Category Archives: Celebrity

California Trip: how Dennis Stock caught the darkness beyond the hippy dream

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His iconic portraits of James Dean in a wintry New York won him fame. But it was his travels in the west coast that brought out his true genius, as he captured the cracks in the 60s counterculture

‘For many years California frightened me,” Dennis Stock wrote in the preface to California Trip, first published in 1970. “For a young man with traditional concerns for spiritual and aesthetic order, California seemed too unreal. I ran.”

Stock, a naturally sceptical New Yorker who had served in the US Navy before hustling his way into the ranks of the esteemed Magnum photo agency, had instinctively picked up on the edgy undercurrents of the late 1960s Californian hippy dream. As the idealism of that decade peaked and faded, California became what Stock called a “head lab” – fomenting various radically alternative lifestyles fuelled by eastern mysticism, experiments in communal living, and all kinds of post-LSD mind expansion.

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Chrissy Teigen ridicules Trump after president’s late-night Twitter attack

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  • Trump complained he was not getting enough credit
  • Hit out at ‘boring John Legend and his filthy-mouthed wife’

Donald Trump’s social media behaviour took another surreal turn with a public attack on model Chrissy Teigen and her musician husband John Legend over the issue of criminal justice reform.

Related: 'A dynasty for decades': Trump aide stokes succession speculation – live

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Rosanna Arquette: ‘They said I was a pain in the ass. It’s not true’

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Ever since she was abused by Harvey Weinstein, Rosanna Arquette says she has lived in fear. She talks about harassment, the collapse of her career – and the thin line between caution and paranoia

Rosanna Arquette sounds panicked. She thinks someone wants to stop our conversation taking place. For 30 minutes, a BBC publicist has tried to patch us into a conference call; now, Arquette has taken matters into her own hands and phoned me directly. “This is what happens! All the time!” she says, her voice rising. There are no pleasantries. It’s as if we were already talking before I picked up.

“Why is it disconnecting every time?” she asks. “There is something strange here. Really strange. I don’t understand what’s happening. Why can’t we get on the phone with each other?” She laughs, a nervous sort of placeholder laugh.

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Nico in Manchester: ‘She loved the architecture – and the heroin’

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She had been a top model, then sang with the Velvet Underground, and in 1981 Nico moved to Manchester. Her friends there share their touching, alarming memories of ‘a true bohemian’

An imperious blond German ex-model with a voice once described as like “a body falling through a window”, Nico was already extraordinary by the time she leant her vocals to songs including Femme Fatale and All Tomorrow’s Parties on the Velvet Underground’s classic first album, produced by Andy Warhol.

Soon after that, she embarked on a solo career, and made records, such as The Marble Index, that were even darker, with despairing lyrics and a wheezing harmonium accompanying Nico’s Teutonic tones. By this time, she was no longer blond – she disdained her traffic-stopping looks – and was addicted to heroin.

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‘I even loved his Twankey’: Dench, Hopkins, Mirren and more on Ian McKellen at 80

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Wild parties, stunning performances, silhouette erections and marrying Patrick Stewart twice. As the actor turns 80, friends including Derek Jacobi, Janet Suzman, Michael Sheen, Bill Condon and Stephen Fry pay tribute

Ian has been been very important in my life, even before we became good friends. When I was a young teen I remember watching Walter on the TV and being hugely affected by it. Then at Rada in the early 90s, I finally saw him live, in Richard III at the National. I was blown away. I remember him doing the opening speech while lighting a cigarette one-handed. It was brilliant, so understated. It exemplified his mastery – and his work ethic. To do something so difficult and complicated and make it look so easy. Ian has an innate sense of theatrical audacity, something I think he shares with Olivier. They both did things that would make the audience gasp self-consciously.

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Kim Kardashian West and Kanye West name fourth child Psalm

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Reality TV star and musician ‘blessed beyond measure’ with arrival of baby boy

Kim Kardashian West and her husband, the musician Kanye West, have named their new child Psalm after its recent birth via surrogate.

Kardashian West posted a picture of the boy on social media with the caption “Psalm West”.

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Behind the bloodshed: the chilling untold stories about Charles Manson

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Tarantino’s epic is the big draw at Cannes. But there are other Manson movies around – including one about what ultimately happened to the young women who fell under the murderer’s spell

Over the last half century, one villain has loomed large over Hollywood. The gruesome murders committed by Charles Manson and his followers in the summer of 1969 have filled countless films and documentaries about stardom and the debaucheries of the 1960s. But his malign influence extends far beyond the screen. Aside from murdering eight people, Manson and his disciples – the Family – have been blamed for wiping out the counterculture, free love, communes and hippies.

Three new films are making fresh attempts to reckon with “the symbol of animalism and evil”, as Rolling Stone magazine called him. The biggest is Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, about to premiere at the Cannes film festival. Set in Los Angeles during the Manson era, the film stars Leonardo DiCaprio as a fading TV western star and Brad Pitt as his stunt double, both attempting to make the leap to the big screen. Margot Robbie plays Sharon Tate – the actor and wife of director Roman Polanski – who was brutally murdered by the Family. Manson, a background figure in the film, is played by Damon Herriman.

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Paolo Di Paolo’s Italy in the 1950s and 60s – in pictures

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The Paolo Di Paolo: Lost World exhibition presents more than 250 largely unseen images from the photographer’s archive. Di Paolo chronicled life in his country as an economic boom followed the destruction of the second world war. Although those were the years of la dolce vita he was an anti-paparazzo – he shunned the salacious and respected his subjects. The exhibition is at MAXXI in Rome until 30 June

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Michelle Williams describes feeling of ‘futility’ on finding male co-star paid $1.49m more – video

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Actor Michelle Williams said she was ‘paralysed with feelings of futility’ after being 'paid less than $1,000 compared to the $1.5m' that Mark Wahlberg received 'for the exact same amount of work’ while reshooting the film All the Money in the World. Speaking in Washington DC on 2 April during a hearing about closing the gender pay gap, Williams said 'if it was like this for me, a white woman in a glamorised industry, how were my sisters suffering across their professions?' She said the lack of initial reaction was the most depressing element. The controversy only seemed to come to public attention, she said, after the actor Jessica Chastain tweeted about it

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David Bailey: ‘Deneuve said it’s great we’re divorced – now we can be lovers!’

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As he powers into his 80s, the photographer recalls shooting everyone from Kate Moss to Andy Warhol, shares his regrets over voting leave – and reveals how Gordon Brown pulled a fast one on him

‘You look knackered,” says David Bailey, greeting me at his studio. It’s up a small mews and sprawls so casually across two floors that it still feels like the 60s inside. “Look at you,” he says. “Your buttons aren’t even done up right.” I look down at my jacket: that bit is true. But I tell him: “I’m not tired!”

“I was watching you walking along the street,” he says. “I thought, ‘That must be the journalist, she looks knackered.’” The combination of acuity (he must be right: he is, after all, the one who makes a living with his eyes) and demonic overfamiliarity (by this point, we are holding hands; I have no idea who started it) is disarming. If this is his shtick, it’s working on me, totally and overwhelmingly. Or maybe he has a tailored shtick for everyone he meets.

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Screen queens: the funny, fearless women who revolutionised TV

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Phoebe Waller-Bridge exploded into our living rooms with Fleabag, her vicious comedy about an angry, awkward woman. As it returns, Guardian writers pick their TV heroines

Who gets to be the bitch?

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Gwyneth Paltrow sued over collision on ski slopes

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Actor says $3.1m lawsuit filed in Utah alleging she injured another skier in a 2016 crash is ‘without merit’

Actor Gwyneth Paltrow has been accused in a lawsuit of breaking a man’s ribs and leaving him with a concussion when she smashed into him while skiing at a Utah ski resort in 2016.

Terry Sanderson, 72, claimed during a news conference in Salt Lake City that he heard a “hysterical scream” and was then struck between his shoulder blades on a beginner run at Deer Valley Resort on 26 February 2016. He remembers being thrown forward and losing control of his body before losing consciousness. An acquaintance, Craig Ramon, who witnessed the event, claimed he saw Paltrow hit him squarely in the back.

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Worst job in showbiz: why will no one touch the world’s glitziest gigs?

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The Oscars have no host, Rihanna turned down the Super Bowl, and the White House dinner will be MC’d by a historian. What’s behind the sudden demise of entertainment’s biggest jobs?

The loss of the Oscars’ latest host is, on the one hand, just another mishap to add to the list. From 2016’s #OscarsSoWhite to 2017’s wrong delivery of the best picture award, the ceremony now seems like a particularly slow bloopers reel. Yet the loss of Kevin Hart – who quit after old homophobic tweets resurfaced – is also a sign of something else. The fact that no one has replaced him, and that it’s difficult to think of many people who could, or would, reveals a much deeper malaise: a scary loss of nerve across showbiz’s top-tier events.

Within weeks, the Super Bowl half-time show will air. In the past, the American football final has been an epic showcase for the likes of Madonna, Prince and Beyoncé, a 20-minute, legacy-defining megamix. This year, though, with Rihanna and Cardi B having turned it down in solidarity with the activist NFL player Colin Kaepernick, we will be left with the hardly epochal sounds of Maroon 5.

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What the chauffeur saw: what is it really like driving the rich and famous?

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From princesses on shopping sprees to celebrities having sex in the back of the car, the men and women at the wheel have seen it all. And, just occasionally, the secrets spill out …

In the early hours of one morning, nearly a decade ago, chauffeur Jayne Amelia Larson found herself trying to extricate the son of one of the wealthiest men in Los Angeles from the back of her car. The then-chauffeur had been driving the twentysomething party boy up and down Santa Monica Boulevard in her Lincoln Town car as he tried to procure a “transvestite prostitute” for his girlfriend who, he said, “wanted to convert a gay guy”. After several hours, he threw up on the back seat and fell into a drunken slumber, then woke up and tried to urinate in the car.

“He’d been in rehab again and again,” says Larson, recalling the incident that took place just weeks into her new career. “Another driver I later met had been his family’s driver, and said the kid repeatedly did stuff in the car you would not believe, like he went to the bathroom there because he was just so wasted. And I don’t mean in a clean way; I mean in an awful way.”

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