How Geena Davis fell off a Hollywood cliff
Geena Davis’s life changed dramatically when she hit 40. By then, she had won an Oscar (for 1988’s The Accidental
Tourist) and starred in a series of big films, including two feminist classics in the early 1990s: Thelma & Louise and
A League of Their Own. Both were huge commercial hits. “Everyone said: ‘Now we’re going to have so many movies starring women,’” says Davis. “And I was like: ‘Hot dog! I’m in something that started change.’” But a few years went by, and “absolutely nothing happened”. Then, as soon as she had “a four in front of my age, I fell off the cliff. I really did. Suddenly, the great roles were incredibly scarce. It was a big difference,” she told Hadley Freeman in The GuardianGdin. Nowadays, Davis campaignsc for better representation oof women and minoritiesm on sccreen. The Geenna Davis Insttitute on Gender in Media collectsM daata on the suubject, and loobbies the inndustry; it has been very suuccessful. But shhe still feels, ersonally, urt and diisappointed. “OOh, yeah.
I dod feel let dowwn.”
As a child, Huw Edwards wasn’t close to his father, who was an academic and a Welsh nationalist. “To be blunt, he wasn’t around very much,” says the newsreader. But in adulthood, though they never had a “touchy-feely relationship”, they became much closer: they looked uncannily alike, shared mannerisms, and both had a sharp tongue. Then, in 2009, his father fell ill. Edwards had to break the news to him that he had terminal cancer. Ten days later, his father died – and Edwards plunged into a depression. “It was a proper kind of depression about how I felt and where I felt I was, and my dad and everything,” he told Andrew Billen in The Times. He felt “helpless” and overwhelmed. He carried on working, anchoring BBC News at Ten, but his weight ballooned. “You comfort eat,” he says. “Honestly, it’s like a drug. By 2016, 2017, I had put on a lot of weight. I felt dreadful.” When he hit 16½ stone (the same weight as his late father) he vowed to slim down. At his wife’s suggestion, he took up boxing at his gym in south London. He lost three stone: it was like an “epiphany”, he says: now he’s fit and “mentally more robust”. And last year, in good spirits, he reached a career pinnacle, taking over David Dimbleby’s seat on the BBC’s election night coverage. “I didn’t believe it until I was in the chair, and even then I expected David to pop in from the wings.”