Celebrity

Jennifer Aniston and the allure of woo-woo

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

The gaudy glory of Elizabeth Hurley

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

‘Genius’ is a dangerously misused word

For several centuries, the word ‘celebrity’ meant fame. A couple of hundred years ago, it acquired a secondary meaning of a person overendowed with that quality, and this has now largely driven out the previous usage. In parallel, the same journey has been travelled by ‘genius’. Once an essence that attached to works or deeds, it now also refers to people – celebrities of accomplishment, no field too trivial. Helen Lewis teases out the consequences of this shift and makes a modest plea for its reversal. People hailed as geniuses find their words on any subject magically carrying extra weight Her indictment of the genius myth – the idea that

Spare us from ‘nobituaries’

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

The horrors of the ‘Upskirt Decade’

The subject that Sarah Ditum addresses in Toxic is why the early part of this century was ‘such a monstrous time to be famous and female. It’s about how the concept of privacy came undone and why that was a catastrophe for women’. The concept of privacy was actually undone by a judge in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 2006. A 16-year-old girl was browsing through greetings cards in a shop when a man crouched down beside her and took photographs up her skirt. A security guard saw him and called the police. The whole scene was captured on CCTV, so there was no shortage of evidence. But the judge ruled that

In praise of the Casio watch

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,

Eva Green and the death of the Hollywood diva

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