Kate Moss on Vanity Fair (Photo : Vanity Fair )

Kate Moss may have enjoyed a long superstardom as a much-coveted supermodel, but she suffered a nervous breakdown as a teenager and a tearful heartbreak from splitting from Johnny Depp, the British model tells Vanity Fair.

The 38-year-old supermodel opened up to Vanity Fair in its December issue interview on her traumatic experiences in the photo shoot which helped her rise to fame.

The iconic 1992 Calvin Klein ad campaign featured Kate Moss topless, next to male model Mark Wahlberg.
The ad was literally everywhere, portraying Moss in her fragile physique as the perfect woman.

Like Us on Facebook

But behind the scene, there was enormous pain.

"I had a nervous breakdown when I was 17 or 18, when I had to go and work with Marky Mark and Herb Ritts," Kate Moss told Vanity Fair.

"It didn't feel like me at all. I felt really bad straddling this buff guy. I didn't like it. I couldn't get out of bed for two weeks. I thought I was going to die. I went to the doctor and he said: 'I'll give you some Valium', and Francesca Sorrenti [Moss' friend and mother of Mario Sorrenti], thank God, said: 'You're not taking that.'"

"It was just anxiety. Nobody takes care of you mentally. There's a massive pressure to do what you have to do," Moss recalls. 

"I was really little, and I was going to work with Steven Meisel. It was just really weird - a stretch limo coming to pick you up from work. I didn't like it. But it was work and I had to do it."

The modeling career of Kate Moss began at the age of 14, which now she recognizes as too early.

"I see a 16-year-old now, and to ask her to take her clothes off would feel really weird," she said. "But they were like: 'If you don't do it, then we're not going to book you again'. So I'd lock myself in the toilet and cry and then come out and do it."

Moss' high-profile relationship with actor Johnny Depp provided her a brief comfort, followed by a heartbreak.

"There's nobody that's ever really been able to take care of me. Johnny did for a bit," Moss said.

"I believed what he said. Like if I said: 'What do I do?' - he'd tell me. And that's what I missed when I left. I really lost that gauge of somebody I could trust," she continued.

"It was a nightmare - years and years of crying. Oh, the tears."

And yet, "I was lucky to be with Johnny," Moss said.
"He taught me a lot about fame. He told me 'never complain, never explain'. That's why I don't use Twitter and things like that. I don't want people to know what is true all the time and that's what keeps the mystery."

Kate Moss is soon to release her book "Kate: The Kate Moss Book," which contains a highly personal retrospective of the supermodel's career, tracing her evolution from "new girl with potential" to one of the most iconic models of all time.