Jacqueline Wilson’s closet
In Jacqueline Wilson’s 111th novel, Love Frankie, the title character, a bookish tomboy, falls for the “prettiest, coolest girl in class”. In a way, it’s the former children’s laureate’s most personal book yet, says Lisa Allardice in The Guardian. Wilson’s marriage to a policeman broke up when she was in her 40s and, for the past 18 years, she’s been living “very happily” with her female partner, Trish. Even so, she is loath to view it as a “comingout novel”. “I’ve never really been in any kind of closet,” she says, laughing. “It would be such old news for anybody that has ever known anything much about me. Even the vaguest acquaintance knows perfectly well that we are a couple.” Nor does she see herself becoming a mentor for teens struggling with their sexuality. “I don’t think that girls would ever want a grey-haired, wrinkly writer as a role model if they were wanting to feel good about maybe being gay,” she says. Besides, she is not sure that she really identifies as such. One of her friends once told her: “I don’t think you are a lesbian, I think you are a Trishian.” She replied: “I think that really sums me up.”
Bob Geldof on getting rich
Bob Geldof always saw being in a band as a means to an end: he wanted to “get rich, get famous and get laid”. His plan worked out: the Dublin-born star now lives in a beautiful, 900-year-old former nunnery in Kent. And he is not complaining. “I was w poor all my childhood; poverty is shit,” h he told Will Hodgki inson in The Times. “I gave being rich a try, and a I’m here to tell yo ou it’s a lot better.” The e fame part has been more complex. He felt, he says, “like a f***ing eejit in limousines and so on, but I wanted fame because it was a way to talk about stuff that bothered me”. As for his third reason for forming a band, it was certainly compelling to his younger self – and the most easily achieved. “Getting laid in Catholic Ireland in 1975? No f***ing way. [But] as soon as I was in a band, at the first gig, a girl came up and said, ‘I want to shag you.’ And I thought, shall I continue to work in the abattoir or go in this direction?”
Playing Tony Blair
Michael Sheen is used to portraying real people on screen, said Rebecca Nicholson in The Guardian: he has been David Frost in Frost/Nixon,
Brian Clough in The Damned
United, and Tony Blair no fewer than three times – in The Deal, The Queen and The Special Relationship. As a rule, he avoids meeting the people he’s impersonated on screen, but when he had played Blair twice, he was invited to a party hosted by Rupert Murdoch’s then wife, Wendi, in 2010. “Suddenly, I found myself face to face with Tony Blair. And he found himself face-to-face with me, with a group of people suddenly around us, and Wendi Murdoch, saying [to Blair]: ‘Tony? It’s you!’” At first, the former PM was “very wary” of him, Sheen recalls. It was as though Blair was wrestling with competing demands: he wanted “the social interaction to go well”, but “this other part of him was going: ‘Hang on, this guy might be copying me.’” When a guest asked Blair what he thought of Sheen’s portrayals, he said he hadn’t seen the films, but “when people dispersed and it was just me and him, he started talking in fa airly minute deta ail about individual s scenes”. The cumula ative effect playing the s same pers on so ma any times is p peculiar. “T There’s still al little bit of m me that when I see Blair or re ead about him, that I’ ’m sort of f seeing m myself,” say ys the act or. “That’s aw weird thing to ha ave.”
When Julie Walters was told she had bowel cancer almost two years ago, she thought the doctor was joking: then, he showed her “these two dark lumps” in her intestine. “I walked into the car park where Grant [her husband] was waiting, and when I said the word ‘cancer’ I saw his eyes fill with tears. We just sat there numb.” For 18 months, the actress kept the diagnosis almost entirely secret; she didn’t even tell her 31-year-old daughter Maisie until she’d undergone successful surgery to remove the two tumours. “I couldn’t bear the thought of everyone worrying – particularly my daughter,” she told Louise Gannon in The Daily Telegraph. “I didn’t want to upset people around me.” But she was recently given the all-clear, and now, she has started to see her illness as something of a “gift”. “It’s changed the way I live my life. I’m not rushing about all the time, getting up at 5am and coming home at midnight.” It has also been a poignant reminder of her long-time collaborator and close friend Victoria Wood, who died of cancer in 2016. “I still talk to her all the time,” says Walters, 70. “I have a photo of her in my house. I say, ‘Where are you, Vic?’” Walters’s parents died even longer ago, but she chats to them too. “I feel they are all still with me, and I like that. These are people I loved. Love. They never really leave.”