Celebrity

If you had been fortunate enough to see the first night of Tchaikovsky’s opera Eugene Onegin at the Opéra National de Paris last week, then it might have been with a slight jolt of surprise that you saw a familiar face take to the stage as the cast took their bows.  Ralph Fiennes, the award-winning actor, was not appearing in the opera – although he took on the role of Onegin in a 1999 film that his sister Martha directed – but instead he made his operatic directorial debut with the production. The reviews so far have been mixed rather than laudatory.

There was a time when, whenever the gossip mags wrote about Jennifer Aniston, they’d always preface her name with ‘Sad’. Sad Jen Aniston – it became one of those three-part names, like Sarah Jessica Parker or Sarah Michelle Gellar, only condescending rather than smug. For someone who was allegedly one of the most desirable women on earth, this must have been extremely annoying, recalling the line purred by the courtesan played by Marlene Dietrich in the 1932 film Shanghai Express: ‘It took more than one man to change my name to Shanghai Lily.’ It took more than one man to change Aniston’s moniker to Sad Jen: Brad Pitt, John Mayer and Justin Theroux, for starters.

I’m not awfully keen on family members of famous people putting themselves in the picture; nepo babies are the worst, the equivalent of Japanese knotweed when it comes to the landscape of modern popular culture. But pushy parents are annoying too: Stanley Johnson and the wittering senior Whitehall jumping on the bandwagon when they should be putting their feet up, or the phenomenon of the creepy ‘momager’ touting out her daughter for the delectation of the paying public. But when I saw a photo on Instagram of Liz Hurley, 60, with her mum Angela, 85 – both in leopard-print swimwear from Hurley Junior’s extremely successful beachwear range – I felt absolute glee.

Sometimes it seemed to me as a young hack that writing obituaries must be the best job in newspapers. You can’t get sued – though people tend not to take the gloves off out of ‘respect’ and use ancient phrases like ‘bon viveur’ and ‘did not suffer fools gladly’ when everyone knows you mean ‘well-connected drunk’ and ‘ill-tempered’. It’s only once in a blue moon that someone really says what they think, like when the ‘social influencer’ Jameela Jamil barely waited until the fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld was cold in his casket before X-ing that the capering clown – widely being celebrated as a ‘genius’ – was in fact ‘a racist, misogynistic, fat-phobic rape apologist who shouldn’t be posted all over the internet as a saint gone-too-soon’.

Of all the accessories one might expect a celebrity with millions in the bank and army of stylists at their disposal to choose, a bargain watch is not the most obvious. Yet Casio timepieces – some of which sell for little as £10, and most of which cost under £50 – appear to have become something of a status symbol among a certain strata of the well-off and well-connected. Take former Manchester United footballer Gerard Piqué (estimated net worth £66 million), who split up with pop star Shakira last year. Recently the Colombian singer, 45, released a ‘revenge’ single with lyrics ridiculing the retired Spanish player, her partner of 11 years, for his new relationship with a 23-year-old.

The HR department has killed day-to-day divadom. No longer can you tell your co-worker that her hair needs a good brush; nor can you explain to Richard from accounts that his tan brogues and shiny blue suit sting your retinas. That might upset them. People would be a lot more presentable if you could say these things, but you can’t. Nobody can.  French actress Eva Green, who starred as James Bond’s love interest in Casino Royale, seems to have escaped the great diva slap-down. She was at the High Court this week suing White Lantern Films over a $1 million fee for a film that never got made. It seems Green and the producers had artistic differences over the budget, location and preparations.

Only a mother could love a nepo baby – but there are some professions in which the far reach of the dead hand of nepotism strikes me as worse than others. In such frothy fields as modelling and television presenting, the prettiest face will still usually win out: look at Maya Jama, the new compere of Love Island, daughter of a teenager and a jailbird, who resembles a film star from the golden age of MGM – Fortuna’s apology for Brooklyn Beckham. Nepotism becomes far more damaging to the culture when it sidles out of light entertainment and into newspaper columns, novels and stand-up shows; when it moves the undeserving into jobs which need wit, because wit, unlike cheekbones, is something that can’t be inherited.

Gina Lollobrigida, who died this week at the age of 95, was known in the 1950s and thereafter for the kind of beauty which drove Italian men to self-destruction; and for performances in films which seemed to define a scrappy, energetic, self-possessed Italian womanhood.   During her career, ‘La Lollo’ sculpted, took photographs, did a little journalism and maintained a chaotic personal and political life, in which both her husbands and her male executive assistants always seemed to be in their late twenties. But she ought to also be famous for something else: being the subject of one of the most exciting and vital early experiments in television, a great short film by Orson Welles.

‘Tears are not enough,’ ABC once sang defiantly - but these days, they’re more than enough for handsomely rewarded celebrities to assure us that they suffer like the rest of us, so please don’t hate them. Watching the BBC Breakfast presenter Sally Nugent - a 51-year-old woman - boo-hooing recently after watching a clip of some cute guide dogs, I sincerely wished that Lord Reith might rise from his grave and bundle the heaving hack under a cold shower. I’m just so bored by celebrity tears. Or take Frankie Bridge, the ex-Saturdays singer, an attractive young woman with an adoring husband and adorable children, who like her footballer spouse Wayne has a net worth of around £9 million.

One of the neologisms of 2022 was the phrase ‘nepo baby’. Short for ‘nepotism baby’, it was coined by younger people, the so-called Gen Z, to describe the syndrome of the increased attention and opportunity afforded to the children of celebrities – in practice giving them a leg-up into a career in modelling, acting or singing.  A curious aspect of the trend is that these newly cynical youths are only belatedly realising that many of the young stars in their firmament have famous parents: Lily Collins of Emily in Paris, for example, is the daughter of the rather-better-known-to-their-parents Phil.   But it’s only the term itself that is new.

For a woman whose life was all about ascent, there is a cruel irony to the fact that Ivana Trump was found dead at the age of 73 at the bottom of the stairs of her Upper East Side apartment last Thursday. Born in 1949 in Communist Czechoslovakia, the girl whose father was an electrical engineer made her name on the basis of dizzying verticals: first as a professional skier and then as billionaire’s wife and manager of her second husband Donald Trump’s eye-bending skyscrapers in New York and Atlantic City. After her acrimonious tabloid divorce from Donald in 1991 following his affair with chorus-girl Marla Maples, Ivana made her name from surviving - and exposing - the indignities of her marriage’s collapse.

Brooklyn Beckham, the eldest son of David and Victoria, has launched a new television show Cookin’ with Brooklyn which allegedly took £70,000 and a team of 62 professionals to create. The result is an 8-minute episode that produced a fish-finger sandwich. Brooklyn oversees an assembly of chefs preparing the ingredients, he looks into the camera, totally deadpan and informs his audience, 'With sandwiches you can go so many different ways. It really does help to be creative'. Is this show the epitome of everything that’s wrong with our society, as some have claimed? Brooklyn Beckham is rich. He is the amusing celebrity-child kind of rich.