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OUR new columnist suggests novels to help with trickier times. POST-WEINSTEIN, the 2018 Academy Awards were always going to be slightly muted: if there is one truism that the past few months has reinforced, it is that fame often comes at a terrible price.

Novelists seem to have always held a jaundiced view of Hollywood and actors more generally.

From the satire of Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One, to Henry Farrell’s Whatever Happened To Baby Jane and James Ellroy’s LA Confidential, the authenticity of that ephemerally glamorous world has long been questioned.

The female protagonist of Maggie O’Farrell’s This Must Be The Place is fleeing fame. Claudette Wells had been a box-office smash, as well as the lover of a Scandinavian arthouse director.

By the time Daniel Sullivan encounters her, a recluse in rural Ireland, she is ‘known less for her films than for having vanished at the height of her career’. ‘A far from securely locked

roman-à-clef,’ is how Stephen Fry recently described the late actress Carrie Fisher’s Postcards From The Edge. As the daughter of Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher, she was a Hollywood insider, just like her funny, recovering addict actress protagonist, Suzanne Vale.

From rehab, Suzanne calls her mother, movie icon Doris Mann, and is told: ‘You were happy as a child. I can prove it. I have films.’ But isn’t Suzanne’s problem actually her mother’s star wattage?

That fame can be a troubled heritage was also a subject for Daphne Du Maurier.

In her 1949 novel The Parasites, capricious, self-centred actress Maria Delaney and her bohemian siblings are lambasted by Maria’s husband, Charles: ‘You’ve none of you done a stroke of ordinary honest work in your lives, but batten upon us, the fool public who allow you to exist.’

Life in the limelight may look glamorous, but it can leave you vulnerable and exposed. Safer to be like one of these writers — watching from the wings.