Fifty Shades of Grey film-maker Sam Taylor-Johnson's childhood

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Fifty Shades film-maker Sam Taylor-Johnson had a colourful childhood
Her father left home when she was seven to ride with the Hells Angels
Director's mother moved family into a commune and became New Age guru
Her upbringing has been spelt out in her mother's bizarre new memoir

By Claudia Joseph and Simon Trump for The Mail on Sunday

Published: 19:57 EST, 21 March 2015 | Updated: 08:36 EST, 22 March 2015

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As a devotee of transcendental meditation and yoga, Sam Taylor-Johnson has often been described as a little kooky.

This, after all, is the conceptual artist and film-maker who once wrapped Selfridges department store in a plastic photo frieze.

No one, though, can doubt her extraordinary success, seen most recently when the 48-year-old directed Fifty Shades Of Grey, the film version of E. L. James's smash S&M series.

Yet the drama on screen – and the rumoured artistic differences between author and director – have nothing on the twists and turns of Sam's real life, including a series of devastating setbacks that make her rise to prominence all the more impressive.

Fifty shades film-maker Sam Taylor-Johnson's colourful childhood has been laid bare in her mother Geraldine's bizarre new memoir (pictured together in 2002)

For her childhood featured a father who left home when she was just seven to ride across the world with the Hells Angels, while her mother Geraldine moved the family into a commune in East Sussex to teach yoga and astrology – before running off to become a New Age guru.

Sam, then 15 and doing her O-levels, was forced to move into a tiny bedsit to finish her schooling on state benefits.

This colourful upbringing is now spelt out in Geraldine's bizarre new memoir, which claims she left her family in Britain because a series of visions guided her to seek a 'holy grail' on the other side of the world.

Stranger still, it states that Sam – who was diagnosed with colon cancer aged just 30, and breast cancer three years later – defeated both diseases with the aid of hundreds of bottles of sacred 'Grail Haven' water, produced by Geraldine and her third husband David De Welles in the remote countryside of Queensland, Australia.

Her childhood featured a father, David, who left home when she was just seven to ride across the world with the Hells Angels

However outlandish it might seem, there is no doubt that the autobiography, The Journey To A Sacred Well – Grail Haven, gives a telling insight not just into Geraldine's abandonment of her family, but into the atmosphere and beliefs that shaped Sam's stellar career.

In the 1990s, she was a feted photographer and video artist, one of the celebrated YBAs – Young British Artists – with Damien Hirst, Jake Chapman and Tracey Emin. Sam was nominated for the Turner Prize in 1998, shortly before her colon cancer diagnosis.

Geraldine writes: 'I am often asked if I am proud of my successful, extremely talented and creative daughter who has artwork in both Tate galleries, exhibits all over the world and has produced books, videos, films.

'I tell them, 'Yes. But I do not understand modern art.' But in this time of crisis [when Sam had breast cancer], I was even more proud of her; in fact she was my hero. She had shown the most incredible, indomitable spirit, in view of the unknown effects and outcome of the chemo on her being and her life.

The Fifty Shades film-maker with stars Dakota Johnson and Jamie Dornan during a Berlin film festival

Director Sam Taylor-Johnson takes centre stage at premiere

'She had drunk our special Grail Heaven water and worked with healers who had known her since she was a child. My daughter did not lose a hair on her head, nor was she sick in all that time.

'In fact we had never seen her so radiant, so etherically beautiful, strong and confident.'

Geraldine – who earns a living as an astrologer and healer – lives in an alternative New Age community at Mount Tamborine, near Queensland's Gold Coast.

When The Mail on Sunday visited, we found a small, alternative, hippy-style settlement filled with psychic readers and New Age healing centres dotted among tourist restaurants. Geraldine told us she did not wish to say anything.

She is less reticent in her memoirs, however. 'My daughter had been brought up in a spiritual atmosphere that blended Christianity and yoga and we knew some extraordinary healers,' she says.

'I phoned each and every one of them requesting 'absent healing'.

'I had to wait about three weeks to get on a plane to see her [Sam] in England. Through this interminable waiting time, I continued teaching yoga classes every week – my support and strength as ever.

She married actor Aaron Taylor-Johnson in 2012 after the pair met on the set of Nowhere Boy

'Meanwhile we bottled and bottled. A thousand bottles of Grail Water were sent to her tiny Covent Garden flat in London. She had it in cupboards, on cupboards, mantelpieces, under beds... water, water everywhere!

'When I finally arrived in London, my daughter was still in the New York clinic, having been told it was the best in the world. A few days later, pale, very thin and still in shock, what looked like my daughter returned from America.

'She stood in front of the wardrobe mirror in the room where I was staying. As she changed her clothes, she turned to show me her naked front.

'There was a scar from the stomach tumour operation starting at her pubic bone to her waist and a deep, bloody scar where her left breast had been. 'I have been mutilated,' she said in a flat voice. I wanted to cry for her.

'I was able to stay for the very first chemo session. She knelt on the bed in high spirits with an impish, cheeky face ready to question her physicians. Doctors, nurses and specialises surrounded her. When they brought in the plastic bag containing the chemo and hung it on the drip, she said, 'Is that it? I expected it to be all brown and smelly!' We all laughed.

'From the beginning, she had insisted that only happy and smiling faces could gather around her bed. There would be no doom and gloom, she insisted. She would never taking the chemo 'lying down'.'

As a devotee of transcendental meditation and yoga, she has often been described as a little kooky

Geraldine was just 19 when she married Sam's father David Taylor, a trainee surveyor, in June 1966. The couple moved to Streatham, South-West London, where, nine months later, Sam was born.

She was followed, in 1971, by her sister Ashley, now a married mother of two who lives in Northern Italy.

But five years later, the family's lifestyle came to a bitter end when David, then an accountant for a chapter of Hell's Angels, abandoned them to bike around the world.

Two years on, after giving birth to their half-brother Kristian, Geraldine married her second husband, musician Peter Wood. The new Taylor-Wood family moved to Crowborough, East Sussex, where they lived a 'basic hippy existence' in a yoga commune called Sunny Villa. Sam later recalled how 'strange' it felt: 'Suddenly I had gone from Streatham ice rink and the cinema every Saturday – a very urban life – to nothing but countryside, with a new father and a new life in this very dark horrible house called Sunny Villa.'

However, on January 6, 1982, that fragile peace was shattered when Sam's maternal grandfather Albert died. Months later, Geraldine – who claims she foresaw his death in a dream – walked out on the family.

Sam, then 15 and in the middle of her O-levels, battled to make ends meet on benefits, while her mother pursued her own spiritual journey with her soon-to-be third husband.

Sam later recalled: 'One day she came home, handed me a note and said, 'I'm leaving you all.' I asked her where she was going and she said she would call and let me know. In the end, I couldn't quite cope with it. I left, got a bedsit, signed on the dole and got into college. I'd pretty much failed my O-levels.

'I was the only girl in this house and it was quite frightening. But I did have a sense of excitement, freedom and adventure, although I did put chairs up against my door.'

Geraldine claims that on an Easter pilgrimage to Glastonbury in 1991, Wellesley Tudor Pole – the founder of the Chalice Well Trust – appeared to her in a dream and told her to move to Australia.

'Without a shadow of a doubt, the apparition I saw before me was Tudor Pole,' she writes. 'I saw him clearly. A beautiful, silvery-blue light radiated from him, while the rest of the room seemed to dim in comparison. He appeared solid down to the waist; I saw his face, head and shoulders but below his waist he was only soft light, vanishing away to nothingness.

'His lips moved as he spoke; but the words were only audible inside my mind. They were loud and clear, and he had my absolute and full attention. A little more insistent this time, 'Daughter of the Well, you are being sent to Australia to find water… when the time is right.' I lay there in wonder and slight shock at what I had seen and heard. The next morning the illness had left me and we returned to Tunbridge Wells.'

Within 18 months, she and David had sold their house and left for Australia, taking Geraldine's youngest son Kristian, then 14, but leaving behind her older daughters Sam, then 25, and Ashley, 21. By this time, Sam had graduated from Goldsmiths College but had yet to be discovered by White Cube gallery owner Jay Jopling, who would also become her first husband.

Her mother claimed that Ms Taylor-Johnson defeated cancer with the aid of hundreds of bottles of sacred 'Grail Haven' water (pictured), produced by Geraldine and her third husband David De Welles

Sam has said of her relationship with her mother: 'It took a long time to repair our relationship. I realised how easy it was to make mistakes even though hers were a bit bigger than most. I think I just had to let go of the anger and I also felt I was too tired with my own sufferings to have anger mixed in with it.'

In her book, Geraldine also reveals how she first discovered her daughter had breast cancer: 'I will leave to the fullness of your imagination what a defining moment it is to watch your own daughter go through chemo. She would choose each week a couple of close friends and her sister to be there by her side.

'She insisted they brought along games, jokes, party hats and balloons. She laughed till she cried when someone showed her a Billy Connolly video.'

Today, Sam divides her time between the US and Britain, where she shares a £13 million townhouse in Primrose Hill, North London, and a £1.85 million farmhouse in Somerset with her second husband, Aaron Johnson, who is 24 years her junior.

But she has remained in touch with her New Age mother. 'We have a rocky relationship,' she has said. 'But at the same time it's one I want to maintain.'