Hollywood

Reading the lip-smacking reports of the latest troubled celebrity relationships  (Jennifer Aniston and Justin Theroux definitely high and dry, Cheryl Cole and Liam Payne allegedly on the rocks) I couldn’t help musing that stars – and more specifically, the place they occupy in our mass psychological landscape – have very much changed since the first mass-market celebrities emerged. The film stars of the fledgling Hollywood truly were worshipped as higher beings; a tribe of Pathan Indians opened fire on a cinema when they were denied entry to a Greta Garbo film while women committed suicide when Valentino died. Their marriages were regarded as heavenly unions; their romantic sunderings as tragedies.

Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool is plainly wonderful, and stars Annette Bening, who is plainly wonderful, as Gloria Grahame, a one-time Hollywood movie star who in later life hits on hard times — ‘a big name in black and white. Not doing too well in colour,’ comments her landlady at one point — and embarks on a romance with a young English actor who is 30 years her junior. It is based on a true memoir. It is a love story, told tenderly, bravely, smartly, movingly. And believably. Older women, it seems, can be interesting, complicated, vital, attractive and sexual. Who knew? (But don’t spread the word, or they’ll