Why Clooney should keep mum about being a dad
LIKE millions of women, I first fell in love with George Clooney as ER’s Dr Doug Ross back in the Nineties. Such a gorgeous man and a gifted actor, he quickly made the transition to Hollywood and became one of its biggest-earning stars.
One of the reasons we continued to admire him was that he seemed so down to earth, unpretentious, and unsullied by all that celebrity glitz. As well as remaining so private about his personal life.
We rejoiced when he married the human rights lawyer Amal, although we were rather surprised he chose to stage a £3.25 million, four-day wedding that took over the centre of Venice and was splattered across every celebrity magazine in the world.
After all, he had just gone to the trouble of persuading the local mayor to apply for restrictions to protect his and Amal’s privacy at his gorgeous Italian villa. Anyone stopping near or even swimming within 100 metres of his lake Como home faced a £400 fine.
Perhaps that was the first hint we had that Clooney allows glimpses of his fabulous life, but only when it suits him.
With the birth of their twins, the actor-turned-philanthropist and ecowarrior refused to publish any pictures of their children — to protect their privacy. And when pictures were secretly taken of them over a garden wall and published in the French gossip magazine Voici, he sued, telling USA Today the pictures were taken ‘illegally’.
‘Make no mistake,’ he said, ‘ the photographers, the agency and the magazine will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. The safety of our children demands it.’
What I can’t understand is why, if he is so keen on protecting his kids’ privacy, he keeps telling us about them. When he’s got a film to promote — as he has at the moment — every time you pick up a magazine or newspaper, including this one, there is an another interview with him talking about his children. Yes, the same children he says he and Amal gave ‘normal’ names — Ella and Alexander — so they could grow up like ordinary kids.
The boy just ‘ eats and eats . . . I’ve never seen anything eat so much in my life’. The girl, ‘she’s very delicate and feminine and all eyes and looks like her mother’, George informs us he cries more than they do, as he’s exhausted by sleepless nights. Because of his age, 56, he worries about being a dad with a Zimmer frame.
FATHERHOOD is fabulous, his wife is incredible, his twins adorable — enough already! You’d think he was the first man on earth to experience the delights of being a father.
If anyone is invading the preciously defended privacy of his children, it’s surely George himself. It’s not the first time the eco-minded actor has been hit with charges of hypocrisy. He wants to save the earth, yet was paid millions by Nespresso to promote their coffee pods, which produce mountains of non-biodegradable waste.
Clooney has been a box office success for most of his film career. We’ll continue to go to see whatever he appears in at the cinema.
He doesn’t need to show us he is the perfect, adoring father to get us to watch his movies. If he really wants to give his two precious children the chance of a normal life outside the celebrity jungle, he should quietly be dad — and keep mum um about it.