When Oprah Winfrey tells people, "I am here to ask you to think seriously,” apparently they do. She really did say this, in 2007, and her audience duly thought about who was the best person for the US presidency. It was Barack Obama, America’s first black president. Oprah was, and remains, one...
In 2019, India produced over 1,800 movies, making it the world’s largest film industry in terms of numbers; this dwarfs the 792 produced in both the US and Canada combined. Bollywood, as Mumbai’s movie industry is known, distributes its films around the world and is particularly popular in...
Self-annihilation is a constituent part of many celebrity careers. While some actors or singers slide smoothly from one success to another, hardly pausing for the occasional misadventure, others are ruined, occasionally by others but much more usually by their own devices. Frankie Lymon’s...
“The Elizabeth Taylor who’s famous, the one on film, really has no depth or meaning to me,” the Hollywood icon told Life magazine’s Richard Meryman in 1964. “She’s a totally superficial working thing, a commodity. I really don’t know what the ingredients of the image are exactly —...
“We are very much not a racist family,” shouted back Prince William at the reporter. The journalist had asked the wrong question. The right question would have been, “Is your family class conscious?” The reply to that would have been silence. When Meghan Markle, the duchess of Sussex...
"We all know what the British press can be like and it was destroying my mental health," Prince Harry said in a recent interview for "The Late Late Show With James Corden." Was he kidding? Destroying his mental health? How exactly? By expressing opinions on his behavior? Or deciding whether he has...
Humanity can be divided into two groups: those who know about and understand an influential American family known as the Kardashian-Jenner clan and those who may have heard their names mentioned but have no idea why. The author of this column belongs to the second group. Of the five...
With movie theaters closed all over the world due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Hollywood studios had little reason for celebration over the past year. In business for over a century, Universal Pictures (founded in 1912), Paramount (1912), Warner Bros. (1923), Walt Disney (1923) and Columbia Pictures...
Since the first Academy Awards ceremony in 1929, non-English films from all over the world used to compete for a nomination in one single category, best foreign film, as all the other Oscars traditionally went to American and, sometimes, British productions. But in 2019, Netflix’s...
Diego Maradona was an imperfect athlete, but a perfect celebrity athlete. His faults, inconsistencies, contradictions and oddities were clear in his playing years but became even clearer as he grew older. That’s why the media loved him and made him the most dazzling and fascinating footballer of...
We are all influenced by our experiences. Growing up, a number of women have made remarks that have irked or upset me. One colleague once remarked, “The managers like me more because I am fair and I look like a foreigner.” Another lady gave me life advice that still remains an indelible...
