and a real gentleman. "
A dress of 13 meters of Chantilly lace and 14 meters of ivory tulle began to be sewed in July 2014, and mother Baria and sister Tala came to try on. Having received permission for a Christian marriage in the UK on August 7, George and Amal married in Venice on September 27, 2014. Crowned by a young former mayor of Rome and a friend of Clooney Walter Veltroni. The event was widely covered in the press, and from that moment on, Mrs. Clooney became the subject of a special passion for the paparazzi. However, according to a colleague and mentor, British legal adviser Mark Stevens, "Amal has been used to being the center of attention since she worked at the UN." Slender, even too, beautiful 173 cm tall, with a degree and an excellent sense of style - is this not a rare combination?
“From the very first day we met, I was impressed with her impeccable taste, bold, slightly eccentric attitude to fashion,” Mr. Clooney admits. “No matter what she wears, she is always magnificent." At the same time, observers note that the actor himself began to look better after the wedding. Rumor has it that Amal put him on his own diet, excluding alcohol, flour, fried, sweet and dairy products.
When and how Amal Alamuddin first got acquainted with brands and trends is a rather rhetorical question. Given her repeated wanderings along the New York - London axis, she is scrupulous, you understand that not being guided in the world of high fashion on this route is like not being able to speak English. And then, who better than a lawyer understands the fateful role of such a thing as a dress code?
At the wedding in Venice, she brought far more than just a wedding outfit. Here is a striped dress from Dolce & Gabbana, in which it is appropriate to go ashore, and a red cocktail mini from Alexander McQueen, and a white trouser suit, together with an elegant "English" hat, worked out by Stella McCartney. In everyday life, Amal Clooney prefers Prada shoes and sunglasses, Marant leather jackets, Eliott ripped jeans, Balenciaga handbags. And if for most of us these are the names of brands from the world of haute couture, for Amal it is also friends, neighbors, sometimes customers.
While the appearance of children was not included in the list of “key priorities” for the Clooney family, Amal continues his lawyer practice and writes articles - though now under the name of her husband. Since last year, she began teaching - she gives lectures in New York, London and The Hague. Supports a charity project for higher education by Lebanese schoolgirls. The status of its clients is growing steadily - here is the government of Cambodia in their territorial dispute with Thailand, and the ex-president of the Republic of Maldives, Mohamed Nashid, and the Sultan of Bahrain. Along with this, she defends the rights and interests of all who need it - be it journalist from Azerbaijan Khadiya Ismailova, Al Jazira correspondent Mohamed Fahmi or former Libyan intelligence chief Abdullah Al Senussi.
In 2014, Amal Clooney entered the shortlist of the British Fashion Awards in the nomination "British style". This May in Cannes, where, among others, was honored by the movie Jody Foster “The Financial Monster” and its main characters performed by George Clooney and Julia Roberts, Amal wearing Cartier earrings and an asymmetrical light Versace dress with a 1.5 meter train creeping along the red carpet to be a cut above even Pretty Woman herself, who appeared barefoot at the premiere. Apparently, something similar was meant by the famous St. Petersburg lawyer Anatoly Koni when he said: "The lawyer will achieve little by convincing and proving. He must prove and excite."
