Frank Skinner (Times Magazine, August 12, 2023)

Comedy legend Frank Skinner, 66, is returning to standup at Edinburgh fringe  -the show is called 30 Years of Dirt.  This comes over 30 years after he  won the Perrier Awards.  He is most renowned for his TV show Fantasy Football with David Baddiel and Room 101.  His poetry podcast is about to go into its 8th series.  He lives with his partner, Cath Mason and their son Buzz in North London,  He is also a practicing Catholic.

“I have been trying for some years, and without success, to do a clean show but I think in knob jokes, and I think you can be ashamed by that, but they are so ingrained in me.

I don’t think people want you to be talking about science or politics.  I don’t think comedy has become harder since woke or PC rules, those lines have always been there. When I started out I did working mens’ clubs in Birmingham and was reprimanded intensely because I did jokes about masturbation.  Then I would apologize and do three racist jokes in quick succession.  So it is OK to be racist, but not talk about masturbation,  When I started out in so-called alternative comedy, you couldn’t be sexist or racist, that was the big thing, but over the years I haven’t found that  particularly restraining. 

I don’t mind now that I am a comedy legend,  on stage I talk about being a comedy elder statesman.and all the changes that have happened.

I don’t really get nervous any more.  When I first started, three or four months in, I got properly and overly nervous, then I noticed it just slipped away. Now I can say that I feel different on a show day than on a no-show day, but it is pretty marginal.

I don’t struggle.  I don’t do any exercise except for walking the dog and I lost weight, (one and a half stone ) just by cutting out bread. No struggle. 

I am 66; I didn’t do my first stand up until I was 30, so I did start later than everyone else.
Also I don’t drink, smoke or do drugs and whatever we think about the stresses and strains  of life in this business, it’s not like digging holes. Once I got into my 60’s I felt good about who I was.  I always felt a 66 year old man-in-waiting.

 Some people are born for youth and they sparkle and maybe they spend the rest of their life looking back and wondering where it went 

I was 55 when my son Buzz was born and that does seem old for a first and only child, but I assured myself that many people of all ages had completely messed up parenthood.

For a long time into my 50’s I was tortured by the fact that if I didn’t go out of an evening I felt I was missing something really exciting and it was difficult for me to combine that with parenthood.

I think by then I’d been to all the parties, I had a kid and I was happy to. be doing that. I don’t know why, but I found it much easier to cry after having a kid.  Recently I was watching a woman’s tennis  awards show and I got tearful about a winner, even though she meant nothing to me and I did not even know who she was. I don’t know if that is a good or bad thing.

I called my son Buzz after Buzz Aldrin and it was a name we used for the bump, but then I liked the idea that he was a child who is going to take second place in history and didn’t have the pressure of being named Neil (as in Armstrong) who had to be first in everything. I didn’t want to put that on him.

I didn’t give up drinking and think that would be replaced by comedy or religion, it wasn’t metaphysical like that. I thought when I was drinking Sherry for breakfast it was nothing. but when I started drinking Pernot for breakfast, it was something,  I returned to church when I was still drinking, so I didn’t think that one was a replacement for the other, or a release. When drinking has been your life you get through a lot of hours doing it,  The time you would have spent drinking in pubs was the time you got for comedy.

I remember that I was interviewed on Parkinson’s and he asked me about drinking and the camera goes in really tight on your face.  I said then, and now, that I thought drinking was brilliant and I had the best time drinking,  I don’t think I replaced it as a social lubricant. My friendship group diminished very quickly after I stopped drinking and it never really recovered.
I made friends all the time when I was drinking.  I know there is a theory that men stop making friends when they are 35.  When I was drinking I had no suspicion of new people. I miss the white heat of joy of drinking.  It’s uncomplicated joy.  Watching a goal is a similar pleasure.  Most of our pleasures in life are from work or love, but they’ve got an element of risk in them.  I miss the adventures of drinking.  I don’t mean sexual adventures, I mean going out in London and waking up in Brighton,….a different world.

I’m not sure how I got from New Lad to poetry, I think it’s about how people want to see the drinking narrative. I would never hide the fact that I was Catholic, or that I have a Masters in English Literature, but it didn’t fit with the narrative about me.  Like Aristotle talked about the probable truth. If one thing dominates and there are other moments you don’t mention because that gets in the way  of the narrative and what really happened. The fact that I don’t drink was always downplayed because it was in the way of the soires about me.  I go to church in Hampstead and I have a Monseigneur.

It was easier to come out as an alcoholic than a Catholic.There is something quite cool about a person having a drink problem, as long as they don’t go into the bed-wetting stage. I don’t see the heroic religious person,. I think it’s the age when we were encouraged to embrace the difference in people, but I don’t think Christianity has been on that list. I did a Podcast about the religious poet Gerard Manley Hopkins.  We looked at the poems Pied Beauty and the Windhover. His poetry is like having an electric tingle going through you.

When I went to couples’ counselling with Cath, the couples’ counsellor was a German intellectual. If you’re in any kind of counselling situation and you don’t want to be the brightest person in the room, the best one can hope for is a German intellectual  I’ve never had any kind of counselling before and I thought, if I’m prepared to do this, it’s a show of commitment. The counsellor turned out to be a fascinating bloke and he definitely helped us – we’re still together after 22 years. We still fight, but nowhere near as much.

I’m not sure if you can have passion and harmony in a relationship at the same time. But it is my experience that it is not possible to have a relationship without conflict. I wonder about couples who say “we don’t really argue”, it makes me suspicious. One thing I’ve noticed about getting older is that I give in 98% of the time. Samuel Johnson once said that it will all seem different and less significant in 12 months. And sometimes it can be that, and sometimes it’s a couple of weeks or a couple of days, but sometimes it’s important to just move on. By nature, I’m usually much more confrontational, but I have found recently the allure of the doormat. In the first round of the World Championship of Snooker, Terry Griffiths, the Welsh snooker player, was out and was interviewed. He said “there’s a certain beauty in defeat”. He was completely nonplussed. Giving in is sometimes good for the soul.

I have proposed to Cath four times, but she didn’t want to get married. Her parents got divorced when she was seven and it hit her hard. It put her off marriage. I think there are bigger things than marriage. LIKE If one of us runs away to the West Indies, it’s definitely not a fantasy of mine, to run away, in fact I can’t imagine leaving London. I don’t have the travel bug at all. I think having a child is a bigger thing than marriage. I do think about death in planes because that’s something that happens when you have a kid. You think that you have to be there because you have responsibilities, “I can’t die today”, you think. But I don’t think anyone’s death can be avoided by not wanting it. I’ve always said I’d like to be around until he gets into university, then I can go to Las Vegas and drink myself to death – I don’t mean literally, but that would feel ‘at least my work is done’. At the moment he’s obsessed with rock music and I don’t know what he’d study at university. Hopefully he’d like to do English literature and do the rock music unofficially, but I don’t want to be passing him any direction.

I never had a death thing before, but it happened as soon as I had a kid, you think about letting him down. My parents died when they were 69 and 70, they died quite young and within 12 months of each other. My dad, in the middle of an argument, would say to my mother, to put her on the back foot: “if you die on Monday, I’ll want to die on Tuesday”. She died first. I think the biggest blow to them, both physical and mental, was after the decided to retire, they both died within five years of retirement. I’d like to die like Tommy Cooper, on stage.
 My mum was filled with love all the time and my dad was my hero – probably the bigger influence on me. Because he liked music, sport and comedy and was a Catholic. But my mum – if I went into a pub and shot seven people, she’d still be visiting me in jail. It was a classic working class combo of loving mother and a dad who would come in after a fight. Once he came in with his wrist all swollen, he’d knocked a guy into a garden wall. He said it was because somebody asked him for the time and I wondered if I’d missed something. But he’s from the North East! Where, if someone  asked him the time going down the mine, while he was looking for it, someone would steal his lunch.

When I became a celebrity, I didn’t have to do anything other than be someone would always come up to me and talk to me. It was like I suddenly got good looking over night – and I’m not thinking that I ever have been good looking but I liked to take advantage of that.



 My mum was filled with love all the time and my dad was my hero – probably the bigger influence on me. Because he liked music, sport and comedy and was a Catholic. But my mum – if I went into a pub and shot seven people, she’d still be visiting me in jail. It was a classic working class combo of loving mother and a dad who would come in after a fight. Once he came in with his wrist all swollen, he’d knocked a guy into a garden wall. He said it was because somebody asked him for the time and I wondered if I’d missed something. But he’s from the North East! Where, if he’d asked the time going down the mine, while he was looking for it, someone would steal his lunch.

A long-term relationship is a combination of the right person and the right time. Nobody is 100% the right person, but the right time has something to do with when you think, ‘I wouldn’t mind settling down with this person’. I met Cath when she worked with my management agency, Avalon. She worked in the post room. Also at Avalon, there was then a contractual thing that members of female staff could not be involved with clients. I think this was to protect them. And also so you wouldn’t discuss how much money you made. I told her I’d take her anywhere in the world that she wanted and she said, “I’ve always fancied the Lake District”, then I knew. I still like the Lake District and we do a lot of walking holidays.  . We remind each other that we can spend 24/7 together and be still talking and not stop enjoying each other’s company. That’s incredible after 22 years, that we could go on a walking holiday tomorrow and never stop talking. We did this after the couples’ counselling, instead, we spent money on the Airbnb. I think it’s all about the communication, that’s what heals a rift.

 All those things that used to annoy you about dog owners, suddenly, I feel it’s you. I can sit for 10 minutes and watch the dog chase a fly and it’s better than Netflix. I like him trying to catch a fly and not catching it, because that gives me that Roadrunner feeling. The coyote in Roadrunner spent his entire life chasing something he couldn’t get. He was cuddly and focused and those are not usually words you see in the same sentence, but he was chasing, perhaps, for the perfect comedy gig”.

Frank Skinner brings his new show ’30 Years of Dirt’ to the Assembly George Square – Gordon Aikman Theatre as part of the Edinburgh Fringe from 3rd – 27th August (excl. Wednesdays) at 8:50 pm.  For more info and tickets visit www.frankskinnerlive.com.

Series Eight of Frank Skinner’s Poetry Podcast is out from 2nd August.

Listen on the Absolute Radio app or wherever you get your podcasts –www.absoluteradio.co.uk

Rafa Nadal (July 20, 2023)

Tennis superstar Rafa Nadal 37 discusses life after tennis. He is Spanish, lives with his wife Mery Perello and baby son who takes his name

I live in the island of Mallorca, Spain in a small town called Manacor. Well, I actually live in an even smaller place but the sea in the area of Manacor but called Porto Cristo. I was born in Manacor and so has my family for centuries and I love it here. It is my home and I find it the best place in the world to live.

I think the pandemic changed many things for everyone. Beside the horrible news of people dying and all the tragedies we saw, it also made us realise how freedom is important, it made us appreciate more the simple things in life and it definitely made us all think about our world, our lives and how we live. All negatives have positives as well and that was no exception, but again starting with the respect of all the families who lost their beloved people.

I always see myself as just normal. In the end we are talking about a sport, about hitting a yellow ball over the net and defeating your rival in front. Is it that special, well maybe on the sports field, but life is much more and I have to admit that I am a very lucky person that never expected to achieve all I achieved in the world of sports.

We do travel the world since we are very young, but nowadays is not as bad as it used to be. We travel confortably, we stay at good hotels, we have nice places to go eat, etc. At least at the professional level. So, yes we do have a tough traveling schedule and the pressure of the competition, but no complaints

If you are injured, truly injured it’s not possible to play one tournament. You might be able to play one match but that would be it. Same if you are injured.  we play and practice with pain, the answer is yes. I believe all players play with some degree of pain. You can count with one hand the times you play 100% free of pain. But injured it’s a different story. And regarding emotional pain, not sure what you mean with that. ….Tennis is very mental and you also practice that since you are young. You have to accept defeat, a point, set, whatever, but you have to recover and be ready for the next point, match or tournament.

Roger ( Federer)and I have had a very healthy and off court friendly rivalry and I believe that’s the way it should be. The competition is for the court and it is much mor comfortable and nice to live without confrontation. I have a nice relationship with him and I am sure it will increase more with time. It’s always been good and, again, I believe that’s the way it should be.

I wouldn’t use the word addiction. To the win  It is true that we are all competitors and we take business, sports, very seriously. I am a strong believer in always trying your best on anything you do. In sports it’s not different, you play to win and if you don’t you should stop competing because in a way it would be a lie.

I love the competition , I always did, and I miss being at tournaments and competing, that feeling of practicing, getting ready and competing to win.

To be honest I am not sure I left anything behind that I didn’t have to -and that in any case helps me to be a better person and competitor, so I don’t think I left anything behind.

It is difficult to go to tournaments as a spectator I  went to the Mallorca Championships to see my friend Feliciano Lopez play and yes, you miss being part of the tournament. But fingers crossed I will still be part of tournaments as a player before I retire and I am sure I will enjoy every moment of it as I always did.

I may return to play Wimbledon I suppose time will tell. I don’t know anything about next year and a tournament calendar.

I can say that I have learned a lot I have been traveling around the world for most part of my life and stayed and see many different hotels around the world that helped me in having an idea of what I want for our ZEL brand. I think that the fact of making it feel my second home has that part of my experience and what I want from a place I am staying. 

For me it’s very important to feel the closest possible to a home. In my case to a Mediterranean home, and to have those services that make a stay easy and comfortable. The rooms, the staff, the amenities, the pool and open areas, the gym, … many things that we have tried to apply to ZEL

I got to know Gabriel Escarrer (president of Melia hotels) and his team and in many conversations we discussed at some point the possibility of building something together. And after many more meetings not only with Gabriel but also my team and part of his team we arrived to this concept that today is a reality and that we hope that the guests will enjoy when they come to our properties. 

It was important to have the first hotel open in Mallorca because Mallorca is my home and it’s also Mr. Escarrer’s home. It makes sense like it did to me when I created the Rafa Nadal Academy in Manacor. I had many options and places around the world offering to host it but I decided to have the main one in Mallorca. I suppose my mental exercise, on my part, has been the same with ZEL.

I like the contemporary style but at the same time with a traditional Mediterranean feel and I believe we have achieved that. Contemporary is nice and I love that kind of decor. But also having a soul and something identified with my roots. 

My closest friends – I grew up with But I have also collected some good friends during all these years.

I just always stayed in touch with them, some played with me, some did other things in life but we are still close and friends. Every time I am in Mallorca we are together. 

I am very close with my family

Nails (You Magazine, April 16, 2023)

I used to have great nails. They started breaking off, there was nothing I could do to stop them being frayed, brittle, dry and stumpy – it happened quite dramatically after the pandemic. Possibly a sign that my thyroid hormones were off, possibly a sign that I was old and not producing oestrogen in giant amounts, but I had all these checked, and for a woman who thinks Barbra Streisand is her real mother, this would not do at all.

I’d already suffered the horrors of falling hair and bald patches due to stress. I’ve already had that dream and already spent more than a mortgage on hair products. I was treated by Harley Street doctor, Dr. Sophie Shotter, and Annabel Kingsley, trichologist. I was fully dosed up with all kinds of vitamins and minerals, what works for hair should also work for nails, right? Wrong. The falling hair dreams were replaced by falling nails reality. They looked ugly. You don’t need a mirror to look at nails, you just look down and that’s how easy it is to ruin your day. The message is: you’re very unhealthy and you’re not worthy of your Barbra heritage. Barbra always said she had self-confidence but no self-esteem, surely this was about having great nails. Barbra could embrace contradiction, she said, “I am simple, complex, generous, selfish, unattractive, beautiful, lazy and driven”. And that was me as well! But no embracing of extremes could be possible if I had broken stumps.

Dr Sophie says, “as oestrogen levels drop, so do the hydration levels of your nails, making them more brittle – it’s common in the perimenopause. Hypothyroidism is also a cause of dry nails, because it makes circulation sluggish” and, as we all know, the nails are the last to go – the nutrients don’t reach there, as with hair, they just fall or fail. I was already taking hair vitamins, which are also advised for nails: zinc, vitamin D, calcium and collagen. Perhaps this wasn’t an internal problem, perhaps it was external and I was just wanting a quick fix. I was saved by nail guru Leighton Denny and his products. You can get them at Marks and Spencer or at leightondenny.com. He invented the Crystal Nail File – one sold every 60 seconds – and he’s a fellow dyslexic – never read a book, probably not even the one he wrote, what’s not to love? A former forklift truck driver from Bradford, and now an MBE. Who gets an MBE for services to nails? He reads nails like a psychic, he once discovered a woman was pregnant because of her nails – she had had many rounds of IVF and got very angry that they’d failed but she got pregnant naturally and Leighton was the tester. He got a floral tribute. 

He came to nails after doing courses on hair and aromatherapy and put all this knowledge into his nail products. Apparently nails get ridges as they age, like wrinkles. But, he says, that this can all be sorted out. “How many people’s nails suffered as a side effect of Covid or the Covid vaccine? But they’re getting better now”. We talk about Covid’s contribution to people’s hair falling out or its sudden inability to take colour, and how excessive washing and hand sanitising affected the nails. I used his products during lockdown because the polishes come with an extra-wide brush, and I could always apply them myself when salons were closed. During lockdown, I broke my leg and had to have surgery. Everywhere was closed and so I couldn’t remove the gel on my nails – I had to pick the polish off and my nails didn’t recover. “Oil is the best thing for dry nails”, Leighton recommends his Renovate Cuticle Oil for cuticles. The lady at the nail salon said I had to give my nails a break and let them breathe. Leighton retorts: “nails don’t have lungs. It’s all about the oil being applied. You can’t overdo it.”

My nails seemed to be bad as a result of age and abuse. I look back on the days where I enjoyed my nails and them being admired, no matter what was wrong with me. I remember going to Jessica Nails of Hollywood, it was the closest I ever got to a women power gang – all the top agents and lawyers getting their nails done on a Saturday. All mini Barbras. Yes, I’m obsessed and it’s probably not healthy. But, to me, power nails was having the world at your fingertips – literally. Leighton says, “you have to treat your nails like your hair. You go to have your split ends cut off and you think ‘oh but I don’t want to lose my length!’ yet the hair is better for it, and so are the nails. If they are in a bad condition, it is a necessary evil to file off the tips. You can’t really repair damaged tips, but you can save the nail bed and start again.”

The nails seem to take longer to grow than hair, perhaps because you’re always looking at them. Leighton advises, “no matter how short your nails are, you can always make them shine and look good. You can go for that ‘clean girl’ aesthetic”. Except that, at my heart, I’m a dirty girl. Nails being the window to the soul – strong, shaped nails say you are a strong, shaped person. When I had my surgery, they didn’t want to look at my eyes to see if they’d gone blue, they wanted to look at my nails. “The nail bed shows so much about general health and circulation.”

Since the Covid vaccine, I smell like a dog. For instance, I can smell green vegetables ten minutes past their sell-by date inside my fridge, and all water tastes of liquid metal. And while everyone’s been obsessed with post-Covid hair falling out, it’s my nails that find it harder to survive. Leighton says, “we’ve got to go back to basics. Get natural ingredients and goodness back into nails – we have to look at it as skincare for nails. Nails can be very non-committal, it’s not as dramatic as having your hair coloured or eyelashes put on, that you hate a week later because you’re sweeping the passage with them. You can do your own nails – put them on, take them off, it’s fast. It can uplift you and change your whole outfit and you look immediately groomed”. He recommends his nail facial.

Cleanse

“I recommend a non-acetone remover, my remover is essentially oil-based, don’t just think about going to the chemist and stripping it all off, it is like washing your face in alcohol. Then you file with a crystal file. The crystal file means you don’t get the nail splitting because it seals the tips. People shouldn’t buy a nail file because it’s a cute colour or easilyfits into their handbag . The Crystal Nail File is suitable for all nail types, bendy or brittle or strong. Remember, it’s a myth about colours affecting the nails. The nails should never come into direct contact with colour, because of the base”. Which is why I’ve been enjoying the product GET GLAZED, it’s a donut glaze but for nails – it makes them look iridescent and like moons. And if you apply it after the base coat, it’s neither light nor dark, it’s iridescent and pungent. Groomed and effortless.

Exfoliate 

“You start with the Duplex Buffer, it’s soft and gentle like a microdermabrasion. Then you put on the Renovate Nail Cream, which has been blended with an ingredient that is used in the dental industry for implants, it is used to strengthen bone.”

Hydrate, condition and treat

Renovate Cream is like the nourishing and restorative treatment part of the facial, packed with active ingredients to condition, strengthen and revive dry, damaged and flaky nails.

Seal and shine

“Use the Duplex Buffer to really work the Renovate Cream into the nail.”

Protect 

“It’s best to have a break, to let all the ingredients do their magic. Then you protect the nails with the Renovate Shield, this is like the barrier cream or SPF part of your facial, which you can apply once as a base coat or twice as a treatment alone. It’s like applying scaffolding and it acts like a natural building gel.”

Nourish

“You finish with the Renovate Cuticle Oil, you can never over-moisturise your nails, so use it as often as you can. You can use it when you’ve got acrylics or gel or anything on.”

The nail beds are the first place to show the body is lacking oxygen, which is why the surgeons watch the nail beds while the patient is under anaesthetic. Pink is good news, blue means not so good. Your nails speak even when you can’t. Which is all part of their charm.

The Six (Mail Weekend, April 16, 2023)

It’s a powerful moment in any drama when the fighting stops within a couple. One says to the other, “I didn’t realise we were so alike” and they see each other for the first time. They think they are soulmates. They see each other in each other. They realise that the songs they’ve been writing have been coded messages to each other. They are the same person. This is what happens in Daisy and the Six, a TV series loosely based on the real-life Fleetwood Mac where everyone was in contorted relationships with everyone else.

 It was all about bad love and good drugs and they literally imploded after their album Rumours which in 1977 was the biggest selling album of all time. The six split up after their live show in Chicago which was the height of their fame and fortune and covers of the Rolling Stone. Central to the core is the real life dynamic between Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham. I became lured into the appeal of Fleetwood Mac when I read an article  about them which intro ed ‘the radio said there was a lot of weather.’ Weather. A perfect metaphor for this band made up of dysfunctional couples. It was sunny, it was stormy, it was unpredictable.

I’ve always been obsessed with Stevie Nicks – got her on Google alert, there’s always a ping to at least move my heart into another dimension – I’ve met her and interviewed her several times. I have tops named after her: the black Stevie, the shimmering Stevie… they are floaty things and I remember her telling me she created her style of witchy / fairy / floaty stuff on top with granny boots as she thought it was something she could wear as an old lady performing. This and good lighting – it always was her choice as she’ll be doing it for a long time. And she did.

And this is where the show doesn’t get it quite right. They go for the glamour of the 70’s: the Afghan fur collar and the hot pants… too much leg and too much material in the wide arms. Not really feisty enough to be signature Stevie. I made sure I was wearing these tops when I met her.  One time I was in her home in Los Angeles waiting in her kitchen (her home is a bit like her dress sense it’s all velvet floaty curtains and plushy seats, comfortable and over the top all at once) and her assistant explained why one of her dogs was wearing a coat indoors when it was very hot outside. They seemed to be to Yorkies – mother and daughter – with a same floppy tawny Stevie hair around the face. The one with the coat was entirely bald and apparently Stevie had spent a fortune on therapy for alopecia because she thought it was traumatised when in fact she had put the mother dog in kennels when she was away and a Chinese crested (a bald breed) had taken a liking to her and this was the product. I don’t say I know this – instead we talk a lot about this compelling relationship with Buckingham that produced some of the greatest songs ever written. Landslide will do it for me every time. She earned 7 million from that one song alone but she still hoped to write a better one.

“I made a choice a long time ago of what was going to be the most important and that was my music.”
She and Buckingham were musically rivalrous and they knew how to wind each other up and probably still do. “I was never rivalrous with him but he was with me. I ironed his jeans and sewed moons and stars on them. I was the cleaning lady but as soon as we joined Fleetwood Mac and people started to single me out… I think he just wanted a nice woman and children and that was not me. If we had not pursued a career, we would’ve made it as a couple, we would’ve got married and had kids. He would sometimes say, ‘I don’t care how much money we made and how famous we were… all Fleetwood Mac did was break us up’ and that was the thing I hold most dear.”

The real Stevie Nicks doesn’t do regret and doesn’t look back. We could all aspire to that but she does tell me how alike she and Buckingham were – the same as on the TV show where they both crave to know each other and be known by each other because they are narcissists. She says she was June Carter to his Johnny Cash. In 2020, when I watched Almost Famous, I loved the idea of the rockumentary  – that movie is based on the real life of Cameron Crowe, its director, and his start at Rolling Stone and his love of being with the band. I love it because I love the idea of being on tour with the band: the travel, the adrenaline, the glamour, the champagne, the luxury hotels and limos… it all seems so unreal and real because what brings it back into our hearts is the fact it’s all about the broken and the lonely and a love that destroys itself. And the song and the torture is the Muse and the character based on Stevie says I don’t want to be the Muse, I want to be the somebody. We all want to be somebody.

I am not the muse, I’m the somebody. Is that not the narcissist, too?

Michael Bublé (Times Magazine, March 11, 2022)

I’m no stranger to the Michael Bublé encounter, we’ve met many times. This time, he starts off in Gestapo German, which I mistake for Cockney. So we settle for doing it in South African. Last time I met Bublé, it was pre-pandemic. He was about to hit a string of gigs in the O2 (it was 2018). We met in his hotel suite. He was looking svelte, and he smelled so clean yet, in the adjourning room, there were remnants of a big old Italian take out – meatballs and red sauce. One time, before, he gave me his grandfather’s recipe for spaghetti carbonara. Another time we met, he was tiny – in a doll-sized leather jacket and he didn’t eat carbs anymore. Yet today he seems middle-sized, he is a Virgo, full of extremes. His suits and his vocals are extremely tailored, his emotions unbridled. He is full of drama. Just when you thought “he’s a good boy”, he becomes a bad boy. And just when you got used to him being a bad boy, he’s everybody’s Mr. Christmas. A heroic father and family guy. He is everybody’s white Christmas in March. Tinged with tragedy, but he brims with hope. In fact, his glass is always brimming with fizz, all the more tasty because it took him pain to get there. 

When he was first starting out, he slept with a bible under his pillow, asking God to make him a famous singer. And when God did make him famous, his relationship with Emily Blunt was so disastrous he had to go into therapy and read books about how to be happy. While he was getting over that, in 2009, he met his wife: Luisana Lopilato, an Argentinian model-actress who doesn’t drink and only eats healthy food. Their cute little blonde boy, Noah, got a rare form of liver cancer when he was three and was in heavy cancer treatment for two years. He is eight now and clear, but it changed Mr. Bublé profoundly. Of course it did. I think he made some kind of deal with God to always put his family first and never do long tours, fuelled by late-night debauchery. He is a full father now with baby number 4 on the way ( announcing on insta Oops we did it again ‘ Bebit en camino ‘ He is not religious, but he is spiritual. And in any case, he didn’t want to always be working on a new album. He became the family man that everyone always thought he was.

He appeals to all generations – the cool and the uncool. His heroes were all the macho crooners of the 50s and 60s, like Frank Sinatra. His best-selling multiple Grammy-winning song was I Just Haven’t Met You Yet, and then he did meet her, and he’s in it for the long-haul. And he’s also into his music; he has rediscovered it, because he’s not churning out a hit package anymore. He’s thrilled with his new album, Higher, and all the lush arrangements and seeing him thrilled is contagious. He’s now trying a Geordie accent, but it sounds like it’s from Pakistan via Wales. He takes the frivolity out just like that, he tells me that every time he does a show, he sings Where or When, he remembers my cat Slut, and dedicates it to mums and dads who love their children – and not just human children. Because love is love, right? And you can love fur children. He recalls Slut had a kidney issue, but he didn’t know that that song actually played her out – she died listening to it in my arms. When I told her it was OK to let go, we would see each other again, although we didn’t know where or when… Bubbles and I both start to lose it. But we go from tears to laughter pretty quickly. 

When Noah was in the hospital, Bublé created a play tent made from sheets. It was inspired by Life is Beautiful, which was about how to make life in a concentration camp as playful as it could be. He can take a sad song, make it a drama, and that very extraction can be uplifting. That’s the way he connects to people, to make them forget everything in their life and lose themselves in his lush songs. 

He tells me that, in fact, covering the Sam Cooke song, Bring it on Home to Me, might have been “one of the greatest moments of my career”. “All these incredible African-American voices, I took them all in the studio, it was during the pandemic. We were all there with our masks, we played the song, I turned around and I saw a lot of the faces were crying behind the masks. One of the singers, Angie, listened to it and said “if that doesn’t tell you soul has nothing to do with the colour of your skin, nothing will”. I melted. Like a candle. It meant a lot to me because, to be honest, I was very intimidated by this song and singing it with all these incredible voices and having my vision becomes a reality with no boundaries.” He shudders. The song captures Sam Cooke’s transition from gospel to pop star. It’s got love, and God – rather like Bublé in reverse. He tells me he made the song his own quite by accident. When he was first starting with it, he played a wrong chord, which turned out to be a right chord. This is an essential part of his talent. 

There are many songs on this album and in the past that are not just famous American songbook songs, but songs which have been made famous by other people. For instance, Feel Your Love, written by Bob Dylan, but made famous by Adele (whose was the biggest voice in his head? Dylan or Adele? “Dylan, of course. But the version I knew best is from Teddy Swing.”). It is intimidating to want to own that, as well as the Barry White classic, You’re The First, The Last, My EverythingSmile on High, written by Charlie Chaplain but covered by everybody who was ever on X-Factor, and Barbra Streisand. Surely that was very difficult to make his own? “A lot of this record was me being intimidated. But I was not going to allow myself to make decisions based on fear. Smile was the first song I started working on and it came about in a very strange way. I had been watching the news, like everybody else, and there was this man named Captain Tom who raised £33m to help people who lost everything (he did a sponsored walk when he couldn’t really walk, and had to use a Zimmer frame). “I was really moved by him and his story, I recorded this song and made a little video. I sent it to him. I did it just for him and nobody else. There was only one copy and it made me feel good. About five months after that, he passed away. His daughter wrote and asked, “do you think we can use that song at his service? He always loved Smile.” So I made a sweet arrangement and I thought it was a wonderful story of what we were all going through. A song written when we were at war, and here we were, at war again.” Every song has a little story, and they came together over time (lockdown time). “Like everyone else in the world, I couldn’t go anywhere, so it gave me time to settle myself and start to create songs.”

“Creatively, lockdown was good for me, I was in Vancouver. I got to be home, with a new baby (Vida). I got to be a full-time Pappi. I was the home-school teacher. My wife and I would try to advocate for different people every day at the same time. We would meet on our Facebook Live. And that’s when I realised I had so many friends who were living alone and struggling with their mental health. My wife and I knew so many doctors who were looking after families where one of the kids had cancer, and their counts were low and it was scary for them because they wouldn’t get into hospitals for treatment due to Covid. It hit us hard. Obviously. So we tried to take our energy and put it towards being in the lives of people we didn’t really know, but who we knew were suffering.” Lockdown was hard for everybody. Couples who locked up together ended up hating the noise each other’s eyelashes made when they blinked. “Yes”, he says enthusiastically. “I found I had over-empathy for people who were suffering – people who couldn’t get their chemo. I felt I had to be worked up about this, so I might feel less upset for myself. So many people with cancer weren’t getting their treatment because the hospitals were overrun and I became very upset about that. So many people I knew thought their mental health was fine, they had never felt vulnerable and then, all of a sudden, even the strongest thought “I am vulnerable”. I kept speaking about this and then people started to really fear for themselves and their livelihoods and they lost their greatest attributes – they lost empathy. My wife and I thought, “there’s gotta be something we can do”. We realised, of course, there was no magic fix.”

We discussed the time-twisting aspect of the pandemic. Two years, it felt like two minutes and also two thousand years. Noah was in remission before the pandemic, but he could have easily been one of those patients waiting for the chemo. “We were just so grateful, we wanted to help others. And I’m probably sounding really ingratiating now, but we thought “let’s just help people via whatever platform we have. It didn’t help that we were seen as ‘celebrities’, because so many celebrities lack self-awareness. Nothing was more glaring to us than celebrities doing cell-phone messages from their swimming pools in their massive mansions telling people “feel sorry for me, I’m trapped” – are these people out of their minds?” Michael Bublé doesn’t see himself as a big star even though he is aware of his celebritude and wanted it for so long, yet he sees himself as one of us, not one of them. One of the boys at the bar, watching the hockey game, who neatly transitioned into family man, playing Pappi, trips out with his wife and kids – always doing the ordinary, never the extraordinary. He is still agitated. Tangibly. “People were dying, people were doing calls from their mansions.” He never wanted to be one of them, but he always had this huge drive to succeed. “Let’s think of something more positive.” Although, he says, he sometimes feels like a little gerbil going round and round and doesn’t know where he’s going. But someone says “go shit little gerbil, and here’s some pellets for you. You did a very good interview here”. 

Did he stay friends with James Corden? “Yes, I am, but there’s someone I speak to more – and that’s his father Malcom. We write to each other all the time. I tell him “I’m thinking of you and your beautiful family”. He was recently in LA, so happy to be together with his kids and grandkids. He was excited to film some Super Bowl stuff with James. They’re a very sweet family and I like him so much. I sent him all the songs from the record, and he especially liked that I used the saxophone so much.” 

The album is called Higher and it seems to be about his life being high-drama, or does he see it as low-drama? “My wife would tell you that my life is high-drama, although I would tell you that I’m just so easy going, but actually I’m a dramatic bitch.” I tell him he’s probably high-drama and easy-going. And that’s his hook. He laughs: “I suppose that’s possible. I like drama. I like painting pictures. I love everything I do. And now, in my kids I see it. when my eight year old tells a story and his eyes are big and so expressive, and I think “what’s that story about, it didn’t mean anything?” but he’s so dramatic. My wife says, “he is you!”, he mimics his wife’s Argentinian accent. Apparently, when they first met, she spoke very little English and he spoke very little Spanish, but together, they spoke with the language of love. “My kids are all dramatic. The other day, my wife’s parents, who lived with us for the whole of the pandemic, left to go back to Argentina. My kids reacted as if they were being dragged off to a camp of death and would never be seen again.” He mocks his children crying as if they were strangled kittens. “My wife said, “Michael, it is just you”. 

“My wife is just so cool – not cold, but cool. She takes everything with the greatest irony and I am beloved of that. She is the opposite of me because I love the drama. I think you’ve gotta love it to perform. It’s part of what makes me creative and why I’m good at arranging. I loved rearranging the McCartney song My Valentine (he gives that song drama). That guy is so low-drama, he kind of floats, he doesn’t even walk.” I was once told people are either Lennon or McCartney, cat or dog, India or Africa. “I am McCartney, dog, Africa. I spent a lot of time in Africa, and that’s why we are so good at the accents. Hanging out with McCartney, I learnt that he was a special guy – not because he was a Beatle, nor because of the gravitas that comes with working with Macca, because this man is one of the greatest musicians in the history of music. I knew he would take me and lift me and bring that song to a greater place. I wrote to his manager just the other day to thank them for taking me under their wing.” Such a polite, dramatic boy. “I saw this interview which was about 20 years old, and the interviewer said to him: “So many people say that you were riding on the coattails of John Lennon, and he was the talented one. How does that make you feel?” instead of being defensive, he answered, “It doesn’t bother me because it’s not true. John was an amazing artist and so was George and so was Ringo and it was an honour to be in the with them. I know I’ve lost and I know who I am and I don’t worry about it because I know the truth.” 20 years on, nobody ever says those words, and I don’t think he gives a shit. That’s a substantial human being, there.” 

Bublé is perhaps the opposite of that, in that he is dramatically insecure and he works really hard to connect with people. He has never felt comfortable with the understated, but very comfortable to put his whole being on the line: “I think I just need three other guys to work with.” I also read that he is renewing his wedding vows, is that true? “No, it’s not. I have a dry sense of humour and I know how it came about. My two boys, especially Noah, got so excited when we got pregnant with our little girl. He asked why he was not invited to that part where we fell in love to get the baby. Why wasn’t he there when we did whatever we did. Why was he not invited? My wife said, “We can invite you because we’re very much part of it”, but they asked can they be there when we get married. And I said “Well, we are married already. But listen, kids, one day we’ll do a thing where it’s just us and the family – we’ll get married and you can help us.” and I think that’s where this whole ‘renewing of the vows’ came from. The thought standing in front of 500 people and renewing our vows and telling everyone how in love we are actually makes me a little sick. I feel that people who do that are either getting divorced soon or hiding something.” 

He has never been good with the work-life balance, how is he now? Noah getting sick certainly skewed him away from work, but how did he reconnect to it? “I will work hard, I will tour, but I will never allow that to take over my life again. I’ll never shirk my responsibilities of being a dad. I just know that that won’t be fulfilling for me, and it’ll end in tears. I would rather look back and think “If I had worked harder I could have sold more records and had bigger grosses on the tour”, I can accept that. But I can’t accept thinking “If only I had been with my kids more, my family more.” Anybody who knows me would tell you I just wouldn’t find that acceptable. So I will tour, but not for more than three or four weeks at a time. I have to be really strong with that because people would love it if I would go out for two months.” Michael Bublé, he’s always on some kind of edge of drama. That’s what makes him good and bad. He ends the interview by saying, “I’m also thinking of getting an eye tattoo”.

HIGHER is released March 25

Jason Isaacs (Times Magazine, January 2022)

Jason Isaacs in Jan 2022. Photo by Gareth Cattermole.
Jason Isaacs in Jan 2022. Photo by Gareth Cattermole.

Jason Isaacs is a tortured actor, but he doesn’t let that define him.  He is 58, exceptionally smart, exceptionally funny. Most famously, he rose to fame in Harry Potter, was in The Patriot and Black Hawk Down, more recently in Sex Education, The Great and the lockdown disaster movie Skyfire.

He is married to documentary maker Emma Hewitt and they have two daughters – Lily (19) and Ruby (16).  He is soon to be seen in the critically acclaimed Mass – two couples dealing with loss and forgiveness after a school gun shooting.

He is currently in Canada filming Good Sam. “Saving the world one artery at a time I like dressing up in the jobs that I never got to do – grown-up jobs like doctors, policeman, lawyers. I did a law degree – I knew that I was going to go off and cover myself in greasepaint and run around swearing a lot. They were kind and let me pass even though they got a lot of doodles instead of answers in the exam. They took away the honours part. Victoria Wood also had her degree made ordinary. She was excited.

I often didn’t attend lectures. I didn’t want to have a safety net. I was going to drama school.

We moved from Liverpool to London when I was 11 and I dropped my accent overnight as soon as the first person took the piss.  I went full south London overnight.  I reinvented myself at every turn.

I see the fact that I can do accents well as a sign of weakness.  From an early age I always wanted to fit in.  I would consciously adapt the way I spoke.  I would speak in a way that I thought would pass in whatever group I was in.  If I do it in the back of a taxi and I hear myself I try and stop doing it, but whoever I’m with my accent changes.

For British people it’s not just the accent telling us geographically where they’re from, but it tells you about class and education. The kind of person you want to be perceived as is all put across in just a few words. I feel I don’t belong anywhere, or I belong everywhere.
When I’m on a job and I’m American all day it seems odd to me when I go back to my own voice and speak to my family.  Even in London my accent can shift enormously.  Sometimes I sound like the people I was at university with and sometimes the people I used to skateboard with and everything in between.  When I hear other people doing that, I think how pathetic.  I was amongst the first people ever to skateboard, so the accent was early Ali G. Then I went to Bristol University the year that the Sloane Ranger handbook was published.  And that was what most of the people I was mixing with at university sounded like and I wanted desperately to sound look and dress like them.

I like to play music on shoots that keeps people s toes tapping.  Even when you’re doing tragic things on camera you may as well feel good.  The music doesn’t change Aretha, Stevie Wonder, Otis Redding, Bob Marley, Nina Simone, The Bee Gees, Kool & The Gang – I have a thousand playlists but I always go back to the same one. There’s nothing like seeing a bunch of crewmembers tapping their toes like that scene in Almost Famous where they’re all singing along to Tiny Dancer, music blasting out at four in the morning in some remote location.  It makes the day go by.
I was on a film called Spinning Gold (a biopic of the 70s music industry producer Bogatz).  So there were people in it playing Bill Withers and Gladys Knight and the Isley Brothers.  They would sing on set and the sound would be amazing.  I would be miming along.  No notes ever came out of my mouth.  I only sing in my car by myself.  It was five years before I song in front of my wife and that was in the car with the volume turned on full and all the car windows down.  No one has heard me sing in public, trust me.
I was once cast in a musical.  My agent said, “they must’ve heard you sing.” Trust me, they hadn’t.   They probably thought they can teach anyone to sing and that is just not true.

I was once persuaded I do some charity golf.  Everyone else doing it was an American sports star and I’m the Norman Wisdom of the bunch.  When I got on, they have to move the crowds back in case I killed anybody.  It was embarrassing.  I had to play with all these basketball gods.

“Mass was shot just before lockdown. It was really inconvenient to do. It was in the middle of nowhere in between going and coming back from Australia.  No financial incentive but as I read it, I thought that’s the reason I’m an actor, to do things like this.
Also I had been away from home quite a long time and then flew myself halfway across the world. I had no sleep.  There were so many reasons not to do it.  I thought it would never even be a film. I thought it might not be watchable.  It’s four people sitting in a room dealing with very emotional material …..yet… I believe in the power of stories, and I wanted the emotional experience.  That’s a selfish part of acting.  It’s very powerful sometimes if you let go of all your expectations.  Also, I thought I can’t look at myself in the mirror and pretend that I even believe in acting if I don’t do this.

If you concentrate on doing something that is enormously powerful, worthwhile and interesting, people respond. The response has surprised and thrilled us. It is in some ways the biggest film I’ve ever been in because it’s about the power of forgiveness and everyone knows what it’s like to carry around blame or hatred or anger for people that you’re probably not going to meet.  It’s a film that deals with that. People carry around that burden.  It is like taking poison and expecting the other person to die. Whether your anger is at Brexit, vaccines, Republicans, whatever…

This is people meeting who have been through a terrible tragedy trying to find meaning.  They release the anger that they have been carrying.  They try to forgive people because they know that not doing so is ruining their lives.

Am I good at forgiving? God knows. I understand the notion of taking poison and expecting the other person to die… The seed of hope is when you understand at least.  Being in a place where it is causing you enough damage or pain and knowing there is a tool you have to reach for.  The world doesn’t change.  It’s the stuff between our ears.

I did drugs for years, although not for a long time. I don’t often go to 12 step meetings anymore. I miss it.  I just don’t make the effort which is my loss.  There’s a lot of fear around at the moment and it’s challenging just to try to be the best version of yourself.  Take whatever steps you can change the things you can change and let go of the rest.
The drugs weren’t a way of dealing with a sense of distance.  They were the cause. When I got clean, I remember my wife saying, “OK, we can finally buy a home and have kids.”  And I actually said darling I just met you and she said,”What are you talking about? We’ve been together 10 years!”

The most important thing is I’ve learned to live in the moment and to find ways to be grateful for the good things you have and try and get some of those tools.

To live our lives feeling sorry for ourselves or being angry other people is no good. It’s better to be grateful for what we’ve got rather than resentful for what we haven’t got.  These are tools. Told come through art, fiction, music, therapy, whatever.  Different things work for different people.  Living with grace and gratitude is the most important journey.

I’m really grateful that I was a drug addict because I’ve had access to so many people who are trying to lead their best lives.  Doesn’t mean to say that I do it but at least if somebody says something that knocks me off kilter, I can recognise it and have ways of dealing with it. I know this is true of so many people who got sober.  They are grateful to have access to people and information. The world can be as complicated or terrifying with the walls caving in and the sky falling down if we let it.

I choose a job if I think it will be interesting. I’m embarrassed sometimes that I get to do a job for a living that brings me satisfaction. I don’t mean that in a thigh slapping way on a deeper level. It’s rare that something satisfies me and I think will be entertaining and be of value in people’s lives. Independent films are just dying.  All having to go to streaming immediately because people rarely go to the cinemas.  Independent films are the art form of the 20th century.

Awards for Mass would be great because it means that people would watch it and it would mean that people can watch films with people that don’t wear capes in them.  Don’t get me wrong. I like playing in the sandbox, I like a cape. I just don’t want independent films to go away.

Giant spectacles are great, but if it was only them, what a sparse and barren landscape it would be.

I’m now in Toronto until April. Good Sam has 12 parts. Emma will be here lots of times and the kids have Canadian passports because Emma grew up here.  She is part Canadian.  She didn’t pick up the apologising part. She picked up the gentleness part.  The girls are now 16 and 19.  It was different when they were younger and Emma bore the brunt of that.  She was an incredible documentary maker and she had to give a lot of that up to look after them.

They don’t really need us now, they are young women.  It does mean that I can sign up for a series and instead of me being absent it feels to them like a free travel opportunity.  Ruby is 16 and was in a school play last week.

Lily is 19.  She is halfway through her second year at university studying English.  Last year she spent most of her time in a bedroom on a laptop. I hope that soon she is out burning the candle at both ends and the middle.  It was a pretty shitty year for students. Ruby wants to be a horror film director. Not sure if she’ll still want to be that this time next week.

Lily says she’d like to be a journalist – how can I with any conscience say don’t pursue the thing that you’re interested in because it might not work out? She loves literature and she’s always loved literature.  I think it started with Harry Potter.  She was only seven when she asked me on Skype if she could come to the premiere of Harry Potter and I said I want you to read the books before you see the films.  When I came home a few weeks later she’d read all seven books. She had never read a book before.

I am mentoring various people and I can see when their eyes glaze over and all they’re thinking is ‘I want a job, I want a job. I’d like to be in a film, I’d like to be in an aeroplane, I’d like to be in a hotel room.’

Mostly I tried to tell people to take the reins.  It’s not about how to get a job, it’s about choices. It’s all about what you say yes to and what you say no to.  I can talk about how to get jobs, but mostly it’s about how to take the reins early on.  If you have a smart phone, you can run a film studio.
Why do journalists ask, “What attracted you to this role?”  No one is ever going to tell the truth. I was getting on badly with my wife, my agent threatened to fire me. And also, why do they ask what was x really like?
Compliments? I’d like to be able to take them, but the truth is I’m only as good as the material.
I am not good at compliments.  They are so alien to me. It is an anathema for me to tape a scene and think oh I was good in that.  Everybody I respect has impostor syndrome.

I think my criteria for choosing something is can I get away with this? Will I look like an absolute turd?  If I can’t stand in front of the camera and make a scene halfway believable, I don’t wanna take the job.
I like people to think that I’m a much better actor than I am because I choose parts, if not projects, where I can hold my end up.
When I was in LA just before shooting Awake, producers came to my house and said, ”We’d like to take the grey out of your hair because nobody goes grey on television,” and I said I’ve been told my hair takes colour quickly.  This fabulous woman came – we became close friends. She left the colour on for 20 minutes and my hair was blue black like a superman comic.  It looked ludicrous
In Skyfire, they died my hair black and my face was orange, yet so many people loved that old fashioned disaster movie and weirdly people found it emotional.   I cry very easily. I cry at Yellow Pages and HSBC ads, but there is a difference between crying and feeling.
I watched Mass with a group of people in Washington who wanted to change gun laws and they were crying – many of those people in that room had gone through the process of forgiving in that way.
I saw a film the other day, Petite Mamon. I was utterly transported and moved. It was so simple and beautiful.
During the pandemic I had access to every single streaming service and I thought it would be like going to the film school I never went to.  I thought I’d be able to stop boasting about the great films that I’d never seen, but my kids only wanted to watch Grey’s Anatomy (17 seasons) twice and The Office.

Hair Loss (Style at Weekend, May 16, 2021)

I first noticed bald patches on my head when I looked at a video of a friends birthday party on Instagram.  We were all wearing Barbra Streisand masks over our faces, but only one of us had bald patches.  
 
We had gone to see the original A Star is Born in London then on to tapas .  As the camera panned around the restaurant amid the bad singing and the toasts, I was horror struck to realise the bald patches belonged to me.  It was in a state of disbelief that I went to visit my hairdresser of almost two decades – Mark Smith of Nicola Clarke at John Frieda.
 
He has seen me through various traumas and tantrums.  When I said, “My hair is falling out, look at this bald patch,” he tried not to say anything.  His face went frozen and said, “Let’s talk to Jessie (Renyard senior colourist who happened to be walking by).” 
“ If a man says I am losing my hair you can gloss over it and say that is kind of what happens.  When a woman says that, it’s very sensitive.  I felt that even if I could see it, my instinct is to tell a little white lie.  It was very difficult…”
 
 Jessie actually took pictures of it so I could see it, the bald patch at the back and its general thinness.  I was on high alert. I wanted advice. I didn’t take it from one person I took it from everybody.  
 
 Mark agrees, “You threw the book at it.” 
 
 I veered between being frozen in denial, wanting people to say, “No, I really can’t see it,” which some friends did.  I loved them, then hated them for it, then I wanted to confront it by visiting every hair loss doctor ever known to human hair.  I was living mostly in Los Angeles at the time.  Fortunately I owned many hats, essential for the sun, now essential to disguise the hair.  That year I bought hats obsessively, good ones, expensive ones – I was on a mission – My Hair or My House. I stopped paying the mortgage.
 
 I remember going to one interview with Elisabeth Moss at the Four Seasons.  We sat inside.  I wanted to bond with her so badly but I knew that if I kept my hat on indoors she would think I was weird.  If I wore a wig she would think I was having chemo, therefore attention seeking or I could just sit there with limp, thin hair and look at her glorious bright blonde shining hair.  
 
This week I reminisced with Mark about the American doctor I saw who prescribed something that would make me incontinent, but I wouldn’t be bald.  It was a tough call.  He also advised Rogaine but warned me if I got it on my fingers I could get hairy hands.  The first thing I started was Viviscal because one of Mark’s clients had found it helped.  All this happened in the summer of 2019 and now because of Covid, the stress of pandemic and lockdown, hairdressers are experiencing wide spread hair loss. 
 
Mark says, “We come into the salon to feel good about ourselves because of the transformative quality of hair, but if the hair isn’t there we can’t feel good.  Covid hair loss; it’s a thing.”
 
The New York Times confirms Google searches went up 8% this last year and the topic was searched for on average 821,000 times per month in the US.  A mixture of stress and post viral inflammation causes temporary hair loss.  
 
 I was beyond devastated.  I have always felt that hair and sexuality are intrinsically linked.  I wrote about hair, I wrote about what celebrities reveal in their various hair decisions.  Hair is the psychology of the soul and mine was dropping out.  Also, I love cats.  Years before I had gone on a safari where the open topped Jeep had got stuck in sand and we had to pass a mother and four teenage lions and their kill. My friend said, “I can see the headline now, ‘She loved cats then one ate her!’” This was a less fun headline, ‘She loved hair then she went bald.’
 
It turns out my hair loss was largely due to hormones and stress, it was called non-scarring alopecia. Of course, at the time you don’t know if it’s temporary or not. In LA they are all over it. I went to a salon called Blow Me Away.  They took pictures of your scalp on a computer so you could see hair growth or loss. Then you would receive a 45 minute head massage with various pro hair oils.  Apparently in Japan head massage places are like nail bars – everywhere.  
 
I saw a demonstration by Chris Appleton of how to get Arianna Grande’s fierce pony tail – he invented it –  and said, “If you pull hair into a ponytail tightly you might see some scalp. You can colour with Color Wow’s Powder.  I had used this for root touch up and now I was applying it to my head but not feeling very grande.  Once back in the UK I went to see Dr. Sophie Shotter.  Shotter is a doctor who specialises in transformative skin tweakments and hair. Her own hair is bouncy and glossy but she is big on empathy and has seen it all.  Through her Kent clinic (www.illuminateskinnclinic.co.uk) she has had several hair loss virtual coffee mornings as she believes hair loss is the last taboo. Women’s baldness is talked about less than female incontinence.  
 
 Dr. Sophie says, “By the age of 60, 50% of women will have experienced some kind of hair loss.”
 
That is a pretty huge percentage for it to be a taboo.  There are various different kinds of hair loss, it can sometimes be hard to determine which is which. Anything with the word alopecia in it is frightening.  It started with a blood test and Dr. Sophie tweaked my thyroid medication.  
 
“Hormonal shifts can mean a lot (these can occur in pregnancy, post pregnancy and with thyroid problems).  There can also be vitamin deficiencies like vitamin D or B12 of other B Vitamins and iron and anaemia can be a cause.  There can be certain medications that cause hair loss and more common in certain ethnic groups, styling.  For instance, in Afro-Caribbean women might wear their hair in corn rows which can cause traction alopecia.”  
 
 Also, diet.  John MacPherson is an iconic hair stylist who has a hair studio/salon in Ladbroke Grove. He recalls when a client went vegan and her hair fell out.
 
 MacPherson comments, “A lot of clients are experiencing hair loss due to stress and Covid.  They took B vitamins and zinc and biotin and silicone and conditioned their scalp to reverse it.”
 
 Mark Smith also had clients who took B-12 injections.
 
Dr. Sophie says, “Historically, I think there has been fear about talking about female hair loss, about women’s hormonal problems, about women’s aging, until the last few years it really hasn’t been okay to talk about them.  It’s confronting societies perception of attractiveness.  Very few people talk about hair loss.  When someone is a new mother, if they start complain about their hair the perception is that there is some degree of vanity versus they should just be delighted they’ve got a new baby.  Things are improving and opening up.  People are starting to talk about hair.” 
 
 Most people who have suffered hair loss went to see the UK’s premiere trichologist – Annabel Kingsley.  She sees a lot of weeping women.
 
 “I do, yes. How our hair looks, and how we feel about it, impacts the way we feel about ourselves. It affects our mood, confidence and self-esteem more so than any other part of us. Women I see often tell me they don’t feel like themselves anymore, or that they have lost a part of their identity when they are losing their hair. Hair loss can be psychologically debilitating. I have seen it affect work performance, social life and relationships”
 
Hair is in her DNA.  Her father Philip was hair doctor to the stars. Philip Kingsley is now her clinic.
 
“There are many types of hair loss. The two most common types of hair loss that we treat are androgenic alopecia (aka hair thinning/female pattern hair loss) and Telogen Effluvium (excessive daily hair fall). We also help people to manage rarer hair loss conditions, like autoimmune and scarring alopecia.”
 
Her products really helped.
 
“There is no ‘one size fits all’ as everyone’s hair loss story is individual – and what works for you may not work for a friend. It’s why we take a holistic approach at our Clinic, looking into every possible factor that might be affecting someone’s hair i.e. health, diet, lifestyle, hormones and genetics.”
 
It all starts with a blood test
 
I had both androgenic alopecia and telogen effluvium. Androgenic alopecia is where hair follicles on your scalp are genetically predisposed to be sensitive to normal levels of androgens (male hormones). This causes follicles to gradually miniaturize and produce slightly finer hairs with each passing growth cycle. To treat this, I was prescribed Kingsley Clinic scalp drops containing minoxidil (a stimulant that helps to keep hairs in their anagen (growth) phase) and anti-androgens (help to protect hair follicles from the impact of male hormones). 
 
“TE is a reactive hair loss, caused by an internal disruption. For you, this was due to your thyroid condition, not eating properly, and stress.
 
 “You were given our Gelatine Protein Supplement, Tricho Complex multi vitamin & mineral supplement and asked to improve your diet! I also asked you get in touch with your doctor to adjust your thyroid medication dosage – your blood tests showed your thyroid was in a critical state.” 
 
What hair I had was also broken off and brittle. 
 
“Breakage is also something to be aware of. Often times, women who are losing their hair also have fragile hair – and it’s important to address this as breakage can further thin-out your mid-lengths and ends. I recommended you use our Elasticizer pre-shampoo conditioning treatment once to twice a week.
 
“Your scalp is your hair’s support system; it is the bedrock of your hair follicles. If your scalp isn’t in good condition it can impact the integrity of newly growing hairs. A flaky scalp can also cause hair loss. Also, any topicals you apply to your scalp to treat a hair loss condition penetrate a clean scalp most effectively. 
 
 “Remember that your scalp is simply skin and needs similar care to the skin on your face. i.e. frequent cleansing and toning.  In terms of scalp conditioners – you shouldn’t apply conditioner to your scalp. They are formulated for your hair.” 
 
Kingsley continues, “Covid-19 has 100% impacted people’s hair.  6-12 weeks after any sort of fever or illness hair usually sheds. It’s called ‘post-febrile alopecia’. While our hair is hugely important to us psychologically, it is a dispensable tissue as physically we can survive without. This means that when we are unwell our body diverts attention away from hair cell production and towards maintaining essential systems that keep us upright and breathing. Stress also commonly causes hair loss as it can impact our general health. For instance, it can disrupt our gut microbiome and our ability to absorb nutrients. Stress can also mess with our hormone levels and scalp health – both of which can result in hair shedding.
 
“We aren’t classed as medical, so we have had to shut during lockdown. However, we have been giving Virtual Consultations.”
 
I also discovered Centred – a range of hair  wellness products and Pills created by Laura Tudor who suffered from stress related hair loss and is married to an award winning hairdresser. Hair loss knows irony!
 
Her research showed that 40% of women had visible hair loss by the time they reached 40. This is attributed to more stress and more people being vegan.
 
Mark Smith concludes, “I hit upon the ultimate taboo by mistake.”
 
He felt that he shouldn’t be seeing hair loss even though he is a hair stylist, in the same way he had been taught growing up not to look into a woman’s handbag and he didn’t know how to confront it either and then he realised, “You have got to arm yourself with knowledge so you can steer people in the right direction.  I would say have a blood test. If you haven’t had any stress in your life and nothing has changed it’s always worth a blood test to see if there is something you are missing out on.  It’s not always stress related.  It can happen if you become depleted in certain vitamins and minerals.  Also, there are things that you might be doing wrong when you are washing or styling your hair.  Using a sharp or aggressive brush or combing or washing hair too much, using too much heat, obsessively washing hair and tonging it.  The Viviscal really helps and I had a client with long, very fine hair, she took it and it made it amazingly thick.  
 
“Many clients have been concerned about their hair and have wanted help.  It does depend on how much hair you have to lose.  If someone has got a real lot of hair it’s not going to make a difference, but if you’ve got fine hair like you, it can be devastating.  We should be open, we are part of people’s mental health.”
 
Absolutely.

Azzi Glasser (of The Perfumer’s Story, February 14, 2021)

It is more difficult than you can imagine buying someone a fragrance.  Men buying perfume for their enamoradas can be the sartorial equivalent of scratchy red lace lingerie.  They buy what they think is sexy but without taking the soul and the essence of the person to heart.

Even if you have a signature scent the scent can change as companies get bought and ingredients vary, or the person has changed.  Carnal Flower was my go to for several years – I remember Denzel Washington thought it was like a sexy Hawaiian retreat. He liked it so much I bought him the scented candle (many times). It was heady and in your face and one day I wasn’t that person anymore.  Years before that my signature scent was Agent Provocateur.  People would smell it and know I was there, to me it was about sex.  It smelt like a sexual invitation.Agent Provocateur was sexy. It was well crafted and sophisticated but I loved it because it said I’ve arrived. Entering any room with Agent Provocateur was like a smack in the face for people you didn’t like, or the most delicious flirt for those you did.

Azzi Glasser (of The Perfumer’s Story) created that scent and many others. She is all about designing the exotic, the luxurious.  A rebel in a traditional industry.  She is renowned for creating Bespoke perfumes (for Johnny Depp, Orlando Bloom, Cindy Crawford, Helena Bonham Carter, and also creating scents for some of their iconic characters to help them flip into that other being).  You wear her scent and you feel more of yourself or, after lockdown when everyone’s world got small and claustrophobic, you feel yourself again.  You can access your own soul and step into it, just like an actor stepping into a role.

My lockdown life was so small I was’t able to do the things that defined me – go out, go to work, touch people.  When, with the help of Azzi, I found my fragrance DNA, I stopped being a ghost of myself.  We found this with a quiz given to me by her perfume robot, a kind of Artificial Intelligence version of Azzi herself.  It asked various questions like did I want a fragrance for him, her, or unisex?  Was my mood sensual, edgy, confident, cool, eccentric, caring?  How do I like my notes?  Woody, floral, oud, animalistic, fresh, sweet, musk? What are my passions? Art, film, travel, books, music, fashion?  What is the signature style? Bohemian, edgy, classic, glamour or street?  My fragrance turned out to be something called Build and Destroy.  It’s hard to describe scent, it does smell animalistic but in an extremely elegant way. I think the reason I love Build and Destroy is because it’s extreme in  that it is about  opposites and I relate to that. It’s woody and it’s earthy, it’s edgy, it has a fresh polished side which is quite cool and its opposite warm note comes from  the incense. The base note and the top note in constant juxtaposition. It’s many things.  It doesnt not pin you down.

When I went into hospital recently, I didn’t pack an overnight or rather 3 day bag because with a broken leg I had to be very specific in what I could carry with me, but I took the perfume because I feared feeling anonymous and  because I needed to know who I was. Literally I needed to put my scent down. It was animalistic.

For me, this hot and cold thing is also about sex. I like lovers who are cold because underneath the chill, there’s heat. I like it when you feel the heat and the chill both at once. I love ambiguity because it just keeps me hanging on.

I always used to like asking people in interviews do you prefer to be loved, understood or respected? Dustin Hoffman put it best when he said that he wanted to be understood because without understanding you couldn’t have love or respect.   The perfume robot is a virtual version of what it’s like to have Azzi design a fragrance, her Bespoke version costs around £15,000 and it’s an intense process where she gets to know who you are and how your fragrance best expresses that.  The robot resembles the woman. The Robot is called  AI.zz

“I wanted it to look like a robotic but not an exact version of me.  My designer worked with pictures of me to create the 3D digital version, but it wasn’t a scan, that was too realistic – I wanted it to look like a fantasy, I made the hair longer though I had AI.ZZ’s nails painted my signature yellow.  The biggest way it resembles me is in the way I think and profile my clients to find their perfect scent.  My brain and nose had to be the key for resemblance.”

How did she come up with the questions?

“This idea is something I have dreamed of for a long time, the challenge was how to translate it to work for a customer. Fragrance language with traditional descriptions by ingredients and notes can be so confusing and hard to identify with. I did it in the same way I develop a Bespoke scent that I know will really connect with my client by understanding their character, style, personality and passions.

“The Perfumer’s Story range has fragrances that represent characteristics and stories that the customer can immediately relate to and scent evokes connection and confidence.  However, I knew I needed to help that fragrance DNA discovery journey further and direct the client to the perfect fragrance and I wanted it to be fun and personal as if I was there with every customer.  Since that is not possible the idea of a virtual robot represents me.”

How did she work out what the most important questions would be that the robot would ask?

“I kept the quiz short, since no one has time these days, and I wanted it to be easy. I translated the same questions I always ask my clients to get their scent DNA.”

In other words, she distilled her process to an essence, a bit like the process of making a perfume itself.

“Who is the fragrance for is important because, although all our fragrances are unisex some are more masculine or feminine and some are truly universal. What mood are you in helps describe who you are and more importantly what mood do you want this fragrance to take you into.  You might want a wardrobe of scents to match your different moods.  The robot has been carefully programmed to think like me, so it can map out, eliminate, and choose the fragrance match by the answer to the questions.  When I created each of the perfumes in my collection they were based on these characteristics.  That is why you cannot simply create an Artificial Intelligence digitally on a perfume collection unless all the perfumes were designed with this in mind. You can answer the questions for yourself or someone you want to give a gift to that they will actually love. To gift a new fragrance, as scent is so personal.”

The robot version of Azzi replicates what it is like to be here in her perfume den, luxuriating over her various perfumes notes and having characters like Johnny Depp hang out there.

“He is truly like no other.  He is funny, intelligent, handsome, super stylish and charismatic and his knowledge of history and art are beyond.  The fragrance I created for him is very sexy, edgy and manly.  When you smell it, it is like nuzzling the neck of a man you just want to get closer to.”

The fragrances she created for his roles are all very different.  The Mad Hatter scent smells of a mad hatter tea party scene, it’s eccentric; tea, sponge cake, icing are all captured in the scent.

Depp say of Azzi, “Azzi possesses a certain sorcery in that she is capable of capturing the perfect essence of a character in scent. So much so 300 years ago I suspect she would have been hung for witchcraft.”

For his character Barnabas he played a 200 year old vampire, the character was dapper, dark, but sweet. The scent mirrored this.  Azzi met Stephen Fry at a BAFTA lunch at the Chiltern Firehouse.

“I just love listening to him talk, his views are so fascinating and funny.  Stephen loves wearing Old Books. It smells of paper and poetry and sex and rock and roll, and also Tuscan Suede.”

She created Cindy Crawford’s scent as a birthday surprise. She met and adored Helena Bonham Carter, her own scent is quirky and intelligent and since then they have worked together on a number of roles.

“She doesn’t always have roles where she smells great, one time she had a role where she had to smell of cigarettes and whisky, that was her part in Dark Shadows (dr Hoffman)because she was a chain smoking alcoholic.  The cigarettes she smelled of is a French cigarette called Gauloises. She would go on set at 6am reeking of cigarettes and bourbon.  Princess Margaret is based on the actual scent Princess Margaret wore, I was working with her son, David, so he was very helpful in making a scent for him which was based on his mother.  It is quite floral and classic, 1970s. It was a Diorisimmo

They don’t make it anymore, or if they do it smells completely different. The original one had more expensive ingredients.  She ordered quite a few bottles when she was working on Princess Margaret.  Elizabeth Taylor is really strong, confident, it smells of mink coat and red lipstick.”

Every brand likes to have celebrity clients to draw in others that might identify, but this is different.  If you want your scent to be the role you step into, if you want to smell like a rock star or impress as if you are Elizabeth Taylor entering a room, you can.  She has got the questions all you’ve got to do is find the answers.

Azzi is also doing a Scentysational Box (The Love Box) especially for Valentine’s Day, everyone’s least favourite day of the year, but if you do the test for your partner with the robot, you’ll know who they are and you can show love, connection, appreciation and desire all at once.  If you get the fragrance right it shows that you really know another person and understand them.

There are 3 sizes of boxes that contain your specific scent, and a candle and /or room spray.

www.ThePerfumersStory.com

Dame Maureen Lipman (Weekend Mail, January 30, 2020)

Cover of Weekend featuring Dame Maureen Lipman
Cover of Weekend featuring Dame Maureen Lipman

Dame Maureen Lipman and I are doing a remote interview ostensibly to talk about her exquisite portrayal of the title character in Martin Sherman’s one woman epic Rose. It is a powerful drama.  A memoir of harrowing events of the last century told through the eyes of a feisty Jewish survivor from Shetl in Russia to ghetto in Warsaw, where her husband and child died.  She headed to the sewer and then as a woman who didn’t belong anywhere, found a boat to the promised land which was invaded and she was brought back to Europe, yet escaped to the US with an American Jewish sailor and ended up running a hotel in Miami.

It goes out on Sky Arts 27th Jan which is Holocaust Memorial Day. “Martin has done a brilliant piece of work, he is an old soul.” I first worked with him in 1999(?) for Messiah, he has got my voice and I have got his voice.  So even the fact that I had to learn 47 pages in a very short time while still doing Coronation Street I knew it was going to be alright because his rhythm is in my heartbeat.  You don’t bend the dialog it just rolls out like Cleopatra coming out of a carpet.  I love the young director Scott Le Crass We have to go in the garden to rehearse in Media City, just before we recorded it, they put scores of greenhouses; wooden ones, painted ones, We sat in one of these where you are supposed to get parmesan fries with this script with its immense themes. He got me, he realized that I didn’t need to do too much but to let it happen and we had such a nice time.  The first day was the worst because I said I had to have the words there in case I dried, like a black hole, dead.  The whole thing was made for 2K.  There was somebody kneeling beside me with a computer that didn’t do the trick at all.  The second day he managed to get me an auto cue, like Barbra Streisand, I just needed the comfort.  When I first saw it I was transfixed by what I can only describe was my face and I couldn’t see that it was good.  When people were saying it was very good I thought I must steel myself and not be such a wanker.  Then I saw it was good.

“Rose is now in Florida and sophisticated, so someone from Angels sent in a blouse but it did not go over my bosom. It so happened I had with me a gray little jacket. It came from my friend Elspeth who was from Germany, she left clothes to her friends. She was 102 when she died and she still did Pilates two times a week.  She was a photographer for a magazine called Ambassador and she was an inspiration.  Even when the reviews came out they said, even her jacket was redolent of a concentration camp.  It is marvelous how you can see what you want to see.  At the start of lockdown I wrote a little play for my grandchildren, The Gorilla and the Unicorn.  The guardian wrote it as  guerrilla , so you see what you want to see.

Maureen is in her home in West London and asks “Can I write your intro? She greeted me in black palazzo pants, her skin sun kissed her hair tawny streaked and azure blue eyes. The carpet was cream just like Barbra Streisand’s.” 
She remembers I met Barbra. “Did you go to her house? Did she have art deco furniture?” Rose is set on a bench where Rose is sitting shiva (Jewish people sit, remember, discuss the dead and I let Maureen know one time I interviewed Barbara, she too was sitting shiva. But I sat on the wrong side so she got very upset with me.
Maureen was incredulous. “There’s a right side to sit shiva?” I explain not a right to side shiva but a right side to sit next to Barbra because she feels one side of her face is less attractive. It looks more like her father and it’s the one she used to camera when she starred and directed Yentl, where she is a woman mostly playing a man.  The irony deepens – Maureen’s husband, Jack Rosenthal, wrote Yentl. He died in 2004.  
“Did you ever interview a woman who was happy with the way she looked?  Who was that woman, apart from my mother, who liked her appearance?  If women are happy with their face because they have had a lot of work done, that is not a woman who is satisfied with her looks because then you do it again and again and that is the problem.  When you do see yourself regularly on screen that does not make you happy, you fix on things. It used to be that I fixed on my eye bags.  I used to sit with cucumbers on my eyes every morning and one day I didn’t, I fixated on something else.  Saggy bits where cheekbones should be and that takes care of the next year and I think I could but what if one side looks different from the other?  When I think now, 1976 it would have been, I was on stage with Debra Kerr nice woman, funny, self-deprecating, I thought to myself, Poor thing, she is 58.” She had not had work done and she was gorgeous.”
Talking to Maureen, her mind darts and jumps. We move back to Yentl and she tells me that Jack told her of the intense preparations for the making of the film.   One day before the cameras were about to roll (Barbara and Jack didn’t speak much, they just got on it). One day she was “up and down restless, the assistant was in and out and finally she came back with a package. Barbra went into the bathroom and she said to Jack, who was famously gullible, she looked him in the eyes and said, “When the green ring’s at the top and the blue ring’s are at the bottom or is it the other way around, which one makes you pregnant?” Jack said, “Errr…” it was a brilliant moment because millions of dollars rested on his decision.  The film went ahead and she did an exceptional job which people really don’t give her credit for.  A woman playing a man with the infinitely obscure Mandy Patinkin.  He is very mystic.  I saw him in a play once and I told him Jack had written Yentl and he said, “Ehhh…”.  
Maureen assumes we are talking remotely because of the pandemic but in fact I have fallen down the stairs and can’t walk.  She says, “One of the things I have discovered about aging is that you don’t pick your feet up enough.”  Sometimes you are just slurrying. I did it down the tube steps, landed on my knees with a sickening crunch.  And it makes you tentative.  But where would we have met if we could?  Two benches in the park?  I still use a bench. I sat on a bench outside the vets the other day.  I ran into Catherine Tate and she said, “I am a great fan of yours!” 
I said, “Is that dog a Griffin?”  She said, “You are the second person ever to have identified the dog.  I have a Basenji and a Podengo. The Basenji (Diva) is 15.  The Podengo is a Spanish dog, a rescue from a concrete bunker.
She is really more like a cat. She is not a cuddly dog. I remember Diana Rigg said to me when we were in Cherry Orchard, “Why don’t you get yourself a real dog?” I said, she is a real dog, I love her, and she said, “Well, she doesn’t love you!” I love dogs, but I shouldn’t have them because you have to give them your full focus.
What happens when she goes to Manchester for Coronation Street where she plays Evelyn?
Max is here, she is my amanuensis (someone who does everything). All About Eve takes place in this very flat, I tried taking Diva on tour and she ate the dressing room in Woking.  Diva is 15 and the Podengo is only 2.  Diva is so beautiful like a little movie star, like a fox, red and white. They are very cat like – she doesn’t come near me unless I say so, which is good for me because I don’t really do needy. I am not very good at being fussed about or fussing. I need my space.”  
Our discussion flits in and out of the ageing process. “We think we are immortal which means you never plan ahead. You are just entranced by each new thing that comes up and you think OK, I’ll deal with that.”
I tell her that’s exactly what I’m doing at the moment with my leg in the cast – dealing with things one minute at a time. She says, “You have to be glad you are a journalist and not an ice skater!”
Dame Maureen is an elegant, opinionated, vibrant 74. She says, “I’ve started making noises when I get up, ow, ow, ow, surely that is the beginning of the end.”
I think otherwise. Her Rose is so brilliantly observed and portrayed it shimmers and even in lockdown her energy has been unstoppable.  She has been going up and down to Manchester to play Evelyn in Coronation Street, she has been doing her own version of a workout every day, sometimes on a chair.
“It’s not really a Joe Wicks type of thing. It won’t get you out of breath. It’s not really yoga, but it’s kind of daft yoga and in between I do face exercises, voice exercises and eye exercises.”
Then she asks have I done any jigsaws in lockdown? “It’s better than mindfulness and meditation. This is something where two hours can pass without thinking about Covid, Brexit, or Boris Johnson’s hair, anything.  All that matters is that frilly dress on the woman in front of that blue building.  I hadn’t done a jigsaw in 70 years, but I have got this video of Hugh Jackman. He has done this massive jigsaw of New York, he puts the last piece in and you see him take it all apart.  I love Hugh Jackman.  I worked with him for a year and I didn’t find anything to complain about, and I can find the flaw in a Persian carpet before it is spun. 
I went to see him in Manchester and I got tickets for some of the Coronation Street people. I went early to have a chat with him, he lets in people who are either big fans or disabled, he meets them all before the show, signs things, then he has a little circle where the cast went.  Then he introduces me, I had gone out beforehand around Manchester, bought a bottle of wine, passed it around to the cast. It really was fabulous and he is a fabulous showman.  Half way through he introduced me to thousands of people, I had to stand up and my face was red. 
At the end of it, the guy who plays Craig the policeman said, “Thanks very much for getting us tickets but did you mean to have that in your hair?” – I then saw that I had been walking around with a velcro curler in all night.   The whole time I was turning and accepting compliments with a velcro roller in!  
I got through the first lockdown with jigsaws and I relished my lack of ambition.  Suddenly I didn’t feel my mother breathing down my neck.  Suddenly I was just spraying furniture and painting tables.  I took up painting and somehow gave a monster courgette. I was busy. This time I have just got the jigsaw and a couple of good books.  I’ve seen all of Call My Agent on Netflix, I loved it so much. My Octopus Teacher on Netflix was great. I don’t watch a lot of television, I get steamed up about the cliques in television. I will go for walks. I move the furniture around.  I walk in Kensington Park Gardens, I walk in Holland Park, Golders Hill Park. Last week I walked with a friend to Notting Hill Gate down Portobello Road.  Looking for silver linings, if you look up in London you see amazing things all the time, it’s so fantastically beautiful.”
This is coming from a woman who has just had some very bad news. “My partner who is in a respite home had the vaccine on Wednesday and by Friday he had Covid. 
We don’t know how he got it or when or if he had it when he got the vaccine.  My partner is very private, so I am being deliberately obscure. He has a form of Parkinson’s disease and he is being cared for in a small home. Normally I would be there quite a lot, but I can’t go.”
We do know from archive that her partner is over 80 and is retired businessman Guido Castro and they have been together over a decade. It does seem a scandal that people don’t get tested before they are given the vaccine.
Lipman says that she did feel OK but commuting Manchester London and the new virus strain has made her feel, “I did feel safe but not now. I don’t feel terribly safe. I’m used to taking out of the news whatever I want to. It’s not that. It’s the new strain. Say what you like about Boris. Nobody could have coped with this one. When the vaccine should have been the best of news, it’s been totally taken away by this variant. Nobody really knows if this vaccine is going to fix it.
Tony Blair is a wonderful ideas man, he is right to get it started (it was Blair’s idea to roll out the vaccines faster by rolling out more of the first dose and leaving a longer time than 3 weeks for people to get their second dose). When it comes down to those fine details we don’t know, we are just guinea pigs. It is agonising, nobody has the right to complain anymore.  We have a vaccine, Trump is out, we are out with Brexit and the deal, we just have to get on with it.”
She’s not afraid of travelling to Manchester to film Coronation Street. “They are very good at sending cars and it has a screen.  I am one of the first people ever to wear a mask from February last year.  People looked at me like I was crazy.  I sit there with my mask and my gloves and I check into an anonymous place and before going on set they take my temperature.
I go to my dressing room, my costume is hanging out there, my make-up and my rollers are there inside, I plug in my rollers and put them in my hair for Evelyn’s style.  The make-up girls are not allowed to touch us. It doesn’t bother me because if you’ve been in the theatre you can always do make up.  Tests, of course, aren’t entirely reliable.
Does she get depressed or anxious? “I get sleepless.”
I am told being depressed is to do with worrying about the past while being anxious is worrying about the future.
“Well, we’ve got something to be anxious about. We have to believe in the vaccine. He must have already had Covid when he was given the vaccine. I hadn’t seen him since Christmas Day. I had a test and I was negative.”
In the meantime, she has been listening to a lot of Louis Theroux and Ruby Wax. “There’s so much about mental health. People are funny because of their pain. Being funny is important but is it so important that you fuck up your life for it. We are funny because we are angry.”
Then she seems to change the subject, but not really. “There’s something in the fact that Bill Bailey won Strictly. He was elegant and graceful and screamingly funny. I thought one of the pretty ones would win because they always do. It’s a great mark of where we are as a nation that we wanted someone who’s slightly over the hill to win.”
Would she like to have done Strictly? “I’ve never done Strictly because I’ve never been great with criticism. I don’t want to be pushed towards emotion. It’s too easy. If I was standing there and I’d done my best and…. I don’t want people to see me getting upset.”
Although she fits effortlessly into Rose because she’s a great actress, not because she wants to be pigeonholed as a great Jewish actress or national treasure, she’s not terribly like Rose. Rose for instance had a long suffering mother who never praised, teased or hugged.
“My mother was a proper mother. It was Matin Sherman (the writer of Rose and Messiah and Bent) who had a difficult childhood. His mother had a condition where for a lot of her life she was unable to talk to him. Originally he wrote it when I’d done the BT commercial (where she played Jewish mother archetype Beattie – it’s good to talk)
I was very loathe to go into another Jewish part. I became a bit of a national treasure and I was too young to play Rose. Rose was 80 and I was 40 but this came at the right time. It doesn’t necessarily have to be another Jewish experience. It could be a Vietnamese boat experience. It makes you feel differently about immigrants.”
It’s about people who don’t belong. She is booked to do Coronation Street until September. “I don’t know if in September I’ll be done for good but the plan is, or at least I would like to perform Rose in the theatre, if by then there is such thing as theatre.
I was delighted when I was offered the part in Coronation Street. I do find television a bit cliquey. I always like it when people say to me what are you doing these days? Ahhh, you are in Corrie, never watched it myself.” (She puts on a dismissive tone) and says, “Well 10,000,000 people make up for you.”  I am very grateful for it. Jack wrote episode 13 and then he wrote 150.  He started work on the same day as Tony Warren. I was in it before but with a different head on.  It is a strange mixture of down to earth reality and fantastic absurdity …. if you watch something with passion you can take anything.

It’s with the deepest irony Maureen Lipman concedes as her phone was beeping with multiple congratulations for her astounding performance as Rose (which premiered on Sky on Holocaust Remembrance Day, January 27) she was sitting vigil for her partner of 13 years Guido Castro with his three daughters as he lay dying.

“He died after a short Covid related iillness – Not of Covid

“He was such an interesting man – he was old (84); he programmed the first actual computer and one of the first prototypes for Ford.

“He went to every country in the world except Papua New Guinea because I wouldn’t go. He learnt to fly, he played real tennis, he was a lovely gift, a gift to me, I met him when I was three years a widow.

“I’ve just seen a letter from Shirley Conran to the girls… she was his sister-in-law with his first marriage when she left home she slept on their sofa – it’s an amazing letter with him being called the catch of Cairo – he was born in Egypt.

He was Egyptian. He was one of this perhaps little-known group who had an exodus from the Middle East in 1956 when all Jews were kicked out of Iran, Iraq and Yemen. 850,000 of them. Their houses were taken and their jobs were taken. Alan Yentob is one of them.

They had a beautiful house on the Nile and after they were booted out it was given to Madame Sadat — she lives in it today. Guido’s sister, late in life, married Sir Keith Joseph. They were at a do in New York and Yolanda was seated next to Madame Sadat and they had such a pleasant time together that when the dinner was over and they left, Madam Sadat said, “I had such a nice time in your company, please remember if you’re ever in Egypt, my house is your house.”

“Isn’t that brilliant?

“I said to Guido it’s time to go, you’ve got to let go and I think for once in his life he actually did what I told him… I was driving home, I turned the car back and that was it.

“It’s a savage irony that a moment of personal triumph – well you can’t be a really good actor in a rotten part I was very lucky to get that part — all the congratulations came on the same day as I lost my love — again.”

Her first husband Jack Rosenthal died in  May 2004 after 30 years of marriage

“There I was sitting with him and his three daughters on the floor of his respite place. On the evening of January 27, I came home, tried to watch Rose but I was too tired, I went to bed and the next day I drove back to see him and it was clear that I was going to see him off; he knew I was there – I did sonnets I sang I Love You A Bushel And A Peck — I told him we’re going to be all right, please let go and he did and all I could hear on the phone with ping ping ping as people were saying “Mazeltov” and “Congratulations it’s the best thing you’ve ever done. There is nothing that’s more relevant to the Jewish experience!”

“He lived a long life and he did everything he set out to do.

When he met me, he was already in his 60s and I was three years a widow in my 50s. He thought nothing of getting in the car at Gerard’s cross and picking me up in Southwark at midnight.

He was gentle, deep and sweet, thinking he didn’t know who anybody was in the world of theatre yet he loved opera and theatre and reading. For instance, when he met Christopher Biggins he said, “What do you do for a living?”

“Shirley Conran said he could meet James Bond and it wouldn’t matter to him; he’d say, “And what do you do for a living?”

He went everywhere in the world except Papua New Guinea and Cracow and Belize. He stopped travelling much when he met me.
It’s only in the last couple of years that he’s seemed weak… in his early 80s, he was beating people at old tennis.

“He had the jab. He got Covid – it wasn’t Covid that killed him but it weakened him terribly.”

Ben Whishaw (London Sunday Times Magazine, October 31, 2020)

Chrissy Iley and Ben Whishaw October 2020
Chrissy Iley and Ben Whishaw October 2020

I’ve met Ben Whishaw a few times now and I’ve decided he’s the most cat-like of any human being. It’s not just the eyes to mesmerise or a feline, slinky way of moving, it’s that you think he’s going to be all soft and vulnerable, Fluffy even. He seems to call you in and then you find that he’s surprisingly self-sufficient – pragmatic, even. He has certainly been super pragmatic in his acting choices, earning both the moniker of national treasure (he was the voice of Paddington, he’s Q in James Bond, Keats in Bright Star, Sebastian Flyte in Brideshead Revisited) and he is widely named The actor of his generation because of Hamlet (when he was not long out of drama school) and his brilliant Golden Globe-garnering performance as Norman Scott opposite Hugh Grant in A Very English Scandal (2019). He has certainly moved with dexterity between roles which were openly gay, sexually ambiguous and straight. He is the first actor to be able to do this – a beacon for others to follow. He is civil partners with Australian composer Mark Bradshaw although I’m guessing they don’t get to see that much of each other, what with him being the world’s greatest actor and all, he’s pretty busy filming around the globe – “Mmm” he says. We’re at his home in Chicago, where he’s currently filming Fargo. It’s in an area called Lakeside because of the views of a sparkling spring lake. It’s in a very old building, and he’s enjoying it. He says, “I think this year I am going to be much more at home – I’m gonna do my house up, it’s the time. It’s nice to be in-demand, but I do think I need to be at home for a little while. It’s been six months here, that’s a long time away. Mark visited, he came out for a month and I was back at Christmas. It’s definitely a big test.” What was unknown to us at the time, was how fast Whishaw’s prediction of home turf would come to light. A few days later, all flights to Europe were banned. There was a small window to get to the UK. Production had been halted and he doesn’t know for how long. Fargo was due for release April 18th, but now, like everything else, it will be delayed.

The Bond movie was the first big movie to announce that it was moving from early-April to November. Does he know why they took that decision so early? “I honestly have no idea, I just got a text message from Barbara saying that they were going to make the announcement. They never explained why – it must be related to the virus.” And perhaps because it’s called No Time to Die. We laugh. Perhaps a little too manically as we know scary times are to follow.

He’s wearing a blue shirt with a white sketched image on the back – a scene from Orpheus and Eurydice – and black trousers. His hair was cut really short in the summer, now it’s back to normal length: “in Fargo I wear a wig”. In Fargo he plays Rabbi X, does that mean he has a wig with Rabbi ringlets? “no, because I’m not really a Rabbi, I’m an Irishman who’s been raised by a Jewish family and now living with an Italian family. They’re all criminals, and they all call him Rabbi. They’re the people he’s part of. You can’t really see it, but I’ve got bits at the top shaved to make my forehead bigger because I have a tiny forehead. So they shaved my hairline to make the forehead higher. I think I look weird. I was happy to cut it very short, it was for a part. But when the filming was over, I properly shaved it all off and that felt great. Have you ever done that?” no, it’s different for girls, “oh, yeah”.

“I really like Chicago. I like being on the ninth floor and looking over the lake. I can watch the sun come up and watch it change. I can just sit on the sofa by the window for many hours and daydream. And I’ve had time to do that, which is lovely. The apartment is an Airbnb which I got sort of by accident.” Who knew that the words ‘Airbnb’ would sound so exotic these days. He’s recently given up meat, “I don’t feel healthier but I made the decision I was going to do it and I like to see things through. I wanted to do Fargo because the writer/director is exploring. It’s a lot about immigrants, it’s a lot about assimilating. How do you become an American and what does that mean? Who is let in and who is left out? My character is an outsider who doesn’t fit in anywhere.” People may assume that Whishaw is an outsider who doesn’t fit in, he always seems to go for the outsider roles and even when his characters aren’t outsiders he gives them quirks. “Hmm I don’t know, things are pretty contradictory.” For instance, Q is a techno-wizard who traditionally has seemed to be a foil for Bond, but living in a separate world of gadgetry. And yet, it is usually Q who comes up with something – a piece of super-enhanced techno that saves the day.

“I find it hard to talk about. Partly because it was long ago, although it wasn’t that long ago. It does feel like it. But also we never did get the full script. I did my bits not in the chronological order so I find it hard. Even though I’m not allowed to tell you what happens in the story, I couldn’t because of the way that it happened. But I can say, very late in the day I give him some technology that helps.”

Do they not give you a full script because everything is changing all the time or because they’re so paranoid that things will be leaked? “that’s a good question. It’s partly the secrecy that always surrounds it, but on this one to be honest, it was  a difficult journey. Although it was part-intentional, the director works in quite an improvisational way and we had a very tight deadline……. But as I say, they don’t tell us anything.”

Does he find it hard as an actor to not know where his character is going? “yeah I did find it hard to be honest, they don’t tell you anything.” He doesn’t  know if there will be another Bond let alone who that Bond will be, or if he’s in it. “I guess either they’ll call or they won’t.  When I go back to London I’m going to do another television series. It’s based on a book called This is Going to Hurt. It’s based on a man called Adam Kay who is a doctor, and it’s about his comedic but also tragic experiences working as a junior doctor in the NHS.” Is the doctor gay or straight, or that doesn’t come in to it? “He’s gay.” In the past decade, there’s been a sexual revolution in gay acting. In the olden days, gay actors only got to play gay roles. And there has recently been a theory that straight men shouldn’t play gay just like abled-bodies shouldn’t play quadriplegics. Personally, I think if you’re an actor, you act these things. “I’m in agreement with you.”

Whishaw was born in Clifton, Bedfordshire, his parents split when he was young and he has a non-identical twin brother. They are totally unalike: “He is blonde, came out first and was very pink. I was a squashed, dark thing. We were always dressed the same and were taken out together even to things I was not interested in, like football. I’ve always defined myself by him, but in opposition to him. I like everything different to him.” Nonetheless, they get on very well, and he is the perfect uncle. His mother worked on the make-up counters in department stores. His father was a footballer. It is often written that he’s an IT consultant: “he’s definitely not an IT guy, definitely not. He’s done all sorts of things – he worked for a company called Re-Diffusion, he ran a nightclub, and he managed a fleet of cars. Now he works in a sports facility. He doesn’t talk about it very much and I don’t press him. He’s barely stopping work.” Do you find it’s difficult to ask questions, like, it’s hard to ask your dad stuff? “no, I do ask people questions but sometimes not the people I know well. I feel with my dad I ought to have asked the question a long time ago and now it’s too embarrassing to ask it. And I know he would play-down what he does. I don’t know why he wouldn’t really want to share that kind of stuff with me, but more importantly, he’s a really good bloke. He gave his father his cats to look after when he started travelling a lot. His favourite cat was called Puki. “I was particularly close to her. She had a lovely voice – she sort of trilled and I do miss her. She was tortoise-shell, mainly black, with bits of orange and an asymmetric patchy face, she was very beautiful. She spent hours in the sink watching the tap – she was mesmerised by it.” We spend a little time trilling and making cat noises. Very important, but they don’t really translate to the written page.

I think people used to speculate more about sexuality ten years ago, or twenty. But ending that conversation – making something private public – was of course massive to him. After the civil partnership, it wasn’t all just easy, but I have the impression that it was easier than he imagined it to be. He is not direct about this. Although he’s open, he’s very private. I remember the BBC show The Hour. I loved it. set in late 1950s BBC. There was a ‘will they won’t they’ get-together situation with Romola Garai’s character. So it’s rubbish to think that if you’re gay you can’t play straight, it just takes cleverer navigation. Sir John Gielgud was out and proud, wasn’t he? He did play a lot of butlers…but some people have always managed to steer a course.

Mark Bradshaw is his civil partner, they are not married. Would he ever want to be? “no.” They met on set of Bright Star, directed by the Australian Jane Campion in 2009, the civil partnering was in 2012 and they have a home together in London. He says he’s looking forward to settling down more in London and the time has come to get cats. He is very much looking forward to cats. The last time we met, he reintroduced me to the lyrics of Stephen Sondheim. This was before Marriage Story, when the song Being Alive was relaunched onto the public. I talked for hours about how the line ‘the coffee cup’ was small but brilliant. His favourite was ‘losing my mind’ and the line ‘or were you just being kind’. Now he says he hasn’t listened to the Barbra (Streisand) version or the Dame Edna version: “I need a break from that song, I find it quite painful to listen to.” My theory is you only listen to painful songs when you’re in pain. “yes, where you can sort of loosen it up – get it out. Wail. Cry. And feel free to let the pain out.” Emotional pain, too, seems something to be nostalgic for along with drinking a cup of coffee in a café. But good to know that he’s not in emotional pain. Just when you think everything is sorted and easy about him, he admits “I’m still afraid to meet people” on Mary Poppins he was afraid to meet Meryl Streep. Does the fear enlarge with the more famous the person is? “no, it’s anybody. I get anxious that I’m really bad at small-talk. And I’ve been doing a lot of hanging around on set, where I should be doing lots of small-talking. I’m just quite shit about it. I don’t know what to talk to people about.” Maybe it’s just because you think if you haven’t got anything in common with that person you can’t do small or big-talk. It’s just pointless. “Absolutely, I get anxious about it so now just think ‘I’ll sit here quietly and do my work’ or I get overwhelmed. There are so many people and I find it quite draining.” Now I see him as that independent cat who stops asking for headbutts and just puts their tail in the air and trots away.

We are in an East London eatery –  we sit outside on benches, inside is a vast emporium and lots of chandeliers but its beauty is infected with Corona virus restrictions – there is a track and trace which doesn’t work on my phone, ubiquitous hand sanitiser, and don’t go this way go that way – the vibe is very similar to when we met in Chicago. It feels like the we are seeing the dawn of something much worse that’s going to happen…

Whishaw looks a little thinner and more languid than before – Even in a chunky bottle green jumper and tiny waist jeans he looks like he could fall down the crack of a pavement enigmatically.  His wild hair is rather neatly coiffed. it’s as if it’s trying to contain itself and there is facial hair that defines his cheekbones even more than they already defined.

He didn’t come back and get London cats. Although part  of him still longs for that moment. He says, “I can’t take responsibility for myself at the moment much less cats.”

There is something portentous about the afternoon – as if it’s going to thunder but it doesn’t.   It’s more to do with we don’t know what social restrictions are coming and with them comes a life that nobody wants.  Right now he really wants a cheese toastie but somehow he doesn’t go and get it.  The bigger picture is that we feel like we’re on the eve of something bad again.  “It’s true but this time we’ve gone through it already and we don’t want to go there again but there seems no stopping it, it seems inevitable, inevitable bleakness.”

I change the subject to the TV series Fargo because it is screening soon.

“I was pretty much finished filming, I didn’t have to go back to Chicago but everybody else did and somehow they finished it. Somehow they actually managed to shoot things.  Everywhere is running out of content so people are desperate to get stuff finished that was nearly done.”

He was coming back to the UK for TV series about a doctor .  It has been postponed to January, “At the earliest,” he says.  He has gone from non-stop working to doing? “Nothing… I’ve been a bit of a hermit… Once we were forced to stop I didn’t have any inclination or desire to do anything really…”

The waitress explains that the cheese toastie has to be ordered at the deli counter not from her so he says that he will go up there in a minute but we know he won’t. He is stopped doing everything.

“I wanted to stop, I’ve seen my family when we were allowed to and I’ve gone for long walks and had loads of naps,“ he says, not even trying not to sound bleak.

I tell him that last years meme was “Do one thing a day that you are afraid of,” These years meme is, “Just do one thing.”  I tell him about the Instagram live show I did with Malminder Gill – the hypnotherapist.  We called it Love In the Time of Corona because there was so many problems when the dynamic of relationships suddenly changed and people couldn’t get away from each other – the divorce rate went up, “Yes,” he nods sagely.

Did he survive? “Yes I’ve survived but I’m not going to talk about it.“ There is no point in meandering around how the dynamic of he and his partner might of changed – he just looks, too done in to talk about it. He also says he’s lost his ability to predict anything, “Everything is so touch and go. And I don’t know how people are going to be feeling if we are we going into total lockdown again.  What’s going to happen? I don’t know I’ve given up thinking about it.”

He hasn’t seen the Bond movie in total.  “I have seen a tiny bit because as I had to come in and do some ADR.” He can’t be drawn to comment on it.  “It seems like I’ve got absolutely nothing to say about anything!!!”

Then he perks up, his eyes igniting.  “It looks like Bond is the one film that people might actually want to be persuaded to go out and see. People have been deprived of blockbusters and this is something that is diverse and multi generational, it could unite everybody. It appeals to a vast number of people…”

“It is hard to remember a time before walking around in masks, washing our hands every five minutes and sanitisers and this film was a time when people could go around like ……James Bond.  I think the Bond film is just what we really need right now, I really do.  We need something that is thrilling and fun and a kind of escapism. “

We talk about how much we miss the theatre.

“I sat in Regents Park and saw Jesus Christ Superstar on a screen I sat on the lawn and listened to I Don’t Know How to Love Him and it was so moving.  It had been such an effort, you couldn’t get into the theatre because the seats were sold out because there were so few of them, it was projected onto a screen for people who just wanted desperately to see something live with other people.  We saw the bravery and the commitment of the performers to a socially distant performance where the had to stand two meters apart, it was really beautiful.  I cried for the first twenty minutes.”

Because it was cathartic?

“Yes, perhaps…. I find that I can’t think about the future at all.  I can’t see what is going to happen beyond this second.  I can’t see the point in planning.  Although some people have been productive I am happy just to exist, get up whenever I needed, nap quite a bit, I have done absolutely nothing,” he laughs.

This is a person that is used to living not only off of adrenaline but pride in his work.  Someone who is used to being brilliant and basking in that.  He contradicts, “Maybe I was just busy. I trust sometime in the future it will come back.  For the moment, during lockdown, I painted my room blue, I learned how to put up shelves and pictures and I actually learned how to develop photographs, that is quite impressive isn’t it?” He says, not so impressed with himself.

This is a man who is used to throwing his entire being not just into another person but into another world.  He’s nothing if not overwhelmed by the minutia of lockdown and he just can’t wait to get back.  He wasn’t designed to do nothing but put up shelves.

Sam Smith (Chrissy Iley Exclusive – October 18, 2020)

Sam Smith and Chrissy Iley
Sam Smith and Chrissy Iley

Sam Smith’s voice is like honey seared in raw pain.  It vibrates on a level of vulnerability previously not known to human beings.  They reach in and grab you by the throat, the heart, the soul, and stain you.  If there is pain to feel, they’ve felt it deeper and harder.  Propelled by these uncanny abilities, Smith – gender queer who uses they/them pronouns – has won four Grammy’s, three Brits, three Billboard music awards, a Golden Globe and an Oscar.  It is also the reason that my burly builders working in my basement turn up to early every day because they know that I am playing the new Sam Smith’s album Love Goes.  

 
They wave me off like I am the Queen going to launch a ship when they know I am going to meet them for the interview which is in management offices in Hampstead.
 
“I am good with builders, they are my fan base.”  We agree their fan base is as wide as his inspirations. “Ever since I was a kid I have listened to women singers, I think I see myself within the lyrics, within the stories.”  (Amy, Britney, Bey Madonna, Christina.)
 
“Singing completes me. And during Covid I was singing all the time, I just came to this place where I was falling in love with singing again.”
 
The album Love Goes is nostalgic, referencing ends of relationships, but not the end of love.  They are comfortable embracing extremes – young and a very old soul. They like to mix the euphoria of disco and the pain of loss.  They like crying and dancing at the same time.  Their birthday is May 19th, Taurus, stubborn.  And do they like to use lots of fabric conditioner?
 
“Yes!  Yes!  I have got very sensitive skin.”
 
They love to feel softness around them.  They are delighted when I tell them as soon as they came out as non-binary I was listening to their music on Alexa who immediately referred to Smith as they/them.  
 
“Wow, I did not know that and it is clever and lovely.”
 
I tell them that I have messed up a few times with the they/them.
 
“I mess up, my mum messes up, my family messes up.  What I have learned over the past year is that it is not an ideal world.  It would be wonderful if we could change lanes like that. When people correct themselves it is a wonderful feeling because people try.”
 
Do they feel more comfortable in their own skin?
 
“Yes.  I have always been non-binary, I have always felt the way I’ve felt and just hearing other non-binary stories made me suddenly feel seen and I felt this is a way that I can live, where if I tell people this is how I feel and this is how I like to be treated life is easier.”
 
Did they have to change their name and title on their passport?
 
“I don’t think you are allowed to do that yet which I find sad.  I am pretty sure mine says I am male and you have a choice to be male or female.  It would be wonderful if it could change, hopefully in my lifetime.”
 
They are wearing a soft grey sweatshirt and jeans.  Their thighs are very shapely, girlie and they like that.  Was there a moment that inspired the pronoun change or was it a process?
 
“For me, what triggered everything was the work I was doing with my body issues.  I always had body dysmorphia.  As I started to address that, I started to address my gender and realized that I was holding myself to these ideals of how a man should look.  As I looked into it, I did therapy, I realized there was more to it.  I have got girl thighs and I have got girl breasts too.  It started to awaken this conversation that had always been in the back of my mind.”
 
Years ago, he went to Amelia Freer the nutritionist that James Corden and Boy George used and he lost many pounds.
 
“In the words of Rhianna, I have been gifted with a fluctuating body.  I can lose weight I can put weight on quickly, I am a shape shifter. When I read Rhianna I felt very seen.”
 
“Seen” is a word they use a lot.  I think for them it means being accepted, but it’s paradoxical too, as a famous pop star losing and gaining weight is a shackle.  Do they have a love/hate relationship with fame?
 
“I wouldn’t say that I love fame.”
 
“Fame means I can get certain messages across which is a wonderful thing… but it’s very invasive.”
 
The songs are so confessional anyway, how much more can they be invaded?
 
“It’s a weird life change, it’s quite traumatic.  I was 21 when fame happened (28 now) and my whole world changed.  I didn’t realise how much of a home body I was and how much I loved my privacy.  You can’t go back. I have gotten used to it and aware of how lucky I am… also I have to be cautious.
 
“It was very difficult, I remember I got papped when I was 22.  I have always looked at myself with affection no matter how big or small I am, but I saw this and I felt ashamed.  So now, I don’t look at pictures or read anything about me, good or bad.”
 
A few years ago they had a file on their phone called Crack where Instagram and Twitter lived.
 
“I have changed it now. I am still on those things, but I have stepped away for sure.  I keep it mainly music focused, all the information people need is in the albums.  When I sing and tell stories – I write everything I do.  I don’t think people really realise because of the pop umbrella, that the way I make music is organic and from the deepest part of me.”
 
On the album their favourite song is Another One.  It is very trance-y.  It is about loss and hope.  My favourite is Dance Until You Love Someone Else.  
 
“I think I was going through a breakup when I was writing the album, it was after my main relationship of my life.”
 
They were together with Brandon Flynn from 13 Reasons Why for 9 months in 2018.
 
“That was my longest relationship basically, so there was a catharsis going on.   When you write songs you may start with an initial inspiration but then it becomes something else – a story that everyone can relate to.  I also found it hard that the relationship was public.”
 
This was a big conflict.  They wanted the relationship known because they were proud, they’re are not so many gender queer couples, but they didn’t want it because it put pressure on the relationship.
 
“I think there are ways to get around it, where you can maintain a level of privacy, but it was hard.  I was 25 during that time and in many ways I seem a lot older but when it comes to relationships I am still a bit of a teenager.”
 
The relationship was played out, at least for a lot of the time, in California.
 
“I actually do love California. I didn’t love California.”
 
They were lonely there.
 
“Even though you could always find me in West Hollywood dancing down the streets.”
 
Is it more important for them to love or be loved?
 
“Before it was more important to me to love – that is part of the reason the album is called Love Goes.  I was addicted to the melancholy of love  – you are putting yourself through pain to be inspired because it is a creative space.  Now I understand what love is – for me it is something that you nurture and someone is nurturing you and there has to be an equal amount of nurturing going on.”
 
In their songs they break up with people, but they still love them.  Isn’t it much easier to hate the people you break up with?  Their deep eyes twinkle.
 
“I have tried to look at every relationship as a different experience and something that has helped me understand myself.  I have had a lovely time with the people I have been with and there is a lot of love there.  Love doesn’t go away, I will always love these people and by putting them into songs it will live on, although when I listen back to The Thrill of it All or The Lonely Hour I don’t think or feel for those guys at all now.  It is just like looking through an emotional photo book. Sometimes I listen back to my music and think, ‘I was so childish’ and so thought I knew everything about love.”
 
They are single now.
 
“On the front line.”
 
Just now they are more in love with their album.
 
“I want it to be an empowering break up album.  Just step in and own that heartbreak.
 
“When my parents broke up, I was very lucky.  There was not a lot of nastiness and I know divorces can get very nasty.  My parents still love each other very much even to this day.”
 
They use this theme of love outlives the relationship as a blueprint.
 
“You let the relationship last as long as they are going to last.  They got 26 years and 3 kids… they are happy now, it is a lovely, happy, dysfunctional family.”
 
And what does the family think about the theyness?
 
“They fully support the theyness.  My mother has always known I have been that way and so has my dad.  A lot of people just know me from my first record, but I was wearing makeup and female clothes from the ages of 15 to 18.  I was fully glammed up every day for school.  My dad, before school a few times, would say, ‘You need to powder your face because you look orange.’  My family want me to feel happy and settled so they are incredibly supportive about my pronouns.  They say live it and enjoy it. 
 
 “It is not my job to be an activist. My job is to make music and I needed to enjoy being out as a non-binary person for a bit.”
 
Do they feel responsibility for their young fans who may be struggling to come to terms with their identity?
 
“I think there is a lack of education and a lack of understanding. No one ever talked about queer sex or queer love growing up and I have been put in dangerous positions because of the lack of education and understanding from society.  I feel that if my music or gender expression helps anyone of any age who feel like they see themselves in me, or it helps them understand… because if I were a young kid and I was a non-binary artist talking about this it might have saved me a bit of heartache and pain. So, if I could be that to someone that’s wonderful.
 
“I am a singer and I am very human.  The concept of being a role model is wonderful, but it is not something I am looking for.  I make mistakes.  I am flawed.”
 
Are they looking for a relationship?
 
“Of course.  I am not looking, I am hoping – it is like wading through water and trying to catch a fish with your bare hands.  I am just sitting by the side of the pond now.  Being single during lockdown was not fun.  I spent it with my sister and felt very lucky because we get along so well.”
 
Do they think about the future?  Do they want to have kids?
 
“I am trying to seize control of things and let life happen, but I would love to have kids, I want to have a kid before I am 34.”
 
How are they going to acquire one?
 
“There are lots of options, adopt, surrogacy, I have got friends who have done both.”
 
They have friends who are non-binary and friends who are not.
 
They won an Oscar in 2016 for the Bond track Writing ‘s on the Wall.
 
 Billie Eilish sings new Bond No Time To Die.
 
“Billy is absolutely beautiful and it is a beautiful song.”
 
Were they overwhelmed during their Bond period?
 
“I was.  My whole life changed and I was trying to navigate through it.  I hadn’t been home because I was touring and I found it a strain on my mind and physical body.”
 
 
“I would wake up and think what is going on?  Chemically? You go on stage every night, your adrenaline is off the roof, and then you walk off stage into a dressing room of complete silence.  It’s addictive because the feeling is amazing, but it doesn’t warrant for a steady mental ride. You are made to feel you are very important then you realise you are like everyone else with the same issues and boyfriend problems.”
 
“I have got some wonderful queer friends in London, but my closest queer friend is in New York.  During lockdown we had FaceTime dinners and cocktails.
 
“I love food as much as music, I am a foodie.  I am staying healthy now, I have got a plan to move to rural Scotland someday and enjoy eating. 
 
“My skin is very Celtic, the sun and I don’t get along.  My grandmother’s mum was French and there is definitely Scottish and Irish in me, perhaps I was a non-binary Celtic Viking.”
 
We talk about The Three chimneys on the Isle of Skye. 
 
Excitedly they say, “I went last year with my cousin and her husband on a road trip all around Scotland.  Very special. Skye is wonderful, very haunting, then I went to the outer Hebrides which is wild.  Scotland is my favourite place in the whole world, my family were from Whitley Bay (Northeast of England).”
 
I remind them they once said, “Life is like a Richard Curtis movie because I am so romantic”.  At what point in the year do they start watching Love Actually?
 
“All throughout the year.  I am obsessed with Sense and Sensibility at the moment.  I am a romantic – I think I could over romanticise things – I would adore to write a soundtrack to a Richard Curtis movie, and one day I would love to make a queer romantic film.  I see romance in different ways, always have.  Life to me is romantic, the ups and downs, the sadness and happiness, I look at the whole and sometimes i can get carried away.  I have OCD so I try not to linger on too many thoughts for too long.”
 
They still get a thrill from heels.
 
“OMG!  I love heels, love heels! I was starting to wear them every day last year, but it was exhausting.  I am 6’2” so there is a lot of weight on a heel and a lot of height. I find I don’t want to stand out that much. One walks differently in heels. I strut.  I look fabulous in a heel. But OMG, I am a size 13. I have to go to specialist drag shops or places to get boy heels.  Or they heels.  They is a beautiful word.”
 
They love clothes from Random Identity – all gender fluid clothing.
 
“Also I like Ella Boucht, she is incredible, she’s a they/she.  I say I am a they/them but many people like to be known as they/he or they/she – all beautiful words.”

Sam Smith and Chrissy Iley
Sam Smith and Chrissy Iley

Mica Paris (Mail Weekend, July 18, 2020)

I met Mica Paris back in the day when she was a famous pop star, beautiful voice and gorgeous girl.  I always knew she was more than just hot glamour and great vocals. We met again recently, just before lockdown via mutual friends, she had cooked amazing Jamaican chicken with rice and peas. This woman can cook. Celebrity Master Chef semi-finalist doesn’t even tell you the whole story. I think you can actually taste love on the plate.

First off, you think ‘what a strong  powerful woman’, but her strength comes from vulnerability and faith. She stands tall and confident, but on the very day we met, she’s nursing a heartache. Her best friend – Paul Field – an editor for the Mail group had unexpectedly died. They saw each other all the time and were working on a book together about female singers who rocked the world. Right now, she is about to rock the world with a BBC documentary: Mica Paris and Gospel Music. It’s built around six songs about suffering and redemption over three centuries. Mica has always had faith. She grew up in the church; she and her siblings were brought up by their Pentecostal grandparents. Her grandfather was a pastor and everything was very strict. From a young age, she sang in church. I’m eating her delicious Jamaican chicken: “I’m a food person. I cook really good. I can cook anything – Japanese, Jamaican. I cannot bake to save my life”, then she lets out a big dirty laugh. Rylan was her rival semi-finalist, she loved him: “he’s a wonderful guy, I was very pleased about my Jamaican chicken dish, everyone was saying how wonderful it was. But then I saw flour, milk, eggs and sugar and I thought I was gonna die. It meant baking. I couldn’t even breathe because I knew I was going to get kicked out, and I made the worst crepes ever.”

This week (June 22) she releases the song In Broad Daylight- vocals that reach inside your heart and all proceeds going to Black Lives Matter and Mobo Music awards Charitable Trust

And  she’s made the definitive gospel music documentary full of detail and resonance– everyone can relate to these songs. Hearing her sing brings a warm shimmer to the soul, it seems particularly fitting that this program should come out just post-lockdown. Watch it, and even though you might not be religious, you understand why churches need to open. “It’s produced by Lenny Henry’s company. I wanted to do two programs, one talking about gospel music and the other talking about all the women singers – Ella Fitzgerald, Janis Joplin, Whitney Houston – who had been tortured in the business. The BBC wanted me to do the gospel first because it’s my heritage, it’s about me. The program opens up with Stormzy at 2019 Glastonbury performing a rap version of ‘…’. It’s moving, and he literally brings the entire Glastonbury crowd to church. “Church was like a little community. It was a social event, it worked for me. When I was a kid, I felt I had a party trick. I would hold that note and the room went ‘oooommmm’. I felt like Bill Withers on ‘Lovely Day’.

“I come from a family of six, I desperately wanted to be noticed, so you had to do what you had to do.” Growing up, she had to be extremely well-behaved.

It’s normal in Caribbean families that the children are looked after by the grandparents. She saw her parents all the time: “my grandparents were lovely but super strict. As my grandfather was a pastor, we were the first family of the church so we had to be really circumspect. My Sunday clothes and Sunday shoes could not be touched for the whole of the week and on Sunday we had to have a beret to cover your head for church. Everyone looked at the first family for leadership. So when my parents were playing out, I was not allowed. I was in the house doing choir practice. A Victorian house in Lewisham that’s five bedrooms, a garden, a dog, a rabbit, a chicken and a cat. We still ate chicken rice and peas – just not that chicken. Everyone came to the house so there were lots of activities like a Monday prayer meeting, a Tuesday Bible study, so going out wasn’t even an option, but there was always something going on at home. It didn’t even feel weird. When I got to fifteen, I suddenly wanted to go out with my friends. And I did. And my grandmother followed me to my friend’s house. There was this dark figure darting around the street, watching me, going around the corner. She was very strict. But in a weird way, I don’t think she was controlling, just protective. And I’m actually thankful they were like that because a lot of my friends ended up really messed up. And going into the music business actually really helped me. I moved out when I was sixteen and signed my first deal at seventeen.”

She was studying art at Vauxhall college, and went to live with her sister in Brixton. “My grandparents had a complete meltdown and said ‘you’ve got to come back home’ it was horrible.” What were her parents doing at this point? “My mum and dad would visit us at weekends. They were total sixties children, all about the party – so imagine the contrast. The very strict Pentecostal upbringing. My grandad always wore a tie at home, we would have three meals – breakfast, lunch and dinner – and were never allowed to eat between meals. Dinner was served at six o’clock, and then you don’t eat again until the morning. When I used to go visit my mum and dad at weekends, it was curries, goat, chicken all the time and dub music, and people walking in and out of my mum’s house. I actually didn’t like it. I preferred the quiet and chill of my grandparents’. It’s a very Caribbean thing, that the children were looked after by the grandparents. It was about stepping in and looking after the children while the parents work. I remember getting told off by lots of people – mum, dad, grandparents, aunties, uncles. A line of people were telling me to behave myself. You didn’t say anything, it was all about ‘respect your elders and shut up’.” For anybody this would be hard to take, but for Mica, who is all about self-expression and telling it like it is, she found it impossible: “I couldn’t take it. I got to sixteen, and I moved out. I left the idyllic quiet life and strict upbringing and I thought ‘this is great’.” It’s always a woman to embrace extremes and feel quite at home in both of them. She was the youngest of the girls and then three boys followed. The three sisters sang together. Her elder sister, Dawn, has a PhD and is a lecturer  The next sister, Paula, is a well known gospel singer.

Singing in church and singing with her first record label were a lifetime apart, much further than the distance from Lewisham to Brixton. “My granddad said ‘you’re going to become a harlot’. I had to look up in the dictionary what that meant. And I told him I was prepared. I had had fifteen years of Jesus and I was prepared.” Curiously, she can still quote with precision and passion from the Bible. She might have left Jesus, but I’m not sure Jesus ever let her go. “No, it never does. In fact, it got me through the pitfalls. You know, how one minute you’re loved and everyone wants you, and the next minute you’re just gone. I’ve had many peaks in my career, and many lows.” Peaks included her debut single My One Temptation – it was a worldwide smash, and two seasons of hosting What Not to Wear, as well as successful Radio Two presenting shows, Mica Meets  and West End musical like Fame

“There have been many lows, and it’s my faith in God that gets me through that. I don’t go to church, but I pray. I pray in the morning, I pray in the evening. And I have a faith that is unshakeable. I believe there is something bigger than us, I’ve seen it work in my life many times.

Just yesterday I was speaking to Chaka Khan who is one of my oldest friends, and God-Mother to my eldest, Monet. She wants me to do some shows with her in America. I remember when I lost my second deal with EMI records. It was a time when they had Robbie Williams and they decided he was their next king, and anyone else didn’t get a look in. I made this album ‘Black Angel’, produced it, wrote it, did everything myself. And EMI said ‘this album is too urban we don’t know what to do with it’, I was devastated. I had been making this album for two years, I was with Raphael Saadiq and James Ingram. I suffered for that, it was 1997. Horrible times.” I wonder if anyone would say that these days, ‘it’s too urban’

Urban was a dirty word .it meant unplayable. Despite how far we’ve moved, clearly racism still hurts us all. “I went mental at EMI and said ‘I’m gonna be here after this building is gone’, I walked out, went back to my flat, and suddenly thought ‘what have I done?’ I haven’t got a deal, I haven’t got any money. And that’s when I got a phone call from Chaka who was in London doing a play, Mama, I Want to Sing! and she said ‘I hate it, the only way I can get out of this play is if you take it’. No problem, so the other day I said ‘you know, Chaka, you saved me’. I had no money, and I had paid thousands for this record, then lost the deal. Then I got this, that’s God.

I was in that show for six months and one day a producer Mike Peden, who produced I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For, by The Chimes  came to the show and wanted me to do another  U2 song called One. I’d never heard the song (even though it’s one of U2’s most famous) so I did my version without being influenced by the original, and it was a massive hit. Bono wrote me a beautiful letter saying I did a great job. It just shows you how, in this business, you have to have faith, everyone had written me off, saying I had had my moment then I had a resurgence.” Here’s hoping that Black Angel will now have resurgence along with her new career as a documentary maker.

She has two daughters, Monet and Russia, and for now she’s a single mum.  We reminisce about a man she loved very much, Max Beesley. “We were together for four years, but Max then was not who he is today (a sought-after television actor who starred in Suits) he was playing in Paul Weller’s band. I was just splitting up with Monet’s father,  and  I was heartbroken then I met Max and we totally fell in love, I couldn’t help myself. I had had a lot of dalliances in my life,  Max was one of  the best things that ever happened to me. The problem was the timing, I was so traumatised by the breakup of the marriage to Monet’s father it didn’t matter that Max saved up for four months to buy me a ring, he was only a session musician. But he was a legend, the best step-father and the best boyfriend you could ever have. But did I see it at the time? No. I was still traumatised by the previous relationship.

“He’s making another record and he wants me to get involved, which of course I will. He’s married now and living in LA. But if I could rewind the clock… Divorce is not easy, I was 25, had this little girl, Max was amazing, though I couldn’t see it then. We’re still friends.”

Gospel is all about  stories of suffering and redemption, you feel it  hard when she sings … .. she’s been through it.

In the program, she’s in a house in Memphis, which was a safehouse for slaves seeking their freedom. It was a basement. When the screen goes black and you imagine the darkness that they lived in and their fear for life itself Mica cries, anyone who watches it will cry. It’s no surprise that Mica rose up from nervous breakdowns: “I had a nervous breakdown after I split from Max.”

What happened? “I had a mass of anxiety attacks after I split from him. A doctor came round and called it ‘an anxiety attack’ I couldn’t breathe and thought I was going to die. They gave me morphine and told me I’d taken on too much. I was financially supporting many people and I was getting over the breakup. I had to stop being mummy to everybody, it was killing me. I hadn’t realised how much emotional support Max had been giving me until we split, and that’s when it all fell apart.”

Her pop career was  still soaring  she  became close with Prince he wrote if I Love You Tonight for  her. and had had  a couple of encounters with Whitney Houston: “I’d just had my first hit record, My One Temptation, and you used to have to go to Germany to do this TV show. –  it was like German Top of the Pops. Whitney was there. We had to do several rehearsals because the shows were not live, and all of a sudden we’re waiting in the greenroom and a big stretch limo turns up outside. I mean, you’ve never seen a limo as long as this, it took up the whole street. My record was killing it at this point, I was starting to get the bodyguards and that lifestyle, but not a limo the size of a street. Who’s got a car that big? Six bodyguards walk out, and then Whitney. She sang I Wanna Dance with Somebody. She was beautiful, super thin. Really shy. And awkward. Not comfortable in her own skin. We decided we’d go and have dinner afterwards. I told her ‘I think you’re really great.’ At the dinner table, she was playing footsie under the table, I think she was really into me but I had just come from the church and I was like ‘what? I don’t get it.’ I’m from south London, we don’t do that.”

They had stuff in common, they both came from a church background, “. I was 18, and although I loved her to bits, I was freaking out. Our next encounter was a year or so later when I got invited to Wembley when she was doing a concert. When I met her backstage, I said ‘good to see you’ I thought ‘this woman is so beautiful’. Forget the pictures, in real life she was so mesmerising, and I’m not even gay.” At that time, she was having a relationship with one of her female managers, Robyn. She was the best. She was strict with her but took good care of her. And then Bobby (Brown) came along: “he and I were really good friends, he liked my voice but he fancied my sister. We had a great time and lots of laughs and then Bobby met Whitney. Let me tell you, Bobby was a really good person, but he was influenced by others who were  naughty. Do I think Bobby changed when he met Whitney? No. I think when Robyn was kicked out, Whitney went down. I don’t blame Bobby for Whitney, he just wasn’t strong enough to help her i think

The documentary shows the power of singing and redemption in a world where there was none. In a world where there are so many Black Lives Matter protests, it becomes all the more poignant. “We’ve got to remember, my thing is – and this is very hard to say as a black person – I love people, I love everybody, I don’t understand racism. I’ve even been told by my own people that I’m ‘not black enough’ because my children are mixed race. People even told Whitney she was ‘too white’ and that’s why she made the record Your Love is My Love, because she was trying to be black.” Whitney was famously controlled by Clive Davis and tamed into a pop princess. Mica’s record boss was Chris Blackwell at Island Records, who didn’t try to change her. “Bobby was fun, and an amazing performer, but he still had to go home to Whitney. And I don’t think women should ever have to apologise when they’re more successful than their man. He loved her, yes, but he wasn’t as big as her, and he was massive at one time. But he was with the queen so he wasn’t as massive. I feel the same thing happened with Amy Winehouse. I put her on  my live show at Jazz Café which accompanied my Radio Two show called Soul Solutions. She wasn’t known at the time.

‘Gospel and women performers are my two loves. And this is the book I was writing with Paul, about why female singers are so tortured. Amy was always apologising for being successful. “Paul and I were best friends for 18 years, we met when my brother Jason was shot three times and killed by gun-crime. It was a massive story. Everyone was asking for the exclusive. Paul called and said ‘just wanted to say Should Have Known Better is one of my favourite songs of all time.’ I had had hell with that song because no one wanted to release it because it was ‘too black ’, it was also Whitney’s favourite song. I was so impressed the journalist even knew it, it had been relegated to a b side – so I said yes to the exclusive. And we became best mates, every month we’d have lunches that would go on for five or six hours. We’d go on holiday with his children and wife Michaela who is adorable Two weeks before he died we had a lovely dinner, and for the first time ever we went out raving afterwards. We were both passionate about food so going to a club was unusual.  although he was also passionate about music – he had over 7,000 vinyl records. We went out and danced for two and a half hours, he died right after that. He was my best friend, I loved him. He’d take a bullet for you, in fact for lots of people. His dad had died in November 2019 and I don’t think he ever got over that. He was so good to so many people.”

She’s emotional, composes herself and talks about new projects. Her last Radio Two series was Mica Meets, where she interviewed people like Gladys Knight and Sister Sledge. And before that she took over from Trinny and Susanna presenting What Not to Wear. In an industry which is sexist and ageist, she’s coming into her time again – documentaries, acting and more.

Her cousin is boxer Chris Eubank: “he’s always said the British write you off when you get to a certain age, but if you’re passionate and you want to be relevant you still can.”

In Broad Daylight is out now.

The Gospel According to Mica  is out July 25 on BBC 4.

 

Michael Sheen (Mail Weekend, June 20, 2020)

There have been no lockdown haircuts for Michael Sheen. His hair is big. A mass of charcoal cherubic curls, paired with a bushy beard – not the kind you used to see people in Apple Stores sporting. It’s entirely unmanicured. He says he never changes his hair until he begins a part and then they instruct changes. This was his hair in the lockdown comedy drama Staged, in which he stars with his friend David Tennant, an exquisitely observed drama about insecure male actors rehearsing a play – Six Characters in Search of an Author, to be staged when lockdown is over. Sheen has pretty much been the star of lockdown anyway, his dazzling Chris Tarrant from the acclaimed and wonderful Quiz was the high point of the start of lockdown when we were all at our lowest. For a mercurial, sensitive Welshman, he is curiously upbeat. His new baby, Lyra, with his partner Anna Lundberg, a Swedish actress (around 25 years his junior) is complaining loudly in the background. I ask if she’s disturbed, he says she’s excited – how ‘glass full’ is that?

Sheen and I last met a few years ago in a restaurant in LA, his parents joined us – they were lovely. He was living there because he was working full-time on epic series like Masters of Sex and because his first family, daughter Lily with actress Kate Beckinsale lived there.

Theirs was a deep love affair but didn’t stand the tests of time, fame, or whatever it is that makes people who love each other not want to be with each other. He has had many long encounters with beautiful famous actresses such as Rachel McAdams and Sarah Silverman, but with Anna, he seems properly settled and unphased by lockdown: “it was always my plan to take time off and spend time over here with family, my parents are only 20 minutes away and the new series of Prodigal Son will be in New York but nobody’s sure when”. Does he fill with nostalgia when he sees Netflix + palm trees + Californian blue sky: “we don’t get to watch much TV at the moment, we’re busy with the baby, so we listen jealously when we hear other people talk about a boxset or anything else they’ve binged watched. I do miss it a bit, although the weather at the moment is Los Angeles-like in Wales and we spend a lot of time in the garden. I feel really fortunate that lockdown was in this period of time because I wasn’t going to be working anyway. I was just filming Prodigal Son in New York, we came back to Wales, my plan was to have a break – the plan was not to do any work so I didn’t have to pull out of anything and nothing was cancelled, and because of the baby it’s not massively different to how it would have been anyway. We would have been seeing my mum and dad more – which we haven’t done, but in the context of a really strange time for everyone, I am grateful for the small mercies, and it became weirdly busy”. He also appeared in a production of Dylan Thomas’ Under Milk Wood with key workers, doctors and teachers, where each one of them recited a few words about a sleeping Welsh fishing village (it appears online): “a lot of things came in and a lot of things that people ask me to do I can’t do because I’m working, but they knew I wasn’t working or going anywhere so it was harder to say no, and besides I want to help where I can”. ‘Help’ is in his nature, he’s run several charity football matches: ‘Football Stars Against Actors’ for Unicef. Last year, when he staged ‘The Homeless World Cup’ in Cardiff, some funding dropped out and he had to pay for everything himself. He ‘put it all on the line’ for the Homeless World Cup. He said at the time “we got into a bit of a state so I essentially put everything I had into this, you either commit to this stuff of you don’t. I have the opportunity to earn money, at this point I can work as much as I want. I figured, if I’m not prepared to give it all away, what am I doing?” When he was a pre-teen he was offered a place to train with the Arsenal junior team, his parents decided against it, it was one of those moments where his life could have taken a different fork. And even though he is passionate about soccer, he would have never have been an actor if he had been a footballer, and even at twelve he understood when his father explained how few people really make it big in the Premier League and how short their careers are anyway. His mother, Irene Sheen, was a secretary but was super poetic, and he feels a huge kinship to her. His father, Meryick, was a manager but also a full-time Jack Nicholson impersonator. He’d show up at premieres that Jack couldn’t make it to, and try not to speak in a welsh accent.

When Staged came up (for BBC One): “it was a chance to work with David that I thought would be quite fun. I loved working with David on Good Omens and we became good friends. We knew each other socially, although we hadn’t acted together again. In the period of Good Omens, which was a long time, it was just me and him together for a long period. And then even longer promoting it, going around the world. We both had babies at around the same time. David and Georgia had their little baby Birdy, although he’s got about a hundred other children, and we had Lyra, so we had been sharing baby stories.

On the show, they look like impenetrable close friends, but they are good actors so it’s hard to know, even though Sheen insists he’s playing a version of himself. He left it a couple of decades between children so “we’ve been sharing a lot of different experiences, aside from enjoying each other’s company. People talk about our chemistry as characters and it’s true, we do have chemistry and it’s very interesting to explore that. We are playing ourselves but they’re still characters really. David is straightforward when it comes to working, there’s no ego, no mess-around, he turns up, he’s brilliant. He makes it so easy”. And that’s exactly how Sheen is, no ego, no fuss, just brilliant work. And then he deflects from the compliment: “I think David makes me a better person and a better actor”. He doesn’t even mind, although I mind for him, that his Chris Tarrant was reviewed by some critics as an ‘impersonation’, he’s not an impersonator, he’s a wonderfully nuanced actor who is capable of taking the essence of the person, real or fictional, and showing what matters about them most: “it doesn’t matter if people discredit you, the show was so well received. No one ever imagined, when it came out, we’d be in this lockdown situation. It worked in our favour because people were looking forward to things to watch and this is what brought people together”. That, and Normal People: “like I said, we don’t have much time to watch things, but we are slowly making our way through that, and it’s beautiful”. Sheen famously played Blair three times in The QueenThe Deal and The Special Relationship. He was very good at that, after that he went on to play David Frost in Frost/Nixon on stage and screen versions. And football boss Brian Clough in The Damned United, but playing Blair three times made a close association in the public eye, and one horrific experience for me, after I had interviewed him the first time. This voice came on the phone saying it was Tony, and I thought it was Michael pretending to be Tony, but it was actually Tony. So that only led to an association of personal embarrassment. One reviewer referred to Michael Sheen as Martin Sheen, the veteran actor, so Michael’s reaction was to change his Twitter handle for some time. The name Michael was never meant to be his in the first place, his parents called him Christopher, but when he was in hospital, a nurse put the wrong baby tag on him: “due to some complications, I was separated from my mother for a few days and when my mum and dad came to pick me up and take me home, they said ‘we’ve come to pick up baby Christopher’ and they said ‘we don’t have a baby Christopher, we have a baby Michael’, so they named me Michael Christopher. I also did one of those family tree programs where they said that my ancestors had come over from Ireland and one of them had 20 children but only five of them had survived – all the boys called Michael had died, so I avoided the curse of Michael Sheen because my parents had named me Michael. So, by accident I snuck around the family curse”. At the moment, though, he seems more blessed than cursed, even making lockdown work for him. I wonder, could one really rehearse a play in lockdown so they could be performed? “you could up to a certain point, you could work on it. The first weeks of rehearsing anything is talking through stuff.”

Does he miss the theatre? “I do. I miss doing a play on stage in front of an audience. But when I wake up, doing a play, it’s the first thing that hits me – I’ve got to do a play tonight. It feels depressive and I feel anxious before the performance, even though it’s a couple of hours a day, it takes over your life and it’s hard to focus on anything else. It’s much more consuming than working on film and TV, although paradoxically you only spend a few hours doing it, it takes up more bandwidth. I love the feeling of acting on stage in front of an audience”. And the camaraderie of working with fellow actors? “yes, but you get that working on a film or TV show, especially if they’re long-running ones. When you’re in the theatre, you don’t spend much time with other actors until you’re actually on stage. When you’re filming you’re all sitting around between takes, so there’s much more a sense of the group during filming”. So working in an actual theatre with a new baby was never an easy equation: “yeah, it could be a lot worse. It’s not been as disruptive for us personally, but we’re very aware of how it affects people”. She’s quiet now, less disturbed and excited. On the whole is she a good baby? “she’s a baby, I don’t really divide them into good babies and bad babies, the whole experience is just wonderful. It’s all the fun of sleepless nights and nappies being changed. It’s wonderful to go through it again”. Is it surprisingly different from your first baby-daddy experience? “I don’t think so, when my first daughter was born, it was an extraordinary experience, life-changing. It does feel like one of the most profound experiences you can have. It changes everything. So I can’t say I was surprised but on another level you don’t know what to expect. What has changed since last time is car seats. These days they actually fit. I remember last time wrangling around with the seat belt, now you just have something that fits permanently in the car, it’s easy. Prams and stuff, easy. Technology has changed for the better, but the basics of sleepless nights and poo-y nappies are just as bad and difficult to deal with. But it’s amazing, the best experience ever.

Staged focuses on insecurities and quirks that come up with lockdown: “obviously it tests relationships because there are very few people that would spend this much time together constantly. I’m sure some thrive and some are shown crack. I think it’s important to be able to speak to one another and express yourself and what’s going on. So even not in lockdown conditions, relationships can be better if people share what’s going on. A massive generalisation is that men are not as good as expressing their feelings as women”. Paradoxically though, Sheen is good at expressing emotions. Possibly because he has a direct channel for those emotions in acting, but also because he’s fearless about emotions which is a rarity and makes him rare as an actor. “I’ve been lucky in another sense because my parents are only 20 minutes away. My sister and I take it in turns to do the weekly shop for them. I see them then, they stand in the doorway and I stand two metres away and drop off the food. But I know it’s difficult, particularly for my mum (who likes to hug everyone) and she had to have her birthday on lockdown. And even with the baby, although technology allows us to have contact, with FaceTimeZoom and Skype, the baby’s changing all the time and my mum and dad are really aware of that, and it’s frustrating that they can’t see her much even though we’re only down the road.

They were never comfortable using technology but a lot of people have had to get comfortable with that and step up. Although, saying that, there have been a lot of facetime calls where I’m faced looking at a wall. But the family have done a group-chat over Zoom, so they’ve done really well to do that, and I’m grateful that we’ve been able to stay in contact”. It seems like Sheen didn’t do some of the lockdown things that were everyone else’s insecurities: the lockdown haircut, the lockdown texting the ex, or have the lockdown anxiety that they were going to kill their partner if they heard them blink one more time. “I have seen a lot of dodgy haircuts going on. Friends of mine have said ‘I’ve let my kids cut my hair’ which is obviously taking your life in your hands, so I’ve avoided that”. He also seems to have avoided neurosis, over-self-examination and fears for the future. There will be another season of Prodigal Son, he doesn’t know when. And another season of There’s Something About Movies, for Sky TV, he doesn’t know when. Perhaps it’s the baby, perhaps it’s being home and close with his parents, he’s become extremely patient.

Robert De Niro (London Sunday Times Magazine, February 2, 2020)

Robert De Niro

Still as much of a celebrity magnet as it was when it first opened, Nobu, famed for its sushi, has spread from a single LA restaurant to a worldwide phenomenon, these days with bedrooms to extend the experience of fabulousness. This summer, a second Nobu Hotel will open in London, in Portman Square, to join its sister hotel in rather more edgy Shoreditch and two standalone Nobu restaurants, both in Mayfair. How has this American import, which brought the now ubiquitous “black cod with miso” dish to Britain in the late 1990s, managed to evade the vagaries of foodie fashion and become a solid success story? The answer probably lies in its celebrity connection — but one in the boardroom rather than the dining room.

When, not so long ago, I spend time with the Hollywood actor Robert De Niro — co-founder of the chain — I find him gentle, kind, empathic, funny. Initially one thinks “actor decides to be restaurateur and hotelier in twilight years because actor needs back-up as they’re not getting the roles”. But De Niro is getting the roles. His much lauded film The Irishman is up for 10 Oscars next weekend. He was also rather brilliant in Joker , with Joaquin Phoenix — another awards big contender. He’s happy to multitask as an actor and Nobu impresario. De Niro has a very distinctive look. It’s somewhere between angry, tired and curious. He’s wearing a very lived-in jacket, his shirt is crumpled. His new black suede trainers look at odds, his hair is grey but full and longish. When he stands up, you try to work out: is he tall? Officially 5ft 10in, somehow he transcends height. He’s a man who is passionate — his passions also seem to transcend size. He’s a man of few words, but his words are usually either impactful or funny. The eyes, which can twinkle very disarmingly, narrow when he speaks to you, so you’re not sure if he is scrutinising your soul or about to fall asleep. But he’s much more approachable than you imagine, friendly even.

How come someone of such impeccable Italian heritage likes Japanese food so much? De Niro laughs. “I’ve got Italian, German and English all in me.” His mother was of Dutch-French-German- English ancestry, his father Irish-Italian. The story of his side hustle as a restaurateur and hotelier began about 25 years ago, when De Niro was a regular at a small but cool Japanese restaurant in Los Angeles called Matsuhisa, whose chef and patron was Nobu Matsuhisa, running his first place in the city. The Japan-born chef had honed his speciality, black cod marinated in miso (see recipe, page 47), in Alaska. Before that he was in South America. De Niro has worked out that I have trouble saying the name of Nobu’s first restaurant, which is actually Nobu’s last name — Matsuhisa. He tries to teach it to me over and over again as if I am a baby learning to speak. When he’s satisfied, I tell him the first time I went to Matsuhisa, Kelly Osbourne took me. She said it was a family restaurant that she’d grown up in.

“Well, I was there one night with a British friend, Roland Joffé [director of The Mission], and I told Nobu, ‘If you ever want to open a restaurant in New York, let me know.’ And a few years later he said, ‘I’m ready.’” One taste of Nobu’s signature dish was all it took. “I had the cod and that told me right away, this guy is really special,” De Niro says. Is he good at making instant assessments of people? He nods.

“I like him. He’s low-key and I knew that there is no way this restaurant would not have worked in New York.” De Niro brought in his friend Meir Teper, a financier. I catch up with both of them, along with Matsuhisa, at the Nobu Hotel in Las Vegas. Teper, a former fashion impresario and film producer, is now in his seventies, but he’s still lithe and elegant from an early career as a dancer in his native Israel. I wonder, did he meet De Niro on a movie? Teper explains. “We were friends first. I worked with him on movies a couple of times, but I met Bob through another producer friend.”

Was it an instant feeling of a kindred spirit? “It was, actually. We talked, but not that much. Because he had a good feel about me. More than I had about him because he’s the big star. One day he called and said, ‘Do you want to come with me to Deauville film festival in France?’ I said sure. He was there to promote [the 1987 film] The Untouchables. Paramount got me a ticket. I met him in London and we hung out together. Then we flew to Deauville, and after that every time he went on a trip he called me. He felt comfortable travelling with me. We became friends and we started travelling together. If he was going out on the road for promo or location-scouting he liked me to join him. We like the same things. We like looking at things and we like hotels.” Together they could escape the crowds and the media. A comfortable hotel room and a comfortable friend was exactly what De Niro wanted.

“I remember one time we went to London,” says Teper. “We always would travel under different names, but somehow someone at British Airways told the press and when we landed the paparazzi were everywhere. We were in a limo with the paparazzi all following us. Bob says, ‘Don’t go to the hotel. Let’s go to this other hotel that has an entrance in the front and we’ll come out the back and get a black cab to our hotel,’ which was the Savoy. We lost the paparazzi — it was like a movie, but it was real life.” You can see why they get on. They’re both men of few words who, when they warm up, don’t shut up. They like talking about details: food and bed linen, places and cultures. They can go on for ever about such things and they can also be quiet with one another.

In what sounds like a movie title, De Niro, Teper and Nobu Matsuhisa are called The Stakeholders. Stakeholder is where it’s at, rather than CEO or controller; they’ve put in the money, the time, the skill. Teper says: “Bob brought me to Matsuhisa, saying, ‘I found a nice Japanese restaurant. We should have dinner there.’ It was a very small restaurant with 30 seats — and Nobu was talking to every table and cooking for them. We all became friends.” He liked De Niro’s idea to bring Nobu to New York. “The idea was to invest and hopefully get my money back,” Teper explains.

“I used to travel to New York a lot and I wanted to have a place to have food there as good as we have in Beverly Hills, and to meet friends.” Never underestimate that old Cheers bar factor. A place you can call your own. Where everybody knows your name. Or at least your sushi preference. Teper continues. “After New York, we were so successful people started saying, ‘Can we have Nobu London? Can we have Nobu Vegas?’ Nobu’s a chef, Robert De Niro’s an actor. I was the only business person in the group. I understood how to negotiate, how to make the deal.” Gradually Teper’s interests in film and fashion disappeared. “I’m so busy with Nobu and I put so much time into it, everything else has gone away.” De Niro takes pleasure in just observing a room. The image that stays with me is Teper and De Niro sitting in the rooftop penthouse suite of the Nobu Hotel in Vegas. It’s the hotel’s fifth birthday party. Caviar and Moët are being served; Nobu chefs in white coats are making sushi and grilling things while leggy girls serve champagne and lychee martinis.

None of the stakeholders even looks at them. Teper and De Niro watch everything as if it’s on a screen, as if they’re in a different movie of their own. This party is for all the casino high rollers. There is no VIP area, no silver cord, yet the stakeholders keep to themselves. De Niro looks content, approachable, but no one does approach him. How does he balance the Nobu empire with his acting career?

“I’m not doing what they do,” he says, referring to his business partners. “I’m here when they need me. We always ask each other for input. I’m front and centre when needed.” He doesn’t do the deals like Teper does, he is the metaphor for the brand. They need him to be still acting. “These days, we have meetings on set if it’s not a tough day. Sometimes I’m waiting around a lot, so we sit in my camper. Sometimes you need less distraction. It depends. Sometimes you need to get your mind off something. It’s a welcome distraction. ”De Niro and his chef, meanwhile, are very different, yet seem to relax each other, almost like a Morecambe and Wise Christmas show. “I cook from my heart,” Nobu says. “Why does everyone like their mother’s food? Because the mother cooks for the kids with heart. I don’t ever want to forget to cook with heart, with passion. It’s about making people happy. Success never makes people happy.” Was his mother a good cook? “Oh yes. She would always have ask what I wanted to eat tonight, tomorrow? Always with heart.” I wonder if this is the secret. I ask De Niro if his mother was a good cook? “Not great,” he replies.

If he was a Nobu dish, what would he be? “I might be the artichoke salad.”

I was rather hoping to be the artichoke salad myself. Soft and creamy on the inside, crispy on the out.

“OK,” he says without a fight. “I guess I’d be a big fish. The cod.”

”The black cod with the sweet misoon the side that you don’t discover straight away?”

“Yeah.”

Rupert Grint – Mail Weekend (Jan 2020)

Rupert Grint and Chrissy Iley
Rupert Grint and Chrissy Iley

I first met Rupert Grint over 5 years ago – the Harry Potter films were already over but a whole generation still felt they owned him. He was their friend, their brother, their personal wizard. As we sat having coffee in a tucked away street a dozen people in the course of an hour called out “Ron! Ron! Ron!” and asked for selfies. He didn’t seem irritated by this level of invasive fame, he just obliged. Today, it’s been nearly a decade since Harry Potter ended and he’s managed some personal wizardry – people still stop him every day, he is still one of the most famous people in the world and still responsible for revitalising Ginger. Curiously, he has managed to keep such a lot of his life private, for instance, he has been together with actress Georgia Groome (from Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging) since 2011, but nobody knew they were a couple until about a year ago.

He is next on screen on Apple TV in which is possibly his first fully fledged grown-up role. The show is addictive, creepy, twisty, turny; I was going to watch 1 episode but binged 5, I couldn’t believe it was so good. Shyamalan says that Rupert was pivotal. He’s not the lead role, he’s the main character’s brother, but he steals the screen in such a way that he makes it his own. In the show, as Julian, he wears his snazzy suit, one of them a blue tartan tweedy affair which is both ridiculous and charming – a bit like him. His sister is Lauren Ambrose, flame-haired actress from Six Feet Under. They actually look as if they could be related: “ever since I saw her in Six Feet Under, I always wanted to play her relation” – see, he manifested it.

Today  when we meet in his room in a smart London hotel he is wearing a thick black jacket and black roll-neck and a necklace with a few charms, one of which is a heart that says ‘happy birthday, Anne, 1967’: “I have no idea who she is but I like to think about who she might be. I got it at a vintage market in Philadelphia. I’m a bit of a collector”. Indeed, he’s got a rare elephant bird egg, a skeleton of an ostrich which stands in his dining room, and several ancient bones. Is Antiques Roadshow his guilty pleasure? “Not so guilty – not guilty at all, I love it. I love hearing the stories of the relationships people have with these objects. And I’m into… stuff. Fiona Bruce presents it and she’s really good, I don’t know if I could do it better but I’ve not got a bad knowledge and I can identify bits of ceramic so I wouldn’t mind being a presenter.”

He’s 31, as ginger as ever, and with naughty twinkling eyes. He doesn’t feel 31 (or particularly look it), but because of Potter, he has a weird relationship with age. Potter overtook his childhood so he has a strange relationship with age. When it ended, did he have an identity crisis? “Yes, I suppose so. And I wasn’t sure if I wanted to do anything like it again, or act again. I was quite keen on having my freedom back, I had my tonsils removed straight away”. Does he mean so he couldn’t talk and it was a celebration to have his voice removed? He replied “kind of, but I had massive tonsils, and I had to get them out. I felt like a man – it was good. You can’t speak for a few days and you shouldn’t eat ice cream, you should eat scratchy things.” Why? I thought the whole point of having your tonsils removed was so you could eat ice cream for a few days? “That’s completely wrong, you’ve got to encourage chewing and swallowing textured food. But I did have ice cream as well.” Ice cream has always been important to Rupert – he once wanted to be an ice cream man: “because I always loved the van, it was my first car and I learned to drive in it. It has pictures of 99s on it. Whenever I rode it out it was chaos with people wanting ice cream, but it was a great choice of transport. I still think it would be a nice job, but the ice cream men are very territorial – there’s a whole mafia, you get into trouble if you go onto someone else’s patch.” What’s your favourite ice cream? “I like ‘em all, my favourite’s a 99 and a Raspberry Ripple”. He makes me laugh a lot, his is cute and endearing but he’s also old-soul smart. In Servant his sister suffers the loss of her baby and replaces it with a Baby Reborn doll as part of grief therapy. The doll is made of silicone, hand-crafted, weighted and very realistic. Although his character Julian is brash, he’s the man you’d want in a crisis: “he’s always two steps ahead, and he’s always popping in for tequila. It felt very natural playing Lauren’s brother – I used to imagine we would be relatives in something.” Reborn dolls are real therapy dolls and used when women really want to conceive and they can’t or when they’ve suffered a cot-death. Rupert tells me “I have a Reborn doll, but it’s like a vampire. I’m not sure it’s quite the same thing, but the dolls are really realistic and when you hold them you can’t stop bouncing them.” Perhaps being Julian will finally make people realise he’s Rupert, not Ron, or even Ed Sheeran – who he’s always being mistaken for, including once by Leo Sayer at a car rally who kept asking him about his latest album: “I just played along, it was easier. Being Ron, though, it’s strange. It’s never quite died down. And now a whole new generation is finding Harry Potter. They have this kind of ownership of me – they see me and they think they know me. And, of course, Harry Potter still lives on because there’s a theatre play, and a ride at Universal Studios which I went on at the opening and it got stuck. It’s amazing what they’ve built: a Hogwarts castle, a train and King’s Cross, it takes you straight back. I am very proud to have been part of it, but it could be a bit claustrophobic, especially when we had finished the last one, nearly 10 years ago now. There wasn’t any real period of adjustment. Suddenly everything was over and it was overwhelming. It was the right time to finish – there are no more books anyway.”

Is he aware of the rumour that was circulated that there was going to be an original cast reforming on another Harry Potter? “I don’t think that would happen but I’d never say never.”

“I’ve got a whole new perspective on those years now. We were in this protected bubble but we didn’t really see it. We didn’t really feel that famous. I didn’t hate it but it had its own challenges. I did struggle, I think, because I had naturally merged into the character of Ron. I felt a very strong affiliation with him.” Does he feel that he merged into his character more than Daniel Radcliffe (Harry Potter) or Emma Watson (Hermione Granger)? He thinks long and hard: “I don’t know.” Maybe it’s because he’s the better actor. “I’ll take that… but I still feel him. I feel protective over him. When I went to see the play (Harry Potter and The Cursed Child) and someone else was playing me I didn’t feel right. But on another level it was really fun – great to see him reimagined.” Is he still in touch with Emma and Daniel, who were his closest companions for a decade? “It’s been a while since I’ve seen either of them… I see Tom Felton (Draco Malfoy). I see them as family but more like distant cousins – it’s great to reunite when we do, but we’re not with each other all the time. It was an intense period.”

Coming out of a role that he played for so long, it must have been difficult to choose projects or characters that were different enough. “It’s never been a conscious thing to remove myself from that world, but I wouldn’t jump at the opportunity to be a wizard again. I enjoy stuff that’s grounded in reality.” Although, Servant is grounded in the creepiest reality. And his Reborn doll doesn’t seem very realistic because “it’s a vampire doll with little fangs. You still want to look after it and handle it carefully. Reborn dolls are a real form of therapy, although I can’t say that I would recommend it.” Why did he acquire his? Was it therapeutic? “No, because people know I collect weird things”. The presence of the babies on set made him actually quite broody: “as well as the dolls, on set we had triplets. They were always around. I love kids, I really do want children one day. Servant taps into this primal fear we have about protecting our young, and that’s how the show twists that part of the brain.” At the moment, though, he is happy to be a Cat Dad to a pinky-white sphynx cat called Milk, “it’s a myth they are hairless, they do have hair, but it feels like suede. And he loves skin-on-skin contact. He’s white but he’s got a pink hue and a bit of red fur on his nose.” He did a campaign for Milk a few years ago, so he obviously feels very close to him and that they have a likeness. He shows me his picture – he looks like a new-born foetus (if that’s possible). Milk doesn’t like to wear outfits but has a special heated bed that he likes, “he’s got beautiful blue eyes as well – owners do look like their pets, don’t they?”

As well as having a confused relationship with his age, he has an even more confused relationship with money. He made several million, some reports say £28 million  from the Harry Potter franchise but has no idea how much money he has: “it rings a bell, yes, I couldn’t actually tell you. Money is something that happens in the background. Milk has got very expensive tastes but I haven’t had an issue with money from such a young age, it makes it weird. I think I’m thrifty, I like a bargain – but maybe that’s just because I’m getting older. What age do I feel? I couldn’t put a number on it. Younger than 30 and also forever.” Is it true that Julian is your first grown-up character? “I think you always put a bit of yourself in the character, but Julian is removed from everything that I am. He is hugely confident and not hugely likeable.” I find the lack of confidence alarming. He’s shy and blushes easily but he has every reason to be confident – he is very funny and smart, and has something special as an actor. He has managed to be grounded and private, even as one of the most famous faces on earth. “I think I have a very normal existence, it’s a malleable level of fame and I enjoy it. The Harry Potter films had a profound effect and deep meaning to people, especially of my generation – they get tattoos of it. It’s a real marker of their nostalgia, I’ve learned to embrace it.” Some drinks and some chips arrive, but he’s far too polite to eat them, or maybe he’s just not hungry. His brother now rally drives and his father used to: “my dad used to sell Formula One memorabilia on QVC. I’ve always liked cars, but I haven’t got the ‘car gene’ as intensely. As well as the ice cream van, I’ve got an electric car. We all go through different phases, and this year, I started beekeeping.” He keeps the bees in his garden in North London: “I let the bees have the honey, they’re just amazing things to watch – inspiring and so busy. They’ve all got jobs, there’s an undertaker bee who carries out the dead bees, and the Queen is massive and has a green dot which they paint her with. You’re born a Queen, it’s a fascinating society – the hierarchy of the hive. I’ve got a lot of bee paraphernalia, a bee suit and smokers.

Does he mean he wears a black and yellow stripe suit to tend them?

“No!! a protective bee suit!

“When you open the hive you have to smoke them because it relaxes them, otherwise they can get quite aggressive. It’s a primal thing, they think it’s a forest fire so they stay in the hive. I’ve never been stung. Bees really don’t care about you, they’ve got so much to do: filling the hive with pollen. This year there were mites that hurt the hive, so we’re building them back up and next year we will be able to take some honey.”

Next up, he will go back to Philadelphia for another series of Servant, where he will collect more antiquities and books: “I’ve mainly got David Attenborough books, he’s got an elephant bird egg as well, and I’m sure he likes bees. I would love to meet him, I think we would have a lot to talk about.” I wonder where Attenborough would stand on the Reborn doll.

Servant is on Apple TV new episodes every Friday.

Richard E Grant (London Sunday Times Magazine, December 8, 2019)

Richard E Grant on the cover of The London Sunday Times
I met Richard E Grant earlier this year at the Four Seasons Hotel, Los Angeles, peak Awards season. He was on “the ride of his life.” Nominated in every possible award ceremony for his performance as the rakish Jack in Can You Ever Forgive Me? opposite Melissa McCarthy’s literary forger Lee Israel. A crookster, with impeccable charm based on a real-life character who died of AIDS in the 90s, it was a standout performance, but what stood out more was the way he rode those awards.  A veteran of over a hundred movies. He made his 61st year a spellbinding second act. He reinvented. This was his most talked about role since he debuted as the debauched Withnail in Withnail and I in 1987. And it’s not like he didn’t have a career. He’s worked constantly in wonderful movies like LA Stories, Gosford Park and who can forget his hair as Michael Heseltine opposite Meryl Streep’s The Iron Lady. Jack put him on the map he’d always been on, but not everyone had noticed. 
     I’ve known Richard E for years. I’m always enthralled by his diaries which are luxuriantly observed and sparkle with sharp, diamond wit. He deals with the minutiae of life like no other. I also loved his autobiographical film about his unusual childhood in Swaziland, Wah Wah (2005).
     More importantly he was the only human who could touch my then cat Shiksa without blood being drawn. We bonded over our mutual obsession with Barbra Streisand.  To put it in perspective, he would ask me if he could listen to old interview tapes and this year, she got in touch with him via a Tweet that he posted around the time of his Oscar nomination. He tweeted a picture of a letter that he wrote her as a 14-year-old fan. ‘And look at you now’, she replied as if he were 21, not 61 but nonetheless, it made more than his day and he has since been invited into her inner circle.
     Has his life changed since the nominations? He’s working a lot, but he’s always worked a lot. He’s in the new Star Wars – The Rise of Skywalker but he’d already filmed that.  Now he gets the precious ‘Oscar nominated’ before his name which is a very elite and fancy club to be a member of, but for him the Oscars meant meeting Streisand at the Governors Ball which he attended with his daughter Olivia.
     “She grabbed Melissa McCarthy’s arm at the Governor’s Ball and said ‘That woman in the sparkly black beret is Barbra Streisand. And you know what this is going to mean to my father if he sees her.’ So, Melissa grabbed me and said, ‘You’re coming with me,’ and that was the first time that I had seen her since the Tweet.” And now he gets invited to be in the celebrity section when she played Hyde Park, where the other 65,000 who’d paid hundreds for a ticket, scrambled on the grass.
     “She sent me tickets to see her in Hyde Park and then she asked me if I was going to be in New York for Madison Square Gardens, so I said yes. I was filming in Philadelphia when I got an invitation to see a private screening at Donna Karan’s house in East Hampton where Barbra was the guest of honour. I thought how do I get to the Hamptons from Philadelphia? A bus? A train? A helicopter? I ended up in Ron Perlman’s helicopter and I was invited to stay in a guest cottage on his 90-acre estate. I literally ran from the restaurant I was having lunch with Sally Field in. The Hamptons is this surreal place. You already feel like you’re in a movie. The screening was outdoors. A big screen at the other end of the pool with big sofas and I got to sit next to James Brolin and Barbara Streisand and then I sat speaking to her face to face until 1am. I couldn’t believe it and I’ll never forget it as long as I breathe. Everything else pales in comparison…”
     The Awards ride started at Telluride Film festival in September 2018. “I kept meeting actors who said ‘you’ll be on the campaign trail for 5 months’ and I was shocked. I can’t not work for 5 months. I have to earn a living. I would say what, have you seen this in a crystal ball? And they would say ‘no, but that’s how it is.’ So much smoke gets blown up people’s fundament in this profession, you’re in one day and out the next, but it all just snowballed and suddenly everybody that I newly wanted to meet or had wanted to meet for a lifetime was in one room. The Governor’s ball – the Vanity Fair party. A second act – it’s more like planet movie star and you’re Cinderella about to turn into a pumpkin.”
    The pumpkin never happened. “Tom Hanks said to me it doesn’t matter whether you win or not because for evermore you will be Academy Award Nominee. That moniker goes with you for the rest of your life.” And of course, no one remembers who won but we all remember Richard E Grant’s hell of a ride.
     At the time, he’d already worked on Star Wars – The Rise of Skywalker but he wasn’t allowed to talk about it, not even to his family. Not even the name of his character which is Pryde, an evil General. And even now, weeks before the film’s release, he has not seen it. Did he enjoy the experience?
     “Star Wars is like a marmite factor. If I say to people, I’ve been doing it, sometimes they proudly tell you ‘I’ve never seen a Star Wars movie and I’m never going to see one’ and some people love it and are obsessive and have seen everything. I saw the first one when I was 20 in 1977.
     Two months before I started doing this, I got sent a scene to self-tape with top secret written across it. Your name is written across the pages so you can’t reproduce it and you have to delete it once you’ve learnt it and self-taped. I knew immediately it was generic. A 1940’s B Movie interrogation scene. I taped it, sent it off and didn’t think about it and then I got a call saying you’re still in the running and I had no memory of ever doing it but my agent said ‘the producer wants to meet you at Pinewood. They’re sending a car for you’ and that never happens. They took me to the Carrie Fisher building which was weird in itself as I knew Carrie. I met her back in 1990 when I was doing LA story (where he also formed a lifelong friendship with Steve Martin). I was ushered upstairs and passed on to various people and then I met JJ Abrams (writer/director) in his vast office which is like a Star Wars memorabilia museum. I’d met him once before when I was 24 and he’d just made Regarding Henry with Anette Bening and Harrison Ford about a man who has an accident and has to rehabilitate his whole life. What I remember about Abrams was he was a man who spoke incredibly fast who seemed so self-possessed and I’d written in my diaries that he said ‘I’ll work with you one day’ and almost 40 years had gone by since then.
     I walked into his office and Daisy Ridley was there. JJ Abrams speaks bullet speed like a Scorsese and he’s asking me if I’m going to do it or not and I said I haven’t read a script and he said ‘nobody gets a script’ and then he starts telling me ‘you’re going to play this guy’ but at such speed it was surreal and somehow he segued into ‘you’re a Streisand fan.’ Daisy Ridley had done a duet with Streisand for Streisand’s album (Movie Partners on Broadway – 2016) so suddenly we’re just talking about Streisand for an hour and a half. I don’t remember him telling me the name of the character or anything. He just gave me a big hug and said, ‘so you’re going to do it?’ and I said of course I’m going to do it whatever it is. And then I was told I couldn’t tell anybody anything. 
     They had a dinner for the cast where I was told ‘You’re playing Pryde and Daisy Ridley said, ‘It’s a good part.’ The secrecy continues when you start working. There are bodyguards and you have to hand over your mobile phone.  Apparently, you can read the script on an iPad that they give you, but you can’t photograph it or take notes and you’re just given the pages of the daily work.
    “They are printed on crimson paper so you can’t photograph them. You’re not allowed to take them away, so you’re handed them on a sealed plastic folder where it says in bold letters that if you do not return these at the end of the shooting day… You’re even given a cloak with a hood on it that you have to wear if you move from your trailer into the studio because various news organisations have got drones flying over the studio.
    When you walk onto the set there are various security people with Security written all over them. You’re allowed to use your phone for calls and texts but if you lift it as if to take a photograph, a hand will appear.”
     As a person who likes to diarise everything that happens to him, how did he take notes or pictures and aide memoires?
     “You couldn’t on this, but I don’t normally. I could sit and text or write. At that cast dinner, what struck me was not a single person took a photo of anybody else…. I can’t remember a dinner with actors or performers where everybody wasn’t instagramming everything. I’m now allowed to say that I’m an evil General. JJ Abrams described what I do as the normalcy of evil, so the most heinous things are completely normal to this person and that’s as much as I’m allowed to say. 
     JJ Abrams is someone whose brain works very fast and feels like you have to run and leapfrog to catch up with him. He’s always pushing the boundaries of what you do and he speaks to extras as if they leading actors which is a very disarming and delightful thing. But one thing I love about this movie… is that you walk into this set that is a huge spaceship that you have seen your whole life. They open those huge octagonal doors. In the movie they seem like hydraulic doors that have no sound. They just open as you walk towards them. I thought they must have some fancy system of how they work them, and I look around the corner and there’s a middle-aged English crew member standing with ropes and literally pulling the thing with weights. It was so endearing. Walking backwards and forwards down a corridor with troopers all helmeted up and these doors opening and closing. I felt like a kid again.”
    Earlier this year he said, “I’m a 61-year-old Awards virgin.” He’s now 62 and an Awards veteran. He’s pretty astonishing at playing characters of dubious sexual orientation and next up he plays a retired drag queen who becomes the mentor to sixteen-year-old Jamie. It’s based on a true story and hit West End show Everybody’s Talking About Jamie.
     “I sing and dance in vertiginous heels. It was the most frightening job that I’ve ever taken on because of the singing and dancing and also playing a drag artist. All in a proper Sheffield accent. But it’s a very good thing when you’re of my vintage to have that sort of voltage.”
    Both Withnail and Jack were louche and addicted to alcohol which is bizarre because Grant himself has an enzyme problem which means he can’t drink. His father was a demented alcoholic. Maybe that put him off also. 
     “Technically I should be an alcoholic and for years I thought it was a psychosomatic thing not being able to drink alcohol, but I was tested and they said the missing enzyme means I can’t digest alcohol.”
     Grant also doesn’t eat cheese or chocolate because he hates them. If he had to be a dish it would be Christmas pudding. He eats them quite a lot because he tells me they get drastically reduced in January and they keep a long time but mainly because they’re so “rich”. He luxuriates as he says the word “and you cut the sweetness with lemon sorbet”.
    He cooked dinner for Meryl Streep, crab linguine followed by pannetone bread and butter pudding. “She loves eating so it’s a pleasure to cook for her.”
    Did he not feel vulnerable cooking for Meryl? “Isn’t that the nature of talent?” 
     He manages a life without alcohol very well, but he says he’s not without addiction. His lifelong addiction has of course been Streisand.
    He fell out with his mother in his youth but had a reconciliation and she tells him that she’s proud of him after all these awards. “And that has been surprising and gratifying.”
     She asked him to forgive her and he did after a year or so of therapy. He gallantly goes off to get me a coffee even though coffee and tea are repulsive to him. “Hate the taste. The taste of it is pants. Likewise, chocolate, likewise cheese.”
    I tell him that’s maybe why his skin is so fresh and radiant after hours and hours of long-haul flights. He says it’s DNA.
     He took the character of Jack Hock from the essence of Chariots of Fire actor Ian Charleston who died of AIDS in 1990. “Ian had this amazing little boy lost quality and charm in tandem with a scabrous wit and enormous appetite for life. More than anybody I’ve met, and I thought he was the essence of what Jack Hock was.”
     He recently saw that, American actor Darren Chriss, who won the Emmy and the Globe for playing the leading role in The Assassination of Gianni Versace announced that he wasn’t going to play another gay character because he felt he was taking parts away from gay actors.  “And I’ve always had that concern. The Transgender movement and the Me Too movement means how can you justify heterosexual actors playing gay characters? We are in a historical moment. If you want someone to play a disabled role that should be a disabled actor.”
   I thought the easiest way to an Oscar was playing disabled. Just look at Daniel Day Lewis in My Left Foot and Eddie Redmayne in The Theory of Everything.
     “Yes, I know but I understand why and how it’s come about.”  It seems a long time since his friend Rupert Everett complained that he wished he’d never come out because now he only got gay best friend roles. These days there are so much more scope for the non-specifically gay actor. I n the way that Andrew Scott can get away with playing heterosexual very endearingly.
    “And what’s extraordinary about Timothy Chalemet is that he has such an androgynous quality. Of all the actors out there, he is the most gender fluid of them all.”
     Grant has never been gender fluid, but he’s quite often turned in his best, most nuanced performances when sexuality was never even involved in the part.
     Has he witnessed any of the horrors where women were abused or taken advantage of by male producers or actors?  “I haven’t been involved in one of those projects where there was misogyny at large. Logan (which starred Hugh Jackman and was an X Men spin off) was particularly blokey.  Guys with huge arms. Star Wars is not blokey but it’s not misogyny.” He also starred with Jude Law in Dom Hemingway, which has been loosely described a bromance movie.
        
I asked a transgender friend what they thought of Grant playing a drag queen and they didn’t hae a problem with that. He’s playing a drag queen,, not a transgender. And his role is as a drag queen mentor. It’s not like he’s got any gay sex scenes. 
 
    When he was growing up, he wore a big eyelash inspired by Clockwork Orange when he went to see the movie. His father was drunk and threatened to kill him. He shot him but missed.
    “He was so angry because I got back from a movie wearing make-up, but he was also infuriated that I’d emptied a crate of scotch down the sink. If I hadn’t done that, the Clockwork Orange eyelash worn on the lower lid would not have been a catalyst.”
    At his father’s funeral a priest jumped into his grave to raise him from the dead. “I put that in Wah Wah the movie but at preview screenings people said it was too extreme, so we cut it. He died 38 years ago at 53, of alcoholism and a devoted love of my mother. That was the tragedy of his life. He drank to numb the pain.”
     His mother left him for someone she fell in love with then married someone else and they have been together 40 plus years. His father Henrik was the head of education for the British government administration in the protection of Swaziland. Famous scene in Wah Wah is when Grant was a boy about 10. He was sitting in the back seat of the car and had to watch his mother have sex with his father’s best friend. This led to their divorce and his father’s alcoholism and a fractured relationship with his mother.
     From an early age Grant kept a diary for the same reason he’s kept a diary throughout all the Awards seasons. “You establish a reality and a way to process – which seems too fancy a word but to understand what’s going on.”
     Because of the deception and adultery of his childhood “secrets to me are kind of toxic. They cripple families. If you have secrets, you have to deal with an awful amount of defence. If you choose not to keep them, you have to evolve and be the stronger for it. It’s a contradiction. People think keeping a secret will make you stronger but it’s the opposite.”
    Grant has been married to voice coach Joan Washington since 1986. They live in Richmond and he seems particularly devoted to his daughter Olivia.
    He’s still friendly with Lena Dunham. He was in her cult series Girls.
    “Lena had seen me in Spiceworld The Movie which completely exonerated all the flak I got at the time for being in that movie. Olivia was 8 years old and a Spice Girls fan and that’s why I was in it, but all the grandees of my profession asked how could you be in Spice World? But the bonus of that is I got cast in Girls and I got tickets to Adele at the 02 because she knew me from Spiceworld. Adele and I share the same birthday but not the same bank balance.”
    He got to be in four episodes of Girls, one of which he was in rehab. So often in artistic rehab but in reality, never even a drink or a drug. Does he feel that everyone is less pigeonholed as a result of Me Too and as a result of diversity, or is that just a new box. Have people become less judgmental?
     “We’re always judging. My role model for inspiration when I was a teenager was Donald Sutherland. He had a very long face and didn’t look conventionally good looking.”
    I was recently at a Big Cat Sanctuary where one of the lions had a really long face and a high forehead. I took a picture of him and told Grant I would name the lion Richard because it looked like him. He was pleased.

Richard E Grant and Chrissy Iley
Richard E Grant and Chrissy Iley

Cameron Douglas (London Sunday Times Magazine, December, 2019)

I pretend not be shocked when I see the Uber driver taking me to Cameron Douglas’s house is wearing a surgical mask.  She drove me up the canyon to a quiet street, to a typical canyon house –  white stone, small front yard with a large dog.  I knew I had arrived at the right place because the tattooed torso of Cameron Douglas seemed to be rising from the roof.  It looked like something you might see from Dynamo the magician, he seemed to levitate. He was actually catching some pale winter sun on his terrace.

He has the face of his grandfather and the intense eyes. In his white wife beater, I even think he has the torso of Spartacus – more elegant than muscley.  He puts on a red plaid shirt for our interview. He makes me a good cup of coffee. The living room is covered in baby paraphernalia. We sit in what could be loosely described as a den – grey comfy armchairs, books, hardwood floors, the large dog, a Mastador, lies by the fireplace.

Douglas is warm and friendly and fidgets unconsciously. I wonder if this is nervousness, but the Douglas’s – Cameron, Michael and Kirk aren’t really nervous people. He’s easy company and easy on the eye. Before long we are laughing.  He didn’t see me in the Uber and thought that was me in the surgical mask. He was trying to work out if I was a very kind person with a cold that I didn’t want him to catch or I was trying to protect myself from Douglas dust.

He’s just written a memoir, Long Way Home. It’s quite the page turner. It has a great rhythm, pace, graphically drawn characters as he describes relationships that fall apart, the misguided tough love of his father, his drug dependency and drug dealing, misplaced Hollywood glamour, and his eight years in various prisons.  Prison soon lost its gangster rap allure.  He got into brutal fights, witnessed rape and savagery and for the first few years had the edge taken off with smuggled in Oxycontin and Zanex.  When this was discovered it led to many months in solitary which in turn led him to rethink his whole being.  To survive prison you had to be strong, if you got into fights you had to win them.  You needed respect.  His grandfather Kirk, on hearing that he had won fights said, ‘That’s my boy.’

I tell him he inherited his grandfather’s writing skills – Kirk Douglas has written many books but Rag n Bone Man, his first memoir is compulsive, a macho Jackie Collins.

“That’s a great compliment,” he says. He’s always been close to granddad Kirk. “I have breakfast with him every week. I take my daughter over there every weekend to spend time with him and his wife Anne. Grandfather, grandson and great granddaughter all have birthdays in the same week in December.  Kirk will be 103 (on December 9), Cameron will be 41 (December 13) and Lua Izzy will be 2 (December 17).

Was it cathartic for him to write this book? Did you have a burning to tell your story?

“That didn’t come in till later. Initially, oddly enough it was my father’s idea.  He was quite pushy about it. I had a hard time understanding that because my family had always been very private and I tried to follow suit, but once I started putting pen to paper, I tried to understand where my father was coming from. I came to a couple of conclusions. One, he wanted to give me the opportunity to look back over my life and have a better understanding of where things went wrong…”

Things went really wrong.

A Douglas firstborn to one of Hollywood’s First families, acting royalty and he managed to mess it up royally. He didn’t take himself seriously, he didn’t take his work as an actor or DJ seriously, just used the latter to hang out in nightclubs and score drugs. His father had lots of money and Cameron had a sense of entitlement and then his father would cut him off if he was behaving disappointingly, which is ultimately, he reasons, why he became a drug dealer. His father refused to pay for his apartment and he was on the streets – well, a hotel. With no college education but a sense of privilege, he was not going to pump gas.

He had experimented with drinks and drugs from the age of 13 and by 17 he was taking crystal meth and then graduated to liquid cocaine.  And finally, heroin, shooting up 5 or 6 times a day.

He doesn’t pull the pity card though. “I can’t go back and change the past. Obviously, I would do some things differently, but what I can do is take those experiences and turn them into something useful. I think it was a selfless act of love on the part of my mother and father and the rest of my family for giving me their blessing to write this book.”

Certainly, his parents come off as troubled human beings. At one point he says he was always in awe of his father but never close to him. His father’s liberal use of tough love, cutting him off and cutting him out, seemed to propel him into danger and loneliness.  His father hired heavies to try and kidnap him to take him to rehab.  Yet now he is learning to play golf so he can bond with him further.  His father hired lawyers that were out of their depths and he ended up getting an extra 3 years added to his sentence.  His father seemed lost on just how to deal with him.  There was always closeness followed by estrangement .Sometimes extremely harsh, sometimes loving He writes “My dynamic with dad is seething frustration on his part and wounded sensitivity on mine…. “ His father invited him to New York for Thanksgiving and he git high and was several hours late – Douglas Sr had his doorman say they had left already but h was upstairs with the children too furious to see his oldest son

“That’s where it got complex for him because on the one hand if you are kind, it makes you feel you are helping feed the addiction… it’s a no win situation.”

And he didn’t win. “Well, not in the short term but maybe in the long term.”

Not counting his stretches in juvenile hall, the highlight of which was a brief affair with a woman called Liz a few years his senior.  He was in prison for close to 8 years – 7 years and 9 months. He is still friends with many of the people he bonded with while he was there.

“I have really close friends that I speak to. Not often, but often enough to touch base.  I am loyal and the bonds that you form when you are in a situation like that – in prison – are very strong. You go through a lot together, you get to know individuals really well and you see them in all types of circumstances because you see them every day and I feel grateful for that.”

The big dog comes over, nuzzles him and lies back down again.

“A lot of guys, when they go to prison they get forgotten. Their families forget about them. I was blessed that my family never gave up on me and in the end that played a huge part in helping me make the evolution I made.”

He now lives clean – drug and alcohol free. His partner Viviane is a yoga teacher. They met in their wild days – she was a Brazilian model and party animal, she is now a yogi.  She reached out to him in prison.  By the time they started seeing each other they had both changed their lives around.

It seems strange that he became closer to his family when he was in prison and locked away from them than when he was living a drug addled, drug dealing life in New York and LA, with unsuitable friends that he remained loyal to. His uncle, Eric Douglas, to whom he was always being compared, was a lost soul who felt he could never live up to the achievements of his father Kirk and brother Michael. He tried acting and stand up comedy. I saw one of his shows at the Edinburgh Festival. All the jokes that worked were about Kirk and Michael and there were only half a dozen of us in the audience.

Turning into Uncle Eric was another hideous spectre that loomed. Michael Douglas though, seemed to go through many evaluations of his own life.  When his son was in prison he somehow found it easier to form a loving relationship.  In 2010 other inmates read the tabloids and told Cameron that they felt sorry about his dad’s stage 4 throat cancer.  It was very difficult for Cameron to see his father, this larger than life man, shrunken from cancer treatment, but nonetheless on a crusade to help his son.

“He was very supportive. He actually played a major part in shifting a particular law in prison. I lost my family visits for many years. I hadn’t seen my family for 2 years and I had 2 more years to go but my father received an award for playing Liberace and during his acceptance speech he said that the BOP (Bureau of Prisons) won’t allow me to see my son and it’s been almost 2 years. About a month after that I got called to my counsellors office and he suggested I make a formal request to the warden to get a visit with your mother and father. I did and it was granted. And about a month after that one of the wardens told me, ‘I want you to know that we’re implementing the new rule that says if an inmate is having his visits revoked for an extensive period and we feel like it’s undue, then we are going to give it back early. You are the first one. You are the role model.”

“My dad did that. I’m sure it’s benefitted a lot of families.”

I’m not sure if I see a tear in his eye or if it’s an extra sparkle. In his book he says that after going through the all the shenanigans – he was set up, fooled and caught as a drug dealer, first condemned to a shorter sentence then a longer one for not ratting on his drug dealing friends, he lost life as he knew it, and then his father had cancer. He couldn’t cry.

“I’m a very emotional person. Doesn’t take a lot to make me cry so that was alarming. A friend of mine in prison said ‘There’s no shame in crying,’ but I just couldn’t. just something inside of me. going back to acting has been very helpful with that. As I got closer to my release date, I started thinking what I wanted to do with my life. Acting is something that’s in my blood and I’d been doing it most of my life, even though not professionally. After I was released but still in a halfway house, I threw myself into a theatre company. Doing the work in those classes brought the emotion to the surface and it was very therapeutic.”

Was it like the acting classes they have in The Kominsky Method? (Award winning Netflix show that features his father Michael Douglas as a failed actor turned tutor who loves a good emotional workout with his pupils).

“Yes, it was similar to that. In fact, my acting teacher taught my father many years ago. I found it so helpful on a therapeutic level, getting in touch with these emotions that I’d stuffed down deep inside of me.  I had some time in juvenile hall but it’s a different ball game when you are in prison.”

Looking back it was easy to see ever since, as a teenager, when he was sent to a strict boarding school while his parents were divorcing, he was always on one of those unstoppable moving walkways.

“In juvenile hall I was well on my way to prison but I didn’t realize it.”

Why didn’t he stop acting out, shooting up?

“Probably I was scared.”

The catharsis would all be so neat if prison set him free and recreated a good relationship with his father but when he came out of prison and was in the halfway house his father rejected him again.  What was going on there?

“My father had gotten to a point in our relationship where he thought I wasn’t going to make it, so he started detaching.  My father is a very pragmatic man but he didn’t come to this point lightly.  For the majority of my life I had been carrying on so coming home from a long stint in a high security prison, I think he was a little circumspect about what results he was going to get and that’s understandable.  Catherine actually played a real role in motivating my father, at least initially, to open back up to me and then it has just been showing not telling.  Since I have come home I have been working my ass off (he is back acting and starts in an independent film in a couple of weeks) I have a fire and desire inside me that is enormous.  I have got a lot to make up for.”

And people to make up to?

“To myself.  If it turns out this whole prison experience and all the nonsense leading up to it was all for nothing I wouldn’t be able to live with myself.  I have to know in my heart that it was for a purpose.  I am on a quest of proving to myself that one day I look back and be truly grateful for having gone through it all.”

You feel for him in the book.  The less self pitying he is the more you root for him.  The turning point in the book is when he is making a movie in Ireland about mushrooms and had smuggled in enough drugs to last for a couple of weeks.  The guy who was looking after his pet rabbit was supposed to send him more.

“I never saw that cute little bunny rabbit again or that friend either.”

Back to the story.  He has this idea he can find drugs in Germany.  He is suffering horrendous detoxing symptoms and misses his flight back  He gets sacked from the movie and has to make the desperate trans-Atlantic flight back vomiting, shaking and all the other cold turkey symptoms.  You feel the desperation of all that.

“It was an extremely low point of my life, so low that I turned to what got me into prison.  I had the opportunity to pivot and change course but I didn’t.  I had already gone through most of the detoxing but I wasn’t willing to let go of my addiction.”

That is when he came back to Los Angeles and his father had decided not to pay the lease on his rental.  He gave conditions that he had to separate from the woman he was with.  He didn’t like conditions.

“Again, it was a time where I had an opportunity to make some changes but I didn’t.”

In the book you really feel for Erin, she looks after him, she is more than an assistant less than a girlfriend at the start anyway.  They almost get married so she can visit him in jail.  What happened to her?

He flinches slightly, “She is doing well, she lives on the East Coast.”

Is she in a relationship?

“I don’t know.  We were in touch because she inherited my dogs, one passed away while I was in prison, the other a few days ago so we spoke about that.”

Junior was a black labrador and they were devoted to one another.  He had his sperm frozen. He was interested in breeding him, even creating a new breed  because he was so loving and so smart. He wanted him to mate with a Boerboel  to create the first Boerbador

“One thing I prided myself on, I was always able to take good care and raise good dogs.  My father still has one of Junior’s children, Maxi, who is 15.”

When he was in prison and Erin was sole parent to Junior, Junior got cancer.  He blames Erin for not taking him to the vet before he was riddled with tumors. He was able to talk to him on the phone as he was dying.  It was then that his relationship with Erin didn’t continue in the same way.

Junior died and he wasn’t there for him, his grandmother died and they were close, he was unable to be there or even attend the funeral. He was able to phone her but she could no longer talk – he listened to her breathe.

He takes a breath, “Right now I am really focusing on a couple of screenplays that I am writing and the indie film called The Runner.  I play a jaded detective who will get the job done by any means necessary.  I am looking forward to digging in, getting in front of the camera and hoping it leads to more.  I am a work horse.  My life is very simple by design these days.   It revolves around my family and building a career for myself; nice and simple.  Life is good.”

Is he planning on more children?

“I am not opposed to it.”

I wonder how his relationship with Viviane is different.  There are many relationships or flings with women in his book, all of them, in different ways, were mother figures to him.

“That’s true, in different ways.  Viviane is a great mother and she does take great care of me.  She is a yogi and she really believes in that life and practices it.  It’s positive and powerful, I love being immersed in that philosophy, that energy.  She is a great influence on me.”

Does he do yoga?

“She is a yoga instructor so I take advantage of that.  She gives me private  lessons.”

Like Sting and Trudie?

“Possibly,” he chuckles.

Do they go tantric?

“I would say I am at the basic stages of yoga.  I had started my evolution in prison.  I had been on a rock hard routine, I think routines are helpful.  I don’t work out as much as I did in prison.  It eats a lot of your time and it takes your focus off where you are, it was integral to my life there.  Now I am not so worried about being as strong as possible, it’s just about being in good shape and having a clear mind.”

I notice something that looks like feathers inked on his chest, is it a phoenix?

“It’s a butterfly.”

The tattoos are mostly from prison.  He also has one of his grandfather’s and father’s faces. Two that he didn’t get in prison on his wrists are in the process of being removed.

“They don’t have any meaning for me anymore.  When I see butterflies I think of freedom.”

Another thing that represents freedom to him is going out with his granddad for breakfast.

“He still walks and is sharp and has a great sense of humour.  They still travel up to Santa Barbara one weekend a month.”

They really do look alike.

“That’s nice of you to say.  I hear that more these days that I look more like him than my father.”

Is that a beautiful thing or a cross to bear?

“It’s a cross I am grateful to bear.”

His grandfather has been married to Anne for 65 years.  She doesn’t like to give her age.  She told me she always lied about it but certain records have her age as 100.  She is certainly strong, she stayed with him while he had various affairs saying as long as he was honest and she was the number one he could do what he wanted.

“I don’t know much about those particulars, but whatever they decided between them seems to work.  They love each other very much.”

He changes the subject.

“I want to get involved in prison reform in this country as somebody who has had first hand experience, it is meant to punish and crush you and years of that kind of treatment doesn’t turn out a great individual.  The government owes it to the American people to turn out men and women who are reformed.”

On the one hand, he couldn’t wait to get out of prison and on the other he knew it would be very hard.

“As my release date started to get closer guys would say, ‘It will be a difficult adjustment. You have been here a while and the time you have done has been a little more extreme.’ And I would say, ‘You guys are crazy, this is where I don’t belong. I am going to slide back into life like I never missed a day.’ But in reality it was a very difficult adjustment.”

He came out to find there were many new brands of breakfast cereal and everyone had smart phones.

“I will never forget the first time I stepped onto a subway after coming home from prison.  Everyone on the platform was staring at something, it seemed like I was in the Twilight Zone.  I do have one now and I love the amazing new cereals which I eat at night.  I spent 29 years of my life trying to figure out who I was, where I fit in, how I like to express myself and then 8 years trying to figure out who I was in that environment, how I could express myself and making some changes.  I came out and tried to find out who I was again, where I fit in and how I wanted to express myself.”

He was released from prison in August 2016.  He had a female lawyer with benefits, Meg Salib,  wrote a memoir which his hasn’t read, about their sexual relationship.  He writes that the forbidden seemed to turn her on, she even liked to have phone sex when she knew all the calls were being recorded.  He doesn’t seem to pursue women; they pursue him  Maybe it’s in his genes.

Towards the end of his sentence Viviane Thibes visited him in prison and their relationship seemed to move fast when he got out.  Before long she was pregnant.  Was that because he felt an urgency to make an imprint on the planet?

“Maybe subconsciously.  Initially when coming home I wanted to do everything right away because I had lost so much time.  We were together fully while I was in prison, she was there waiting for me with my mother, my brothers and sisters and we have been together ever since.  I think it was difficult for her.  I am trying to please everyone and yet the person who was closest to you often gets what everybody else doesn’t get.  To be perfectly honest it was a difficult time but we are both survivors and now, life is really starting to come together.”

He says he is finally starting to become friends with his father, and have the kind of relationship he always wanted.  Has his father finished his pragmatic detachment?

“I think so, it just took some time which is understandable.  We enjoy each others company.”

And on cue, Michael texts him.  They are going to grab a bite to eat.

“I am not particularly religious but I like that saying, ‘Let go, let God.’ It means you make your best effort and let it go and see where it lands.  I don’t have to walk on eggshells with him anymore, I have nothing to hide.  I have made some serious mistakes but I have paid for them.  Now it’s just about proving to myself what kind of life I can put together.”

He and his mother, Diandra, enjoyed a complicated relationship. For a while growing up he thought of himself as the man of the house, for that reason he had to love her and protect and he also hated her for that.

“It was an interesting dynamic.  I love my mother a lot and I felt very protective of her.  There are things that she has done that I don’t necessarily agree with.”

His mother was certainly beautiful – he writes that she cultivated drama with men

Diandra Luker (Douglas) had twin boys through a surrogate with hedge fund manager Zach Hampton Bacon III, Hawk and Hudson and she later adopted a girl, Imara.  All of them visited their brother prison even though often the prisons were over 600 miles away, they made the prison pilgrimage.  In her younger life I am not sure she comes over so well.  Always chasing a man, and with a taste for exotic pets like a Savannah cat and a monkey and quite often making uninformed decisions with terrible consequences. How did his mother feel about the book?

“Everybody took their ego out of the equation with the understanding that perhaps it could have a greater effect than if I worried about how they looked here and there.  I don’t think I paint anybody except myself in a bad light.”

One person that comes off very well is Catherine Zeta-Jones.

“Catherine and I have always gotten along fantastically.  We get along as friends but she has been very inclusive with me, with her children and was a major motivating factor in getting my father to open up to me.”

Does he think she helped with the thought love, making it more about love and less about tough?

“Maybe.  I see Carys and Dylan fairly often.  Dylan is at Brown and he was just in a performance and was fantastic.  They both wrote to me and came to see me in prison and my mother brought her kids to visit me as well. (Diandra had twin boys with the help of a surrogate and later adopted a daughter.)”

These days he doesn’t mind being compared to Uncle Eric.

“I would like to think I am like him, he had amazing qualities, a huge heart, and was talented as a comedian.  But he was tormented, always beating up on himself.  A lot of comedians have that dark sensibility.  He is at peace now and he had a struggle with the family and that was probably what I experienced with the family.”

So many demons to live up to and not live up to.  Could he be as famous and talented as his father and grandfather and could he be as less troubled as Eric?

“I’ve never really seen it that way.”

Famous parents are a bit like communism.  It seems like a great idea but it can never work.

“That’s not true.  Carys and Dylan are amazing kids, my father and Catherine have done an amazing job.”

Do you think his father had some kind of epiphany and made a conscious effort to do things differently? Or the chemistry with Catherine was different?

“A bit of everything.  Wisdom comes with age and experience.  As he got a little older his life was different so he was able to do things differently. And what is most important that he and I have a good time together now.  We like to watch sports together on TV most of the time, but we do go to games.  He loves golf, I don’t, but I am starting to learn in an effort to find things to do with my father.  It’s nice to find a sport you can play through your whole life and he gives me a lot of guidance with acting.  The whole process; auditions, introductions, everything.  He is very supportive which is the best part.”

He exchanges a knowing look with the Mastador, they know about loyalty, they know about support.

 

Elisabeth Moss (London Sunday Times Magazine, September 1, 2019)

Elisabeth Moss and Chrissy Iley
Elisabeth Moss and Chrissy Iley

I’m waiting for Elisabeth Moss in the bar of the Four Seasons hotel Beverley Hills. I’ve actually waited a long time to meet her and suddenly I wonder is she the person I hope she will be? The intelligent, sensitive, feminist who wove her way all the epic television series -her character Peggy in Mad Men starts off as a secretary and ends up a boss, through to Handmaid’s Tale, the Margaret Attwood vision of a dystopian future where women are slaves and wombs for hire. And she is the subversive insider.

The series hits all of the feminist marks. Browbeaten women will overcome, so on trend that Kylie Kardashian threw a Handmaid’s Tale themed party for her friend where all the women wore the red capes and white bonnets.

Before Handmaid’s, Moss was in the other great American series, The West Wing. There’s got to be something right about a woman who chooses what are largely considered the top 3 series of television’s golden age.

She has won the Emmy, the Globe and the Critics Choice Award for The Handmaid’s Tale, the SAG Award for Mad Men, the Globe and Critics Choice for Top of the Lake and the Producers Guild of America award for the Handmaid’s Tale.

When she plays Offred in Handmaid’s she is mesmerising. She fills the screen with an expression and inhabits the character. Her acting is considered and intelligent. She makes something unbelievable totally believable. Even when she is not saying anything onscreen, she is emotionally porous. You feel it all with her.

I’m at a corner table and Moss arrives –  a white T shirt, cut off denim shorts, a reversible bomber jacket with palm tree motif. She says she couldn’t decide what to wear as she’s in vacay mode. Her hair is blonder and thicker than you’d expect and her eyes have some crazy powerful inner sparkle.

We talk about how it’s not easy to find one outfit for hanging out by the pool, doing interviews and going to a fitting for an awards ceremony all in one day (It was the MTV Award for Handmaid’s Tale, which she won). Then she alights on my cat diary. I’d been sitting transferring events from my hardbacked diary into my phone. She picks it up, exploring each hand painted cat. It turns out she’s a cat woman. Or maybe THE cat woman. When she shows me her ginger girls Lucy, bright red, named after Lucille Ball and Ethel, pale blonde ginger, we coo and then she shows me the picture that would break the internet. Ethel wearing a Handmaid’s tale outfit, the red cape, the bonnet, designed by the Handmaid’s costumer designer Anne Crabtree. This revelation puts me in a kind of trance of admiration and ecstasy. How can I get one for my Lola?

This works on so many levels. A cat with claws being forced into the ultimate submissive outfit. Feisty and volatile, wearing a bonnet.  The paradox speaks to us all. And with this I realise Moss is everything I hope she’d be.

“Obviously I wouldn’t be a cat lady if I didn’t have pictures. My cat sitter just sent me a couple of videos.” We look at the pale ginger little tiny faced girl and super confident red ginger Lucy. “They’re my babies. I love them.”

She’s just coming up in The Kitchen – set in 70’s New York in Hell’s Kitchen when 3 mob husbands go to jail, their 3 wives take over.  She co-stars with Melissa McCarthy and Tiffany Haddish and it’s written and directed by Andrea Berloff, the Straight Outta Compton writer. It’s thrilling with a killer soundtrack. Moss is a person who chooses her projects cleverly.

Her character Clare has the most interesting arc. She starts off as the woman who always gets beaten up and later channels that into becoming a killer. Once again, there’s that theme of victim to self-empowerment that we all love to watch.

“I’ve never played an assassin or a hit woman, so it was definitely new and interesting. I thought it was a very compelling storyline. The idea of this woman who was so abused and such a “victim” and so interesting to try to understand her instinct of taking her own life back in an extreme way and thinking I’m actually going to own this.”

She had movie assassin training by actor Domhall Gleason with whom her character falls in love. “This isn’t a crazy character arc of all of a sudden she’s a hit woman. Even when she’s abused, she’s not meek. Maybe because of the violence she’s received, she can accept acting violent towards someone else.  Of course, she’s had a lot of emotional pain and we learn that she lost a baby when she was abused.”

Her characters are always losing babies or giving them up – Peggy, June/Offred, Robin in Top of the Lake and now Clare.

“Aren’t they? It’s a theme and so weird. Since I was 19 when one of the first films I did, the Virgin, a tiny independent film in which I play a woman who is raped while she’s unconscious, gets pregnant and thinks it’s the second coming. And Peggy in Mad Men of course gave her baby away. June lost two of them. It’s really weird. I don’t know what it is.”

Once could say there’s no such thing as coincidence. Is she really saying I keep losing these movie babies because I have to have a real one?

“No, I don’t think so. I think it’s more that I seem to be drawn to a character that has conflict and it’s the ultimate conflict for a woman. You bond with your child, it presents great conflict and drama, the idea of losing that child. I don’t think it’s a conscious thing but it’s a theme I’ve been aware of for a while. I always try my hardest to keep hold of those babies.” She shakes her head.

She’s ordered Greek yoghurt and honey. It looks good. She invites me to taste it even though I’m wearing bright red gooey lipstick which will make the yoghurt pink. She doesn’t care.

Does she have a really close bond with her mother? “Yes, pretty much so. Maybe it’s manifesting that. We are very close and not in a ‘best friends’ kind of way. You know how some people say I’m best friends with my mom. No, that’s not us. She’s still my mom and I’m her daughter. We’re very, very close and she’s been incredible.

If I ever have a baby though, I’m going to hold onto that thing for dear f***ing life. I’ll have it chained to me. It’ll be a 50 year old kid and I’ll be ‘no, you’re staying with me.’”

Don’t you think the child might rebel? “Probably but I don’t care. I know what happens when you let them out of your sight.”

Did her mother ever let her out of her sight? “Yes, she was great. I moved to New York when I was 19 which now as I’m 36 seems so young, but at 19 you don’t think you’re young at all. I look back and think my God, she let me go to New York at 19. I suppose I was always considered a mature person. You sometimes need somebody to believe in you and not doubt you. A lot of people don’t have that kind of support.”

She started her acting career at seventeen on the West Wing where she played Zoe (President Bartlett’s/Martin Sheen’s daughter). I’ve never met a person who didn’t love The West Wing. Or Mad Men. Or Handmaid’s Tale. How did she pick these compelling women in these pioneering series?

“My guiding principal for picking anything is the writing, whether it’s a film, television or play it’s always the writing. If it’s not well written there’s nothing you can do, no matter how good the director is or the actor is. So that’s always been the biggest guiding principle and this coincided with what is now called the golden age of television. No one can plan something. I was seventeen, I got cast in the West Wing. That and The Sopranos were one of the shows that started the golden age. And then I got Mad Men.”

It’s hard to imagine that former age where it was all about the movies or all about the stage and television actors were dismissed. Now anyone can do anything but mostly it’s the TV actors who rule.

“I did a play the Heidi Chronicles, written by Wendy Wasserstein in the eighties and there’s a line in the play that comes from a television actor. It goes Meryl Streep would never do television.  And one of the biggest posters on Sunset Boulevard is for Meryl in Big Little Lies, along with some of the other biggest movie stars (Kidman, Kravitz, Witherspoon). So that’s the end of that. The line that used to exist between film and television. I’ve lived through it. It was a gradual fading but there’s no line anymore. It’s done. And that’s a wonderful thing because now there’s so many great opportunities in all fields.”

Does she feel that woman are more powerful in the industry than they were 10/20/30 years ago? In the years of the kitchen where they turned from wives to mob leaders.

“Absolutely, but that’s not to say they are equal yet. I was reading some numbers on Instagram on the percentage of women who are behind the camera and it’s still really low but it’s not equal yet. But it’s a hundred times better.”

As well as acting the lead role in Handmaid’s, she also produces the show, something she takes very seriously –  it’s all-encompassing. Checking casts, checking scripts, checking edits. It’s a role which doesn’t stop when the series does because there’s pre and post production. She’s also involved in the hiring process.

“There are women directors but they need to be hired. When we start looking at directors for Handmaid’s tale which we do at the beginning of each season, we have this incredible grid that’s sent to us. It’s mostly women because we try to hire mostly female directors. There are so many out there that are talented and we don’t have space for them all. It’s the same with cinematographers. They are out there. I think there’s an awakening and a realisation of the inequality and a necessity rising in people for people to fix that which is good.”

Big Little Lies and Handmaids have been pioneers in this respect.

“We have a 50% female hire this year. Over 50% of female directors. We have a male DP and a female DP.”

At this point, a tall tanned blonde arrives and hugs her. It turns out she’s a rep for Dior and she’s going to Paris with her mother for a Dior couture show. “What a dream come true to take my mother to the Dior couture show in Paris. That’s definitely like a wow, I never thought I’d get to do that.”

Her black canvas bag is this season’s Dior. “They gave me the bag. When I go to shops it’s much less expensive places. I’m a huge Chicago Cubs fan, 4th generation. I was looking at Cubs outfits for cats the other day.”

She grew up in Los Angeles.  Her mother Linda is a harmonica player, maybe even THE harmonica player who has played with blues superstars like BB King. “She’s really good. She started when she was 15 in Chicago.”

Her father Ron manages musicians. She has one brother. As a child she wanted to be a dancer. As a young teen, she went to New York to study ballet at the School of American Ballet. She home schooled and graduated aged 16. Always wise for her years, she realised that by now her dancing career would be over. As it stands an actress and producer she is one of the queens of the golden age of television.

Her parents are both Scientologists. I’m not sure how serious she is about that religion. She drinks Moscow Mules and Rose wine, both of which are frowned upon by Scientology.

Her role in Handmaid’s Tale has often been described as being part of a scary cult and she’s often asked the questions of how this relates to being part of the scary cult of Scientology and her Scientology beliefs.   She thinks it directly relates. “Religious freedom and tolerance and understanding the truth and equal rights for every race, religion and creed are extremely important to me.”

She has a way of saying things simply that are profound and so to the point they feel powerful and heartfelt.”

Her upbringing wasn’t in any way starry or privileged or deprived or oppressed, yet her roles have spoken more about feminism than any current pundit.

“I think there’s something about my generation where feminism woke back up. When I was a teenager and in my early twenties there was no concept that something like Roe vs Wade could be reversed. I didn’t even know you could do that. I didn’t even know they could take that away. So, there’s something about the work that I do and gravitate towards that’s important to me and important to my generation and it’s coincided into this perfect storm.”

We foray into worldwide abortion rights being reduced, how women have gained a little power in one direction and then it’s grabbed away. She nods. “It’s weird, right.”

I wonder how much of The Kitchen is based on reality. “It’s based on a comic book, but I don’t know how much the comic book was based on reality. I know there was an Irish Mob in Hell’s Kitchen and an Italian Mob and they were both extremely violent. But the three women, I don’t think so. For me this story wasn’t just about three women who become best friends and everything ends happily ever after. They’re on top of the world of crime. They had conflicts. Women don’t always get along. It doesn’t end happily for everyone. They become more powerful but there are challenges that come with power. They are three very different women from completely different backgrounds, linked only because their partners are in the mob and led by a necessity to make money and take care of their children. That doesn’t mean everything’s going to be perfect and it doesn’t mean there won’t be a reckoning.”

Although her character Clare is tinged with tragedy, she is the one that gets the hot guy who understands her – Domhall Gleason.

“He’s a fantastic actor who I have admired for a long time. We got the most incredible cast of supporting actors (including Margo Martindale (Sneaky Pete) and superstar rapper turned actor Common).

Being a feminist does not mean that all women love women. It means there’s conflict and competition. That’s why All About Eve is one of the most enduring movies of all time. It was made into a movie in 1950 and it starred Bette Davis, then in her forties. A woman in a lead role over forty is very rare today today.

Moss corrects, “I don’t know. We’ve got Meryl, Diane Keaton, Ellen Burstyn. All About Eve was great writing, great performance.  We don’t remember all the shitty movies they made at that time.”

Does she think more interesting female roles are written now or is it just her who happens to get them all?

“I do think they are being written. I think the industry has realised that women go and see things and we are getting more and more opportunities to put women at the forefront. We are a huge audience and we want to see ourselves represented.”

That’s why it works to have three women stars of The Kitchen. We can find ourselves in one of them for sure. What does she watch?

“I watch everything. I’m always looking for new things. I just watched Fleabag and Phoebe Waller Bridge is genius. She’s literally the second coming. I’ve also enjoyed After Life with Ricky Gervais, The Office was one of my favourite shows. Fleabag’s probably the most significant one.”

She lives in New York – Upper East Side. Came back to LA briefly to film Mad Men. As well as losing babies in every role she does, she seems to drink whisky.”

“I think it’s easy to recognise whisky as alcohol in TV and film. A Moscow Mule is less obvious.” We wonder if she should order Moscow Mules now, but she decides that it might make her fall asleep during her fitting. She’s a little bit on East Coast jetlag.

“I used to live in the East Village for about 13 years. Then I moved because I got a little bit older and I thought it’s too noisy and there are too many bars. I need to go uptown with children and dogs.”

Did she think she wanted children and dogs? “No.” At this time she did get married and unmarried to Saturday Night Live actor/comedian Fred Armison. They met in October 2008, married in October 2009 and in September 2010 filed for divorce.

Did it feel that it all happened in five minutes?

“Probably, but it does seem a long time ago.” Her answers are small but heartfelt. There’s no defensiveness. There’s no weird atmosphere. I’d read that she was so busy acting and producing, she didn’t have any time for dating and then she was dating but deciding not to name the person.

“Well that’s true but I now think who cares? His name is John. We’ve been together for over a year and he’s by the pool right now.  In a way you want to preserve your privacy but in another way I don’t care. I love him, I’m playing it by ear, he’s lovely and I’m happy.” And they have two ginger fur daughters together.  Does he at least have red hair?

“No, that would be amazing. But their actual daddy is a street cat in Brooklyn.”

There was a tabloid frenzy linking Moss to Tom Cruise. According to OK Magazine US edition, he wants to marry her and have babies.

“Not as far as I know. It would be awful for me and my boyfriend. I’m sure he’s perfectly nice but I’ve never met him.”

I wonder if the Tom Cruise rumour came about because they’re both Scientologists? “I have literally never met him.”

I’m glad.

So many women of all ages love her, in part because she’s been a vulnerable power taker, a transformer. Somehow that doesn’t fit with becoming a Tom Cruise girlfriend.

“I always try to make my characters end up being heroines and representing feminism. I always try and make them real, whether it’s representing a woman in the workplace or a mother. I never think that’s why I identify with them. I think they’re just like you and I – not special, not perfect. We are not birds that are caged and cannot fly. Nobody is 100% good all of the time. We don’t have special powers. We’re women and we’re human. But real women who are not perfect can find their strength, whether that’s getting out of a bad relationship, telling your boss you want a raise or marching on the capital in a red costume.”

In a way, the red capes are part of a new wave or superhero costumes. “Yes. When I put that on, I feel proud. It represents something important to me. I feel there’s a responsibility in that costume. It’s red. It represents blood, it represents fertility and it can also represent adultery. It’s evocative. There’s a good reason why Margaret Attwood made the Handmaid’s dress red. We feel something when we see that colour.”

She worries that her face is shining so she touches up with Charlotte Tilbury powder “the best,” and a slash of super red lip colour.

Attwood has written a new book so there will be another Handmaid series. “I hope so. I hope I’m involved. There’s a gap between the current Handmaid and the new book which means we can finish our story and do whatever we want with it and it won’t have an effect on the book that’s been written.”

At the end of series 2 there was a decision where June/Offred could escape but she went back to fight from the inside.  “There was no way she was gonna leave her daughter there and she has to be on the inside.”

Does she watch on a weekly basis? “As a producer I want to air one a week. As a viewer I love bingeing.” Is this her foray into producing? “No, I produced a film called Queen of Earth with Alex Ross Perry. Producing Handmaid’s is a big job. We’re going over who we’re hiring for season 4 and I’ve got 20 hours of cuts I need to make on episode 11, 12 and 13. It’s a round the year job because I’ve got to be in pre and post production.”

Working and juggling so much may mean that her red cape does indeed have super-powers. “I love working, I love my job, I love what I do. I don’t consider it a job. It’s my vocation. I feel very grateful that I have the opportunity to do it. Not a lot of people get the opportunity to do what they love and make a living.

Up next, she’s in a remake of the horror film The Invisible Man. “It’s the lead but it’s not what you think. It’s a story of female empowerment, not an invisible woman but a woman going from victimised position to a powerful one. You can spend years on television doing that (like Peggy). I’m born and bred in television and I love the longform exploration. I don’t know if the tighter turnaround is easier or more difficult. It’s just you know exactly where you’re going to end up and it’s nice to be able to plot that – whole arc from beginning to end. In a series you don’t know that.”

We look again at Ethel in her outfit looking vulnerable and fierce. “I’m interested in exploring vulnerability and the duality in characters. Most people have both.”

She says this looking vulnerable and fierce and that’s exactly why so many people relate to Moss.

HER SMELL is out in the UK on Sept 9.and The Kitchen is out Sept 20

 

k.d. Lang (London Sunday Times Magazine, June 16, 2019)

Chrissy Iley and k.d. Lang
It’s hard to believe that in the 90s k.d. Lang was the world’s most famous lesbian. Back then a butch woman popstar was such a contradiction and such a revelation. Of course, the world has moved on to a very trans and gender fluid place and lesbian storylines in movies and television passed from acceptability to old hat.
     Back then Lang was a trailblazer for others who would come out later. Back then Ellen de Generes was closeted but unthreatening and Melissa Etheridge was just another country singer. 
     Lang was always a militant and a pioneer but then and now it’s about her voice. Erotic, soaring, soothing, the voice that Tony Bennett, her long-time collaborator said, “When she sings I can see angels.”
     Madonna described her as Elvis born again as a woman. The 1993 album Ingenue with its hits Constant Craving, Miss Chatelaine and Save Me was a landmark album. It went multi-platinum, won a Grammy and made her a star.  She catapulted into our consciousness by the Herb Ritts Vanity Fair cover image. Cindy Crawford in a camisole mock shaving Lang in shirt sleeves and pinstripe. It was provocative and brilliant and still remembered. It helped Ingenue become classic. Her writing partner Ben Mink said it was always supposed to be timeless in the vein of Gershwin or Weil.
     Last year, a re-mastered version of the album was re-released and this year there will be an Ingenue Redux tour in the UK.
   Lang now lives in Portland and when I arrive at the airport, I ask a woman selling vegan lipstick if she has heard of Lang’s street and how far away it is. She says rapturously “It’s a street where the buildings are beautiful because they are so strong and romantic.” Of course it is and it’s only half an hour away. 
   k.d. is abbreviated from Kathryn Dawn. I can never imagine that she could have been a Kathryn or a Dawn. She’s known she was gay since she was 5 years old.
     She comes to let me into her building. She’s tall and wearing a mandarin collared navy shirt and trousers, sort of Buddhist pyjamas. Her loft space has wide oak shiny floors and smells of a particular incense that comes from Tibet, which she says is letting the deities know we’re here.
     The space is high ceilinged and large. I sit in a 1960’s style wooden recliner while she does a photo shoot on the roof. She makes me strong, fluffy coffee. Behind me is a space reserved for her Buddhist practice, in front a large oak table with a 1960s typewriter. To the side a piano. In the centre, cosy couches and in the other corner her bedroom space with a neatly made bed and a  compelling framed picture by Joel Peter Whitkins of a beautiful woman with a beautiful penis between her legs. But more of that later.
    Her hair, now flecked with grey remains in a punkish crop. She still cuts it herself.  She noticed that I am rapt by the picture.
     “It was a gift from Joel Peter Whitkins to Herb Ritts. I would always talk about it with Herb and say I have to have it and then unfortunately I did end up with it because after Herb’s passing, I bought it from his foundation.” The picture was created long before there was photo shop and long before today’s current trans trend.
    Lang was already friends with Ritts when the famous shaving picture was unleashed on the world. One picture that really changed everything.
     “It did. It was a powerful image. It was just after Ingenue came out and it really helped it gain momentum. The common denominator for that was Herb. We were all kind of hanging out at the time. We all had a great deal of trust in Herb and his ability to capture in a provocative yet classy, elegant way. It’s something I’m really proud of.”
    She doesn’t write many songs these days. She finds it difficult, although there was an album last year with singers Laura Veirs and Neko Case. It was a somewhat torturous experience because they were all used to driving their own music. None of them had ever “shared the steering wheel before.”
     She is happier now reinterpreting the songs of Ingenue and looks forward to touring the UK. She’s already done the Ingenue tour in America and Canada.
     “Touring has completely changed for me. I need to have a very legitimate and all-encompassing reason to go on stage these days (She’s gone full circle from flirting with fame, in the eye of the storm to introspection and quasi anonymity).
     “Ingenue Redux anniversary tour IS a good reason. I love that record. I loved that moment in my life that really pivoted everything for me and the UK has always been important, sort of where I started.”
     Certainly, it was where women for the first time threw their knickers at a woman onstage. “They’re good at throwing knickers, yes. The knicker throwing has waned considerably these days but maybe that’s a good thing.”
    There’s a quietness to her and a thoughtfulness.  She’s still flirting but flirting like an introvert.    
     “I like to flirt with everybody, boys, men, moms. I think it’s an integral complex part of what human beings are. It’s a kind of acknowledgment, a baseline acknowledgment of desire and being human. 
 
    How did she convert from extrovert to introvert?
     “A combination of things – age (she’s 57), my Buddhist practice and for someone who’s had the fame experience it’s easy not to love the limelight any more – but I do love to sing. I don’t think I have the same confidence as thinking of myself as an authority on anything to write. I don’t really feel like writing about relationships anymore or love. I feel like I’m interested in saying something on a much deeper level, but I don’t feel that I’m an authority on a much deeper level.”
   Everyone wants to know about love. “Yeah…that’s why we’re alive.”
    When she sings about love, people feel it whether they are gay, straight or trans. There’s knickers to be thrown at her yet.
     As we talk her legs are curled under her on the couch. Her bare feet that are strangely elegant and strong. She has long, piano players fingers. She is tall and square shouldered but she has lost weight from the last time I saw her a few years ago, although still heavier than her girl Elvis days of her twenties.
     “I definitely don’t see myself as a sex object, but I do know the allure of the singer.”
   Maybe she never felt comfortable as a sex object. “I think I was very cocky about it but it’s not my desire to use that vehicle anymore. I’m interested in connecting emotionally and spiritually with people. My priorities have shifted.”
    Is that because she’s in a stable relationship with Canadian Heather Edwards? (She doesn’t confirm her partners identity, but the Daily Mail and Page 6 did.) Edwards ex-husband is Canadian oil billionaire Murray Edwards.  
     Is that why she doesn’t want to flirt with the audience the same way? “There’s an aspect of that but I think it’s just not who I am now.”
   She likes birds and there are several bird ornaments and pictures.  She stops talking every so often and closes her eyes to hear the birds sing. She misses the birds in Los Angeles. She moved to Portland in 2012.
     “And then I fell in love with a Canadian so I’m also in Calgary where I’m basically just 3 hours from my mom, so it’s like returning home.”
     Her mother is 96 and in a wheelchair but she is “strong and funny and my relationship with her is so enriching. For years I was on the road thinking I should cook more, I should hang out with my mom more.”
   And now she actually does both. She came out to her mother in her teens when her mother questioned why she was so miserable. It was because her girlfriend got a boyfriend.  At the same time, she told her mom that three of her four children were gay.
          “It was kind of cruel to also out my brother and sister but that’s where it was at that moment. I actually knew I was gay when I was five because I had a crush on the swimming instructor. I am over developed and under developed at the same time.”
     Did she ever let the swimming instructor know? “No, I hope not! But she was hot and I was aware of who I was at a very early age for sure.”
    She grew up in a very small town, Consort Alberta – population 600. Everybody knew everybody.
“I think my dad might have had some gay tendencies as well.”
     They were close but he left and ran off with another woman when Lang was about 12. “In England they tend to over focus on my relationship with my father saying that his leaving is why I was gay.”  
     But Lang was already fully formed gay.  She has always been in tune with her sexuality. Scorpio’s are like that.  I wonder, though, how her relationship with femininity has changed. It’s certainly been a long time since anyone has seen her in a dress.
     “I think my relationship with femininity has been exactly the same all the time. What I don’t think has been clear is my relationship with society’s view of what femininity is. To me it’s an approach, an emotional, spiritual approach to living. It’s not necessarily the exterior of what gender looks like. As you know, we are full on basking in gender fluidity and non-binary stuff right now. I feel very happy to be a woman, but I approach it differently from the norm.”
   Does gender fluid mean that some days one feels masculine and some feminine? And non-binary one feels that you don’t want to be defined by either.
   “I don’t know. It’s moving so quickly things change day to day.”
   I talk her about 14-year old girls all wanting to look gender fluid. It’s almost a fashion thing.
  “I understand it but I don’t understand it intellectually.”
   Where Lang has always liked to flirt with the idea of looking mannish, that doesn’t mean she’s ever wanted to be a man. In the 90s she broke boundaries as the first lesbian pop star, now that in itself seems old fashioned. It’s all about the trans and the gender fluid and the androgynous. She corrects, “Androgynous is so antiquated at this point.”
     Androgynous was David Bowie. If anything, Lang looks more feminine now. She no longer wears the heavy workman boots on stage. She sings barefoot.
     “I felt they were a little heavy and they portray an aggressive thing. I like to sing from the heart, so it helps me to feel grounded and natural to sing barefoot. And I have the most stability when I’m barefoot.”
   Onstage she wears suits similar to those worn on the original tour but updated. A lot of her clothes including a cowgirl outfit with lots of fringe (featured on the cover of Absolute Torch and Twang in 1989) are at the National Music Centre in Calgary, Canada. They sit with the effects of other famous Canadians Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen.
    She did a version of Cohen’s Hallelujah. Did he like it?
     “I don’t know. We didn’t talk about that.  We talked about Buddhism and finances as we both experienced a similar challenge with our business managers.”
     Cohen’s money was embezzled by his business manager and then he let go of everything anyway and became a Buddhist monk. Lang had to sell her house in LA because of a similar situation and downsize. 
     “Both my dogs passed away, my Buddhist teacher passed away so there was not too much reason to stay there. I had run out of money because it had been stolen. I didn’t want to downsize in LA.”
    Had she already broken up with her girlfriend Jamie Price? “No. I thought we were in a good place, but I wanted to move out of LA and she didn’t. that was all part of letting life in LA go. We are still good friends.”
    Is she good at being friends with her exes? “It depends if it’s a good relationship. I don’t necessarily believe in monogamy and I don’t believe in staying with someone for a long time. I believe in relationships and the fluidity of that is not constrained by social norms. It couldn’t stay the way it was. It shifted. Everything shifted and I needed to move on and we just made that decision”
     Was she seeing anyone else in Portland? “Nope.
      Is touring hard on relationships? “I hardly tour anymore. I’m not retiring, but I don’t have any plans for more music at this point.”
   Around the time of Ingenue, Madonna did not dismiss rumours that she and Lang were in a relationship and Lang didn’t dismiss it either. “We shared a publicist.” And she decided to put out those rumours so they could both sell records? “I don’t know the entire story. Maybe. Because I was kind of dating one of Madonna’s close friends, so we were in a circle. We hung out. The lesbian chic thing was something that both Madonna and I benefited from, but I didn’t know it was implied that we were actually doing it. But Madonna and I never did.”
    It’s easy to feel sad for first generation girl rock stars. They became stars as much for their looks as their music. It has has taken truck loads of botox, filler and stress  for these women to master a version of that look and still feel relevant in their fifties and sixties. Even those women who did have a great voice like Kate Bush and Annie Lennox don’t sing anymore. Lang never in any way traded on her allure to the opposite sex – she stayed in the game.
     “I knew at an early age that the physical promise wasn’t permanent. I studied men and how men’s portraits and men’s physicality increased as they got older. There’s a type of respect that you feel to men who get older. I tried to study this and understand it. Why in society it’s like that. Why in biology it is. I don’t have the answers, but I was certainly aware of it and I wanted to take the interest in my physicality away from people and put it squarely on an internal impact that my music might have.”
     Older men can stay good looking – they’re called silver foxes, whereas older women are dismissed for not being foxy anymore.
     “That’s the way we’ve constructed our society and both genders are to blame for that.”
     We wonder if men’s skin looks better because they never wear make-up. Lang’s skin is fine lined but soft and youthful with a natural pink blush.  She’s never worn make up. Maybe that’s the key to it. 
     There is a sheet of paper in the typewriter. “I do write on it sometimes. I like the graphic, but it feels like manual labour.”
    Is that how she sees writing now? Manual labour? “Yes.”
    She typed the lyrics of Constant Craving on fax paper and she still has that paper. Only a few minutes rifling around in a draw and she shows it to me. She’s so organised that she knows where everything is.
    “That’s just because I got rid of a lot of stuff when I downsized.”
     The print on the paper has faded into shadows, yet the lines are still there. These days she’s writing “very very very small amounts”.
     What will she do? “I will look after my mom, hang with my partner and my partners son and I will live my life. And I’ll cook things.”
     Maybe she’ll open a restaurant or a coffee shop. She made extremely good coffee. “Nope, sorry. I make a coffee because we have a purpose. You wanted fluffy and strong and you got fluffy and strong.”
 
k.d. lang’s Ingénue Redux tour comes to the UK in July
k.d. Lang and Chrissy Iley

Judy Kramer (London Sunday Times Magazine, March 31, 2019)

Judy Kramer is the big eyed, pretty blonde in the corner of the restaurant already waiting for me. She manages to look unassuming in a bright purple ostrich feather jacket. She is the super producer creator of Mamma Mia the stage show and the movies. She has been described as “the greatest impressario of the 21stcentury.” In the year to the end of last March, Kramer, Benny Anderson and Bjorn Ulvaeus of Abba shared dividends of £1.3 million. 
     She is unexpectedly accessible. Girly even, with chats of costume departments advising her to rub pencil on zips so they don’t stick. And then we talk about bras and horses. Not what you’d expect from the woman called “the greatest impresario of the 21st century.” Mamma Mia has been seen by 60 million people worldwide in 50 productions in 16 languages and has grossed over 2 billion dollars at the box office. It has achieved the status as fifth longest running musical in West End history and then there were the two wonderful Mamma Mia movies – the first one repositioning Meryl Streep as a musical comedy star.
     On April 6th 2019 it will be the 20th Anniversary of Mamma Mia.
     Kramer, who’s now 61, risked everything to make the musical happen. She worked as Tim Rice’s assistant on the musical Chess Premiere in 1986 when she met Ulvaeus and Andersson and spent many years trying to convince them their song lyrics had all the drama, the loss, the love, the tragedy and the triumph of a hit musical. She saw it. No one else did. Pretty steely.
     Doesn’t she think she should be called an Impressaria? “I see what you mean but in this day and age an actress is an actor. Perhaps I should start signing things Judy Kramer, Impressaria. There’s something very Victorian about it.”
    Did she have a master plan for making the two Swedish people with beards into increased legendary status? “There was no actual master plan, although, there was a plan to get a show on, to help the craft of writers, make people come to it and hope that it runs a while so you can pay your investors.” She has in fact produced 50 productions of Mamma Mia. It went global, it grossed 2 billion and then spawned 2 big studio movies.
     “I can analyse it by saying it was organic and had a certain amount of serendipity.”
     The stage show alone really has grossed 2 billion? She shrugs. “That’s the kind of figure that’s used when you’re putting comparables into market research.”
     There is no comparable. She knows that? “Well the 2 billion is shared and that’s the gross. But the movies have taken another billion. The first one took over 6 million at the box office and the second one 400 million.”
     It was only released in July 2018 and the DVD in November 2018 on so the figures should now be higher.
    “People always said it will never play Broadway, there will never be a film but it ran on Broadway for 12 years. Not a master plan. It became its own little industry. Well, a big industry.”
     And Kramer became not just a producer but a CEO, or as I like to sing to the tune of Super Trooper, a super producer. Does she remember the defining moment where she met Ulvaes and Andersson?
     “I met them in the early 80s when I was working on Chess. I guess I’ve known them half my life. I met them in 1982. They had stopped being Abba and I was working for Tim Rice as his production assistant. One of my first jobs was to collect Bjorn from the airport. I was booking orchestras and working for all three of them and that’s when I fell in love with the songs. But they’d moved away from Abba. They were doing something else. I’d worked on several musicals (Cats, Rocky Horror, My Fair Lady), all quite traditional. And there’s the thing with musicals. We often get the story right but not the music and the music right but not the story.
     “After Chess finished, I stayed in touch with Benny and Bjorn, mainly Bjorn because he moved to England and was living in Henley. Somehow, I or his wife Lena had persuaded him to buy a horse so I went to see the horse and him quite often. I’d drive to Henley, ride the horse and stay with the family. It was always in the background. The lyrics would be the source material. The idea was to tell a story using those songs as if it was an original musical. As if it was a Rogers and Hammerstein.”
     She shared her vision. The particular song Winner Takes It All she imagined it at the helm of the musical. The anchor. “On Broadway they call it “the 11 o’clock number”. I call it the Don’t Cry For Me Argentina moment because every musical has the big kind of end ballad that the actor or actress sings and I always felt that that song had the power. I love the lyrics and I’ve always felt that Abba songs have a female consciousness running throughout. Bjorn had written those lyrics for Agneta and Frida and they were very much a look inside a woman’s head. Winner Takes it All was the one I’d always wanted to sing to a boyfriend or to myself. It has the high emotional drama, the rollercoaster. It’s a big romantic split so I used to listen to it over and over because it ends up making me feel good. It hits you.”
    And that’s what an Abba song does. It makes you feel triumphant over bitterness. It gives you riches out of desperation. All those opposite emotions in a few minutes.
    “And that’s what I thought. Like an opera. I could hear how it would translate to musical theatre, to the stage. Somebody giving it their all, taking a big breath and going out with that song. And, of course, Meryl does that in the movie.”
     Mamma Mia reached another level once Meryl Streep signed on to the movie. “When her character sings that song to Piers Brosnan before her daughter’s wedding he said the hairs on the back of his neck went up. Of course, they were on a clifftop in Greece.  Meryl was always our first choice.”
     Was it hard to get her involved? “No, and that surprised Phyllida Lloyd who directed the stage show and the first movie. Early on we decided we weren’t going to be casting 35-year olds (to play a mother of a young woman). This character is a real woman with history and substance. I had seen Meryl in New York doing Mother Courage and I saw something in her portraying this woman with a tough life. She had a kind of a fight so I went to Meryl’s agent slightly under the radar because at the time the studio had to approve casting and they were “shouldn’t we go for the younger generation…?”” And just like that without any proclamations of feminism, without any complaints of older women don’t get cast in lead roles, just like that it was done. And Meryl’s career changed forever. Without Mamma Mia, there’d be no musical Meryl, no little number in this year’s Mary Poppins Returns, there’d be no Meryl in Sondheim’s Into the Woods. It added a whole new dimension to Streep’s already over accomplished career. (Streep had sung at the end of Postcards From The Edge in 1990, but before Mamma Mia she was not known as a singer and now no one can stop her.) And without Streep, there may not have been the numbers at the box office and a movie franchise that’s already in talks about a third movie.
     When the first Mamma Mia was made ten years ago, it was exactly that time where you would so often see a male lead in his fifties and wonder how could his wife be 25 and the mother of teenagers? 
     “Meryl had seen the show and she immediately said ‘yes I’m interested.’ When Meryl said yes we had T shirts made that said We Were There Before Meryl.”
     It was a female triumvurant. A female producer, director, writer.
     “It was unusual at the time although I think it’s no longer so unusual.” (Actually, it is. In the recently announced Golden Globes, everyone in the Best Director category is male.)
    “It’s about roles for strong women in two generations. That’s the genius of the story. Great roles for women.”
     Catherine Johnson wrote it and Phyllida Lloyd directed it. They were all in it from the beginning.
     “When the three of us got together in the 90s we were the original architects. Then we went to Meryl and Meryl liked the fact that we had not produced a hundred movies but we knew the essence of Mamma Mia and the architecture. And that was part of growing the legacy of these 3 women, creating the roles for women and we also became great friends.”
     However, they weren’t involved in the second movie Mamma Mia Here We Go Again, which was written by Ol Parker with Richard Curtis as advisor. It was also directed by Ol Parker. 
     “You had to think outside the box for a second movie and we’d all moved into different areas of our lives. A bit like a family where you’re all completely in each other’s pockets for years as we were, then you grow apart for different things, different relationships. There was a time where we’d open a show anywhere in the world and see each other at the parties. I talked to both of them of course about doing another film and they were up for the ideas being thrown around but it never worked which is a shame because it would have been great to keep the family together so to speak.”
     She says this with just a hint of nostalgia. “The lead singer found another band. I phoned Richard Curtis. It needed someone who could distance themselves and actually not be caught up in the past. In a way, everything does feedback very much to the original characters but I don’t think anyone would have been brave enough to kill off Meryl if they were on the inside track.”
    In Mamma Mia Here We Go Again it weaves from past to present. Streep’s character has died so only appears in the past sequences and the showstopper is Streep’s mother being played by Cher. It remains a feminist film. The head of the board of Universal Pictures is Donna Langley. “Another great woman who was part of the first film and is now the chairman of Universal. Rare that a woman runs a studio. We remain friends.”
    We order food, Swedish herrings in deference to Abba. It was 10 years between the first and second film. Fans on social media are demanding a third movie now. There’s plenty of Abba songs to be rediscovered but as of yet it’s not been signed off.
     “Even Piers said, “we can’t leave it another 10 years.” Although there is something about the 10 years that makes it like a good wine, matured and Cher is a very good actress, a very powerful one and she came on board especially.”
     Quite a coup. “Ah. Cher was – to have two of the biggest legends that are only a few years apart in age to play mother and daughter…. I think Meryl found it hilarious and so did Cher so that was a good start. And Cher had always liked Mamma Mia. I heard she went to the theatre on Broadway.”
    Perhaps she wanted to play the Streep part first time round? “I think she thought she could be that role and she is that role. She is the woman who’s done it on her own and has all those ingredients. She is the ultimate rock chick but that could so easily have had a different path.”
     “I had approached Cher for the first film in 2006 before we cast Christine Baranski. Phyllida and I flew to Malibu to meet Cher to talk about her playing Tanya.  At the time, she was a little sad not to have Cher but agrees she was much better to play Ruby, Streep’s mother. “It wasn’t the right time for her then. She said to me when we were filming “Things worked out didn’t they?” She loves playing Ruby and she loves singing Fernando and she got to choose Andy Garcia.”
     Really? She cast her own love interest? “We had a list and she definitely had approval and was very pleased with him. We’ve never had a problem with casting really. Pierce, all you had to say to him was Abba, Greek island and Meryl Streep and he was in and Andy Garcia heard duet and Cher. It’s empowering, Cher as the grandmother and gets Andy Garcia.
     “Cher’s look in the movie is more fairy godmother than grandmother. The platinum wig, the sequins, the make-up were all her decisions. it took her character to a whole other level.  I always wanted Cher. Ol Parker wrote it with her in mind. We had to have her, we had to raise the bar and we were delving into the back story of Donna Sheridan, who had to have a mother somewhere. She had done everything the opposite to her mother. She brought her daughter up on an island giving her safety and security whereas her own mother was probably slightly wayward. She would definitely have been at Studio 54 in the white dress suit with sparkling champagne. Cher’s great concern was that she didn’t want to be seen as a bad mother. No one says her character is bad, just not very hands on.”
     Now Kramer and Cher have become good friends with. I wonder if the purple ostrich jacket might even have been inspired by Cher?
     “Great friendships have always been formed on the back of this movie. In the film world, you make friends but you may not see them all the time. When everyone comes back it was like a big wedding weekend. I’ve become firm friends with Christine Baranski.
     When Cher first arrived on set, I think she felt nervous. She hadn’t done a film for a while but she tells the story about Ron Meyer who was her agent and now works at Universal and I’d called him and said any chance we can get Cher playing Meryl’s mother and I wondered how he pitched that to her. She said “he called and said, ‘Mamma Mia 2, you’re doing it’ and hung up”. So, she turned up and felt straight away the Mamma Mia factor. She came in when were shooting at Shepperton in the studio. It was a big party brewing and it was also the week we had Meryl. You know how Cher’s feisty. Well she’s fragile as well. Not in a physical way. I can relate to that because people always think I’m not shy because I do what I do. But I’m actually permanently going into rooms full of people and feeling shy.”
    Kramer lives in London, has horses in Warwickshire and an apartment in New York but will visit Cher in California. Cher was so inspired by her Mamma Mia experience she did an album Dancing Queen and gives Kramer a thank you. Kramer shrugs it off. “She just got inspired.” Still, it was Kramer who did the inspiring.
     We finish our herrings. Kramer is open yet discreet and that’s very charming. She’s soft and easy company, yet a risk taker. Later that night I’m at a showbizzy party where I meet a man who helmed Polydor Records, Abba’s record company in the 80s and 90s. He knew Kramer. He told me she risked everything to make Mamma Mia – her home and everything in it and it took her years.  He tells me at the time she was involved with Olympic medallist Alan Pascoe. 
    Of course, there have been various men in her life but the only man now is Hector the horse. She grew up loving horses, and show-jumping, although now she favours dressage mistakenly thinking it might have been easier. 
     “I’ve always had horses. I’ve got nine now. As a teen I worked as a groom. I met a horsey crowd but when I was 22 started working in theatre and now the horses have come back.” 
     She rolls with some big international riders, one of them being Nick Skelton (Olympic medallist in Rio).
     “And I became an Ambassador for British show jumping. I became friendly with Nick Skelton and we discussed buying show jumpers but they are very expensive now. But I did want to get back involved with horses. I was one of the first people to buy a racehorse from his son Dan and now I have four National Hunt racehorses. I love seeing them. I’m always tempted to ride them but it would be a risk. They are an area of my life which has got nothing to do with being a showbiz impressaria. I became fascinated by the racing world. It’s not what people think – that it’s about betting and horses that go very fast. It’s the psychology of the training. I love that world.”
    Her other horses include a retired mare called Rock Chick Supremo who had a fractured bone and was about to be put down but she’s now a brood mare. “She sits in a field and gets pregnant. These horses are looked after like it’s a Four Seasons spa. They have chiropractors, osteopaths, they are massaged all the time. 
     I wanted to get back into riding again. I thought dressage would be safe but I realise now it’s not…I bought a beautiful grey stallion, called Hector. I thought he can almost teach me, but in my first year of having him (in 2016) he bucked me off and I broke many bones down my right side. He thought he was being playful with me and I was probably being too friendly with him. Stallions are like men. Also, I’ve learnt never to wear perfume around him. It frightens him. He didn’t mean any harm. Anyway, I’m under his thumb.”
    She gets out her phone and shows me a picture of the beautiful horse, almost white with giant, soulful yet naughty eyes.
   “There’s a Warwickshire life, a London life and a New York life.” She enjoys having all these lives. One as an escape from the other and now there’s a new life in fashion. Elizabeth Emmanuel made her the outfit for the Mamma Mia Here We Go Again premiere. A white silk suit with embroidery. A Prince Charming outfit. He could have worn it on his horse.  Emmanuel has also made some exquisite fairytale military jackets (very on trend) as well as tons of white silk designs. 
    “She’s had a tough time.” Emmanuel was planning a fashion comeback but her backer dropped out so Kramer has been putting some money into her business. “My life is very full now. I love what’s happened with Mamma Mia. Generations of people have come to see it. I know Abba have never reformed as a band but because of the musicals they’ve never really gone away. Whole generations have been involved in the Mamma Mia family.” 
    Of course, it would be easy to think that everything Kramer turned her hand to was vastly successful but the Spice Girls musical written by Jennifer Saunders had a very short run and people didn’t warm to the Spice Girls songs as they did Abba. This year the Spice Girls are reuniting for a world tour. Maybe it just wasn’t the right time. 
     “It was kind of a rough time for me.”
    What was it about the Spice musical that seemed different to Mamma Mia? Did she know from the start it wasn’t going to be successful?
     “No, you try your best, you don’t know, or maybe I knew too much. In the beginning I had a certain level of naivety that got me through. I believed there was something there. Obviously, the Spice Girls had a huge fan base but it wasn’t the story of them. It was another mother and daughter story really.”
    Is mother/daughter her thing? Is she the Impressaria with an extremely close or difficult relationship with her mother that she drew on?
     “No, I loved my mum very much. She passed in 2002. I was probably closer to my dad.  She didn’t see the films but she’d have been there for every show and my dad as well. Catherine Johnson came up with the mother/daughter idea for Mamma Mia and she is a single mum and now in fact she’s a grandmother.”
     Our conversation recoils back to Cher who Kramer thinks is a pioneer. Certainly difficult to have a daughter who ends up a son.
     “She’s had some tough times but she is a pioneer. In the 60s on television doing her show. She won’t stop until the wheels fall off. She feels like a young person. When we were planning the premiere of Mamma Mia I told her that the big premiere was in London and there might be a screening in Germany and she said ‘what about New York?’ I said I’m not sure about New York. It’s a big global event so we probably won’t go to New York the next day. She said, ‘what’s the problem? The old people won’t make it?’
    In all the different Kramer lives, a permanent man doesn’t seem to feature. “Men are the coolest people but we don’t necessarily want to live with them. That definitely applies to me.”
    Does she want to live with Hector? Does she want to move into his paddock?  “I do in a sense, although I think he’d rather move into mine. That’s how I feel about him.”
     While we’re at lunch the nominations for the Golden Globes come in. Mamma Mia is not on the shortlist. She pauses wondering what to think about it. Last time round Streep was nominated. It’s a given that good box office doesn’t guarantee awards. She thinks for a while. “I’m sad for Lily James. I wanted her to get a nomination. We were in the Vanity Fair top ten and actually I’m fine. it means I don’t have to worry about going to the event and not winning.”
   She knows getting the award is a process and not necessarily anything to do with talent. 

Ben Whishaw (London Sunday Times Magazine, March 24, 2019)

Ben Whishaw and Chrissy Iley
Ben Whishaw and Chrissy Iley

Ben Whishaw is wearing a navy shirt, dark wool trousers and a fluffy knitted hat. It’s a strange combination of quirkiness and elegance – he’s a one off. Lush, dark curls. He’s all cheekbones and large eyes. The eyes look so intense. They could be the eyes of a very intelligent animal, but perhaps that’s just because you can imagine him so easily as Paddington Bear – he is the voice of Paddington.
He’s also brought a new quirkiness to the quiet genius that is Q in the Bond movies and he’s just fresh from picking up the Golden Globe and Critics Choice Award for his portrayal of Norman Scott opposite Hugh Grant’s Jeremy Thorpe in A Very English Scandal. He was achingly good. Everyone thinks so.
Did he expect this double win? “No idea. You never know how these things are going to work out but it was very nice.”
Is it career changing to have a Golden Globe winning prefix to his name? “I don’t know if it changes anything but it feels nice. They make you feel great being the winner,” he smiles and sips on herbal tea.
We are in a photographic studio in East London where I’ve just seen him drape himself so elegantly and effortlessly over an old-fashioned gymnasium horse and a British flag.
Does he think that winning awards in Hollywood means he will be spending more time there? “I don’t feel it’s my world out there. I just sort of dropped in and it was a lovely thing. I would like to drop in more often. Maybe it opens doors. I guess we’ll see. I haven’t directly communicated with Norman Scott but I gather he was happy and he asked for a signed photo of me holding the award.”
He speaks of Scott affectionately. In the mini series which sees Scott involved with horses and dogs, relating to them perhaps more easily than people? “He definitely feels a kinship with animals. A security that maybe he didn’t have with people.”
He is in London rehearsing a play called Norma Jean Baker of Troy. It will open in New York early April. The director (Katie Mitchell) doesn’t fly so the rehearsals are all in London. He plays a man who likes to dress up as Marilyn and the opera singer Renee Fleming is his co-star. I find it quite odd that Mitchell won’t be coming to the first night of her own play. Whishaw accepts this and says, “She doesn’t have enough time in her schedules to take the boat. She goes to Europe a lot to work by train and Renee has crazy insane schedules to everything has been slotted about what Renee could do. Renee is very open and hardworking and really clever. It’s incredible she’s open to this weird and wonderful thing. We just got the costumes. I wear a dress that’s a replica of the one she wore in The Seven Year Itch – the white one where the wind comes up and they’ve given me bum, hips and breasts although I think they’re not as big as Marilyn’s they made it proportionate to my body. It’s a strange thing, I’m not playing Marilyn but a man who’s infatuated with her so much that he wants to dress up as her to be close to her and because he’s in mourning for the loss of her the play is set in the year she died. Apparently, there was a spate of copycat suicides that year.”
The play will open as the first play in a space called The Shed which is also an art gallery and music venue. It’s been written by the poet Anne Carson. Carson is a Canadian poet and professor of classics and has been described as the greatest poet since Robert Lowell.
He thinks nothing of one minute doing an independent play and then a blockbuster. He moves in and out of both extremes easily. He was last seen in the Disney epic Mary Poppins Returns. It’s what happens to the characters thirty years after the original movie. He played Mr Banks – the grown-up boy Michael, now the father of the family facing 1930s depression and the potential loss of his home after the actual loss of his wife. His children aren’t adjusting and the governess Mary Poppins (Emily Blunt) has never been more needed.
“Mary Poppins was the first film I ever saw. My dad taped it off the telly and we had it on a Betamax tape. I watched it so many times the tape wore out.”
Is it possible to wear out a tape? Isn’t that a metaphor?
“It’s how I remember it.And now I play the grown-up boy who’s now the daddy of the family. His old nanny blows in because there’s been a lot of crisis in the family. Michael is struggling to cope and look after the children and run the household and pay for everything. That’s what motors the film. He’s about to lose the children’s home.”
I can see why they wanted him for that part. A man child, a 38- year old actor who can create the “perfect man with the struggle in his soul.”
“Well there’s nothing interesting about somebody who’s doing fine, is there?
Mary Poppins had a cousin called Topsy Turvy played by Meryl Streep. Did he get to hang out with Streep?
“No. I met her at the rehearsal and she was nice but I’m so completely left speechless when I’m in the same room as her.”
Ah yes, the introvert, extrovert. The actor who once told me he’s afraid of meeting people.
“Do you never feel that speechlessness come on you? Even though she seemed to be the nicest person, I was very timid and shy around her.”
Whishaw has an unusual but mesmerising charm. I wanted to give him my childhood Paddington Bear because it was special to me and his performance was special but my mother had thrown it away. He wasn’t disappointed by this, or at least he’s too charming to show it. He comes over quite other worldly, hyper sensitive but very soft and determined, full of contradictions like shy and actor.
“I haven’t got over my fear of meeting people. I love people but I’m just shy of meeting new people especially when they’re famous.”
Years have passed since Whishaw was fresh out of drama school and at 23 was acclaimed as one of the best ever Hamlets (the next Olivier) in the Trevor Nunn production. He played Hamlet as a teenager alienated from the world. Last year his portrayal of Norman Scott was arguably the best thing on TV. Clearly the judges at the Golden Globes agreed. He actually blushes when I mention this performance – so nuanced, so vulnerable, so creepy all at the same time.
“I’m pleased you found it all of those things. Did it make you laugh?”
Oh yes, and cry.
“He was a very sad man.” Scott loved his dogs. Whishaw loves cats. His father’s cat Bob died recently. He was only 6. He had to give his cats to his dad when he started working away from home a lot. They were a mother and daughter duo and the daughter Yana is now 18, the mother deceased.
“Yana got dragged under a car when she was 3 and her leg was ripped off. They had to stick it back on and ever since she looks fragile but she’s tough, almost indestructible.”
I wonder if he identifies with that. Looking fragile but actually quite strong.    He’s very excited to have the role that embodies the vulnerability and the feistiness of Marilyn Monroe. I see the qualities in him.
When he comes back from New York he will begin shooting the new Bond.  Of course, no one in a Bond movie can ever tell you in advance what it’s going to be like but I assume it’s a security issue.
“I think they’re probably trying to figure out what to do with the storyline. At least I know that y character is the same someone did tell me this time that there might be a scene with Q’s cats which you would be interested in.”
Have the cats been cast yet? “I don’t think so.” I immediately want to sort out an audition for my cat Roger (Moore). He would definitely have screen presence.
“And that would be a lovely connection named after a former Bond. Does he travel? Can he come to Pinewood? Can he cock an eyebrow?” Yes, he can. That’s why he’s called Roger Moore. “I’ll get onto Barbara Broccoli about it.”
Who is Mr Bond these days? “It’s still Daniel Craig, I think. They never tell you till the last minute.”
I tell him that I preferred Roger Moore’s Bond when they had film titles like Octopussy. The Craig Bond seems a little hard, a little rough diamond. His edges are the perfect contrast to Whishaw’s fluid Q.
He changes the subject back to Norma Jean. “Isn’t it good that I’m going to dress up as Norma Jean?” It is. I tell him I once went to an auction of Marilyn’s clothes and put in a bid for some pink marabou trimmed stilettoes but the winning bid exceeded mine by around £12,000.
“I would have loved to have had something of hers. She really was amazing. She had a lot going on. A lot of sadness on her plate, poor darling. To be a star in that star system and those men.”
If she had been born 50 years later, does he think she would have been part of the #metoo movement?
“I’m sure she would have. I’ve been listening to interviews with her. She doesn’t seem afraid of anything.”
Fearless and vulnerable. That’s another contradiction that could possibly describe both of them.
“Yes,” he says with a ‘cats got the cream’ expression. He loves contradiction. We talk about the contradiction in the song lyrics of Steven Sondheim.
He asks, “Do you know the song Losing My Mind (by Sondheim)?” He sings it. He can sing. All the great divas have sung it.
“I’ve just finished reading a book called Fragments. It’s bits of Marilyn’s diary, notes on hotel paper, poetry. She writes beautifully. Apparently, Arthur Miller was here with her when they were doing the film The Prince and the Showgirl and she opened his diary and read about how disappointed he was with her, how embarrassed he was being around his intellectual friends with her. Apparently, this was devastating to Marilyn.  All these men say how difficult she was. It makes you want to strangle them.”
Has he ever read anyone else’s diary? “No, I haven’t but she must have known what she was looking for to see what she feared. It’s like looking at someone’s phone and somehow, it’s easier to look in the phone or the diary than ask the person directly. Isn’t it the thing that you want to have it confirmed but it’s really self-destructive? But maybe you think I have the evidence that would release me from this thing but no, I’ve never checked anyone’s phone or diary. There’s something a bit desperate about that, isn’t there?”
Well, Whishaw is the master of sensitivity. He’d never want to be desperate. He’s just finished a film Little Joe, “about a genetically modified plant that takes over people’s brains.”
I wondered if he played the plant. He doesn’t. how does he choose his roles or do roles come to him if producer and directors think the part needs the Whishaw effect? – something simple made a little spooky, or something spooky made a little normal.
“Usually I want parts where the character is compelling to me but sometimes if I fall in love with the director and want to work with them so much, I’ll do it no matter what they ask. It was my love for the Austrian director Jessica Hausner that made me want to do this film. She did a film called Lourdes a few years ago about a woman with multiple sclerosis who is indeed cured when she goes to Lourdes. It’s about miracles and how they happen or did they? And with Little Joe you’re not actually sure if a disaster is going to happen, if the plant is manipulating people or people are just insane. It’s the same kind of question.
“I play a scientist who has created this plant – a very pretty plant actually.”
The thing about a Whishaw role I find, is it haunts you long after the movie has retired. The Lobster was one such movie. It was surreal and bizarre and black like fairy tale.
He liked doing the Lobster where he played Limping Man. it was a love story. His character was straight, or at least in a sexual way.
Whishaw has created an ever-widening niche for himself –

Barry Humphries (London Sunday Times Magazine, March 17, 2019)

Barry Humphries and Chrissy Iley
Barry Humphries and Chrissy Iley

From the outside Barry Humphries home in north west London is unassuming. Inside, every inch of wall is lined with gorgeous pre-Raphaelite paintings, book cases heave with first editions. There are thousands of books. I wait for him in a pale blue sitting room with tones of hyacinth.
His wife Lizzie is there. She is tall and elegant and very funny. Before long she and I are showing each other our impersonations of Olivia Colman as we discuss her performance in The Favourite. Humphries joins us with, “It gives lesbian porn a bad name.”
He’s wearing a purple linen jacket, a green pullover and purple corduroy trousers but the corduroy is horizontal, in perfect keeping with the idea that Humphries likes to blend in, seem normal but is actually completely the other way. He defends Colman saying she was very good in the Night Manager. Lizzie and I chorus ‘but she’s the same in everything’. Humphries smiles. “So am I.”
Of course, nothing could be further from the truth. Humphries is the creator of many diverse personas – Dame Edna Everage, Sir Les Patterson and the ghost Sandy Stone.  Often they could say things that Humphries himself could not.  Humphries is a rare breed – a man who is altogether a man who is available and unavailable at once. He’s intimate, yet detached, kind and razor sharp, cutting.
We’re here to talk about his return to the London stage for Rob Brydon probes Barry Humphries Live On Stage. Did he know Brydon already?
“Yes I wrote to him and I said I admired his work so we met for dinner.”
So, it’s like a bromance? Will he rehearse this probing? No. It’s totally spontaneous,” he grimaces.
You wonder if it’s hard for Barry Humphries to be Barry Humphries. Last year he put on an intriguing show at the Barbican with the Australian chanteuse Meow Meow. It was a fascinating journey through songs from the Weimar Republic, composers who were banned by Hitler that Humphries had rediscovered as a child. He was whip smart and funny as himself.
“I’m getting confidence now to do things as myself. I’ve always preferred to be heavily disguised but a disguise I’ve never used is the disguise of myself.”
He’s just back from Australia and is still suffering from jetlag. Where do I live in LA he asks apropos of seemingly nothing, but the eyebrow is raised.
I am giving you a scoop,” he whispers. “Edna’s coming back. She’s in very good shape. She’s been measured for new frocks and 3 songs have been written.  She’s back there at the end of the year after opening in Australia.”
Edna did a retirement world tour a couple of years back where she put away her sequinned winged glasses for good.
“My first song for that show is written and it’s all about why Edna didn’t retire. It’s a wonderful song explaining to the audience why it was impossible to retire. It says there were too many people trying to copy me, including Barry Humphries and it was time they reacquainted themselves with the real thing. Too many clones.”
Edna got into trouble before she retired or maybe it was Barry Humphries because people were saying she was very anti-trans. Is it the same political situation in Australia?
“Oh, nothing has been more grotesquely interpreted. Edna carefully said she thought that men who had themselves castrated did not become women and that got taken the wrong way.”
Edna was still causing trouble even in her retirement.
“She was about as gone as Cher or Dame Nelly Melba of whom your younger readers will know nothing (Australian singer who did many retirement concerts).
It seems Humphries works tirelessly. He’s revising the comic strip Barry McKenzie, writing the new Edna show and the meantime he has the Palladium.
I remember going to an Edna show in Drury Lane and I caught a gladioli. “You catch gladioli like you catch Ebola. Right place right time you get it..” I laugh, he smiles.
“I like anyone who can make me and an audience laugh.”
He hopes his Palladium show will be a conversation about how comedy has changed, about what’s funny and what isn’t.
Does he think that the fashion has changed in his and Edna’s lifetime? “Not in a drastic way. More and more people want to be comedians. In my day not many people wanted to be a comedian as an ambition. It wasn’t profitable. But with television and all the other outlets and also fame attached to being a comedian, comedians are the new rock stars. Billy Connolly was the first rock star comedian.”
What will be some of his greatest comedy moments?
“I’m still deciding but there will be some scenes from the Marx Brothers, Steve Martin and Woody Allen. And I’d like to include some of my own early films. Lizzie says if she hears me laughing in another room, she knows I’m laughing at one of my own jokes. She can tell.”
He remembers going to his first comedy show.
“It was an amazing discovery when I went to The Tivoli with my parents. The Tivoli was a disreputable theatre in Melbourne which had variety shows but on this occasion my parents went because I was a fan of someone called Arthur Askey, a British comedian. To hear a man onstage making the whole audience laugh was a miracle to me. I thought I wonder how they do that and the seed was planted, little knowing that I might one day…”
In the past, Humphries has described Edna as being opinionated, acerbic and bolshy and did he even like her? “I like the effect she has on the audience. She makes them laugh.” Thus, Edna gave Humphries the gift he’d wanted as a child. And it must have been hard for him to give her up to be onstage as himself as he is much shyer.
The prep for Edna – the dresses, the wigs, the make-up, the dancing, the eight shows a week must have been very exhausting. And everyone’s always asking where does Humphries end and Edna begin.  Suddenly there was no circle. Edna was ended. But it seems he couldn’t live without her and her voice. She’s coming back later this year. There’s already a tour of Australia and US dates planned.
He is nostalgic about the comedians and the Australia in his youth.
“When they’d done every stage in England several times, when the audience could repeat the words of their comic routines they went to Melbourne to the Tivoli. They made jokes I didn’t understand and I noticed my parents exchanging guilty looks, must have been naughty jokes. Risque. Little did I know I would become a risqué comedian. A blue comic as they were called.
When I first got a gig at a return serviceman’s club in Sydney in the 1950s, they said to me ‘the audience likes blue material and at the age of 22 I was so naïve I wore my Sunday best blue three-piece suit. I thought the material was fabric.”
Humphries has had a 64 year career onstage. By now he knows the difference. It turns out he has quite a thing for Brydon.
“Every time I turn on the television Rob is there on the deck of a ship. He seems to live a wonderful life on board those ships (he does a commercial for P&O cruises). I am consumed with envy of Rob. Benevolent envy.”
As Humphries he’s extremely benevolent. As Edna less so. He cuts an impressive figure today – so colourful and energetic and still has the legs for Edna. Does he feel 85?
“No, I feel 52.” He likes to paint. He enjoys a good restaurant – especially one owned by a celebrity chef – and he has friendships with many luminaries including Prince Charles and Camilla.  He’s done countless world tours and has written two memoirs – My Life As Me and More Please, both achingly well written.  He has courted danger and controversy throughout.
I’ve always wondered though is it a political statement. Why is it that Edna never wears a bra?
“She’s never been embarrassed to say that she was blessed in many ways but not that way. She waited for something to appear but it never took place. She found the twinset helpful and that if she wore elaborate spectacles no-one’s eyes dropped south of the glasses. She’s never tried to be a sex object. She’s very relieved she’s not known as that. They’re a miserable lot, the sex objects”
He is the master of being attached and detached all at the same time.  It’s been so long since he had a drink, he doesn’t really treat it as an issue anymore.
“It’s a nice thing but a life’s a life. For some people like me it’s off the menu. It just doesn’t work. I have it in the house for other people. I could give you an absinthe if you want one. I brought upon myself some horrible events.”
Did he find that Edna had taken away the voice of Barry Humphries so that’s why he found it so hard to return to the stage as himself? And maybe himself was never himself.
“It’s more like I find the voice for it. Whatever the thought it I think who would be best saying this? Me, him, her, it so I choose like a casting agent. When I saw The Favourite, I thought Edna would be very good in the Colman role.”
Edna a lesbian? “No. As she once said, she doesn’t even like the word. It leaves a nasty taste in her mouth.”
I remember her saying that. “It was one of her famous utterances.”
Does he ever think her humour was too cruel? “Nobody ever asked for their money back. she’s fundamentally caring.”
His parents were far from encouraging. I remember my mother saying ‘look at that comedian. It’s pathetic at his age but the comedian she was referring to was only about fifty. These days 85 is the new 50.”
Humphries was not there when his mother died. He was told she was in hospital but it was nothing serious. But contrary to the end she would say, ‘look at these lovely flowers Barry sent me’ but he had sent no flowers.
“I come from a family who have a great deal of prudiness about illness. If someone was very ill we’d say he hasn’t been very well lately, which means dying.”
Also, perhaps the family didn’t tell his mother she was gravely ill.
“That’s right. I had a vision of someone coming back to Australia after a long absence and going to the family home and finding it was occupied by Ukranians and then you say to your sister what’s happened to mum and dad? ‘oh, they died but we didn’t want to worry you.’
Does he forgive his parents?
“Yes, I sympathise with them. I agree with them wholeheartedly about everything that they said to me that offended me at the time. My parents were very nice. They had a hard time with me. Whenever I did a performance or asserted myself in any way at a family gathering my mother would say, ‘don’t look at Barry, he’s drawing attention to himself.’ I thought that would be a good name for a show. Barry Humphries draws attention to himself one more time. Maybe I’ll call my new show that. My mother had a series of phrases. They weren’t original but they were, on her lips, rather devastating. She timed it perfectly. She was a frustrated artist I think and they are dangerous people, frustrated artists. You know Hitler was a frustrated artist. She was very hard to please so I grew up with the assumption that women were impossible to please and some of them obliged me by conforming to this, by being impossible.”
Humphries has had four wives Brenda Wright, a dancer (1955-1957) when he was 21 and she was 19. It ended quickly. Of the marriage she has said, ‘there’s nothing about Barry Humphries that I want to remember. My marriage to him was a long time ago and thankfully every year takes me a little further away from it.’
Rosalind Tong (1957-1970) a dancer, artist Diane Millstead (1979-1989), mother of his two sons Oscar and Rupert and Lizzie Spender (actress and equestrian, daughter of the poet Stephen (1990 till now) He has two daughters, Tessa and Emily from his 3rd wife.
“Women are impossible but not Lizzie. She’s the exception. It took four marriages to find her.”
Perhaps he should have kept them as girlfriends and not actually married them.
“I was doing very well financially and I thought I’ve got to get rid of this money somehow.
Is that close to what happened?
“Yes, the Ukranians improved the family home greatly. Sometimes I think it would be funny to advertise the new show and then say to the audience coming in very sorry ladies and gentleman but Dame Edna has passed away. We didn’t want to worry you.”
Humphries is presented with a contraption and he grimaces. He says to his assistant who has just delivered it, “You had to do that in front of a journalist, didn’t you… So far the grim reaper has made very few inroads but my hearing has suffered.”
His hearing doesn’t seem to be any different with the contraption but I can hear a high-pitched squeaking. The hearing aid has done the opposite to aid and it’s reminding Humphries of all the restaurants he doesn’t like to go in because they’re too loud – “the Caprice is deafening.”
He once wanted to open a restaurant called The Oubliette, which he would fill with Shostakovich like music so no one would be able to talk at all.
“In the middle ages they used to chuck somebody in a hole and then they forget about them so the Oubliette was a restaurant where you are forgotten and the waiter never comes. I remember one time in the 1960’s when a cookery writer at The Express invited me to lunch at The Savoy. I could choose whatever I wanted and she would interview me about food so I ordered Oysters Zarina which are oysters with caviar on them and you dip them in cream. Must have cost a fortune. The chef came to the table and said, ‘you’re the first person to order Oyster Zarina since Ambassador Ribbentrop’.
He seems a little sheepish about being 85. There must be a sense of time running out.
“Is there a follow up to the CBE and if so, how long does it take?” Humphries is already a dame as Edna. Perhaps people might think a Sir would be superfluous.
“People have said it’s not strictly kosher, Edna’s damehood.”
What age does he feel? “I feel about 52.”
We discuss a man in Holland who tried to change the date on his birth certificate because he identified as 45 instead of 65. He wasn’t allowed. One can change one’s pronoun but not one’s age.”
After the trans-phobia, Humphries got into trouble because he was pro Brexit, anti-Brussels and now he is redefined as anti-Brexit.
“I think I have actually but I don’t have any interesting political views. What was lovely about being in Australia was they’ve never heard of Brexit. I was in Sydney writing and Lizzie was visiting her horses. We have a flat with a view of the harbour. I’m reviving Barry McKenzie the comic strip. I thought what would this character so popular in the sixties be doing now and I worked it out.” (it first appeared in Private Eye, now it’s destined for The Oldie.)
He’s come back to England because he wanted to see some Australian mates who are not in Australia any more.
“There are no Australians in Australia any more. Only Chinese.”
The Australians of his generation like Germain Greer and Clive James are very much part of the British heritage. “I wrote a clerihew about Clive James. Dear old Clive James is still alive. We know he’s not dead because he’s telling us about all the books he’s read. Germain is still alive. And I’m very glad. And Rolf Harris is still alive. I never liked his appearance.”
What does he fear? “Obscurity and ghosts. I’m very scared of ghosts. I believe in them and I’m very wary of them. I don’t like to sleep in haunted places and Australia’s very spooky. Ghosts are there. Explorers and senior citizens. I’ve promised to be one. There is a theatre in Adelaide called Her Majesties. They are building it and I promised to be a ghost there.
He once said of his children, ‘I think their abiding memories of their father are a man surrounded by suitcases. Now he says, ‘They’re all doing well. Two daughters in Melbourne, one a painter, the other an actor. My son Oscar is an art expert and dealer. My son Rupert co-wrote a video game called Red Dead Redemption and he’s hugely successful. All of these children of mine are mostly well behaved and don’t require any financial support. What more could you wish? Rupert has twins and I dote on them and Oscar has a daughter.”
“Edna heard that Barry Humphries was claiming to do an Edna act and a few terrible drag queens were doing Edna as Edna. She needed to set the record straight.”
I still think he just couldn’t let her go.
Rob Brydon probes Barry Humphries Live On Stage at the Palladium April 28th

Roseanne Barr (London Sunday Times Magazine, March 10, 2019)

Chrissy Iley & Roseanne Barr
Chrissy Iley & Roseanne Barr

The story of Roseanne Barr is one of epic rise and epic fall and possible redemption. She is a provocateur, fierce, funny, an outsider. Her television sitcom Roseanne ran from 1988–1997. It was a staple of American culture, won Emmy’s and Globes. It was revived by ABC and in 2018 it was the most watched show in America. Last May, in the middle of the night – 2 am she Tweeted. This Tweet was deemed innapropriate by her bosses at ABC, who immediately fired her and cancelled the show and within 48 hours had forced her to give up all rights to the show which was based on her own life.
  The Tweet was ‘Muslim brotherhood and Planet of the Apes had a baby’ in reference to Valerie Jarrett, a former advisor in the Obama administration. At the time, the network said Barr’s tweet was “abhorrent, repugnant and inconsistent with our values, and we have decided to cancel her show.” The following month, the network decided to bring back the show but without Barr, and title it The Conners.
  Going forward The Tweet is now usually described as a racist Tweet. That was not its intention as Barr didn’t know that Jarrett was black and no one seemed to know that Barr was Jewish and the Tweet was really about Iran/Israel. Racism was never her intention. 
  Her friend of 20 years, Rabbi Shmuley Botech tried to help. They did a Podcast together. He says, “she said that she wanted to engage in penance. She made a mistake. She took full responsibility. She shouldn’t have written that Tweet but she was judged very harshly. Her whole life dismantled, so I reached out to her. 
  We studied the Torah together for the last 20 years. Jewish values state three things when you make an error. No. 1 own up to it, No.2 apologise unconditionally and no. 3 make restitution in some form of tangible action. We did the podcast and she said ‘I absolutely want to engage in penance. It breaks my heart that people think I’m a racist. I’ve African American children in my family. I’m humiliated.’ She was sobbing.
  Since the Tweet that changed her life, Barr went to her mother’s in Utah to have what she describes as “a nervous breakdown. seeing herself so vulnerable was shocking.
  We meet her in her office/studio in El Segundo. On the way there, the Uber driver tells me he is a fan and points out that Bill Maher is applauded when he makes racist Tweets. It seems unfair. Is comedy about cruelty? Barr tells me it wasn’t like that. 
  She is first and foremost a Jewish woman who has fought Anti-Semitism for most of her life. Growing up in the Mormon Salt Lake City was harsh. She has said in the past “You weren’t supposed to think there. First of all it was frowned upon to be a girl, and second of all to be a fat, dark-haired girl who had no waist, and third to be a loudmouthed, short, fat, dark girl.”
  Of course, these days she’s not fat, she has a waist, looks trim and has long blonde hair. She’s young looking for 66. Various surgeries have been well documented but it’s not about that. There’s something vibrant in her spirit. She tells me about the Tweet.
  “I was dreaming and I woke up and I thought this is the really great thing that I’ll Tweet. I was appalled I was not allowed to explain it.”
  The Tweet stems from the Obama regime, foreign policy on Iran and Israel. Her explanation in grander terms has included visits with Rabbi Botech to Israel, meeting politicians from the left and right and talks about anti-Semitism. 
  “I signed the rights for my whole life’s work away,” she says gravely. “I thought I had to do that. I thought this is what it’s going to take so I did it. Just the other day the Hollywood Reporter changed the Tweet again. They are on a tear against me and have been for a long time. They got my ex-husband (Tom Arnold) to review one of my shows.” Arnold is one of 3 ex-husbands. She’s friendly with the others but not him. “They’ve tried to silence me and humiliate me since I came to Hollywood.”
  Her two sons Buck and Jake work with her at her studio. Jake makes me a perfect cup of coffee. Roseanne has started smoking and he doesn’t like the smell even though he smokes. He has special smoking clothes. She’s not doing any booze or pills. Let her smoke.
  We circle back to the Uber driver and his Bill Maher point. “Bill Maher doesn’t get a quarter of the ratings I got and because he’s an arm of the Democrat party he gets away with it and he gave more than a million dollars to the Democrats. There is sexism but I’m not sure that men can get away with a lot anymore because everyone’s got their #metoo issues nailed, but now they just send in women to say the same shit men say and they think it’s feminism. It’s ain’t. It’s disgusting.”
  Rabbi Botech says, “We now live in the divided States of America. Roseanne was perceived to be a pro Trump person and that automatically means she has to be a racist. Her show was ethnically diverse and politically diverse. Half the people like Trump, half the people hate Trump and that’s real America. Other sitcoms they’re all liberal or they’re all Conservative. This show had different political strands and they still cancelled it. My opinion is ABC should have said ‘you’ve done something that seems very offensive. We’re going to dock your pay for a month and donate it to an African American educational charity. Which she did anyway. She’s always donated to charities. Instead they moved to destroy her. Her show, it bears her name, it’s based on her life.”
  It’s true. Roseanne loves Trump. Her politics though have always been provocative, standing up for the minorities, whoever they may be. In 2012 she formed the Peace and Freedom party. Before that she was Green and before that she hated George Bush.
  As I’m talking to Roseanne in a pink fluffy sweater, she’s not what I expected – harsh and combative. She’s hypnotic, yes, but loveable. She’s still reeling from signing away the rights of her life. 
  “My life, my kids, but they (the network) told me if I do one more thing they don’t like they’ll remove my reruns for ever. And I said could you define what the one more thing is and they won’t. it could be that I say the word shit. It could be whatever they want. It’s a total Stalinist censorship. I’m known for free speech and also bringing free speech into a family context with the conversations had on my show. They don’t want none of that no more. They only want pliable servants. I’m not that. I’m not a slave.”
  We discuss stage one, the aftershock. “I had a complete nervous breakdown.” She couldn’t get out of bed. “Right.” She couldn’t speak. “Right. I couldn’t think either. They gave me 48 hours to sign away the rights to my show or I’d be sued because I ruined the season. They cancelled the show before one sponsor pulled out which is unheard of, unprecedented. They wanted to get rid of me. My boyfriend (Johnny Argent has been her partner since 2003. They met through a writing competition she hosted on her site) said it’s because I was bad for the hate business. Because I brought people together under one roof who disagreed about the President, but they moved past it and still got along. One thing changed in that game – it’s the philosophy based on the hatred of an outsider. It’s called anti- Semitism but it’s also anti-intellectualism and anti-free speech.
  My show had the most progressive storylines ever on television. If you say one positive thing about President Trump, the new progressives will destroy the most progressive show on TV. I knew it was going to happen. They tried to kill me the first day I went back to work.”
  Literally or metaphorically? “Everything. Physically, mentally and spiritually, in every way. It was a mistake to go back there. I’ve made mistakes many times in my life.”
  Part of Barr’s love for Trump is because he supports Israel but she also thinks he’s a “genius”. Now she feels the most opinionated woman on TV is not entitled to some opinions.
  “Americans know next to nothing about the Iran deal and the Obama administration and what they did with the Iran deal to put Israel and the Jewish people in an existential crisis around the world. The government in Iran was like the movie Planet of the Apes. We’d already said that for weeks.” 
  It has been reported that someone called ABC which resulted in Barr’s removal. Barr alleges that it was in fact Michelle Obama who called the President of ABC who fired her. She said, ‘this Tweet is unforgiveable’. That’s what I was told and I tend to believe it because the woman who fired me is now working with the Obama’s at Netflix.
  They wanted to take a Jew down. They wanted to take down a Zionist because they think that Zionists are the problem with everything in the world and a lot of people in this country think like them that’s why I was flattered when Schmuley called and said, ‘let’s teach Torah’. I have a lot of Rabbi friends because one of my passions in life is to talk about the Torah. When I sent that Tweet, I had this feeling in my head that God gave me this idea.” 
  But it was in the middle of the night. “Yes, and I was also in an inebriated condition. I’d gone to bed at 11.00, sent the Tweet at 2.00, was on Ambien. It was a very stupid thing.”
  I took Ambien and it made me sleep eat. “It did me – 2 pounds of cheese every morning.”
  But it also made her sleep Tweet. “I wished I hadn’t done it and I don’t take Ambien no more. It made me think in an impaired way and I’d also had a couple of beers. I should have written it backwards. It came out dyslexic. It should have been ‘Valerie Jarrett’s ties to the Muslim brotherhood have now allowed Iran’s government to remain as in the movie Planet of the Apes’. That was the conversation. After a 30-year career of championing civil rights, it all ended. They hate powerful women and they hate powerful, deplorable women and I do consider myself deplorable. Deplorable is the greatest thing that Hillary ever called us because it empowered a revolution, we are deplorable to her kind. Of course, all working class people are deplorable to her because it was working class people that elected Trump.”
  According to Rabbi Botech, Barr is now in the second phase after the Tweet.
  “The first was extreme remorse and heartfelt apology. That podcast was listened to by hundreds of thousands of people, but regardless of the degree to which she apologised, people still didn’t forgive her, she started becoming more defiant. She said ‘Schmuley, I’ve apologised and it’s got me nowhere. People are not in the mood to forgive. My friends tell me you can’t apologise in this culture. It’s like confession.’”
  Can she forgive? “I’m not going to forgive.” Our mutual Rabbi friend might suggest that that’s hard to carry around. “It’s not hard to carry around it’s wonderful, it gives me great fuel. Schmuley and I disagree on that. If you forgive the unforgiveable, you’re not a moral person.”
  Reading the Torah is something Barr has done all her life. She and Botech met when he came on her talk show to promote his book Kosher Sex. She let him know that she wanted her daughters to marry Jews and he selected three Jewish boys for them to try out. “I found nice Jewish boys and we filmed it. It was like the Jewish Bachelor.”
  It didn’t work out for them.
  “They were nice guys but he didn’t go with the looks.”
  Her daughters are married now. One of them did end up with a Jewish guy. “The other two are Jewish now.” They converted? “No, they just by osmosis became Jews. When I first met Schmuley I thought he was very interesting. We did a debate on pornography with Larry Flint the three of us. We respect each other’s opinions and he’s one of the few men that listens to women.”
  Does her boyfriend listen to women? “He’s a good one. He’s a hippie. Vegetarian and all that. I am too mostly. He’s not crazy about me smoking,” she says, lighting up another but feeling somewhat self-conscious she opens the door and cool air wafts in.
  Her entire career has been built on provocation. In the early seventies she married Bill Pentland, a hotel clerk. They moved to Denver, lived in a trailer park and she had three kids. As a child she’d learnt that the only way to survive was to be fierce and funny. She started performing at local comedy clubs. Eventually she got her break on The Tonight Show where her humour offended the audience until they gasped with laughter.
  A few days after her divorce from Pentland in 1990, she married Tom Arnold, even took his name. she describes that period as the worst time of her life and “a horrible dysfunctional relationship.” They posed for Vanity Fair naked and mud wrestling. Perhaps a metaphor for that relationship.
  In 1995 she married Ben Thomas, had her youngest son Buck, divorced in 2002. 
  She is emphatic she has never been a racist, whatever she’s been.
  “Jew haters are calling Jews racist. Let’s be real. Does racist mean by silenced by the left? They want to throw it around so much. Of course, I’ve apologised because this was an insensitive comment, but really its damage was in the way it was perceived. I can’t be responsible for the way people perceive things. People have always done this to me. They don’t get me. I have a lot of fans. First of all, the only people who called me in Hollywood were black people. White people in Hollywood don’t know about racism. Let them say ‘Roseanne called black people monkeys’. Let them do it if that’s the spin they want. I had a nervous breakdown because of how I was mentally abused. It was really freaky. They lined up to abuse me and kick me in the teeth. They are not good people.”
  Another blow was when they decided to continue the series, calling it The Conners but without Roseanne. Roseanne had died of a drug overdose by using other people’s prescriptions to get drugs.
  Rabbi Botech says, “When The Conners came out, I was very upset about how they dealt with her death. A grim ending of a beloved character that has been a staple of the American culture for 20 years. It’s a blue-collar show. It’s an insult to the working class that they’re all trading prescription drugs.
  Barr continues, “They think because they killed me it’s OK for them to use me, use the memory of me. Still mention me. It’s still my show but they stole it. They are going to do it to other comics. I’m just the first.”
  Isn’t that the nature of the comic – to get a reaction? To make people laugh, you have to make people unsettled.
  “I don’t just like to make people laugh. I like to piss them off and make them think too. I like to provoke them. I’m a provocateur. I knew they were trying to censor comics ever since Obama signed the NDAA into law. I Tweeted the next day ‘he’s just killed comedy’. It’s like the PC police. A PC police state and they have no compunction about destroying innocent people every day. It’s about mind control. Everyone in America is under mind control from television except for my show, that’s why they got rid of it.”
  Does she think she’ll ever have another show? “No, I’m totally done. People have approached me. People say ‘go on this channel. They’re not about the ratings’ but I’m a champion of ratings.”
  Does she ever think she’ll be President Barr? “People are saying that too. Part of why I love Trump is that he took so many of my ideas from my 2012 campaign. I’m about to put out my speech to show it.”
  “He’s welcome to those ideas. Nobody owns good ideas. People are always stealing my ideas. Everything on television is some kind of theft from me. They don’t credit particularly women my age here. You know, if you’re not fuckable it’s no good. Not that I ever was. I’m one of the few women who’s made it on looks and talent in Hollywood.”
  “I tried to sleep my way to the top but there were no takers. I would have but that wasn’t open to me.”
  No one ever #metoo’d her. “My friend Mike Tyson the boxer called it #youtoo. It’s a witch hunt.”
  How does she feel about women who claim to be abused 20 years previously but didn’t say anything about it at the time?
  “That’s because they’re ho’s. if you didn’t say no and just stayed there to get along, you’re a ho. Men are ho’s too. There’s a total ho mentality. What am I going to get for trading sexual favours? Not that I’ve got anything against ho’s. Not real ho’s.”
  While she was having her nervous breakdown, Rabbi Botech called her. “He said, ‘we can’t let them destroy you because you’re the strongest voice for American Jews in Israel. It woke me up. I had my fight back. I just went with him to Israel. In Israel they can talk, talk out differences, talk to each other. I was invited to speak by the left-wing Labour party. No one is all good or all bad. I don’t like what the Obama administration did to Israel and Jews worldwide.”
  Did her love or Torah come from the idea that Torah was for the boys, not for the girls? Did she ever have a Yentl thing going on? 
  “Yeah, totally Yentl. I got that movie although I like calling it Lentil.” I really want to sing Papa Can You Hear Me but I’m bad at singing so I restrain myself. “That’s another joy of my life – singing. I’m doing it more and I’m loving it.”
  When I tell her I was recently thrown out of a restaurant for bad singing, she says, “singing badly is still hilarious.” She gives me her DVD Rockin’ With Roseanne (fun filled kid tunes with loads of singing and dancing). 
  Becoming a grandmother changed her, softened her. She loves singing. She loves kids. She loves the Torah. She loves growing things in her home in Hawaii, cooking soups and selling them in the shop (carrot and ginger is a favourite). “My life is so peaceful. I’m not angry anymore. I use my anger to write. It’s a good battery but I don’t live it and that’s a good switch. I don’t let it bleed into my real life.”
  Do blondes have more fun? “I love my blonde hair. I’m going to let it grow to my waist. I’m never cutting it again. It’s a whole new attitude. My friend said to me once when I was unhappily married…” To which husband? “oh, to all of them eventually. My friend said ‘time to dump the ape and go blonde’. We always called men apes in Utah. I’m in touch with the ex-husbands, all but one. I don’t speak to Tom Arnold.”
  She has children with these ex-husbands and now grandchildren. Often the grandchild/grandparent relationship is stronger. “Yes, we understand each other because we have a common enemy. I really do love children and young people. It opens up a whole new wrinkle in your brain and you have a longer view of the world. And they’re what you leave behind.”
  Does she ever think about that – dying? “No – I won’t be there. It don’t matter.”
  Not doing her sitcom doesn’t meant to say she’s not working. “I’ve got my own channel. I’m working on content for that. When I fell back into writing the show for a 10thseason it was just like riding a bike. I turned my back brain on. They didn’t take that away. They killed me off but that was just stage one. Stage two is over (her breakdown). I’m at stage three now – their pain. The karmic boomerang. I can’t allow them to win. I’m not that kind of a person. 
  Did you ever read that book about circus freaks? The parents shot the kids up with drugs when they were in the uterus so that they would be born with two heads. I’ve also thought about a movie called Sitcom and everything would be based on real things that I lived through. They’re hilarious now a million years have passed. They weren’t funny at the time. I was talking to Mel Gibson about a movie based on the Torah. I would love to write that with Mel. He’s a very good director.”
  So much for him being a Jew hater. “He’s a very layered structure of a human being. He’s unstoppable. Been there, done that. Here’s my talent motherfuckers.”
  She thinks President Trump is a very layered man.
  “He’s a real deep thinker.” That’s now how he comes across. “Well that’s his Trump puppet. He’s got a Trump puppet and he’s somewhere else. Like here’s a shiny object. It’s too complicated. I’ve met him several times. And don’t forget you can’t judge anyone for how they Tweet on Twitter.”
  We agree that Prozac makes one quiet. She has taken anti-depressants of course. There isn’t anything she hasn’t done. “They dull your rage. Most people don’t like angry women. And Prozac makes you just numb but sometimes you need that, get through the trauma. This trauma I’ve faced it head on and I haven’t done that before. I didn’t face it alone. I let people in to help me like my boyfriend and my mom. My mom took really good care of me for 3 months until I got back on my feet. We’ve been on good terms for about 20 years now but this time she was just wonderful and I felt a lot of love from people I hadn’t let in, so more now than ever before I let the love in.”
  Does she think because of that people want to help her? “I don’t know. I think they might have identified with getting screwed.”
  She really has found a kind of strength from being vulnerable, from letting people in. It’s magnetic. She’s allowing herself to be empathic whereas before she closed walls like armour. She’s already spent almost a year in purdour. The last time she radically offended, it took years. I called it the star mangled banner incident. It’s when she grabbed her crotch and spat ata nationally aired baseball game in July 1990 at the playing of The Star Spangled Banner. She was called disgraceful by then President Bush.
  “That’s when I pissed off the right and now I’ve pissed off the left. It took about fifteen years but they got over it.”
  Did she ever want to be liked? A really long pause. “Well yeah. I’m human but I didn’t want to be liked by the wrong people. I wanted to be liked by the right people and noticed by the wrong people.”
  Why was it so different when you allowed your mother to support you? “I realise that’s what I wanted my whole life but I never felt I got it.”
  Did she push people away? “Yeah. I left men unless I needed them and I needed to change that. I’d already kind of changed that since becoming a grandmother. That was fading. Life can change.”
  Do you mean this is the final metamorphosis? “I hope not my final. I think now I’m gonna figure out what God wants for me. But I never do anything unless I think God wants me to do it.”
  Does she think God wanted her to shut people out? “No. he wanted me to expand my radius of love. That’s what he wants for everybody.”

Richard Gere (London Sunday Times Magazine, February 10, 2019)

I’d flown to New York from LA to meet Richard Gere. He is in his first ever TV series – the BBC’s Mother, Father, Son – a complicated tale of families and how to survive them set with Gere as a self-made man, a billionaire newspaper owner and influencer – by that I don’t mean he’s got a lot of followers on Instagram – I mean shortbread with the Prime Minister.
  Gere himself lives in upstate New York but has chosen to meet me at a simple but chic Italian eaterie in Chelsea in the city. It’s booked under my name to preserve his anonymity.
  It’s pouring with rain. I’m in a sopping Fedora and distinctive golden brocade coat. There had been a lot of weather which had resulted in hefty delays and a diversion to Minneapolis so the 16 hours of travel and then the Nat West Bank calling me at 4am east coast time, had all resulted in extreme exhaustion and sleep deprivation so when I turned ap 45 seconds early for our table it was because I needed caffeine. The chic but simple restaurant said I could sit at the bar- not the table till noon that was their policy. I said I didn’t want to sit at the bar for 15 seconds. I wanted a large espresso before my guest arrives – but too late he’s here. 
  Dressed for the rain. Collar up, cap on looking as inconspicuous as a still sexy 69 year old A-Lister can manage. I didn’t want him to know I was the hysterical caffeine deprived woman. It was noon. They showed me to my table. I took off my conspicuous coat and pretended that I hadn’t been that woman. He sits down and looks at me quizzically. He’s got a great quizzical look that looks right through you.
  He’s wearing his trademark rimless glasses. His platinum hair flattened by the rain and the cap but it’s still full. He’s still the man from the poster of An Officer and A Gentleman except he’s not wearing the tight, white trousers. He’s still the man from Pretty Woman but without the expensive looking suit. He’s more pared down, relaxed, grey pants. Simple as he would say, but not ordinary. 
  Of course, he knew it was me. Why was I so upset? Now I was embarrassed. He told me not to be as he ordered a jasmine tea.
  “The American Indians bred horses which were essentially quarter horses. They had great stamina great speed, great agility but their greatest attribute is that they calm down quickly. They bred this horse so that you could ride him hard, work him hard but then calm him down because thoroughbreds stay hyper all the time so maybe you’re a little too thoroughbred.
  Oh my God. Smooth or what?
  He lives with his 17 year old dog, his son Homer (19) from his ex-wife Carey Lowell and new wife Alejandra Silva (35), an activist and her son Albert (6). They’re going to have their first baby any minute. 
  When I asked Jeff Goldblum recently how he felt about having babies after the age of 60, he told me that he went to therapy to work out those issues. Did Gere worry about being an older parent? He looks at me like I’m mad.
  “Not at all.” Some people might be worried though. “No…” he shakes his head. If he was ever a worrier he’s not now. Nothing seems to bother him including what people think of him. I tell him I’m surprised that he even turned up for an interview at all. In the past the press have savaged him. I read a lot of celebrity press cuttings constantly – for research -I’ve never seen any as bizarre as his. And cruel. Around 30 years ago there was an urban myth about his sexual proclivities. It ran and ran until about ten years ago . The rumours were so ridiculous I’m not sure how they ever made it legally to print. Then there were other rumours about his unstable and unloving marriage to Cindy Crawford in the early 90s
  He must have felt pushed into a corner. He took out an ad in the New York Times stating that the marriage to Crawford was a happy one and they were both heterosexual only to divorce 6 months later in 1995. Once again, something that met with criticism. Allegations that could not have happened in the me too / diversity era of now.
  A few years ago, he said, “If I was a giraffe and somebody said I was a snake I’d think no, I’m actually a giraffe. Those kinds of things hurt people around you more than they hurt you because they hurt for you.”
  Soon after this he stopped making Hollywood studio movies, favouring independent movies and some of the most acclaimed work of his career like 2016’s Norman and his Globe nominated Arbitrage. Mother, Father, Son is his first ever TV series. How did that compare to working on a movie?
  “It was like doing 4 indie movies back to back, but the same one.” Was it not interesting and challenging for him to develop the character over 8 episodes? “No, I don’t think I’ll do this again to tell you the truth. It’s 6 months of shooting (in the UK). It’s too long.”
  Is that because his character Max is quite harsh? He didn’t want to be around him. He jumps to Max’s defence.
  “I don’t think he’s harsh. He’s a man who’s clear about what he wants and what he’s doing. People who work for him like him. He’s fair and he cares about them. He’s just not a typical guy. The cast is great. As good as any I’ve worked with. Billy Howle (who plays his son) is a superstar. I was so impressed with him as a person and an actor.”
  Helen McRory plays his ex-wife and he found her “terrific” although he’s never seen her in her much-loved role in Peaky Blinders. He continues to tell me that Max is not hard but he had a hard life, grew up in his father’s steel factory in Pennsylvania and his father wanted to make him a tougher character.
  “This series is a deep and honest exploration of journalism, publicity, the potentially dark mix of bad politics.”
  Does he think journalism is dark? “It doesn’t have to be. It’s certainly very competitive. I’m old enough to remember when news was not expected to make money. It was a service and people who worked in that area felt that they were doing something that was profound, telling the truth. Now they’re all rivals and the press in the UK is particularly difficult. As I said I don’t care. I’ve been around this a long time.”
  Was he always like this? Not caring. “The things I have control over I care about but things I don’t have control over, why bother?” I tell him that reading the toxicity in his press clippings gave me chills. “Honey, I don’t care.” It was a nice, warm ‘honey’, not a patronising ‘honey’. What about your mother/father?
  Did his mother and father inform his character Max?
  “Tell the truth, it was probably the location. My parents grew up not far from where the character grew up. beyond that I had a very different mother and father (Gere was born in Philadelphia. His mother Doris was a housewife. His father Homer (97) was in insurance agent. Gere was the second child of five. 
  Did he have the kind of father who wanted to instil discipline – make him tough?
  “Not at all. I don’t know if Max is about discipline. It’s about you have a number of years on this planet, make something of it. I think all of us feel that way about our kids, not you’ve got to do it this way or that way.” 
  The conversation circles back to his new baby. Gere doesn’t really show emotions like excitement, anger. He pares it all down but you can tell he is excited about it. It’s a boy, right? “Nobody knows because we haven’t told anybody.”
  Homer, named after his grandfather is in a gap year between high school and college. Is he artistic or science biased? “He’s very sweet, very sensitive, very smart. He’s smarter than me, stronger than me, faster than me, taller than me, better than me. He’s great. I love him.”
  Soon there will be a family of five. At the moment they are four. How is that family dynamic. Who rules? “Who do you think rules?” Probably your wife. “Probably.” Is that because he doesn’t have arguments? “No, it’s because she’s smarter than us.”
  One thing they’re not arguing about is what to watch on TV. “I don’t watch much television. I like the Sopranos and Game of Thrones. I like to watch the news. I like to know what’s going on.” Doesn’t that depend on what news channel he is watching? American TV news comes with a bias depending on what channel it’s on.
  “It’s not really that hard. First of all, don’t believe anything Trump says. The opposite of what he says is going to be the truth. It’s pretty easy. I have a very full life and honestly, TV is not high on my priority list.”
  Would he do more TV if it didn’t take 6 months out of his life? “It depends on the script. The selling point on this for me was the script and this script is fabulous. They had to send me 6 episodes before I would commit to it. I don’t think there are bad guys here. They are all living and breathing and working through their issues. It’s very well written like that. It gives you a dream space. I’ve never met a person who is simple so the more time you spend with someone the more levels you’re going to find and certainly having 8 hours with these people you’re going to know layers of their being and their dreams.”
  How was it working for the BBC? Were they cheap? “I never experienced them as a corporation, just as a production. It was the same as making an independent movie.”
  It’s been 11 years since Nights in Rodante (2008), his last studio movie which was huge box office ($84 million) but critically panned. These das he’s not been attracted to studio movies at all. 
  “I make the same kind of movies I’ve always made but the studios don’t make them anymore but they make them independently.”
  By this I think he means the studios make movies ruled by CGI aimed at the teenage male market. I read at one point that the studios had been asked not to use Gere because their money-making Chinese counterparts didn’t want him in China because of his pro Dalai Lama, anti-China politics?
  “No, it’s more complex than that. China has a system for foreign films that can play in China. Chinese distributors want to have the big blockbuster CGI movies. Successful box office movies. That’s the highest priority. I don’t make those kind of movies so whatever their issues are with me politically – and they have issues with me – it’s irrelevant because it doesn’t change the kind of movies I make and has no effect on me whatsoever because I don’t make movies they would be buying.”
  He’s putting lots of black pepper and rock salt into the olive oil and we’re dipping our bread in. We order ravioli with butternut squash and walnuts. I ask for extra cheese. Gere advises I won’t need it. He’s of the ‘less is more, simple is best’ school of thought and I’m ‘bring me more cheese’. He is of course right. Our pasta is good. “Delicate but filling.”
  Gere tells me, “I’m not in the city that much. Mostly I’m in the country.” He has a hotel in Bedford, upstate New York.
  “It was fun to take a building that was falling apart and that’s been various inns and rooming houses. It was built in the 1760s when the British burnt down most of Bedford but not that. There are 8 rooms and a yoga loft.” 
  He’s not intending to branch out to a chain of hotels or being a hotelier as a back up career. Not that he knows what he’s got coming up work wise.
  “I went through a period of making back to back difficult films which I loved. I’m reading things. I’ll see what touches me.”
  Perhaps the arrival of the new baby means it’s a good time not to be working? “Life is work so one is always working but maybe not working with a camera in your face. The pressure of having a camera in your face every day it’s not natural and it takes a bit of getting used to. It takes a lot out of anybody.” 
  And now he wants to be a hands-on daddy? “Oh yes. I’m there.”
  In an interview he gave many years ago he said, “I reacted to fame like an animal, I ran and hid from it.” Does he remember that?
  “Sure. I don’t think many people are built to be scrutinised over and over again all day long, except maybe Trump. I think what maybe problematic with him is the extreme narcissism. He’s a train wreck so you want to watch a train wreck. That’s what he trades in.”
  Why does he think people were so compelled to watch him to make him want to run like an animal? He was never visibly a train wreck. Maybe the idea was to goad him into causing one to happen? 
  “It doesn’t matter. These are small things now. I see them in a different perspective to how I saw them then. Then it was with a young man’s energy. I’ve been around for a long time so I’ve seen a lot and these things don’t throw me anymore. My reaction was to have the animal response of fleeing. Now I just work. People don’t realise that but what an actor does is work, not play. It is creative but the concentration is hard, the hours are hard, it’s taxing emotionally and psychologically. You have to be continually breaking through stupid stuff to find the honesty. It’s not easy work and I love it because it uses every bit of me. My heart, my soul, whatever I’ve got.”
  I’m relaxed enough to mop up my sauce with my bread while I just feel happy to admire the man sitting opposite me. However much he downplays it, he’s still a striking presence. Was he pleased or horrified to be trapped in the sexiest man alive peg? 
  “I’m not trapped, not pegged. Other people may be, but not me. I just work, that’s what I do.”
  Nothing I’ve said or done seems to irritate him even though I have been irritating. Did he work on being so calm? “I was fortunate early on. I was searching, a natural human process to make sense of it all. I had the instinct to search for an answer and I was very fortunate that I was able to find Buddhism and find great teachers. I’m very fortunate that I’m able to devote my life to these daily teachings. If you do the practise you get the results.”
  He is the living proof. “No, I’m not. The Dalai Lama is. But I’m doing good. It’s not a magic trick. It’s doing the work. There is no other thing for us to do in this lifetime than work on ourselves.”
  His life affirming audience with the Dalai Lama was “maybe 35 years ago”. How was it? “Everyone’s expectation is you’re meeting the Dalai Lama. He’s going to go ‘everything’s going to be alright.’ It doesn’t work that way. I was so impressed by his utter simplicity and skill in dealing with me. He got into the deep layers of who I was but not in a Shamanistic or magical way, just simply. One can feel the hard-won wisdom, the way you would with a great college professor. They’ve worked on themselves. And the other side is about open-hearted compassion and empathy. It’s not just about feeling altruistic.”
  Empathy is a skill set. “Empathy can be primitive. Babies have it. If one starts crying, they all start crying. One laughs, they all do that. But that doesn’t take you very far. Wisdom starts to kick in and you start to feel ‘my emotions aren’t much different than the emotions of this person’. What am I going to do with that? I’m going to make a commitment that I’m going to remove the suffering from that person and develop myself to the point where my ego is quite small. Then I really know how to help someone else. It becomes spontaneous.”
  For instance, when I arrived in this restaurant exasperated, panicking, angry, embarrassed, anxious, he became like the therapy dog I met in Minneapolis airport. Bella the golden retriever was on hand to calm stressed, delayed passengers. He’s taken my anxiousness away and I’m left feeling something mystical.
  How did an interview over lunch with Richard Gere become neo nirvana? “It makes it easier, doesn’t it? Just let it go.” I’m seeing him now with a sign above his head. ‘Pet Me’. “How nice…The Dalai Llama gets up at 3.30 every day and works his mind.
  I get up at 4.30/5.00 to work on my mind.”
  Shall we have dessert? “I am a dessert person but I don’t usually have any for lunch.” Nonetheless, I order a Tiramisu to share. “I have to pick up my wife so I can’t be late.”
  He met Alejandra four and a half years ago in Italy. Was it one of those instant love at first sights? “Instant from my side. I instantly became happy just looking at her. It was one of those powerful things.” Has this ever happened to him before? “Yes – I’ve been married three times – but it didn’t happen with the kind of power this one was. But I do remember the first time I met each of my wives. I’m very lucky.”
  And even though things may not have ended well with Crawford and Lowell, he doesn’t hold onto any toxicity. He simply says, “I’m very lucky.”

Dennis Quaid (London Sunday Times Magazine, December 2, 2018)

Chrissy Iley & Dennis Quaid
Chrissy Iley & Dennis Quaid

I meet Dennis Quaid in The Village recording studio, West LA. Every rock God from Tom Petty to Robert Plant seems to have made their greatest albums there.  Quaid, 64, is recording his first album with his band The Sharks. He jokes, “The oldest rock band ever to make a debut album.”
      Everybody says it but it’s true. He’s handsome.  Tall, ripped, good cheekbones and good hair and inquiring eyes – the kind that make you feel he’s interested in what you have to say. He’s in skinny jeans and a dark tee. 
    He was born in Houston, Texas. Grew up wanting to be a cowboy or an astronaut. As an actor he could and was indeed both. His breakout leading role was in The Big Easy in 1986 famous for his sexy chemistry with Ellen Barkin. He was Jerry Lee Lewis in Great Balls of Fire (1989), played opposite Meryl Streep in Postcards from The Edge (1990) and was Doc Holliday in Wyatt Earp (1994).
     He disappeared for a while as a leading man but returned in a Globe winning performance as the closet gay in Todd Haynes Far From Heaven (2002). He was in last year’s super weepy surprise hit A Dog’s Purpose.
     And he’s next up reprising his role in the Sci-Fi TV series Fortitude (Sky), set 400 miles from the North Pole – the safest place on earth that suddenly becomes violent, dangerous and spooky.  
     “I really loved it,” he says of the extreme temperature. “I’ve been colder in New York.” In the last series his character (Michael Lennox) went a little crazy. After obsessively trying to find a cure for his wife’s far too rapidly progressing wasting disease, she dies.  He becomes undone with grief and starts drinking.  “How about that…”
     “I connected to my character because we’re both extremely bull headed.”
     Astrologically he’s not a bull, he’s an Aries and I know this because he’s the same day as my dad and Hugh Hefner – April 9. He and Hef had a birthday party together once.
     “It wasn’t really a joint birthday party. It was his party which I was at. It just happened to be my birthday.” He’s exactly the type who would never miss a Hef birthday bash.
     “April 9th people are filled with adrenaline. They are tenacious and optimistic. They run before they think. They are comfortable in extremes. The middle ground is…” (he pulls a face) “we don’t want that.”
    Quaid calls himself a romantic – has been married 3 times, divorced 3 times. The first to actress P J Soles (1978-1983), most famously to Meg Ryan (1991-2001), most recently to Texas real estate agent Kimberly Buffington (2004) and his divorce finalised just a few weeks ago.  
     “I think what divorce does is it takes away your identity. It’s like a death. Your identity is wrapped up in the relationship and if it’s not going to be there…” His eyes are searching, troubled. He finishes the sentence, “who are you?”
     Isn’t it death of a family member and moving house that are supposed to cause the most stress to the human psyche?
     “And then there’s divorce which is death and moving. The birth of a child is another stressful situation. Not just because things could go wrong (his ten-day old twins were given a thousand times stronger dosage of blood thinner by mistake and the babies nearly died) but also because you have to redefine who you are.”
    Does he mean he was no longer Dennis but daddy? “Yes, my son Jack is 26 now. I was 38 when he was born and I realised my life was over. I could no longer have any guilt free experiences… I’m exaggerating but I am responsible for someone else in the world and that’s never going to go away. My mother (91) still worries about me.”
     She texts him nearly every day. His mother Juanita was in real estate and his father William Rudy an electrician.
     “He passed away when he was 63 in 1987 of a heart-attack. And I’m 64 so when I had my 63rd birthday it was a psychological moment – it definitely ran through my mind then I forgot about it until one night a few months ago I was having trouble sleeping and it hit me. My dad’s birthday was November 21st and he died on February 8th and I started adding up the days and I was exactly that age. Then the next day I realised I was older than he ever made. I made it past. I intend to live until I am 130.”
     How did he redefine himself when he had the twins Thomas Boone and Zoe Grace born via a surrogate in 2007?
     “It was very different. You have both of them coming at you at once. The good part is that they each have a playmate and the hard part is that you have to do everything double.” They are now 10.
     Did having twins change the relationship with his then wife? “Having kids always changes your relationship.”
     He says of Meg Ryan “We are friends.” I’m sure that wasn’t always the case. At the time of their separation in 2000 they were the biggest couple in Hollywood. They were at the peak of their careers. When they lost each-other they lost grasp on that, with only Quaid regaining acclaim and ratings.  America’s sweetheart got puffy and pillow faced with fillers. Her currency redundant. Quaid stayed himself, determined, chiselled, handsome. He says he works out a lot because, “I’m vain. The industry’s vain.”  Plus remember, he’s planning on living to 130
     The most unusual place he had sex is in an elevator. “Is that really unusual?” he muses. “It was a slow elevator. It was in Quebec.  It must be the French influence. It was the elevator going to my own apartment so it wasn’t like a public building.”
     That makes it a little more boring. “Well, not for me.” But there wasn’t the excitement that someone could call the elevator and the doors would open. “It’s true. I knew the other floors were currently unoccupied and no one was coming in but she didn’t,” he laughs. Was this a while ago? “Not too long.” Out of politeness I stifle my giggle because in the next room is his girlfriend of 2 years, French-Canadian model Santa Auzina, 31. She’s tall, blonde, endless legs, tiny lycra shorts, tiny vest, smiles a lot like nothing bothers her.  We all wish we had that smile. She’s documented their love, their soulmate status with many Instagram posts of their exotic holiday destinations as a couple.
     I think Quaid enjoys talking about his mistakes.  We start from the movies he turned down.
     “I turned down Big. I hit myself over that. At the time there were three other movies with a similar storyline and Big was going to be second but it wasn’t. I should have taken Big.”
     He also missed out on An Officer and a Gentleman. “I didn’t turn it down. I was on an around the world trip with my wife. In those days you could buy a ticket for $1000. My then wife PJ Soles and I were going around the world. We were literally half way round, in New Delhi, when my agent called and said, ‘The part is yours. You just have to come back. Taylor Hackford wants you’. We cut short the vacation. We flew back to LA and either they had decided while I was en route they wanted Richard Gere… I did not get the part.”
     Did that contribute to his first divorce – cutting short the big vacay? “No, they even said they would send me back on my vacation if it didn’t work out. They didn’t.” 
    Curiously, he’s already played several presidents. Why does he think he’s such a good presidential candidate?
     “You get to a certain age and you can play presidents if you have that trustworthy/untrustworthy look.”
     So far, he’s been Clinton, Bush, and he’s just about to be Regan. “I was Bill Clinton in A Special Relationship (2010) when Michael Sheen was Tony Blair and a Bush like character (President Staton) in American Dreamz (2006). I was offered George W Bush for the Katrina film but I turned it down because of conflicts in schedule. Regan is a very interesting person. So many stories that people who were close to him didn’t really know him.”
     He became friends with Clinton. “I spent a weekend at the White House when I was married to Meg. We went there when we were invited to the King of Spain’s state dinner.”   (In a frighteningly convincing Clinton impersonation he continues) ‘You’ve got to stay, you’ve got to stay. We’re gonna play some golf.’”
    “Meg went home, Hillary was out of town so it was just me and Bill. We played golf, we got in the Presidents Limousine and had a couple of Subway sandwiches. At the time I was better at golf but he would have been a much better golfer if he wasn’t President.
     “He was the smartest guy I’ve ever met and very kind to me. When it was announced that Meg and I were getting a divorce he called me from Airforce One. He was over the Atlantic right after Palestinian talks had collapsed. I don’t know how he found me but he did. He just wanted to let me know he was thinking of me.”
     The week after our interview he is off to Canada for a sequel to A Dog’s Purpose. He’s heard the stories that people who never cry dissolved during that movie. It’s sentimental, it’s about dogs who are devoted, who love you and then they die but the love goes on.
     Quaid has always been a dog person. Grew up with them. At the moment he has a miniature English bulldog named Peaches. 
     “Just one. I had two French Bulldogs die in the same year. One natural causes as they say, he went into the kids bathroom which he never went into, lay down and had a stroke or heart attack. The other drowned in the pool. It was really hard to take. They weren’t brothers, they were two years apart but they loved each other.”
     We wonder could the second one have thrown himself into the pool on purpose? He nods, “It could have been. If you’re going to have pets you’re going to have death.”
     In the dog movie the dog is reincarnated and comes back several times as a different type of dog. Quaid has always been interested in various kinds of spiritual thinking – he doesn’t like organised religion.      
     “When I was 11 I was baptised into the Baptist church. Then I was re-baptised in the Ganges river by a friend of mine who was a preacher. When I went round the world my question was ‘Who is God to you?’ I’ve read the bible twice, the Koran, the Baghavad Gita. I’m a seeker. I used to call myself a Zen Baptist. Basically, I’m a Christian but everyone goes through a crisis of faith. I have crisis all the time… but some of them are champagne crisis meaning that’s a pretend crisis.”
     The crisises in his life have been quite documented, especially the divorces and cocaine addiction, yet more recently he had a new addiction – the Swiffer.
     “Yes, it’s true. I got obsessed with dusting with the Swiffer. It was right after the divorce in my single life. I would get into bed and my feet were just black from everything.  I didn’t like that feeling so I discovered the Swiffer. It works quickly and it picks up all the dust. Doesn’t that say something about my champagne crisis?”
     It says that he wasn’t comfortable without someone taking care of the home. It says that the dust in the apartment and the black feet symbolised that he was alone. He still drinks champagne and other forms of alcohol. He gave it up for 10 years as part of the process of giving up cocaine in the 90s.
     “Then I started drinking again because alcohol was never my problem. I never liked the feeling of being drunk.”
    Alcohol high and cocaine high are opposites.
     “I would do coke and I would use alcohol to come down.”
    What about doing coke so he didn’t feel drunk?
    “That was the deal back then so I had to break the cycle.”
     He reminisces. “I liked coke. I liked it to go out.  I missed it for quite a while. I used to grind my teeth for four years. I was doing about 2 grams a day. I was lucky. I had one of those white light experiences where I saw myself being dead and losing everything I had worked for my whole life so I put myself in rehab. I had a band, basically Bonnie Raitt’s backing band and the night after we got a record deal we broke up. (Like in The Commitments) The next day I was in rehab.” 
     “I took anti-depressants back in the day around coming off cocaine because there’s a depression that goes on. It’s a temporary thing. I don’t think they were ever intended to be taken on a long-term basis.”
   When he was coming off cocaine did he want to eat a lot? “Yes, I wanted to sleep too. I suddenly discovered sleeping.”
   He does eat. I’ve just seen him bolt a giant sandwich down in less than 30 seconds. “I’ve always had a high metabolism. I get high from exercising. I really do. I think it does what all those anti-depressants are supposed to do.”
     When he played Doc Holliday in Wyatt Earp, he lost 44 pounds because the character was wasting away from tuberculosis.
     “I went down to 138 pounds and it took me a year to put it back on because when you get into that compulsive obsessive behaviour of not eating it does strange things to your mind and it took me a while to get over that self-image of myself. I got over it and now I don’t follow any diet and I like cooking. My signature dish? A Louisiana seafood gumbo.”
    “But I also like caviar. Would you like some? I’ve just bought some. It’s here in the studio fridge.” I decline to join the caviar party although any partying with Quaid has got to be fun. I am impressed with his self-confidence, his charisma.  He has not had work done he has just worked on himself.  For a minute I am confused but he reminds me, at my request, of some chronology.  He was not doing drugs or alcohol went he met Ryan and they were married for 9 years.
    “I was single for several years and I met Kimberly.  We were married in 2005 and our divorce finally wound up a couple of months ago.”  The divorce with Kimberly went on and off a few times and the only constant was his band.
    He formed the Sharks 18 years ago. He tells me he was always a performer.  Always a song writer.
    “The Sharks are having a great time. We’ve done about 40 gigs this year. After this last divorce I’ve really got back into music again. I was going to be a musician before I was an actor.”
     Has anyone famous ever recorded his songs? “No, that would be an ideal thing. I’ve been going to Nashville quite a lot recently. It’s my favourite city. It’s such a collegiate feeling. Everyone is there for each other.”
     We talk about the possibility of living in Nashville. “I tried to move back to Texas (Austin) because I grew up in Houston. But when I moved back I found myself meandering around the house. I didn’t factor in that I’d already spent 35 years in Los Angeles and your friends and the places you haunt… so I moved back.”
     “For 30 years I had a ranch in Montana. It was beautiful. I used to spend 4 months of the year there but then it dwindled down with work and whenever I’d go there I’d find for the first week I’d just be fixing things but I felt too guilty to go anywhere else so I decided to sell it.”
     “I grew up wanting to be a cowboy but as I grew up in Houston – a space city and I wanted to be an astronaut. Gordo Cooper was my favourite astronaut because he was a bit rock n roll and had a cool name. Gordo is short for Gordon. I read his book and said if they’re ever making a movie I want to play him. And I did. I met him and he put me in touch with a flight instructor. I’ve got my pilots license so now I can fly jets. I’m learning to fly a helicopter. It’s like riding a magic carpet… I love to travel. I just hate to leave but it’s always really great to arrive.”
     He does enjoy simple pleasures such as calf roping. “Calf roping is where you’re on a horse and another person is on the left and on the right the calf is let out of the chute. He runs, you catch the horns and the other person catches the foot. It was a skill learned when they gathered cows for branding but you get timed for it. 
    “Horses are such sweet animals. Such intimacy when you are on a horse, especially bareback. He can feel your heartbeat and you can feel his.  They are very sensitive animals, not predators. They always look around for danger.”
     He mimics a horse with eyes doing a panorama.
    He shows me pictures of the Icelandic horses he encountered when filming Fortitude and teams of dogs pulling his sledge. He explains that the dogs are ranked fastest at the front and get competitive with one another and that the horses are climbers. 
    “About 3,000 people live there and 5,000 polar bears although I didn’t see a single one. It doesn’t snow the whole year but the snow blows around. They don’t have immigration or tariffs so it reminds you of the old West.”
    So once again a dream come true – an Arctic cowboy. He enjoyed the extreme of Fortitude where they had 5 days of almost total darkness. “I don’t know if there will be another series. If you’re an actor in a series you want to keep it going but maybe the golden age of many seasons is over.”
   He doesn’t seem to have the slightest insecurity about that. 
     Santa is patiently waiting in another room. I wonder was it a conflict with his recently ex-wife?
     “No, it wasn’t a conflict. I met her very close after my ex and I were separated. I was just going to be single and that was just going to be it. I was going to be stone cold Steve Austin when it came to love and then Santa came along. It was like….”
     She replaced the Swiffer?
     “She’s better than a Swiffer, that’s for sure. She was not going to let it go. Couldn’t help it.  So, I had to go with it.  I am a romantic. I like being in a relationship, I really do. It’s fun to be single up to a point but I like being in a relationship. I also like having kids around, as annoying as they can be sometimes, I am a family orientated person.”
     Is he planning more kids?
     “I’m not planning kids. I don’t rule anything out.”
    And that’s how Dennis Quaid gets to be Dennis Quaid… he works out every day and he doesn’t rule anything out.

Rob Lowe (London Sunday Times Magazine, November 25, 2018)

Rob Lowe and Chrissy Iley
Rob Lowe and Chrissy Iley

I’m waiting for Rob Lowe at the Polo Lounge, Beverley Hills Hotel. I’m sat in his favourite table, corner banquette outside. The best spot “for people watching”. When he arrives, the staff perform bowing rituals as if he is royalty.  As indeed he is – Hollywood royalty, having started off in the 1983 era defining Francis Ford Coppola film The Outsiders and proceeding to become a high-octane member of the Brat Pack with Robert Downey Jr, Sean and Chris Penn, Emilio Estevez and Charlie Sheen after his role in St Elmo’s Fire.

After a decade of excess (of everything – alcohol, sex) he found his niche proper as Press Secretary Sam Seaborn in The West Wing.

There’s been a profusion of TV series including Code Black and the much loved Parks and Rec, a Globe nomination for his The Grinder and for his role as Dr Jack Startz (creepy cosmetic surgeon) in Beyond The Candalabra and a whole new career as an author.   His memoirs Stories I Only Tell My Friends and Love Life are both wonderful reads (both NY Times Best Sellers) with just the right amount of fun, self-deprecation and revelation.

In the flesh he is so handsome you gasp – perfect, chiselled, jaw droppingly handsome. His skin is firm and tan, his slinky body ripples under his dark blue T shirt. His eyes are cornflower blue. Not surprisingly he’s got a skincare range called Profile. Who wouldn’t want to have his skin?

“I’m so hungry,” he announces as soon as he sits down. While you might assume Rob Lowe’s hungry would be for a piece of steamed fish, it’s a burger he’s craving with fries and we share a Macarthy salad to start. It’s an enormous chopped salad involving very bad things.

He’s about to leave for London where on December 1 he will perform his one man show Stories I Only Tell My Friends. He says he’s written it instead of a third book. He’s also going to be filming Wild Bill, a crime drama for ITV set in the Midlands.

When the chunky salad comes it seems as if he’s hungry on another level, an emotional one. Is that a tear glistening in his eye?

He tells me his three-year old dog, Jack a German short haired pointer has just died. He’s in town for meetings. His home is in Santa Barbra and everything happened so quickly he couldn’t get back to say goodbye. “By yesterday he was blind and having seizures. They think he was poisoned. I saw him eating mushrooms in the yard… I pulled him off but I must have been too late… He was such a f****** good boy. I’ll show you a picture of him.”

He shows me the dog – sensitive eyed, brown and white speckled.  Lowe loves his dogs. He has another, a Jack Russell called David. He took David to see an animal communicator.

“She would give voice to the animal such as ‘David wants you to know he’s working very hard and he doesn’t feel he’s appreciated.’ David is 17 and every time I go away I think somethings going to happen to him…but it was this guy. He was so happy and I’ve never had a dog that would play fetch with me all day long. David doesn’t do fetch but David was a surf professional. He would surf with his own life preserver on and a dog board but he gave it up.”

Would Lowe ever give up surfing? “Hell no. I’m into it more than ever.”  Lowe is into many things. He’s the ultimate multi tasker. Acting, writing, surfing. There’s an energy from him that’s nothing to do with his high caffeine consumption. It’s an inner drive. It’s electric. It’s palpable. He’s used to turning things around. There have been quite a few life changing choices that have gone on for Lowe but more of that later.

“You know all dogs go to heaven.”

My sunglasses fall off my head because the arms are too wide. He tries to fix them. He’s got such elegant hands, long fingers, pink nail beds, an intricate wedding ring and a wizardy looking gold ring with a diamond triangle, both made by his wife Sheryl (nee Berkoff), the jewellery designer who sells at Bergdorfs and Niemans. High end stuff for high end people.

Does the wizardy one have magic powers?

“In a way. It’s the sign for being in recovery.” I’ve never seen anyone with a recovery style ring as beautiful as this one but I’ve never really seen anyone that’s been in recovery for 20 years. He’s passionate about being in recovery. He said if he’d been on the booze he wouldn’t have achieved anything and right now his days are very full.

“This is a very famous salad you know. It feels very Jackie Collins in the best possible way.” Indeed, it was her favourite salad. “I made it into one of her books once. It was a career highlight. It read ‘he walked into the room and he looked like Rob Lowe.’” I tell him no one looks like Rob Lowe. “You’re nice to say it,” and he smiles, happy to have a compliment and I’m happy that he’s not one of these people who say, ‘no, no, surely not.’

The waitress delivers a candle even though it’s daylight to help the flies go away. They noticed from afar that the flies were bothering him. “Flies love me. I hate flies. My wife hates flies. Sheryl Lowe loses it over flies. Once we were in Hawaii. It’s a beautiful day and she says, ‘these flies have red faces.’ There’s nobody more quotable than Sheryl Lowe. I’ve had more people offer to make a reality series out of her than…”

Wait a minute. I thought you already did a reality series with your boys (Matthew 25 and John Owen 23). “Both smart, cool guys. The Lowe Files was us on the road exploring supernatural legends. A very different kind of reality. I loved it and I’m proud of it but if we had the traditional cameras following us everywhere it would be the biggest thing because my family is so nuts…My wife is such an original. Her business is growing faster than she can keep up with. It’s very inspiring to watch but not surprising. One of the reasons I fell in love with her when I was dating everybody under the sun was that she had her own business, her own work life, a tremendous work ethic and she was so driven. And that really comes through in everything she’s accomplished which is awesome.”

There was a time when Rob Lowe really was dating everybody who was A lister ready. And why not? He was young and gorgeous and available. He dated Natasha Kinski, Demi Moore, Princess Stephanie and Melissa Gilbert and admitted to using MTV like a home shopping network. If he saw a sexy dancer on the latest Sting video he would get her number.

The opening chapter of his book Stories I Only Tell My Friends is about how he lived in awe of John Kennedy Junior – his heritage, the fact that all of his girlfriends loved him and when John Kennedy Jr saw that Lowe was married to Sheryl and expressed surprise ‘How did you settle down?’ and Lowe recommended that the gorgeous blonde now chatting with his wife was one that Kennedy should not let go, soon after Kennedy married Caroline.  Just after he put Lowe on the cover of his magazine George he was killed in the plane crash.

But how did Lowe do it? How did the most handsome man in the world make monogamy interesting?

“When it came down to it, what kind of woman do you want?  There were the Princess Stephanie’s who sleep till 5.00pm, wake up, dinner, no less than 15 people a night, a club, repeat, repeat, repeat. Or there’s the Sheryl Lowe’s who come from nothing and own their own house by the time they are 20.”

We realise he’s missing a pickle and the pickle arrives immediately. Not sure he’ll get this kind of service in the Midlands where he goes to shoot Wild Bill.

“I play an American law enforcement analyst whose father was a cop who never wanted to be ground down by the system. He went to Stanford, got his degree in algorithms and still ended up in law enforcement. He has a 13-year old daughter who’s struggling since her mom has died. He’s been headhunted by the police force in Boston UK to come and take care of the largest crime rate per capita in the UK.”

We’re not sure if the crime rate statistic is fact or fiction but in 2018 the Lincolnshire area crime rate was higher than average and in 2016 it was the highest in the UK.

“It’s a classic fish out of water – cosmopolitan American comes to the Midlands. It’s a different case each week but each case has a direct correlation to the growth and discovery of the character. It’s an interesting hybrid in the way that you could only do it in the UK because it’s a character driven piece with procedural elements. He’s a fly off at the mouth, say anything, hot tempered guy and he runs foul of the skittish British sensibility…”

But first up is the one man show. I tell him I can’t wait to see his show live. It has stand up comedy elements and Q&A. When Lowe endured of those infamous VH1 roasts, no one enjoyed it more than him. He loves a bit of self-roasting. Roasts are scary, people insult you but he was ‘bring it on’. He is thrilled by self-deprecation.

“I’m so excited to see how it plays in the UK. It’s predominantly comedy. I give myself a pretty good beating.”

Why does he do that? Pause.

“All my heroes – and I say this in no way self reverentially – were big movie stars who owned it, had tons of charisma and didn’t shy away from it and were unbelievably self-deprecating and self-aware. They got the joke yet they were also being very serious. So it’s in that spirit that I write my books.”

The books flow. They are serious without taking themselves seriously.

“This is like having a third book that I can continue to amend. A living, breathing thing. My reference and inspiration for the first book was David Niven. Niven had a way of writing that delivered everything you want from a celebrity memoir.”

Humour, revelation and flow. “And self-deprecation. Get in, get out, nobody gets hurt. There’s a substance to his book like when you’re done with it, it’s not disposable.”

And I would say it’s the same of Lowes, which opens with the John Kennedy Jr moments and goes through his uncomfortable family set up (parents divorced when he was 4) The gregarious father was absent and his mother, a teacher, loved language.

Born in Dayton, Ohio he was a working actor at 8, in repertory at 15. There’s a punchy chapter about his excitement at being chosen for The Outsiders and his anguish when he saw most of his scenes had been cut.

Of course, it’s a compelling read – what eighties fame felt like from the inside and how it slipped away. He doesn’t slip away from his infamous incident the night  before the Democratic national convention. He was there at 24 supporting Presidential candidate Michael Dukakis. He took two girls that he met in a nightclub back to his hotel room. His age had been checked rigidly. He assumed theirs had but one was only 16. Their encounter was filmed and the result was the very first leaked sex tape. The 16-year olds mother brought a civil suit against Lowe who ended up with a fine and 20 hours community service.

In the book he says that that night “would set in motion events that would ultimately, through a painful, long and circuitous path, lead me to greater happiness and fulfilment than I could ever have hoped for”

In the book he describes his return to TV in the West Wing and all of thats nuances…

“Writing a book for me was like writing an album. Do I want to open with a hit or the radio single? When Vanity Fair excerpted it, they opened with the radio single, the story about the casting of The Outsiders. All of my life I wanted to be on the cover of Vanity Fair. I never got it for my acting but my writing. For me Kennedy is the lead single (the hit). I also looked at having too many ballads, too many epic songs and that’s how I edited the book. When I do the show live, it’s the live album version as opposed to the studio version.

“What I wear has been an evolution. I started with a crisp suit, no tie, now it’s black jeans, black work boots, grey T shirt, leather jacket. It went from movie star to rock star. I base my entrance on the Rolling Stones. One of their nineties tours where all of a sudden there was a flash and they were just there. I don’t have a flash but I’m just there. It doesn’t feel like a show. It feels like a chat. The best part is the section where people ask questions.”

Are there any questions that he dreads? “No. the more unusual and off topic, the better the show is.” I wonder if US audiences talk about the sex tape, now 25 years old.

“I’ve done hundreds of Q&A’s with lots of questions each night and that never comes up.” I wonder if the British audiences are different in that they love the whiff of scandal, the idea of the beautiful being taken down into an ugly world, whereas American audiences prefer to raise people up.

“I don’t have any qualms about anything in my life. Everything’s in my book.” And it is. Those events are intimately depicted. He doesn’t shy away from it. It’s Lowe’s belief, if you front it out it makes it interesting, not dark and it adds to your charisma.

“I get a lot of West Wing questions and I love that. A lot of Parks and Rec questions.” His co-star in that, Rashida Jones referred to him as a benevolent narcissist. He beams when I bring it up, or is that the double expressos arriving?

“The show’s good for all ages. Kids who’ve rediscovered The Outsiders, middle aged women, maybe their husbands, predominantly female but not exclusively which is why you never know what subject they’re interested in.”

His career has been diverse, perhaps that’s the clue to its longevity. “I think you’ve got to have the goods. That’s prerequisite. Then you’ve got to be decently fortunate and pick the right things. Very few people can get it right every time.”

He says if he’d still been drinking, “It would have been over for me for sure. First of all, because of the pace of which I live my life… I did two years of a gruelling show called Code Black, a medical drama, then I went into directing, starring and editing a remake of The Bad Seed. And then I went to Africa for 6 weeks and shot a Netflix romantic comedy movie – Christmas in the Wild – it’s me and Kristin Davis. It’s in the vein of Eat, Pray, Love but in Africa. And then I partnered up with the people who made American Ninja Warrior and we made a version of it – the ultimate obstacle course but for the mind. The most technically complex set every built for a competition series. And my one man show – doing that is as close to being a rock star as I’ll ever get.

“Bradley Cooper’s done very well this year. Everyone’s raving about A Star Is Born and it’s a movie about addiction.”

Does that mean he’s slightly feeling it should have been him up there with the Kris Kristofferson beard, singing, talking amorously to Lady Gaga’s nose. “No.”  He says he’s too busy getting on with what he has done to think about what he didn’t do.

His Bad Seed movie for Lifetime TV was a remake of the film noir about a child serial killer. He says, “I’m really proud of it. My books, my one man show and The Bad Seed are the most personal things I’ve ever done because they’re mine and I’m not for hire…”

He downs his double expresso. He once said he’d like to have an caffeine IV drip feed him. He corrects himself. “I love working with the great collaborators.”

The great collaborators of The West Wing tried to stop him getting the solo cover of George magazine which seems a bit mean because he was the name that got the show on TV in the first place. No one had heard of writer Aaron Sorkin back then.

“Sometimes you think you’re crazy and I think was it as intense as I remember? The other day somebody had me sign the cover of the first season DVD. I went to sign my picture and I couldn’t find my face because they’d put me in the back row even though I’m first billed in the show…That’s just mean.

“In all fairness the West Wing was so good it didn’t need me, but it needed me initially for people to pay attention to it and it needed me to get it on the air but after that the show was amazing, the writing was great and everybody was amazing. But everybody runs things differently. It was their show, they called it.”

I don’t think he’s losing any sleep over what happened in the nineties. I like the way he knows himself. Sure, he’s done a lot of work on himself but it’s not that. There’s no false modesty, there’s no self-aggrandisement. There is a love of language and a vivid imagination and a sense of separateness, of otherness and a need to communicate their very being. That usually comes from being an only child but he has a brother Chad.

He nods. “It’s interesting you say that. He was four years younger than me and four years is a big difference when you’re young, especially because from the time I was eight I knew what I wanted to do and every single thing in my life was seen through the lens of wanting to get where I wanted to get, even at eight. So that immediately puts you aside from everybody else.”

He was working in local theatre when he was eight and repertory when he was 15. “I was the breadwinner for the family because my dad paying child support was always a major trauma. He was a lawyer and my mother’s parents had some money. My family was solidly middle class.

But is he a benevolent narcissist?

“All my heroes are benevolent narcissists. Rashida also said that her father, Quincy Jones, is the Mount Rushmore of benevolent narcissists, so anything where I’m mentioned in the same sentence as Quincy, I’m in. There is the element with the stars that I look up to as being larger than life and being unashamed about it. They are approachable and down to earth. That combination is rare but it’s what I love.”

That’s part of the complexity that makes him charismatic. He is larger than life yet approachable and unashamed. And what’s also rare is a lasting marriage. He nods.

“I talk a lot about Sheryl in the show. If I do another version at some point, the show will be almost exclusively on me and my wife. When I talk about her the audience love it because it’s humanising. Everybody is either married, wants to be married or had a bad marriage. I have a long sequence about why it’s impossible to sleep in the same bed as my wife (don’t want to ruin his punchline here. It’s partly because she snores and partly because of her obsessive watching Family Feud 16 episodes a night).”

People want to know how does he make monogamy interesting?

“I do talk about that but a little elliptically. You need to know it’s going to be a struggle at times. I don’t believe it’s a natural arrangement in terms of nature. But in terms of society, in terms of happiness, health, wellbeing, in terms of success nothing beats it. People’s natural inclination is to have a devil on their shoulder saying ‘is this it? Is this the last first kiss I’ll ever have? Is this the last first butterflies I’ll ever have? Is this my last wild, crazy sex I’ll ever have? These are all the things that may or may not be true, that get in the way. The key to it all is the same thing that Alfred Hitchcock said when he was asked what was the key to a hit movie. ‘Casting’. And I was great at casting. Do you know the phrase the picker is broken?”

I’ve never heard that phrase – it means making bad choices. What if you let other people pick you?

“Sometimes I like to let the inertia of events make decisions for me because it takes the pressure off. I’ve done a lot of thinking on this about intimacy and sex, intimacy and love, intimacy and relationships and I’ve done a lot, a lot, a lot of work on it.”

Does he think that sexual intimacy and love intimacy can be the opposite? For instance, one can be intimate sexually with someone and not love that person and vice versa.

“Absolutely.  You’ve diagnosed the problem.  Many people have that problem and that’s why most people have a hard time with long term monogamy because it’s not easy, but the integration of that is where long term intimacy and long-term monogamy lives. I know this 100% to be true.”

There’s a glint in his cornflower blue eye. It’s not quite a tear. More a chink in his steadfastness. A chink that says he always knows the right thing but sometimes he struggles.

“Left to my own devices I’m right there with you but you have to work on these things. Relationships. And if you’re not willing to work it’s not going to happen. If you’re not willing to forgive it’s not going to happen. People want to die proudly on their sword and oftentimes there’s more dignity in forgiveness. People may be able to grow and change and work on themselves too and not make the same mistakes over and over.”

The sunlight catches the diamond triangle on the wizardy looking ring. Maybe being in recovery is part of the magic because people who are recovering alcoholics have been forced to rock bottom and are forced to talk openly about themselves and to themselves.

“Working on yourself is not fun. Worse than painful, it can be boring. But if I look at the lengths I used to go to to find some bad behaviour, I should be able to go to those lengths to make my life better.”

He has said that his rock bottom came when he decided to finish a bottle of tequila rather than go home to his dying grandfather. Of course, he would never do such a thing now but the fact that he once did makes him much more human.

He’s politically savvy too. Fascinated by the post Brexit world. He remembers, “watching as the vote came in and Christiane Amanpour practically vomiting and crying as the sun came up on Big Ben. There’s nothing worse than a foreigner weighing in on the affairs of another country. That said, I’m so interested. I think there’s a connection to people in the US who are feeling forgotten and ignored and who are really mad. I’m fascinated by all of it. When I was in Africa I was out of the cable news cycle. I had broken my addiction for news and I feel the better for it.”

I’m not sure if I believe that. He’s far too keen to talk about Richard Quest – British CNN newsman.

He’s looking forward to his time in post Brexit Britain because watching people and how things change interests him.

“I must say that London was a tough nut to crack. I remember vividly at the height of my teen idol phase walking the streets of London in the midday sun and it was crickets.  They were very slow to the party and I remember my 21-year old ego thinking what’s going on here? I was used to walking down the street having my clothes ripped off. I walked in London in anonymity.”

Really? No one ripped his clothes off?

“Well…..Well I have to go now.”

As he strides out through the Polo Lounge, every head turns to watch him and I’m sure he won’t walk in London in anonymity again.

Rob Lowe Stories I Only Tell My Friends – Royal Festival Hall. December 1, 19:30

Barbra Streisand (Weekend, November 24, 2018)

 

BarbraStreisand-Weekend-24Nov2018

Barbra Streisand at 76 has come up with an album of songs that she wrote as a protest against President Trump and his regime. It’s her first album of original songs for over a decade. The songs could be love songs although the album Walls is a mixture of love and anger.

She’s wearing slinky black flares, black suede boots, a black fluffy jumper and a vintage lace collar. Around her neck is a beautiful miniature of her now departed dog Sammy, a Coton du Tolear. The white curly fluffy dog went with her to every interview, every concert and recording session.

Streisand mourned her passing “as if it was a child.” Sammy had an “oddball personality,” so it could have been her actually genetic child. She identified with her intensely. So much so that two of her new dogs Miss Scarlet and Miss Violet are clones of Sammy and a third, Fanny is a distant cousin.

We meet in a studio just across the road from her house in Malibu – the one with the rose gardens and her collection of dolls houses. The dogs didn’t join us. “Because there are three of them and they would take over. The two dogs are made from Sammy. They’re her DNA. They are clones. This is the technique – how they make clones which is used in cancer research. The pet fund wrote me a letter that said thank you for doing this. Cancer is very prevalent and growing in both cats and dogs because of the pet food industry, the pesticides etc… Nobody had to die to make a clone. They took a cell from the inside of Sammy’s cheek and another from the outside of her tummy right before she died. You don’t know if you’re going to get a dog. You can get none, you can get five and I got two.”

Presumably she went via the clone route because she loved Sammy so much she wanted to replicate her so are the puppies like her?

“Not in personality but they look just like her. They’re curly haired like her. The breeder told me she was a rarity because she was a runt. If these dogs are for shows they have straight hair.  Sammy was at my last show in New York – it was such a rarity to get a curly haired one so in order to have a curly haired dog I had to clone Sammy.”

It’s easy to conjure the image of Streisand with her tight curly perm in A Star Is Born. Perhaps Sammy reminded her of herself in that. Samantha is now around her neck close to her heart forever. I tell her I have my cat Mr Love’s fur in my locket.

“Uh huh. I have a lock of her hair in my other locket.” It’s a bonding moment. We have both got dead pets round our neck. “It’s unconditional love,” she says “and you know love in sickness and health, curly or straight.

Momentarily she seems vulnerable. You want to reach out to her, hug her even. You feel you know her. You’ve known her songs all your life and her voice has touched you, slipped inside of you so easily. But despite our bonding she bristles as my arm touches her by accident. It goes back to her mother. She wasn’t a hugger and was always very critical, yet somehow despite this she found self-belief and drive. She’s been a star for a lifetime yet still she doesn’t like being photographed. She changes the subject back to the record.

“You’ve heard the album,” she says, eager to talk about it. Every time I meet her I think it’s going to be the last tour, the last show, the last album yet this work feels very fresh. It has a new and different energy to it. You can tell that she’s written a lot of the songs and the ones she hasn’t she sings in a new way.  Her voice is fierce, not thin, not old. It cracks into your heart. Oddly even though it’s not about a man woman love struggle it’s passionate.

“That’s exactly right. That’s what it felt like creating it, that it had a different energy.” She has written or co-written 7 original songs which appear on the album including Walls – that keep you in as well as keep you out.  It’s a plea to unite a divided country. It’s about physical walls and emotional walls.

The single Don’t Lie to Me has the lyrics “How do you win if we all lose?” She sings it like a diva. The truest sense of the word.

She includes the Burt Bacharach classic What the World Needs Now Is Love, originally written as a Vietnam protest song but equally valid if not more so today. The album ends with Happy Days. It’s a song she’s sung often at the end of her concerts and also for the Clintons at President Clinton’s inauguration and as a celebration of democracy. This time it’s sung with an irony so piquant you can feel her tears.

Lady Liberty is about “how they came from different lands, different religions, languages and culture, all seeing the American dream. The subject of immigration is complex and requires deep contemplation not knee jerk reactions. Now if you look at her face you’ll see tears falling from Lady Liberty’s eyes. Love Is Never Wrong is about love being the most powerful force in the universe. It transcends race, religion and sexual orientation – something I’ve always believed everyone has the right to love whoever they want to.  I tell her the record is raw.

“Raw,” she nods. “I’ve never thought of that word for it.” Indeed, you don’t normally associate raw with Streisand. You think smooth or perhaps silky and soaring, definitely comfortable but not this. I tell her when I first heard the album, it was the first time I felt relieved that I wasn’t on Prozac because I was able to feel the full experience.

“Oh!” she says excited now. “Will you say that in the article because that’s very funny? I bet you won’t say that right. But you’re right. Prozac dulls your senses. When my mother was on it she forgot to be angry. She had dementia as well and she forgot that she was always very angry but that pill really helped.”

Maybe it was because of the dementia she forgot to be angry? “No, it was those pills.”

I told her I had a male friend who said he liked me much better on Prozac because I wasn’t angry. I kept on with it longer than I should have. “The guy or the Prozac?” Both.

She was clearly not on Prozac when writing this album because there’s a lot of anger in it. “Oh yes there is. I believe in truth and I believe if I’m truthful in what I’m singing about that comes across as being passionately upset with what is happening to my country.”

Her expression of dissatisfaction with the current president began with a series of very smart Tweets – an eloquent  counterpart to the Trump potty mouth outbursts . Then she wrote articles for The Huffington Post (The Fake President and Our President Cruella de Vil) and then came the songs. They are cleverly written. They work on two levels. Love songs that can be interoperated as personal and protest love songs for the world.

“That’s right, that’s right,” she says excitedly. “I’m so glad you get this.” This is why you let me come back. Because I get it.

“Last time you brought me cake. This time I get nothing. But that’s good. I’m on a diet. It’s good you forgot.” I didn’t forget, I was told that she was trying to diet so I didn’t bring the cake “OK, but this President did make me anxious and hungry for pancakes. Buckwheat pancakes. I had to put butter on them and maple syrup to ease the pain. People don’t realise what food does for you. It makes you feel good. My son brought me pancakes at my last recording session from a great place. They’re made of oatmeal but obviously they have sugar in them and that’s why they taste so good. They’re very soothing to the brain.”

Pancakes are very American. It was as if she was eating the most delicious, the most American food to savour it, as if it too was in jeopardy.

“I live in a house that’s filled with Americana. American art, American furniture. I really love my country and it’s painful to see democracy being assaulted, institutions being assaulted and women being assaulted.”

We digress to the painful topic of women’s abortion rights and the possibility of women no longer being in control of their own bodies and having the long fought (in the early 70s) right to choose.

“Can you imagine…?” she says darkly and then, “There’s a war between people who want to live in the future and look forward to the future and people who want to live in the past. Imagine women who after forty-something years who have had the right to choose, now, perhaps won’t.”

President Trump was elected by a small majority but women certainly voted for him.  Why would women vote for a man who does not let them control their own bodies?  Why would women vote for misogyny?

“It’s a terribly complex thing. A lot of women vote the way their husbands vote. They don’t believe enough in their own thoughts so they trust their husbands. Maybe that woman who is so articulate, so experienced and so presidential (Hillary), so fit for the presidency, was too intimidating for some women. Perhaps she made women feel unsuccessful. Women are competitive and so forth. All of this was so devastating to me and I was heartbroken and very sad so I wanted to write about it, sing about it and deliver an album and it was perfect timing (as synagogues are being blown up and bombs delivered to any luminary who has had something bad to say about President Trump). I just did it.”

I’m not sure she realizes how brave it is to stand up and stand out and I wonder if she ever wanted to take it further – to be that woman who was articulate and presidential and could talk passionately and open people’s eyes. Surely there’s a situation vacant in the Democratic party that she may want to fill?

“No. I don’t want to go into politics. I don’t think I’m articulate enough and it’s too late for me. Maybe when I was younger but not now. I like my garden too much. I like staying home. I like privacy. I like writing my book…sort of.”

She’s still writing that autobiography? “Yeah, four years already. I’m trying to convince the publisher to do it in two volumes so I could stop the first volume with my Harvard speech.” She is very proud of this speech. “It was in a book called The 100 Greatest Speeches of the 20th Century. But they edited it without showing me and that was not nice. I like manners. People in England have manners. They are always very nice to me.”

Streisand comes across as a woman of power, a woman unafraid of being criticised because she’s in control. A woman that feels being seen as controlling isn’t a negative attribute. It’s been an interesting journey to get to that point.

In 1976, as producer and lead actress of A Star Is Born she had final cut of the movie.  The ultimate control which is very rare and much sort after but she gave her power away. She cut out some of her own scenes because she didn’t want to be criticised for being a producer and having too much screen time. Why? She shakes her head.

“I love constructive criticism. It helps me learn something but I didn’t want to be … just criticised. “    Maybe this is a deep seated fear locked in by her super critical mother. There is anxiety in her eyes as she talks.

“A woman writer in the New York times criticised when I performed at the Clinton’s inauguration.  She attacked my suit. It was a man’s suit and I wore great diamonds with it and a waistcoat. I like the combination of masculinity and femininity. I liked the feminisation of masculinity.  I’m fascinated even in furniture, I like strong architectural lines covered in pink velvet. I like men who are masculine but have a feminine side. I like men who cry at movies and they like soft things. It just makes them complex and that’s interesting. So this woman criticised my suit with diamonds. This woman was talking about my sexuality because I was wearing a low cut vest and the legs of the trousers had a slit. I have a passion for design and that criticism was unfair.

It always seems to me unfair that she was never acknowledged as a beauty. Today she has a mesmerizing presence and her skin glows and not in an artificial way.  She doesnt look fake. She has a lioness quality.

In the mid seventies people in Hollywood weren’t used to a woman being in control. She was producing ASIB for First Artists – a company originally set up for Paul Newman, Sidney Poitier and herself. In exchange for no salary up front they could make their own film with full creative control and a piece of the back end which they only got if the film was a hit. Her budget was $6,000,000 and any penny spent over that had to come out of her own pocket.

“I was completely responsible for the money and the content.”

She updated the film from the Judy garland original (1954) to reflect the changing of the times.

“I wanted her to write her own songs. I wanted the character played by a liberated woman yet I gave away the title of producer and took a lessor one and I even cut out certain scenes of mine so I would have less screen time.”

Instead of being praised, she was vilified.

“I was put on a magazine cover bald and the title was ‘A Star Is Shorn’ They made me bald. Why? Because I was a woman in control and they wanted…” her voice trails. They wanted her to look horrible. “That’s right. So I got scared and I gave them power. But when I directed Yentl I had power artistically but I had a completion bond on my shoulder so I couldn’t go overbudget. I went only a tiny bit overbudget which was fine. I got an award for directing and I said it’s wonderful not to have to raise your voice because people are finally listening when you are the director. So… I’m going to direct another film and I won’t give power away in the way I did earlier.

“ When I’m directing I do give power away to make people feel they’re needed. I would make sure my understudy felt involved. ‘Why don’t you work with the cinematographer while I’m working on the script. Why don’t you measure distances for the lens and show me what marks I need to hit.’ In other words, empowering people. I want everybody to feel needed on the set.

“I enjoy working in England, perhaps because you have a Queen and you have a woman Prime Minister. I think they are less intimidated by a woman with power.”

Perhaps that just because she doesn’t live in England.

Is she acting as well as directing in the new movie?

“I can’t really talk about it. We’ve signed contracts but until I know more… I can tell you I’m not acting. I don’t like acting. I don’t like make believe. I like real life.”

That’s a shame. She’s so good at it. “I’m crap at it.” It always surprises me when she’s self-deprecating. Its part of what makes her an icon. The ability to take herself seriously and not seriously at all

The Way We Were still moves me – the ultimate impossible love story – she as the archetypal jew and Robert Redford as the archetypal WASP. It won her an Oscar nomination. She’s always played characters who had an uneasy vulnerability – you don’t expect that of her in real life. You do expect that she is a fighter, a campaigner for love, for truth, for dogs.

Its easy to feel powerless – that’s why she’s so compelled now to stand up to Trump – to grab back the power.

I just saw the new version of A Star Is Born. Whether it’s better  than the previous version, divides the nation. Did she think Lady Gaga was channelling herself in some parts?

“I don’t know. Did she say anything about that? I haven’t seen it but I know they used the nose thing.”

The original movie, written by Joan Didion, made a reference to Streisand’s nose. At the time she was considered kooky looking, a prominent noise was not seen as a bonafide glamour-puss movie star nose. In the Gaga/Bradley Cooper version they overplay the nose with several references to Gaga’s nose and a lot of nose shots. At the time Streisand’s nose was considered not beautiful and she had to fight to keep it untouched in movies, on record covers and refused any nose jobs in real life.  Gaga is not known for her nose but none the less the movie makes a big deal of it.

Streisand shrugs. “I haven’t seen the whole movie but I saw the beginning and it looked like mine. Bradley (Cooper) showed me that and the beginning started with the same concert and then singing in a little club.”

I note the new A Star Is Born has the same producer as her version – Jon Peters – her hairdresser who became her boyfriend and thereafter a big deal producer – with her help. Perhaps that’s why there are some of the same nuances. Because of the same producer.

“Well he was the one I gave the credit to.” Does she mean gave her power away to. “That’s right.” Because he was her boyfriend too?

“Because I wanted him to have respect on the set. He had good ideas. The first time I walked into his house he had crude burnt wood frames paired with lace curtains at the windows. He understood masculinity and femininity. He was complex. I liked that.”

I am sure she still likes Jon Peters although she does not like being reminded that she gave her power away to a man because she feared criticism for being overbearing.

It’s a complex thing, she likes strong men but not bowing down to them . She has the right balance with her husband of 20 years James Brolin

“My husband has the perfect forehead, the perfect jaw, the perfect teeth. Even when he makes me angry I still get a kick out of his symmetry”

She is also immensely loyal – she has had the same manager – Marty Erlichman for 52 years.

Someone else who works with her is waving their hands in a panic. “I have to get out. I have to go.” One more thing. “What?” she says suspiciously. A picture. Streisand has famously and repeatedly said no to impromptu pictures.  She’s still afraid of a bad shot, of criticism? She says -she’s going to do it.

It takes bravery and a little bit of control. “I’ll do it but not with your phone. With mine so I can have power to delete.” She directs the way we’re sitting, tells the assistant with the phone, “you’re going down too low.” I move closer to her, so close I’m almost touching her but of course we’re not going to touch. I feel that’s making her uncomfortable.

Her hair sweeps long beyond her shoulders. It’s beigey blonde the colour of a lions mane. It even mingles with mine. I can smell her hair. It smells of roses, perhaps from her own garden. It’s a heady smell.  She makes me promise that I won’t put the picture in the paper and before she goes I read her a message from my friend Nancy who grew up with a criticising mother, like Streisand’s, and wanted me to let her know, “She’s helped me throughout my life. She’s my secret mother. I love her. I love the way she sings with skill and abandon. I love what she’s doing today. It shows the spirit of women and it shows that I was right to love her. No one else is sticking their neck out politically and she’s on the right side of history.”

She’s taken the picture and she’s taken the compliment and she likes it very much that she’s on the right side of history.

Nicoletta Mantovani and Luciano Pavarotti (AT Mag, November 18, 2018)

My all-consuming memory of Luciano Pavarotti is a great volcano of a man emerging from his swimming pool wearing a straw hat and a giant smile.  The latter crushing and melting into terror when he noticed I was wearing a purple dress. Purple is the colour of death, or at least according to his religion or superstition.
I felt guilty. He did die a few years later in 2007 but not hopefully from my purple dress. He had pancreatic cancer. At the end he was a shadow of his former 25 stone self. People close to him say he remained optimistic, refused to see anything bad. That was what he was like. A contradiction, seeing good in bad and death in purple dresses.  He always wanted to spread the love, but at the same time he was very volatile.  He was one of those men who loved women. That is always a little scary – a man who loves women usually needs more than one of them.
He was married to his first wife Adua for 35 years. He had become estranged from this relationship when he met the quietly charismatic Nicoletta Mantovani. When they met she was in her early 20’s and he was 57. She came looking for a part time job to help her through her Doctorate in biology at Bologna university but Pavarotti wasn’t having any of that. He wanted to swoop her off her feet round the world and always be with him.
We are in the private dining room of the Gritti Palace in Venice and if I peer over the table centrepiece – a bowl of perfect Italian vegetables, I can take in Mantovani.  She’s one of these people who seems to be able to walk around with several layers of her skin peeled off. She doesn’t care how vulnerable she is. She’s been hated by a lot of people but this small sparrow of a woman was able to set that aside and look after her husband and their daughter Alice.
She exudes caring without being overbearing. She’s interested, curious in what other people have to say but not prying. When the third course of food comes she jokes about how she and her husband’s big fights came when she tried to put him on a diet.
Theirs was an intriguing partnership. While Pavarotti had always striven to bring opera to the people, it was their concept together to bring pop to opera and she produced several successful concerts in the early 2000s – Pavarotti and Friends where popstars like Bono and Zuccero and Lionel Ritchie came to Modena to sing with the big man. She was good at these big ideas but apparently had no actual secretarial skills.
The cliché would be pretty young girl baits and tantalises multi-millionaire operatic king. She might have worn heels, tiny skirts, push up bras. That’s not who she ever was. She’s now 47  with prettily layered tawny hair, black comfortable clothes and flat shoes. Trademark cats eye glasses and strangely more attractive than the young girl who doesn’t seem to fit into her body.
She says she didn’t want to be sucked into his world. She fought it but she felt it was a coup de foudre although she says this in Italian. Coup de foudre doesn’t really translate into English.
Now she’s in the business of looking after the legacy that Luciano Pavarotti left the world. He was consistently described as the world’s greatest tenor with sales of over 100 million records. His music should live on.
Hence, we are here in the very fancy Gritti Palace Hotel in Venice with its views of the Grand Canal and its very special ravioli and Acqui di Parma products in all of the suites.
We are here because she has partnered with Decca Luxe, a new venture that is as over the top as the maestro himself. The concept is – creating a product of rare luxury and a price of £84,000. It’s for people who already have their top of the range Bentleys and their yachts and houses dotted around the world for them to sail between.
They get a box, a very special box, only ten of them will be made in the world by David Linley, Lord Snowdon. Each box would have been 1,000 hours in the crafting. The box will feature limited edition prints of Pavarotti’s paintings which are brightly coloured as naïve as they are sophisticated. You also get the Windsor and Newton oil paints from his palette – a lifetime supply. You get every note he ever recorded including newly discovered tracks in the Decca archives and a player which will give you immersive sound. Immersive sound is a thing of the future. Apparently five years ahead of its time, and in this box. Remember when people thought that VR and AR were the next big thing? Well, now it’s this. A sound so immersive you feel that the man himself is sitting in the room with you. A sound system borrowed from cinemas, the kind of which best sound editing Oscars are given. You know the ones – you’re right there in the battle, in the love, in the pain, in all of it. And then they win a best sound editing Oscar.
And as a person who doesn’t see the point of VR and AR, I was ready to dismiss it but sitting there in the Gritti Palace where Luciano Pavarotti loved to hang out, you feel wrenched emotionally when they turn it off and put on a regular stereo.
In this package called A Life in Art you also get dinner with Nico Mantovani cooked by Pavarotti’s favourite chef and you go on a Pavarotti diet and some of your money goes to his foundation. A bargain I hear you thinking. You also get flown there by private jet which means unfortunately you have to go to Luton, voted consistently Britain’s worst airport, but you soon get over that even though the plane is tiny. They give you enough booze to make you forget about it.
Mantovani was not what I expected. Certainly not the femme fatale, not the husband stealer, although there’s certainly a strength to her. She stopped the publication of Pavarotti’s assistant Edwin Tinoco’s memoir. Not because it was salacious and gossipy, but because she didn’t think he would have wanted it. It didn’t fit in with his legacy.
When they first met, Pavarotti warned her she might be described as somebody “not nice”. All that stuff was easy when he wasn’t there to protect her. “It was harder.
“He warned me that everyone would think I was after his money. We talked about it a lot. He asked me if I was prepared to be seen as somebody not nice.”
How this operatic romantic tragedy unfolded is just far too complicated to describe as just not nice. Scrutiny was inevitable when they met because of the age gap of 34 years.  Mantovani wasn’t even born when he married his first wife and Alice and his grandchild are around the same age.  Yet, “Luciano always thought of me as the older one. I was more grown up.” He was middle aged, rich and famous. She was young, tiny, not rich and a student.
During their 15-year marriage, there were certainly a few knives out for her, especially at the end when people reported falsely that their marriage was over. No doubt marriage was stressed because she was dealing with her husbands’ terminal illness which he himself decided to treat with more courses of optimism than chemo.  She never left his side and made sure that their then 4 ½ year old daughter was with him too so she would have the memories.
Obviously this prodigious and prodigiously rich man would have all the relatives fighting for the spoils.
Under Italian law 25% of his wealth goes to Mantovani, 50% is split between his 4 daughters, leaving another 25% in question. And questions were asked as he’d made 3 wills.
The next day we go to Modena to the house where they lived which is now a museum and restaurant and we experience first-hand the Pavarotti diet. Across the table you see her eyes are flecked with multicolours. She misses nothing. She’s not wearing make-up but the hair is good. She’s made an effort but not too much of one and you like that about her.
Endless cheese and endless sorts of salami and fried dumplings that are called called Gnocco Fritto. You eat with salty prune jam. Then there’s a large plate of buffalo mozzarella, potato, pesto and balsamic vinegar.
Modena has become one of the food capitals of the world with chef Massimo Patron with his 3 Michelin stars nearby. After this we get a Pavarotti’s personal favourite is thick  al dente risotto drizzled in balsamic vinegar – he liked to drink this with red sparkling wine – Lambrusco.
Mantovani tells me, “he thought the combination of the risotto and the wine were very healthy. They made you happy so they were healing.  He was obsessed with this particular wine, this particular balsamic and this particular salami and of course his own pasta so that wherever he went in the world his entourage would each have to hide the food contraband in their luggage.”
Mantovani adds that she’s not sure if she’s allowed in the US these days as she was always the one who got caught with the forbidden substances like cheese. Pavarotti’s relationship with food was integral to his being. He didn’t eat to blot out emotional pain. He ate for pleasure. He liked his size. It made women feel like they were surrendering to him.
Mantovani says, “even now I miss those hugs – like big panda hugs.”
After our risotto came a salad with strawberries and more balsamic, then an orange blossom ice cream with a walnut caramel balsamic sauce.  The man who runs the restaurant sees me about to fall into a food coma and provides espresso.
Mantovani and I go upstairs, just above the bedroom that she and her husband shared. She now lives in Bologna with her parents and daughter and is strangely unperturbed by inviting the public into the home they once shared which is now a museum filled with his notes, his costumes, his paintings and his music.
“I feel it’s a place where people can relax because they can feel him. He was very happy here because he always loved life. He had a very positive presence. He was always able to take the very best out of you. I don’t know how he did it but he did it with everyone. You always felt much better to sit next to him. I tell her that last night when we had the immersion sound it made me cry and I don’t know why. It must have been really emotional for her?
“Yes. It was really strong. It was like having him here in front of me in the room, yet 11 years have passed since he left us. And when he left, part of me left with him…”
She composes herself. “We decided to do this and work with the foundation in order to bring his passions to life. He had a big passion for giving back. He did a lot of charity work, especially with refugees. Music, like sport can keep people united. We have a school in Bosnia that we founded with Bono and two schools in Guatemala. And right now. we’re helping young singers which he always did till the end of his life. He was always teaching them how to be with themselves in public, how to have not just a voice but the right attitude. He wanted his academy to be free because he never went to a conservatory. He always said, ‘a voice is like a white flower. It can grow everywhere, even in the desert but you have to look for it’. In Italy it’s very expensive to create such an academy” (there’s no tax relief for charity).
A percentage of the Decca Luxe boxes will go to the foundation. Mantovani’s English is fluent. Her emotions organised. Not at all like Pavarotti’s. They were very different. You can see also how when something troubles her it troubles her deeply.
“I think he enjoyed every minute of his life because when he was 12 he had an accident playing soccer and he got tetanus. It was during the war when people played with no shoes. He went into a coma for many days. He got penicillin and was saved but from that moment he said I’m going to be happy always. He found ways that bad things can help you become a better person.”
She slips effortlessly into nostalgia and romance. We go over that coup de foudre moment. “I’d not been working for him long and he asked me if I would leave with him for a couple of days to go to Switzerland. I said no and he said ‘come to the airport to say goodbye’, I said OK. The minute I saw him leave I took a plane. That was Culpo di fulmine.”
When love strikes someone like lightning. “That was him. When you let yourself be open to any experience you don’t put any limit on them. He had no borders. No borders in music or in life. As Bono said, ‘he didn’t just sing opera – he was opera’. He was never bothered if he didn’t have a nice review. He would just say, ‘people are free to think what they want.’ Like when he was criticised in the British Press for hugging Princess Diana because it wasn’t Royal protocol. The papers said ‘shame on you’ and he said ‘I was very happy that I got to hug her’.”
When Mantovani and Pavarotti met she was studying biology and completely unable to sing. “We were strangers, completely different kinds of people. Maybe we knew each other from a past life. Everyone was asking him to explain what it was he really liked about me and what happened. He would say ‘if you can explain love, it’s not love’. He would say to me was I ready? Was I prepared? But he was my guardian angel, protecting me from what everyone said. We were always together. It’s different now although I still feel him as a different kind of guardian angel. And now people have stopped talking bad about me, I mean after so many years.”
But what about the rumours that he was about to get back with his first wife on his deathbed and give her all his money?
She sighs, quietly dismissing it. “‘When you are a public figure, you have to accept everything bad and good’ he would say. You cannot play a game where everyone is on your side. You cannot be loved by everyone. I wonder if he left us now, after all this social networking how different it would be.”
Would he have had an Instagram account? “No. he liked to exhibit himself for sure but he was never vain, narcissistic. The engine of his life was that he was always open to new experiences. He was curious – always wanted to try something. He was the first in mixing pop music with opera (his crossover Pavarotti and Friends concert in the noughties).”
Opera was his pop music. “So that’s why he had the idea to bring it to the people even if he was attacked by the purists of opera lovers.”
The moment where he decided to paint came after he played Cavaradossi, a painter in a Tosca opera in the eighties and someone gave him a box of paints.
“He said suddenly he was acting at painting and then he was painting. He painted for one week and didn’t eat and that was a big thing for him.” We laugh. He didn’t like to go long without food so he must have really been obsessed.
She shows me a painting that he and Alice painted together when she was really tiny. Very sweet.  It’s blues and yellows, sky and sunshine. She shows me a picture on her phone of the now 16-year old Alice who was four and a half when he died. She looks very rock n roll but has her father’s eyes.
“I don’t think she has a memory of him but she has a lot of stories that have been told to her. She has a deep sense of justice that Luciano had. he was always fighting with his whole self to protect people. Luciano was a very pure soul. Some people think he was childish but he never had any prejudice and always saw the good in people and I think it’s genetic.
“He would always ask a lot of questions. He was never afraid to ask anything like ‘why do you like that science stuff?’ The basis or our relationship was always talking. 24 of hours of the day talking and trying to understand each other’s deepest thoughts and we were always so different. It seemed to give him energy. He would always say ‘you are the eldest of us. You are the old one’ and even if I was 25 he would say ‘could you stop being so old.’”
The first turning point in their relationship came when Mantovani went to a doctor and was diagnosed with MS and the doctor said ‘in a few years you’ll be in a wheelchair.’
“That made Luciano crazy because it’s a terrible thing to say to a young girl and thank God they’ve made lots of progress with the treatment. When we had this response from the doctor I told Luciano I couldn’t stay with him anymore because I would be a big weight. He said ‘until now I loved you but from now on I adore you and the two of us together will win’. I cried and he said ‘no, don’t cry. We’ll make it’. He was really my engine.
First off, Mantovani was given drugs that had side effects so bad she decided to quit them. Recently, she saw a doctor called Zamboni where she had surgery to substitute a vein. He’s based in Ferrar.
“It’s very controversial and some neurologists don’t think it’s right. Worldwide it is recognised that there is a sickness created in the vein block but it’s not necessarily recognised as working for MS. It’s not for everyone – there are so many different kinds of MS but it seems to be working for me.
“In the beginning of my diagnosis Luciano would say ‘it’s not a bad thing. From now on you will change your priorities. Now you won’t take the flowers for granted’. He said this because the MS made me lose sight for two weeks.”
There are two basic types of MS. One intermittent and one progressive. She was told that she may not be able to get pregnant but of course she did. She actually had twins but Alice’s brother Ricardo wasn’t as strong.
“They were both born premature at 7 months. She was a tiny, tiny girl and unfortunately her twin brother had died before.  I have beautiful memories of Luciano carrying her around. He was the one who fed her. He came at her with the bottle when she didn’t have enough power to suck and he’d cry ‘you eat! And he made it fun for her.”
Did he really eat like this every day – the cheese, the meats, the risotto, the ice cream, the wine, the dumplings?
“He had pasta every day for sure and he had a lot of butter on food and I was always trying to put him on a diet. We always had fights over that but it was fun and he could also ask me if I could avoid singing to Alice because my voice was so bad and he said I was destroying her ears. He tried to teach me for the longest time because he said at the beginning ‘everyone can sing’ and then he said ‘every rule has an exception and you are that one’. We spent some time where he would perform the soprano role and I would perform the tenor and he would imitate my very bad voice.”
“At the very beginning of our relationship he lost weight then gained it back. Up again down again like a rollercoaster.  He used food as his medicine. It gave him a sense of protection.”
Does she mean he wanted a layer of fat to protect him from the world? “It could be but he was not insecure. He had a taste for good food and he was very serious about it.”
I wondered when he was sick from cancer and on chemo if he was still able to enjoy his food? “Not really. He realised he was sick but he was positive for the future. On the one hand he accepted his situation saying ‘I’ve had such a lucky life, a fantastic career, I’ve explored my passion, I’ve helped others and I have a beautiful wife and a beautiful family and 3 daughters before that. He felt lucky.”
She tells me how he worked up until the very end planning his future as if he would go on forever. When he was sick he could still sing. His students would say ‘when he is sick I can hear his technique even better’ and he loved that. he could still sing because he had a fantastic vocal technique and when he was sick he was forced to use it even more. He had the surgery to remove a tumour and then he did the chemotherapy.”
Did he accept that he was dying? “I think he always thought he had a positive future.”
It must have put a strain on your relationship, you knowing how sick he was and him trying to unknow it?
“We were always trying to be positive together because Alice was very young. We coped with his illness as we did with mine. He was always strong for everybody else. I always saw him like a lion so he was….” Her voice drifts at this change of dynamic. “When he was a lion I was a lion with him.”
And when he wasn’t? At this point something really strange happens. For no reason, my tape recorder and my phone fling themselves off the little table between our two creamy leather armchairs. It was as if he was there with us and he didn’t like any talk of sickness or weakness. She composes herself.
“Until the very end he was positive and teaching and surrounded by friends. He was the strong one. He was actually trying to make a new album.
It must have been an excruciating shock to go through the world where they were together all the time, even reading the Harry Potter books to each other, to be without him. Certainly the idea of working with his foundation, opening up the museum is her idea to keep him alive in the world.
“Yes, I miss him and the thing I miss most are his hugs like a panda. This house was too big for just me and Alice so I decided to open it to the public and go and live with my parents in Bologna. He loved this house so much but it was too big for me and Alice.”
Mantovani herself doesn’t find it as easy as her husband did to be happy. These past few years she says have been “heavy” for her. There was a relationship that didn’t work out because the man lied to her and was seeing someone else at the same time.  She almost lost her faith in humanity until she refocused into doing so much for the foundation.
“I don’t think there will ever be anyone else. One big love in life is enough, don’t you think?”
Not really. Pavarotti had two great loves, two wives.
“He was more open than me. More curious and more genuine. I’ll try my best but it’s not easy.”
Instead, she wants to take me downstairs to another room in the house where we can see messages from all over the world about how much Pavarotti affected people. The room is called the man who creates emotion.
“because he was always able to create big emotions. Not just for opera lovers.”
He was also able to cause a drama. One time they were in New York and they had a fight, Mantovani insisted she was leaving and going back to Italy but Pavarotti had called the head of Alitalia to stop her getting on the plane and to tell her he’d broken his arm.
“I got home and in full dramatic mode he said ‘you left me alone and look what happened. My world collapsed’. We were having dinner and I was kissing his arm and a couple of hours after the dinner ended I said are you OK? He said ‘of course I’m ok’ and whipped his arm out of the fake bandage.”
We laugh. What did they fight about? “We were always fighting because there was fire in us, fire is passion. But he also did big things for me. When I took my exams in the university of Bologna I went to dinner with my family and heard his voice in my ear. He’d taken a plane from Tokyo where he was performing Tosca just to say he loved me and flew back to Tokyo the next day.”
It’s no surprise that all this drama is to be made into a movie and a stage show. First up it’s a documentary from director Ron Howard and then a West End show.  John Berry, British opera producer has bought the rights to his life.
Mantovani herself is producing another movie. It’s about an important figure in the Italian gay and lesbian movements in the seventies. Of the musical she says, “This is a very important project for the West End. There are many ideas so far and I don’t know which way we’ll go. His life was so immense.”
She takes me downstairs to a golden coloured bedroom, sunlight streaming in. the presence on his side of the bed is palpable. This is where he lived, loved, died. In the bathroom which is ensuite, there’s a large set of scales. She tells me sometimes she goes in there and for no reason the scales tip to Pavarotti’s weight and then go down to zero again, back and forth. Perhaps he’s telling her that he’s still here and oddly, the subject they fought most about – his weight, is still the metaphor for an enduring passion.

Lynda La Plante (The London Sunday Times Magazine, October 28, 2018)

You have to be quite brave to wear an all-white tent dress with a round neck – even if it is Valentino. La Plante greets me from a corner booth in her creamy beige hotel in Los Angeles and says “I’m ready for my pre-med,” referring to her designer dress that looks like a hospital gown and bursts into cackling giggles. Lynda La Plante is brave in so many ways. And funny.
     Her original TV series Widows was one of televisions most watched in the 1980s over 18 million viewers. It was an event. Landmark TV, story of an all-female heist, unknowns cast as leads who later would become household names like Ann Mitchell who played Dolly Rawlins (Eastenders)  
   Widows has now been made into a powerful movie by Steve McQueen (12 Years a Slave) starring Viola Davies, Robert Duvall, Liam Neeson, Colin Farrell and Elisabeth Debicki. The movie is quite different from the TV series – for instance it’s set in modern day Chicago and a name has been changed – Dolly is now Veronica – but the premise is the same. Three armed robbers blow themselves up in a failed heist and the wife of the crimes leader discovers his notebook and detailed plans for jobs and they team up with the other widows to finish the men’s work. The film is exciting, sexy, powerful, emotional with all of the unexpected punches of the original – already an Oscar buzz about it and the film opened the London Film Festival on October 10th. 
     La Plante is here in Los Angeles pitching a different TV series to various networks and enjoying the gentle afterglow of the Widows buzz as well she deserves – last year was a terrible year where she thought she was having a nervous breakdown.  ITV commissioned a prequel to Prime Suspect, Tennison 1973, which centred around the young DC Tennison, the character that was to make Helen Mirren a superstar and Lynda La Plante a force to be reckoned with. The ITV version had almost no force at all. La Plante had to take her name off it. It was humiliating.
     La Plante does humiliation well – as long as she’s telling the story. She comes to the West Coast for TV meetings but not that often. She has homes in the UK and in the Hamptons on the East Coast, thus has never got to know California. 
     “A few years ago, before sat nav, I had to drive to Montecito for lunch. Because I have no sense of direction I got up really early and drove off in a rented little sports car. Lunch with my friend was at 12.30 but I got there at 9.30. So, I thought I’ll just go and sit by their pool and let myself in to this very elegant place, changed in the pool house, helped myself to beautiful iced drinks from the fridge and fluffy towels. I was there quite a while when someone came out and said, ‘Who are you?’ I’m Lynda La Plante and he said, ‘You are in the wrong house.’  I used their suntan cream, their towels, their drinks and my friend lived a few doors down. By the time I got to her I was still an hour early.”
     She laughs loudly at herself, almost frightening the waitress who is bringing the coffee. The breakfast at the wrong house anecdote gives more than a clue to who she is. A woman who doesn’t care if she’s out of place. She’ll just get on with it. The more you know her, the more you realise she has all the bravery of the tough women heroines she’s created and all of the heart.
     La Plante was born in Liverpool in 1943, a middle child with an older brother and younger sister. She was an actress until she created and wrote the series Widows, followed by the sequel She’s Out.  She spent years in prisons, bordellos, mortuaries for research. Her first novel The Legacy was published in 1987. More international best sellers came and in 1991 she created Prime Suspect with Helen Mirren as DCI Jane Tennison. She has 3 Baftas and two Emmy’s for Prime Suspect and was awarded a CBE in 2008. 
     Her father was devoted to the gold course, her mother loved sports and was buried in a Liverpool shirt. She wouldn’t watch anything of Lynda’s on TV if it clashed with the football. When Prime Suspect was on its third series, she once asked ‘Did you write that?’
    La Plante continues, “I’m here (in LA) because of Widows (seeing final screenings) and I’m pitching a series with Tom Fontana (Emmy winning writer/producer of Homicide: Life on The Street, St Elsewhere and Borgia). All the studios say they don’t want anything quite as violent as I’m used to. Then they keep saying how do I see the second season, the third season…”
     We agree that the golden age of the box set is perhaps over forever and why can’t there just be one good series?
     She is used to being a lone voice in a room where she’s pitching. ITV questioned her creative control as a writer/producer/show runner. They wanted the Tennison character, but it seems nothing else of La Plante. She found it shocking.
     “Because I didn’t have control at casting, at producing, getting the crew… It used to be a joy to me. Being an actress for so long I knew intuitively if someone was good. (She trained at RADA, worked with the RSC and was on TV in Z Cars and The Sweeney) I love actors. Sam James the casting director walked out, couldn’t take it. The abuse I saw during the casting was really quite something. The director would say do it again, do it again, do it again but without any notes. He didn’t believe in notes.”
     There’s a smell of calm in the creamy beige hotel and fresh floral arrangements but still a smell of outrage in our booth. Does she feel that it would be a lot different if the casting had taken place just after the events of #metoo rather than just before? She laughs, “Yes, it would have been much better.”
     Did she feel dismissed as a woman? Dismissed because she’s not young? (She’s 75) She doesn’t know which it is. She’s not used to being dismissed. All her projects have involved prodigious research. Her knowledge of police and police procedure is phenomenal and outside of that she is credited with discovering the then unknown Idris Elba when she cast him in The Governor and a young Paul Bettany in Killer Net.  Perhaps the other producers were slightly in awe of her, afraid of her?
     “No, they were just amateurs. Scared of any decisions or any risk,” she dismisses.
     “Someone at ITV found an actor that they wanted to play the lead but I said, “He can’t act,” and they said, “But he’s very attractive.”  I said, “He can’t walk and talk at the same time,” and they said, “You don’t understand, he’s very attractive.”  He was cast and by the time the reviews came out I had walked.  One of the reviews said when the bomb went off in the bank and this actor was burnt he probably burned up very quickly because he was so wooden!  I cut it out and sent it to them.”  More giggling.
     Some people might have thought this was childish. For her it seems a small triumph.  She doesn’t care if she never works for ITV again. The original Widows was on Thames (ITV). She says you could never get it on TV now. She cast black people and mixed-race people in leads rather as maids and butlers and in the eighties this was in itself a revolution. She was always a woman ahead of her time. That must be why she clashed with the male bosses at ITV.
     “No, I think they were egocentric amateurs. That’s it. They wanted to do what they wanted to – whatever I wanted they didn’t care.”
     Would it have made a difference if she was a man? There’s a pause as long as you could smoke a cigarette in.
     “Probably,” she concedes.  “The emotions of stress and frustration was difficult to deal with. I felt heartbroken. I had spent so long working with the old cops, so much research…(all of her input dismissed).  What was the most shocking of all was when the man who commissioned it had lunch with me at the Ivy. I said I’ve got all the material, I’ve got Jane Tennison, I’ve written a book. He looked at me and said ‘Unfortunately for you, you don’t own these characters. We do and if we wanted to make our own series of Jane Tennison we could. We wouldn’t do that,’ but that’s exactly what they did. From day one they wanted me out.
     “Franchise of the novel continues and they are huge worldwide. I own the other characters and two other production companies have liked them and I’m in talks to develop a series around them.
     “ITV also decided to change the killer and not kill another character off. I was bypassed at every single level so I took my name away. John Heyman (producer who died recently and father of Harry Potter super producer David) told me, ‘don’t waste a second being angry. You want revenge, be a success.”
    Indeed, she’s now on book number 4, Murder Mile, in a series of 10 Tennison books which is about to drop. Widows has been re-released and a best seller in many countries, with new territories added almost weekly. She’s in the Best Seller list of several countries every week. She’s pitching her new crime show with Fontana which she says is exciting and the book Widows continues to roll. In Australia it’s already in its 6th reprint. Rights have been sold everywhere from Japan to Russia. Widows the novel has been expanded and enhanced from the original work and it’s still a ripping read.
     Although she is not officially on the payroll for Widows the movie, she is ultimately the creator of these characters and as thus she is able to bathe in the large pools of its success.  
     She smiles. “The extraordinary development is that Widows is rearing its head like a monster… 
     “I met Steve McQueen at an event at Buckingham Palace honouring members of the Royal Academy.  John Hurt was there.  He had this shaggy moustache, maybe it was for a film and his hair was standing on end.  He took me aside and said, ‘Everybody here looks so fucking old,’ and he died a few weeks later.”
    La Plante is more than aware of time passing. Friends Lynda Bellingham and Cilla Black both now gone means she doesn’t want to lose a day, an hour even. At the same party, McQueen came up to her. “Are you Lynda LaPlante,” he said.  I didn’t know who he was.  He is quite a formidable person, large.  He said, “My name is Steve McQueen,’ and he had just made 12 Years a Slave.  He said, “I have been obsessed with Widows since I was a child.’  He told me how he watched it as a teenager and it stayed with him. It was dormant in him and he’d like to make a movie.  And I thought that would be absolutely incredible.  He has been so respectful.”  La Plante didn’t write the script but she was consulted at every turn.
     “The notes sessions were incredible, where did you find these women?,” he would ask.  “And I went through all the lives of all the women I had met in prison and he was, ‘Tell me more, more, more.’ He sent the script and I had a lot of notes, every note that I had he would say, ‘Yes, yes, yes,’ and that is how we worked.  
     “He is quite boyish when he wants something.  He said, ‘You have a lot of humour.  Why do you have this humour?’ and we laughed.  And I said, ‘If you laugh with somebody you like them.’ Dolly Rawlins comes over as hard hitting like a hammer, but she’s got to make mistakes and jokes so you like her. In the movie she is Ronnie.   If you were making this for TV first off, they’d say Dolly Rawlins has got to be Olivia Coleman and the glamorous one would have to have several TV credits.  
     The film so far has been receiving rave reviews. Producer Eain Canning says “I did not set out to write a film about diversity but we knew we had a very significant female voice echoing the original. This is a contemporary love letter to Lynda’s Widows. She very definitely has a voice in it. We wanted to make sure that the original spirit was there so she was part of the process. We didn’t set out to make a film about diversity but that is Chicago. We simply reflected what we saw on the streets. Steve and I are equally surprised that people are surprised that this story connects with audiences, just like Lynda’s TV show connected. It’s crazy that in 2018 we’re still talking about it being abnormal to have a film with female leads. Hopefully it will be the last time people focus on this.”
     It’s almost as if the feminist clock had been ticking backwards and that there was more freedom for women in television in the eighties.
  “When I originally cast Eva Motley (British born Barbadian actress in the role of Bella), the casting director was nervous because she had just come out of prison.  I remember reading something about Lauren Bacall when she first worked with Bogart she found it very difficult to lift her eyes, she looks down and then up (she mimics this and looks quite Princess Diana) I noticed that Eva did that. She had a gruff voice, yet this vulnerability.  Director Ian Toington was a man who loved women and said, ‘I think she is scared but wonderful.’  
     It was a risk, that nowadays, she would not be allowed to take.  
“I see Eva every day of my life in a poster in my office. She committed suicide before the second series.  Every time I think about her, I always want to make a film in her memory.” 
     Now this fearless, tiny juggernaut of a woman, a woman who’s been chopped down and always stood up again, has large tears rolling down her face.  
     “It was like her dream had come true and then it turned into a nightmare.” In many ways there are parallels here. La Plante’s dreamed of another TV series and then it became her nightmare.  
     “I’ll fight and I will be as strong as I can be.  I have always been on my own, I have never had back up until recently where I have had people working close with me and it’s changed my life, that I could trust people.  Going into those rooms pitching totally solo and I would be saying things like, ‘This girl is no good,’ and them saying, ‘Well we all like her.’”  
     Widows has been the opposite experience – inclusive and respectful.  Although the is set in a different era, a different city, “the emotions are the same.” More than ever, it’s a movie that’s right for this time. It’s about women not putting up with abuse and being sidelined. It’s about women rising up and women doing it better.
     “It’s quite violent.” But it’s a powerful, emotional, heart stopping use of violence. It’s interesting to her that in her recent pitching, the networks all seem to want the violence toned down or taken out altogether. They see it as gratuitous.
     “The thing I have always disapproved of is gratuitous nudity.  For example, in Tennison there was a 17-year old victim.  We cast a young girl – in the script it very clearly states that the only thing you can see is her Biba boot.  The police officer looks and says she is very young.  She is covered, it’s raining.  In the TV series you see her whole body. That girl was left naked for hours and hours.  It’s abuse.  There was an autopsy scene where this young naked girl lay on a trolley for ages while the crew drank coffee.  That’s men, male directors, unasked for, unnecessary, abusive.  I am very protective of actors.”
       Does she think she could take an occasional acting role? In our meeting she’s done quite a few accents including five different Liverpudlian ones. “I don’t think I could act now, I walk into furniture because of my eye problems.”
     In January she had cataract operations that went wrong.  
     “I had glasses everywhere. All over the house.  I thought, oh I think I’ll have laser surgery.  I went in to have the laser and they said,’ You are too old to have the laser, you have slight cataracts. What we can do is get rid of the cataract and insert lenses so you will never have to wear glasses again.  Both eyes at the same time.  Everybody I have met says you never have both eyes at the same time but off I went.” 
     Was this blind optimism or too busy to really think about it?
     “Don’t know. They told me it’s just a couple of weeks recovery time and before that things will just be a bit blurred.  After two weeks and drops and drops and drops in my eyes I still couldn’t see a thing.  Morning, noon and night drops.  ‘Oh, you have a slight infection,’ they said.  More drops.  I told them I can’t judge dark from light, I fall over. ‘Only to be expected.’ they said. They didn’t tell me that.  The operation was January 10 and since then I have seen eight specialists.  Some have said the lenses they inserted are problematic.  They now tell me if they re-move the lenses I could be completely blind.  
     The Queen, she goes in, wears dark glasses for one day and it’s over. But not me. Lawyers are looking into it. I have become very fearful of them doing anything.  I was in the garden and I thought, ‘There are an awful lot of bugs in this drink.’ I go inside, empty it out, fill the glass and they are still there, then I realise they are everywhere.  It’s in my eyes.  Little black dots everywhere.  Then they told me it meant the retina was coming away.  Another specialist said that apparently my right retina came away during the procedure but they pushed it back.  
     “I actually had the Queen’s surgeon look at me and he is the one that pointed out the possibility of blindness. It’s something about the lenses being stuck into the eye.  Another surgeon said there is the possibility of placing a black lens in the eye and I said, ‘I would look very weird,’ and he said it would help my ability to judge day from night.  
     “You’d be amazed how many places have white walls and white tables.  There is a new drug that costs $900 a month to help with that. I took it and it had absolutely no effect whatsoever.  I deal with it by using a big magnifying glass and using very large print, like a children’s book. I have to have somebody to take me around the airport and into the plane.  And all these meetings in these studios, they all have huge white tables.  And I am sitting there thinking, they don’t know I can’t see them at all.”  
     Once again, we laugh almost hysterically as we both know it’s quite tragic. Is there no hope?
     “There is hope that they would do one eye at a time to remove the lens.  If the first eye goes blind then they won’t do the other one.  I also have nightmare pain in the neck from a disc.”
     She has had several procedures where steroids have been injected into the disc and she still can’t turn her neck properly when it flares up which is probably exacerbated by stress.  
     What makes her power through it?
“I don’t know.  I have had five operations under anaesthesia where they shoot steroids into the dodgy disc and then they say we missed it.”  
     She is also on pain killers.  
   We order croissants, no jam because she’s a spiller, and wearing white. She’s like all the strong female boss characters she’s created and then some. I wonder, does she laugh a lot and make jokes to make you like her? She’s certainly very easy to talk to, kind. The eyes, the neck, the ITV. They’re all scary but she seems to have taken them in her stride. Perhaps she’s prolific because of the setbacks. It’s her way of working through the pain.
     The first tidal wave of pain came when she was divorcing Richard La Plante in 1996. “When you go through a marital exposure… for me it was a betrayal of everything.  The worst was my trusted PA.  I kept saying to my lawyer, ‘I don’t understand how he knows everything I am earning.  Every contract.’  She was feeding him everything.  They got married.”
     How very All About Eve. No wonder trusting people is new to her.
      She nods. “He had Raymond Tooth as his lawyer, an obnoxious little man (known for his ferocity in the court and nicknamed Jaws) and I had a man with a stammer!  I was told to stay quiet and not say anything.  
   “Eventually I said, ‘How much do you want? Put it on the table.’ And I sold everything I had to get rid of him.  But I wouldn’t let him have so much as a brick of my house. When it was over, the relief was immense.  
     “Richard was coming after me for the house in the Hampton’s and alimony for the rest of his life.  I sold everything that I possessed so that he didn’t get a brick.  But I didn’t have to give him his name back, that’s the only thing I got out of it.  My name before was Marchal. It’s not a good name.  What’s the best gift I have ever had?  My divorce papers.  I waited so long so I was glad for it to be over and to be free.  And to be able to have my son.  
     “He wouldn’t let me adopt, I had had three miscarriages and he said no to adopting.  It was over for me.  I thought I have got to be very grown up and just accept it was over for me and babies.  I got a great Dane.  
     “I remember the moment – I had gone to the States.  Was at a friend’s house by the beach. The water came up almost into his yard and I saw this girl walking towards me and she had a two-year old on her hip.  His little legs were moving and I remember thinking I will never have that.  Whereas before I thought it’s too late, I’m too old, I thought I had accepted it but suddenly I felt such emotion. I thought that I had dealt with it but I hadn’t. When I got home there was a phone call from an attorney – when I had been hoping to adopt I had been listed with many attorneys, this one said, ‘we’ve got something for you, there is a baby being born in Florida, we don’t know if it’s male or female, the birth mother does not want any finances, she does not want to know or meet any adopters, she has not queried if it’s a single parent.  Somehow you have risen to the top of the list. If you can be in Boca Raton by tomorrow morning, the baby is yours.’ So I left immediately from the Hampton’s to Boca Raton and the next morning I had my son.”  
     How interesting – the moment she gave up and let it all go, she got the call. She answers simply with the stream tears from her eyes,
     “Perhaps other people would have queried it, saying I am by myself now but I didn’t.  When we were married he said, ‘We are not adopting.’ I didn’t have to turn anyone down, this was the first.  I know my son (Lorcan now 15) finds it hard at school as he is always referred to as Lynda LaPlante’s adopted son.  He hates that, he says, ‘I am your son.  Why do they always say adopted?’  
     I promise her I will not use the phrase LLP’s adopted son.  
“He says, ‘I am your son,’ and he is extraordinary.  She can’t hide her pride in him. Does she fear that the birth mother will come looking for him?
     “I hope that one day I will reunite her with him.  At his Christening – I went to town, it was huge.  I talked to the Archbishop who was doing the ceremony, I asked, ‘Can you please insert a prayer for the birth mother to be at peace with this?’ He said, ‘I have never had to do this before.’ And I said that I would appreciate it.  And there wasn’t a person at the ceremony who didn’t feel it. 
     “I owe her 15 years of love from this extraordinary, naughty boy who is now in the Hamptons with his motorbike.  He can’t go on the road, just on the grounds. He is gorgeous looking and very funny.  He is very handsome, brown haired.  He said, ‘Will I have a suit at the premiere?’ I said yes, and he said, ‘Not a Marks and Spencer’s one?’ He is quite a snazzy dresser.  He is broad, he does rowing (I’ve seen them together and they look like they belong). 
     Since he was three he has had a girlfriend called Hailey, they met at summer camp and they have been together ever since.  She looks like a young Kate Moss.  They are a divine couple, beautiful together.  She bosses him around.”  
     I’m sure Lorcan is a large part of her drive. Her east coast banker boyfriend has been gone about a year. “I got quite tired of when he came to London, get tickets for this, book Harry’s bar… I am not his secretary.  He is very, very, social, Mr. Society, has all these huge parties.  We had an enormous argument about a painting.  I don’t know if you ever saw that play Art, where one of them has bought a white canvas.  He bought a white canvas by… I said I don’t care who it’s by, you actually bought a white canvas.  I cannot believe you would do that.  So, I drew a little face on it and he went berserk.  
     “My house in The Hamptons is full of American Indian art.  He would walk in and say, ‘Oh my God, the red Indians.  Why have you got them in every room?’  
     She sent out for painkillers which have just arrived. She slips one down. Of course, never having complained
She has a library of her own intellectual property. In the library are outlines for a further 5 Tennyson books, outlines for Above Suspicion. I wonder why all these outlines laid out? She’s up at 5am every day – never stops. Is it because she thinks at 75, she might not have time to write all these books? 
“No,” she says. She takes it in her stride. These days she can’t really see where she’s going, but she’s going there anyway. Any pain, any problems seem to disappear when she talks about her son. And when she talks about the kindness of Steve McQueen which seems to have totally compensated for the pain caused by ITV’s dismissive attitude.
     “Steve gave it back to me.  He constantly refers to the way we work together.  He is generous to me.  He sent me the most amazing flowers saying, ‘Thank you for your amazing notes.’ She smiles blissfully.
    She worries that she might have to let go of things she cares about like her house in the Hampton’s, her 1970’s Mercedes.
     “I can’t drive it now, but I hate letting go of things.  I keep things because they make me remember exactly what I was doing when I got them.  I keep doing bits of letting go.”
     Is it because she’s testing how it feels to let go of the small things to see if she’s ready to let go of bigger things?
     “I don’t think so,” she smiles, enjoying the ride even if she’s no longer driving the car.
 
Widows and Murder Mile are published by Zaffre

Michael Buble (Weekend, October 13, 2018)

Chrissy Iley and Michael Buble
Chrissy Iley and Michael Buble

Michael Buble is nestling in his London hotel suite. He’s looking suave and slim. Impeccable, yet there’s a strong smell of tomato sauce and meatballs – it’s coming from a half-eaten takeout. As ever he is a contradiction in terms. Trim but an indulgent eater. Joyful about his new album Love, yet still in the shadow of what he describes as “hell”. For the last two years of his life he stepped down from all music business duties to look after his son Noah, now 5 as he was being treated for liver cancer. 
     He’s very emotional and his brown eyes well up even just a mention of the words Noah and cancer in the same sentence. When he finds I’ve just flown in from California and it was touch and go whether I’d make it because of my unwell, senior cat he says, “Suffering is all relative. I know that you feel just as much for your cat as some people might for their children.”
     Buble, now 43 has been married for seven years to Argentinian actress Luisana Lopilato. They have three children – Noah, Elias (two) and new baby Vida Amber Betty who is just six weeks old. Vida, he tells me means hope. 
     He fought hard or his career. When he was a teenager he slept with the bible. He prayed on it that he could one day be a singer. As a boy he already shared his grandfather’s love of Frank Sinatra. The crooners (of that era) became his heroes. His 2007 album Call Me Irresponsible was a worldwide No.1. In 2009 he wrote possibly his most famous song Haven’t Met You Yet. He went on to win 4 Grammy’s and sold 75 million records worldwide earning around $45 million a year. Yet all of it must have been meaningless as he faced his then three-year old son being diagnosed with cancer. 
     I tell him I never saw him as the person who lost hope. His glass seemed not just half full but brimming with a cocktail of fizzy optimism. He looks askance. “I don’t know if I’m that person. I don’t know who I was or who I am. Going through this (with Noah) I didn’t question who I was. I just questioned everything else. Why are we here? Is that all there is? Because if that’s all there is there has to be something bigger. This has been such a difficult exercise for me. Difficult because it’s such a conflict of interest. It hurts me. It hurts to talk about him because it’s not my story to tell, it’s his, but I know it’s my story too and I want to talk about everything I’m doing but everything, my whole being has changed. My perception of life. I don’t know that I can even get through the conversation without crying. I’ve never lost control of my emotions in public…”
     Buble, a Virgo, is not an out of control person. His suits are tailored and so are his vocals. There’s passion within both but it’s measured. I’ve always believed that part of why he touches you is that he’s more interested in how you feel and he’d rather talk about that and sing in a way that connects to the public rather than himself. He doesn’t feel comfortable crying. This is a man whose heroes are all heavy-duty macho men like Frank Sinatra, Bobby Darin and the jazz players of the fifties and sixties.
     “I can talk about it now.  In a weird way it’s therapy for me. I actually thought I would never come back to the music business. I never fell out of love with music. I just needed to put it aside. Part of me wanted to move on but I couldn’t. Here’s what’s hard – to go to the store and buy hot dogs and toilet paper, go to a gas station. Go walk by the sea to clear your head but every person recognises you and each one says ‘how is your son?’ And if you think you are close to getting over it you’re sucked right back into it but at the same time I was given faith in humanity. Even the media helped me. They were not disrespectful. My record company in two years never asked me what the plan was. They said ‘we love you. We’re praying for you.’”
     Two years ago I was all set to interview Buble as he was about to host the 2017 Brit Awards. That interview was cancelled as it was supposed to happen just around the time of the diagnosis. I was told then he may never come back.
     “I had no interest in my career and I’m grateful I could afford not to. I spent a good deal of time with people who were not so lucky. The other day I was talking about how the road can be hard but my friend said, ‘So many of us go through the road and find it has cracks but sometimes the cracks are where the light comes in.
   Just because he’s sad, he laughs easily and he likes to make everybody around him laugh. Today it’s through a display of accent. We go from Liverpool to Texas via India and then he decides to do the whole interview in a South African accent but then he swaps it for his version of a London accent which he says he loves a lot and he loves the voice of James Corden.
     He loves Carpool Karaoke and it’s been a dream to perform with Corden.  A dream come true because Channel 4 are doing a Carpool Karaoke special for Stand Up to Cancer with Corden and Buble. 
     “There’s a movie called The Gruffalo that I watch about five times a day because my kids love it and James Corden is the voice of the little brown mouse so he’s in my house ‘all the day’ as my little boy would say.”
     Buble enjoys being a family of three now. He’s a proud daddy but again there’s that contradiction because sometimes he just likes to play. 
     The next night at his show at the O2, he refers to this cosy family unit and says that being here without them is like “a paid vacation.” And then he threw in the raunchy song Me and Mrs Jones. When he recorded that he was dating English actress Emily Blunt who sang backing vocals on it. Then he wrote for her the song Everything. He decided he had not been a good enough boyfriend and that next time he would get it right. So one gets a sense with his wife, he never lets himself put a foot wrong. 
     He tells me, hopefully not seriously, “This is my last interview. I’m retiring from the business. I’ve made the perfect record and now I can leave. Leave at the very top.” I don’t think he means it. Who could not be seduced by the rapturous reception he received when he played his one-off date at the O2. He has the uncanny ability to appeal to audiences across all ages.
    His last album Nobody But Me released in 2013 was platinum selling, yet the new album Love you can hear something special in his voice. A clarity. It seems to reach inside you. It knows love, pain and everything in between. He can take a song like When I Fall In Love or Only Have Eyes for You and give it something special. He can remain faithful to the essence of the song yet ‘Bubler-ise’ it, just as he did with hits like Feeling Good and Cry Me A River. 
     He perks up at the compliment but explains, “When all of this terrible news came in I realised I wasn’t having fun in the music business. I’d lost the joy and at some point before the Brits I was starting to lose the plot. I had become desperate to hold onto something I thought I could lose and I was so desperate and thinking that I had to do something special to keep it, I started to move in ways that weren’t in my comfort zone (like presenting) and the truth is it had been a while that I hadn’t been having fun. I’d started to worry about the numbers and worrying what critics said, what the perception of me might be.”
     He grabs the voile from behind the curtain and puts it over his face and says, “It’s hard to explain. I felt like I was living with this sheer over my face and the reality I was seeing was disguised by that. And the moment the diagnosis came (he tosses away the curtain) I realised how stupid I was to worry about these unimportant things. That they had affected me made me embarrassed. When I had clarity I was embarrassed by my ego that had allowed this insecurity. And in that moment, I decided I would never read my name again in print, never read a review and I never have. I will never use social media again and I never have.
     “I realised for many years I didn’t believe I was on the same stage as my heroes, that I was sharing a microphone with Tony Bennett, Diana Krall. I couldn’t believe I was looking across at someone like Paul McCartney and I would be saying things like it’s hard to get here but my God it’s harder to keep it… who cares? Many people come to their deathbed before they think I should have pursued real things like love and family. I would trade it all in now… 
     “However, then I woke up and I thought, after ten years of trying to get there and five years of being scared it was going away, I think I can enjoy it.”
     Despite all his huge successes, “I was insecure. I’d been learning from my heroes for so many years. Even though I was learning with passion I was afraid I had become a photocopy of my heroes. But when I came back from this terrible time I realised I’m not a photocopy. I’ve learned everything I can from them, taken it and found it in my own soul, my own voice, my own style and now no critic can take that away. It needed clarifying.”
     He says that if his son’s life-threatening illness hadn’t happened, “It could have taken me another 15 years but now I don’t worry about the numbers. I’ve never asked what the pre orders are doing or care if the tickets are selling. I’ve done that already. Now I’m just singing the music I love. Maybe when you let go, maybe that’s when it comes back to you. Like love.”
     He means the minute you stop chasing your obsession it comes to you. The looser the grip the tighter the hold. “Exactly. How many times have you been in a romance where you say I love you, I need you and they run away, but if you suddenly go yeah, maybe not for me, they want it. That’s how it works. I’m fascinated by watching my wife if she’s waiting to learn if she’s got a part I was more panicked about it.  Did they call you for the part? She doesn’t care. How did the movie do? ‘I don’t know.’ What do you mean you don’t know? What was the opening box office? ‘Meh’.”
     Some people are just more secure than others. Watching the numbers is surely a sign of insecurity. “I don’t have the stomach for it anymore. The celebrity narcissism.”
     He doesn’t know if it’s because he’s more secure now or because his priorities have shifted. “I never saw this coming. I lost the plot. I started to crumble. I lost the joy.” 
     It seems that his son’s illness and his fear of celebrity narcissism both conjoined. “I felt I’m going to lose everything.” But suddenly everything took on a new meaning.
     “Why did I want to do this in the first place? I forgot it was about souls connecting because I’d become so anxious. I don’t want to blame certain individuals but there were people in my business life that kept saying if you had not done this or done that or written a better song, tickets might be selling quicker. I started to take all that on board – no one wants to take any responsibility. It’s much easier for people to pass the buck to me because I was insecure enough already. I had to eat it, digest it and say it’s my fault. I’m absolutely rubbish. It affected me and I started to think it’s all going to go. I’m going to lose everything. 
     “You know how insecure I used to be. When there were 25,000 people cheering in the stadium, I’d come off the stage and I’d say do you see that? They hate me. The insecurity probably made me more loveable.” He laughs at himself. “Clarity didn’t come in one moment, one shock.”
     The process had started where he was finding less joy in the music business at the same time as learning about his son’s cancer. His return to music coincided with the news of his son’s remission. There was joy in his world again. Although the two are inextricably linked it wasn’t as straightforward as my son’s recovered. I should go and make an album. What was the moment that he decided to start again?
     “That’s a great question. I told my manager I wanted to take a ten-year sabbatical. I just wanted to hang out and be bad. Part of it was I missed my friends, my guys who are my band so I said to them ‘my wife is leaving for Argentina. Let’s get shitfaced. Come over to the house, let’s drink, order pizza, play video games and jam.’ They came over, we partied and we were like ‘hey, let’s play some music.’ And then I remembered. It was like Peter Pan and I thought Wow!  This is fun.”
    He takes out his phone and shows me little videos of his friends who came over, jamming in his house, playing the various songs that ended up being the album.
     “It was then I realised that I missed it. I didn’t even know I’d missed it. This was about a year ago and the songs in their rawest of takes were produced for the album by David Foster.”  
     What was happening with Noah at the time? “The doctors who told me that 93% of couples who go through this split up and then odd weird ones go on to have another kid. They told us that days into it.” 
    Is it not true that shared trauma makes a couple stronger? He stares at the floor and shakes his head. Did they fight?
     “No, you can’t fight. You just want to die. I don’t even know how I could breathe and my wife was the same and in fact I was the stronger one of the two of us and I wasn’t strong. My wife was… I’m sorry I’ll never be able to make it to the end of the sentence… we find out who we are with these things.”
   The way he got through it was to pretend he was the Roberto Bennini character from Life is Beautiful. “I don’t even know if that was a choice but that’s who I was.”
     The Bennini film was set in a concentration camp and the way he and his son coped was to make a joke of everything. Losing everything and having a striped prison uniform became fun – like wearing stripy pyjamas. This was Buble’s own personal Holocaust. His way of dealing with the devastation.
     “For instance, I never called it the hospital. I called it the fun hotel. And every single day I got extra bedsheets and I would build a tent from the lumber to the bed. I just made the best of it because life is beautiful. It wasn’t the choice. It’s just what I did. Survival.”
     And Noah was in the “hotel” most of the time? He nods quietly and then comes back with. “There are three reasons I wanted to carry on and do this album. One, I felt a debt of gratitude, deeper than I can explain to millions of people all over the world who prayed and showed me compassion. That gave me faith in humanity. Two – I love music and I can be the man and continue the legacy of my idols. And three, if the world was ending – not just my own personal hell but watching the turmoil in America politically and watching Europe break up – there was never a better time for music.”
    On the album there’s a song he wrote, Forever Now, which everyone assumes is THE song about his son but his version of Where or When is the song he’s particularly close to. 
     “This is the story about reincarnation, not knowing where we’ve been. A deja-vu and I’ve had that a lot.
     “Everyone thinks that Forever is about my kids but this one has more of a connection. My fascination with reincarnation. I think to myself is this connection to Elias, Noah, Vida, my wife? Is this all meant to be? When you hold your baby for the first time it’s as if you’ve always known them.”
     He’s still emotionally charged with this song when he sings it at the O2. His voice soars and then he’ll click his fingers, jump around and dance, inviting audience members to sing with him. He’s back enjoying himself and life and having fun again.

Bono (The London Sunday Times Magazine, September 30, 2018)

Bono and Chrissy IleyI’m standing side stage at the Boston Garden. I’ve just seen U2’s eXPERIENCE + iNNOCENCE show – it covers the optimistic power of innocence and the folly of experience. It’s a life looking forwards and backwards, to dark and light. It’s personal and it’s political. It’s Bono’s life.  For the final number there’s no gratuitous group bow, no basking in audience adulation. It’s Bono alone with a single lightbulb, staring at a replica of the house he grew up in. A Bono dolls house.

He comes offstage dripping – a little breathy. Black jacket, black pants, black boots and a towel. We swoop into a black SUV.  Other SUV’s are lined up behind but we’re number one.

A police escort will flank us as we speed through the city at night into the bowels of the hotel. But this moment is not just about rock star secrecy and protocol. It’s about looking at Bono, totally spent and soul baring. He talks in phrases about how he’s on the circumference of awkwardness about the reconstruction of the American Dream, not making sense. He’s undone by this show.

I hold his hand. His is a weak but intense grasp. Apparently, a lot of people loathe Bono. I can tell you that no-one has loathed Bono more than Bono has loathed himself, but more of that later.He can see the contradiction in his situation, raging conscience straddling galloping success

Usually it’s his wife Ali who collects him from the stage and puts him in the car. Once it was Oprah. Today it’s me, so if you don’t like Bono stop reading this now. We are friends. I’ve known him for 20 years since we first met over poached eggs in the Savoy several albums ago. I’ve seen him operate first hand in the White House during the Bush regime, I’ve seen him seem to shrink stadiums with his big charisma and soaring voice, I’ve seen him at home as a daddy, as a husband. But I’ve never seen him shake when he comes offstage.

I’m not reading this hand holding as a display of affection. It was more that he needed a hand to ground him. His eyes looked sad and careworn behind his lilac tinted glasses. He had a stubbly face which gave him definition but strangely also a vulnerability. It was as if his face was smudged.

We’re now in the bowels of the Ritz Carlton hotel but it could be any car park anywhere in the world. He is escorted to a lift that will take him to his floor and he will stay in his room. I go in another lift to the lobby where there’s a nice bar and various people who work for U2 are starting to congregate.

The Edge will come down and his wife Morleigh Steinberg who is a creative consultant for the show, but no other band members. They’re all in their 50’s. They’ve been on the road for 3 consecutive years and one senses that they need to preserve their energy for the next night’s show.

Adam Clayton, bass guitarist, gave up alcohol in the 90’s around the same time as he gave up supermodels. Larry Mullen, the drummer has never been a party animal. He’s much too reserved and now he has an hour of physio after the show because all that drumming takes it out on his arms, neck and back.

Bono cymbalsThe next day I’m in Bono’s Penthouse suite. Room service has delivered lunch of chicken and greens. He takes the metal covers from our lunch and clashes them like cymbals.

There’s a clashing noise at the very start of the show where it mimics the deafening sound of an MRI scanner. It’s about facing death. Bono says, “It’s not a very sexy subject, mortality, is it? But what is sexy is being in a rock and roll band and saying here’s our new song, it’s about death.”

Yeah about as sexy as working the circumference of an embarrassment and awkwardness.  He nods cheerily. “Yes, that’s right. The end of the show is when you go back to your house, the home you grew up in. You think that’s who you are.  But I’m no longer in Cedarwood Road (the house that he grew up in). I’m now facing a different direction. Does it sound pretentious to say that we are an opera disguised as a rock n roll band?”

Yes, it does. “When opera first started out it was punk rock. Opera only became pretentious. Mozart had a punk rock attitude.”

Let’s maybe not say it’s opera. Let’s just say there are grand themes in the show and it’s not just a bunch of songs. “Right,” says Bono. There was a part in the show last night where he was saying how he lost his head along with Adam (Adam going off the rails is well documented) and then he continued, “and then it happened to The Edge and Larry later.” The Edge looked askance.

When did The Edge fall off the edge? “OK, I was just saying it because I was feeling a little mischievous. I don’t like seeing them looking smug.  The Edge, a zen Presbyterian looked a little miffed and Larry looked ‘this could be true?’

He is laughing but he’s thinking seriously about change. “Who would want to stay the same is what I’m really talking about. If success means that you trade in real relationships and real emotions for hyper media centric ones then maybe success is not good. But that’s not what success has done for me. You have a dizzy moment where you think your daily toil is of interest to the general public then you realise it isn’t really.”

Kind of tough to be performing in stadiums and thinking that you’re of no interest to the general public. He corrects, “I mean early on in the 80’s I remember being very self-conscious and thinking what newspaper I choose to buy in the newsagent was going to define me. And I remember hanging out with Chrissie Hynde who was so totally herself at all times. It took me a few years to get there.”

He thinks he wasn’t himself for decades. “In public I had different selves and all of mine were pretty annoying. We went to the film Killing Bono and I said to the Edge about the actor playing me, what’s that accent he’s speaking in? That’s not my accent. And The Edge said ‘it’s not but it’s the accent you used to give interviews in.”

The actor must have researched it from old interviews.  “It’s like people have a telephone voice, a telephone personality and I had one in the 80’s.”

We both talk in our telephone voices for a while and laugh at each other.

“What happened with my accent was that I had a Protestant mother and a Catholic father. Dublin Protestants tend to have less of an accent because of their Anglicised influence.”

Was this accent purposely odd so that people couldn’t define if he was Protestant or Catholic?

“I don’t know. To be clear I didn’t know I was doing it but if you have a musical ear you can take on any accent.”

I give him my famous accent test which is to talk with a Geordie, Welsh and Pakistani accent and then repeat and repeat and see how long it takes before they all become the same. And after that it’s Australian, New Zealand and South African. And because I’m winning he suggests we might do Dublin Northside and Dublin Southside.

“I had a fear early on when I moved to the southside of Dublin that my kids might have a southside accent and sound like spoilt brats. One night I was coming home with Ali to our house in Temple Hill when I heard a party going on up the road so I said Ali let’s go over and find out what the neighbours are like. She said ‘you can’t just walk in on them and’ I said just for a laugh. She went to bed and I wandered up the road and I walked in to this party. Some cool music, some uncool music, some friendly, some gave me some attitude. One of them, let’s just say he was called Cormac and he had a Mohawk and a bit of attitude and decided to give me some grief. Because I’m a successful singer in a big old rock band and this is 1988.  And eventually he says in that Dublin 4 accent, the southside accent, ‘I’m an anarchist.” I grabbed him and lost my temper for a second and grabbed him and said, ‘Cormac, you’re a fucking estate agent,’ because I knew that’s what he’d grow into.

The next day Ali asked me how the party was and I said there was exactly the percentage of arseholes to really cool people that I grew up with in Cedarwood Road, no different.”

The blinding summer sun streams in and we’re submerged in the hot breath of the humidifiers. Bono doesn’t touch his lunch.

In a recent Rolling Stone interview Quincy Jones said that when he goes to Ireland Bono always insists that he stays in his castle because it’s so racist there. Which castle is this?

“I love Quincy. I saw him recently and gave him all the love I have in my heart but I don’t have a castle.”

He does have a Victorian folly at the end of his garden which Quincy may have stayed in. Most guests do. When I stayed there, there was a wall signed by President Clinton and Hillary.

“Now that I think about it he did tell me that he had some racist incidents in Ireland in the 60s and I said it’s not like that now. Come and stay with us.”

Quincy also said that U2 were never going to make a good album again because it was too much pressure. “Yes, and Paul McCartney couldn’t play bass. We’re all having these meltdowns apparently. Most people accept that the album we’ve just made, Songs of Experience is right up there with our best work. It certainly had the best reviews.” The single Love is Bigger Than Anything In Its Way is currently No.1 in the Billboard Dance Chart “which we haven’t been for a very long time.”

Despite what he says it must be a pressure to come up with songs like One or With Or Without You or New Year’s Day or In The Name of Love. Songs that have defined decades.

“One of the reasons U2 are so regarded in the US is because black artists like Quincy Jones have always championed us.  And back in the day, Donna Summer. Our music wasn’t rooted in the blues and they found it fresh but also not alien. It’s in some ways harder you might argue to relate to it if you are an indie kid than if you are black and American.”

There’s a section of the show where we see a film showing the neo Nazi riots in Charlottesville. The desecration and reconstruction of the American Dream. This he tells me will be restructured for the European shows. How does he think the Nazi stuff will work in Europe when they start their tour in Berlin?

“We will rethink it but there’s plenty of Nazi’s right now in Europe. I think we can reimagine it with the same spine.” In fact, they decide to start the European shows with Charlie Chaplin’s speech from The Great Dictator. “Dictators free themselves but they enslave the people! Now let us fight to fulfil that promise! Let us fight to free the world – to do away with national barriers.”

“In many ways it’s a narrative based show. This is our story.”  The show is personal and political. in the US it aimed to coalesce the centre and bring both sides into a common ground, as outsiders to the US they would not presume to critique. But it held up a mirror and was timely to what was happening there and then. Europe it is a different matter. It’s their home and inspiration. It’s what made them and it’s where they, their families and friends live their lives. Of course they’ll make statements about the rise of the far right. That’s their tradition. Rock n roll with a conscience.

Of course this show seems to be about Bono’s actual life, ono’s actual street that he grew up in etc. but it’s a metaphor for all of their lives. Ts his voice that carries their story. He speaks for all four of them, woven into a singular voice. Bono is the conduit and the lightning rod but it’s about all of their experiences. They are U2. They are a band. It’s not the Bono show although he is a showman extraordinaire.

“One of the stories we tell about ourself is about our country. Countries don’t actually exist, they are drawn. Part of coming to eXPERIENCE + iNNOCENCE is realising that history can change and what we are witnessing in the US right now is that it’s rewriting itself with darker tones. We’re here in search for America at a time where America is in search of itself. It’s happened a few times over the life of U2 but we are looking for the same thing the country is.”

U2 and Bono specifically has always been close to the American dream and those who dreamed it. Bill and Hillary Clinton were not only invited to his “castle” where he signed the wall – I saw it there. A + B = a bed for C. But only the other week Bono went to visit Bush apparently?

“I did. I saw the 44th president last week. If you do work with people you don’t just cut off from people. I’m still close with Obama (he hasn’t stayed in his castle) “but he and his missus and his kids have been in our local pub.

I don’t like to think of my relationships with these people as retail. I like to think that having gone through some stuff together we stay together even when they’re out of office.

I saw George Bush on his ranch. He spent $18 billion on anti-retroviral drugs and I had to thank him for that.”

Last week he also met Vice President Pence because he at some point was involved in PEPFAR  Was he helpful?

“Well…we haven’t had the vicious cuts that the administration proposed. I would have to say that Congress have played the largest role in this.”

And what about the orange one? “I’m wise enough to know that any sentence with his name in it will become a headline so I just don’t use his name. It’s nothing personal. It’s just you have to feel you can trust a person you’re going to get into that level of work with. Lots of my leftie friends doubted I could work with George Bush but he came through as did Tony Blair and Gordon Brown – came through in a way that changed the world on development. If they had not made development a priority, other presidents would not have. They made the lives of the poorest a priority for rich nations. 45 million go to school because of debt cancellation.”

And the orange one? Is he with your plan? “No, he’s trying to cut all that stuff at the moment which is why I don’t want to be near him. If he’d put down the axe maybe we could work with his administration. But we can’t with the sword of Damocles hanging.”

We talk about Ivanka Trump and Bono says, “I have no doubt she has the intention to try and move the gender equality debate.”

As does Bono himself. At one part in the show there’s a screen saying ‘Poverty is Sexist’.  The show takes place essentially in a round. A cage which sometimes encompasses the band is also used as a screen for the Anton Corbin film where in his potent trademark black and white film, we see children going to school, having their breakfast, wearing army helmets. A nation, a world at war where the children are in danger.

“We started Poverty Is Sexist a few years ago before the #metoo movement. We were getting messages actually from our daughters. You can’t solve the problems in the world using half the brain power that’s available. He worked closely with Harvey Weinstein on the Mandela movie Long Walk To Freedom (2013) where he won a Globe for the accompanying song Ordinary Love.

“He did very good work for U2.  My daughters are very unforgiving in this regard whenever I get philosophical they tell me, ‘it’s not your time to speak on this.’”

I can’t tell if it’s sadness I see in his eyes or just tiredness but there’s still optimism, there’s still solutions.

“There are certain institutions that have kept the world in balance like The UN, The EU, The Breton Woods Institution, The World Bank, The IMF. All of these things whatever your position is on any of them you’ve got to admit that there’s a complete transformation of institutional norms as well as international behaviours. Whether you’re an artist, an economist or a voter you can’t not be interested. At least after Brexit, people are arguing, educating themselves.”

Isn’t it crushing to be such an optimist? “No, I’m cautious. For many people in the United States they are grieving after the last election. A death happened. A death of their innocence. And my attitude to that is it’s OK to wake up out of this naïve view of the world where we thought the human spirit would evolve naturally and the world was getting more fair. There is no evidence in 10,000 years to suggest that there’s a forward motion.

It was Dr King who said the moral arc of the universe is long but it bends towards justice. We don’t see evidence of that. I want to believe it’s true but in my lifetime there’s never been a moment like this where you actually think democracy is not a given.”

We talk of mothers separated from babies as they crossed the border and this action being backed up with biblical quotes. “The One campaign fights against the injustice of extreme poverty. People don’t arrive at the border risking life and limb without real purpose. We are Irish people who were economic refugees. We floated past the Statue of Liberty. The idea that we would be separated from our children when we got off the boat…..you could say the European Union was the invention of America. If you think about the post Second World War that was an investment in protecting and unifying Europe because the Americans were smart. General George C Marshall had the wisdom to invest because if we succeeded we would buy their products.”

The Innocence and Experience show is indeed about political grief as well as personal. One minute you’ve got Bono jumping around the room with the room service lids and the next he’s deeply sad.

He said that the poet Brendan Kennelly said he had to write every song as if he was already dead?

“Yes, to imagine yourself free of ego or concerns about what people think about you.”

Was this about his own near-death experiences? By this I don’t mean falling off his bike and having a 5 hour operation November 2014. After he broke his arm in 5 places and his eye socket. At the end of last year he was seriously ill.

“I mean I don’t want to speak about it but I did have a major moment in my recent life where I nearly ceased to be. I’m totally through it stronger than ever.”

He’s talking about this as if he had a decision in it. Did he have a choice whether he could go through it or not?

“No. I didn’t. It wasn’t a decision. It was pretty serious. I’m alright now but I very nearly wasn’t.”

No wonder this has changed the course of his songs, so many that question mortality, that others are letters to his children and wife, reflections, conversations with his younger self about how things could have been, should have been.

“Funnily enough I was already down the road of writing about mortality. It’s always been in the background.”

Sure it has. How could it not be? He was 14 when his mother died. Iris had a fatal aneurysm at a family funeral. He’s always liked to point out how many rock gods lost their mother like John Lennon. Initially he and Larry bonded over the death of their mothers. It was always in the background.

“And then it was in the foreground.”

Did he have a premonition that it was going to happen? “No but I’ve had a lot of warnings. A fair few punches over the last years.”

Like falling off the bike? “That was only one of them. There were some serious whispers in the ear that maybe I should have taken notice of. The Edge says I look at my body as an inconvenience and I do. I really love being alive and I’m quite good at being alive, meaning I like to get the best out of any day. The way I’m set up as an artist is I don’t see the songs as being art or the being in a band. I see life as being what you express yourself with. I certainly have a renewed vigour because it was an impasse. It was the first time I put my shoulder to the door and it didn’t open. I’ve always been able to do that and now I feel God whispered to me. Next time try knocking at the door or just try the handle. Don’t use your shoulder because you’ll break it.”

And this has had an impact on practical things like touring?

“Yes. I can’t do as much as I used to. On previous tours I could meet a hundred lawmakers in between shows and after the show and now I know that I can’t do that. This tour is particularly demanding and it asks of me that I prepare for it daily, that I concentrate on it so I can give myself completely. That’s why these shows are so great. I prepare for it and my voice is stronger than it has been. Have you heard about that Michael Gladwell book the 10,000 hours?”

It’s about you have to put 10,000 hours of work into something to be any good at it?

“I think we just got to 10,000 hours. It’s not genius. It’s just 10,000 hours. I’m not there yet but the band are. They are at their peak. Early on we were good, even great but I didn’t think we were and I didn’t tell them that and I was probably the weakest but I was the front man. I could grab attention. I could propel the songs. They’ve turned in their 10,000 hours and are on a whole other level right now.  But nobody’s gonna tell me they saw U2 on another tour and they were playing better. It’s not gonna happen.”

Perhaps it’s because he has a feeling of completion. That it can’t get any better. If you start your show with an MRI and end it onstage alone with a solitary lightbulb, the metaphor is you come in and out of the world alone. He’s 58 but maybe he has lived his life in dog years.

“Everybody gets to this place. Whether you have a face-off with your own mortality or somebody close to you does, you are going to get to a point in your life where you ask questions about where you’re going.”     Does that mean this is the peak? There won’t be another U2 tour after this?

“I don’t know. I don’t take anything for granted. U2 in this moment with these songs, these love letters, it’s some of our best work and I’m not sure that can be said about a lot of people who’ve been around this long.”

Bono has always lived in fear of U2 being dubbed a heritage act with greatest hits tours. Last year they did The Joshua Tree tour, not just the hits, they played the whole album.

“As if we’d never recorded the album. As if we’d put them out that year. It’s OK to acknowledge work you’ve done and give it respect, but if it’s the best we can do then we’re not an ongoing concern.”

He tells me that a critic once said ‘being at a Stones show makes people feel good but being at a U2 show makes people feel good about the person who’s standing next to them.’

I tell him the joy of being at a U2 show is that it just makes you feel who you are. The songs and visuals stretch your intellect as well as unfold your emotions.

He winds back to his personal apocalypse and I wonder if his younger self would be disappointed with his older self.

Would his younger self have approved of the album Songs of Innocence gifted to everyone on iTunes? Some people appreciated it more than others?

“We were experimenting. It was intended to be generous. The intention was never the over reach that it appeared to be. I’m not sure that my younger self would approve of where I’ve got to but I like to think that if my younger self stopped punching my face, my younger self would see that I’ve actually stayed true to all the things my younger self believed in. I’m still in a band that shares everything. I’m not just shining a light on troublesome situations, but trying to do something about them. I still have my faith, I’m still in love, I’m still in a band. What about your younger self?”

My younger self would say you fucked up on life, you fucked up on love, you loved all the wrong people at all the wrong times, you’ve been evil and destructive but hey, you’re in a Penthouse with Bono. My younger self would be yay, you made it!

Final word from Bono “You should be the singer of this band.”

Adam Clayton

I’m back in the Boston Garden Arena. In the winding bowels of the building the U2 production team weave seamlessly. They do this every day and most of them have been doing it for years with a level of loyalty that’s unquestioning. Most of the production staff are women, women who get things done. They pad about in dark jeans or cargo’s and Converse.

I first ventured backstage with U2 a couple of decades ago.  There was a different uniform – a floaty maxi dress and platform shoes and women would run, not teeter in vertiginous heels across stadiums. Women no longer have to run in heels and it’s a statement U2 take on board.

I meet Adam Clayton in the guitar bunker beneath the stage. He gives me a tour of what goes on there. The Edge’s technician, Dallas Schoo, is lovingly poring over Edge’s 33 guitars, 25 which he uses every day. The bass guitars are less in number -about 18 but they make up for it in sparkle and Clayton has given them names.

There’s a lilac glitter guitar with a heavily studded strap that he calls Phil Lynott and a more gothic strap that he calls The Cure. They’re all lined up, ready for action. We climb up to the stage itself. I look out at the vast, empty arena and then clamber up into the long slim cage that wobbles. It’s where they perform a chunk of the show. The sides of the cage also double up as a screen for the films for the virtual reality footage and the political movies. I don’t like heights or enclosed spaces and Clayton, ever the gentleman, helps me down.

He’s wearing a Westwood T shirt and Sandalwood. His body is ripped, impressive. He likes to work out. He is 58.  We part some makeshift curtains to do our interview which will happen at the same time as he’s having his physio. Soon he is naked but for a towel. The physiotherapist is on tour with the band and Clayton gets his massage before every show.

“I work out a lot – I run and do weight training in the morning so that tightens me up and then in the show carrying the bass and there are various other occupational quirks that affect the body. I have to make sure they don’t develop into real problems. It was a bit of a shock to learn that the things you could do in your twenties and thirties in terms of being a player, when you get into your forties and fifties, they cause repetitive strain injuries.”

Does he mean carpal tunnel? He’s playing his bass and his fingers won’t move?

“Exactly. But actually for me more of an issue is what it does to my hips and lower back, shoulders and neck. You just get so tight you can’t turn, you can’t move. When you go on stage you don’t want to be feeling those things.”

Hargen the physiotherapist is German and he speaks with a German Irish accent. He’s got strong hands that seem to know what they’re doing. Watching someone be massaged is quite meditative.

“It is. You make sure that your channels are open when you’re onstage. You don’t want random thoughts coming through your mind.”

Of course, there was a time in the nineties where Clayton was full of random thoughts and random excesses. The polite gentleman went wild. Fell in love with Naomi Campbell. His man part was the cover of ZOO TV, his inherent shyness replaced by rampant exhibitionism. He’s come a long way since then.  He’s married to Mariana Teixeira de Carvalho, a Human Rights lawyer and has a new baby, Alba and his addictions end at exercise, designer T shirts and the perfect Sandalwood scent.

He’s more than come through it.  He’s a spectacular player and he owns the stage. His bass guitar strut looks far from tight or injured. He’s pleased when I tell him his 10,000 hours show.

“Ah yes, from Gladwell.” He smiles. Random thought comes into my head. Why does it seem normal to interview a man who’s naked except for a towel, talking about sonic perfection?

“I use only about 6 or 7 guitars. Edge uses 30 different ones. He’s the one seeking perfection sonically. When we started from 1976 onwards, the sound of the punk band was the most aggressive and powerful thing that a teenager could hear and all the bass players were stars. It was much cooler than the guitar so from that point of view – I was. We are also a little more mysterious at the back. I’m a big fan of bass and drum. I realise it’s a bit niche. These days most modern records are programmed and synthesised bass and drums. It’s not real.”

Clayton likes the real thing. “Larry has special needs because for 40 years he’s been pounding something that has been resisting him. He has to get physio done an hour before the show and an hour after. He’s in pain and his muscles need to function properly. Drumming is the most physically debilitating thing you can do. These are things you do in your twenties and thirties. It’s the equivalent of a sports career where you shouldn’t really be doing it past the age of 35 but nobody knew that when rock n roll started and nobody realised it could be a long career.  I guess the jazz players of the thirties and forties might have found that out and those people probably weren’t making enough to have doctors to help them. They probably medicated with heroin.”

Does he ever medicate? “If my neck is tight and painful I’ll take an Aleve (like paracetamol).”

Onstage it looks pure and loose but now I’ve learnt it takes a lot of massaging. Three consecutive tours have had an accumulative effect. It won’t continue like that.

“I don’t think so. It’s been good for the band’s playing and the band’s tightness and when you see how much Edge does – singing, keyboards, guitar, Edge is at the top of his game. Bono has learnt to master, to dominate these stages, but we’re due a break. The Joshua Tree tour was a runaway train. We extended it because it was popular and it suited our schedule because our album release date was moved. A lot of people work harder than we do but I think we need a break now. Being in front of audiences that are enthusiastic is an amazing pay off but being away from home for most of the year is gruelling.”

I was only on the road for a few days and I feel a strange kind of exhaustion from travel and from never being never alone. It’s a weird thing. Clayton is looking forward to a holiday “with the rest of the lads with the South of France.” They all have houses near to each other on the French Riviera. Extraordinary that they not only work together but want to holiday together.

“Yes, it’s perverse.” Is that some kind of masochistic syndrome? “No, what really works is we’ve known each other for a long time. Everyone now has children and there’s a whole group of friends that revolve around it so it’s a community and it’s nice to spend time together.”

They all still like each other? “Yes, I’m very grateful for it. I still think that Bono and Larry and Edge are the most fascinating people in my life. They constantly surprise me in terms of their insight, their development, their intelligence. When you find people like that you hang onto them.

We haven’t done anything to embarrass our younger selves. We were young guys coming out of the suburbs of Dublin that didn’t know anything but had a certain idealism of how we thought the world should be and we’ve honoured that.  Our tours have always been based on more than crash, bang, wallop and video effects. They’ve meant something.

You learn things as you’re going. Trying to eat as healthily as you can and being in a healthy frame of mind helps you. We have an on the road chef who knows what we should be eating. I’ve gone vegetarian. I’ve heard so much about the meat processing business that I don’t trust anything. I’ve got high levels of mercury in my blood so I don’t eat fish.  I’ve not drank for twenty years and that was a completely different life but I notice other people are heading that way. There’s now a theory in the UK that even one drink is harmful to you. I think that’s a bit extreme and a bit of a buzz wrecker but it does seem that alcohol is being thought of as possibly causing cancer.”

Not very rock n roll, is it. But maybe that’s old rock n roll where it was all about living for the moment, doing lines and drinking shots…all night. And now the challenge is longevity and not losing relevance.

After the show in the hotel bar in a cordoned off area, there will still be champagne and The Edge will be the only band member socialising because Edge never does extreme.

Clayton continues, “The longer you are off it the easier it is but I can never have just one. I see people who drink half a glass of wine and I get anxious thinking how can you leave that other half? But there are those people who can have just one glass and leave it and people who the minute they have one they’re off and their mood changes. It’s a powerful drug and a powerful industry. I wonder if the legalisation of marijuana is going to be competitive.”

They have worked the last four summers, either touring or recording. Clayton looks forward to family time and enjoying his daughter’s first birthday. It’s hard to tell if I’m sensing that this could be the end or whether he’s just looking forward to the break.

“Albe really does love banging musical instruments. And she has an eye for looking at the light and noticing. I’m happy to say that there are strong signs that there is an artistic soul in there.”

I’m wondering if his massage therapist has remote superpowers. It has relaxed me too. Clayton’s is the most sophisticated sandalwood. It doesn’t punch you. it gives you a comforting embrace. Edge 56 Bono 58

Larry Mullen was in fact the founder of the band. Mulen is still the heartbeat. Nothing happens without him. He provides dignity, strength. He also has a Dorian Gray thing about him. He’s always looked much younger than his 56 years. He’s always fit and I’ve always loved those drummer’s arms. As we chat in the Boston Garden Arena before the show, he tells me that these days those arms don’t come easy and neither does the drumming. He has to work out, he has to have intense physio.

“It’s not so rock n roll but it’s what you have to do to get yourself up to this. I don’t come from that kind of discipline – the same as the jazz drummers. Technically it’s complicated and physically it’s a different thing.”

He means he’s not the kind of jazz drummer who sits mellow and still and only the arms move. “I’m a street drummer. When you throw yourself about and after doing it for a long time you just can’t quite do it in the same way.”

For Mullen, constant touring has been hard and not just on the arms. In the nineties after a huge tour he simply took off on his motorbike and disappeared with some kind of reaction against the band and also an inability to cope with being home, but that’s long since been worked through. He’s had ambitions to further his acting career. I’m sure his deep, thoughtful presence is an interesting cinematic one. He has had parts in the films Man on the Train in 2011 with Donald Sutherland and A Thousand Times Goodnight with Juliette Binoche in 2013.

“We’ll finish this out and then there will be time to decide what we want to do next. I’d like to take a really long holiday.”

There’s something in the way he says it, not just tiredness, that make me think maybe this really is it.

“I don’t know.  You never know. I assume there’ll be another album. I don’t know when and I’d like to think we have some time to consider it. I don’t know that anybody needs a U2 record or a U2 tour anytime soon. People could do with taking a break from us and vice versa.”

Will he try to resume acting? “I’d like to but I had to put all that stuff on hold.  The problem is if the tour gets changed the album gets released at a different time, all bets are off. My agent said ‘I can’t do this because you’re just not available so I think I will re-employ the agent and tell them I won’t be doing this for a couple of years. I’d like to do something else.”

Shouldn’t the agent have kept him on the books? “Well, in fairness it was difficult. I wasn’t answering the phone.”

And that’s Mullen for you. He’s not an answering the phone type.

While Mullen goes for his physio I am in catering perusing selections of cheesecake and pasta and soup. I meet Willie Williams the shows creative director over bowls of spaghetti.

This is his twelfth world tour with U2.  “What’s been fantastic about working with U2 for so long apart from the fact that they are who they are, is that they’ve always done big, ambitious projects. Then they take a hiatus so I’ve been able to have my own life back and I don’t feel it’s been taken over.”

Williams recently has installed lighting for the Hakkasan group in Vegas. He has designed a centrepiece – a spaceship chandelier at Caesar’s Palace.

Williams also constructed the Innocence tour which was similar in its staging but it’s interesting to see in three years how much technology has moved on.

“For them it’s about finding the connection between spectacle and emotion. We tweak the show as it goes along. The joy of this show is we start with a narrative. We spoke for a long time about the band growing up in Dublin and honing their story so we could tell the experience part of the journey.”

At the time we speak, he is redesigning the show for Europe – the general theme will be Europe at a time of crisis. The European flag will replace the US flag. That should be nicely controversial in Brexit Britain.

There is a cityscape for every night which is redone for every city of the tour.  When I see the show this time, Bono has selected different seats for me because he wants me to see other aspects of the show. His attention to detail is like that. For me, it was interesting to watch the stage after having been under it and on it.

After the show we’re back in the hotel bar. It’s Edge and Morleigh’s wedding anniversary. We all eat handmade chocolate cake. It’s a group of people who know each other really well and can move instinctively and swiftly with each other.

The next day we all travel from Boston to New York on Amtrak.  U2 have reserved an entire carriage for cast and crew.  Once we arrive, the set must be built immediately at Madison Square Garden for their 4-day residency.  Edge is the only band member on the train – the others all left after the gig last night to see their families.  Edge’s wife and daughter are here with him. Did he give Morleigh a gift for their wedding anniversary?

“You get special dispensation when you are on the road – she is with me and that is the best present.”

He’s very smiley when he talks about family and equally smiley when he talks about guitars. Does he really use 33 each night?

“It’s possible.”

We talk about how in the early days he only used one guitar which meant that Bono had to hit some very high notes.

“These days we try not to do that to him, we try to save his voice. He does hit some very high notes.  He has a good range. A ‘B’ would be his top note these days but he has hit ‘C’ which is what a top tenor would hit, which is very, very high – an opera singer would hit that maybe once a night.”

I sense a strong concern for Bono.

“Bono has a very ambivalent attitude to his physical self.  He doesn’t naturally take responsibility for his physical well-being, he is more about other things and the body just comes along with it.  Which is fine in your 20s but you get to a certain point… somebody once said for the first 30 years your body looks after you and supports you then you have to look after your body.  It is a difficult shift for him.

“It is a difficult shift for anybody who is living in the moment, considers himself an artist.  It’s about being current, being present.  If you spend too much time thinking you are old and past it you probably can’t do it anymore.”

This is the dilemma they all face. Take care of themselves but not so much care that they are over thinking it.

On the road places them in a kind of cocoon. They’re with your rock n roll family doing the things that they always do. It’s not so much holding back the years but not acknowledging their existence.  If they think about being old, it becomes difficult to feel relevant.

We see passengers on the platforms peering in. Perhaps they can spot the odd vacant seat in our carriage. They wonder why they can’t get in. You feel set apart, not so much alienated but special.

“As you can see, it’s a family experience on the road, we are surrounded by the people we love so it’s not as alienating as you think although I am not under any illusions that we are not to some extent institutionalised by being a member of U2.  How could you not be?”

The train rocks along.

“I must say I am really looking forward to not being on the road.” (They have a break before their European tour starts August 31 in Berlin). “I am sure there will be a withdrawal of a certain type but I think the minute you feel being on the road is normal is when you know you have got to get home fast.”

“The physio keeps us from not getting in trouble in the physical sense.  What we do as a guitar player or drummer is use the body in a very unnatural way. It’s like a tennis player; there is a lot of asymmetrical movement.  Your body will change shape to make that the norm which plays havoc… I get to the gym when I can, I am not a big believer in heavy weights and the like, I care more about flexibility.  I used to do yoga.”

Edge isn’t fanatical about the gym, he’s not fanatical about anything.  He is measured, he has always been the balance of other band members excesses.

Does he have Morleigh on the road with him the whole time?

“No, I wish.  She was director in residence for a while when Willie was away.  She was our eyes and ears in the audience and helped tinker with the show.  It’s a constant process trying different things and she has helped Bono over the years with his use of the stage.  Her background is modern dance so it’s all about the visual medium; the shape of the show.”

Their daughter Sian is very smart and engaging. It’s her image that is used for the Poverty is Sexist visual and she’s also on the cover of the album along with Eli Hewson. Last night in the bar, she and I bonded over dyslexia.

“I am sort of dyslexic when it comes to music,” says Edge. “I am totally instinctive. I use my ear and am not technically proficient. I am very lazy so I know just enough music theory to get by.”

The other night on stage he looked perplexed when Bono said that he and Adam had gone off the rails and it happened to Edge later.

When did that happen?  He laughs, knowing that he has never gone off the rails. The eyebrows arch as he briefly ponders just how devastating that would have been, not just for him but for the rest of the band.

“I have been pretty together through the years – I am sure we have all had our moments and lost our perspective and started to buy into the bullshit.  That’s the hardest thing, to hold on to the perspective.  The general rule is that everybody involved in any endeavour always overestimates their own importance while simultaneously undervaluing everyone else; once you realise that you can start catching yourself.”

I even caught myself feeling put out because the second night at the hotel the U2 crew did not have the whole bar to themselves as we’d had the first night. We were given a cordoned off area within the bar.  And that is me after two days.  How could I become so arrogant after such a short time?

“Good question.  I think we all have that tendency to enjoy being made a fuss of. It’s a Seamus Heaney phrase, ‘Creeping Privilege’ you have got to look out for it because it can turn you into a monster or somebody who needs help, a victim.  And you don’t want to be that.”  He laughs his wise laugh.

“That is the good thing about being a band member, we all spot each-others tendencies to go off track.  We are peers and equals. Which is not a given because solo artists have no peers or equals.

“We are not afraid of bad news.  In the beginning we had to work hard to get anywhere, it was always a struggle.  That’s just how it feels, we enjoy the fight and the internal struggle to get where we feel we need to go and a sense that we have got to fight for our position to maintain where we are at creatively and literally.”

Edge has optimism. Edge sees the past, sees the future and would never let U2 become a heritage act.

“Yes, and we should not feel entitled. Because the other part of this creeping privilege is that you get to the place that you think you are entitled just because you are a name and you’ve been around a long time.”

They keep each other in check. Do they actually criticise each other?

“It generally doesn’t have to be said, it just becomes clear.  That’s the nature of our band culture.  These things get figured out. There have been very few times when we have had to have what you might call an intervention.  It’s basically what friends do for each other because that what we are; a bunch of friends.  And even when we are not touring we will all be in the south of France with each other.  Recently I have been mostly between Dublin and Venice, California. I am trying to build a house in Malibu but not having much luck.  Hopefully in the future I will be there.  Meanwhile, we are renting a place in Venice, low key, not a big house on a street.  It’s grounding.”

“Touring to me is not the same as travel because you are in a bubble.  I still try to get out even if it’s just going for a walk in a park, a bit of shopping, maybe a bar, there is something really educational about travelling.  Our kids have to travel to see their dads and I’ve watched how their attitude to the world opens and their acceptance of difference is just a natural by-product of seeing the world.  It’s healthy.  Being insular in your own little group is not.”

“We have made two of the most personal and introspective albums of our entire career but the show is very political so I am hoping to open it up in more Euro Centric ways.  But the music, that’s personal.”

The political only becomes meaningful when it relates to the personal. There is of course a bond between the Americans and the Irish. A statistic claims there are 40 million people of Irish heritage in the US. The desecration and reconstruction of the American dream is also an Irish dream.  The European tour will be different because the European dream doesn’t exist in the same way.

“We are hoping for a global dream which is hopelessly idealistic. Let’s start with getting the West on the right footing. If you are ready to look into it on a deeper level an anthropological level you will find that during times of crisis people instinctively reach for the monster they think is going to protect.  That can be a movement or an individual.  In the US it seems to be a bit of both.  For sure the orange one with the help of some very smart advisors has tapped into a movement of disaffection which has clearly been brewing for 20 years.

“I was just in Washington on Capitol Hill, all these neoclassical edifices – the statement is of power.  Not the power of an emperor or a king but the power of the state. If you are a miner and you are in Washington worrying that you’ve lost your job or health care it would be so intimidating.  Someone like Trump talks to the guy at the end of the bar somehow you relate to him.  This is a guy who is pretending to represent ever man and he is the most elitist.  So many levels of irony.  If you look at the longer arc of history what we are seeing now is a backward step.

“The actual drift is in this direction and a positive thing but it relies on respect in the sense of pluralism which is my culture, your culture; my religion, your religion.  People have very strong religious ides which we find crazy, dinosaur deniers.  Some people who have whacky thoughts; extreme Christians, extreme Muslims to be able to understand where they are coming from and not demonize or look down on them and not say, ‘Your reality is not as valid as my reality’.  The problem is that the divisions are big.  Europe, weirdly enough on some levels, has less diversity than America.  Europe is post Christian for the most part, in America they share a common language but a huge diversity of world vision.  In Europe we have cultural difference, linguistic differences, political differences.  If we keep our never EuropeEloper can survive and we can all pull together.  Brexit is, of course, a bit of a set-back, but we’ll figure it out.

“Picture us at 16 or 17, we were a really awful, terrible band. We managed to persuade the powers that be to let us play a short set in the school disco.  I remember everybody gathering into a little room in a panic because we realised, of the songs we were about to perform we had never managed to get to the end of any of them.  So now we can get through the songs and we have sold a few records, we have had a long observance in the same direction and that has gotten us where we are.  In other words, total blind thinking.”

They started off with the very smart thinking Paul McGuiness as their manager, who remained from the start until 5 years ago.

“To be fair, we found him.  He had done a little bit of management of a Dublin band but his day job was in the world of advertising, commercials, assistant director, he had worked on a couple of movies.”

It was his concept that the band should split everything equally four ways.  This levelling seems to have been genius thinking.  So many bands split up because of egomania and in band rivalry.

“It was a piece of genuine wisdom – he had heard why so many bands disintegrated.  It took us about three minutes to consider and go, ‘Yes, that’s a good idea.’”

We talk about science because he’s intrigued where intuition and science meet, the logical brain and the poet brain. They meet in The Edge’s brain.

When the train pulls into Penn station we head off in opposite directions. I’m already sad to leave behind my rock and roll cocoon. Feels like family. I already miss the fact I won’t have a show to watch that night.  People to meet after the show…. talk about guitars and lost dreams and reconstructed ones……what if it really is the end?

Denzel Washington (The London Sunday Times Magazine, August 12, 2018)

I order a Lyft car to go to the screening of Denzel Washington’s  The Equaliser 2 in Century City Los Angeles. Traffic on Santa Monica Boulevard is murderous and I’m agitated.
“Perhaps you can get to a later show,” says Grace the Lyft driver. No, I say puffing up. It’s a special screening because I’m interviewing Denzel Washington tomorrow. “Oh,” she says. “You’ll like him. His son and my son used to play basketball together. They’re friends. Denzel is a good man, family man. Gave lots of money to the school.”
I decide to run in heels the rest of the way to make the screening and in the opening sequence I learn that Denzel’s character Robert McCall is an undercover Lyft driver. He’s also an avenging angel who rights wrongs violently and proficiently before anyone even asks. He is a dark force for good and he does a lot of his research while driving his Lyft. That’ll teach me to dismiss Grace.
The  Equaliser 2 is the first sequel of Washington’s career which has spanned 2 Oscars, 3 Globes and 1 Tony. Although the next day when we meet he’ll shrug and say, ‘Well, nobody ever asked me to do anything twice,” I think it’s because he doesn’t want to admit he’s close to this character and that’s why he was able to so effortlessly revive it.
Also, there’s something perfect for the times that a powerful dark angel exists, a guy who can correct everything that goes wrong with brutality yes because you feel those wrongs. You root for him. It’s cathartic to watch.  The fight scenes are powerful, fast, shocking. Washington himself has spent years in boxing training ever since he played Rubin Carter in the 1999 film The Hurricane.
I’m in a suite at the Four Seasons Hotel. I hear him before he comes into the room. He’s got a great laugh – large, infectious and loud. And an even larger presence. He’s 6 foot 1 but seems taller in a black suit and black tee.
Washington likes to banter, to distract. He asks questions about the wallpaper with the utmost curiosity. He doesn’t enjoy questions about himself which is odd for an actor, although there’s nothing about him that’s “Hollywood”.
He grew up in Mount Vernon, New York. An odd buffer between the city and the rich Connecticut suburbs. It was mostly middle class. His father was a preacher who worked for the local water company by day and his mother owned beauty salons. They divorced when he was 14. His mother ruled him with tough love and tried to protect him from the bad boys.
He went to college to study medicine, changed to political science, also considered law and journalism and ended up in a job where he could investigate all of these professions. He started off in the theatre honing his craft and, in many ways, feels that’s where he most belongs. He has revived A Raisin In The Sun and The Iceman Cometh on Broadway as well as Julius Caesar.  He’ll stare at you but if you stare back he’ll look away.
We’ve met a few times before and he wants to know what city is my home. I ask is LA anyone’s home? He muses, “I used to tell people who would say oh you live in Hollywood. There’s no place called Hollywood. Hollywood Boulevard has some little stars that people walk by and look at.”
Does he have a star? “Do I?” he tries to recall. “No, I don’t, but I have hand and footprints.  “Why don’t I have a star?” he wonders.
I tell him that I loved The Equaliser 2 which I did. “Oh good,” he says, suddenly staring at the large TV screen that’s in the room. He absolutely cannot take compliments and when I call him out on that he says, “Do I look like I didn’t believe you?” No, you look like you can never take a compliment. He concedes, “No, I’m not good. But enough about me.”
We laugh but that’s really as he prefers it. An interview that’s not about him. Then he comes back to my Lyft driver and works out that it is his younger son Malcolm, 27 who’s twins with actress daughter Olivia, who played basketball a decade ago, although he won’t admit what he donated to the school or what basketball team he gave money to as Grace said he wouldn’t.
He’s been married to Pauletta for 35 years by film industry standards, even if there was a lot of partying that’s rock solid. His older son John David, 33 started as a football player but got his big time break in HBO’s Ballers and is upcoming in Spike Lee’s movieBlacKkKlansman. His eldest daughter Katia 30 is a producer. She worked on her father’s movie Fences and  Django Unchained.  In all they’re a super successful family, revered by people like my Lyft driver for their unity and kindness but I were ever dare to say he’s a role model he would hate it more than he would hate being given a compliment. Partly because being a role model is a compliment, partly because although he’s very aware of the platform he has as a famous actor and a famous black actor, he never takes advantage of it. That’s just him.
He started off his career where people thought he was a goody two shoes having total swallowed his bad boy past. That’s why I think he’s especially linked to this avenging angel character, McCall.
“No,” he dismisses. “You just want to make something good that people will enjoy. We had great success the first time around and when people say hey let’s do this again, why not?”
Equaliser 2 is better than Equaliser 1 I tell him. “I’ve been hearing that but why? Is it because now you know the guy or is it because it’s more personal?” All of that and it’s actually more emotional. You invest in his relationship with his best friend – Susan played by Melissa Leo and you invest in the father/son quality of the relationship he has with Ashton Sanders’ character.
Sanders shone in the Oscar winning Moonlight. He’s the kind of actor whose silence fills the screen with something deep.
In this movie Sanders is a teenager on the brink. He can go to art school or he can join a gang. In real life Sanders is an artist as well as an actor.
“Some of the drawings may have been his. He’s very talented and he’s in a unique place with all the success he’s had right off the blocks. He’s a good dude. I wish him well. He’s got his head screwed on right.”
When I last met Washington, almost a year ago, he was very solid with Sanders and industry people told me he was mentoring him. Washington didn’t like that word but clearly he identified with him.
“I’ve been where he’s going. He asks me questions because things are changing for him. His friends are changing.  I have been down that road.”
I wonder if Washington saw in Sanders his own youth? He and his three best friends were all in a band. The others did not fare well. One died through drug related AIDS and at least two of the others spent many years in jail. One of them at least I know Washington helped out by buying him new teeth and there’s always the thought it could have been him had his mother not tough loved him right out of that bad boy set.
Was that the bond? “It was a natural thing. We were spending all this time together and between takes we were talking.”
On screen they looked as if they were extremely close but they’re actors. “I think you can tell when it’s not genuine. At least I can.”
In the movie Sanders character is poised to join the gang with the bad boys and Washington’s character saves him from that. Art reflecting life. It is remarkable of four friends, three are in jail or dead and the other is a full on movie star, reportedly worth $220 million. That’s why the scenes with Sanders are so impactful. How things could have gone.
“It just shows you, in my case growing up I had someone who really cared about me and was willing to make sacrifices to see me succeed and my character takes on that role. In my case it was my own mother but he didn’t have that. He had no example of what it was to be a man.”
And he thought it was all about being a gangster. Washington nods slowly. This is sensitive, empathic Washington. You don’t see him for long and he refers it back to the movie.
“There’s this shot when I look down on him and the guys come and pick him up. That’s how it happens. You know, a kid is isolated alone and trying to fit in and here come the guys. ‘Come with us where the fun is’.”
Washington has always found the fun in being serious or in straight up laughing at me. Laughing at my rambling questions, laughing at my attempts of accents but it’s not a cruel laugh, more playful and curious.
In The Equaliser Robert McCall likes to read books. Washington replaced what was in the script with a book called Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates.
It’s a book written to the author’s teenage son about the feelings, symbolism and realities about growing up black in America. It discusses the racist violence that has been embedded into the American culture and this is the book that Washington chooses to give Sanders character. It’s not obvious. It never is. But this is as close as Washington gets to using his powerful platform as an African American.
Washington likes detail. He’s not a natural preacher like his father although he could be a wonderful preacher. He is partial to an intriguing Bible quote and he himself once went to church with his mother and had the experience of speaking in tongues.
He says he met author Ta-Nehisi Coates randomly and then became intrigued. “I thought, that’s what our story is about – coming of age. My character in the movie reads books anyway so I thought this is a good book to give the kid.”
Because it’s about growing up as an African American? It’s about being black?
“Was there a question in there?” Well I’m just checking in which way the book relates as I haven’t actually read it. “Oh…ok,” says Washington, still not really wanting to go there. It’s not an ugly pause or a silent one. He doesn’t knock any questions back without laughing. In fact, he chortles quite a lot.
He recently did a very funny interview on the Jimmy Kimmel show talking about how he saved the Oscars in 2016. The Oscars he saved were the notorious wrong envelope Oscars where Kimmel was hosting and was mystified when Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty read out La La Land for Best Picture and there seemed to be something wrong. Washington looked at Kimmel and gestured to him to get Barry Jenkins the director of Moonlight.
“I saved the Oscars. I didn’t win one. I must have been up for one because I was right down at the front.” He was absolutely up for Best Actor and Best Picture for Fences. He directed Fences adapted from the stage by August Wilson.
His first Oscar nomination came for freedom fighter Steve Bilko in Cry Freedom (1988) and then for political martyr Malcolm X in 1993. His first win was for Training Day in 2002 although I think he should have won in 2000 for The Hurricane and 2013 for Flight.
These days he likes to mix up his film work with some directing and the stage where he started off has become increasingly important to him. He’s just finished a couple of month’s run of The Iceman Cometh on Broadway.
He likes to add personal details to scripts such as in this year’s Roman Israel he added the concept of his characters love of peanut butter. In The Equaliser he walks into a room and knows who’s there because of the smell. Asparagus tips and soy sauce and a specific ladies perfume. That was not in the script. It was from Washington because that’s what he does. Smells out the room before seeing it.
“You don’t mean me personally? You mean the character.” I meant both.
Today I looked up the definition of Denzel. “It means a fortress, right?” No actually. It’s a small town in Cornwall, England.
“Really?” he says, disappointed. He was much happier with being a fortress. “I feel like now I’m a little hut on the side of the road and in my mind, I was a fortress.”
Antoine Fuqua the director said that Washington and his Robert McCall character were alike because they like to do good and they didn’t want to be seen doing good. Is that so? Another quizzical look.
Fuqua directed him in Training Day, Magnificent Seven and both Equalisers. Fuqua went on to say, “Denzel wouldn’t want me to talk about it, because he doesn’t want to take credit for it, but he does a lot for people. He taught me something he learned from Nelson Mandela: a shepherd leads from behind – not from the front.  He takes that idea and quietly helps people along the way.  I think that was important to him to express in Robert McCall.”

Washington corrects. “A leader like a shepherd, sends the fast, nimble sheep out in front so that the rest will follow, not realising they are all being led from behind. A good shepherd doesn’t lead from the front. That’s from Nelson Mandela but I don’t know where he got it from.”
We discuss Mandela’s possible career as a shepherd and the qualities of his leadership and Washington is quick to correct, “But I don’t want to assume I’m a leader.”
I always assume he’s a leader. “Thank you. But a leader of what?” Of course, there are so many ways in which he could be a leader but he doesn’t want to assume any of them.
Instead he tells a Biblical story about pigs being led off the edge of a cliff. “You’ve got to watch who you’re following.”
He took a decision on his 60th birthday (he’s now 63) to give up alcohol for what he calls his fourth quarter. “Moderation is the key. If you drink too much water you’ll drown. I’m not drinking alcohol.”
Has it changed his perspective? “On life? I hope so. I’ll put it this way. When you’re toasted you need a day to recover. You get a hangover. So that’s two days out of your life. I don’t have time to waste. Let’s say there’s 365 days in a year so in 10 years that’s 3650, so how many days do you want to waste?”
Does he still have dream roles? Something he would look forward to or any projects he wants to direct?
“I want to get back to doing some Shakespeare off the top of my head and plays by great writers. Be able to interpret August Wilson, Eugene O’Neill and William Shakespeare. That’s what I’ve been doing the last few years – acting in movies, acting in the theatre, directing movies so those three. That’s plenty.
On most days he boxes. You can tell because of the way he spars onscreen. Very nimble. Listening to music is also a big part of his day.
“When I was on Broadway I’d stay up half the night because I didn’t get home till 11.30 and I wouldn’t sleep till 3 or 4. My character doesn’t go on for the first 50 minutes so as soon as the play would start I would turn off the sound and start playing music.”
If his Equaliser character had a theme tune what would it be? “He’d stay away from certain music because it would bring him too many memories. He doesn’t want to open up to those emotional things.”
And just in case I was going to ask what Washington’s theme tune would be, he pre-empts me with, “Isn’t this a big TV? My TV at home is smaller than this TV but my room is bigger.”
I don’t have a TV. I watch everything on my MacBook. “Really?” he says incredulous. Yeah, because if a TV dominates the room it’s too distracting. “That’s a good point. You go to dinner and look what happens. Everyone’s sitting around a table like this.” He mimes texting.
Is that because you know the people you’re having dinner with so well you feel comfortable with them or you’re trying to avoid them? He laughs. “You’re speaking from experience and you’ve been on both sides,” he says knowingly and then checks his pockets.
“I don’t even know where my phone IS!”
On a recent red carpet, he said of fake news, “If you don’t read the newspaper you are uninformed. If you do read the newspaper you are misinformed. That quote is a hundred years old. Interesting, isn’t it? There’s fake news about me every week. I’ve died or something. Fake news doesn’t even have to be first anymore. It’s just got to be sensational.”
No wonder he’s wary of a newspaper interview.
Does he think that the film industry has changed in the post Weinstein era? “I hope so. I think there are just more rules in place. Time will tell on this one but it’s good right now.”
His daughter Olivia is an actress just starting out, honing her craft.  Does he feel that she is safeguarded as a young woman in the industry?
“Yes, plus I will break somebody’s back if they mess around with my daughter. Let that be the message to put out there. Their back will be broken.”
And all this from the man who says he is not an avenging angel.

Jeff Goldbum (The London Sunday Times Magazine, August 5, 2018)

Jeff Goldblum and Chrissy Iley
Jeff Goldblum and Chrissy Iley

We are in a small, dark supper club – The Rockwell. We are in a bohemian district of Los Angeles.  Packed to the rafters. The waiter  warns the food will take a while. But no one’s here for the food. They are here for Jeff Goldblum, to hear him play jazz piano with a curious charm.  Soon his be-ringed fingers will flash and sparkle across the keyboards.
Everybody loves Jeff. I’m not sure if that was always the case but somehow, rather stealthily he’s now Hollywood royalty. Not just for reprising roles as Ian Malcolm, the scientist in the Jurassic movies, for blockbusters like Thor and Independence Day. Not just for turning in so many expertly quirky roles including his recent gangster chief in Hotel Artemis. Not just for his iconic and still quiver making performance in The Fly in 1986. But because he survived it all. He’s 65 and has grown into his face and body. 6 foot 4 ½ no longer seems geeky. He’s sexy in a way that he never used to be.
He comes onstage and he’s so fully himself.  Random friends are texting me messages like ‘he got me through my college years’. I’m not sure what did other than be around and be a constant but he’s still doing it.
He’s in a sharp suit and thick rimmed glasses and snappy hat. He’s his own warm up guy. He plays a game with the audience called The Movie Game. Similar to that one a few years ago Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon where everything led back to him. Any film, any co-star and then it’s a direct Goldblum association.
Then, in manner of Dame Edna, he’ll select audience members, no point in cowering because he’s coming for you. In his game Would You Rather, first up it’s Johnny Depp vs Orlando Bloom. He asks “Chrissy Iley, which one smells better?” As one reviewer said “You haven’t truly heard your name unless you’ve heard Jeff Goldblum say it.” Its a great voice.
Then it’s Nic Cage vs Matthew McConaughey.  I go for Cage and tell the audience about the time McConaughey was getting a haircut and he made the stylist pick up all the hair from the floor in case someone would perform voodoo on it. I think he has researched every person I’ve ever interviewed.
Then the show itself begins. He favours cool jazz from the fifties and sixties. There’s an incredible energy to his playing and his band, the Mildred Snitzer Orchestra all have presence. He’s generous onstage. The audience whoops especially for ‘I Wish I Knew What it Felt to be Free’ which Brits would recognise as the theme tune to Barry Norman’s long running BBC film show.
He’s been doing these shows on and off for quite a few years but Decca Records picked up on his talent when he accompanied Decca artist Gregory Porter – who he met at an airport – on the Graham Norton Show.
The atmosphere at The Rockwell was recreated at Capitol Records with a club set up, Imelda May on guest vocals, Sarah Silverman on Me And My Shadow and a celebrity filled audience for the album recording of his version of Cantaloupe Island, My Baby Just Cares for Me and Straighten Up and Fly Right.
The next day we meet for brunch at the Chateau Marmont. Goldblum is wearing skinny black trousers, a multi coloured knit shirt that looks Italian and a very soft fawn suede jacket.  It’s a hug hello and I can feel it’s a body that he takes care of. He gets up at 5.30 am every day, practices piano and then works out. He became a daddy for the first time in his sixties. He now has two little boys, River Joe who’s one and Charlie Ocean who’s three with his wife Emilie Livingstone (35), a former Canadian Olympian gymnast.
He invites me to smell his neck so that at some future point I can compare his scent to Depp, Bloom etc. He smells of dark flowers. “Ah yes, the title of my first autobiography – Dark Flower.” He’s joking, of course. We agree it would be a good title. There is something dark about him but something deliciously floral.

Jeff Goldblum rocks Chrissy Iley's shades
Jeff Goldblum rocks Chrissy Iley’s shades

I’m wearing my wide, dark rimmed sunglasses so we match. We swap glasses for a quick photo op.

Jeff Goldblum's Jewelry
Jeff Goldblum’s Jewelry

He’s wearing more jewellery than me. A classic Tank Cartier watch and quirky gold and silver rings on every finger. His wedding band is platinum with rose gold on the inside and his wife Emily had put on an engraving ‘Patches plus Peaches eternal love.’
Who’s Patches and who’s Peaches? “She’s Peaches because she’s quite peachy and my first nightmare which I recalled to her was about a witch trying to tie me down on a tree stump. I was four or five years old and instead of cutting my head off she said ‘Peeeaaches, Peeeaaches.’ I told my two older brothers that dream. We all shared a room and when we went to bed at night they would all go ‘Peeeaaaches’ and scare me.’ He mimics a gurgling witchy tone.
“She is Peachy and she is Peaches and I have a nice distribution of hair on my torso but on one side, right here there’s a little bit of extra. It’s a patch so I’m Patches.”
Isn’t Patch a dog’s name? “I AM a dog!” he says enthusiastically. “I LOVE dogs.”
He was in the Wes Anderson animated movie Isle of Dogs where he was the voice of Duke.  He has a dog, a red poodle called Woody Allen. “Officially the term is apricot but Woody is darker and redder.”
Did he name his dog Woody Allen because he admires his namesake as a director or as a clarinettist? “It’s either or both”.
The names of his boys Charlie Ocean and River Joe “were not just tossed up.
I spent years before I had kids fantasising about what their names would be. What would go with Goldblum?”
Charlie had dark feelings about the introduction of his younger brother so we keep them safe and say you can hit the floor. You do not have to suppress your feelings. You can say you don’t like him but you can’t hurt him. And now there are many moments of friendship and sweetness. They bathe together and Charlie helps and protects his younger brother. River always wants to know what his brother is doing. He’s just started to walk. He’s a bit wobbly but he follows Charlie around.”
Goldblum too was a younger brother. One brother four years older (Rick who died at the age of 23 from kidney failure), the other (check name) five years older went into real estate. He also has a younger sister Pamela who is an actor and artist.
At the moment his wife and children are in Toronto with their mother and grandmother and last night Goldblum slept only with Woody. “He sleeps with us anyway. Last night it was just us and we are very close.”
Now we look at pictures on each others phones. I am showing him cat pictures, he is showing me dogs and babies. It’s almost like there’s no barrier and there’s instant intimacy, or maybe it just seems that way.  Maybe it’s all part of the smart illusion.
Actually No – he’s an insatiably curious person about all sorts of things . Where do I live? What do I like? Who am I? And I ask if this is a distraction technique just so we don’t talk have to talk about him. “No,” he says, a little abashed and refers me to his acting teacher Sandy Meisner who instructed him that the best performance was always about chemistry with other people and although this is not quite a performance it’s an exchange of sorts and I see him feeling around for the correct level and pitch of the interview. “He said you have to be interested otherwise you’re not interesting.”
Did everyone always love Jeff and how exactly did he help my friend through her teenage years? “Ah yes. I show up and sense somebody on this block having a difficult teenage time and I get them through,” he jokes, bemused at his sudden superhero status. In fact it’s taken a while for him to arrive even though his breakthrough performance was possibly in The Big Chill over 30 years ago.
There was a brief first marriage to Patricia Gaul 1980-86, The Fly co-star Geena Davis 87-90 and a brief engagement to Laura Dern but essentially over two decades as single man. When we tried to play the Would You Rather game at brunch I tell him I can’t throw female stars at him because I don’t know if he’s slept with them or not. “Well there’s that but I think it’s nicer these days in that setting to stick with men. I’m hypersensitive to the challenges of womanhood.”
Has he had experiences of female co-stars crying about having to touch the white bathrobe? “No. I was never reported to about Harvey Weinstein. I never worked with him but if you watch something like Mad Men and you have grown up in that culture you can imagine what women have been subjected to. I have had frank discussions and heard women’s stories. Who doesn’t have a story of some discomfort or even some kind of traumatic circumstance and women all over the world still need to fight and we need to fight it with them for equality and dignity.”
Indeed, Goldblum is a “nice fella”. His comedy skirts the edges of discomfort but never humiliation. He likes the idea that he’s very available. “I’m not trying too hard you know. I like the idea that I’m offering something of interest and amusement. I do it to set up the music. As a performer it’s all about a shared experience. I feel I’m hosting a show. It’s kind of like a sixties one – Playboy After Dark. Hugh Hefner early on had a TV show. When I was a kid I used to go to a special part of the dial to find it because it was at that point one of the only portals into adult sensuality. It was called After Dark and the conceit was you’re in some kind of living room, a salon and there’s talk and there’s music. He was in a smoking jacket and had couches in different areas. Ostensibly it was a party and there was a piano.”
The album has a living room party vibe about it. It immediately places you right there. It was produced by Larry Klein who is famous for producing Herbie Hancock, Tracy Chapman and Joni Mitchell.
Did he imagine that he’d ever have a jazz album? “As a kid I would write on the shower wall please God let me be an actor. I think around eight or ten something happened in middle school where I went to this camp and fell deeply in love with performing. I was baying at the moon about it.”
Was he always a person who fitted in or stood out? “Early on when I was a kid I fitted in to our little family. I developed into my own individual person and then through junior high school and high school I was a fish out of water. I didn’t fit in with some groups until I found the arts programmes in that camp. That in one way or another saved my life.”
Now he’s able to fit in and stand out.
“I had piano lessons from eight years old and studied but I didn’t study acting.
My parents both liked music, my dad particularly. If we went on vacation to Miami they would do the Mambo. They took dance lessons in the Cha Cha Cha. You can imagine that era. They also had a taste for jazz and Errol Garner. He was a famous (jazz) pianist from Pittsburgh and they would bring records home and play on the HiFi. He really is kind of wonderful so I was exposed to that kind of music early on. That’s how I got interested in jazz. When I was 15, I went into a room and locked the door because I felt it needed to be secret and I looked through the Yellow Pages and would call one club after another saying ‘hey, I understand you’re looking for a piano player.’ Most people would say no but a couple said, ‘How did you hear about this? Come down and play.’
So I got a couple of jobs when I was fifteen. My parents would drive me to them and somehow I met a girl singer who was older and could drive and I would play for her. It was never that I was trying to be a musician. It just happened. Even with this record. It just happened. I’m not saying it’s going to be my new career.”
And this career wouldn’t have happened if he hadn’t met Gregory Porter at an airport. “A few years ago I went up to him and said Mr Porter? I love your music. And then I was going to be on the Graham Norton show a few months ago and the musical guest was Gregory Porter promoting his Nat King Cole album so I offered to play the song with him. That’s how his record company Decca got the idea and here we are.”
We’ve yet to order as we’ve been talking thick and strong. He seems very in the moment but says, “I am nothing if not disciplined. I have a conviction about work ethic. When I was a kid I didn’t know about the joys of getting homework done but after that I couldn’t help but practise my piano and now I have to tear myself away. We’ve been playing for about 20 years and it just developed under the radar.  At first I wasn’t as good as I am now but I made sure I played so I could develop and memorise everything that we were playing. I would go through them most days even if I was on the road I would talk to the concierge in a hotel, find a music store down the road or play the piano in the lobby.”
So people in the lobby of a random hotel would find him giving an impromptu performance. “Yes I like to play with people around.”
Finally we get to order brunch. He wants scrambled eggs but it’s not on the menu. He doesn’t power order or suggest that most kitchens have eggs.  He goes for ancient grain bowl from the menu. He likes to eat clean.  “I get up at 5.30, do my piano and my workout first. I like to get eight hours sleep so it means going to bed at about 9.30.”
He now has a gym in his house where he and his wife workout. Emilie was a rhythmic gymnast. “Those are the dance gymnasts. They do all the hyperstretch contortions. She was the Pan American champion when she was young and she studied in Russia from 11 to 16. She’s now learnt Cirque du Soleil aerial stuff.  She doubled for Emma Stone in La La Land. She was the dancer whose body you see dancing outside the Planetarium. And that movie Valerian, Rihanna plays a part in it and every time you see her face it’s Emilie’s body who’s dancing. We met at the gym. I saw her working out and toddled over and said well you’re not the usual…”
That was his pick-up line? He stalked her in the gym? “It wasn’t a pick-up line. I was interested in what she was doing. I have no lines and formula but I did start up a conversation. It was Equinox on Sunset and that was seven years ago. I went to see her perform and then invited her to a gig. I said I wonder if she’s going to do some contortion dancing on the piano. I said to the guys we should do the song from Fabulous Baker Boys Makin’ Whoopee, the one that Michelle Pfeiffer sings. He sings “Another bride, another groom
Another sunny honeymoon
Another season, another reason
For makin’ whoopee”
And she got on the piano and she did an amazing routine. We got the dog first. We were talking about children. She introduced it,” he says with a proud daddy smile.
Everyone must have said how strange it was that he got to sixty and wanted children. “Yes, right. I had to think about that and I’m still thinking about what it all means and trying to navigate the calendar and my gift of living every day. But when she said maybe it would be nice to have a baby it was so sweet and deeply genuine. I said if you’re serious we should talk about it. I had a therapist at the time who I took her to see. Luanda Katzman – we began having several sessions over a period of time where we excavated considerations and finally we both got enthusiastic about having a child and getting married. We got married here – in the Chateau Marmont in one of the bungalows with fifty people – mostly her family.   We had already started to try to get pregnant and the day before the wedding she presented me with a sonogram saying ‘Look what happened’, so it made the wedding sweet and romantic.
I was a bachelorly kind guy of in the way I never had food in the house. The first time she opened my refrigerator I had a bottle of water and some Chinese takeout. Now it’s a family fridge with abundance all over. It’s great.”
He never wanted to have children before? “Not seriously even though I’ve been married before.”
Then he was alone for a long time. Was that on purpose or coincidence? “I never plotted it that way. There was no strategy but at this point it all seems to have been necessary and perfect, including the not having children.”
Because he wasn’t ready? “I think that may have been part of it, yes. Exactly.”
He wants to know if I can sing.  Maybe we could do a performance together.  I don’t tell him my story about when I blew Bryan Ferry off stage because my version of Jealous Guy was so much better. I just tell him no I can’t sing.
He suggests that maybe we could do poetry readings together. He once read the whole of Wuthering Heights out loud to someone. “Yes I’ve always loved Wuthering Heights and I was so touched by it I wanted to read the book to somebody. I have often read books out aloud and I’m about to do it professionally for the first time. My friend Norm Eisen who is the US Ambassador to the Czech Republic has written a very interesting book about working for Obama. He is a very wise and wonderful guy. I met him via Wes Anderson when we were doing Grand Budapest Hotel. He said ‘we have a guy who is a model for your character.’ So I went to Prague and he let me stay in the Ambassadors Palace and we’ve been in touch ever since.”
He loves food. Nothing fried or saucy. It’s part of the plan to stay healthy, not for getting good roles but for the role of daddy.
Does he think he’s going to go for a girl child? “I’d love a little girl. The other week Emilie said ‘gee I’d like to see you with a girl but I don’t think she really wants it. I think she’s happy to stop with these two.”
Perhaps he has a girl out there already who’s 25. “Not that I know of. I’ve been pretty good. If I could talk to my young self it would be to expose my young self to many lessons that I have come by gradually. I’ve not always been good. I’m still trying to learn about health and relationships and hygiene and how it keeps revealing itself to me in many more refined ways. It’s good that life happens the way it does really. You don’t get a view and no one can tell the future and it’s all a surprise.  I’m amazed and pleased at the way things have turned out. Come on, what’s unpleasing?” We make our exit where everyone seems to greet him to say hello/goodbye. I’m not sure if they are fans or friends. He’s all about making the world a happier place and at the same time he’s all about science, astrophysics, astronomy, practical ways to save the oceans.
“Science is pretty inspiring. The extent and size of the universe and the place of our planet in it. We’re fragile. We need to stick together and do right by ourselves.”
He is all about the feel good – and his gift is to make people feel happy when he plays

Jeff Goldblum debut album is out on Decca records

Alexis Ohanian (The London Sunday Times Magazine, July 1, 2018)

Alexis Ohanian

There’s something disconcerting about having a 6 foot 5 multi-millionaire technocrat come to do a shoot in your home. For a start he’s hitting his head on chandeliers and simply doesn’t fit into my tiny, under the stairs bathroom. The 35 year old Alexis Ohanian manages to make my place look like a dolls house but oddly he doesn’t make it at all awkward. He’s easy company with his charming, beardy smile and his unique ability to switch topics of discussion from crypto currency – he’s a big fan of using money outside the restrictions of any national banking system to his baby – 9 month old Olympia and his tennis queen wife Serena Williams. He shows us videos of the little girl who he refers to as Junior. She’s already training in the gym and standing and walking. In one video, she looks like she’s about to whack a massive serve at the camera. She doesn’t have a racket. It’s just something in that stance. Ahead of her time, fearless and ready for it – traits she inherits from both parents.

Williams became the youngest ever winner of the US Open at 17 and is categorically considered to be the greatest tennis player of all time with 39 grand slams behind her and at 36 she’s still counting.  Ohanian became a multi-millionaire at 23 (in 2006) when he sold Reddit – the internet discussion site that he created with his college roommate Steve Huffman. They built it in 3 weeks.

Ohanian continued to work closely with Reddit, watching it grow to be worth $1.8 billion, the third biggest website in America with 243 million users per month, but he stepped back in February this year to focus on Initialised Capital, an investment fund he started with Gary Tan. It has more than $250 million in assets.

Under this umbrella there are hundreds of start-ups and he’s across all of them – this is a man who knows how to multi task. He has a crazy impressive drive, yet he’s an advocate for parental leave. He was able to take off 16 weeks for the birth of his daughter, the latter in flexi time by taking off every Friday although it’s very hard to see how he ever switches off.

He has dived into the tiny bathroom for another shirt change and chandelier avoidance says with an earnest nonchalance, “Yeah, we’ve collected a few portfolios over the years. We invest in about 15 a year. Some get acquired, some go out of business but a strong number continue to grow and our speciality is providing value at the earliest stages.”

He asks for a glass of tap water but I fear I don’t have a glass giant enough so I hand him a litre bottle from the fridge. He looks for relentlessness in the people he invests in.

But how does he know what starts ups to choose? Is he part psychic? “Yes. Intuition is a huge part of it. Also having gone through the experience of having done it before and in particular with Reddit, having started the company, grown the business, it helps identify a well thought out product. You know I always had a foot in Reddit. I was always advising in one capacity or another and about four years ago I had the chance to turn it around. It’s now fully independent from Conde Nast with a hefty valuation.”

People are always asking him does he regret selling it when he was 23 for an estimated sum between 10 and 20 million dollars as it’s now worth 1.8 billion.

“I am not upset at selling it early. It was tremendously great for me and my family. It gave me the freedom to do all the things I have done since and lo and behold I got the chance to come back, get a stake back and get it to the next level.”

Ohanian was an only child who got his first computer when he was eight. “Neither of my parents were technologically savvy but they got me an educational computer from Sears which you can play games on. I found the exact same one on eBay for my daughter when she’s a little older.”

Older like two? “Maybe one,” he says seriously.

He invested in that computer all the time, energy and care that an eight-year-old might invest in their first pet. It wasn’t enough for him to learn how to use it. He wanted to create new programmes. Money was tight and he didn’t want to have to buy them so he made them.

He was born in Brooklyn in 1983. His father Chris Ohanian (a travel agent) was an Armenian American whose grandparents came to the US as refugees after the Armenian genocide, his German born mother Anke was a pharmacy technician at a hospital. He revered her. He talks about her strength. They were extremely close. She died of brain cancer just after he sold Reddit. He’s grateful that he was able to treat her generously before she died and his father to front row season tickets at his favourite football team.

When he talks about his mother I see someone who is both vulnerable and mature. He has a manner of making everything look easy, everything look possible, but I don’t think it ever was that easy for him and that’s what makes him interesting.

His favourite band is Metallica and he was particularly intrigued with their documentary Some Kind of Monster where they employed a group therapist. Metal bands, like Ohanian are not known for their openness. It’s a situation he related to and made him feel there was nothing wrong with having an executive coach to help you and your co-founder work it out.  He doesn’t let emotions rule him but he’s modern. Doesn’t keep too much hidden and work ethic is his overriding force. That work ethic is just one of the parallels that bonds Ohanian and Williams. “I thought I was the hardest working person on the planet in the hardest working industry but watching my wife is a humbling experience, seeing what high-pressure situations actually look like. What it takes to be that great. It’s work ethic on another level.”

We’re sitting down at the table and my fat black cat jumps on him. His stomach wobbles and he starts talking about his own little dog – the three-pound teacup Yorkie who managed to trick everybody into thinking he was starving and everybody in the house thought they were the only one feeding him. He’s happy to admit he’s been outsmarted by a Yorkie and in the next sentence he’s all about ruling the world with Crypto currency.

“What Bitcoin and Crypto currency allow us to do is to build a new internet. Things like money or stores of value are built into it and allow a greater efficiency and better user experience (which means we can build on that first version of the internet when we didn’t have the infrastructure to do what we can do today). Crypto currencies are interesting to people in countries where currencies are way more volatile.”

Is he talking about the British pound here? “I was thinking recently in Venezuela there’s been some massive currency swings. There are people who have seen generations of wealth evaporate and have limited faith in the long-term liability of the government, so people are putting their money into stores of value like Bitcoin, which also gives them freedom to move the world without worrying about losing their money. They don’t need to worry about getting to an ATM.”

He speaks in technocrat but senses he might be losing me and when the next cat Roger jumps onto his lap, it reminds him that I might like Crypto kitties. “It is a digital collectible, the digital equivalent of Beanie Babies. Where the artwork in question is what we call a non-fundable asset. In the fiscal world so I can say there is only one of these hats” – he takes off his black hat, a perfectly ordinary cap and he continues. “This is the only hat that exists and it’s special because it’s the only one and I will give it to you in exchange for money you’re willing to pay for it because you have just bought a limited thing. In the digital world a cat is infinitely reproduceable so you would probably not pay me for the photo of that cat because you know that I can make a million copies of it. We try to enforce copyright laws but that’s not easy. What Crypto kitties has proven is you actually create a digital image of a cat that you can say is unique and only one of them exists because there is a global ledger where it’s identified as such and can now be traded. It’s a proven way for you to create a marketplace. The possibilities are limitless.”

Then he gets a text from his wife. He says there’s an emergency and he must call her back. She doesn’t pick up and he replays the video she sent this morning of their daughter.

“She has a lot of grace and a lot of swagger. I think she’ll be a super athlete and a super businesswoman programmer. I really want to give her the opportunities my parents made for me. I owe them everything, even though they didn’t understand what exactly they were giving me. By the time I was in 8th grade I was campaigning for a computer in our home, a desktop. Computers were very expensive back then and it was a huge investment for my parents but I wore them down. I promised them I would use it for homework even though I just wanted to play video games. It was through the video games that I got interested in programming. I would look under the hood and see the parts and think why am I paying someone else to install new memory? I’ll just do it myself. It was very empowering as a kid.

I have two sisters now but back then it was just me and my computer. I had some best friends from my kindergarten who were only children so we were like brothers but I really relished time alone. The time to be bored. I enjoyed doodling in a notebook or staring out of a window. I hope this delight in boredom is something I can instil in my daughter because it’s so much easier now with technology to have mindless distractions and little hits of adrenaline. I feel some of my best ideas have come from being bored and letting my mind wander.”

She doesn’t strike me as bored. She strikes me as switched on. He nods. “That was my yesterday video and it already feels like a hundred years later. It’s a challenge. She travels with her mum while I am working. I’m gone this week then back for a couple of weeks. Then we will all go to Wimbledon together.

She got her first jetlag on a trip to Abu Dhabi when she was only a few weeks old. She was there for 72 hours and was a real champ. It helps that the grand slams are usually in major cities so there are usually tech conferences. Being in London is great because we have investors there so Serena will train in the morning and I will take meetings.

I’m really pushing swimming with Olympia at the moment. A lot of my parental leave I was in Florida. We were all there as a family and we had a pool outside. As a kid my parents took me to the YMCA in Park Slope, Brooklyn. It made me comfortable with water. In Florida I could get Junior out there every couple of days. She can’t swim but is very comfortable and always has been.  During her pregnancy momma did lots of pool work for exercise. Every time she got in the water she could feel Olympia kicking and getting excited. Serena made a point of saying this baby loves water and sure enough she does.

It’s things like that which are good daddy daughter moments. As soon as we get her in the pool she loves kicking and dunking her head.” Williams was shocked to discover herself pregnant two days prior to the Australian Open in January 2017. She summoned Ohanian from across the world and presented him with a brown bag containing 6 positive pregnancy tests. He was thrilled and determined to have a strong and enduring relationship with his daughter. “I took full advantage of my 16 weeks parental leave. I always assumed that 16 weeks would be 16 weeks straight but if it’s flexible this is particularly helpful to fathers as we are not needed, at least on the nursing side, so you can build a plan depending on your family’s needs. You can take a month off at first and then take every Friday until those days are used up. that’s how I used it and I found that I had the freedom I needed to be there for my family. And then get out of baby talk for a day or two, get some work done, feel connected and not miss a beat. And I think that goes for women as well as men. It’s part of gender equality.”

Finally, Williams calls him back. The baby is projectile vomiting. Visibly distressed, he takes the rest of the call outside. Ten minutes later he returns composed but he has already reorganised all of his flights so he can return to them on the East Coast immediately.

Much has been made about the start of the romance between Ohanian and Williams.

She was playing a tournament in Rome. He was speaking at a tech conference. They were in the same hotel. Williams and her coach went for a late breakfast by the pool. Ohanian came and sat at the table next to them, which they planned to take over with the rest of their team. One of the Williams camp shouted, “There’s a rat!” in order to get Ohanian to shift. He calmly said, “I grew up in Brooklyn. Plenty of rats.”

He was not only afraid of rats, he wasn’t afraid of Williams. Unassuming though he is, Ohanian has a fearlessness about him. This must have been part of the initial attraction and a component of what they have in common. Williams, worth an estimated $170 million, was then and is now ranked number one in the world. They chatted and she invited him to the French Open in Paris. He referred to it as an LA style invite – once you extend because you’re sure it’s never going to happen.

He did go to Paris – saying he was there on business. They met, wandered through the city in the daytime and came across a zoo. He was by her side when a bunny was fed to a big cat. She winced. He held her and knew then he wanted to protect one of the strongest women in the world for the rest of their lives. It was love. The proposal came nearly a year later at the same hotel in Rome. He came armed with a plastic rat. They were already talking about children.

“We are different in a lot of ways and that is helpful because we learn from each There is a set of values that we share. Work ethic and competitiveness. I don’t understand what it takes to do what she does but I understand the level of commitment and doggedness that’s required. She might be up early to train or working on a Sunday on her fashion line but we’d never fight about that. We never fight about ambition or drive. That level of respect and understanding and shared values helps tremendously because we both want to be the best at what we do and that includes being parents and partners. In that way we are very aligned. If there’s a setback or a mistake, we are both geared to self-improvement and we have a lot of the same values in the context of being parents.

We were surprised to be pregnant. So many close friends have spent their thirties trying to conceive and we knew children was something that we wanted. We were grateful it was so quick. No more babies for a little bit because mom is so focused on work right now but we’d love to have more.”

He often refers to Williams as mom or mumma, Does he see the benefit of Olympia being an only child like him? “I do, but now I have two much younger sisters I relish my role as an older brother. But I didn’t have to share anything as a kid.” He laughs.

He has soft eyes and a soft chuckle. It juxtaposes his inner steel but it doesn’t hide it. “My father remarried and his wife adopted these girls so they are my family now. Best of all worlds. But I don’t have the childhood memories that Serena has with her sisters. They all shared a room so were very close literally and figuratively. Early on I joked about wanting a football team. 11 kids are not gonna happen. I’ll settle for a basketball team of 5 although I don’t think that’s gonna happen. We are happy with one. Serena’s got more work to do. In France (earlier this year) she flipped another switch. She’s always had this resilience and toughness mentally and physically but now she has this mom strength button that she pushes and it’s just so powerful. You read these stories about moms lifting cars off their babies. That’s mom strength.”

Williams does indeed play as if she’s lifting a car from a baby with every hit. At 36 she defies time. Ranked number one in the world longer than Stefi Graf and Martina Navratilova, her training must be excruciating but losing would be more excruciating.

“There are moments that are just a shadow of her full power, especially after she had such a traumatic birth. She nearly died and was laid up for a couple of months. To have all this happen less than a year ago and is now back to competing at this level is phenomenal.”

Williams had to endure an embolism during her pregnancy which was very high risk. Ohanian says solemnly, “I’d been tested a few times in my life but I’ve never had to spend a night in hospital myself. I’ve experienced it through the lens of people close to me but this was the next level.”

Becoming a millionaire and then so shortly after his mother dying must have been traumatic?  “Yeah,” he nods, the brown eyes making rare eye contact. “In a lot of ways it convinced me that I wasn’t going to fail. It put into perspective – the struggle of being an entrepreneur. It made me more resilient, gave me fewer excuses. I had a bigger purpose. I knew that my worst day was nowhere near as bad as my mom or my father in supporting her. I see in Serena a superpower to respond and react in the way she did. To get to see her as a mother and a wife with this power… but I’m never gonna play tennis with her. I didn’t even watch tennis before Serena.  I played a lot of team sports growing up because of the camaraderie.  Because I was an only child there were always 10 other guys in a field helping carry me. When you’re out there in a sport like tennis it’s just you and you need to reset your brain after every game.  I appreciate it now, not just because I am in love with someone who’s the best at it but because it combines a physical and mental challenge. My dad is really into boxing. There’s a barbarism to it. Tennis avoids the barbarism and is guilt free to watch but it has some of the same elements. I was named after a boxer, Alexis Arguello, a Nicaraguan fighter who my dad idolised so I would watch boxing with him as a kid and I think all these boxing sessions trained my brain to appreciate the mental and physical battle that’s required for tennis. When I watch Serena play I can’t help. I feel a visceral reaction.”

Does he have that same visceral reaction when he acquires a new start-up or grows a new company? He nods. “Partly. You cultivate it in your own head. It’s this idea of them against the world. You are gonna build a team to be successful. Somewhere there’s going to be a need to go through the wins and the losses as quickly as one might do on a tennis court and find the ability to reset. To reset mentally after losing the first set when all eyes are watching you takes mental strength. It’s not dissimilar. Those eyes watch you when you launch something new into the world. I show up to work and I don’t have millions of people watching me in a meeting, which would be traumatising, but they are watching even though it’s not a camera.”

Certainly, Williams and Ohanian have more in common than you might initially assume but these days technocrats are the new rock stars. It’s all about the Beauty and the Geek. Technocrat king Elon Musk, creator of PayPal and founder of Space X married British actress babe Tallulah Riley twice before finally divorcing her in 2016 where he was rumoured to date Cameron Diaz and Amber Heard. And now he is dating Canadian pop star Grimes. The powerful creative geek and the female superstar is a meeting of equals and work ethic supremo’s.

A quick swig from his water bottle and he changes track to talk about freedom on the internet. He has been dubbed the Mayor of the internet after constantly standing up to Congress against over regulating of the internet.

“We definitely lost a set in the US with the FCC repealing neutrality. But different states, including the state of California, are proposing bills to enforce it at a state level so you could start to build a case to get to Congress.

Without the safeguard of neutrality, it means any internet provider in America can discriminate traffic which means for the consumer that instead of paying $60 a month for internet where they can go to Google or Facebook and your internet will start to look like your cable television where you have to pay an extra $10 a month to visit Google or Facebook and as soon as you tier and discriminate across the internet you break the free market. The only people who don’t want neutrality are cable providers and politicians who get paid by them. Net neutrality…I still have to remember it’s game, set and match. We might be a set down but we’re still in the match.”

Ohanian talks effortlessly in tech speak as if it’s a language he owns. I switch us to talk about the Royal wedding which he attended with Williams. Williams was in a dusky pink Versace creation which skimmed and ruched in all the right places. “It was a lot of fun. I was a history major so I was geeking out to be in Windsor castle.”

Was he the tallest person there? “Yes, I think so, I’m used to always being the tallest person in the room. Idris Elba was pretty tall.”

He is only 6’3. One rarely sees a Brit who’s 6’5.

“It’s really unsettling to meet someone who is 6’5 because I’ve never seen eye to eye with anyone so it’s startling if someone’s taller than me. I will watch them all night and make sure I don’t turn my back on them.”

And there you have it. Alexis Ohanian, technocrat, multi-millionaire always has to be a head above everyone else. He looks down, not up.

Don Johnson (The London Sunday Times Magazine, June 3, 2018)

I’m sitting at the corner banquette of a restaurant in Studio City, Los Angeles waiting for Don Johnson. It’s a perfectly pleasant, discreet Italian restaurant and I am at the quiet table that I requested.  It was waiting for me along with a basket of rosemary and garlic flatbread and sweet tomato chopped salad on the house. I’d been there about fifteen minutes when his publicist calls me. “Where are you? He’s waiting for you. He’s in the restaurant in a corner table.” 
     I look up, walk round the slightly rustic bar and find him…at another corner table. I beckon him to join me. I’m slightly over animated, nervy, foolish, but he summons me. I must join him. He has the same flatbread but untouched. He doesn’t eat bread, or carbs of any kind, or drink alcohol, although of course he used to. At a certain point in his life he decided simply “it didn’t serve me.”
     I’m still a little nervy. How could we both be sat in the same restaurant and have missed each other. He is unmissable. Charismatic, kingly and still with the same stubble as he sported as Sonny Crocket in Miami Vice, undercover cop who liked to stay out all night and take drugs and never wore socks.  The feet are under the table so I can’t see the socks but there’s a classic striped navy Tee and Bomber jacket and eyes that change colour. We talk about his eyes. Are they blue? Are they green? Are they grey? Are they yellow? He grins, amused.
     His image with the rolled up sleeved Versace jackets and lady loving, marrying Melanie Griffiths when she was 18 and he 23?, divorcing 6 months after and marrying her again 13 years later. His insouciance and shameless sexiness seemed to define the excesses of that era – the eighties. After Miami Vice he had a musical career recording with Barbra Streisand and onstage with Guys and Dolls. There were more TV series like Nash Bridges and some movies that were destined never to be household names. He was always there but not in the same kind of way.  He had a kind of renaissance when he was “rediscovered” by Quentin Tarantino and played Big Daddy in Django Unchained, although he would think he was always there. After that he was the ultimate fringe shirted cowboy in Cold in July and had a successful TV series Blood and Oil.  Last year he channelled a potty mouth Donald Trump character for the TV series Sick Note with Rupert Grint. “Sometimes you’re a big deal and sometimes you’re not,” he shrugs. He’s serene. 
     This week though, once again though he appears to be a big deal in the surprise hit with sexy sixty somethings Jane Fonda, Diane Keaton, Mary Steenbergen and Candice Bergen – Book Club. 
     Book Club has been wowing audiences and capturing a new market, so much so that there’s already a sequel planned. Johnson has his own theories on that.
     “We’re exploring a whole new area and there’s more senior dating and senior sex being had than amongst middle aged people. It used to be you got into your sixties and then it was just over but now as people get older they start to realise I’m here in this life. What are the things I’m gonna regret. I don’t think anyone’s going to look back and say I made too much love.” I’m sure he isn’t.
   Book Club is essentially a romantic comedy but it’s not in the way of the dreary Exotic Marigold Hotel with Judi Dench. Those are really old people finding love. These are women with implants, attitude, whose lives are transformed when they rediscover their sexual libido through reading the Fifty Grey of Shades trilogy, which was made into three movies, unleashing to stardom none other than Johnson’s daughter with Griffiths, Dakota Johnson.
     I venture, isn’t that interesting? That movie turned around Dakota’s life and now this movie may turn around yours? He looks at me with cold, don’t go there eyes. All the sweet banter out the window. “Let me stop you right there. If you think this is going to turn into an interview about Fifty Shades and Dakota you may as well save your time.” I yelp. The noise that comes out of me is much more like a Maltese terrier than I’d hoped for but I continue by asking him if by now he’s at least read the book as it’s in his movie?
     “No,” A pause. He has said in the past that he hadn’t read the books or seen the films because it’s not the type of film he would ever go and see. He puts it in the category of Twilight Saga or Vampire Diaries.  
     “Here’s the only thing I’m going to say about that; it’s what we call in the business the McGuffin – the reason for this movie just happens to be that the comedy comes from these ladies who read Fifty Shades of Grey. The movie is about these wonderful women and ultimately it’s a love story.”
     Fortunately his phone rings and he leaves the table to have a brief conversation. By the time he comes back, the initial tension is dissipated and we speak on neutral subjects like how he doesn’t get jet lag. He can outfox it – except for once when he took a melatonin on his way from Los Angeles to London to shoot Sick Note. He says he managed to make his quasi dream state work in his favour to more easily channel “the character of an unconscious egotist and totally self-involved person.”
     And did he love Rupert Grint? “Well I liked him. I don’t know that I love him.” I wonder if Harry Potter movies were also not on his hit list. “What – with six children? You see all of those.” He has three children with his wife of 20 years Kelley Phleger, Jasper, 16, Deacon, 12, and Grace, 18 and Jesse Johnson, 35, from his marriage to Patti D’Urbanville and of course Dakota, 28, from his marriage to Melanie Griffiths.
     He orders the grilled salmon with some green vegetables. It’s not on the menu. Of course it’s not. He says he’s on a Keto like diet. It helps with his clarity. He tells me that the phone call he took was for some humanitarian work he’s doing but he can’t announce it right now. “But it’s with a powerful global organisation that works with the UN. I’ve worked with the UN before in different capacities. I do it on a very undercover level.”
     I tell him he’s an undercover kind of guy. He laughs approvingly. “Not really. I just don’t require special notice for doing something that is intrinsically human – being of service.” He’s very busy right now. “I am. It’s a very rich time.”  
     His character in Book Club is hardcore romantic which is not how we have seen him for a while in his roles. “Yeah, but it’s not a new thing. It’s in my DNA. The role was very naturally organic to me because I have a deep, deep fondness for Jane Fonda. We’ve known each other for a long time. I joined a Peace and Justice group Jane Fonda had founded just so I could be near Jane. I was about 21 at the time and she was a little older (she is 12 years older with possibly the best facelifts in the business). I was smitten the moment I saw her in Barbarella,” he says dreamily.
     Jane Fonda has already said that she specifically requested Johnson for her love interest. In the movie he meets a woman who he was in love with forty years previously and the relationship rekindles. “Art following life or life following art or something. I’m not sure which way round. It’s a dream.”
     He’s big on dreams. Uses their signs, symbols, imagery in the creation of characters. He used to be big on cigarettes until one day he stopped and now he only vapes. He stopped a lot of things and he makes it sound simple.   
     “Everything gets easier when you question whether or not it serves you and if it doesn’t serve you in a way to make you behave in a better way, you’ve got to get rid of it.”
     I stare at my empty bread basket. I suppose the bread didn’t serve me but it was delicious. He laughs and continues. “I have found a way of simplifying my world. I don’t eat sugar or grain. I eat everything else.  I have discovered the key to controlling your moods and your weight and your health is to control your blood sugar. It’s a very efficient fuel for the body.”
     Over the course of our lunch, I learn like most people who were previously addicted to alcohol or sugar and were extreme in any way, find that control is the trade off, their comfort place.
     I’ve always seen him as a dog person. He grew up with dogs and has talked before about his ability to communicate with dogs. He corrects me. “I’m an animal person. When I had my ranch in Colorado I had a virtual petting zoo. Goats, pigs, chickens, donkeys, cows. I grew up on a farm.”
     He grew up on a farm in Missouri so living on a farm was second nature to him.  Did he eat the cows? “No, they were pets.” He got rid of the ranch twelve years ago. Does he miss it? “Oh no. I move on. Once it’s in my rearview mirror I don’t look back. My best friend Hunter Thompson lived a quarter of a mile from me and he died. Glen Frey (of the Eagles) lived there but moved away (then also died) so the charming ski town where I had bought for my ranch suddenly changed. Everything changed but that’s the one thing you know. Change for sure is coming.”
     He had owned the ranch for 25 years and worked with Hunter Thompson on Nash Bridges. In 2013 he resolved a high-profile dispute over monies owed to him by the show’s producers as he successfully claimed half ownership and was awarded around $19 million for his work.  He didn’t get rid of his 12 very fancy cars because he was broke. The cars, Lamborghini’s, Porsches etc were “completely impractical. I realise that I bought a lot of this stuff because I thought I was supposed to have them. I had an image of what you were supposed to do when you were famous and had too much money. All this conspicuous consumption. I just got rid of it all.”
     He’s very zen and I suppose this is how he copes with being a big deal or not. When did he realise he WAS a big deal? “It depends on what you want. You have to be clear about what your intentions are. My intentions were to do something I loved and I just happened to get paid for it. The better you are at doing something the more people notice. Fame is a by-product and a pretty powerful by-product. It takes a long time to get used to. Some people never recover from it.”
     At the height of his Miami Vice fame, they were shooting an outdoor scene and the women in the offices above all threw their underwear out into the street. “That’s a true story. It was very comical to me. I mean I’m still laughing about it. It’s the gift that keeps on giving.
     I don’t think I think about fame in that way anymore. I don’t have a massive social media presence. I mean I’m grateful for my followers on Instagram and everything but I don’t feed that machine like a lot of contemporaries. Actually, I shouldn’t say contemporaries because of some of my contemporaries don’t even bother. Jane (Fonda) does – I think that Instagram is in some ways a voice and sometimes it’s ego and I find that unattractive so I don’t have a large commitment to social media.”
     Social media is of course the greatest modern-day addiction and he’s probably filed that in the compartment of things that do not serve him, things to which he could get dependent. “Yeah, getting ‘likes’ is a little dopamine hit. It’s actually physical. The release of dopamine which is the pleasure centre of the brain. So when you open up the Instagram and someone has liked your picture you get a little ‘bop’. I suppose our generation did that in other ways but this seems to be shamelessly about servicing the ego.”
     I’m grateful that we’ve got over our rocky start of sitting waiting for each other in opposite corners of the restaurant and my mentioning of the D word. He’s warmed up and seems to grin a lot. I can’t tell if it’s a joyous grin or a supercilious grin but it’s definitely a charming grin. 
     His skin is extremely youthful. He says it’s because he’s been using a reverse ageing cream. He certainly looks considerably younger than his 68 years and he’s super trim. He rejects coffee today but says he does drink it sometimes. He requests more sparkling water. It arrives, no lemon, no lime. There is an attractive austerity to him because it is a complicated one. In his attempt to be simple he is of course immensely complicated and in some ways unfathomable.  When he looks at you – or rather through you – with those colour changing eyes, it feels like a dopamine hit. He shows me his Instagram. The latest one is of him having a head cast done for the HBO series Watchmen, based on the graphic novel written by Dave Gibbons and Alan Moore. He looks at my Instagram. “That’s a lot of cats. What are their names?” Slut, Roger, Lola, Mister. “Is it only cats who follow you?” I’m hoping that he doesn’t notice any egotistical looking selfies. It turns out he is a big cat fan, by this I mean a fan of big cats. 
     When his mother in law was big cat rescuer Tippi Hedren (Griffith’s mother) he “raised a bunch of them. I raised lions, tigers and leopards. It was a blast.”
     Was it a dopamine hit? “Yes it was. When you raise them as babies and bottle feed them you become a parent and they are very loving. They used to sleep with us. We would go to bed and have a couple of lions in the bed with us.” 
     Did they snore? “Yes sometimes.” And did he say shut up Melanie and find he’d just nudged a lion? “I wouldn’t put it that way but you nudge them and they go miaow (makes a whimpering sound) and then they go back to sleep.”
     Were these full sized lions who shared your bed? “Adolescents, about 9 months old. Then they start to become cumbersome and scare the neighbours, but in our world it was normal and they were very housetrained. Tippi still has the big cats on her reserve. The ones that slept with us were essentially Tippi’s but they felt all part of the family.”
     A lion for a brother in law? “Yes. They were all big cats who were rescued from zoos or people who thought they would be fun and then when they got to be 300 pounds they didn’t want them anymore.” 
     Now he has me charmed. It’s no wonder this is a man who’s been all about women. It’s no wonder this man used to be dubbed Don Juanson. He’s all about the women.  He confirms to me he lost his virginity at 12 with the babysitter who was 16. Now I get it when he says romantic is in his DNA. He started young and says “yeah, it was like checking your Instagram page.” He was everybody’s crush in the eighties and some of those same people are crushing on him now.  Part of the appeal is he’s unexpected. You might have been thinking he’d be brash and excessive when he’s all about the zen.
     You think of him as salty when he’s actually quite sweet. You wonder was he just a womanising racoon or a man who knows how to love women?  He’s purposeful, determined, well read, ordered, yet there’s certainly been a lot of crazy in his life, like marrying Melanie Griffiths twice.
    In a recent interview Griffiths, now single for the first time in years following her divorce from Antonio Banderas, seemed to come over all swoony when his name came up on her phone. She spoke of him almost breathlessly and implied they still loved each other and said that Don Johnson’s diamond engagement ring was better than Banderas’s. 
     Johnson has had four wives in five marriages, three of which were brief. His first two marriages were annulled within days. He met Griffiths as a teenager and they married when she was 18, were divorced 6 months later. In the eighties there were many affairs. He lived with the actress Patti D’Urbanville (she of the Cat Stevens song Lady D’Urbanville) for five years and they had a son Jessie.  He also had an affair with Barbra Streisand. He speaks of them all so warmly. He says Streisand is “a wonderful, wonderful woman and very funny. We are friends to this day… I stay friends with people I connect with because they are unique and extraordinary beings and the world is a better place when they’re here.”
     He has been married to Kelly Phleger for nearly 20 years. She calls him DJ. He calls her, “Fabulous Kelly. An extraordinary woman. I knew this the first time I laid eyes on her.” 
     They met at a party in San Francisco and he made it his business to meet this “statuesque brunette.” After their first conversation he told her that he was going to marry her. “I just knew. Yes… and then she ignored me for a year – she was with someone else and she is a woman of character and principle and I wasn’t idle.” I’m sure he wasn’t. Two years later they were married. Idleness has never been in his DNA, in his love life or in his career. 
     After he came out with Till I Loved You with Streisand, he played in rock bands for a while. “Although I will sing a little bit in an episode of Watchmen and I’m still very connected to all that stuff, I made a choice that I was going to enjoy life. I would do music for free and work as an actor on a commercial level. I play music with my kids. Jessie plays guitar, piano, Alexander plays everything, Deacon plays everything, Jasper now 16 is always making beats but he’s my basketball player. 6 foot four and a lovely young man. I’m very close to all of them. we might have arguments and disagreements like every family but they are my best friends.”
    He’s always managed to stay close to his ex-partners. “Look, there’s something insane about people who stop having relationships they have a child with. Insane. You loved each other once and that child is an expression of that love and if you say something unpleasant about that person that you made the child with, you’re saying something unpleasant about that child and that is essentially ridiculous.”
     When the man who never looks back reunited with Griffiths for a second marriage, he reasoned that “two old souls connected so that Dakota could be born.”  He nods. Was it just that? Pause. 
     “Melanie and I have loved each other since we were kids. Love doesn’t die, it changes in volume and intensity but it never dies and I feel the same way about life. We are energy. Energy doesn’t die it just transforms and that’s the way I feel about love.”
    So he’s saying that even if your partner cheated on you, lied to you, left you and hurt you, you should forgive them? “Yes. If you forgive everybody all your family, all your friends and lovers in your life and release all the resentments, anger, there is happiness.” “I don’t want to hold any anger towards someone because that doesn’t help you.”
     OK, I tell him that he is a much more evolved person than I am.  He says earnestly, “if you’re able to make that statement, at least you understand that there’s an option. Forgiveness, it’s happiness,” he says and he looks at me, bores a hole in my soul with those eyes. There’s another dopamine hit.
     He reaches for his sparkling water. I tell him I can see no bread might be possible. I can’t see no coffee and I can’t see forgiveness.
     “It doesn’t really cost you anything and it benefits you.” I tell him to stop being unreasonably wise and we need to talk about something trivial which is how does he maintain the perfect level of stubble? He looks at me. he’s very wary of trivial but goes for it anyway.
     “In the eighties no one walked around with 3 day stubble but I did it because of the nature of the character and then I realised there are benefits to being in the sun and not shaving because you shave a layer of skin off so you leave this baby skin exposed to really powerful sunlight so it’s the secret of no sun damage.”
   Then he corrects me and says sometimes he does shave it all off because he’s discovered the age defying skin cream called Augustinas Barder. “This doctor is the head of stem cell research at Leipzig University and he has discovered how to communicate with your own stem cells so it’s reverse ageing.”
    A bit like Book Club. Women in their sixties and seventies rediscovering themselves as a hormonal teenager when they read Fear of Flying.

Patti Smith (The London Sunday Times Magazine, May 27, 2018)

London Sunday Times Magazine featuring Patti SmithI go to meet Patti Smith in a downtown café, New York. I feel like I already know her a little. We’ve had an exchange of emails and calls to set up this interview. She ended up as my migraine advisor, very nurturing. Not what I expected to find. Not the woman whose image I grew up with. When I was at school, a boy who knew me well said as he presented me with her debut album Horses, ‘you’re gonna love this. It’s a singing Sylvia Plath but way more cool looking.’ Indeed she was. A pre-punk poetess whose most successful song Because the Night she co-wrote a few years later with Bruce Springsteen a couple of years later in 1979.
  The Horses album was all about the look. The Robert Mapplethorpe cover portrayed a stylish, androgynous creature with a white shirt, a ribbon tie and a boys’ blazer hung over one shoulder. Black and white. Such a powerful image. Everyone assumed she was a powerful person. She was however shy and vulnerable. She’d never intended to be a rock n roll singer so it was no sacrifice for her to give up touring and marry Fred Sonic Smith, live in rural Detroit and be a wife and mother to their two children. When he died at 45 in 1994 she was forced back into the limelight to make albums and tour. But she never stopped writing. She’d already been working on Just Kids – a memoir of her life with Mapplethorpe, a moving poetic best seller published in 2010. In that book, we see that she is a complex person, a good girl doing bad things or a bad girl doing good things. Since then there have been more books including M Train, another winner of the National Book Award. 
  The night before we meet she’d hosted a premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival for the documentary Horses (out on Apple Music May 22nd). To make people feel it was worth their ticket price, she decided to perform a short set joined by Bruce Springsteen and Michael Stipe. What was a casual jam for Smith, was THE ticket of the festival – the only news item of Tribeca to hit Page 6.
  She’s texted me she’s sitting at the back of the café so I head straight over to the woman in John Lennon spectacles and long, grey, tangled hair that probably never sees a brush. The waitress says ‘Oh, you’re with her,’ and nods with a look of nonchalance combined with respect. It’s her local café. She’s here every day. We would have gone to her home but she explains her daughter Jessie who runs an anti-climate change organisation, is embroiled in meetings there.
  She’s wearing a red tartan flannel shirt and a t shirt she’s slept in, given to her by the Electric Lady studios where she recorded Horses and where we are soon to end up because the café is too noisy. 
  She smiles when I bring up the Horses premiere. “It was a wonderful night.” On cue her son – the bands guitarist – now back in Detroit calls. They chat warmly, sort of like mother and son but somehow even their casual is intensely close. Then Jessie arrives in the café for a takeout for her and her colleagues. We all walk down the street towards the studio. Jessie towers above us. “I used to be tall,” says Smith, “until I had children. My son is 6 foot 4.” Jessie’s legs are indeed endless and liquorice stick skinny in her black leggings with lace inserts.
  Smith has added an Anne Demeulemeester blazer to her ensemble. When Smith was broke, Demeulemeester sent her a suitcase full of runway garments. Smith spots that I am wearing an Anne Demeulemeester eyelet shirt. “I have the same one, “she says enthusiastically, “and there were so few of them made.” I can’t help it. This makes me feel bizarrely akin to her, so I can ask her all the questions she’s never answered because have the same shirt. 
  Once inside Electric Lady, she takes me into the actual studio where Horses was recorded. Electric Lady studios were built by Jimi Hendrix. 
  We go upstairs to a quiet spot with a velvet couch and floor tapestry, past the murals which Smith remembers being there on the opening night. But in those pre Instagram days things were different. Things were not documented. “Things shift as you get older (she’s now 71). When I was younger I was extremely photogenic and I was fascinated to get my picture taken. These days I’m not so fascinated with my own image but I like connecting with people. Instagram I don’t take many pictures of myself but I take pictures of the world. I never appreciated the phone at all before. It was thrust upon me by my kids but now I find it very useful. You can write about a café in Czechoslovakia or your favourite poet or when Milos Forman died I did a little meditation for him and today I put up a picture of Saint Bernadette, always my favourite Saint when I was young.”
  Smith grew up a Jehovah’s Witness. God, prayer, the saints, the Bible have always been significant in her life. Her mother, a Jehovah’s Witness, encouraged her to read the bible every day. She found it a creative tool. God is indeed throughout her lyrics. The seminal Gloria starts “Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine.”
  You don’t necessarily associate androgynous rock star and God but that’s why it all works. When you meet her she’s not the least bit androgynous. She’s more mother figure and uber female. 
  “I felt a kinship with Catholicism as a young girl. It was almost completely aesthetic. We were a poor family and I found objects of Catholicism that my friends had like rosaries, holy pictures were a fascination but I wasn’t drawn to the dogma of the church. 
  My mother taught me about God when I was 3 years old. I was a precocious reader by the time I was 3. Not a child genius or anything but I went to bible school early in life. It was very spartan. They had no crosses or statues, just bibles. Teachings revolve around the interpretation of the meaning of the scriptures. I was fascinated with the difference between our meeting hall which was unadorned and then going with a friend to mass which was like being inside of a jewel box and it seemed magical until I got whacked on the butt by a nun for not getting up and sitting down at the right times.
  There is a romanticism of the stories of the saints but being whacked on the butt is not in the bible so I found myself rebelling against these Dogmas. Can you imagine Jesus doing that? Jesus was a remarkable teacher. I’ve read the bible all my life and I still read it. At Easter time I like to read the New Testament and I read it quite a bit because my sister is a Jehovah witness and she reads the scriptures every day and we have a nice rhythm of having bible studies together. I enjoy talking about the bible with her because next to her children and grandchildren it’s the most important thing to her. It’s a beautiful way for us to connect.”
  She and her sister Linda remain close. She is not so close to her sister Kimberley – 12 years her junior. The song Kimberley on Horses was written for her. “She’s had a lot of difficulties in her life. I do the best I can by her but we’re not as close as my other sister and I. people evolve in different ways.”
  She was super close to her brother Todd who died suddenly one month after her husband in 1994. “He had a faulty heart valve which, if he had known, a 39-cent piece of plastic could have stopped it. It was a terrible, terrible blow. My brother was so animated, so energetic, so loving. A great man. A double blow because we had decided after my husband Fred died that my brother would come and live with me and help raise my son and daughter. We felt that that would be a positive and good transition because my kids loved him but then he died.
  He wasn’t sick, he had no symptoms. It just happened. It took a long time to reconcile. I had already lost Robert (Mapplethorpe) and then my pianist died from the same heart valve problem as my brother. I couldn’t imagine anything worse than losing Robert but then my whole world was grief.” Mapplethorpe died in 1989. “I was just getting myself emotionally back on my feet when Fred died in 94.”
  She took her marriage very seriously. At the time, feminists complained that she’d swapped the edgy rock n roll life to be wife and mother, implying it was a giant betrayal. They saw her refusal to shave her armpits for the cover of the album Easter (1979) as a feminist statement, but it was nothing to do with that. It was her statement as an artist, as a person.
  When I was a young girl I was interviewed by Ms Magazine. They came to my apartment and I was doing my boyfriend’s laundry. He was a musician going on tour and the journalist found this so distasteful but I said he pays for our apartment and I like doing his laundry. She found it so anti-feminist she dropped the story. If I want to treat my husband like a king, I’ll treat him like a king. I don’t want to be defined by anything. I don’t want to be defined as a punk priestess. The wild Mustang of Rock – whatever they called me. I did my best work when I was married and out of the limelight and people found it so vile. They would do articles about me depicted flying through in the air with udders, cow udders. I had turned into a domestic cow, yet I flourished.”
  “I’ve been writing poetry and stories since I was 12 years old. I’ve always considered myself as a writer. I came to New York as a poet and when I met Robert that was my essential preoccupation. Then I began to perform poetry and because of my energy without planning it I just organically started merging rock and roll and poetry. I never expected to make a record. I never expected to tour. It was something I was given the opportunity to do. I thought I would go back and work in the bookstore but when there was an opportunity to tour – I always wanted to see the world and never had any money – so I was thrilled. We went to London and Paris and Finland. I still thought I would go back to the bookstore but then I was offered another record. I felt like in the course of four albums I’d said everything I needed to say. I didn’t love that as we became more successful, demands increased. There were all these interviews and radio stations. I didn’t feel I was evolving as a human being. I didn’t feel like my writing was evolving. I felt like I was spending a huge amount of time with these extra-curricular things and because of the stress I was becoming an arrogant or demanding person.
  All these things I’ve kept to myself, but when I met Fred in Detroit on the road – he had been very successful in the band MC 5 – and he now had another band Sonic Rendezvous Band (Sonic Youth would later derive their name from this band). 
  We fell in love. I knew he was the one immediately. I don’t know why but I did. I knew I would marry him but I didn’t really want a long distance relationship. At that time, if I was in Ireland and he was in Detroit it would cost $300 to talk to him for 20 minutes and we were always parted and I didn’t want to be parted from him anymore. He was a Detroit boy and he was loyal to Detroit. What did I want to do? It wasn’t all based on love but in the scheme of things there are all these great new bands and I thought rock n roll would be fine without me. It wouldn’t matter whether I was there or not.
  When I was out of the limelight in the 80s it was my most prolific time writing. I didn’t publish anything but I learnt how to write. Had it not been for those years I wouldn’t have been able to write Just Kids. 
  I also think I became a better person. Fred was politically involved, very concerned at the plight of the common man and I too knew all about being poor. In the beginning I wasn’t concerned with what was happening in the world. I just wanted to be an artist but in marrying and having children I learned what it was like to be a citizen.
  My mother and father struggled and they were very hard working and then I saw for myself how hard it is to take care of a family, make 3 meals a day and do the washing and the ironing.”
  Did she live off royalties? “We lived very frugally. I had one successful song Because the Night and a couple of moderately successful songs. We lived really simply. We didn’t go anywhere. When we really needed money in 1987 Clive Davis gave us the money to make Dream of Life.”
  In her former life as an artist living in New York in the late 60s early 70s, she lived only with her art materials, no phone, no TV. “I never had a TV in the 70’s but Fred, a Michigan man, had to have his TV. We weren’t deprived. We lived simply.”
  Does she think that growing up a Jehovah Witness and used to a spartan life made her more accommodating of this? “No I don’t think it had anything to do with it. Aesthetically I always liked the things that I liked, whether I could have them or not. My mother worked as a waitress, my father was a factory worker. We had a lot of rough times when there wasn’t enough to eat and I was sick a lot. I had bronchiolar problems.”
  Even today she’s still coughing, a lot. She’s given up certain foods like tomatoes and aubergines for health reasons and in the café ate roasted beets even though she doesn’t like them. She says she’s not seriously ill but has reached a point where she has to take care of herself. At the time of being a suffering artist she didn’t mind. “Everyone suffered. Van Gogh was poor, William Blake was poor. Their work wasn’t received by anyone so I felt ready for that. It wasn’t to do with religion. It was a certain amount of sacrifice and hardship was how it was meant to be. Robert on the other hand found nothing romantic about poverty. He wanted to make money and was very ambitious. Robert did not have the constitution to have a steady job and be creative. It drained him so much but I had a really strong constitution. It wasn’t a sacrifice to me to work in a bookstore”
  She was happy to be the working one, the practical one, the one taking care of Robert. They met when she first moved to New York and she was living on the streets. Again, something she accepted not so much as a penance but as a rite of passage. They recognised each other as twin souls. They immediately found empathy and a bond they’d never known but was it passionate as well as soulful? A pause.
  “We met when we were 20. We were both very unformed. Robert was not that experienced. We had a beautiful physical relationship. We were very work centric. We didn’t have money to go anywhere. We took walks to Washington Square Park. We entertained ourselves. We led a simple life. We didn’t have a telephone, a TV or a radio. We had a record player. I would sing him little songs or write little poems to him. We’d make love and he’d get up and draw. I loved our life. When we were 23 we moved into the Chelsea Hotel but by 24 he’d been through his – I don’t know what to call it – self evolution.”
  By this she means he had discovered he identified as a homosexual male. It might be easy now to say that Mapplethorpe, who became famous for his beautiful and tortured homo erotic art, his sado masochistic epics, was gay… 
  “But back then when I was raised in the 1950s and early 60s people hid their homosexuality because their families would institutionalise their kids, sons especially, so the only homosexuals that you met were drag queens or very affected people. That was my only window. And his.”
  She thinks he didn’t have any idea? “He didn’t and then he did. And when he did I’m sure he felt this nature burgeoning inside of him. Don’t forget he came from a strict Catholic family. His brother was in the military and he was groomed to be in the military or be a priest so there was a lot of pressure he was under. When we lived together he shed all of their expectations but in shedding them he kept shedding and found his true nature. I think us being together was probably helpful in that he could be himself but I had no idea… It was hard for Robert to let our relationship go. Robert shed as many tears as I did. I had a lot of difficulty grasping and accepting. He was always there for me. in my romanticism I thought maybe I was different but he was very, very careful to constantly tell me that this had nothing to do with me not being a good enough girlfriend. 
  People thought that Robert and I was a relationship of convenience (they also accused her androgynous looks with being a lesbian). This was not true. If anything it was inconvenient. We were two people who really cared about each other who were destined to part but who really mourned parting. We stayed together probably longer than we should, not out of convenience at all but because it was painful to go our separate ways. And when we finally did it was only by a few blocks.”
  He must have been tortured. Does she think that all those S&M pieces he did was his expression of being pulled apart? “I never read that into it. Robert was not a verbal person. We didn’t have to talk about the meaning or why.”
  Mapplethorpe did find fame and fortune. His work was overt. His work represented a time of gay free spirit. A celebration of coming out of the darkness and then the darkness came back. Even his most famous images themselves became sad with the onset of AIDS. An epidemic. A metaphor for the death of sexual freedom. His images that celebrated this time became even more of an anachronism when he contracted the disease and died with AIDS related complications. I’m not sure his work would have flourished in this century.
  “Robert told me at the end of his life in 1989 that he was glad he took his pictures when he did because ‘I could never take them now.’ Because of the climate, because Robert had AIDS and he was dying of AIDS, many of his friends, many of his models, many people that we knew either had died or were dying of AIDS and he was well aware that it would not be the climate to do these photographs so he felt very privileged and grateful that he took them when he did.”
  There’s a pause. Not a sticky one but a sad one. She’s looking into mid distance as she often does. Not because she’s afraid to look people in the eye, but that it’s like a little meditation descends over her, where she’s connecting with something higher, maybe even Robert himself.
  “I always feel Robert is with me. I hear his voice. I feel him. When I was working on the book I could feel his encouragement and his impatience.
  The phone rings and it’s her daughter Jessie. She tells her she’ll call her back and tells me she’s an awesome girl. And suddenly she’s back in the 70s where she was in this very studio recording Horses.
  “I had no expectations or knowledge of what was ahead of me but I knew I wanted to be with Fred and Fred wanted children so we had them. I had never imagined having children. I wanted to be an artist. My whole childhood I was so sickly I never thought I’d be living very long. I’d been coughing my whole life. It wasn’t on my radar but I’m so glad I did because I love my kids. I loved them when I had them and being part of their life. I love them now. They are such great people and great friends and they magnify their father. They even have his annoying traits which I see and love.
  Fred would take hours to choose a tie and my daughter will also take hours to choose something that she’s going to wear. I’m the kind of person that well, will just put on anything (including the T shirt that she’s slept in). I have worn these jackets from Anne Demeulemeester for years since she saw me in a concert in Belgium in the 70s. She fell in love with the picture on the cover of Horses (with the Catholic schoolboys blazer bought from a thrift store). She told me I was her imaginary muse. Women’s jackets have too many darts. They were so fussy. Anne sent me a huge box of clothes when my husband died. She sent me this blazer about nine months ago. I haven’t changed my style since the 70s. Jessie found a picture of me from the 70s wearing a striped polo neck shirt and black pants and I was actually wearing the same thing that day. I’m sorry I didn’t dress up for you and I’m wearing the shirt I slept in. I mean, I was exhausted.”
  She’s wearing a pink ruby ring around her neck. “It’s an Indian ruby. It’s a Talisman. I’ve been a widow since 1994 so I buy myself jewellery once in a while. When I finish a major work I’ll buy a present for myself. It’s not that I care about money. If I have to live simply I will but on the other hand if someone books my into a five star hotel with Italian sheets and porcelain from France I will enjoy it. But also if it’s not cold or raining I can sleep on a park bench. And that’s how I work. I can go in front of 100 people and do poetry or 100,000 and rock and roll. Either one.”
  When she starts her UK tour (June 2ndBrighton Dome and All Points East in Victoria Park on June 3rd) it will be the latter. Jackson will be with her onstage. Jessie will be doing climate change activism in Paris.
  “My children didn’t even know I performed but I had to come back. For a start, we were living in rural Detroit and I don’t drive. I can’t legally drive as I have a neurological problem where I can’t tell right from left.”
  Was she ready to get back into rock and roll? “I was ready to get reacquainted with people. It was really writing the book Just Kids that helped me. It’s the most successful thing I’ve ever done, which I find very funny. Robert always wanted me to be successful. I didn’t care. I was conceited. I wanted to be great. I would have rather been unsuccessful and poor but be great. All I ever wanted to do was great work. Robert asked me to write the book the day before he died and I vowed to him that I would.”
  In this book she also reveals that when she was 19 and living in the laundry room of her parent’s house in South Jersey because there were not enough bedrooms, she became pregnant and decided to give birth to the child knowing she was going to give it away.
  “Yes, it was very difficult. But I had my goal and I was determined. I was still living in a very poor situation. The father was younger and poorer than me and I wanted the child to be brought up in an atmosphere where they could get a good education.”
  She would have to give up art college and her part time factory job that she took to support herself through college. “At 19 it was the best decision I knew how to make. I was on my path to be an artist. I couldn’t even find a job in this area. It was the right decision at the time. The child was always in my thoughts and I said a prayer for the child every day and continue to do so.”
  It’s as if the tumultuous ordeal was a suffering she had to make worth it. She had no choice but to be a great artist after she’d given up her child and as for the praying, I learned that it really is part of her life. 
  “The way we pray is almost like saying Grace. If we’re having a little dinner with some people Jessie might say ‘will you say a prayer?’ and I’ll say of course. As a Jehovah witness we don’t go to church but Jessie and I often go to churches to light candles for our loved ones. We sit and contemplate… although the individual candle thing was getting very out of hand. The beautiful thing about churches is these are things where people bare themselves. There might be prayers of gratitude or sorrow, for forgiveness or for the sick but they vibrate with the energy of people in prayer. Often I just sit there and think about things.”
  She often has this other worldly look as if she’s being transported somewhere spiritual and I wonder how the inner works with her outer aesthetic. She’s always liked a specific look.
  “I’ve never worn make up. I grew up in the 50s and early 60s where girls used tons of make-up. Cleopatra eyes, tons of hairspray and I couldn’t stand it. I don’t like perfume or nail polish. I even did theatre for a while. I was good on stage but I couldn’t stand the pancake make-up.”
  That didn’t stop her doing a cameo a few years ago in The Killing, one of her favourite TV series. “But they didn’t make me wear make-up. but I’m not an actress. I learned that very quickly. I’d have loved to have been an idiosyncratic detective.” She’s also a big fan of Wallander. “I just don’t have those skills but I admire them. I also admire people who are good bricklayers or bakers. The things that people do that take an enormous amount of work, concentration and sacrifice.”
  Sacrifice again. Still a big theme with her. She’s also become more politically evolved, particularly with environmental issues. “Environmental issues because of all the toxins in our water and our food. Our children are getting sicker. I’m looking at the rise of autism, the collapse of the bee population, neurological diseases in children and the Great Barrier Reef dying. 20 years ago, I remember Adam Yautch of the Beastie Boys meeting the Dalai Lama and asking him what was the most important thing that young people could do and he said ‘looking after our planet.’ That was 20 years ago and it stayed with me. There are many important causes to embrace but basically I’m a Humanist and the fate of our planet is at the top of the spectrum. It’s probably the most difficult time I’ve seen in my lifetime but life is still beautiful.
  I’m hoping America will develop a new party because the old guard has not done too well. I’m exactly the same age as Donald Trump. My generation had so many dreams and hopes, things we wanted to do… Donald Trump and I were both living in New York and I met him at a dinner party when I was about 30. He was one of the most horrendous people that I ever met. Bullish, conceited, full of himself. I was invited as an artist and he was there as an investor. He was developing Trump Tower then. He was there with his then wife Ivanka. I didn’t like him then and I don’t like him now. My generation had dreams of peace and making our environment better so it’s like having the anti-Christ in charge. At the same time all these young people have given me so much hope so I don’t wake up and think about what he’s doing. I think about what the young people are doing to help make a change.
  We have an environment which is hurting our children so I try to focus on that.”
  She has always stressed that she prefers to deal with human issues rather than women’s issues and therefore is not particularly connected to the #metoo movement. “For myself I don’t have any stories to offer. “There are many things that concern me but we have to choose what to put our energy into. I haven’t had to suffer what some people have had to suffer. My fight all my life has never been with that focus. Even if there was a gender issue I never recognised it as such.” 
  Does she think that women have become more vulnerable? “I’m in a different time in my life so I’m not preoccupied with that. I’ve never been to therapy. I’m not self-analytical. I’m a work-based person. I have to put my energies into things that I think are important with the time I have left.
  My issues were all over creative control issues, career ending decisions like doing a song called Rock n Roll Nigger or having armpit hair on the cover of the album Easter. I had no idea it was controversial. I don’t shave my armpits. I never thought about it. They refuse to rack it in many states in America. On the cover of Horses they wanted to airbrush my hair because it was messy. They wanted me to wear make-up and it was a simple thing for me. I didn’t want it and if there were repercussions I didn’t care.”
  She wasn’t doing this as a feminist. “But as an artist, as a person. Women have never had anything handed to them. Whether it was the right to vote, the right to have abortions, nothing is handed to women. Women have to fight for everything. I know that we have many feminist movements. All of these movements are necessary for change. I have never been a person to align myself to any movements. I find myself confined.”
  She’s soft spoken still, yet such defiance, such passion all within her. Does she miss not having a man to make King? “I do. I miss him, I missed him, I still miss him. I miss Robert. I miss Sam Shephard, a man who has been a friend my whole life. I have men friends, I enjoy them. I like female friends and I like my children. I’ve never been a gender based person and at this point in my life at 71 I’m even less gender based. I have some male friends who like to make me feel pampered but not in a romantic way. In a neo romantic way.
  All the men I’ve had the strongest relationships with have all died but I still have a rewarding life. I have my band, my friends, Lenny Kaye has played with me for many years. He’ll come to the UK on the tour. I always play Brighton because I love Brighton. I’m writing another book, a sister book to Just Kids, which is more focused on me and not Robert. Fred will be the King of this book. People ask was Robert the love of your life? Robert was the artist of my life and Fred was the love of my life. I still feel both of them but I feel them differently. My husband in my daily life because he was my daily life and through my children. I can’t even watch the shows we watched. We used to love watching the British Open together. I tried but I can’t. It just makes me miss him. I’ve always kept him with us. My children and I talk about him. We laugh, we go to his grave together.
  Does she think she’s going to die? “No but if I live to 90 I’ve still only got a certain amount of time and a lot of work to do. I’m not talking in a morose way. I never talked like this until I turned 70. That’s a number to be reckoned with. Before that I had been a Peter Pan type person, disassociated with chronology.”
  How could she not be after going through so many deaths? Does she think about death itself? I’ve read various philosophies about what happens after death but I’m just focused on living as long as possible so I can be here for my kids and my projects. I’m working simultaneously on five book projects so I need all the time I can get to continue working.
  Aware that we have spent several hours together I sense it’s time to go. She points me in the direction of a cab uptown but afterwards calls me, worried that it was the bad time of day to get a taxi and am I back safely? Still out there, still edgy, still defiant, still rock and roll and still saying her prayers. 
June 2nd 2018 Brighton Dome
June 3rd 2018 London All Points East, Victoria Park
June 5th 2018 Manchester Apollo
June 11th 2018 Cardiff Church of St John The Evangelist
June 12th 2018 Cardiff Festival of Voice, Wales Millennium Centre
August 4th 2018 Cambridge Folk Festival

Kylie Minogue (April 2018)

When I first learnt that Kylie’s new album Golden was a country fusion I wasn’t a little reticent… but actually it is mesmerising. Sumptuous pop riffs and the discovery that Kylie has the perfect country voice. It’s an extraordinary blend of classic Kylie pop, yet soul baring country style lyrics. It’s personal. It’s deep. Her most raw thoughts set to music ever, yet somehow with their catchy, sunny melodies those thoughts are made beautiful. And that has always been Kylie’s style. To see good rather than bad. To create ease rather than stress. I’ve known Kylie for some time now and I’m glad to say we have an emotional shorthand. Kylie is and always was extraordinary and special yet down to earth real.
  We meet in The Ritz Piccadilly. She has The Royal Suite which is several rooms vast. Lots of brocade, candelabra, chandelier and swirly gold frames on 19thcentury oil paintings. The Kylie herself is wearing gold snakeskin stiletto boots, an off-white floaty chiffon skirt that has golden embroidery and alabaster chiffon-y top, hair longer and more golden than ever.
  She pours me tea and agrees that the making of Golden has been a cathartic experience. “I’m actually sad not to be going into the studio because creating is very rewarding. It’s a weird time to have to let it go. 
  In the beginning it was very much like a dear diary sort of thing. I don’t think the songs were very good. Now I’ve moved on the songs have too. But I was glad to reach a point where I thought I’ve got to be honest with myself more than anything. I wrote about relationships and love and the usual culprits. I was writing about heartbreak. I sing I’m Broken Hearted.
  Actually, I think I was a bit more broken than just heartbroken because for a long time I was in a relationship that we both knew was ending. I think it came out in the press a different way (it came out that Joshua Sasse the 30-year-old actor to whom she was engaged had an onset romance with a co-star) but towards the end of any relationship it takes its toll on you. I knew I wasn’t strong in myself so going into the studio and getting all that stuff out of my system was a way of dealing with it. My A&R guy Jamie Nelson had the idea that we would give it a country feel so it was a reinvention.”
  Kylie always seems to manage reinvention seamlessly. “I didn’t know what he meant at the time when he was talking about a little country edge but then we found it. I realise you can get away with putting more of a story in the song and you can be humorous with those stories.
  The most beautiful thing about the really sad songs is that they manage to be hauntingly sad and at the same time cleverly upbeat – a bit like the woman herself. You would never see Kylie as sad but this album is about getting over a relationship with the man that she was supposed to marry.
  They met in September 2015 onset – the TV musical comedy Gallivant when Kylie made a guest appearance and six months later they were engaged. By the end of 2016 things had started to fall apart. Sasse is a British actor 20 years’ her junior and the son of poet Dominic Sasse who was killed in a plane crash when he was five.
  They were pictured together often and looked happy and thrilled with each other but the love went wrong and it became the basis of the album. “We started in the UK and then we went to Nashville and I worked with English writers who live part time in Nashville. There’s such a different feeling about the place. It’s not like London, LA, Melbourne, Sydney. Even the shopping is different, although I didn’t have much time for that,” she tells me as I try and press on her a list of vintage cowboy boot ‘must do’ shopping experiences. Unlike her not to be excited by shoes.
  “It’s that people seem so emotionally connected there. I don’t want to take things away from any other thing that I’ve done but this was just different. I went to The Bluebird Café. I loved being in a room and seeing an audience of all ages listening. It was just beautiful with actual Stetsons and cowboy boots. I felt I could fall in love a million times. That’s the feeling there. That’s the energy and when you go to the performance rooms there, you see the songwriters talk about the song, how it came about. Not necessarily the best performers but you were there listening to it. I would love to perform at The Bluebird Café. Can you imagine how nervous I would be? But I’m going to try and do it. I’m already thinking of the stories I’m going to tell.”
  This is already the new Kylie. Previous Kylie would rather listen to stories than tell them. She would rather deflect the conversation away from herself. “I’d love to go back to Nashville. I feel I just scraped the surface. It had a profound effect on me and I really want to get to the next level. Everybody seems emotionally connected -as I said – so maybe it happens by osmosis. It really helped me believe in the song at the moment. It made me feel if you’re not going to give it everything, you may as well not be there. Although there was definitely a moment where I said, this is cool, but when we get back to my real world how is it going to translate? I worried that it would seem disingenuous to have gone all country. I didn’t want to be disrespectful to the genre but at the same time it’s so fun to sing.” This is not to say Golden is pure country. It’s Kylie-fied country and it is after all called Golden, an homage perhaps to her golden hot pants heritage and everything else glittery that encapsulates Kylie.
  “I didn’t know this album would be called Golden. I felt I was sifting and chipping away for long enough and I was like, I need a nugget, give me a nugget. So that was the album. Not so much a style, but the style of my healing.”
  As we talk about this healing she’s not specific about what she’s healing from, but she looks at me with an implicit understanding. She knows that I know she’s talking about Joshua Sasse. 
  Was she really going to get married to him? “Well I had the ring on the finger, didn’t I?” Had they planned a wedding? “No, we’d not gone that far.” Did she know which country it was going to be in. “no, no, no. It was a hasty move. It was the moment. It was a beautiful moment and I loved it and there was obviously a honeymoon period, just without that exact wording. And then you know as time goes on….”
  What happened. Did they fall out of love with each other? There is a long pause and a quizzical expression. “I think we did, yes. It’s complicated. And to try to put it in a nutshell would not only be too difficult but unfair.”
  Was it true that he went off to do a movie and fell in love with a co-star? “These things are known to happen but I wouldn’t want to comment on it. I mean, we can have a girly drink and I’ll tell you – otherwise I wouldn’t go down that road. For me, and this is going to sound selfish, but this album is about me. It’s about my relationship, where I am in my life and some songs talk about that point. In A Lifetime to Prepare I say ‘thought I’d settle down, a happy ever after princess…’ But actually, I never thought I was the marrying kind. I know for a lot of people it’s an important goal. That’s where they want to end up but for me it never was. I guess the thought was – that’s what people do. Maybe I’ll give it a try. But either it isn’t for me or it was the wrong person.
  I was swept up in the moment and I’m not afraid to admit that. To go back to lyrics of A Lifetime to Repair I say, ‘I’m not giving up on it’ and I’ll probably do foolish things again in the future. Otherwise I might as well stay at home and get lots of cats.” There’s a long pause. I’ve got lots of cats I say. “Have you?” she shrieks incredulously and we both burst into laughter “But you don’t just stay home. I mean no offence to multiple cat loving people who stay home, but I think my greatest fear is loneliness even though sometimes I crave to be alone. Maybe more so as I get older. I just want some quiet.”
  We muse this must be a Gemini thing, wanting to be alone and fearing loneliness. I remember a time when a friend told me she was really lonely and I had to think for a while. I didn’t really know what loneliness was and then my relationship of many many years broke up. I thought…this is lonely…and I immediately got more cats. We laugh as I tell this story and Kylie accentuates her mirth by banging on the table a couple of times. “I mean I have considered a cat,” she says mock gravely, “but I travel too much. How many cats do you have?” Four I say cheerily. Kylie is dissolving into her golden boots with hilarity.
  Once composed she tells me, “I think the end of being in the relationship was the hardest part. The decision making. Afterwards people were going ‘I hope you’re ok after this break up’ and I thought, you know I AM OK. Once it was done it was a relief to both of us, because it’s hard. You hang on to what is good and it’s hard to let go and you feel strangely embarrassed thinking oh, are we supposed to try and make this work?”
  She nods knowing it’s a situation that most people have been in. Do I stay or do I go? It’s also come at a particular time of life. Kylie turns 50 in May. “Golden, not old, not young but golden. I know it sounds a little fantastical but it’s true. You can’t make yourself younger. You are who you are and it makes sense to me in a realistic and slightly existential manner.”
  By this she means, I think, she is not going to be daunted at the prospect of reaching 50 and that milestone doesn’t mean she won’t have fun or excitement or love in her life. 
  “I’m always asked how to I feel about being my age in this industry and I think by asking me that you’re perpetuating the cycle, the myth that you can’t be older. By the same token they also asked me how it feels to be 18 and in this industry when I was starting out. I don’t know because I had nothing to compare it to.”
  On Golden there’s a sense of the passage of time, an urgent need to live in the moment which is perhaps a result of her cancer diagnosis and survival. Is that how cancer changed her? Needing to live in the moment? “No. I think it’s just where I am right now. I don’t think I would have sung those things 10/15 years ago. I want everything I’m singing to be authentic. Every story to come from a real feeling.”
  That is an interesting circle. In Kylie’s beginning she was dismissed as a manufactured pop star and now she’s describing herself as a woman who craves truth, authenticity. She is allowing herself to be open. All the songs have a truth in them. 
  “For instance, Radio On, I didn’t take a specific drive, put the radio on and cry but we’ve all been there and I just feel strengthened that I’m at a point in my life where I can look at things realistically.”
  Does she feel anxious about getting older? “I’d be lying if I said I never think about it. Sure. High heels and walking down the stairs my knees make sure I know about it. They’re going, how much longer are we going to be doing this? The heels come off as soon as I get home. But I do feel better within myself. A lot of people I know are turning 50 or have turned 50 recently and one thing that seems to ring true for all of us is to think, this is me. Not a number but this is me. I’m turning another corner of who I am. And a lot of things start to make sense. Things that you can’t have known when you were younger.”
  When women approach 50 they fear the unknown, the menopause, but Kylie had that in her 30’s as a result of her treatment for breast cancer. “Oh yes, I know about those things already,” she nods with a grimace. In fact, she told me everything about it at the time when I questioned why she was carrying a fan around her. She told me I would soon by carrying that fan and she was right.
  “You are flummoxed, you are hot and you forget what you’re saying.” So at least she doesn’t have to worry about that as she’s already had it. “I don’t have it now but I know what to expect.” What? You’re going to get it again? “Probably I will, yes because the first one was medically induced. So, when the time comes at least I know what it will be like.” That’s really unfair. “I know! They didn’t remove my ovaries or anything like that. They just suppressed my oestrogen and once you stop the medication, once you’re past a certain period it comes back. So, I’ll be back in the fridge. I remember a friend of mine a bit older than me used to go to the fridge, open it and stand in front of it. I’m ahead of the game with that experience. I’m under no illusion as to what’s instore.
  Of course cancer affected her life in so many ways but does she feel that there was one overriding thing that changed her? “Whaat? That question is so hard. I don’t think I’m cut out for interviews. I mean this is my life, but the interview bit…whoaaa. OK this is what happened… I wish I had a soundbite but the truth is a lot of things happened. You’re in that moment trying to get through… I felt a lot of guilt with my family because they felt helpless. They weren’t because their strength was important to me. It was tough to see them hurting so much and putting on a brave face. I don’t know how much they cried or how much they hurt out of my sight because they just couldn’t show that to me then.”
  But this is the Minogue household. This is jazz hands, smiles. Did she feel she couldn’t show her pain. “Oh, there were times, more than a couple of times that I really did. Now I’m just going to say cliched things but perhaps that’s alright. You take a look at the bigger picture, what’s important to you, who is important to you, what you want to do differently although I didn’t want to do anything differently. I just wanted to get better and get on with it. But I did realise that I like what I do, love what I do even and sometimes the good points come from beautiful moments of connection. I’ve got pretty good fans. They’re kind. I had a cabby the other day – I had an appointment but I really wanted to get a good coffee and there’s a place just near my house and I thought do I have time to go there or maybe I can get the cab driver to divert for the coffee. Its only three blocks away but the weather was sideways so I asked him. He said ‘hey of course. I want to thank you. You sent my daughter a picture. I remembered I’d been in that cab before and he’d said it would be such a thrill for his daughter to have something so I took his name and address and I said don’t promise her in case it goes missing or something but he said we got it, we framed it and wrapped it up and she opened it on her birthday and burst into tears. It was a beautiful moment. So that’s why I say if you’re not gonna give it everything you may as well not be here.”
  Menopause, break ups, taking off heel, cancer. Miserable subjects yet we we’re laughing. “Laughter, friends, music, family” – that’s how she dealt with everything.
I wonder is she dating now? “No,” she says, semi firmly.
 Does she want to? “Some days I think yes and other days I think I just don’t want a boyfriend right now. It sounds a cliché but I’m not looking for cats either.”
  We have more tea. I notice there’s not a line on her face. Her complexion is gorgeous. Would she ever have work done? “One of my absolute idols is Jane Fonda and the way she has handled it is admirable. I remember her saying something like it’s 80% genetics, 10% taking care of yourself and 10% a good surgeon, so if and when the time comes I’ll be taking a leaf out of Jane Fonda’s book. I’m not pro or against anything. It’s not the 1980’s where there weren’t options. I’m a bit lazy to be honest. Just today I was looking in a magnifying mirror putting on mascara and I said to the guy doing my make up, I think I need to do something, which of course I won’t get round to doing and in a flurry it may happen. I think you can do minimal stuff when you’re golden. 
  Men don’t get asked these questions.
  But I do love to cleanse my face. I have to get everything off. And I love a good sunblock. I’m hilarious. I love to be by the beach but I reapply all the time, under the tree with a hat, fully covered, swatting mosquitoes. But I love the vibes of the sea and I get myself a bit of Vitamin D. In Australia you really can’t manage staying out of the sun that much.”
  Of course, this album will come with a tour, a world tour and she will be back in Australia for that but before selected showcases “which now apparently, they call underplays – very small shows in London, Paris, Berlin and maybe Basel. 
  She was a big campaigner for gay marriage in Australia. “When the postal vote came through I was in London. I was texting with my sister and saying what if it doesn’t happen? It’s a modern country and we want to feel that we are forward thinking and liberal so it was kind of shocking to feel that we were so far behind in that. I was part of a campaign but I did wonder if people are sick of celebrities talking about it but the irony is you have to be heard and you’re more likely to be heard if you have the platform of celebrity.”
  Kylie is, of course, a gay icon and she wonders about that. When I suggest it’s because she has triumphed over tragedy and has a lot of shoes she tells me she was a gay icon long before she had tragedy or a lot of shoes. 
  “When I started off I hadn’t had a lot of real tragedy in my life – apart from bad hairdos. Charlene was a tomboy mechanic on Neighbours and that was going against the grain then so perhaps it’s someone who goes against the grain but I don’t really know much about sadness. Back then when I tried to release a single people tried to say you can’t do that, you’re an actress not a singer so I suppose I overcame that. The show must go on and it will go on again.”
  Of course it will and that’s a beautiful thing.

Olivia Newton-John (April 2018)

I’m inside Olivia Newton-John’s kitchen – she lives on a ranch just outside of Santa Barbara – she’s making pancakes from eggs from her chickens.  We hug hello like we’ve always known each other which doesn’t seem in the least weird because I have always known her. Who hasn’t? Who didn’t love her in Grease? Who doesn’t know all those songs? Who hasn’t lived and breathed her various life shattering traumas? Her breast cancer 25 years ago – her broken relationships, her unstoppable spirit, her bravery and her defining warmth. Yes, she really is adorable in person. How did she know I loved pancakes? She tells me they’re very nutritious, made from just laid eggs and they’re gluten free. She serves them with grass fed butter and almond milk coffee. Does this mean gluten, dairy and sugar are her enemies right now?
    “I never call anything my enemy because it’s a negative emotion. I’m just not eating them.” she laughs. She’s rigorous about releasing any toxic energy. Especially that surrounding certain words. She’s not a cancer “survivor”, she’s a cancer “thriver”. Only in the tabloids do people “battle” cancer. She explains to me once you set it up as a war, as a fight, it’s already negative.
    In May 2017 she was given the news that the pains in her back that caused her to postpone her US and Canadian tour dates were not in fact the sciatica she suspected. Her breast cancer had metastasized in her spine. She seems very carefree as she piles blueberries and blackberries on her plate. “They’re very low in sugar and I can have butter if it’s grass fed. I believe my body wants and needs a certain amount of fat.”
    Because you’re fine-tuned in listening to your body and psychic? “Well, it’s a mixture of reading up on these things. People say to me ‘how can you go without sugar?’ I say, when it’s about your health you just make that decision.” Because it’s life or sugar? “Yes, exactly. An easy choice. I also have an amazing husband who is incredibly knowledgeable about health and plant medicine so I’m very lucky.”
    As if on cue, her husband John Easterling (sometimes referred to as Amazon John because he once had a company that sold herbs from the Amazon for health benefits) sits down to the table. He’s tall, rangy, handsome, funny. He reaches to hold her hand as he forks up his pancakes with the other. They’ve been married 10 years. They love each other. You can smell it, touch it, feel it. Every morning he makes her a smoothie augmented with his specialist botanicals. “Every day I make Olivia a smoothie. Apple juice, reishi (a form of mushroom), cannabis leaves which I’ve trimmed from my personal garden, some rainforest herbs. The smoothie supports the immune system, detoxes and balances hormones and supports liver and kidney health. We start the day like that.”

    When she discovered the breast cancer had returned, she was in so much pain she couldn’t walk.  Surely this was a dark time? John says, “We got lots of messages from people saying I can only imagine what you are going through. We thought it’s stage 4 breast cancer. Nothing to freak out about. We know what to do. We’ll just take care of it so we went to this wonderful clinic in Georgia that has special ways of monitoring the system and that does a variety of IV’s with herbs and minerals that get extraordinary results. The pain level went from a 10 to a 1 in days and her energy levels are back and the counts are good. The more standard trained practitioners are going to have standard protocols but this is a time in history where there’s an explosion of information and discoveries to educate yourself. We have to rise up.”
    Did she mix alternative therapies and conventional therapies? “Very limited conventional. I don’t take any pills. Last year I did a course of photon radiation which is very targeted radiation to the problem area. Apart from that, plant medicine and herbs.”
    In California cannabis and cannabis oil CBD is totally legal and my cat has been prescribed it. She is 20 and doing very well but it’s not legal in Australia. Even the oil is difficult to get. “It’s crazy isn’t it? That has to change. In Australia they are not up to speed with America yet so it’s harder to get there. Hopefully becoming less so. It’s helped me a lot and should be available for patients, particularly those going into palliative care. We went to Australia to talk to the politicians about making it easier for people to get it and its benefits. I feel it’s my duty to talk about it as a cancer thriver myself.”
    It’s hard to get Olivia to talk about pain, even to remember it. She takes a breath and recalls, “I was working in Vegas. I thought I had sciatica. Well, I did have sciatica. I don’t know which came first.  I was in chronic pain and one day my girlfriend had a birthday and her favourite thing is tennis so we all went and played tennis and at the end of that day I couldn’t walk and the problem went on and on and on.”
    Did the sciatica mask the cancer? “I don’t know if the cancer escalated it or it was always there. I’ll never know. It didn’t occur to me that it could be the return of cancer until a year went by and I was still in excruciating pain. I had an MRI and we found it was in there.”
    It’s unusual for breast cancer to occur so many years after its original appearance and at the time of its discovery Olivia had referred to some dark moments but now she’s wiped them away. “The clinic in Georgia suggested the radiation as a safety measure because in the bone it’s hard to get to and since then I’ve only done natural healing.”
    I tell her that I had a friend whose breast cancer metastasized to the spine and she did chemo which of course made her feel terrible but she was never offered an alternative. Olivia nods with empathy. “I understand. When I went through this 25 years ago, even though I was terrified of chemo and I didn’t want to do it, I did it. I chose to. I can’t blame anyone else for choosing but people would say why don’t you do it as a safety measure and I’m glad I did it because now I’ve had the experience so when patients at my centre are going through it I have compassion. I understand that it’s really difficult and it leaves you with a chemo brain for years. You’re really kind of hazy. I’m still hazy or at least that’s my excuse!” She laughs, a really sparkly laugh and then she says, “I wouldn’t do it again. It’s a very old fashioned way. We’ve just been watching The Truth About Pet Cancer and even though it’s about pets, it’s still about barbaric ways of treating them with chemo. There are other ways. I have my own herbal guru here so I would and whenever my dog (a black German Shepherd) gets anything, she gets natural therapy from my husband.”
    John tells me that he’s actually working on a formula for pets that will build up their immune system and help them be less prone to cancer.
“My whole background is in plant medicine. Cannabis is in the plant kingdom. We’ve had access to it for thousands of years and it’s only recently been interrupted. Our relationship with that plant is very important and now we discover that there’s a system in our bodies that’s very receptive to this plant so people should have access to it. I don’t think it should ever be called a drug. It’s clearly plant medicine. “When we are in Australia we’ll visit politicians, share information, educate and influence where we can.”
  John and Olivia use the ‘we’ word a lot as if they think as one. They had known each other for about 20 years before they had the coup de foudre moment. I ask John, didn’t he have any thwarted longings when he knew her as a friend? Any persistent pangs that they were meant to be?
    “No,” he grins. “We met at an environmental show where I was displaying my botanicals because they are sustainably harvested.” Olivia and a couple of mutual friends came to the show. John continues, “They sampled some herbage and then they came back the next day because they were pretty excited about all the things they did that night because they got a herb jump before. They got herbed up, yes. I had a herb company for 27 years and still formulate products for doctors’ groups. For years we supported the same charities but that was it. We didn’t get together.”
   There wasn’t an immediate special connection? Olivia answers, “No, not for either of us.” John says, “I was busy and I thought that if you’re involved in Hollywood you must be a nutcase and I was doing real stuff for real people. We’d see each other every year at charity functions and the more I got to know her I thought oh, she’s a really nice person. She really does care about people and animals, the rainforest. So we became friends and that’s as far as it went.
    Then I was doing a talk in California. She came to it and I stayed in her guest house. The next morning I was driving to the airport and drove off a cliff.” Olivia says, “You see, he didn’t want to leave… He went to the hospital and he wouldn’t take any of their painkillers.”
    John was X Rayed and it was discovered he had a fracture in his lower spine. “I could barely move so I stayed on her couch till I could travel again but she had a dog, a setter. Dogs are very intuitive and that dog stayed with me all night, bonding with me. Olivia said. “And then he went on the plane the next day.”
    But the dog Scarlet was going to have puppies. John says, “I had just lost my dog so she said she was sending me a puppy. She definitely picked the craziest dog and sent him up. I had never heard any of Olivia’s music. Her first stuff was just not my genre of music and I never saw Grease.”
    What? You were the only person in the entire universe that never saw Grease? Olivia confirms, “He was.” John says, “It’s true. I haven’t found anyone else that hasn’t seen it and I’m still looking.
    I was living in Florida and her assistant called and said Olivia’s doing a concert if you’d like to come. You can bring your girlfriend. I said I’ll bring the dog so I took the dog and when the lights went down I heard this Peruvian music. Then she walked out and started singing Pearls on a Chain which is a very healing song and that’s when I recognised who she was. She’s a healer and this is her medium of healing.  All I could think of was I want to introduce her to other healers who work in the Amazon so after the show I asked her if she wanted to come to Peru and she said yes and I thought oh no I’m taking her to Peru. I’d better watch Grease.”
    I wonder about this healing notion. There is a reason why people go to her shows, love her and feel uplifted and touched by something and I’m not sure it’s just when she does Peruvian flute music. There is something extraordinary about her. There’s enormous bravery for a start. We can’t all identify with that but we all want to glimpse it. Plus she’s very switched on to other people’s needs. She shrugs that off and continues with the story. “It never occurred to me I was a healer.” Of course it didn’t. “It was my friend Nancy’s 60th birthday so they came with us, the four of us to Peru. I was really going because it was Nancy’s birthday.” John says, “She heals people all the time.” He smiles at her adoringly.
    “I do my show and I’ve done an album recently about grief with Amy Sky and Beth Nielsen Chapman. It’s called Liv On. After my sister passed away and after I went through breast cancer I wrote an album. It was the first album I’d written on my own called Gaia. About the spirit of the planet. This is before John and I were together. One of the songs is Don’t Cut Me Down about the rainforest. We were on a parallel path. Then I did an album Grace and Gratitude after I went through another life crisis. Music is always my healing.”
    Grace and Gratitude was released in 2006 and I wondered if it was about her partner of 9 years Patrick McDermott who went missing and was presumed dead after a fishing accident in 2005.  
    “When I’m going through something my way to express it is through music so Grace and Gratitude was another album about coming through something difficult and seeing the beauty in life, being grateful for it and then live on. I have done three albums like that, not pop albums but they are kind of healing.”
   Her Spa in Byron Bay is called Gaia, voted consistently best Spa in the world. “It’s a very special place, a healing place and then there’s my hospital (the Olivia Newton-John Cancer Wellness & Research Centre in Melbourne) which is my passion. I have been introducing wellness programmes in a cancer hospital environment. Introducing the patients who go there to the kind of therapies that I was able to have access to but most people can’t afford.”
   The people in the hospital have these therapies largely as an extra to chemo. “My dream is that one day the hospital will take off the word cancer and it will be a wellness and research centre because there won’t be cancer anymore. They will have found the answer.”
   She doesn’t like the word cancer and she particularly doesn’t like the words ‘MY cancer’. “It’s THE cancer. You don’t own it and I don’t like when they talk about fighting cancer because that sets up a war in your body which can cause inflammation which is the very thing you’re trying to settle down. I use the words “say goodbye to”. I think we manifest these words.” and John continues “and that’s where people get stuck.” Olivia says, “I use the words ‘winning over’ and ‘living with’ because there comes a point where you can’t get rid of every cancer cell in your body. Everybody is dealing with them all the time. Some people don’t even know they’ve got it. It’s a normal part of the cycle. Cells are programmed to die. Cancer cells too.”
    Taken out of context it may seem a little woo woo to be so particular about these words but it makes sense that if you have cancer you have to stay calm. You have to stay positive. I do believe what you think becomes true and all these words just help in making us fearful. John says, “Fear is the problem. It’s in a state of fear where you make irrational decisions.”
    I still can’t imagine that she wasn’t a little afraid when it came back. “It’s unusual, yes. You do think ha, it’s over. It didn’t occur to me that it would have been that. I felt pretty good. I was working and enjoying my work and now I’m just staying healthy and staying strong, taking a lot of supplements. I did some shows last week. I’m taking a little break from more shows and I’m not sure what I’m going to be doing for the Grease 40 year anniversary.”
    One thing that she is going to be doing is auctioning the original Sandy leather trousers. She has kept them all these years. They are of course tiny but I bet she can still fit into them. Everybody had a character in Grease that they identified with.
  “They still do. It’s unbelievable. When I do the show there’s every age group. Grandparents my age (hollow laugh), their children and their children’s children. They all have something to connect with.”
    For the 25th anniversary of Grease, John Travolta piloted a Quantas plane and Olivia was the flight attendant in full uniform. She laughs with just a hint of nostalgia, but quickly moves on to talk about her wellness walk in September.
    “We’re going back to Australia in May to talk to the government about cannabis but the walk is in Melbourne in September. People come from all over the world, some of my die-hard fans. They form little groups and compete with each other to see how much money they can raise.  And for people who can’t come to Australia, there’s a virtual walk. It raises money also for the families because to be a caretaker is difficult and very wearing for people.”
     Hmm. And that is said by a super caretaker. Meeting her for just a couple of hours, you can see she’s nurturing to the core. What about her dark moments? Who nurtures her? Pause.
   “It’s interesting you say that. I’ve about four friends who are going through cancer now. I stay connected with them. I don’t think about mine. It’s not on my mind constantly. I do all the things that I should be doing on a regular basis but I like to support other people because I’ve been there before and I am still here. I think that gives other people hope.  If I can encourage them by saying come on I’ve done it before, we can do this together now, it makes ME feel good.”
    We talk about some of my friends with cancer, some going through it now, one who didn’t make it and one who said she would rather kill herself rather than have another round of chemo. She shakes her head. “Poor thing. So horrible. I think everybody goes through that moment.” But really she’s nurturing other people. Who’s nurturing her?
    “Gosh. I had a good support team for sure. The first time is so long ago now. I had my first husband, my sister, my friends…”
    Should people be encouraged to look beyond chemo? “I think yes. I think you should do the research and see what feels right for you.  I would never tell anybody you should. Should is not a word that I use but I would encourage them. What else am I doing? I’m involved in many things like trees. I started One Tree Per Child with my friend John Dee. Tree Day in Australia and everyone plants a tree and in the end we’d planted 10 million trees in Australia and 50,000 trees in England so kids grow up from an urban society that they are environmentally conscious.”
    She’s also written two cookbooks –Live Wise, Grace & Gratitude and has supervised the Gaia cookbooks. They are all on her kitchen shelf and in regular use. She’s also working on an autobiography coming out in September. Was that fun or miserable? “It was cathartic. I worked with someone who helped me because it would have taken me at least ten years if I’d had to do it by myself.  It’s stories from my life, positive ones.
    They’ve also done a movie of my life in Australia with Delta Goodrun playing me,” she grimaces. “I probably won’t watch it. When they told me they were doing it I was horrified, because despite the fact I’m well known, I’m kind of private and my private life, even though it gets into the papers, is not something that I want to talk about. I worry about the people in my life. It’s not their fault they were married to me or were my boyfriend so I didn’t want it to happen but then I realised it was going to happen whether I wanted it to or not. So I decided to make something positive out of the negative so I asked that any money that would come to me would go to my hospital so that way I can do it and feel I care about it. I love Delta. I think she’s a really good actress and a great singer so that made it OK because we’re friends.
   But in the beginning she called me. “Shall I do it or not?” I said first, I’m not sure and then I said, oh you do it.  I haven’t read it and I don’t know how accurate it is because it’s a movie and people weren’t there at every moment of my life but the money will go to the hospital so some good has come of it.”
    An expression of pain suddenly fills the large all feeling eyes. She’s remembered it’s time to give one of her chickens Goldie her antibiotics. She’s recovering from a toe amputation in a separate coop with her sister. I thought giving a cat pill was an epic but giving a chicken a pill… “It’s easy,” she says as she scoops the golden feathered creature up in her arms and buries a pill into Goldie’s favourite sourdough bread. The other chickens – 18 hens and 2 roosters, live in a mansion of a chicken coop and they are all various different breeds, colours, speckly bits and feathered feet. We feed them cheese, salad, blueberries and just a little of their favourite bread. Olivia’s chickens eat better than most people. She’s also rescued 2 miniature horses which are so small only the chickens can ride them. How did this great rescuer of wild things come to be?
    She was born in Cambridge where she lived till she was five before moving to Melbourne. Her parents were academics. Her father a professor and her mother the daughter of Nobel prize- winning scientist Max Born.
   “They were not so much into showbusiness but what I got from them was work ethic. They both worked really hard. My mum wanted me to finish school or go to RADA in London. I did none of those things. I got a job on TV in Melbourne when I was 15. I was lucky. I got to learn the ropes young, rather than going to school and then learning them. I was interested in singing and I’ve had a really blessed life. I’ve been lucky with my managers, my producers…”
    In fact, her current assistant has been with her since Grease and she still works with John Farra who wrote all the songs from Xanadu and many other hits.
    “I’ve worked with Steve Kipner and Peter Allen many times. I’ve always worked and I’ve always worked hard. Even in the beginning with Pat Carroll when we were Pat and Olivia we worked all the crummy clubs, staying in local digs. We had fun. I never thought this is horrible, this could better. This was my reality and we had a great time.
    Even though we came from an academic background, my sister too became an actress. She passed away 5 years ago from a brain tumour very quickly. In the beginning she was what we laughingly called a chaperone. She was funny and cheeky and gorgeous.”
    Is she saying she led her into more trouble? “Yes, exactly but she kept me out of too much trouble and we definitely had fun. I think I was more HER chaperone if the truth be known. She always encouraged me because I think I was doing what she wanted to do. She got married very young and had a family and didn’t pursue it.
    In the beginning my family really wanted me to go university. I didn’t have the brain of the focus. I could do it now but then… I had the determination. I didn’t settle down till my thirties. I was afraid of marriage because my father had had three marriages and my sister had three so I was nervous and finally I have the perfect husband. I am so happy.”
    She reminds me she was 59 before she found the love of her life. Not that she didn’t always have a good relationship with her first husband Matt Lattanzi. “We’re good friends and Chloe is living up in Portland near him. He has a wonderful wife that we both love and we’re all friends.”
    I marvel. Most break ups are toxic and carry at least some bitterness. She sighs. “Life is about love and forgiveness and moving on. He’s still the father of my daughter. We actually made a pact very early on, even before we got married that if we ever had a child we would never allow anything to come between the relationship with the child and we’d never make her part of a pawn thing that people do. We’ve watched our friends go through divorce.”
    Was she always so grown up? “With those things you have to be because it’s about another life.”
    What does she look for in a friend? “Everyone’s different. I have a wide and diverse range of friends. A lot of them go back to when I was really young. People I can trust and have fun with. When I go back to Australia I stay in touch with them and my family. My sister’s children and my brother. He likes to be out of the limelight.”
    I didn’t even know she had a brother. “Actually I have two. A brother and sister from my father’s second marriage. They live in Sydney. He is a doctor, a pain therapist.  My sister works in administration. My father was a professor of language. He worked at Bletchley Park, cracking the codes in the second world war.  He spoke perfect German and had an incredible ear. He was a good singer so maybe I got it from my dad. He won scholarships to Cambridge and spoke German with a perfect accent. When he joined the air force they made him the interrogator of German prisoners of war (including Rudolph Hess).”
    Her life here couldn’t be further from academia. It’s all about living and working with the land. John tells me “We love to be with nature with the chickens, the horses, the dog, the cat. I was a tropical guy for a long time in Florida so we like to go to Florida and get in that ocean. We like to be here and hike and just have a good time together. We laugh a lot.”
   Olivia muses contentedly, “I get up, feed the chickens, collect the eggs and make sure they’re OK. I used to have a full grown horse but since my reoccurrence last year I haven’t been game enough to ride. I don’t know if I should. I have to make sure everything has grown back in before I do that.  It could be good for me but I’m not convinced. My instinct will tell me. My instincts are pretty good.”
    Yeah, she made me pancakes when she was going to make me Portobello mushrooms and scrambled eggs.
    She thinks her ranch is very healing.
    We go to take a walk in her healing paddocks. It’s hard to imagine that this year she turns 70. She doesn’t look 70, not that I’m sure what 70 looks like.  With the trademark blonde hair in a tousled, long bob, she strides across the paddock still with determination.  Despite being so warm and open in her spirit, there is part of her that is guarded, that doesn’t easily trust, but I don’t see that part today. I must have told about 3 people that I was doing this interview but word spread and during the time I’m there messages from all over the world are coming in for her. Some of my friends actually know her and are sending her love and she sends love back very graciously. She is totally unassuming and if she is self-protecting she does so in a really classy way. When I hug her goodbye, it’s a real proper hug. Dare I say it, a healing hug.

Jodie Whittaker (Sunday Times Magazine, March 18, 2018)

The Sunday Times cover-20180318 When I meet Jodie Whittaker she is dressed entirely in black. A black knit rib top, black skinny jeans, black ankle boots – flat, no nonsense. We’re sitting in the library of the Charlotte Street Hotel which is all cluttery cosy with tapestried couches. She couldn’t be more at odds with the surroundings.  Her hair is in a variation of a blonde bob, her make-up understated.    Down to earth Yorkshire woman. There is a firmness to her. You don’t mess with her. There’s a strange kind of deep seated confidence and strength and that’s something that she brings to the roles she plays.  There’s very little of the vamp in her, but with her huge eyes and voluptuous lips there’s a trace of a woman who can do anything. Including take on the role of the first female Doctor Who and in the film Journeyman play the wife of a boxer who becomes brain damaged.
In Broadchurch her character was labelled the most terrorised woman on British TV (her son was murdered by a family friend), but she was never tragic, never a victim.
This is the kind of spirit that permeates her character in Journeyman. At the beginning we see a loving relationship with an important sexual connection and then we watch as her husband can no longer control himself and doesn’t understand what sex is anymore.  She deals with it, or at least her character does in a strangely fearless way. 
Someone has bought us teeny weeny little muffins on a chintzy plate. It feels like I’m taking a panther to tea in a dolls house. Not because she’s large – she’s actually tiny – and not because she’s fierce.  She’s actually warm but she takes no prisoners and has a huge presence  and I’m sure her home is not decorated in chintz. She is struggling with her newfound Doctor Who fame – people coming up to her in the supermarket and asking for selfies. Even as the most terrorised woman on TV she was never recognised – a tribute to her chameleon abilities and her decision to take boundaries seriously.  She has taken on this new fame gamely –  as long as it isn’t too invasive. She’s more than willing to make someone’s day. In fact, she does a little video message for my friend Rob – a lifelong Doctor Who fan. He almost cries when he gets it. She knew he would. That is the kind of emotion Doctor Who evokes in people. She is hugely empathic to its fans. She knows she’s taken on something that comes with heritage. She knows that the supermarket will never be the same but there are certain things she doesn’t want to share.  She’ll talk about her husband, actor/writer Christian Contreras and talk about the fact that she’s a mother but she will not say what sex her child is.
She is rather a contradiction. The more we talk, the more I see the contradiction – she’s warm and friendly, open with her opinions, yet barriers are so indelibly drawn there’s absolutely no crossing them.  
She sounds as if she’s never left Yorkshire although she’s lived in London since drama school. She’s now 35 and she’s spent a lot of time in Los Angeles. “Not for work,” she shudders. “Just because my husband is American and he often works over there. So we’ll go for 8 weeks at a time. To me 8 weeks is a long time. That’s one of the things I love about this job.  It means you can travel to different places and learn how they can become incredibly familiar quite quickly. I find it’s a certain mindset. If you’re used to having to just land somewhere and get to know it quickly you just immerse yourself in it and Google the best places. I’m good at being somewhere new. I’ve already done that with so many places in the UK.”
Broadchurch was shot in Bridport and she did three series. Journeyman was shot mostly in Sheffield and Doctor Who in Cardiff.  She filmed her first episode for Doctor Who in October 2017 – a small but integral part in the Christmas special where the previous Doctor played by Peter Capaldi regenerated into Whittaker’s 13th Doctor.
It’s interesting to think of the concept of a female Doctor Who, not because having a vision and uber-knowledge are necessarily male criteria but because there are not so many superhero female role models. She’s certainly no cat woman. She doesn’t play her as an ultra-female but she’s not exactly non-binary either. It’s an interesting mix. An 8month shoot for the entire series means she won’t be taking breaks to shoot another movie. “Basically, because I’m in every scene.”
She found the time to do Journeyman in gaps between her other work.  Although she’s the female lead she’s not in every scene. “I was in it a lot. I’m not very good at doing two things at once.” 
Is that because she’s all or nothing? “Yes but also because when I learn my lines I really need time. I think if I did try to double up stuff I’d be all over the place. Some people are amazing at it.” I tell her I wouldn’t be very good at it either. I’m not very good at writing more than one piece at a time. I get brain freeze. “I would never spend time writing anything if I didn’t have to. I’m someone that failed their GCSE’s.”
We have a long discussion about the word ‘mardy’ which is a northern word. It means grumpy. She says sometimes she is mardy and she has to remind herself, “What would 10- year old me do? They wouldn’t complain that it was freezing or whatever. They’d be a pig in shit, so stop moaning. I’m not a big complainer. If I’m annoyed I’m annoyed and people will know where they stand. If I’m upset I’ll be crying and if I’m happy I’m proper happy. I don’t have a filter or a poker face. But strangely I can do it with work. If you need me to be somebody I’m not I can manage that.”
She laughs, a proper laugh. Maybe she doesn’t want to work in her personal life. She just wants to relax. Playing all these emotionally wrought women must take its toll. Referring to her character Emma in Journeyman’s strength “it’s not like me. It’s quite a graceful strength, an elegant strength.” We dissect her character and wonder how she could have endured.  Journeyman is a boxing movie but not of the Rocky kind. It’s not triumph over tragedy. It’s a journey to survive. It’s about a boxing champion (Paddy Considine) going in for one last fight which he wins and also loses because he becomes brain damaged and he has to learn to live all over again.  How to walk, how to talk, how to have sex again, how to have relationships with his friends, his wife, his child.
“We shot it pretty much in sequence and I think that helped.  We did a lot of it on first take.” Considine not only plays Matty the boxer. It is also his directorial debut.
“It’s hard when you’re with someone who is a phenomenal actor and he’s got great banter. We would be there having a lot of laughter in between takes. No one was in character the whole time. It wasn’t method. That’s not how he or I work.” 
The film is not an obvious tearjerker but emotional it is. Be prepared to cry. There’s a very subtle manipulation of our emotions but much of it is about normalcy. “That makes it harder cinematically but there are so many scenes that are very affecting.” There are many twists and turns and shocks, emotional and otherwise and a beautiful Nick Cave song that forms the basis of the soundtrack. “What was brand new for me was being directed by someone who was in a scene with me and who had written it before. I would say when it’s my close up will you be there or behind the monitor? He was there. I was a bit worried about it. It sounds daft but actors don’t give other actors notes. It’s a respect thing so I thought it would be weird having another actor saying ‘don’t do it like that’, but he doesn’t direct like that so it was fine.”
A lot of the themes were even by Whittaker’s standard “harrowing.”  Of certain scenes she says, “I found it excruciating.”
Although it is not based on a real-life boxing legend story, Considine is an ardent boxing fan. “It comes from having that passion. And while we were shooting this it actually happened to a boxer.” 
Three years ago, Will Smith’s Concussion examined head injuries in American football players and that was based on a true story. The British story is “about what happens to a family when this kind of injury happens. She was much stronger than I could be.  I am instinctive in my acting and when someone tells you soften it, it will come over in a much stronger and more contained way. There’s a guilt and a rawness and even though it’s about something bigger it’s also about relationships. My favourite stories are all about the relationship. Even if it’s on an epic scale like Arrival it’s about relationships.”
Whittaker’s work is often about the minutiae that damages us. She is always onscreen very accessible, very human and now she is in the world of science fiction, the world of Doctor Who. I’ve no doubt she is perfect at finding the human side of the Doctor.
Part of Doctor Who’s appeal is that it has always managed to be ordinary as well as extraordinary and it knows the issues that move us, past, present and future. She reminds me how she was moved by the film Avalanche, particularly by the family dynamics.  The father runs away. His animal instinct is to run.
“You think please don’t be a f***er. Please be a good person.” Would she run or stay to protect her kid? “Ha!” she says, accusingly. “I agree that I’ve got one kid. That’s as much as you’ll get out of me about that. I’m just really funny about it. I want their life to be private for as long as that’s maintainable.”
There’s a millisecond of a pause and she continues “But would I do flight or fight? I hope I’m a fighter. You don’t know though, do you?”
At the end of last year she did a BBC series Trust Me about a nurse who takes a job as a doctor. Sinner or saviour? She likes that. “Also morally dubious. I like playing characters that are not sugar coated.” Again, it’s about survival. “I am lucky though that no one’s had one idea of me and held on to that and thought this is all I can do. I’ve got a strong accent, I’m very obvious in my personality type but I want people to believe I can do anything.” 
Her first film after drama school was Venus with Peter O’Toole. She was 24 years old. “I spent an entire press junket trying to convince people that the director hadn’t found me at a bus stop having a fight with a mate. He found me via my agent. I left drama school early because I got a part in Mark Rylance’s last season at The Globe. I finished The Globe in September and started Venus in October. I was lucky and also, I had a mindset that was naïve but helpful. The mindset was this acting lark is fun isn’t it rather than the mindset filled with trauma and rejection.”
She puts this down to her parents. “I was brought up in a household where you were celebrated for what you could do and you were never shamed for the things you struggled with. There was no part of my upbringing that suggested I needed to focus and get a proper job. There was no telling me what I wanted to do was ridiculous or unrealistic. Also, from a young age me and my brother were told if you don’t know something just ask so I’ve never been embarrassed about not knowing anything. I find gaining knowledge wonderful but I don’t mind not knowing something. I just ask.”
She grew up not knowing any actors. There was no family tradition so you wonder where this brilliant creature came from. She just seems to have landed in herself from a different Universe. Maybe that’s what she and the first female Doctor have in common.
“No acting in the family, nothing, just the love of film.” (She grew up in the 80’s where cinemas were very accessible. “I was far too young to watch Jaws but I did, I loved being exposed to Spielberg and cinematic adventure.”
Her father ran a small business and her mother was stay at home but as soon as Whittaker was old enough she went back to work as a teaching assistant at a school for children with behavioural problems. She had been a nanny, a paediatric nurse, always worked with children…
She cites Some Like It Hot as an inspirational movie growing up. “I must have watched Some Like It Hot like 500 times when I was young.” Did she want to be Marilyn Monroe?  As I ask the question but I feel I already know the answer.  Monroe is way too obvious, way too vulnerable, way too girlie. “I think I wanted to be Jack Lemon, you know I liked the journey of that character. It was phenomenal.  
And here we learn what is extraordinary about Whittaker – she is probably the only woman who could watch that movie and identify with the man who dressed up as a woman.
“Do you remember Bottom – the TV series with Rik Mayall? I watched every episode of that growing up.  And quite a few people have said I remind them of that character.” Meaning she is the joker, the tomboy, the person who can make the magic?
“If I hadn’t been an actor I would have loved to be involved in a team sport.  I have never wanted to direct because I don’t have a vision.  I have never wanted to be a writer because I don’t want to be in a room by myself.  I don’t know the answers or the bigger picture but I don’t mind someone saying ‘That doesn’t work, why don’t you do it this way?’ 
I like being part of a team.  Growing up I played squash, hockey, rounders, not netball because I couldn’t cope with standing still.  I like watching teams on the Olympics, everyone is individual but it only works because they are all in something together.  I love relationships with other actors and directors. Doctor Who is very collaborative, it is a very exciting job.”
She had a code name with her family and with her agent before her Doctor Who announcement. It’s always top secret and this time even more so. “It was The Clooney. Because to me and my husband George is an iconic guy. And we thought, what’s a really famous iconic name? It was just fitting.”  And although it felt overwhelming she also took comfort in that she was part of a team, a team that existed before she was even born.  “It’s wonderful and overwhelming and I absolutely love it. As a family we didn’t watch it except at other people’s houses.  But I was much more aware of it when it came back with Christopher Eccleston, David Tennant and Matt Smith.
Who was her favourite? “David of course, because I know him (her co-star in Broadchurch).  I think he was amazing. But there is no right or wrong, there are no rules.”
What does it feel like to be the first woman Doctor? It feels completely overwhelming; as a feminist, as a woman, as an actor, as a human, as someone who wants to continually push themselves and challenge themselves, and not be boxed in by what you’re told you can and can’t be.” I want to tell the fans not to be scared by my gender because this is a really exciting time and Doctor Who represents everything that’s exciting about change. The fans have lived through so many changes, and this is only a new, different one, not a fearful one.”
Does she play the role as a woman or simply a being from another planet who doesn’t really have a gender?  “That is a difficult question because I am a woman, I don’t ever play being a woman, I wouldn’t know how to play being a woman.  Just like a man wouldn’t know how to play being a man.  It’s me, but I am not bringing gender to my choices. I am bringing character to my choices.  I don’t mind not knowing.”
Often the Doctor becomes very close to his female companion and there’s a semi-romance. Is her companion male or female? “I’ve got three companions, two boys and a girl.  Bradley Walsh, Tosip Cole and Mandip Gill.  Everyone is a different age.”  But is there a romance? “I am only a few weeks in so I don’t know the answers to quite a lot of questions yet.”
Is she signed on for one or more series? “I am not allowed to answer that.” (Again, this is traditionally surrounded in secrecy). As female empowerment came into the news there have been a lot of questions surrounding her pay.  And the BBC gender pay gap has recently been uber criticised. The question is, is she paid the same as her predecessor Timelords? Fortunately, she was able to achieve the same pay as Peter Capaldi. “It’s an incredibly important time and equal pay is a notion that should be supported – and it’s a bit of a shock that it’s a surprise to everyone that it should be supported.”
She’s already lost her anonymity and she’s so far only been a cameo in one episode. Just before Christmas a picture of her Doctor Who costume was released. It’s quite clever. It acknowledges the heritage of previous Doctors but it is its own entity – a T shirt with a rainbow stripe echoes the multi coloured scarves of previous Doctors. Petrol coloured trousers with braces and multiple earrings that are stars and planets. Days after its release social media endlessly pondered their meaning. Did she feel daunted by it? “No,” she beams. “I went to the audition excited but I always come into the room with the attitude I sound like this, I look like this but believe me, I can do it. 
She tells me about the Journeyman audition. “I didn’t know Paddy (Considine) before we did this.  I wasn’t nervous but I really wanted to get the job and I knew every other actor reading wanted it.  I also know I am not a ‘name’ so I would probably be able to raise £2.50 in financing, so I went in thinking this was a long shot.”
Clearly, she is a name but maybe she just means she’s not a Hollywood A Lister that can attract millions in financing? “Well I am sure I bring a certain amount of finances, I’ve got skills…I would do anything if there was a script that excited me or there was a person I wanted to work with.  I have done the low budget really tough, gruelling shoots where you are huddled around a candle trying to keep warm and I would 100% do that always if I loved the script.  I think on the British Indie film level.”  Does that mean she doesn’t see herself as a Hollywood A Lister of the future? “It doesn’t mean if you say yes to one thing you say no to another.”
She’s certainly not put off Hollywood because of the current post Weinstein revelations. Has she ever been pressured in auditions to do something unpleasant or unscripted with the attitude ‘if you don’t do this another woman will and that woman will get the part?’ “It hasn’t happened to me but I am lucky,” she says seriously.
The Doctor Who auditions were brutal in a different way because they went on for such a long period of time.
And I was going, ‘Please, please tell me, please.’  I had three meetings and a self-take and then they needed more scenes so I had to take another self-take and then a final meeting.” Most auditions, even for landmark roles are a much swifter process. She tells me that the Broadchurch audition happened when she was in a dress rehearsal for the play Antigone. She was an hour late!  “Antigone itself is quite demanding.  I did my scenes like I had got nothing left to give and they were like ‘Perfect.’  So, it just shows you never know.”
Broadchurch became a crime series that was much loved and much emulated and she was known for the woman who seemed to suffer like no other.  After she left drama school she was cast in The Storm at The Globe with Mark Rylance and her first film Venus was with Peter O’Toole. She’s used to a landmark victory. “I think I have been really lucky.  Doctor Who definitely puts me on a level where if I go into a meeting I probably don’t have to say what I have been doing for the last few months.” She grimaces. She has worked hard at being the most unrecognisable recognised British star. It’s been an interesting equation. Hard to balance but she got it down.
“People have been absolutely lovely so far.  The other week in Cardiff I could see this little lad plucking up the courage to talk to me so I made it easier. “You all right mate?” So, I know it made his morning.  I’m actually fine with that.  People are lovely but I am very private. It’s hard to be private but it is possible as long as you stick to certain things.  I still get on the tube and I will continue to get on the tube but I might wear a hat.”  She laughs. Her rules for what’s private are interesting. She doesn’t consider talking about her husband as private.
“I have been with my husband for a really long time.  He is a screenwriter and an actor, he is Googleable.  I just think it’s easier for people to believe in me on the screen if they don’t know that much about me.”
She and her husband have been together since drama school. Does she consider this relationship as something that doesn’t really define her? She laughs warmly but doesn’t commit to a yes or no.
 
“A lot of this is on my Wikipedia page but my birthday is wrong on it.  It’s June 17, same day as Arthur Darvill (he played Reverend Paul Coates in Broadchurch) and we are exactly the same age.  We were on set at Broadchurch and he was in the guardian birthday’s list and I was like, ‘I can’t believe it!  Where am I?”
Somehow, I don’t think she will be missed off that list this year. “I love talking about work, politics, opinions, cinema but if you know too much about them it makes it difficult to watch them.  I know it makes me seem rude, which I don’t mean to be, it makes me seem a bit of a knobhead…That’s the way it is.” She laughs – a deep, gurgling laugh. “My mates get to know the real me, my family, but not everybody.”
She stretches out on the little couch. “I missed London when I was filming in Cardiff. When people say, ‘Where is home?’ I say London.  If you had asked me when I was fifteen I would have said Huddersfield.  I am obviously from Yorkshire but I married to an American and I live in London.  A few years ago, I remember getting on the tube. Huddersfield were playing, I think it was an FA cup semi-final and all of these people got on at Finsbury Park and I had my town scarf on and they were like, ‘Come on darling,’ and showed me how to use an Oyster card.”  
She is, indeed a contradiction.  Warm and friendly, likes to have a laugh but also impenetrable. She never even posts anything on Instagram or Twitter. “I don’t want to know what people think about me… sometimes when I am really passionate I would love to throw my voice but perhaps I am too argumentative and I will say something immediately offensive.  The problem with Twitter is we all think our opinions are facts.  I have never been able to face Facebook. I am in touch with all of my mates.  I see them.  I don’t have to see them on the internet.”
This must mean she missed all of the social media posts about the Doctor Who announcement including the one “Who needs a Tardis full of bras?’”  We laugh at this. “Well, I’ve missed that good stuff. Who does need a Tardis full of bras?  I wonder which person we could find to say, ‘See, what I really need today is a Tardis full of bras.’
Journeyman opens March 30

Anjelica Huston (January 2018)

I’m at Anjelica Huston’s Los Angeles home. It’s both cosy and luxurious, extremely artistic and totally charming, rather like the woman herself. I am greeted by a fox terrier called Oscar, a Havanese called Pootie and four cats. It’s the day after the Golden Globes. Anjelica, in dark jeans and pink cashmere wonders what I thought of the ceremony.
     She says, “I was not born a #metoo girl. It wasn’t who I wanted to be at school and it’s not what I want to be now –  a snitch. I think it’s a very idealistic idea of young women to think that we’re going to change men because we haven’t done it thus far in history. Nothing has happened since the day they were wearing bearskins and wielding clubs. Men have never changed about certain things. And by the way, you may have noticed last night there were not a lot of mea culpas (men admitting to take the blame).  As long as women go beating on the chests of men with tight little fists this thing is never going to happen.
     Seems like Huston is with the 100 eminent women French school of thought who denounced the #metoo movement as a puritan backlash that treats women as children. Intellectuals, actresses including Catherine Deneuve have come out against the Weinstein inspired scandal amid accusations that men’s careers were being ruined “When their only wrong was touching a knee or stealing a kiss.” They say “far from helping women to become independent, this in reality serves the interest of the enemies of sexual freedom and religious extremists who believe in the name of Victorian morality that women are children with the faces of adults.” They argue that the #metoo generation are chaining women down to be eternal victims. 
     Huston has been round the block with more than one caveman type. “The only way you can get round a man is to behave like you want to be in the cage with the 300-pound gorilla. That’s all. It’s just the way it is.” 
     Huston’s history involves a lot of gorilla taming or at least sitting in the cage. The men in her life have always been giants. Her father John Huston was the ultimate man’s man. He made macho epic movies, liked hunting and womanising, a powerful man who loved and admired Jack Nicholson, her first long term boyfriend. They were together 17 years. Their relationship ended in 1990. Huston was married to the sculptor Robert Graham from – a gentle but nonetheless powerful figure. 
     Huston offers me tea or white wine. It’s the afternoon and I love the old schoolness of the white wine but there’s a pot of medicinal lemon, ginger and honey tea already made and it seems more appropriate. We talk about the start of #metoo and the disgraced Harvey Weinstein and Gwyneth Paltrow’s white towelling bathrobe accusation after more than two decades of appearing on Oscar podiums and yachts with Weinstein. Perhaps #metoo should be changed to #whynow? She laughs.
    “Harvey was always a bully. I was bullied by Harvey, never sexually thank God. The idea, eww. But when his company bought The Grifters I had been living with Jack for a while and Jack never appeared on television talk shows which I thought was a really good idea. I said to Harvey “I don’t do television talk shows…” Well, I did every television talk show there was following that conversation. What can I say? I lost the fight. You shut up and that was that. 
     Of course I was bullied but big deal. For as long as I’ve known them, men have always bullied women. My father bullied me into all kinds of things but also he bullied me into some good things. He bullied me into the first movie I ever made (which he directed – A Walk with Love and Death). It should not have been a horrible thing but I felt that I had to give up my identity, my rather negative identity to do it. I thought I knew a lot better…”
    We weave back to the silent protest of #metoo – the Globes with everyone wearing black. “It was nice for once not to see everyone bathed in colour. It looked quite serious and Oprah – that waist!” She makes a gesture to replicate the tiny corset like waist of Oprah. “She looked great. She spoke very directly and was very powerful.”
     Huston herself was not at the ceremony. “I wasn’t asked to present and I didn’t have much that came out last year but it’s not something I’d want to do. Trawl the red carpet for no reason although I’m shocked at who does.” 
     She pours more tea from the white china pot with green shamrocks. Last year she did a movie called Trouble (out this year) with Theresa Rebeck who is the creator and coproducer of the TV show Smash. 
     “It actually traces back to the Golden Globes 2014. I was sitting at a table. We had been nominated and Theresa said ‘I had no idea this would be so long and boring.’ I said welcome to my world and she said ‘Let’s make some lemonade out of this and glanced across the room where my brother was siting nominated for Magic City and she said ‘How about I write a screenplay for you and your brother?’ I said it should be about a fight and she said ‘What about?’ and I said land. She went off and wrote it. I didn’t do it with Danny because he was busy with something else but I did it with Bill Pullman and David Morris. It’s coming out soon.”
     She also worked with Rashida Jones (daughter of Quincy) and appeared in a couple of episodes of Transparent. “We pluck along,” she shrugs. She is 66, looking elegant, her glossy hair in dark sheets falls past her shoulders.  She has a striking charisma. She doesn’t bemoan the world of acting is tougher for women of a certain age, she doesn’t bemoan ten deaths of close friends that happened last year. She just gets on with it.
     She was delighted when RTE came to her with the idea of presenting a show about James Joyce (Anjelica Huston on James Joyce – A Shout in the Street – BBC Four January 15)
     She grew up in Galway and her father was made an Irish citizen in 1964. Her father’s last movie was The Dead – not one she had to be bullied into doing. “I was very willing to be in that.” The Dead was adapted from Joyce’s selection of short stories The Dubliners. It was the last story and widely considered the best.
    I found the documentary about Joyce intriguing. His story was not one I knew about and I’ve never made it through Ulysses. Huston rather beautifully explains the relationship with his wife Nora, a country girl who grew up in the poor house. Joyce was middle class and broke and allergic to middle class snobbery and they were bonded for life – a bond that grew out of large sexual appetites on both parts.
    I enjoyed the clips from Irish luminaries such as Edna O’Brien.
   “I think she looks 30 years younger than me. She looks amazing. I’ve known Edna for a long time. I’m always surprised when I see her on film how youthful she is and how much she cares. I think August is a wicked month was written about her romance with my father.”
   Her father appears on screen talking about The Dead in a very direct and profound way, yet when he made the film he was in his death throes. He growls onscreen and his words are always particularly resonant for Huston. After her first effort in working with her father she vowed she’d never do it again and she didn’t for 16 years and then in 1985 she won an Oscar for Prizzi’s Honour and then two years later she played Greta in his final film The Dead which was much applauded. 
     “At first my father was the only one who wanted to work with me. I went to acting class, got my thing together and then understood more about the dynamic, that even though he was my father I didn’t have to take everything personally as an actress. We worked well together. We had a good shorthand. He still terrified me to a certain degree and I always wanted to be spot on for him and to be in a position where I would not be humiliated in front of the camera crew. I would do anything not to be so I think it improved my game a bit.
     The Dead came as he was in hospital having an eye operation. I went in every day to see him and his eyes were bandaged up and he asked me to read the script on the nightstand. I saw on the opening page ‘adapted by Tony Huston’ (her brother). I was shocked that this whole thing had gone on and I didn’t know anything about it but I read it and it was great, really good. And he said ‘What do you think? Should we do it?’ He was not only in hospital having his eyes done. He had an aneurysm operation and was having trouble breathing so he had to be on oxygen at all times.
     I remember Donal McCann (her screen husband) coming to meet him and we read a couple of scenes in the house dad was renting and then we went to a warehouse district opposite Magic Mountain in the middle of nowhere to shoot it. None of us had trailers. We had cubicles. When the Irish were waiting to work they waltzed around, they played cards and smoked and went back to their hotel which was called the Black Angus which should have been called The Black Anguish and they learnt line dancing there. It all happened pretty fast.”
     They shot very much in sequence and Huston didn’t have much to do to the last scene when it became her movie.
     “I was sat there all hyped up and nervous. My dad said, ‘honey how’s your horse?’ I said ‘My horse is fine. I was having none of it…We did the scene as a dress rehearsal and he said ‘very good honey now put it in the past’ and that was his one direction for me for that scene.” She smiles, a mixture of love, respect and nostalgia.
     Huston has always been very moved by her own father, possibly because she grew up in a fractured way, sometimes separated from him when he was making movies or had moved on to women other than her mother. There was always a sense of longing. She wrote – very well – a two volume autobiography the first called A Story Lately Told was largely about her father. Was being involved in the documentary about James Joyce a way to get back to him?
     “Oh, he’s always there. Sometimes he’ll crop up almost like a message. The other day a friend of mine was telling me about a house in Ireland that was up for sale right near where we used to live and on the same day my sister Allegra sent me a little piece on my dad becoming a naturalised Irish citizen. Two things together out of the blue… he was talking about the effect of being an Irishman and how his children were feeling about it. I was twelve and my brother was thirteen and he talks about the Irish weather and then the Irish weather (rain and mists) came today.”
     Her home with its cream woodenness, its lush green garden and wet emerald grass all seem very Irish. Huston also has a ranch above Central Valley with some ancient horses, including a brown and white one Charlie who is forty. “He barely has a tooth in his head anymore. We give him special food. All my animals live to be old. I look after them well.”
     Huston is in that way very old school. She looks after things. Her latest Innamorato died last year. The fox terrier was his dog. She was with him for nearly four years. “He was a marvellous man. I knew he was not well but I didn’t know how not well but that became apparent to me. He was also very defiant in the face of his illness. Very courageous and interesting and powerful person. He was an entrepreneur and businessman. He was partner with Norman Lear at one point and organised the Ali fights. His name was Jerry Perenchio.” Perenchio was a big deal in Hollywood. He was an original investor in Caesar’s Palace, was the money man behind Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner and Driving Miss Daisy. He was 86 when he died of lung cancer last summer.
    We’re back to the theme of powerful men. “They are so much more fun than weak. Weak is annoying and cloying and while it might be fun to rule the roost for a bit, I don’t want to be the one calling the shots. I much prefer to have the shots called and rise to the challenge if there is one. I think I was just fated to be this way because of the way my dad was. He developed in us minor contempt for people who could not carry their own weight or who were shallow or grasping. 
     When my mother died my mother and father weren’t together so he didn’t know what I was up to. He didn’t have a chance to be critical of my boyfriends. The first boyfriend he knew about was Jack and they were deeply in love.” We laugh and snuggle with the lemon, ginger, honey tea and randomly I’m reminded of a story from her book which touched me. After she and Nicholson broke up – she found out that he’d got a woman Rebecca Broussard pregnant while she had been going through IVF treatment herself. The relationship was unpalatable.  A few years later for Christmas for he sent her an exquisite piece of jewellery – a pearl and diamond bracelet that Frank Sinatra had sent to Ava Gardener and with it a note saying ‘these pearls from your swine…yr Jack’.
     She smiles at the recount of this story but is not as undone by it as she once was as she had found it devastatingly charming. “This year for Christmas he got me a scarf from Barneys, very pretty and a mug.” She goes to get it for me. The mug has a picture of Jack on it from the eighties.  It looks ridiculous. We laugh.
     “I know, the mind boggles sometimes.” One minute you’re a powerful man in Hollywood and then the next you’re somebody’s mug.

Intimacy Director (January 2018)

We are in a rehearsal space near Waterloo. The occasional train thunders and shakes our space. We are in a room where actors in yoga type outfits are howling like dogs then slapping their bodies like seals on the shiny, blonde wooden floor.  Then they growl like big cats and culminate by bouncing and shrieking like monkeys.

Intimacy coach O’Brien is guiding this workshop. Later she will instruct the participants how to incorporate these animalistic movements into simulated sex scenes – the more they are animal, the less they are human, the less post-traumatic stress will be involved.  Plus if you can slap like a seal and bounce like a monkey, you’re basically mimicking some very lively sex.

O’Brien is a woman with sad, sparkling eyes and a gentle but controlled disposition. She tells me, “it’s not about censorship. It’s about safety.” When I first heard of Ita O’Brien, Britain’s first intimacy director for stage, film and television, I thought surely she is a product of post Weinstein hysteria in the industry. Before Weinstein, former impressario and guru of The Oscar there was tacit approval that sexual predatory was just part of what went on. He did not create the culture but his downfall ended it. No one said anything about casting couches, impromptu sex scenes, on and off camera. No one mentioned the word abuse until everybody did. After Weinstein was exposed, the bigger picture was this was an industry where it was easy for the powerful to take advantage of the vulnerable – a little like life itself.

After Weinstein’s behaviour was outed, many others followed.  Kevin Spacey was condemned for bullying, for paedophilia. Applauded television hosts like Charlie Rose was written off as a sex pest. Even the unlikely multi-national treasure Dustin Hoffman came under the cosh.  The abused took the stage and encouraged others to speak out and the #metoo generation was formed, urging for rules to change.

O’Brien with her background in movement and her desire for carefully choreographed safe sex scenes with no improvised surprises, seemed to be the perfect navigator to chart the unrippled waters of the new climate. But far from being a product of this climate, she’s merely seized her moment.
She has been campaigning for guiding principles for actors and directors working with simulated sex scenes and intimacy since 2015.  At this point she didn’t have an agent and only Carey Dodd would take her on. Together they campaigned to get her proposals to equity and now she is the hottest client on their list. Everyone wants her. Her plans are now catapulted into the spotlight and into Equity and into the Managers Association and into workshops in the hope they will be adopted as guidelines for best practice.

Weinstein-gate was a tsunami and suddenly O’Brien and her work is riding on the crest of that towering wave. But what exactly is her work? I feared for sure it would be censorial and it would revolve around distance, cover ups and no kissing. Or maybe that 1950s movie kissing with no tongues. Actually it’s way more intriguing.

She points out that productions always have a stunt director who helps coordinate the movements away from physical danger so intimate scenes should have the same. Her argument is if the actors feel more comfortable they will perform better.

A few of her rules for best practice are: “Intimate scenes including nudity should be identified upfront by producers and directors. Any scenes with simulated sex should be discussed before signing the contract and she argues that it’s important to “establish boundaries around areas of concern, keep the actors personal intimate expression out of the rehearsal room and focus on the role in the scene, the beats of the scene, the characters physical expression of intimacy by exploring animal mating rhythms,” and she says it should be standard practice to agree to areas of physical touch – no surprises.

As more and more of the recent abusive practices unravelled, we learned of for instance an alarming practice for the movie Traffic – where without notice actors were asked to be involved in sex abuse scenes.  Some suffered post-traumatic stress. O’Brien believes that there is a direct correlation between abuse in the audition and on set to the kind of abuse that young actors allegedly suffered from Weinstein and the like. They obviously felt threatened if they didn’t perform something unspeakable they wouldn’t get the part.

O’Brien’s workshop is about giving young actors the confidence to stand up for themselves and with those I talked to later it seems to be a valuable education.  O’Brien’s background is in dance and movement as well as acting. She recently worked as a movement director on Humans training the feet of the actors so they could move like synths. She’s moved from training people to be robots to training them to have safe sex on screen. She says, “I see helping the actors with intimacy is helping them to open out rather than close up.”

Does she mean like foreplay? Getting the connection? She laughs nervously. I overhear one of the actors talking about how much the seal movement has helped him with his upcoming sex scene. He’s demonstrating as his body flops on the floor – slap, slap. O’Brien continues and opens up about her own personal relationship with abuse.

“In 2009 I devised a play (April’s Fool) which was about sexual abuse in our society. I thought if I’m going to ask an actor to play this I want to make sure that they are safe. When abuse happens some of your voice gets cut off and I wanted to use that healthily. It’s not just that you can’t speak. It’s part of your personality gets cut out. We get stifled. So I wanted to create a container and an ensemble warm up that’s open, present and grounded.”

I notice her own voice gets quiet when she’s talking about being stifled and I sense she is talking through her own personal pain. “My story was of a girl who was abused by an uncle and the fallout from that which the family felt. It was just a Catholic family story…It was my story.”

So the abuse happened to her? “Yes. If it’s alright I’d rather not explore it further and go into the detail of what happened… but I can talk about how it affected me – that is I have a sense of and a reason to keep myself safe. And I know how abuse affects you. It has ripples through your life. I’ve done a lot of work on personal healing from that but I have an awareness and understanding to bring to this work.”

Indeed, she channels that pain into helping others. We weave back to that important correlation – being abused in a sex scene or audition and the wider aspect of abuse within the industry.

“Yes of course it is linked. That’s what I thought when I did my piece in 2009. In 2010 there was all the abuse of the Catholic priests and then Jimmy Saville. Abuse has been inherently part of our society. Things are so bad now that there is a call for change. Enough is enough… A relief in a way.
She starts to give examples of historic abuse within the industry and how the actors were not given support or guidelines.  “For instance, if you do an audition for, say, Romeo and Juliet and you know there’s going to be sexual content have the conversation with the director before you take the job about their vision about how they want the intimacy to be portrayed and then you can agree or not.

Maria Schneider in Last Tango in Paris was one of the worst cases. She was only 17, a minor. The details of the sex scene was not in the script. Marlon Brando and Bertolucci came up with the butter/anal scene idea themselves on the day. She initially said she didn’t want to do it. Brando said ‘it’s only a film’ and she says now ‘I felt abused and raped by them.’ The thing with sex scenes is that you are using your body intimately and that has an impact unless it’s done safely. People can have shame and emotional injury.”

She insists that this is not about tampering with the director’s vision – merely about clarifiying. Schneider never worked in a big budget international movie again. She said afterwards, “During the scene, even though what Marlon was doing wasn’t real, I was crying real tears. I felt humiliated and to be honest I felt a little raped, both by Marlon and Bertolucci.”

More recently Nicole Kidman talks about the violent scene in Sky Atlantic’s compulsive seven part serial Big Little Lies where she is essentially raped by her husband. The relationship is one where outwardly Kidman is the powerful lawyer and her husband is addicted to sexually demeaning her. This culminates in a shocking scene where Kidman’s character who has previously seemed ambivalent to the S&M, can’t fight back anymore. There is brutal scene which leaves her unable to fight back, curled in a ball on the floor. And Kidman says she felt “exposed, vulnerable and deeply humiliated.”

Another example was in BBC’s The Night Manager. There was a scene with Tom Hiddleston and Elizabeth Debicki where after months of sexual tension he finally took her and had her against a wall. The scene got a lot of attention because of Hiddleston’s buttocks being exposed and he had many admirers at the time but Debicki said how she found the scene awkward. She said that they did it in one take, everyone looked around and left and we met at the tea caddy as if it never happened. According to O’Brien, that means one moment of improvisation sent Debicki into a place of shame and denial.

Basically O’Brien is saying that safe onscreen sex has to come with no surprises. Then she says, “If you have a dance scene you have a choreographer because you don’t want someone twisting their ankle. If you have a simulated sex scene there should be the same sort of guidelines. Sculpted in a safe way with agreement and consent of all involved.” But doesn’t that mean you’re censoring the director? “No. If there’s a fight scene there will be a stunt director. They’ll talk about their vision. They’ll talk about how they want it sculpted and the stunt director will choreograph it making sure the techniques are safe and the director is absolutely being served.”

I wonder about spontaneity and haven’t some of the most impactful scenes in movies come from the actors imagination and improvisation on the spot? I wonder if Daniel Day Lewis has ever been told how to sculpt a sex scene?

“When you’re asking an actor to do something that’s just improvised they don’t know personally if they’re safe so they can’t be artistically vulnerable. What you want is that the actor really serves the emotional content that’s required.  If you sculpt a scene then it allows the actor to be spontaneous within that boundary. It allows the actor to really give themselves fully to the emotional content because they know what’s happening is agreed and consented to.”

So improvisation is dangerous? “Yes because you feel not safe.” Does she think that there are actors who carry around shame because of the scenes they have been forced to do? “I have run these workshops now for over 3 years and I start by asking people to share their experiences and I would say that in a group, most people have had unpleasant experiences and only a couple would have had safe experiences. This is the proportion.”

The more O’Brien is opening up the more complexities I see. You can’t dismiss her as a censor. She is a huge fan of one of the most controversial directors of sexual content Paul Verhoeven who is renowned for his visceral sex scenes. He won last year’s Golden Globe for the sexually explicit Elle where Isabelle Huppert was nominated for an Oscar for her performance as a post-feminist rape victim. O’Brien is a fan because he personally story boards all of the sex scenes in advance which is extremely rare in the industry. “He talks very pragmatically about vaginas and nipples so there’s no confusion, no titillation or infantalisation. He does detailed story boards and everyone knows what’s being asked of them.”

Verhoeven says, “All the actors knew exactly what they were going to do. All sex scenes in my movies are precisely choreographed. There is no question of, do I lick her nipple or not? Do I go down on her? How far? And what do you see? Every movie is already clear before we start because I talk with my actors and actresses in a very open way about what would be visible, where the camera will be, and what the actions are. I do it in extreme detail, using words like ‘nipple’ and ‘vagina’ continuously to make absolutely clear to the actors how we’re going to shoot that scene, and when we shoot it we really stick to the script. I don’t come to the actors later with additional details that are perhaps unacceptable. It should be clear in the script what’s happening.”

From the actors I talk to today, this kind of clarity is indeed rare.  The very beautiful Serena Jennings graduated from drama school two years ago and was attracted to the workshop because she liked the idea of protection. Since graduating I’ve done various projects with sex scenes – one where I had to masturbate. Often you were just thrown in and expected to perform without having boundaries. There was another sex scene in the same web series about a couple having problems in the bedroom. “I knew it was there but I had no one talk to talk about it. I did carry shame from the masturbation scenes.”
On another project she had to do an improv with a director that she wasn’t comfortable with. “He said ‘take off as many clothes as you can until you feel you can’t go any further.’ And then afterwards he said ‘so, you got down to bra and pants. You won’t really understand the character because you didn’t strip fully’ and for me that was utterly haunting. That’s why I was attracted to having an intimacy coach, guidelines. It was the most uncomfortable five minutes of my life.”

As the workshop progresses the actors split up into groups and are given various intimate text to work with. Swapping the roles of actor and director to discuss the approach, after that they map it out with words like ‘I touch you here’. Then they do it just physically so you see the seals, the monkeys and the dogs panting right back in there. Once it is compartmentalised it loses its potential power as a catalyst to shame and disgust. One text being worked on is a scene from a play called Cowboy Mouth by Sam Shephard and Patti Smith. It’s about a couple who never leave their room. Eat sleep and have sex constantly.

It’s being directed by Miriam Lucia, an actor/director and actor/trainer who runs the Clerkenwell Actors Studio. She has an elegance and composure that you’d not want to mess with and was working with her actors to create a sense of trust. “I found it rather liberating to use words like roll and thrust.   We have incorporated the animal work into the scene of the play so it’s a great way in. I know that actors clam up and freeze because they are caught up in wanting to please and wanting not to make trouble and feeling ashamed.

If they don’t want to do the sex scene they feel someone else will do it and they’ll lose the part. It’s very important that you bring up this situation at casting.” I’ve heard horror stories about auditions – generally from girls but not always. They are asked ‘roll up your skirt, stick your chest out, wear higher heels. It’s shocking and a power play. Especially when the directors are saying ‘look like you really want to f**k now’ with someone who’s 17.

If the script is clear and you don’t want to do it a body double may be hired. O’Brien says, “You should also absolutely be able to agree to what scenes they use. If people are thinking that it’s your body and there’s a simulated sex scene and there’s something you’re not happy with or it doesn’t serve the work then it’s gratuitous and not good. From training people to be robots she’s moved on from training people to have safe sex. “There are many movement directors who can choreograph sex scenes but the point is there need to be clear guidelines.”

“I want to have a clear and effective code of ethical practice. At the moment there is an absence of industry guidelines and that’s what I want to fix.
“Do you know the video A Cup of Tea? It explores the concept of agreed consent – if someone comes to your house and you ask them if they want a cup of tea and they say yes, you make it and by the time you come back they say I don’t want a cup of tea now. You don’t open their mouth, pour it down their throat. You can see that this is ridiculous therefore you can’t force someone to have a sex scene. It’s using the idea of agreement and consent. For instance you agree if you’re happy to be touched and where. Regarding genitals you should never have bare genital touching. The lady should have a murkin and the gent should have a cock sock.

“Part of the guidelines is that you talk about this beforehand. Work with wardrobe to make sure that the “coverings” are available in the right size. There’s one story that an actor had to do a gay sex scene. He was given a cock sock that was too small so the wardrobe department went away and came back with another one that someone had already worn. It was the right size but this gentlemen was of colour and the previous gentleman was white.”

She says all this very demurely and it’s not a surprise to learn that her dancing career started off with Irish dancing. Not just because her heritage is Irish but it’s about keeping very still while your legs move very fast. Contained, like a duck. Everything going on underwater. “But Irish dancing has a heartbeat that releases something?”

We digress into our education with cruel nuns. She had a Sister Mary Helen who beat the girls with a stick. Another reason why safety and boundaries are important to her.

“Actors should always be able to say stop if they are not comfortable.” Isn’t it hard if an actor really wants the part and they’re told in an audition, as was the case in Traffick, they have to do a sex scene? Would a director ever give the part to the girl who walked away?

She nods. “I agree and it’s hard but with this present climate I hope things have shifted and changed.” She points out starts of these changes.
“Tom Hanks says that the industry post-Weinstein, all studios are going to have to have a code of conduct printed on their doors. The climate has changed so this is now possible. The Old Vic (Kevin Spacey’s previous domain) are coming up with a code of conduct and The National too and The Royal Court. What I’m offering to the actors is that they should take autonomy.  They should think do I want this or not? Is this serving who I am as an artist or not? And it is hard to walk away but if you’re in a situation that compromises you, you have to think. For an example, as a dancer I got sent along to be a possible body double for a star in a film who had to be a pole dancer. I was told they wanted me to be the top half and somebody else will be the bottom half. I told them no.”

Was that the thought of being half a body? “Yes and also the thought of me having to dance topless. When I thought about it I felt that I would go into shame and trauma so I said I can’t do this and that’s what I’m inviting people to do.”

She can’t remember who the star of the film was but it was back in the eighties when she could have done with the work.

O’Brien is currently teaching student producers and directors at Mountview.  “Basically educating people across the board that there should be a code of conduct.” (In the past she’s taught at the Drama centre LAMDA).

The actors from Cowboy Mouth are really getting into their seals and monkeys. Very balletic versions of them as they take over Sam Shephard and Patti Smith’s play. They are the most impressive. The other script being worked on features an incest scene from ‘Tis a Pity She’s a Whore.’

Sculpt is one of her favourite words. She’s always talking about sculpting a scene so that everybody knows what they’re doing. What if the scene changes? “That’s when the director needs to come to the actor and re agree what they’re comfortable with. You can change the script but it’s just being aware… Say you want a breast being groped and someone’s not happy with it. Find out where that person is happy to be touched and you can still have that (she makes a sound of whimpering ecstasy)”.

“Bring solutions not problems. Actors need to equip themselves. It’s also important that the man checks where he is happy to be touched. In particular when I was exploring the dynamic of sexual abuse in our society, getting everyone to find when they were the victim and find the physicality for that and the next day everyone had to find what happens when they were the perpetrator. That was really sticky. People acknowledging when they were the ones doing the pushing, the taking. One actor said ‘I have realised all I have to do is stand with my arms out and I’m the perpetrator, yet I think of myself as a nice man. They can be equally in need of being taken care of as the victim because you’re asking them to go to a place that they find very disturbing.”

Clearly different people have different personal histories and sensitivities and what disturbs some destroys others and others may not be affected. “That is why it’s important to be upfront and honest. Yes it’s going to be hard to say certain things, that’s why I contacted Equity. Their guidelines were unfathomable and archaic and that’s why new ones need to be set in place.”

Denzel Washington (January, 2018)

Denzel Washington & Chrissy Iley 2018

We’re in a high-rise New York hotel room. Outside is bitter cold.  Denzel Washington is wearing an exquisitely tailored black suit and neatly coiffed hair. Very much the opposite to how I’ve just seen him in his new film Roman Israel Esq. It’s about a lawyer who is weirdly brilliant and also just weird. It’s about being a truth teller and how his life becomes undone. For most of the film he wears an oversized burgundy suit that seems to belong to part of the last century and sports a mini fro.

He immediately takes issue. “Burgundy? You think that was a burgundy suit…?” The eyebrows raise. “I thought it was maroon. You don’t think there’s a difference between burgundy and maroon?” He’s straight off the top, on sparkling combative form and continues, “And what do you mean mini fro? That was a fro!”

I tell him of a chance encounter with the film’s hairstylist in the lobby who said ‘it was a collaborative idea. “Huh!” said Washington affronted. “It was my idea and my hair. Mini! That was seven months of hard work. It was the full fro. It was Billy Preston.  I don’t want to talk to you now.” He theatrically folds his arms and leans back into the mock mid-century grey and teak couch.

“I did a lot of work. I should have kept it but they cut it off. Maybe it’s a black community thing. When my first son was born we cut the pieces of hair from his first year and you keep it. I guess it’s like keeping baby teeth.”

But this is adult Washington hair. He is 63 and coming into what he calls “the final quarter”. I’m not sure how his system of quarters works but turning 60 was a landmark for him. He wanted to concentrate on his physical and mental wellbeing, making sure he would explore more of the works of great American playwrights on stage and stay healthy enough for the physical demands. He doesn’t look like he’s nearing his final anything. He has a brooding and charismatic physical presence. He laughs a lot and when he laughs his eyes dart and his smile is very sparkly. He loves to chat. I’m not sure if he loves the process of the interview. Sometimes if he feels he’s being interrogated he just changes the subject completely.

We circle back to the topic of hair. Isn’t it a bit spooky to keep hair? “I didn’t but I should have.” In a way this wasn’t Washington’s hair, it was Roman’s.  The flawed lawyer savant he plays in the eponymously titled Roman Israel Esq. it was a movie written for him by director Dan Gilroy who felt Washington was the only person who could play it. It’s a nuanced and powerful performance which earned him a Golden Globe nomination. Gilroy was inspired by Washington’s 2012 Award winning performance in Flight. Gilroy was excited to see Washington do vulnerable.  The scene that got him was the one at the end where the pilot with a sense of entitlement was brought down and admitted to being an alcoholic.

That kind of vulnerability sustains Washington’s portrayal of Israel throughout the film. He’s generous on the brink of crazy. Smart on the brink of broken. Compulsive about peanut butter sandwiches eaten over the sink and the contents of his old fashioned big iPod.  Somehow, he makes you root for him in the way that only Washington can do. This character is peculiar yet he is so human.

Washington is never one for analysing or at least not in public. He doesn’t so much want to sit down and talk as sit down and play. And remind me of past interviews that I’ve done with him, particularly ones that did not go so well. He looks at me with a ‘Come on what have you got for me?’ expression. He often repeats a question as if he’s been asked it for the very first time but I’m sure there’s not a question he hasn’t been asked. Still we try.

His football team is The Cowboys who were in the news recently for kneeling for the flag as a protest. Owner of The Cowboys threatened to send the kneelers home. What does he think?

He shrugs? “You gotta pay the cost to be the boss. You can take a knee but don’t complain if you go home, you know? It’s a free country. You have the right to protest. Are they being benched? I don’t think so. You can’t bench a whole team.”

Washington dances around the political issue. He’s very wary of being a spokesperson for black issues. He just won’t go there. He’ll try and change the subject but at a talk he gave at the national theatre last year he said, “look black people don’t be talking about what the white man won’t give you. I got roles.”

Washington has been married to Pauletta for 35 years – before his film career began. In public they show the kind of solidarity that comes with being together for such a long time. They have two sons and two daughters, all college graduates. His oldest daughter was a producer in the Oscar nominated Fences in which he both starred and directed.  His oldest son played in the National Football league but now has a TV career. His youngest son graduated from the American Film Institute in directing and worked with Spike Lee and his youngest daughter has made her way in both film and stage.

What advice did he give to his youngest daughter Olivia about her acting? “I actually said be the best, learn to act on stage not film. Don’t compromise, don’t be intimidated. It’s going well for her. She’s just finished the Taming of the Shrew with the Chicago Shakespeare Company. She is a working actress,” he says proudly.

As the father of a 26-year-old daughter does he worry about the entertainment industry? Does he worry about the recent revelations where the powerful have abused the vulnerable? He’s nodding sagely. Does he think that the #metoo backlash will have a significant effect on the way the industry works?

“I’m sure it already has. I’m sure there are those who thought they could get away with anything and they don’t feel that now. I mean I hope they don’t. I think it will change the industry for good. Hmm Harvey,” he reminisces. “It’s about 10 years. I haven’t talked to Harvey in about 10 years.” And with that Weinstein is dismissed.

Washington is next up in a play on Broadway – The Eugene O’Neill heartbreaker The Iceman Cometh. A play for which the now disgraced Kevin Spacey received plaudits. How does he feel about stepping into Spacey’s shoes? “Whoah,” says Washington. “I’m not!” his eyes ignite with ferocity.

But he’s playing the same character. “And?” he laughs. “I’ve played Othello and you don’t think about the other actors who have played Othello. There have been many Othello’s.”

Some people have made or at least remade their career on playing that role. I was thinking Lenny Henry. “Yes I heard about that man. In fact I heard about him doing Fences. I’m glad to hear that Othello reinvented him because he was a comedian. I met him in the eighties at one of those Nelson Mandela concerts. Lenny Henry and Ben Elton were the MC’s. it was a big concert to raise money for Mandela’s children’s fund.”

Just this morning I saw Washington on the news talking about parts that he didn’t get. He almost didn’t get Cry Freedom. Attenborough said ‘If I don’t find an African you’ll do.’ “I don’t remember it like that. It was more like a meeting but I came in prepared to audition and it was a good meeting.”

So Washington’s come a long way from maybe you’ll do to having a movie written for him. “That’s what I’m hearing now. I’m glad I didn’t know that ahead of time.” Why? Because he would have felt too responsible? Too burdened?

“I don’t know.” (Director) Gilroy had said if Washington wouldn’t do it he would have shelved the project. “Yeah I’ve heard that.”

Washington does this often, distances himself from compliments, distances himself from responsibility – he knows deep down it really is all about him. It’s just that he doesn’t want to know.

I tell him that I was at a Bafta Q&A where Gilroy said he had an epiphany moment while watching Washington’s performance in Flight the way he balanced power and vulnerability and that’s when he wanted to play someone who was flawed.

Washington of course doesn’t know how to take this compliment but simply says “Oh really, that’s excellent. Would you like a gummy bear?” He offers me one from a jar on the coffee table separating us. He sees me poke around and asks me, “Does colour matter to you? You see I’ve been stealing all the red ones.” He arranges the pot of gummy bears out on the table so we can see the colours. “What’s your second pick if you don’t get a red one?” Orange. “Yes!” he says excitedly. “Orange is the obvious second choice, but sometimes I like to go for the yellow one. It’s kind of neutral. But look at this! A pink one.” I take the pink one. “Roman would know exactly how many were in there, the calorific intake of each one and what was the law behind the company that made them. Roman was trouble, poor guy. Just trouble.”

I would have said he was more troubled than trouble. “Mmm…” Washington savours the thought. Gilroy said Washington came up with the idea of making him obsessed with peanut butter sandwiches.

“Dan started adding jars of peanut butter everywhere. I came in one day and there were 20 jars in my kitchen so the idea must have been collaborative.”

So much peanut butter though. Can he ever eat it again? “I didn’t actually eat much of it. I like peanut butter though but peanut butter and honey. Do you know the actor Delroy Lindo? He and I went to theatre school together – The American Conservatory.  We didn’t have much money. We had bread, half a gallon of milk, peanut butter and a jar of honey and that’s what we would live off for a week.”

Didn’t he get bored with it? “That suggests I had options. I was more bored of starving. Washington grew up in Mount Vernon, a suburb of New York. His mother was as hairdresser, his father an ordained preacher. His mother saw that he fell in with a bad crowd at school and sent him to a strict military school. He doesn’t see much of his three best friends from school anymore. At least a couple of them have ended up as bad boys. “We used to ride the trains together, jump the turnstiles, go into town and hang out. When I did Julius Caesar on Broadway one showed up at the play. He’d been in the penal system for 28 years. Another one died, the third one is a chef doing OK and I am the fourth one.” Quite a difference between four friends. Washington has a primary school in New York named after him. 10 years ago, the Columbian Gorillas insisted they were only prepared to release three hostages if Washington was the negotiator. Washington is of course more than an actor and a director and sometimes he speaks like he too has been ordained. And the rest of the time he jokes around.

Three years ago he gave up alcohol on his 60th birthday. “I just had enough. Some things you can have enough of. Not peanut butter yet but all alcohol. I gave it up on my birthday 3 years ago December 28th with the idea of putting my best foot forward I tried everything else, let’s try this.”

He wanted to make his final quarter a healthier one? “Yes, yes. That too,” he says, now studying the gummy bears that remain –  mostly green and a weird white one.

Alcohol stopped giving him pleasure. He still likes boxing. He first discovered it when he played boxer Ruben “The Hurricane” Carter in the movie Hurricane. And has made it part of his regime. He looks powerful of course – tall, strong, but at the same time there’s something very soft and endearing. He’s a music fanatic too and was advisor on the movie’s soundtrack which is a mixture of 70’s classics and cool jazz.

“My character is constantly listening to music so I just liked to use different songs so that we could build a library of what my character would listen to. We had 28,000 songs.” Does he have a vintage large iPod in real life? “I have all of the iPods pretty much.”

So just as you’ve got Washington down as this one-time bad boy who now likes to look after himself, the survivor of the friends, the one who remained the ultimate cool dude, he reminds you of a religious experience he had. I’d never thought of Washington following his father’s footsteps. I’d always had him down as more of a rebel but he is in fact there is a religious side to him and at one point he says the Holy Ghost came inside of him.

“Yes,” he says matter of factly. I ask him why is he making this sound as if it’s normal. “Well, you know, I was in church and in church at the end of the service they ask if you want to go into the prayer room and they talk about speaking in tongues and then – other than the overwhelming power of the experience what I remember is letting go. Not having any doubt. Not being cynical, just thinking OK let’s go for it and see what happens so yes I spoke in tongues.”

What exactly does this mean? He spoke in different language? “Yeah a foreign tongue and I remember calling my mother afterwards. I remember sweating and getting really emotional and I remember calling my ma and saying this is what happened and she said ‘oh yes that’s right.’ And I said my cheeks filled up and she said ‘that was a purge. Purging the bad spirits coming out of you.’ She was very, not matter of fact because this was serious but she was giving the explanations to the things I had experienced very calmly. Things I didn’t understand and she explained to me so succinctly and that seemed to be proof it was something she had seen and experienced before. She could describe it without having seen it. I think we get far away from what’s natural when some things hit us. We think they are actually supernatural but you have to allow it, be open. It’s not like I’m the expert on it cos there’s lots of things I don’t know.”

Does he think he was ready for it? “It was ready for me. It was actually a bit overwhelming. I was like wait a minute. I’m not ready for this whole commitment.”  When did this happen? Was it in the 80’s? “Actually I’m not sure. I just remember thinking does this mean I can’t go to the club? Does this mean I can’t have wine and the answer was no. I had lots of wine through most of the 80’s as I recall.”

Did it change him in any way? “It gave me concrete proof that the Holy Spirit exists and that it’s real. No question about it. I’ve gone back there and I wonder did they let some mist off in the room that gave you a funny feeling? I don’t know. I remember some people in the room not going through the experience I had but it was real for me.”

His mother had an experience in her hairdressers where one of her clients wrote in automatic writing about Washington’s future. He corrects, “Well I don’t know if it was automatic writing but she had a prophecy which was that I would preach. She said I would preach to millions of people.” Well he does, kind of. “Kind of, yes.”

His phone rings and he jokes, “ah that’ll probably be my mom now…the prophecy also said that I would travel the world and that through my work I would speak to millions of people. At this time in my life I’m now unafraid to talk about it. She said that I would have millions of followers. Maybe she meant thousands and then added too many zeros. Maybe she said I was actually going to preach to ten people ha ha ha. I try not to use the word preaching. It sounds like I know more than you. I’m just sharing my experience.”

Preacher or not, he is a kind of mentor to Ashton Sanders who was in Moonlight. He’s working with him now in The Equaliser. “I don’t know if I’d use that word but I like him and he’s very talented. He’s a good kid and I’ve been where he’s going. He’s talking about how things are changing for him. You know how his friends are changing. I’ve been down that road.”

Does he mean that he has to readjust his circle of friends and get rid of the users? “No, not anything like that.” It’s just who does he talk to? Who has walked the walk he’s walking? “Of course I don’t tell him what to do but I can share.”

We have spoken before that he might have walked a different walk had his mother not taken him out of school that time. “Yes, that’s true.  Two of those friends did jail time and the other one lost his teeth. That was a few years ago now. I got him some good teeth but I haven’t seen him recently. I have one or two old friends from my twenties not that far back. When I moved to LA I stayed friends with all the people I came up with in the 80’s.”

Are they actors? “No.” I read somewhere that said Washington is not friendly with any white actors. He looks at me with an ‘as if’. “That’s not what I said and I don’t even remember what I was asked. I might have said I wouldn’t surround myself with just acting friends and he twisted it.”

People are saying that last year was the Black Oscars because the year before it was all super white. “What do you mean the Black Oscars? What people say this? Who are these people?” I suppose media people say that there were more black nomination in 2017 to counteract the year before when there were none.  He looks at me as if I’ m mad, shrugs and says, “we’ll see what happens… None of it’s up to me. I’ve done my job.”

Does he care about awards? “Of course people care about them. First of all, it’s an opportunity for the industry to celebrate those who have achieved. I don’t know if it’s a measuring stick… I remember they all used to go to Swifty Lazar’s party at Spago’s after the awards. There used to be a parking lot and you could drive up and look down over Spago’s and I remember seeing people going in – Warren Beatty and people like that and I said to myself someday I’m going to get in there. It wasn’t so much about getting the award, it was like I wasn’t invited to the party and I needed to be.” He laughs. “One day I’ll be able to get in there I said.”

Now they don’t have parties at Spago’s. That particular Spago’s doesn’t even exist anymore but I think we can say if it did he would definitely be at the party. Does he think when he looked down he manifested his award-winning future? “No I think I was already headed that way.” Was he always driven? “Yes, driven but you know you can get bored and sometimes you have to reboot or refresh. Like going back to theatre woke me up. When I went back to Broadway I was like oh I remember now.”

He rebooted his Broadway career with Julius Caesar in 2005 and then there was Fences and A Raisin in the Sun. I saw him in a packed out short run of the latter with my mother. I think we paid $700 per ticket.

I wonder if he loved Obama as much as I did. Does he think that the US will ever recover from the loss? He looks puzzled. “What do you mean recover?”

Obama was a good guy in charge. A good President and a good man and now we have the opposite. “Well it’s early days yet…” Really? At this point the Fire and the Fury had not been released but Trump had pulled a few corkers like the flight ban from certain countries and not quite being able to explain his relationship with Russia and his potty mouth on Twitter.

“It’s not like Barack and I are old pals you know. I think he watched someone and was inspired by someone and someone will be inspired by him.”

Does he really think that the current regime is inspiring? “Is it not?” he says ambiguously. OK, politics is not an inspiring conversation point for Washington. Although he’s sat in front of me, in his head he’s already left the room.  Although he looked pretty mesmerised while watching Oprah’s Golden Globes speech. Ostensibly it was her acceptance speech for her Cecille B De Mille award but many are viewing its galvanising passion as a bid to run for the presidency in 2020. In response to the #metoo audience all wearing black she spoke about how speaking your truth is the most powerful thing to do and warned the abusers, “Time is up.” But then he comes back to explain his position on the black president followed by the orange one.

“There’s a pastor talked about this. I think his name is A R Barnard and I think it’s Daniel Chapter 10.  He says that God puts Kings in a place for a season and reason and we don’t always know the reason so this is what it is right now. There’s a reason behind it and I say to people if nothing else we should be more unified. All the more reason to work together.”  He beams, rather godlike and then laughs. And it’s one final gummy bear before he goes.

Castration of Kevin Spacey (November 2017)

Fame is toxic. It requires a sense of responsibility as Kevin Spacey is now learning. He has been removed from the Sony movie All the Money in the World even though it is due to be released in 6 weeks, he has been removed from his lead role as Francis Underwood in House of Cards and as Netflix is no longer working with him; Gore, where plays Gore Vidal has also hit the dust. He has been fired by his agency CAA and his long-time publicist Staci Wolfe which signals they clearly believe his career as an A list actor – or any kind of actor at all is over. And the moral of the tale is you can’t sexually assault young men and teenagers, particularly from inside the closet and get away with it. No, no, no, not in this post Weinstein age of Hollywood. 
 
UK publicist and fame guru Mark Borkowski, author of The Fame Formula says that scandals of similar proportion have been going on in Hollywood since the words silver and screen appeared together in the same sentence. “In the old days, at the hint of a scandal the star would be put on an ocean liner and six weeks later by the time they had reached their destination the scandal would be over, but in the days of instant media it’s different. Whatever happened to innocent until proven guilty? Now it seems they are guilty until proven innocent and the trial is by the media itself.” 
     What did he think of All The Money In The World being restructured with Christopher Plummer replacing Spacey as John Paul Getty?
     “Hollywood is no longer the land of dreams but the land of corporate finance. Once they worked out that no one would want to see the movie with Spacey in it, technology means he could be instantly replaced by Christopher Plummer.” 
     Sony must be pleased with themselves – there’s no need for a marketing budget because a few weeks ago no one knew much about this movie based on John Paul Getty richest man in the world refusing to pay the ransom when his grandson John Paul Getty III had been kidnapped. Now everybody knows about it. 
     Apparently 87 year old Plummer was director Ridley Scott’s first choice for the role but he was told that he needed a bigger star. Now he’s playing it like Sony is standing by him. Sony obviously felt they had too much to lose because who in the world would pay to see a paedophile play John Paul Getty? 
     A lot of people used to love Woody Allen films and now they can’t bear to watch one. Word on the Hollywood streets is that Spacey not only deserves to lose his career but he should be castrated. 
    What started with Weinstein certainly didn’t end there. Weinstein allegedly sexually harassed women that worked for him or that he wished to cast in movies. Spacey fiddled about with children. See – much worse. No one’s going to forgive him. They’ve heard enough evidence that is condemning.
     I’ve never been an advocate of the #metoo stance – one person comes out and makes the accusation and then others who have been abused feel comfortable doing the same.
     As artistic director of the Old Vic 2004-15, Spacey was socially active in London, still denying he was a gay man.  Gay men that I knew in their late twenties, early thirties felt flattered when he touched their bottom in the Groucho Club. They’d been touched by an Oscar winner, a Tony winner, A Hollywood icon. They felt elevated. This is how yesterday’s flattery is today’s disgust. 
     The Hollywood gay community are voicing their disapproval of Spacey. Because he didn’t come out they feel it gave gay haters and the Christian right the chance to say that this Hollywood icon was ashamed and embarrassed about being gay, therefore everyone should be. But what is enraging them now is the fact that gayness has been linked with paedophilia. The timing of his coming out has been met with a scathing response – i.e. after he had already been accused of sexually harassing Anthony Rapp when he was 14. If he hoped to find warmth in the arms of the gay community he was mistaken.
     Staci Wolfe, before she felt it was impossible to continue representing him said last week said he was “Taking time to seek evaluation and treatment”.  This speaks volumes. It’s very rare that both agent and publicist would drop a client so immediately. It’s a sure sign that they have absolutely no faith that Spacey’s career can ever recover.
     But can it? Being replaced in a movie 6 weeks from release that will miss its AFM premiere however much it’s a marketing execs dream  is pretty serious. Netflix are saying they are no longer working with Kevin Spacey. He has been written out of House of Cards. I loved House of Cards. I loved the way Spacey’s character Francis Underwood was so manipulative, cruel, underhand, ruthless, without morals and now it turns out he was just playing himself. Do I feel personally cheated?  Yes I do.  Because I no longer feel I’m seeing acting that makes me ache it’s so good. I feel I’m seeing just another side of a very sleazy man.  
     Netflix is taking its lead from the new Hollywood climate that won’t stand for sleaze.  
     It also irks me that I mistook Spacey for an intelligent man – his gayness was an open secret. Nothing he would ever talk about or admit to. I thought it was quite clever that he never allowed his sexuality to define his roles. Yet last week when Anthony Rapp alleged that when he was fourteen in 1986 Spacey had sexually assaulted him, the actor chose that moment to release the statement that he is gay. ‘I choose now to live as a gay man.’ It was the now word that got me. Like overnight he’s suddenly gay. Like he was never not gay.  The LGBT community were enraged that he should come out as gay and in the same sentence saying he couldn’t remember the encounter with Rapp over 30 years ago. 
Perhaps he couldn’t remember because there were so many. He knew that his game was up and other boys would make their allegations. And still he did nothing. He just waited for the sleaze to hit the fan. 
     And #metoo come into play. After the first teenager there were two more and a third who didn’t want to be named. And then eight current or former House of Cards workers complained that Spacey made the production a toxic workplace with one of them alleging sexual assault.  
     Another personal source from House of Cards says that regardless of his sexuality no one liked him. “It was all about him. He didn’t care about anybody else and the more success he had with House of Cards the worse he became. It just pushed him over the top so I guess that means the harder he fell.”

     Jon Bernthal an actor who previously admired Spacey, says that his behaviour on the set Baby Driver was also reprehensible. Not in a sexual way. He was just rude and a bully. “Working with him, made me lose all respect for him and I was enormously disappointed.”

   And this is new Hollywood. We no longer apparently tolerate bullies, yet bullying goes on every day. 
     I’ve seen an A List actress with her personal assistant in a celebrity shoe shop on the Sunset Plaza. The star in question refused to speak directly to the sales assistant and barked orders at her PA.  It was abusive.  Her assistant simply shrugged and got on with it.  Hollywood personal assistants are well paid. Is that the point? That money solves everything and if your pay cheque is high enough it’s OK to be abused? Certainly the pay for an A list actor is millions of dollars. Does that mean they are also abused? Or does that mean that they are entitled to give out millions of dollars’ worth of abuse, sexual or otherwise. 
     Fame is of course toxic. If you treat people badly it will catch up with you. Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow, but in Spacey’s case his behaviour stretches out over decades. One can’t help thinking was it only one fourteen year old boy in 1986? 
     US filmmaker Tony Montana claims he was groped by the actor in a Los Angeles bar in 2003. He says he was left with PTSD for six months after Spacey “forcefully” grabbed his crotch.
     The sixteen year old Justin Dawes had a situation when Spacey was 29 that he described as “sleazy and manipulative”. Dawes met Spacey after a performance of a play that Spacey was in and Spacey invited him and a friend to his apartment to watch Chinatown. Instead he made cocktails and played porn on the TV.
     “We all had a drink, and we were kind of like, ‘Oh, no one else is coming?’ And he’s like, ‘Oh, no one else decided to come,’ and he never mentioned that this porn was playing,” Dawes said. “It was really awkward.” 
     A journalist in the early 2000s interviewed him at his office in the Old Vic theatre and Spacey invited him to a club where he began reaching between his legs and grabbing his genitals. The journalist said that he told the actor he was in a relationship with a woman and when he tried to leave the club Spacey was furious. “This man was screaming in my face outside of the main bar area, red-faced, spit flying out of his mouth, screaming at me with fury because I didn’t want to f**k him,” he claimed.  “He was actually saying that I did want to and I was a coward. That was his tactic. It was unbelievable.”
     It doesn’t seem like many people have anything endearing to say about Spacey and yes it does seem a little harsh and I have a feeling that the men who have spoken out against him are not the only ones. They are obviously now ashamed that they were once flattered by his attention. I know this means he is guilty until proved innocent but he seems to be doing a really bad job of coming over as innocent of anything. 
     His story is made more rancid by the fact he was so covert about being gay, the people who he’d abused seem to respect his decision to stay in the closet and didn’t want to out him but that’s where the poison starts and start it has. But not where it finishes. 
     There are many other gay actors in Hollywood who fear for their careers, who don’t want to swap action leads for gay best friends, who don’t want to sacrifice a subsequent career in politics. Its not about being gay but who they have abused and got away with it because they live a covert while famous life.  But in the new Hollywood  there are less secrets and his toxic  wildfire is impossible to stop. Come out come out where ever you are ……..or some one is coming to get you

Harvey Weinstein (November 2017)

I met Harvey Weinstein many times – usually at parties thrown by him when he was about to take home a few Oscars and be thanked in Oscar speeches more times than God. Should I be offended or mystified that he never asked me to give him a bj or said he’d like me to meet him upstairs at his suite at the Peninsula so that he could open the door in his white towel and suggest we get massages?

Well, I am never one who likes to miss the party but if that had happened I would have said, “Harvey you are a fat pig. You are not attractive and even though I might like you to make one of my scripts into a movie I’d like you to do that because you thought the script was attractive, not because you want to expose yourself to me.” Ok I might not of thought of that at the time. I might have been upset and horrified.

There were 13 alleged victims referred to in Ronan Farrow’s story in New Yorker, three of whom allege being forced into sex acts. Farrow, son of Mia Farrow and Woody Allen, wrote, “Sometimes it took months and months for them to go on the record… each of them talked about their own fears or what they believed he (Weinstein) might do to them. How they believed people around them would react, how they believed it would affect their careers, and so that was a lot to process for every woman in this story.”

These were mostly women who had worked for him and feared they would lose their jobs and reputations and more.

There were, in the few days after the story appeared, another eight women who alleged sexual harassment – and they were give settlements of between $80,000 and $150,00 — gathering the pace of the most vicious tornado more and more jumped on the hate trail.

At one time Weinstein’s table was the one who everyone wanted to be placed on but not as soon as he became tainted they, or their publicists, felt dirty by association. They wanted to shower themselves clean of dirty Harvey. He went from king of the movie world to untouchable in days. Just days. The speed of this escalation is incredible.

Ashley Judd started the tidal wave. Twenty years ago she was filming with him and he asked her up to his hotel suite for room service – she ordered cereal – then he asked her for a back rub and to watch him shower. She did report it at the time – people ignored her out of fearing to upset a powerful man. Clearly something wrong with that. Then came Rosanna Arquette, Angelina Jolie and Gwenyth Paltrow.

Paltrow says she was 22 and working as the star of Weinstein’s Emma when he invited her up to his room for a massage. She was so frightened she asked her then boyfriend Brad Pitt to sort out Harvey. There is a step back for Weinstein but a bigger step back for womankind. Who knows if she was frightened standing on podiums winning Oscars with Harvey?

One can show respect and empathy for Angelina Jolie, who feels she was sexually compromised many years ago. She warned everybody not to have anything to do with him and completely distanced herself and never worked with him. That is the proper reaction.

Of course, I can see that if your boss is harassing you, you might be afraid to lose your job, after all, your other boss is your boss’s brother. But that turned out to be a wrong move because brother Bob was planning on a rewrite of Cain and Abel. He tore his own brother down from the company he’d made which had been so internationally applauded and awarded, deemed his brother unfit and ensconced himself. Now the world’s greatest independent film company is run by a chump. Oh, yes, Bob, I have met you, too.

Everybody knew that Weinstein had what turned out to be a fatal flaw. Everybody knew he liked to chase women. Seth McFarland, in the 2013 Oscar’s, cracked a joke as he read out the nominations for the best supporting actress, announcing, “And these are the women that no longer have to pretend to be attracted to Harvey Weinstein in order to win awards…”

My point is, people knew it was happening for as long as there have been casting couches in Hollywood. And those couches were tacit approval to sexual predators. It was an unspoken deal – the film industry treats women with contempt. Weinstein is not the cause of this – merely the effect. Was it disgusting? Yes. But nobody spoke out so he is right when he says he was born into a different culture. It was a culture where powerful men made deals involving body parts of women who wanted to be famous or seen as talented or respected, weirdly.

Think Marilyn Monroe. Where would she be without the favour of the casting couch? Alive to a very old age? She wouldn’t have had to die because she wouldn’t have felt used by men. But that is another story. Although there is a tenuous link … one of her alleged abusers, John F. Kennedy, is considered one of the greatest American presidents. He was also a womaniser. Did that make him do a bad job at the presidency? Bill Clinton, too, was a lover of the bj, but a brilliant economist and looked after America’s budget better than any of his successors. So while everyone is busy tearing down the mogul I just want to point out he did not make his great achievements because of or in spite of his horrible behaviour.

Of course, I don’t – and no one can — condone what he has done, but is he paying the price for an entire industry’s wrong doing.

These are some interesting things about Harvey: He is fantastically well read. He’d read all of Dostoyevsky by the time he was 12 because it was feared he was going to go blind so he wanted to read everything before he lost his sight. He was extremely driven, he made movies for which he had passion and marketed them as if he was conducting a philharmonic orchestra in an opera house. He believed in people when no one else did and while he was confident of his abilities he had a very low self image. Without his contribution to the film industry there would be more movies involving other galaxies – robots – car chases and all male casts. Only 17 year old males would watch them. There would have been no Shakespeare In Love, no The English Patient, no Pulp Fiction, Kings Speech, Finding Neverland or Silver Linings Playbook.

He green lit all of these – and now Bafta have suspended his membership, Cannes Film Festival have denounced him and some British politicians are urging the stripping of the CBE awarded to him by Queen Elizabeth in 2004.

It seems ridiculous – you can’t unmake these clever movies that were also great box office. He was known as Harvey Scissorhands not because of the way he touched people but by the way he touched movies. He cut them up, cut them down, falling out with directors who felt they were scalping their own babies but invariably he made the movies better, more accessible, more universally loved.

This public horror show will not stop the film industry from objectifying women. Asking for body doubles with bigger breasts and tighter bottoms for nude scenes and using leading men over 50 with female love interests 30 years younger is disgusting. The culture that influenced Weinstein is wrong. Yet in this culture Weinstein romped around for more than decades. No one said anything – till everyone did. Weird.

When I last met Harvey at the Oscar party for Lion I wanted to ask him something. I wanted to say, “I have written this brilliant script, I’d love you to be involved.” I didn’t say it because it was inappropriate at a party. If I met him now – unlikely because I am told he’ll be forced into some kind of extreme rehab for being Harvey – I would still say, “I would love you to be involved.”

Today I was at a funeral for the Australian actor/writer/opera critic Charles Osbourne. Barry Humphries was giving the tribute. Even he made a joke about Harvey Weinstein in a eulogy. This is how far and how fast it has spread. And the table is about to turn. Yesterday we were appalled. Today it’s a joke.

Afterwards, the talk was not only about Charles Osbourne but about Weinstein. It’s reached that kind of circuit. funeral chat.

People said that complicity is the devil and the silence only encouraged this behaviour, not just Harvey’s but any man of power in an industry that can so easily disrespect women. People said now Weinstein was being humiliated and so universally punished this would make other abusers think twice and it could change the way the powerful men manipulate the weaker sex. Really? Are we the weaker sex? Will it change anything? The buck stops with such men. But I believe it also stops with the women. Let’s be more Jolie and less Paltrow.

Morrissey (Sunday Times Magazine, Nov. 26, 2017)

Chrissy Iley and Morrissey, November 2017
Chrissy Iley and Morrissey, November 2017

 
I’m inside Morrissey’s hotel room at the Sunset Marquis, West Hollywood. It smells incensey, a church of Oud, instantly exotic and at the same time cosy, rather like the man himself.  Mmm I hear myself say, not realising behind the door lurks Morrissey. “What’s hmmmm?” The smell. What is it? “It’s my sweat.”
I sniff his navy sweatshirt with a skull on it – the best sweat I’ve ever smelt. He’s in LA because he’s performing at the Hollywood Bowl and because Friday November 10th has been declared Morrissey Day by the Mayor of Los Angeles. 
He lived here, next door to Johnny Depp until a few years ago and now he’s just visiting. Where does he actually live? A sigh. “I’m in a different place all the time. I’m not sure why everyone wants to know where I live, what that says about me. It means my credit card is permanently blocked for security reasons. They think I’m an anonymous person if I’m never in the same place.”
“I never ask people where they live but they always ask me as if it would reveal anything about me. I’m here now as you can see.”
Because he’s performing. “Well…I don’t perform but I’m occasionally on a stage but I don’t EVER perform.” How so very Morrissey. How delicious. I laugh and a little sparkle flashes across his intense eyes, all feeling eyes, eyes that never want to look directly at you.  It’s as if he never wants to be really seen, except by tens of thousands every time he is on a stage.
So Morrissey Day in LA. What does that actually mean? 
“I’m not sure how Morrissey Day came about. Lots of things happen and I don’t know where they spring from or why. I think it’ll be exciting and I’ll be handed something by the Mayor and that will be very pleasing.”
Will it be like National Cat Day where people post Instagrams of their cats? You raise money for cats and you adopt a cat. “Yes it’ll be exactly like that.” So people will try to adopt him? “I hope so but there’s not money required I can assure you. This city has been good to me. Many exciting things have happened here.”
He no longer lives in the house next to Johnny Depp? “No, he bought it from me to put his argumentative relatives in when they came to stay and since then I have been homeless which is very interesting. I just move around the world as much as I can which is a fascinating way to live. People say but surely you need your own kitchen but I’ve managed for many years doing without.” Does he cook? “Yes I do and it’s a very nice idea to have a kitchen…” And room service will provide? “It tries but it’s difficult sometimes. We don’t like to wait do we, really for anything?” 
This is a moment where I want to tell him about the first time I ever heard his voice. So soul curdling and deep reaching when he sang ‘How Soon Is Now?’
The Smiths are remembered with a giant amount of romanticism. It seems that they were around forever but in fact it was only 5 years and 4 studio albums, but so many songs, such poetry that spoke for a generation about love and loss and waiting.
Post Smiths there were a series of solo albums starting with Viva Hate, some of which were less loved and some of which were less loveable.  There was a well received and darkly funny autobiography and a strange foray into novel writing – List of the Lost was reviewed as “turgid” and received the Bad Sex Award for a sex scene described as a giggling snowball of full figured copulation. It’s not that he ever went away but with the release of the new album Low In High School he seems back in the forefront of our imagination. Back on the radio, back on the television, his voice strangely more fluid and more poignant than ever. His passion, his politics speak again to a new generation. 
He has said that he thought Brexit was magnificent and the new single Jacky’s Only Happy When She’s Up on the Stage ends with a haunting chorus of ‘exit exit’ which some people have translated as ‘Brexit Brexit’.
There’s a sight raise of an eyebrow which is already raised on a permanent basis. “No, it’s not a Brexit song. The words are exit exit exit. There’s no Brexit in it. The line is ‘all the audience head for the exit when she’s onstage’ so it’s nothing to do with Brexit. People just rush to stupid conclusions and create facts and create their own truths and slaughter the issue.”
OK it’s not a Brexit song but he did say that Brexit was a magnificent thing right? “I thought it was a fascinating strike for democracy because the people said the opposite to Westminster and I thought that was extraordinary. David Cameron didn’t imagine the result could be as it was but at least he did the honourable thing and slid away. The unfortunate thing is that politicians only speak to other politicians. They don’t speak to the people so on that day their bubble burst. And now I don’t think Brexit has taken place or even will because Westminster don’t want it. It’s not that difficult. They’re just finding a way to not make it Brexit.” 
Was it true that he banned David Cameron from ever listening to a Morrissey penned song? “No that was never true but these are the things I have to live with.” Big sigh. “I didn’t say it and it’s nice if everybody listens. It really is.”
There’s nobody he wants to ban? “Well, only the obvious – the obvious international pest.” The orange one? “Yes.” Perhaps he would benefit from listening to the latest album.
“He’s beyond salvation. Beyond any help. The biggest security threat to America and the world.  He’s like a two year old constantly reaching for something. Damaging it and then moving on to something else and destroying it.” 
Indeed the next day when I go to his show at the Hollywood Bowl, one of the backdrops is Morrissey in a blue Fred Perry holding a toddler with Trump’s head imposed on it. A tiny tyrant.  It goes down very well.  
The show itself is an extraordinary experience. Morrissey is a mesmerising figure onstage as he lashes and whips his microphone chord. It’s as if he’s sending himself and his audience into a semi religious trance. The audience – a diverse collection black, white, brown, young, old and very young, men, women, gay, straight – have a unification of belief. They believe in political change. They believe meat is murder and nobody objects one bit that the only food sold on the premises is vegetarian/vegan. They believe in Morrissey. He stands for them and they stand for him. 
He gives us the songs that still speak to us even though they’re decades old. He gives us the new songs and he gives us his voice which soars as dextrous as ever. At 58 he is a man on top of his game. 
I’ve been to that same stadium and seen artists of similar years with pretentious trousers and hair plugs. I’ve seen them sing their old songs and look into a crowd of middle aged spread. The only grey on this stage is Morrissey’s suit. OK, I could have done without the bit where he threw the jacket into the crowd and flaunted his unworked out torso but he did it so unselfconsciously it was admirable. Interesting, Morrissey is totally at one with himself half naked on stage but sitting beside him on the couch in his hotel room he’s not comfortable with being looked at and he very rarely looks you directly in the face.
Living nowhere and everywhere gives him an interesting grip on world politics. Does he travel light? “I have a sickening volume of possessions. They’re all stored away in different parts of the world waiting for that moment when I stop and buy a house and relax.” Does he ever relax? “No.” 
We sip our room service bottled water and he asks me if would like anything more dangerous. I suggest maybe a coffee. He shrugs in despair. “That’s not what I meant.” 
The new record is being heaped with praise. “It feels good. People always want their latest offspring to be the cutest I believe.” Morrissey doesn’t have children. He has songs. He doesn’t have a lover. He has the stage. 
Does he have a particular track that’s more important than the others? “No. I mean if you gave birth to quads you wouldn’t say which quad is the best one, would you? You would love all your quads equally for different reasons.”
He looks at me and assesses that maybe I could never love quads at all. I tell him I’ve got four cats. “There. I rest my case. I best you don’t pick one out and say you’re the one I love and boot the others in the linen cupboard.”
I show him the pictures of my cats and we agree that Slut is my best cat. “That’s a beautiful name for a beautiful cat.” 
He doesn’t have any cats himself at the moment because of travelling but Russell Brand’s cat is called Morrissey. “Yes and he’s still alive. I don’t mean Russell – I mean the cat. He’s getting on now. I do mean Russell. I don’t mean the cat.”
I read that he’s called Morrissey because he’s an awkward bugger. “There you go. You should have guessed that one straight away. Cats don’t last and we’re always so shocked and surprised when they don’t last.” Morrissey the cat is well and Morrissey the man is surpassing himself. His time has come again.
“It’s certainly a moment which might annoy many people but here I am and I offer no apologies and no excuses.” The first single Spent The Day in Bed had more airplay than any Morrissey track ever has in the US.  “I don’t spend the day in bed often but people love their beds.”
He advises several times that people shouldn’t stay in bed and watch the news because that’s too extraordinarily depressing. 
Morrissey has spent much of his life depressed. Surely that’s where quite a few of the hits came from. “Years ago I sang a song called Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now and it’s like an old school uniform. People insist I wear it but I’m really not that miserable. I’m not an unhappy person. Not in the least. I’m certainly very surprised and very pleased to still be here and to be in one vaguely acceptable piece. Very pleased about that and I’m very pleased that the music I’ve made appears to mean a great deal to people.”
I’m wondering if his new resolution to appreciate life had anything to do with it nearly being taken away. He is in remission from oesophagus cancer. “I’d had quite a few scares and was on a lot of extreme medication. I lost a lot of hair.  Something gets us all eventually, whether it’s religion or alcohol. Something brings us crashing down. You can be as healthy as possible but something will always get you in the end. I thought here we go. Just accept it, but I’ve done very well. I’m not on any medication now.” 
And his hair is back – greying and the Morrissey super quiff is perhaps not as super as it once was. “It’s real. A lot of people my age don’t have hair. They don’t have teeth so I feel quite blessed really.  He was diagnosed with oesophagus cancer in 2014. “If we must go into it I had a lot of scrapings but they weren’t all painful.”
Wasn’t he worried a procedure involving the scraping of his oesophagus would affect his voice? “No incredibly,” he laughs. “In fact my voice is better, absolutely better than it was. I had to give up 150 things from red wine and beyond but that was OK because I don’t really like red wine. When you sit before a doctor and they use the C word you hear it but you don’t hear it. You just say ‘ah yes’ as if it’s something you hear every day. Your mind goes into this funny little somewhere and you say ‘ah yes’ as if you knew it all along.”
I’m not sure that’s how I would react but that’s how he reacted. He’s always been one of these people who seem to be able to dislocate himself from his own being.
“Giving up red wine was meaningless to me anyway.” Doesn’t he drink alcohol? “Just not red wine. I think you drink tequila.” Yes I like tequila. I wonder if this is some kind of psychic reading where he’s looking into my soul and seeing tequila in my veins. “Tequila frightens me. I don’t drink it but I see people drinking it and it shocks me. As soon as they neck it they are just completely off their doodas. What about gin?” Gin makes you miserable. “It’s supposed to.” Also mushrooms depress me. “Oh they are horrific. Fungus, truffles make me cry. I say to people what are you doing eating fungus?  Truffles shock me and the smell. Ewwww. Garlic is also horrific.”
Morrissey has his very own blend of vegetarianism.  His super food is potatoes. “I’ve never had a curry and I’ve never had a coffee. I’ve never wanted one and I’ve never been handed one. I have Ceylon tea, very very weak with an alternative milk. Cashew milk is beautiful. Dairy farms all over England are collapsing. Non-dairy milk is now 51% of the market which is fantastic.”
32 years ago when he first sang Meat is Murder, veganism was rare and largely only a handful of popstars were vegan. And a vegan diet was difficult to maintain. Now vegan food is in supermarkets, vegan restaurants springing everywhere and a 20% rise in vegan based beauty products.
“What about champagne?” he says. I’m not sure if he’s offering to crack open a bottle but I hate champagne. “I’ve never met anybody that hated champagne.” I’ve never met anybody that hasn’t been offered a coffee or taken out for a curry. “I’ve never asked. I don’t like any food where the following day you can still taste it or you smell of it or your clothes smell of it. I’m very very bland as far as food is concerned. I don’t like anything that’s potent or anything if you’ve had it, everybody in the room is aware of it and you have to run to the dry cleaners. Curry is like that.”
It’s almost as if the psyche of Morrissey is so piquant, so spicy, to make the alchemy of Morrissey function he needs to balance it with food that tastes of nothing. Not only has he never had an onion bhaji, “I’ve never had an onion. That would make me cry. It’s just too eye crossing. I’m strictly bread and potatoes. People around us are obsessed with killing things to eat them.”
People are obsessed with so many things that he isn’t. “Mmm,” he says savouringly “yes, yes.” Sometimes when you interview a person it’s a strict question then answer. No flow. Sometimes they’ll ask you about yourself in a way of avoiding talking about themselves. Very rarely does it feel like a proper conversation. Very rarely does it feel like we already know each other. So we can drift back to talking politics like two people in a conversation might. 
Does he think Trump will be impeached? “It’s a long time coming and there have been multiple reasons and it hasn’t happened. It’s a shocking reflection on American politics. I understand people wanting somebody who is non-political, who is not part of a system. But not him. They thought that he was something he absolutely is not. Surely people realise it now.”
“Everything he says is divisive. It’s meant to be. It’s meant to distract you. And Theresa May. She won’t answer questions put to her. She’s not leadership. She can barely get to the end of her own sentence. Her face quakes. She’s hanging on by the skin of her teeth so she doesn’t become the shortest serving British Prime Minister in history. She has negotiations about negotiations about negotiations about the EU. I’m not a Conservative but I can see she’s actually blocking the Conservative Party from moving on and becoming strong. But as we know politicians do not care about public opinion. And she wants to bring back fox hunting.”
And this is not only “cruel and disgraceful” but signifies that May is “out of step and not of the modern world.” 
Morrissey loves talking about politics, onstage and off there’s always an opinion.  Then he says, “I’m non-political. I always have been. I’ve never voted in my life.”     
At the last election there was a story going round that Morrissey voted UKIP. This too seems to have been simply made up just because he’s totally opposed to the Halal slaughterhouse it doesn’t mean he wants to slaughter every Muslim. 
He is the most political, non-political person on the planet but there again what you think you see is never what you really see. Morrissey is the place where extremes meet. He’s shy except in front of thousands. He write about love but only admits to one proper relationship with Jake Walters, a boxer from East London. They lived together from 1994 to 1996. When he was in The Smiths he declared himself celibate and added that he hated sex. 
After Walters he discussed having a baby with Tina Dehghani and in his autobiography he refers to a relationship with an Italian who he calls Gelato. He’s said in the past he’s only attracted to people who aren’t interested in him. He’s never been on a date. He only writes about wanting to be loved. Many contradictions.  
“Well I’m human. I’m not interested in being part of anything. I don’t see a party that speaks to me and I haven’t ever. My vote is very precious. I won’t use it just to get rid of somebody I don’t like because they’re all absolutely the same.” 
Does he think Corbyn is the same? “He has had many opportunities to take a strike against Theresa May and he has resisted.  It’s hard to believe that this is the best England can produce at this stage of the game. We survived Thatcher by the skin of our teeth and somehow we’re all still alive and we are presented with Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn.”
I laugh. He corrects, “It’s a tragedy. The UK is in a state of cultural tragedy, dominated by political correctness. Nobody tells the truth about anything. If you tell the truth in England you’ll lose your job.”
In this post Weinstein and #metoo era people are less afraid and there’s a lot of speaking out. “Yes but you must be careful as far as sexual harassment is concerned because often it can be just as a pathetic attempt at courtship. I have never been sexually harassed I might add. I’m sure it’s horrific but we have to keep everything in proportion. Do you not agree?” 
Is it also true that he said he didn’t like labels so didn’t identify as heterosexual or bisexual but humoursexual? “No, humasexual as in we’re all humans.” Oh I thought it was only about sleeping with people that you had a laugh with as in humour. “That would dramatically limit things but certainly I think we are obsessed with labels, obsessed with knowing where we stand with other people, what we can expect them to do and it doesn’t make any difference really.”
Just like veganism being gender fluid if not sexually fluid is now much more accepted. “I know. It’s extraordinary. People seem to be very relaxed by it.”
But when Morrissey was announcing his homosexuality he was very lonely. “Yes I was. I spearheaded the movement. I know no other way so nothing has changed or me but the rest of the world leaps on. I am pleased because I want people to be happy.  There is an expiration date on our lives and on this planet. You have to be yourself and hopefully get some happiness from it. It seems that everybody in every respect of their lives is coming out of their cupboard saying this is the person I’d like to be. I want to wear these clothes, not the clothes that have been imposed on me and as long as nobody’s harmed I think it’s good.”
Is it true that he’s never been on a date? “Yes I’ve never been on a traditional date. I’m not that kind of person I don’t instigate those responses in people.” Does he mean no one’s ever said I’d like to take you to dinner? “No ever never. But I’m happy with my vocation.” There’s something very nun like about him. 
What does he consider his vocation? “I’m very interested in the singing voice. I’m very interested in making a difference in music, not simply being successful.”
Does he think it’s not possible to make a difference and at the same time have a date? “No. I’ve never found it to be so.” It’s one or the other? “Well, life leads me. Does it lead you? Are you successful at the cost of something else?” I’m quite shocked by the enormity of his question that not even my closest friends have ever asked me. I stammer it’s not valid because I’m not really successful. 
He says “Well you’re not working at KFC are you? What were you aiming for in your life when you cycled out of Durham or Morecambe or wherever it was? You’re writing for the Sunday Times. Do you enjoy interviewing people because you like them or because