Operation save celebrities: The inner workings of the therapists who help stars to lead a ‘normal’ lifeGETTY IMAGES / PEPA ORTIZ (COLLAGE)
Operation Save the Celebrities: The inner workings of the therapists who help stars lead a ‘normal’ life
The tragic death of Liam Payne, who had previously sought help to cope with life in the spotlight, brings new life to the debate over whether early, unbridled fame is compatible with emotional stability
MIQUEL ECHARRI
Barcelona - OCT 26, 2024 - 23:05 COT
It’s undeniably rough to have sipped from the cup of fame at an early age, only to wind up excluded from the A-list. The process of restoring a celebrity’s damaged psyche can be traumatic, its outcome uncertain.
Tilda Swinton, Demi Moore, Julia Moore and Nicole KidmanSwinton and Moore: Courtesy Toronto International Film Festival; Moore: Chad Salvador—Variety/Getty Images; Kidman: Niko Tavernise—A24
While Brad Pitt and George Clooney Settle Into Silver-Fox Charm, Their Female Peers Are the True Stars of the Season
BY STEPHANIE ZACHAREK
20 September 2924
The pleasures of writer-director Jon Watts’ crime caper Wolfs are numerous: George Clooney and Brad Pitt play dueling fixers called in to clean up the accidental death of a young, adorable student—prior to his demise, occasioned by his jumping on a hotel bed, he’d been picked up by high-powered district attorney Amy Ryan in a bar. Clooney and Pitt have reached the age where they know it’s useless to pretend they’re something they’re not. Their faces look handsomely lived in; the whispers of gray in their artfully sculpted chin stubble feel honest and earned. Like Lucy and Ethel in the throes of a falling out, they’re fun to watch as they bicker and crab at one another, leaning heavily on their silver-fox charm. Still, what they’re offering feels as comfy as the worn-in leather jackets they wear. And in this late-2024 movie season, if you find yourself wishing for something more—for another view of what actors in the 50-to-60-ish age bracket can do—look to the women, who insist on pushing themselves out of the comfort zone rather than settling into it.
Demi Moore in Coralie Fargeat’s horror-of-aging black comedy The Substance, Nicole Kidman in Halina Reijn’s May-December sizzler Babygirl,Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore in Pedro Almodóvar’s moving and provocative The Room Next Door: These big-name movie stars are pushing into new territory rather than just riffing on whatever may have made them appealing 10, 20, or 30 years ago. That’s a luxury no actress can afford, and these women know it.
Penélope Cruz and Brad Pitt Star in CHANEL’s Nostalgic New Campaign
Penélope Cruz and Brad Pitt Star in CHANEL’s Nostalgic New Campaign
MARCH 27, 2024
This campaign isn’t just about revisiting the allure of a bygone era; it’s a vivid celebration of CHANEL’s indelible mark on fashion and film. The backdrop? The enchanting Deauville, a locale intertwined with CHANEL’s heritage, where Gabrielle Chanel herself opened her first boutique. This choice of location is no mere coincidence; it’s a nod to the brand’s roots and its intertwined history with cinema.
Pitt and Nicole were pictured enjoying a cosy date nine months ago, as their relationship was confirmed on Thursday
Jilted husband of Brad Pitt's new German model lover Nicole Poturalski, 27, is seen for first time since they started dating
The big screen icon and stunning model, 27, are believed to have been seeing each other for several months
Brad, 56, and Nicole holidayed together last week at Château Miraval, the estate in the South of France he purchased for $67 million in 2011 with ex-wife Angelina Jolie, it is claimed
Brad is believed to have been blown away by Nicole's stunning figure when he met her at her husband Roland Mary's exclusive Berlin restaurant Borchadt in August last year
The actor has known Roland for many years after he first visited the businessman's restaurant in 2009 when he was in Germany filming Quentin Tarantino's 'Inglorious Bastards'
Mr Mary, 68, who has been married several times, is said to be 'philosophical' about his wife's close relationship with the American big-screen legend
The businessman is said to be in an 'open marriage' with his 27-year-old partner, with who he has a seven-year-old son, Emil
Brad Pitt: No speechwriters involved in my acceptance speeches
Oscar-winner Pitt tells Variety that ‘funny friends’ helped him with his zinger-laced thank-yous during the 2020 awards season
Andrew Pulver Tuesday 11 February 2020
Brad Pitt has revealed that his newfound skill in the acceptance-speech game is not due to having hired a speechwriter, but that he wrote them with the help of “very funny friends”.
In an interview with Variety prior to the Oscars ceremony, Pitt said: “Historically, I’ve always been really tentative about speeches, like they make me nervous … This round, I figured if I’m going to do this, let’s put some real work into it, try to get comfortable. This is the result of that.”
‘A public speaker of rare zip and self-awareness’ … Brad Pitt waits for his best supporting actor Oscar statue to be engraved last week. Photograph: Eric Gaillard/Reuters
Pitt’s podium work has resulted in widespread compliments, with the Guardian describing him as “a public speaker of rare zip and self-awareness”. At the Golden Globes, when he won best supporting actor for his role as a stuntman in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, he said he’d hoped to bring his mother as his plus-one, “but any woman I stand next to they say I’m dating and it’d just be awkward”. After accepting the same award at the Screen Actors Guild ceremony he said his role was “a big stretch: a guy who gets high, takes his shirt off and doesn’t get on with his wife”.
Leonardo DiCaprio, Margot Robbie and Brad Pitt
Pitt told Variety that he “worked on” the speeches with “a lot of funny friends” – naming comics Jim Jefferies and Bob Oschack, as well as “my man” David Fincher, who directed him in Seven, Fight Club and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. “We trade barbs every week,” Pitt said.
Pitt won the best supporting actor Oscar for the same role, and got a politically charged gag into his acceptance speech, saying: “They told me I only have 45 seconds up here … which is 45 seconds more than the Senate gave John Bolton this week.”
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood review – uneven ode to a lost era
The director’s love letter to 1960s Hollywood, where all women are stereotypes and white men the real victims, disturbs and dazzles in equal measure
‘More than a buddy, less than a wife’: Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Photograph: Andrew Cooper/AP
I
t’s hardly surprising that this, perhaps the most “Tarantino-esque” of all Quentin Tarantino’s movies to date, is a love letter to Hollywood. Who has been more vocal about his passion for the movies, in all their glorious (and inglourious) variety, than Tarantino? And who has been more promiscuous with his affections, flirting with everything from grindhouse and exploitation flicks to martial arts, westerns and second world war adventures?
Margaret Quallery and Brad Pitt
But cinema is a notoriously fickle mistress. And Tarantino is a man who clearly relishes the concept of revenge. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, a film that is as much about the movie industry as it is about the Manson family crimes that rocked it, is a work of infatuation, certainly. But if it’s a love letter, it’s the kind tinged with the grasping anguish and stab of bitterness that comes from knowing that the object of affection is almost certainly eyeing up a new favourite.Success in Hollywood comes with built-in obsolescence. It’s an industry with a vampiric appetite for fresh blood. Actor Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio, signposting the character’s vulnerability with a slight stutter) knows this, but that doesn’t make it any easier to swallow. Formerly the lead in a wild west vigilante TV series, by 1969 Rick has already started the slow slide into bad guy bit-parts and bourbon bloat. As a guest on new shows, he allows himself to be bested each episode by the actors who are positioned as his replacements. Wet-eyed with self-pity after a straight-talking producer lays out a road map for his irrelevance, Rick hides behind the sunglasses of his confidant and former stuntman Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt). Their friendship is a constant in an uncertain world. Their fates are linked: “More than a buddy, less than a wife,” is how the film’s narration puts it.
That fear of no longer being current, no longer getting the calls is something that infects everyone who works in the movie industry to some degree or another. And you suspect that Tarantino himself is not immune to it. A scene in which an awestruck child whispers to Rick: “That was the best acting I have ever seen” is milked for manly tears. Meanwhile, young people with a less reverent approach to their elders are dealt with swiftly and efficiently, with the kind of sound design that emphasises the crunch of righteous fist into puny, snickering hippy jaws.
‘Depth and subtlety’: Margot Robbie as Sharon Tate in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Photograph: AP
This is a film set in a stunningly evoked Hollywood past. It can also be read as a commentary on Hollywood present. It’s a present that has skewed dramatically over the past couple of years, in which the balance of power has started to shift. And an industry that has started to hold itself to account. With that in mind, Tarantino’s decision to engineer audience support and sympathy for a character whose career has stalled because of allegations of violence against a woman feels like a deliberate provocation and a petulant dig at the #MeToo movement.
It doesn’t help that the female characters tend towards the schematic and stereotypical. Through sheer force of charm, Margot Robbie invests Sharon Tate, Rick Dalton’s Cielo Drive neighbour, with more depth and subtlety than the gilded, angelic ideal that is sketched on the page. With two notable exceptions – Margaret Qualley’s star-making skittish Manson girl and Julia Butters’s precocious child actor – the majority of the other female characters fall into the categories of either shrews or witches.
It’s this – the positioning of middle-aged white males as the real victims here, goddammit – that rankles. Together with a troubling ending that, at the director’s request, can’t be discussed, it makes the indulgences less easy to forgive. And there are many indulgences: the baggy first hour; the unwieldy two-tier flashback that sets up Cliff’s backstory; the jarring scene featuring Damian Lewis as a polyester version of Steve McQueen; the cheap shot at Bruce Lee.
But, equally, there is much here that represents a film-maker at the top of his game. The delight he takes in the details that anchor the story in time and place: who else but Tarantino would include entire montages dedicated to vintage fonts? The heart-tugging music choices; the limber camerawork and tawny nostalgic warmth of Robert Richardson’s cinematography; every last juicy frame set at the Manson family hideout at the Spahn Movie Ranch. It’s a film that could only have been made by one man. Tarantino’s fear of replacement, the subtext of some of the more uneven passages in the film, is, for the moment, unfounded.
Margaret Qualley knows Once Upon a Time in Hollywood was a 'once-in-a-lifetime experience'
By Derek Lawrence
July 27, 2019
With her bare feet kicked up on the dash, Margaret Qualleymay look like she’s as relaxed as can be inOnce Upon a Time Hollywood. But withQuentin Tarantinobehind the camera andBrad Pittbehind the wheel, she was secretly terrified. “I mean, how can you not be? I was just trying to soak up every minute, because I know this is a once-in-a-lifetime experience,” the 24-year-old actress tells EW.
And for Qualley — who stresses how “frickin’ nervous” she was to be involved in a project with such a pedigree, and how excited she was to be working with her favorite filmmaker — Once Upon a Time almost didn’t happen.
Auditioning for the film, she initially didn’t get the part. It was only after her father began trying to get her to visit him in Panama that fate stepped in. “He was like, ‘Book a ticket to Panama and you’ll get a Quentin Tarantino movie!’” she remembers him saying, which was funny because he had no idea about her audition, or even that such a movie existed. She did book that ticket, and it was on the beaches of Panama where, despite poor cellphone reception, a call managed to get through with a dream of a message: “You’ve got to fly home because you have a chemistry read with Brad Pitt.”She ultimately landed the part of Pussycat, a member of the Manson family who catches the attention of Pitt’s taciturn stuntman, Cliff Booth, in 1969 Los Angeles. Somewhat familiar with the Manson story that plays a role in Once Upon a Time, Qualley further studied up with DVDs given to her by Tarantino, and a surprising musical selection. “I don’t know if you’re familiar with Charles Manson’s album, but I always listened to that on my way into work,” she reveals. “To be honest, it’s not bad. [Laughs] So I’d listen to that the last, like, 10 minutes of driving to Spahn Ranch to kind of get me going; it became an OCD thing more anything.”
But not even that routine could fully prepare her for the Tarantino experience. Likening him to both a “talented jazz pianist” and a “fluid machine,” Qualley praises his generous direction and infectious excitement. “He shows up on set every day like a little kid on Christmas,” she says. On one particularly memorable day, Tarantino appeared with fresh dialogue he’d stayed up all night writing in longhand; in addition to the script pages (which she kept and intends to frame), Qualley got some advice that really resonated with her.
“I remember Quentin came up to me after a take and was like, ‘Did you mean to make a noise? Maybe I’m wrong, but I had this impulse that you wanted to do something but you didn’t quite do it,’” Qualley recalls. “And I did mean to, but I was kind of scared to take up space, because I felt so lucky to be there and I didn’t want to step on anybody’s toes. He was like, ‘Well, do it on the next take if you want. If you feel like doing something, I don’t know exactly what it is, but if you have the impulse to do something, then just listen to yourself.’ And I think that’s such great advice, because it was definitely nerve-racking to be there, but he encouraged me to trust myself, which was really nice and meant a lot.”
A lot more filmmakers will surely be trusting Qualley in the coming years, considering that the Leftovers alum is earning praise for her role in Once Upon a Time just a week after receiving an Emmy nomination for her performance in Fosse/Verdon. But those future projects will have a lot to live up to. “Quentin said, ‘This is going to be the most fun you’ve ever had making a movie,’” Qualley says. “And he was right.”
By the Sea, By the Beautiful Sea – Angelina’s Deep Dive into Grief
By Sasha Stone Posted on November 6, 2015
That Angelina Jolie-Pitt asks us to remove what we know about Brad and Angie from our feelings for a film about a couple embroiled in an emotional tangle is maybe a little naive on her part. They have always used their celebrity to bring attention to the right causes, and for the films they’re involved in – we get parsed versions of their personal life from them, and an often dubious encyclopedia of their personal life from the gossip columns. There are some celebrities who are simply too big, too embedded in our collective minds that that they can never disappear into a role the way most actors can. This would include larger than life personalities like Barbra Streisand, Madonna and now Angelina Jolie. So it is with inevitable overlay of knowledge about the icon that people will watch By the Sea.
Newlyweds awaken Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt’s sex life in this slow-moving vanity project
Mark Kermode, Observer film critic Sunday 13 December 2015 08.00 GMT
W
idely dismissed as a vanity project for its photogenic stars, this serves as the artsy European flipside to Mr & Mrs Smith, the enjoyably brash Hollywood smash-em-up that first spawned the Brangelina behemoth. Where Doug Liman’s 2005 action film found the couple trying to kill each other while falling in love, this finds them trying not to kill themselves while falling out of love. The 70s-set story largely unfolds in a lavish hotel suite in the scenic south of France (actually Malta), where blocked writer Roland (Brad Pitt) hits the bottle when given the cold shoulder by the medicated Vanessa (Angelina Jolie Pitt, also writing and directing). But when attractive newlyweds (Mélanie Laurent and Melvil Poupaud) move in next door, a spy hole in the wall awakens dormant desires that blend voyeurism and revenge, with underlying grace notes of grief. There’s a hint of the psychopathy of The Comfort of Strangers or Blue Velvetas these dead souls play Peeping Tom with the living embodiments of their past, but Jolie Pitt is clearly aiming more for the spirit of Bergman, Buñuel or Antonioni. Sadly, away from the war zones ofIn the Land of Blood and Honey and Unbroken, she becomes somewhat becalmed and we end up more focused on Vanessa’s symbolically entombing Liz Taylor/Sophia Loren wardrobe than the emotional battlefields of the bedroom. As for the couple’s long-withheld secret, its eventual revelation is appropriately anticlimactic.