Ephraim Hardcastle
Disappointingly for her parents – the Duke of York and his aspirational ex-wife, Sarah Ferguson, unkindly nicknamed hyacinth Bucket – the BBC won’t broadcast Princess eugenie’s wedding to businessman Jack Brooksbank next month. Yet the bride’s grandmother, the Queen, and most members of the Royal Family will be there. Lese majesty – or a sign of the times? In 1963, the Corporation devised a special zoom camera to cover the Westminster Abbey wedding of Princess Alexandra, the Queen’s cousin, to Scots aristocrat Angus Ogilvy. It was broadcast worldwide to an estimated audience of 200million.
SAM Mendes, 53, married Titanic star Kate Winslet, 42, both pictured, in 2003 but they divorced in 2011. Why? Mendes now says in an interview: ‘I was not very comfortable being married to a celebrity. I could never throw it off. It made me feel selfconscious. Many times I wanted to be invisible.’ How sad. A brilliant director, he was responsible for two Bond movies and won an Oscar for American Beauty.
Age-defying Cher, 72, on why she looks so much younger in Mamma Mia! here We Go Again: ‘Five pounds of make-up.’ Meanwhile, she rates Tom Cruise, 56, among ‘the top five’ of ex-lovers, but says of legendary ladies’ man Warren Beatty, 81: ‘What a disappointment! not that he wasn’t technically good, but I didn’t feel anything.’
FORMER Brexit secretary David Davis says on Radio 4 of a former Cabinet colleague: ‘Michael Gove is a very clever man, and sometimes clever men can miss the obvious.’ Less offensive, though, than Gove chum Dominic Cummings’ description of Davis – ‘thick as mince, lazy as a toad and vain as Narcissus’.
TODAY’S ‘too clever by half’ politician might be Boris Johnson. Asked to name his worst mistake, he told guests at a dinner in Washington DC: ‘My strategy is to litter my career with decoy mistakes – nobody knows which one to attack.’
HURRICANE Florence didn’t prevent Prince Edward from playing real tennis in stormlashed South Carolina this week. Having dedicated 2018 to The Duke of Edinburgh’s Award Real Tennis Tour, he’s visiting every such court in the world. His 12-day trip to the US – travelling below the media radar – includes games at all nine real tennis courts there. Next month he plays at Fontainebleau and Paris. Fearing adverse media comments, the Duchess of Cambridge struggles to justify a day at Wimbledon, even though she’s the club’s patron.
Appearing aged seven in the 1972 musical adaptation of Gone With The Wind at the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane, Bonnie Langford, 54, recalls a horse called Charlie ‘which did its business on the stage every night’. Misanthropic playwright noel Coward said the problem could be solved ‘by shoving the child’s head up the horse’s a***’. hearing about this at 14, Ms Langford says she asked her mother if the story was true. ‘Darling I’m afraid it is,’ she was told.