Celebs self-helping themselves

By Susan Daly
Wednesday Sep 15 2010

Even the wealthy, the beautiful and the famous need a hand to be happy from time to time. Religion, after all, is not only the opiate of the masses.

Tom Cruise gets his jollies from Scientology, Richard Gere found peace with Buddhism and Madonna has embraced Kabbalah.

As for those who believe that God helps those who help themselves, the self-help industry is booming.

Julia Roberts is pounding red carpets all over the world right now to bring her movie version of Elizabeth Gilbert's self-discovery memoir Eat, Pray, Love to the masses. The Power, the follow-up to bestseller The Secret, is flying off the shelves.

The self-improvement biz is worth billions and self-help books sell in their millions. Some celebrities have decided they know so much about success that they are qualified to write their own.

Two recent additions to the genre come from Sex and the City's Kim Cattrall who wrote Being a Girl: Navigating the Ups and Downs of Teen Life, and pop singer Jessica Simpson who penned I Do: Achieving Your Dream Wedding. Because you want your teenage daughter to take tips from Samantha Jones, and you really want wedding advice from a woman who put her newlywed life on reality TV and then got divorced.

Some celebrities wisely stick to being believers. Demi Moore is a big fan of spiritual guru Deepak Chopra and Naomi Campbell has applauded the work of I Can Make You Thin hypnotist Paul McKenna.

What better endorsement can a self-help book have than to be photographed under the arm of a celebrity?

We take a look at what star has been spotted carrying which self-help book -- and whether they seem to be learning anything from them ...

THE BOOK: Toxic Friends -- The Antidote For Women Stuck In Complicated Relationships, by Susan Shapiro Barash

THE CELEB: Lindsay Lohan.

Spotted with the book in July, a week before entering jail for violating her probation.

DID IT WORK? The book helps the reader to identify 10 types of 'toxic' female friends that need dumping.

These include The Trophy Friend, The Doormat and The Misery Lover, who only likes you when you're down.

Ah, that explains it. Li-Lo's troubles were because she had the wrong people around her. Problem solved.

THE BOOK: Living In The Moment by Gary Null

A natural health guru advises how to have a "blissful" existence by freeing yourself from consumerism and slowing down your life.

THE CELEB: Paris Hilton.

She displayed the book on walkabout in front of the paparazzi after a break-up with a boyfriend in 2008.

DID IT WORK? Null believes in freeing oneself from the traps of materialism. In July, Hilton spent €3,000 on 12 pairs of sunglasses while on holiday in St Tropez.

In August, she was charged with cocaine possession. It is possible Hilton misread the subtitle of Living In The Moment: A Prescription For The Soul for self-medication of an entirely less spiritual type.

THE BOOK: The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle

Former depressive Tolle discovers that the ego, with all its emotional baggage of memories, stands in the way of spiritual awakening.

THE CELEB: Jim Carrey.

The actor opened a lecture for Tolle last year saying he now understood "how thought was just an illusory thing and how thought is responsible for some, if not, all the suffering we experienced".

DID IT WORK? Some would argue that with a man who built his success on Dumb and Dumber is already a convert to not thinking too much.

Saying that, a Time magazine interviewer to whom he recommended Tolle's work in 2007 said that Carrey "wasn't at all annoying. Yes, he's a little too happy, but he seems very comfortable and mellow and unguarded and unpretentious."

THE BOOK: The Secret by Rhonda Byrne

Every positive thinking message spouted in the past 80 years repackaged as an ancient guide to having it all.

THE CELEB: Oprah Winfrey.

The queen of book endorsements. She dedicated two of her 2007 shows to The Secret.

DID IT WORK? The Secret claims you can have the perfect life if you just wish hard enough for it.

Oprah is certainly worth a bundle but with her ever-fluctuating body weight, we wonder what she thinks of The Secret's advice to weight watchers: "If you see people who are overweight, do not observe them, but immediately switch your mind to the picture of you in your perfect body and feel it." That's right. Only look at Oprah when she's down to a size 12-14.

THE BOOK: The Rules by Ellen Fein and Sherrie Schneider

Two dating coaches teach women how to snag a husband by responding to one out of every four emails from a guy and not having sex until the third date at the earliest.

THE CELEB: Beyoncé.

The Rules gals quote B on their website as telling US Weekly that although "there are certain things in there that are unrealistic, it [The Rules] has worked for me".

DID IT WORK? Well she's married, ain't she?

She dated rapper Jay-Z for six years before they wed. That's in direct contravention of Fein and Schneider's rule that if he likes it, then he should put a ring on it after no more than two years.

Nor is it easy to picture her taking on this top 10 tip from the ladies: "Take care of yourself, take a bubble bath and build up your soul with positive slogans like, 'I am a beautiful woman. I am enough'."

THE BOOK: Skinny Bitch by Rory Freedman and Kim Barnouin

"A no-nonsense, tough-love guide for savvy girls who want to stop eating crap and look fabulous."

THE CELEB: Victoria Beckham.

The former Spice girl was papped taking the book down from a shelf in an LA boutique in 2007.

DID IT WORK? Surely the question should be, 'Did she need it?'

Posh Spice was already thin as a rake when she brandished the diet book. It is possible that she was having a laugh at her own expense and at critics of her pin-thin figure by waving it at the paparazzi.

The book's straight-talking advice sounds pretty suited to Victoria's rigid body control though -- the authors tell readers "you are a total moron if you think the Atkins Diet will make you thin" and that "soda is liquid Satan".

THE BOOK: Collected Poems of Derek Walcott, 1948-1984

Not quite a self-help manual but Walcott, who emerged from the isolation of an ex-British colony in the West Indies to win a Nobel Prize for Literature, is probably an inspiration to the self-made man.

THE CELEB: Barack Obama.

Not quite a celebrity, but definitely rather famous, Obama was spotted carrying it while leaving his daughters to school the morning after winning the US Presidential election in 2008.

DID IT WORK? One of Walcott's most famous works is his 1973 autobiographical epic poem Another Life in which he tells the reader: "You want to hear my history? Ask the sea."

Obama could adopt it as the perfect talk-to-the-hand response to the 'birthers' who claim that he is not an American citizen because he was born in Hawaii.

That should keep them guessing.

FIRST PUBLISHED HERE: http://www.independent.ie/lifestyle/independent-woman/celebrity-news-gossip/lilo-has-toxic-friends-beyonceacute-plays-by-the-rules-and-posh-is-a-skinny-bitch-2337799.html

The grey matter

My piece on the vogue for dyeing hair... grey - from the Indo's Weekend mag last Saturday.

Elizabeth Taylor, hair still blue-black into her 78th year, has not got the memo that grey is in vogue. Stars such as Helen Mirren, Jamie Lee Curtis, Diane Keaton and Emmylou Harris have been noticeably growing old grey-cefully in recent years and earning applause for it.

But the appearance of gunmetal and silver shades is no longer the preserve of the ageing. For some young hipsters, going grey is something to dye for. Pixie Geldof traded in her trademark peroxide crop for grey, saying: "I'd been blonde for three years and fancied a change." Kelly Osbourne looked lovely in mauve earlier this year, and pop star Pink has been tinting her platinum locks silver-grey.

As style fads go it's an interesting one, not least because fashion normally rejects anything that suggests ageing -- and because it doesn't seem to be going away.

The August edition of US 'Vogue' sported a photograph of a model with waist-length silver-grey hair, sleek as a cat in polo neck and pencil skirt, suggesting that grey will be good at least into autumn/winter 2010.

Supermodel Kristen McMenamy has just done a shoot for cutting-edge fashion and culture mag 'Dazed & Confused', long grey locks rolling over her shoulders.

The notoriously fickle world of high fashion has even been showing some consistency on the grey matter. Two years ago, silver-haired models began to appear on the Parisian catwalks for Givenchy. This year, Calvin Klein sent out a model with a slick salt-and-pepper ponytail to showcase its autumn/winter collection. Designers Giles Deacon and Gareth Pugh also turned their models' hair the colour of concrete for their 2010 shows.

As Meryl Streep's Anna Wintour-esque fashion mag editor explains in 'The Devil Wears Prada', trends work on a trickle-down basis. First they appear on the catwalk, then on the back of some wealthy haute-couture client, then get mass exposure from influential celebrities before finally winding their way down to the woman on the street.

The celebrity advocates have surely now reached tipping point. Two huge trendsetters on either side of the Atlantic have been at the toner bottle. In the US, Ashley Olsen reinvented the blue rinse by sporting blue-grey highlights in her tousled hair, while Kate Moss got skunk streaks to launch her collaboration with Longchamps.

As with her skinny-jeans-tucked-into-boots combo, are we next?

Sharon Rice, stylist with cutting-edge hair and beauty salon Brown Sugar in Dublin, says: "Things like that do catch on. It's different from when we've had people in the past who were going grey and coming into us looking to enhance it rather than hide it. Or someone who has short blonde hair, they might add tones of silver.

"We haven't seen younger people coming in yet actively looking to dye their hair grey, but I wouldn't be surprised if it happens and we would welcome it because we love doing adventurous stuff."

This slightly rebellious idea of turning one's hair grey when so many in the world spend a fortune on covering their natural greys is key to why the trend has taken off. Pixie Geldof, for example, was not worried that she'd be mistaken for her badger-headed dad Bob, saying of her grey 'do': "It was rad".

When younger people experiment with grey, they wear it with the confidence that it won't make them look prematurely old because they don't have the wrinkles to match. This was especially true of a fashion blogger called Tavi (her surname is Gevinson, but the 'biz' is so in awe of her that she's been given the first-name-only respect).

Tavi is remarkable for many reasons. She's only 13, but she always bags front-row seats at major catwalk shows because her blog is so influential. She also stood out when she turned up at New York Fashion Week sporting a short, grey hairdo. She dyed her hair a soft baby blue a few weeks earlier so that it would have faded to the correct tone of granny-chic grey by the time she appeared front row at the shows.

Sadly, the grey trend doesn't mean that the fashion and beauty industry is suddenly embracing the ageing process. Barack Obama was accused (falsely, of course) in the early days of his US Presidency of adding grey to his hair for extra gravitas. No one would ever accuse a woman of the same. Men get the 'Clooney' and 'distinguished' tags when they start to go silver at the temples; greying women are more likely to face insinuations that they have let themselves go.

Saying that, this wouldn't be the first time grey has had its go on the fashion merry-go-round. Men and women alike went crazy for dove-grey locks in the 1700s, sometimes wearing wigs to get the full halo effect. Otherwise, they powdered their hair white, oiling it to make the powder stick. It was messy, it was smelly and it ruined expensive clothing, but it was de rigueur for the fashionable set.

Marie Antoinette, the trendsetter of her time, loved wig powder to the point of losing her head over it. Her liberal use of the powder was condemned as another sign of her extravagant tastes as the rest of 18th-century France struggled with poverty. There was her country suffering through the Flour War of 1775, and there she was using enough flour in her hair each morning to feed a large family.

By the turn of the century, the English had laid a heavy tax on hair powder and the grey days of Marie Antoinette were over. One hundred years later, in 1907, L'Oréal founder Eugène Schueller had created the first synthetic dye. By this stage, the average life expectancy had increased from around 37 years in 1800 to 47 years in 1900. The appeal of going grey for fashion was considerably lessened by the fact that people were living long enough to see their hair fade naturally.

Now that home hair dye is readily and cheaply available -- it's a €3 billion industry in the EU alone -- perhaps going grey has a chance for a comeback as a fashion statement because it is a choice, not an inevitability. Rod Stanley, editor of 'Dazed & Confused', said it "remained to be seen" if grey was here to stay. "The trend for younger people dying their hair grey is a different thing in many ways but, of course, that could make people more receptive to naturally grey hair in images." Or as Kristen McMenamy puts it herself: "You can get older and still be rock'n'roll."

Here's hoping Pixie Geldof is still rocking a head of granite highlights in her 60s.

FIRST PUBLISHED HERE: http://www.independent.ie/lifestyle/independent-woman/beauty/the-grey-matter-2306506.html#ixzz0xRkSD33l

Come out with your hands up

From last Saturday's Weekend magazine in the Irish Independent
By Susan Daly


Remember that old kiddies' rhyme,"Heads, shoulders, knees and toes"? We didn't know it then, twirling around on our dainty little toes and smooth, youthful pins, but that rhyme was prophetic.

In the age of body consciousness, we've come to obsess over every minute part of ourselves. It started with facelifts. The nip and tuck is no longer the preserve of the ageing Hollywood starlet: it's now a high-street commodity.

In Ireland, we spend roughly the same amount on cosmetic procedures a year -- €55m -- as we do on our supposed national obsession, tea bags.

As the spotlight on the perfect figure grows stronger, no body part is safe from scrutiny. The focus now intensifies steadily from head to toe. Demi Moore got a kneelift when she decided her patellas were less than perfect. Fashion victims found fault with their feet and started injecting derma fillers into their soles to help them stand upright in skyscraper stilettos.

Now it's hands that are under fire. Sarah Jessica Parker, often pilloried for her unconventional looks, is taking a battering for her "bony" fingers. Pictures of her at the recent premiere of Sex and the City 2 were accompanied by bitchy critiques of the "bulging veins" on her hands and arms. The usual unmerciful comments about having the face of a horse were replaced by jibes about having the hands of a man.

Marie Claire magazine found her mitts so unsightly that they did a complete Photoshop job on them for the cover of their June edition. They were plumped up and smoothed out, with no protruding knuckles and no throbbing veins.

Cameron Diaz and Angelina Jolie have also suffered the barbs of the 'granny hands' police for having less than dainty digits. In a mild foreshadow of what was to come, Diaz was lambasted some years back for turning up to the Oscars with chipped nail polish. Anything but top-to-toe perfection is inexcusable on the red carpet.

Now she's accused of sacrificing her hands to her surfing hobby, letting them shrivel up and roughen in the sea and sun of the Californian coast. Jolie's skinny hands are often ringfenced as proof that it may not be possible to be too rich, but it is possible to be too thin.

This sudden focus on the hands is certainly linked with the overall body-beautiful obsession. Even Kate Moss has used a hand double for close-up shots in a Rimmel make-up advertisement. Ironically, the ad was for Renew and Lift foundation. The tagline? Look and feel years younger.

Social critic and psychotherapist Susie Orbach, author of Bodies, says: "Our bodies are increasingly being experienced as objects to be honed and worked on. What I am seeing is franticness about having to get a body. I wish we could treat our bodies as the place we live from, rather than regard it as a place to be worked on, as though it were a disagreeable old kitchen in need of renovation and update."

The result is that an aggressive anti-ageing campaign on the face and body shows up a pair of withering hands like never before. Madonna, for example, has the body of a teenager, the face of a twentysomething, but the hands of a middle-aged woman. Her hands are the age they should be, but they look weird because they don't match the rest of her preternaturally youthful bits and bobs.

Columnist Julie Burchill, writing to "celebrate" Madonna's 50th birthday in 2008, said: "I know I'm fat, but I have to say that if I spent four hours a day working out, I'd want to look a damn sight hotter than Madonna does; those vile, veiny hands, that sad stringy neck -- yuck."

That's the sisterhood for you.

Teri Hatcher, incidentally the same age as SJP at 45, has similarly been roasted for letting the appearance of her hands betray her full age. They might be holding back the years on their faces, but the hands are giving the game away.

Comedian Lucille Ball once suggested that the secret to staying young-looking was to live well, eat slowly and "lie about your age". That's not so easy when your hands are doing the talking for you.

Cosmetic doctor Katherine Mulrooney, of The Clinic in Dublin's Sandymount Green, says she's not surprised hands have become the telltale mark of a person's true age and lifestyle. "People were mostly concerned with their face, neck and chest area up to now," she says. "But the hands are constantly being used and abused. The poor old hands get a terrible hammering."

Even exercise -- so vital for a celebrity's slim-line credentials -- is a vice when it comes to how it makes the hands look. Overzealous cardio workouts increase blood flow and can lead to enlarged veins. Coupled with low body fat, they are both more prominent and easily noticed.

Up until recently, not much could be done about it. Josephine Allen, manicurist to stars such as Julia Roberts and Heidi Klum, says the most she could give her clients was this homespun gem: "If you want to look younger, hold your hands up -- sit with them raised during dinner so the blood flows down and veins appear smaller."

Hands are just too difficult to operate on. The practicalities are that hands can't afford to be frozen or made any way immobile by the traditional surgical 'lifts'. The increasing demand for youthful paws to match frozen-in-time faces, however, has motivated the cosmetic industry to find alternatives.

What it has come up with are topical treatments to treat sun damage, and injectable fillers or fat from elsewhere on a person's body to plump out the hands and make them look fuller and less gaunt.

"The hands are one of the most sun-exposed sites," says Dr Mulrooney. "Photo damage counts for a lot of the manifestation of skin-ageing; collagen breaks down, the hand appears more bony, the skin crepey and the skin acquires sun-damage brown spots. What has happened now is that the more they do to rejuvenate their faces, the more they notice their hands by contrast."

Dr Mulrooney says fillers injected between the metacarpals are becoming popular, as are intense pulsed light (IPL) lasers or fractionalised lasers carried out over a course of a couple of months to treat unwanted pigmentation. A full hand makeover will run you into thousands of euro.

"At the moment, it's a bit like the toe surgery some people have to fit into their fancy designer shoes," she says. "It's never going to be as massive a thing as Botox, but there's definitely a demand for it."

Vivian Diller, a psychotherapist who wrote about women's feelings on ageing in her recent book Face It, wonders, though, if the eternal pursuit for youth is as good for our mind as for our toned-up body parts.

"I have a client who is a cosmetic surgeon," she says. "He talks about how strange it is to treat an 80-year-old who has the breasts of a 20-year old. Body parts are out of sync. How do women feel when parts of their body look young and other parts don't? The psychology of this is not being talked about."

For those not yet willing to put their hands in a doctor's hands, you can take the less worrisome precautions of sunblock and moisturising.

Or if the damage is done, constantly wearing a pair of white cotton gloves might make you look as if you're auditioning for My Fair Lady, but you'll be keeping your hands -- and age -- to yourself.

Read more: http://www.independent.ie/lifestyle/independent-woman/beauty/come-out-with-your-hands-up-2227387.html#ixzz0rW0fCS8O

FIRST PUBLISHED HERE: http://www.independent.ie/lifestyle/independent-woman/beauty/come-out-with-your-hands-up-2227387.html

"We're not celebrities"

Cover story of last Saturday's Weekend mag:
By Susan Daly

Saturday April 10 2010

Celebrity culture doesn't sit entirely easy with the Irish. We traditionally take pride in not being too impressed by the rich or famous.

In recent years, however, a number of homegrown photo-driven celeb mags have fared well here. This conflict of curiosity and disdain for the high profile goes some way to explaining the phenomenal interest in Gerald Kean and Lisa Murphy. Some people might know the names but are not sure why; those who do invariably have an opinion on them.

On (non-glossy) paper, this is a solicitor and beauty-salon owner who met in a bar, dated for a few years and then got engaged. He went down on one knee in the smoking section of their favourite watering hole last December, surrounded by her family. Granted, it was the exclusive members-only club Residence and he had originally planned to propose on holiday in Miami, but still.

Few newly engaged couples are asked on a Saturday night TV chat show to spill the beans on their wedding plans. Nor are they introduced to the audience as "Ireland's Posh and Becks" and look unabashed at the hyperbole.

Gerald Kean disagrees. "I'm not a celebrity, I never have been a celebrity and I don't know where this comes from," he says. "I have very influential friends in footballing and in the music world, I do mix with different people, but this is only a very small part of my life. The rest of the time we could just as easily be with Lisa's mum and dad having a Chinese."

Lisa, sitting next to her fiancé on a sofa in Dublin's Dylan Hotel, is listening carefully and wants to add her thoughts. The couple don't go looking for publicity, she says. "People seem to be interested in what we're doing, and we're just ourselves with everybody."

She does, however, have an insight into the attention she has attracted. "I just happened to fall into it because of Michael."

That would be Michael Flatley, the Riverdance hotstepper to whom she was engaged until their split in early 2006. Six months later he proposed to fellow dancer Niamh O'Brien. In jig time, they were married and had a son. His comments in his autobiography that same year, which inferred Lisa hadn't been a woman he could see as the mother of his children, were less than gentlemanly.

The duration and conclusion of her relationship with Flatley fascinated people. It was a long way from a normal suburban home in Ballinteer to being papped on the beach at Barbados with a fabulously rich Irish-American. She rarely said a word when the pair appeared in public or posed for pictures on the front lawn of his Castlehyde estate in Cork. When they broke up, she continued to keep her own counsel.

As it turns out, the air of mystery had a deadly normality to it. She was terribly shy. In her previous relationship with boxer Joe Egan, she had a breast enhancement for what she has said were all the wrong reasons. She has also spoken of staying away from her own debs ball and having to take a Valium before her first date with Michael

Flatley in order to calm her nerves.

"In my relationship with Michael, we were very quiet, I wouldn't have been out as much," she says. Clearly, things have changed for Lisa. She is warm and open, still softly spoken but not timid.

"Gerald is so much more gregarious," she says. "I'm going to a lot more things and meeting more people, and getting my own business has helped [she runs New Lisa Life, a beauty salon in Sandycove]. Gerald would have given me confidence, wouldn't you darling?" She turns to her other half.

"You are totally different now," he agrees. "At the start, it was a bit of a struggle for her with me. In one day she'd be meeting a crowd of friends I'd been friendly with for 15 years in a pub in Manchester, they would be dancing on tables and singing, and that same night she'd be at a black-tie function. But she's far better with people in so many ways than I am and she has been incredible."

Despite all protests to the contrary, Kean has brought a considerable profile of his own to the table. Solicitors don't generally make for good showbiz, but Kean must now be one of the most high-profile legal professionals in Ireland.

There is no shortage of well-off legal eagles here. He is, I'd wager, the only one to have appeared on reality shows such as Celebrity Bainisteoir and The Restaurant.

Part of the publicity is a consequence of the work that helped him move on from a £7,000 starter salary in a solicitor's office in Capel Street. Kean's moniker as 'celebrity to the stars' comes from the early days in which he promoted the tax exemption relief available in Ireland to artists and musicians. He says it is his famous clients who have mentioned his name and not the other way around, although he does then relate an anecdote about trying to stay out of a photograph of Simon and Yasmin Le Bon when he brought the couple to Dublin.

His marriage to first wife, fellow solicitor Clodagh Hopkins, also brought a kind of mutual celebrity. Social diarists liked to gasp over how she flew him and 70 of his closest friends -- Gerald Kean is nothing if not a networker -- to Paris for his 40th birthday in 1997. A few years later, he flew Clodagh and 150 guests by private jet to a ball in a castle near Salzburg.

The profile of the couple after their split in 2006 is interesting. While Clodagh is still pictured at charity gigs from time to time, it is Gerald who is more prominent in the press. Self-publicity or selflessness? He's insistent that he just likes to help out. To be fair, he and Lisa are squeezing in an interview request from me on Easter Monday morning so I can make a deadline.

"I spend every day of my life helping others; whether that is portrayed in the media or not doesn't interest me," he claims. "I travel the country all week, from Portlaoise to Donegal, and any appearances I do for charities I insist the fees go to the charity. I get footballers and musicians involved in fundraising."

He says he didn't mind when his drink-driving conviction in April of last year was reported in the newspapers. "If you're caught for drink-driving, it's right that it's all over the papers."

Nor does he care that his 50th birthday party, where he and his guests dressed up as pre-revolutionary French aristos, was lampooned by "some silly editor". He laughs it off: "We throw a good party -- it was the best night of my life and we loved it!"

Bad publicity doesn't matter as long as it's not inaccurate, he says. I think -- mostly because he mentions, several times, certain newspaper editors who he believes are "unhappy in themselves" -- that he cares a little more than he would like to admit.

Whatever about the outsider's perception of them, the couple seem very happy. Lisa still lives with her folks in Ballinteer and won't be moving to the substantial Kean country pile in Wicklow until the pair marry at the end of this year, or the start of 2011.

"I would be very traditional like that," says Gerald. "It's a big jump because we don't live together but it's exciting to plan where your clothes are going, where mine are going. You're sharing your life."

A significant point for both of them is that Lisa gets on so well with his 13-year-old daughter, Kirsten. "We're very close," she says. "We were on a cruise there a couple of weeks ago and she would say, 'Don't come and get us [Kirsten and friend], dad, I want Lisa to come and get us'. Gerald will get very emotional and I'll say, 'But darling, I didn't want to hang around with my dad at 13. It's nothing personal'."

It's hard to be cynical about them as a couple when it is clear that they look after each other so well. His health issues have also brought them closer together. Diagnosed as a diabetic shortly before they met in late 2006, Kean has to check his blood-sugar levels four times a day and administer insulin. Lisa keeps an eagle eye on him, not wishing to see a repeat of the incident two years ago when he collapsed at a fashion show in the RDS. "It was terrifying," she says.

He's fresh from the gym when we meet, half the man he used to be, and tucking into an egg-white omelette (after the insulin check, of course). "She guides me and I listen," he says. "She certainly had a hugely positive influence on my life especially at a time when I needed it."

The nuptials will be in Kean's native Cork. He had thought they would marry overseas, because his divorce precludes a church wedding here anyway, but they decided against having people fly out and "spending their money abroad".

Instead of gifts, guests will be asked to make a donation to Scoil Triest in Glanmire, Co Cork, a special school for students with learning disabilities. It's especially personal to Lisa, whose older brother Paul had special needs and died in a road accident in 1995.

"If we have a big wedding, more power to it because we'll get more donations to Scoil Triest," says Gerald. But doesn't ostentation of any kind attract ire, I ask?

"Lisa and I made whatever money we have ourselves. Am I going to stop drinking a nice bottle of red wine? No. Am I going to stop buying a nice shirt and tie? No. I do not come from the stable that, from now on, I must eat stale brown bread. If I make €1,000 tomorrow, I am very happy to spend €500 on a bottle of wine and €500 on a charity."

He mentions that if the couple have babies, as they hope to do, he wishes they will look like their mother. "I want that on the record! And I hope they would have my positivity and enjoyment of life.

"Nothing gets me down."

FIRST PUBLISHED HERE: http://www.independent.ie/lifestyle/independent-woman/love-sex/im-very-traditional-lisa-still-lives-at-home-2132818.html

The victors write history?

Check out this list - http://www.rte.ie/arts/2010/0322/irelandsgreatestfigures.html - before you read my thoughts on it, below.

DON’T be too concerned if you pass Glasnevin cemetery and hear a frightful high-pitched whine coming from below. That will be the generations of noble Irish
heroes and heroines spinning in their graves.

They, like me, can’t believe that a country with 2,000 years of recorded history whittles a list of its greatest citizens down to a top 40 and still finds room for two members of Boyzone and their manager.

Apologies, Jonathan Swift, Brian Boru and Ronnie Delaney. There just wasn’t a seat for you once Ronan Keating, Stephen Gately and Louis Walsh had been given their dues in RTE’s shortlist of Ireland’s Greatest Figures. Another of the favoured forty, the ghost of Charlie Haughey and his giant ego, needed an entire pew to itself.
RTE will argue that the ludicrous nominees on the list are ‘the people’s choice’.

One thousand people were apparently polled on who should make the shortlist. I’d love to know where this privileged 1,000 came from – certainly no-one I know is putting up their hand to admit they think Daniel O’Donnell deserves a place above Brendan Behan.

That’s democracy in action, they’ll tell you. Democracy also means you get the government you deserve – and look how that’s been working out for us.

One wag suggested the pollsters must have canvassed the bored queue outside the passport office, ripe for a bit of anarchy. There are a lot of off-the-cuff nominations in there. Chances are, if you are approached by some clipboard-wielding suit and asked to cast your mind over the centuries of Ireland’s complex history, you’ll be tempted to latch onto the last person you saw on the news last night. Or whoever’s statue you pass every day on the way into work every day.

RTE should be ashamed of itself for its lack of respect. As national broadcasters, they are literally our channel of record. They misleadingly use the title, Ireland’s Greatest, as if it is a definitive list of the finest people we have ever produced – and then compile it in a manner more suited to picking a song for the Eurovision.

In fact, the shortlist for Eurosong was created by a panel of the musically-minded before being presented to the public vote. Where were the historical, social, economic, scientific, cultural experts who could best assemble an informed collection of Ireland’s best and brightest, past and present?

All respect to the late Stephen Gately but chances are, if people had been polled for this list three years ago, he would have been bumped off it by Katy French. His inclusion has all the hallmarks of someone having seen a TV3 tribute to him the evening before.

Popular culture can’t be ignored. But why, say, does Colin Farrell take precedence over Gabriel Byrne, who is considered worthy of being Ireland’s new cultural ambassador to the world – but not good enough to get the nod ahead of Joe Dolan? We all loved Ronnie Drew, but what about the global singing superstar of his time, Count John McCormack?

Why not Maureen Potter or Spike Milligan for their comic genius? Has Louis Walsh done as much to promote distinctively Irish music as Oscar-nominated, Grammy-winning, 70-million-album-selling Enya?

It’s completely random. Charles Haughey – the self-serving shyster who served as a role model for all the self-serving shysters who would succeed him in public office – is the biggest insult of all. Sure, why would Samuel Beckett be included over CJ – poor old Sam only won a Nobel Prize for Literature and the French Croix de Guerre for his work in the Resistance against the Nazis.

The saddest failure of this list is that it devalues the real achievements of our great little country. There are not many made in the mould of Grace O’Malley, who managed to stand up to Queen Elizabeth I of England and come away with her head still intact, or Tom Crean, one of the greatest and most humble explorers of all time.

There are so many outrageous omissions. Robert Boyle, father of modern chemistry; George Boole, a founder of computer science; playwright GB Shaw; C.S. Lewis, author of the globally-beloved Narnia books; Pele’s favourite footballer, George Best; TK Whitaker, the great – and still very much alive – civil servant whose economic plan dragged Ireland into the modern era of free trade and prosperity.

Incidentally, Whitaker was voted Irishman of the 20th Century by an RTE programme a few years back. How fickle are they?

We could treat this poll with the same levity RTE have – and all spoil our votes by plumping for Dustin the Turkey (who, sadly, didn’t make it either). It’s a joke anyway. We might as well make it official.

Bad boys, bad boys, what you gonna do?

The truth about stars who say they're sex addicts
Yes, there is such an illness -- but many just use it as an excuse for bad behaviour, says Susan Daly

Saturday March 27 2010

When Eldrick Tont Woods was still the king of clean, Nike deified him in their iconic, oft-parodied, "I am Tiger Woods" TV commercial.

Thirteen years later, those parodies could be updated with the addition of those five little words: "I am Tiger Woods -- and I'm a sex addict."

It has become the justification du jour for celebrities caught with their trousers down. We especially expected to hear it last Sunday when the man with a catalogue of multimillion-dollar endorsements and a marriage to save gave his first post-rehab interviews.

Clearly, being labelled a serial philanderer is not good for the image, implying as it does a selfish, immoral, undisciplined personality. Applying the term 'addiction' to such behaviour reclassifies it as a psychological disorder, thereby rebranding the trespasser as a victim.

It was thought at one point that erstwhile England captain John Terry might spend a highly publicised spell in a sex-treatment programme to atone publicly for his sins against his wife and team-mates. Likewise, the newly separated Ashley Cole.

Russell Brand, David Duchovny and Halle Berry's ex-husband Eric Benet have all confessed in the past to 'suffering' from sexual addiction.

Whether such high-profile figures are chemically addicted to sex -- or just happily promiscuous until they are forced to give it a more PR-friendly label -- is up for debate.

Interestingly, Woods has refused to use the term 'sexual addiction' in his latest round of mea culpas ahead of the US Masters. He needs to start building bridges with his fans and big-name brands -- and quickly.

His people afforded two television sports stations five minutes each last weekend to quiz Woods on his 'recovery' after 45 days of in-patient treatment. Woods used terms like "disgusting" and "denial" to describe the "bad things" he had done; but also triumphal words like "conquering" and "strength" to ascribe his recovery to his own depth of character. Love the sinner, not the sin.

But when asked directly what exactly he had been in treatment for, Woods refused to elaborate. "That's a private matter," he said.

Dr Eoin Stephens, head of training at the Irish Centre for Sexual Addictions, is adamant that sexual addiction is very real, but that the term can also be abused.

"It can certainly be misused and overdone as a diagnosis," he says.

"This happens partly in the religious right in America, where any sexual behaviour deemed unacceptable can be classified in that way."

Tiger's retreat from the words, he says, could be read in many ways.

"One possibility is that he doesn't want the label or it could be that his behaviour wasn't actually as a result of sexual addiction. I've met people who aren't really out of control but have a sense of entitlement to inappropriate behaviour."

Relationship psychotherapist David Kavanagh doesn't like the use of the term at all. Instead, he describes the "sexual compulsivity" that he believes is causing problems in the relationships of roughly one-10th of his clients.

"In some situations, celebrities have used sex addiction as a get-out-of-jail card," he says, "but I think it is being seen as a shame-based description.

"People think it's easy for famous people to trot it out to evade blame for their behaviour but in some ways, it's more socially acceptable to say you are an alcoholic than to say you are a sex addict."

The medical community does not universally accept sexual addiction as a genuine psychological diagnosis. The committee behind the next edition of the psychiatrists' bible, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, which is due out in 2013, has announced that they won't be including it in the giant tome.

The proposed diagnosis for excessive sexual behaviours that impact negatively on one's relationships, work and mental health, will be called "hypersexual disorder".

So, no, it's not an official diagnosis, says Dr Eoin Stephens, "but then neither was post-traumatic stress until 1980."

This public perception is also often that sex rehab centres and celeb PR gurus are trying to medicalise what is simply bad behaviour.

"If I have to have an addiction, I'll take that one," goes the joke.

David Duchovny's announcement in 2008 that he was getting treatment for sexual addiction was accompanied by predictable sniggers, because at the time he was playing the role of a sex-obsessed writer on the TV show Californication. The 2007 comedy Blades of Glory made the issue its own punchline, with a sex addicts' support group meeting descending into a frantic orgy.

Some celebs have been back-pedalling furiously away from their supposed sex addictions. Musician Eric Benet went into sex-addiction rehab in 2002 but later told New York magazine: "In retrospect, it's not what I would label my situation".

Michael Douglas, who is habitually trotted out as an example of A-list sex addiction, has said that he "voluntarily went into rehab" because of a drink problem around 1990.

"Some smart-ass editor said, 'Oh, another boring story about an actor going to rehab. Let's give him sex addiction.'"

The message is that saying you're a sex addict isn't 'sexy' at all.

"There is a perception, even among our other clients here, that those who come into us with a sexual addiction isn't really as serious as a substance addiction like, say, heroin," says Dr Fiona Weldon, clinical director of the Rutland treatment centre in Dublin.

"It doesn't take long for that misperception to lift because they soon see how devastating it can be. Whole families are destroyed by it, whole lives."

She categorically insists that sexual addiction is real and that as a psychological addiction, it can be much stronger than an addiction to an external substance.

"Take nicotine, for example; it will leave the system in three or four days.

"Behavioural addictions such as sex or gambling can be so much more complex. It is not simply the addiction to the high of the sexual content itself. In most cases, the anticipation of the sexual act is what gives the greater high and it becomes more and more difficult to achieve that same high.

"People end up going to huge expense, effort and time chasing it, to the expense of everything else in their life."

Psychotherapist David Kavanagh points out that whatever you call excessive, repetitive sexual behaviours, we may be conditioned to think it's more normal than it is.

"Maybe pornography isn't actually harmless to your marriage, perhaps it's just an acclimatisation," he says.

"The sex industry has a huge investment in making us believe that going to a strip club for a stag night is harmless fun, but no one knows definitively if that is true."

For now, the spotlight remains on Tiger Woods. In his latest interview with ESPN, he may have given the key to his bad behaviour.

"And as I said earlier in my statement, I felt entitled."

A fit, wealthy young athlete with time away from the wife to succumb to the temptations laid before him: is that sexual addiction or opportunism?

Quiet time with Cillian

Cillian Murphy is down at the Dingle Film Festival this weekend - and so am I. Wonder what our reunion conversation will be like... This is an interview from when I met him in Dublin last week...

http://www.independent.ie/entertainment/day-and-night/features/defying-murphys-law-2104305.html

Defying Murphy's law

Cillian Murphy doesn't do TV chat shows because, he says, he'd be no good at them. That's probably true. The Cork-born actor isn't one to embroider an anecdote just to entertain his interviewer.

It's not that he is rude or unfriendly, but he's just not that comfortable talking about himself. And that's not even the personal details; his wife, his two toddler sons, his 'real' life. We're discussing his more outlandish roles -- the transsexual Patrick 'Kitten' Braden in Breakfast on Pluto, the psychotic Jackson Rippner in Red Eye -- when he blushes and breaks off.

"I hate talking about my own stuff," he says. But as we're not ensconced in this nice suite in the Merrion Hotel to talk about me, he gathers himself.

"I enjoy playing characters who are as far away from me as possible," he says. "I guess that role in that plane film, Red Eye, playing this guy who was seemingly nice and then flips -- I really enjoyed that."

The cliché that acting is a mask behind which one can hide is true in some ways for Murphy, but the interesting thing is that he doesn't actually seem that shy. The last time I saw him, about six months ago, he was on a makeshift stage in a barn in the middle of field in Monaghan. Pat McCabe, author of Breakfast on Pluto, had roped him into performing at his Flat Lake Arts Festival outside Clones. Murphy was either supposed to be playing guitar with his old rock band (more of that anon) or doing a reading with playwright Enda Walsh.

"It didn't work out, so in the end I said, 'Oh feck it, I'll just DJ' and I just played tunes off my computer," he says. Completely unabashed, Murphy took to the stage armed with just a can of beer and his Mac.

Wasn't he a bit embarrassed? "It was great fun," he laughs. "That night, even playing tunes and having people dance, there's that need to perform, you know?" Although he does admit that in the end he got down off the stage and started dancing with the crowd because he felt like "a gawl", a particularly Munster term for 'eejit', up there.

"I wasn't a hugely extroverted kid growing up," he says, "but that performance thing was always there."

At first it expressed itself through music: he and his younger brother formed a rock band, which was at one point on the cusp of signing a five-record deal with a London music label. Their parents had reservations -- his brother, Paidi, was still in school, and Cillian in his first year of law at UCC at the time -- and they turned down the offer.

Shortly afterwards, he turned a fledgling interest in acting into his first professional performance as the charismatic lead of Enda Walsh's Disco Pigs. I saw him in that first stage run in Cork in late 1996 and, although it's easy to say this in hindsight, the raw, visceral power of his performance seemed prophetic.

Murphy didn't see it like that -- at first anyway. "I didn't know any better, I didn't see any future in it [acting]. I just thought, it's a great laugh, you only have to work an hour at night and you can sleep all day and you get to go touring."

Only a run in Dublin and at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival finally convinced him that there might be a future in this acting lark. "I was so lucky to get a play that was so brilliant and so successful," he says. "I began to realise that this was a bit more serious and it was making a proper impact."

So out went college -- "Law was the wrong match, definitely. There is a very narrow potential for creativity" -- and in came a profession where the performer in him took full flight. He might be reserved and unassuming in person, but there has been nothing tentative about his choice of roles.

His Batman baddie Scarecrow used the cool intensity of his striking blue eyes to chilling effect; in Breakfast on Pluto, those same wide eyes are key to the portrayal of the sensitive and innocent Kitten.

His reluctance to tread the chat-show circuit hasn't done him any harm in Hollywood -- his CV of independent 'European' films is interspersed with big-bucks works such as Danny Boyle's Sunshine, the aforementioned Red Eye, Girl With A Pearl Earring, 28 Days Later and, somewhere between the two worlds, Ken Loach's The Wind That Shakes The Barley.

Next week sees his latest film, Perrier's Bounty, opening in cinemas nationwide. It's Murphy's first Irish film in a few years.

"I don't have a system where I do 'one for them, one for us', but I think it's important to make films about your own country. And to have loyalty towards the industry at home. Take Vincent Cassel; he'll make films in America and then he'll go back home and make a huge amount of films in France."

As a younger actor -- he's now 33 -- he says he was keen to seek out roles where he wasn't defined as an Irish person. "As you get older, you worry less about that, it's more about the quality of the stories."

In Perrier's Bounty, he is Michael McCrea, a "bottom-feeder in the criminal world", playing opposite Brendan Gleeson, Liam Cunningham and Jim Broadbent. Broadbent plays Michael's father and it is the relationship between the two of them, as much as the "fun" shoot-'em-up scenes, that attracted Murphy to the job.

"No matter how old you are, you revert to being a surly teenager," he says, "you never, ever meet your parents totally as adults. You'll always be the child, they'll always be the parent, there's this friction and I thought that was really well played by Jim.

"What Mark [O'Rowe, the writer] does really well -- and he did this in Intermission [in which Murphy starred with Colin Farrell] -- he writes Irish males brilliantly. The inability to express one's feelings and the inability to say to the girl what he's feeling about her. The inability to sort this shit out with his parents. I recognise that in myself and in my friends."

If that sounds like a bit of a personal insight, well, it's only a glimpse. He admits that sometimes he can go home to wife Yvonne in London with the "residue" of a character hanging about at the end of an intense filmshoot, but that ultimately, "I'll say I'm just cooling off and getting back to 'Cill'; to myself."

He's been at home since filming on the new Christopher Nolan film, Inception -- also starring Leonardo DiCaprio -- wrapped in December. "I'm sure there's a way of working all the time, but that doesn't really interest me," he says.

Going out on the town doesn't interest him either -- he's anxious to keep his family out of the papers. And probably because of this low profile he keeps, the paparazzi don't bother with him. "I think it's fair game with me but it's not very nice when they do it with the kids. It hasn't happened much and there's not very much you can do about it, but as a dad your animalistic, protective instinct is to get angry."

He also has a professional reason for retaining an air of mystery. "It's very hard to retain any sort of distance from people nowadays, but if you can retain any of that, you should, so that when you do a play or film, people will be able to believe the character a bit more. There are some actors I don't know anything about and I'm glad because I can enjoy their performances more."

Again, he's probably right. And if that's what it takes for him to keep surprising audiences with his chameleon characters then, Cill, it's nice not knowing you.

Perrier's Bounty is released on March 26th

CILLIAN CHAMELEON – Murphy’s biggest on-screen transformations
28 DAYS LATER (2002): Trainspotting director Danny Boyle spotted Murphy in Kirsten Sheridan’s movie version of Disco Pigs and brought the indie darling to mass international attention.
RED EYE (2005): This was Murphy’s year of the baddie in which he proved those stunning baby blues could transform him in a split-second from romantic lead to chilling terrorist.
BREAKFAST ON PLUTO (2005): Certainly his greatest physical transformation, playing transvestite ‘Kitten’ Braden in this Neil Jordan film also brought him his greatest critical acclaim – and a Golden Globe nomination.
THE WIND THAT SHAKES THE BARLEY (2006): Ken Loach cast Murphy as a young Corkman caught up in the horrors of the Irish War of Independence and the Civil War in this Cannes award-winning saga. It was a personal revolution for Murphy, who said he found it challenging to be playing a character close to his own personality (“only braver”).

Angie, Aaaaaaangie

I was very nearly christened 'Angela' but my mother was put off by my father's insistence that he would call me 'Angie'. Mother hates diminuitives in names, for some reason. So I was named Susan instead (because clearly, Susan, can't be shortened to anything... er... Sue, Susie, Suze etc.?)
If you're the type who believes in nominal determinism, you might wonder how differently I might have turned out if my name was Angie...

From today's Irish Independent:
http://www.independent.ie/lifestyle/independent-woman/celebrity-news-gossip/would-you-trust-your-man-with-angelina-2095055.html

Would you trust your man with Angelina?
Susan Daly on Hollywood's number one femme fatale

Thursday March 11 2010

Who's afraid of Angelina Jolie? It's now apparently the turn of Johnny Depp's missus. Vanessa Paradis, his partner of 12 years, was reportedly unhappy to discover that Depp's latest film The Tourist requires him to film a long and steamy sex scene in the shower with La Jolie.

Either Ms Paradis has environmental concerns about water wastage or she is worried Jolie will try to take a bite out of Johnny. Perhaps the whole story is trumped-up publicity for the movie but it says something about the widespread belief in Angelina Jolie's magnetism. French songbird Paradis might have the second-sharpest pair of cheekbones in showbiz (after those of her paramour) but Jolie is, we are constantly reminded, a maneater. Ooh oh, here she comes, and she's coming for her co-star.

What is it about Angelina Jolie that -- six children later -- she is still considered Hollywood's top vamp? Clearly, the looks have something to do with it. Vanity Fair readers have crowned her the most beautiful woman on the planet. The perfect symmetry of her facial features has been used by scientists to illustrate the ideal of female beauty, and its proportions directly compared to those of the Egyptian queen Nefertiti.

Jolie has admitted that she looks a bit odd. "I sometimes think I look like a funny Muppet," she once said. Her beauty is so extreme, it is almost cartoonish. From the moment in 2001 when she was poured into rubber and Lycra to bring to life the pneumatic video game heroine Lara Croft, she has become fetishised. The poster for her 2004 film Taking Lives took for granted that she has one of the most scrutinised faces in the world -- it featured only a close-up of her instantly recognisable lips.

Jolie's other-worldly appearance tips over from being every man's fantasy into the realm of the merely fantastical. Jennifer Aniston, the woman she will forever be pitted against as long as she remains with Brad Pitt, is arguably the more conventionally desirable star. Women imagine that with the right personal trainer, dietician and stylists, they could come close to emulating Jennifer. Men imagine that in similar circumstances, they might be in with a chance.

The idea of being Angelina Jolie -- or being with her -- doesn't seem a possibility for mere mortals. No wonder we feel that should Jolie want something, or someone, not a person on earth is powerless to stop her. The alleged Paradis paranoia we have seen before: in 2004, pop star Kylie Minogue -- again a much-desired woman in her own right -- felt the need to fly to the set where her then-lover Olivier Martinez was filming with Jolie and hang out just off-camera.

What is surprising is that Jolie still has the power to make tongues wag six years later -- it was claimed recently that she once had an affair with Mick Jagger while he was married to Jerry Hall -- despite being in the most settled relationship of her life.

In recent years, especially since the trauma of her mother's death from cancer three years ago, Jolie's slim frame has grown terribly gaunt. Too rich? Not when you and your lover are passionate philanthropists; but too thin? Probably.

Also playing against the old 'homewrecker' perception is the fact that her personal likeability is supposed to be on the up. Her Q score -- a US index used to decipher how positively the public feels towards a celebrity -- has increased since her union with Brad Pitt, the creation of their family and her high-profile work for the UN. Jennifer Aniston or Laura Dern (who was dumped in favour of Jolie by her fiance Billy Bob Thornton) may not consider Jolie to be a friend to women but feminist writer Naomi Wolf has given the actress her influential stamp of approval.

Her paean to Jolie as the new embodiment of 'having it all' graced the cover of Harper's Bazaar last summer. "Polls show that her appeal and magnetism play at least as powerfully in the fantasy life of females," argued Wolf.

It is true that Jolie has thrown off some of the scent of crazy danger that she used to trail through her early to mid-20s. Back then, she spoke freely about bisexuality, her knife collection and self-harming. Her short marriage to Hackers co-star Jonny Lee Miller was notorious chiefly for her wedding outfit of skin-tight leather trousers and a white shirt with Jonny's name written on it in her own blood. The second marriage, to Pushing Tin co-star Billy Bob, was written in tattoos, vials of each other's blood worn around the neck and public displays of groping.

Her new role as matriarch of a family of eight seems Brady Bunch by comparison. Yet the frisson of distrust remains. The Pitt-Jolie relationship is still tarnished by the "uncool" (Jen's word) revelation by Jolie not too long ago that she and Pitt fell in love on the set of Mr and Mrs Smith, while he was still married. She might claim the pair didn't get "intimate" until after Aniston and Pitt separated, but the notion of her homing in on her alpha-male mate like a heat-seeking missile is hard to shake.

Jolie hasn't entirely lost her mystique by becoming a mother. When she was married all those years ago, she was far from a Stepford wife. In the same way, now that she is apparently 'settled', she is still subverting societal norms by not marrying Pitt.

Like her or loathe her -- and few have no opinion at all on Jolie -- she is undeniably a woman of power. That, even more than her pillowy lips, is most seductive of all.

THE EVOLUTION OF THE FEMME FATALE:
DELILAH: The emasculation of the male is a big hobby of the femme fatale -- Delilah managed it by giving her husband Samson a bad haircut.

She's just one of many Old Testament temptresses but the only one Tom Jones ever sang about.

THEDA BARA: The film industry loves its femme fatales and every star from Rita Hayworth as seductive cabaret singer Gilda to Linda Fiorentino in The Last Seduction has Theda Bara to thank for the blueprint.

Her predatory roles popularised the term 'vamp' (short for vampiress) in the silent cinema era.

AVA GARDNER: As sexually notorious off-screen as on was La Gardner. An excellent biography by Lee Server, Love is Nothing, detailed Gardner's insatiable carnal appetites.

She had countless lovers and a callous attitude towards those obsessed with her beauty -- including her third husband Frank Sinatra.

MATA HARI: The Dutch exotic dancer picked up her sexy moves while married to an army officer in Java, and exploited them when she moved to Paris in 1903.

She manipulated her rich lovers to pay for her luxurious lifestyle but in World War 1 she was tried for spying for the Germans and executed.

Then one by one, the stars would all go out...

For Oscars weekend, I had a look at the fading star system for the Irish Independent's Review section.
http://www.independent.ie/entertainment/film-cinema/star-wars---its-the-final--showdown-2090776.html

Actors will battle with computer-animated sprites for tomorrow's Oscars as technology threatens the big names, writes Susan Daly

PICTURE three A-lister actors in a room together. Sandra Bullock, the star whose movies made most money in 2009; Morgan Freeman, the actor who has just crowned a career of playing wise, dignified men by playing wise, dignified Nelson Mandela; and Jeff Bridges, hotly tipped to take the Best Actor Oscar for A Crazy Heart.

They are gathered for Newsweek magazine’s annual Oscar nomination shortlist discussion. And they are not entirely happy. They have just been asked what they think of motion-capture acting, the method used in the blockbuster Avatar to capture actors’ facial expressions and map them onto computer-generated images.

Avatar, the most commercially successful and technologically advanced film in
cinematic history, has been nominated for nine Academy Awards.
Not one of those nominations is for an actor.

Freeman looks stern. “I think it’s a bit faddish,” he says. “Because it’s really cartoons.” Bullock maintains she hasn’t seen it yet. Jeff Bridges plays the diplomatic card. “It was a little uncomfortable,” he says, “but there’s something exciting about it too. It’s where it’s all going.”

Mind you, Bridges would say that – he had his face animated by the same technique for the upcoming sequel to his 1982 science fiction hit Tron.

Their unease is understandable. Avatar suggests that a film can make actors a secondary concern and still be nominated for Best Picture. It may even win – Hollywood does like a movie that shows the industry can still churn out $2 billion-dollar blockbusters.

It’s clear that motion-capture still requires an actor to emote the incredibly accurate range of expression that appears on screen – they just don’t need to be big name stars. Sam Robinson and Zoe Saldana are the actors behind the blue-skinned ‘avatars’ of the movie. If you haven’t heard of them, you are in excellent company.

The Avatar outcry is interesting because this technology has been making inroads at the box office for a few years now. The hideous Gollum creature in Lord of the Rings was created through motion-capture (dubbed MoCap by the industry, don’t you know). The actor he was based on was the very excellent but not at all well-known character actor Andy Serkis. Serkis was also the face emoting the tantrums of King Kong in the 2005 CGI remake of that movie. At least that’s one actor making a few bob out of the new technology.

The hugely successful Pixar animation films started off using stars to voice their movies. Toy Story in 1995 had Tom Hanks and Monsters, Inc (2001) had Billy Crystal, John Goodman and Steve Buscemi. As time went on, the stellar line-ups largely disappeared but success continued. No Pixar film has ever made a loss. Its latest – and also a runner for Best Picture at this year’s Oscars – is Up. The voice actor with the highest profile attached to the project is probably Ed Asner, best known for playing TV’s Lou Grant.

By contrast, a huge star doesn’t guarantee big box office. Last summer’s record for star-cast movies was bad enough: Julia Roberts, the first Hollywood actress to be able to command a $20m cheque for her ability to lead movies to box office receipts of $100m or more, had a deflated return to the screen with the loss-making Duplicity. Denzel Washington and John Travolta made a disappointing profit of about $50m with The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3. Even Eddie Murphy, the so-called critic-proof star, saw his fans turn their nose up at his comedy, Imagine That. It cost around $55m to make and took in around $22m. Imagine that.

The bigger picture looks no better. The lead actors in the highest-grossing movies of the decade included Elijah Wood (the Lord of the Rings trilogy), Daniel Radcliffe (Harry Potter), Tobey Maguire and Christian Bale (Spider-man and Batman), Shia LaBeouf (Transformers). Johnny Depp also gets a look-in based mainly on his participation in the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. Mike Myers is there mostly in voice alone, for the animated Shrek series. In fact, you have to go to No.25 to find a bona fide star, Tom Hanks, with The Da Vinci Code – and that film arguably traded off the bestselling book it was based on.

We speak of George Clooney as the successor to Cary Grant. Clooney, however, has only just tasted what it is to be the lead of a $100m film as Up In The Air has nudged over that mark. (The Oceans series made over the $100m, but he was sharing the limelight with Brad Pitt and Matt Damon.) Tom Cruise, formerly the actor with the longest consecutive runs of $100m opening weekends, only managed a $22m opening weekend with Valkyrie – although it has taken over $200m since its Christmas 2008 launch.

So here’s the situation: franchise movies and movies based on comics, books and video games are hot, hot, hot. Franchise actors are not. In the so-called golden age of Hollywood in the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s, John Wayne, Bing Crosby or the aforementioned Grant hardly knew what it was to flip-flop between hits and misses. (See the panel for the all-time biggest box office draws). Their names were franchises in the way the new Harry Potter film is now, guaranteeing a sellout opening weekend.

Individual star wattage shone even more brightly in accepted franchise pairings – Tracy and Hepburn, Bogie and Bacall, Astaire and Rogers, Crosby and Hope, Crawford and Gable, Powell and Loy, Garland and Rooney. Certain actor-director combos were also surefire winners – Grant and Hitchcock, Wayne and Ford spring to mind.

Some of the most popular actors did consistently well because they were contained within the studio star system which, when it identified a genre that was working well for their starlets, tended to want them to stay in it. Screwball comedy and westerns produced some of the biggest stars because that’s what the audience wanted to see. If you think about it, genre films continue to be the biggest draw at today’s box office: comedy, action, horror and teen franchises like Twilight or Harry Potter. It’s just that the demographic of the audience has changed to a much younger one and so the genres they prefer have too.

All is not entirely lost for our dwindling pack of A-list stars. It is true that they have had more trouble justifying the $20m pay cheque if their films consistently fail to attract box office heat. But there are still some stars who can do it – after that modest opening weekend, Tom Cruise’s Valkyrie ended up taking $200m worldwide and he’s taking no chances by signing up to Mission Impossible IV.

Either way that one turns out, he can either claim a success based on his brand name, or a failure that shows franchises are not the always a winner. Brad Pitt is acknowledged as a still substantial draw – that’s why the promotion for Inglorious Basterds focused largely on him, even though he’s only in half the movie.

There is also the argument that technology has been threatening to overtake the star system for about, oh, three decades now, from the introduction of CGI in the early 1980s. And what happened there? Actor and CGI managed to peacefully co-exist. In fact, would Titanic have made stars of Leonardo diCaprio and Kate Winslet in 1997 had they been forced to ‘keep it real’ and make it on a ferry?

Morgan Freeman shouldn’t worry too much about being made redundant – but he might want to think about getting fitted for a MoCap face mask.

PANEL:
PULLING POWER – The definitive list of box office stars
The A-list star is not yet extinct but the cold, hard facts of cash show that they don’t have the same wattage at the box office as the stars of yesteryear.
The Quigley Publishing Company has been reliably compiling a list of Hollywood’s top money-making stars every year since 1932. The annual Quigley Poll is based on the revenue a star’s movies generate - but also on the votes of movie theatre owners on who they know will attract an audience.

Last summer, Quigley’s compiled their all-time top 20 of the past 77 years, carefully weighted by the number of annual lists a star appeared on during their career. It is interesting to see how few of this generation’s A-listers appear in the top score. Even the few who do – Tom Cruise, Julia Roberts, Eddie Murphy, Harrison Ford and Mel Gibson – are all on the wrong side of 40.

And the all-time box office big-hitter? John Wayne, a man who appeared in over 150 films but only won one Academy Award, for True Grit.

Quigley’s All-Time Top Money-Making Stars:
1. John Wayne: He became a star in John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939) and their partnership endured over 20 further successful movies. Wayne was consolidated as an icon of American masculinity, notwithstanding the variety of hairpieces he wore from the late 1940s onwards to hide his balding pate.

2. Clint Eastwood: Eastwood was another star embedded on the public consciousness by the western thanks to his role in the TV series Rawhide from 1959-64. Shortly afterwards he transferred that recognition to the big screen and created an unbeatable niche as the tough guy anti-hero.

3. Tom Cruise: His break with Paramount Pictures in 2006 and his much-mocked interest in Scientology was heralded as the beginning of the end for the star system. That same year, however, he still topped Forbes magazines list of 100 most influential celebrities. News just broke in the past week that he is on board for the fourth installment of Mission Impossible – it can’t hurt these days to stay hitched to a franchise that has raked in $1.4bn worldwide.

4. Gary Cooper: He once said that “The general consensus is that I don’t act at all.” Luckily for ‘Coop’, the strong, silent type proved to be very suitable to the westerns (yes, those again) adored by the vast movie-going audiences of the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s. It helped that he nearly always played the good guy.

5. Clark Gable: Even though he had already been nominated twice for an Oscar before Gone With The Wind came along in 1939, Rhett Butler sent him stratospheric in the same way Titanic would anoint Leonardo diCaprio 60 years later. Gable’s appeal was such that he was second only to Shirley Temple in popularity in the 1930s – and she’s the film star who apparently helped pulled America out of the Depression.

6. Bing Crosby: The ultimate crossover star, Crosby reinforced his movie star status by being one of the most successful recording artist for 20 years from the mid-1930s onwards. He was the person who did most to boost GI morale in World War II, according to Yank magazine. As a multimedia artist, he was almost unprecedented and certainly unrivalled.

7. Paul Newman: How to explain the enduring appeal of Old Blue Eyes? Was it his
beauty, his talent, his contrary choice to play loners and outcasts that played against his looks? Whatever it was, when he died in 2008, Kevin Spacey remarked: “An era just ended.”

8. Tom Hanks (tie): Hanks might be more of a powerhouse producer these days, but as an actor he has brought in $3bn in box office receipts. If ever there was a test of star power, it was his ability to seduce audiences to watch him play with a volleyball on a deserted island for the best part of the huge 2000 hit, Castaway.

Bob Hope (tie): Hope had a mutually beneficial screen partnership with best friend Bing Crosby that yielded the seven hugely successful ‘Road’ movies from 1940 to 1962. At that time he began his 18-time stint as host of the Academy Awards and a career in broadcasting: no wonder his name could sell a film or two.

Mel Gibson (tie): Like Tom Cruise, his off-screen antics have tarnished his personal reputation, but for the 13 years during his career when he was a top ten powerhouse, he’s earned his place in the pantheon.

The top twenty is rounded out by: Burt Reynolds, Doris Day, Rock Hudson, Julia Roberts, Eddie Murphy, Cary Grant, Abbott & Costello, Harrison Ford, Shirley Temple and James Stewart.

My words are bigger than yours

http://www.independent.ie/lifestyle/my-words-are--bigger-than--yours-2090773.html

Martin Amis and his verbal brawls are no classier than Pete 'n' Kate's split, writes Susan Daly

Saturday March 06 2010

He says he's misunderstood. She says he's a selfish cad. His friend calls her spiteful. The parties involved, all well-known faces, chose to air their dirty linen through the pages of a British national newspaper rather than settle their grievances in private.

You would be forgiven for thinking this to be the latest volley in the bitter split between glamour model Katie 'Jordan' Price and pop-singer Peter Andre. The protagonists in this petty tit-for-tat, however, would be horrified by the presumption. Martin Amis is the enfant terrible of modern English literature. Anna Ford was once the face of BBC news. Surely a spat between them is of public importance?

It was certainly reported as such. The row was sparked when Amis complained to The Guardian newspaper that the press made a habit of twisting his quotes and making him look controversial when, really, he's just a nice old man. Ford, whose late husband was a close friend of Amis, took umbrage at this image of victimhood and called Amis to tell him to get over himself.

Except, of course, she didn't. She aired her accusations that Amis had been disrespectful at her husband's deathbed and neglectful of her daughter, his godchild, in a letter to The Guardian newspaper. Amis vowed to reply to Ford "personally". It transpired that to Amis, this meant a rebuttal fired off to the letters page, admitting his shortcomings as a godfather but calling her other grievances an "unworthy farrago".

A few days later, novelist Christopher Hitchens, a mutual friend of Amis and Ford's late husband Mark Boxer, stuck his oar in to take Amis's side in what he described as this "cultural free-for-all".

Hitchens was right about one thing: it was a free-for-all. The row was as undignified as drunken fisticuffs on a Friday night -- and every bit as trivial. Yet because this bit of luvvie hand-flapping was conducted through the pages of a liberal broadsheet, it acquired the sheen of intelligentsia.

The chattering classes had a licence to gawk at what was essentially a tabloid smackdown with bigger words. (Who uses 'farrago' as a term of abuse?)

Pete 'n' Jordan's bitchfests are in the tuppenny place to the tawdry squabbles of Amis and his literary cohorts. Amis -- the misunderstood guy, remember -- is as prolific in making enemies as writing novels. He threw over Pat Kavanagh, his agent of 22 years, in favour of a bigger advance in the early 1990s, losing his long-time friend Julian Barnes, Kavanagh's husband, in the process.

He dirtied his bib chez Kavanagh a second time by replacing his lover Julie Kavanagh, sister of Pat, with her best friend. He left his first wife, also for her best friend, the writer and now current Mrs Amis, Isabel Fonseca.

Amis's second in his recent duel, Christopher Hitchens, is no less generous with his sabre. An extract from his forthcoming memoir -- and it is forthcoming in many ways -- detailed his trysts in college with two young men who would later become members of Margaret Thatcher's government. He also included the nugget that he had slept with Sally Amis, Martin's younger sister. Amis himself has detailed Sally's battle with the alcoholism that would eventually kill her and what he called her "pathological promiscuity".

If this level of tawdry detail spilled over the pages of Heat magazine, it would be deemed tacky. Literary giants don't do sordid though -- they have grand passions.

Amis is a magnet for negative publicity that he says he does nothing to create. In the column that got Ford so riled up, Amis claimed a "mishmash of quotes" were responsible for reports that he had called for euthanasia for the elderly, and expressed dismay that women have "too much power for their own good".

His talent for generating attention is ironic considering comments he made about Katie Price a few months ago, reducing her appeal to "two bags of silicone". Amis feels he too is being reduced to the sum of his most gossiped-about parts, and his work overlooked. (He has a book out, you know.) He wrote: "The vow of silence looks more and more attractive."

It's a threat unlikely to be carried out. Amis's wordy circle can't resist the frisson of a bit of verbal mudslinging. Salman Rushdie has had a long-running feud with Germaine Greer since she -- he says -- dubbed him a megalomaniac almost 20 years ago. He in turn calls her "sanctimonious".

Chris Hitchens called Gore Vidal a "crackpot" last month and fell out with his journalist brother Peter for years, their dispute re-ignited from time to time in various publications.

The roots of such arguments are as banal as any in the world of celebrity -- professional rivalry, sexual jealousy, sheer bitchiness -- but are elevated by the self-importance of some literary showboats.

Yet, somehow, an obsession with the marriage of the Beckhams or the Coles is regarded as purely for the hard of thinking.

Take the case of VS Naipaul and Paul Theroux, who broke their 30-year friendship in 1996. Theroux later took the trouble to paint a thinly-veiled Naipaul as a miserly snob in his novel Sir Vidia's Shadow. The initial bone of contention between these two literary megaliths? Naipaul had married a "new and hostile" wife.

Essentially, they fell out because one didn't like the other's missus.

How to lose disgracefully

http://www.independent.ie/entertainment/day-and-night/columnists/nightwatch-no-fun-at-the-losers-table-2089664.html

By Susan Daly

Friday March 05 2010

The best backhanded compliment I've ever received came from a very drunk RTE personality. "You're a very cheerful person," he slurred, "for someone sitting at the losers' table."

Hell hath no fury like an ego scorned. There we were, guests at the sparkling jewel in the crown of Irish awards ceremonies (at least that's how the IFTA press release may have described it), but this guy wasn't having fun. And if he was going down, he was bringing the rest of us with him.

This is how it really is at awards ceremonies. Painted smiles served with a side of bitter lemon. In my tiny, highly partisan, bit of experience, the best way to enjoy them is from your couch with all the dull bits and tedious bores edited out. I won't be alone in being glued to the Oscars show on Sunday night. The best dresses, the frocky horrors, the glitz, the glamour! But it's a total spectator sport.

Angelina Jolie might look like she's having the time of her life as the bulbs pop on the red carpet, but what she's probably thinking is: "Oh Christ, it's my turn to get up in the morning with the kids." Jeff Bridges is probably wishing he was at home in his underpants. George Clooney is probably wishing Jeff Bridges was at home in his underpants so he could nab his Best Actor award. It's all me, me, me with these people.

Which brings me back to my disgruntled neighbour at the IFTAs a few years back. I've been to the awards a few times, through chance, by association -- but never on talent, let me assure you. The first time I went -- last-minute date of a desperate colleague -- my eyes were on stalks for the first hour. There's Rosanna Davison in the jacks! She's putting on lipstick! There are some people from Corrie! They're having the beef!

It took my colleague's threat to have me removed by security to calm me down.

In any case, subsequent proceedings tore the rosy veil from my eyes. A notoriously grumpy Irish director didn't smile back when I smiled at him (I found out about his notorious grumpiness later). The only bona fide star was Mischa Barton, who sat lonely as a Californian cloud while all the rest of us plebs did that Irish thing and studiously ignored the most famous person in the room lest they think we were uncool or something.

When it came time to take our seats, I got a little lesson in how to tell you're not at a VIP table. You're seated right beside the kitchen. The swinging service doors hit the back of your chair. Repeatedly. You wave and wave and wave every time a camera pans across the room but your mammy, watching patiently at home with her finger on the video record button, doesn't spot you once.

By the time of my last foray to the IFTAs -- and after this column is printed, no doubt it will be my very last -- I was wise to the old somebody/nobody ballroom divide. There were award nominees at our table for sure, but we were so far from the stage that if one of our number was to actually win something, they'd have to set a new world record for hurdling to get up to their gong in the allotted time.

Our new pal, the TV personality, clearly hadn't cottoned on to the geographical impossibility of his win. As he slipped into the seat beside me, he was all handshakes and bon mots. It was only after he questioned us all on our credentials and nominations that the truth dawned on him. A table populated by some nice but inoffensive documentary-makers, a few hangers-on and one incredibly dour comedian was clearly not the glamour table.

You could see the chagrin spread across his face like a bad case of the pox. The rest of the night was an arse-numbing blur of endless technical awards and hissed mutterings of "bastards" and "outrageous" from my increasingly wine-soaked table buddy. Kanye West would have thought he was over-reacting.

The next day, he rang into my answering machine and left an apologetic message. He needn't have bothered: I'm quite happy to be a loser if it means I can stick to watching awards show in my pyjamas in future.

The Farreller is fine

My interview with Colin Farrell from last Friday's Day and Night mag.

http://www.independent.ie/entertainment/day-and-night/features/the-taming-of-colin-2080713.html

THERE was a time when Colin Farrell was as Dub as you could get. He had a house in Irishtown and, for a time, an accent closer to Ringsend than to the affluent suburb of Castleknock where he grew up.
Funny then that when Farrell speaks of having come “full circle”, that realisation was formed on the toe-end of a peninsula in Cork.
He was 22 when he shot his first significant role on location in Beara as a handsome local lad who makes eyes at a married woman. The production, a four-parter TV drama called Falling For A Dancer, piqued interest in the striking young actor and his dark-eyed charisma. You could say it started there. Two years later, he was cast in Joel Schumacher’s Tigerland, his breakout role as a rebellious US army grunt that announced to Hollywood that there was a new kid in town. Hollywood had a vacancy for a hard-living Irishman and he filled it with charm and enthusiasm.
Almost a decade later, a father of two and teetotal, he arrived back in west Cork to head up Neil Jordan’s new film. In Ondine he plays Syracuse, a former alcoholic fisherman who is doing his best to stay out of trouble. All he wants is to do right by his sick young daughter (played beautifully by first-time actor Alison Barry) and shake off the nickname ‘Circus’, a legacy from drink-sodden years of acting the clown.
“He decided that he was going to extricate himself,” says Farrell, “not geographically, but he takes himself off the grid.”
It’s hard not to refer to the biographical parallels for Farrell who has credited having his eldest son, James, with US model Kim Bordenave, with transforming his life. After a few years of painting LA red, a five-month marriage to an actress, Playboy parties and a liquid diet, Farrell checked into rehab in 2005 for exhaustion and prescription drug dependency. James – or Jimmy, as his dad calls him - was still a toddler. He hasn’t drank alcohol since.
“Obviously the correlation between my life and Syracuse’s life was obvious in some ways but the script was so good when I read it that I didn’t see them or I was blind and in denial,” says Farrell, smiling politely and folding his legs neatly beneath him on an armchair in the Merrion. (Is it possible the Farreller taken up yoga? What would Richard Harris think?)
He looks well. Healthy, leanly muscular, bright-eyed and engaged – all glowing references for the potent combination of sobriety and being deeply in love.
The girl, we know about. The newspapers were full of photogenic snaps of Farrell and his gorgeous Ondine co-star Alicja Bachleda as they dazzled Dublin last week at the film’s premiere and on the IFTA red carpet.
Director Neil Jordan required them to fall in love on screen after Syracuse rescues the titular Ondine, played by Alicja, from the sea. Romance developed off-screen. “It didn’t really get to a place of intellectualising it,” says Farrell, “we just got in touch and went with it and that was it really. Cut to…” Cut to Henry, the son born to the couple on October 7 last year.
I say Alicja doesn’t look like a woman who had a baby five months ago. “I swear, love, she looked like that two days after the birth,” he says. I would hate her but all reports emanating from the room down the hall where she is ensconced are that she is warm and lovely and impossible not to like. But Farrell’s biggest smile is reserved for their boy. Fatherhood, both times, has burst open his heart. “There’s nothing bigger than it,” he beams.
When James was born in 2003, Farrell was in Morocco, stuck in the middle of filming Oliver Stone’s Alexander. When Henry arrived last autumn, filming had just wrapped on Farrell’s last project, a movie called London Boulevard, also starring Keira Knightley and Ray Winstone.
“So I haven’t been working for four or five months which has been lovely,” he says. “Because I didn’t get to meet Jimmy until he was six weeks old, on a runway in Morocco. He was six weeks old when I laid my eyes on him for the first time because I was working. I was blotto at the time anyway but it was still mad, even though I was in a haze. So it’s been lovely to be with Henry from day one.”
Farrell, 33, is disarmingly forthright. And what he says that what he admires most in the character of Syracuse – the absence of self-pity – is also a trait entirely lacking in himself.
He continues, in his free, loquacious manner, “Jimmy may as well have had a fucking driver’s licence at six weeks old for all the changes that go on, the stuff that I missed. Every day, the change that happens. You see this soul trying to connect with this body, in a way. To watch that take place was absolutely magic.”
Life is sweet right now. He, Alicja and Henry live in LA, as do James and his mother so it’s easy for Farrell to enjoy the hands-on dad role he so relishes. He has two movies coming out – London Boulevard and the hotly-anticipated The Way Back with the next generation Irish A-lister Saoirse Ronan (“She’s so fucking brilliant and able and proficient – it’s not hyperbole,” he insists.)
He’s in what the Yanks would probably call a good place – and what Farrell would probably take a few hundred more words to describe. So he does. Being back in west Cork, with its “maddeningly beautiful” scenery, reminded Farrell of what he calls a “modest epiphany” he had a few years back in the States.
“I was caught in this storm in Virginia and I felt this sublime moment of insignificance… the peace that came with it was counter to what I would have expected from feeling insignificant.
“But this feeling of insignificance I felt was in relation to nature and the power of nature was such a weight off my shoulders. I was like, Fuck me, I’ve nothing to worry about. I’m only here for a blip. I really am. This was here before me and this will be here after me. I’m not that important. I’m not the centre of the universe’.”
PLAYING IT FOR REAL: The roles close to Colin’s heart
Playing Syracuse was, says Colin Farrell, “one of the times when I felt I understood the emotional or intellectual cadence of the character very quickly. I understood it with Tigerland and I understood it with In Bruges.” Those two roles also provide a neat summation of how far the Dubliner has travelled…
TIGERLAND (2000): Farrell’s big Hollywood break was to be cast by Joel Schumacher as a Vietnam-era US Army recruit. As the rebellious Bozz, he practices compassion for his fellow grunts and disdain for his boot-camp military masters in equal measure. Variety magazine decided that the role showed Farrell had “everything it takes to become a major Hollywood star”.
IN BRUGES (2008): Despite all the big-budget fare in between, it was this low-fi surprise hit that gave Farrell some of his best critical notices since Tigerland and Phone Booth (2002). His nervy turn as hitman Ray was laced with humour and pathos. It also earned him his first Golden Globe for Best Actor (in a Musical or Comedy).
ENDS

MILF: Mother-in-law fingerpointing

You can almost hear the crack of mother-in-law jokes from here as Ashley Cole rolls out that old misogynistic chesnut...

http://www.herald.ie/opinion/susan-daly-of-course-the-motherinlaw-got-the-blame-it-couldnt-be-ashley-coles-fault-could-it-2081222.html

JUST when you thought Ashley Cole couldn't get any classier -- he blames the mother-in-law.

Has Ashley resurrected the comedian Les Dawson to do his PR? (Sample Dawson joke: "I can always tell when the mother-in-law's coming to stay: the mice throw themselves on the traps.")

Cheryl's mother Joan moved in with the couple two years ago in the wake of Ashley's first jump from the back page of newspapers to the front. A hairdresser called Aimee insisted she'd scored the England defender and the Cole marriage was thought to be in trouble.

Cheryl stood by her man-child, later telling Vogue magazine that she forgave him because he's "got a young mentality for his age anyway". A very attractive quality in a husband, you'll agree. Nonetheless, they stayed together and part of the reconciliation package was to have Joan fetch up in the spare room to support her daughter.

Now that Ashley finds himself back in hot water, he has lashed out and found an easy target. Like any reliable left-back under pressure, Ashley has decided that attack is the best defence.

Really Ashley, was your nine-bedroom mansion not big enough for the three of you? Could you not get a moment to yourself in any one of the five bathrooms, underground swimming pool area and five-a-side football pitch area? Could you not have avoided the mother-in-law by taking the servants' staircase?

Cheryl got one thing right in her marriage to Mr Cole. He's a little boy trapped in adult-size Premiership pants. How depressingly predictable that he won't take responsibility for the devastation of his marriage.

Then again, isn't that we've been told to expect from some men? Take this other theory being circulated by a 'close friend' of Ashley: Cheryl's successful career had driven a wedge between the couple. She left him to his own devices while she was off filming X Factor or on tour with Girls Aloud. Again, it's not me, it's you.

It all sounds terribly familiar. Remember when David Beckham allegedly nipped to the (Rebecca) Loos while holed up alone in Madrid? Somehow it became Posh's fault for not moving lock, stock and barrel of kids to Spain immediately on her hubby's transfer there.

Ashley's 'friends' imply Cheryl failed her marriage by not being at home 24/7 to keep her husband in line. How very 1950s. I bet she doesn't even own a frilly apron, the slattern.

No doubt they would like it very much if Cheryl made like Posh and joined herself at the hip to her husband as soon as suspicion set in. It's such a bogus accusation to level at poor Cheryl. She was a woman of her own making before she met baby-man Ashley. In fact, it probably did her credibility some temporary damage to stay with him as long as she did.

The problem is that while Cheryl is returning to the rest of us here in the 21st century, the door to the time machine that is being a WAG is still open. After all, the players still want them. A talented boy needs a devoted mummy to come home to (and not someone else's devoted mummy, apparently) and kiss their grazed knees better.

The women are to blame too. By aspiring to the post of WAG as some seem to do, they make themselves accessories to their famous and wealthy boyfriends and husbands.

Luckily for Cheryl she can buy her own diamonds and pay her own bills.

Cloning Cowell

My op-ed from Saturday's Evening Herald on news that Simon Cowell might be getting hitched at last...

WE knew it – the X-Factor’s Simon Cowell is just a big softie underneath it all. A ‘close pal’ has been telling newspaper reporters that Mr Grumpy has gotten engaged to his artist girlfriend. Not only that, but he is thought to have popped the question on Valentine’s Day during a romantic dinner.

Hold on one candy-coloured moment: dinner a deux, Valentine’s Day, a £250,000 diamond ring? That’s quite the leap from three years ago when Cowell tut-tutted at the “commerciality” of February 14. “I am not conventional,” he said back then. “I don’t do holding hands and cuddling up in front of the TV. I find things like Valentine’s Day ridiculous, being forced to be romantic on a certain day.”

Would you get him – “not conventional”. I bet he had a team of violinists serenading the ‘lucky’ lady, make-up artist Mezghan Husseiny, and I bet he went down on one knee for good measure.

Mind you, he also said repeatedly that he would never, ever get married. This is truly a momentous occasion. Simon Cowell, the man who thinks he’s always right, admits he may have been wrong.

Even if he’d never vowed to stay a bachelor, news of the engagement is surprising. (Not least to ex-girlfriend Terri Seymour, whom he was with for six of the years in which he was banging on about his wedding phobia). Who would ever have thought that Simon Cowell could love someone more than he loves Simon Cowell. If he was an ice-cream, he’d lick himself to death.

Could it be that turning 50 last year is what did it for Simon? His birthday party was like a particularly debauched stag night, complete with half-naked dancing girls, magnums of champagne and baby sharks swimming in tanks in the toilets. There isn’t much to do after a blow-out like that except get married.

A sense of mortality gets to us all at some stage. Something has certainly pierced Cowell’s armour and – oh dear, God – could it be love? Perhaps this is his version of a midlife crisis. He already has the garage full of trophy cars, so it’s no good splashing out on a firebox-red penile extension. He has to find another way to rebel.

Or maybe Cowell is more conventional than he would have us believe. He has said that his biggest fear of getting married had been the cost of getting divorced. What an old romantic. Now he’s talking of being “smitten” (and presumably, he has a good lawyer or seven who knows their way around a prenup).

But here’s the most telling revelation so far. In an upcoming TV interview, he tells Piers Morgan: “I think I need to have little Simons around.” So that’s it. Cowell’s ego demands that it’s time to start producing the future in his own image. Heavens preserve us all.