Adam Helliker
It’s the 15th anniversary of Love Actually, the film which will, as usual, be shown several times this Christmas – to the enduring delight of one of its stars, Martine McCutcheon.
The dimpled actress, 42, tells me: “I still get people telling me how the film is part of their family tradition over the holidays. Richard Curtis wrote the part for me after watching EastEnders. At the time I had been thinking about giving up the industry so I’ll always be grateful for his confidence.”
After making Love Actually in 2003, Martine was besieged with offers but found herself in no state to take on more work when a spell of ME saw her spiral into depression. Happily, her perkiness has been restored, helped by her hubby, musician Jack McManus, and their three-year-old son Rafferty.
She says: “After you’ve been through what I’ve experienced you learn to appreciate everything. You start to cherish the simpler things in life... and then the career comes second.”
Things may get a bit heated in the Yorkshire household where James Norton will be spending Christmas with his parents and his girlfriend Imogen Poots.
The Ampleforth-educated actor, 33, who returns in Grantchester on ITV early next year, says: “It’s games that take up a lot of our time. Things like charades and the game Mafia [not McMafia!]. It’s a kind of witch-hunt, murder-mystery thing, all about deception.
“It can get to 8pm after a boozy lunch and nobody is talking to each other because they’re so furious after the game.”
It took Monty Don many years before he found solace, and success, in horticulture. “I was very naughty,” says the Gardeners’ World presenter. “Too naughty for my nice primary school – they couldn’t cope with me, and I was asked to leave. I was also expelled from my secondary school [Malvern College] and I even remember being kicked out of confirmation classes because I questioned Christianity. I thought that what I wanted was sex and drugs and rock ’n’ roll. It took a few years to work out that gardening was something that could be an important part of my life.”
When Kate Moss first succumbed to the seductive attentions of blueblood toyboy Count Nikolai von Bismarck, the supermodel was still deeply entrenched in her rackety combo of late nights, cigarettes, vodka, and goodness knows what other naughty habits.
For nearly three years Nikolai, 31, revelled in the slipstream of Kate’s louche lifestyle, as the pair were frequently snapped falling out of nightclubs or knocking back cocktails in various exotic locations.
But when Miss Moss decided to embrace sobriety shortly after her 44th birthday, she chucked out not only the extensive collection of booze from her North London home but also poor Nikolai as well.
“Nik didn’t fit in with Kate’s new clean regime,” explains one of her circle. “He found it more difficult than she did to do without the Smirnoff.”
Now, after curbing his alcohol intake, Nikolai has been allowed to move his knick-knacks back into Kate’s boudoir. Why, the thoughtful chap has even been learning to cook in order to meet Kate’s healthy new requirements.
As the model declared the other day, she has never really worried about what she eats but has been amazed by how her new regime has affected both her health and skin.
She declares: “I’ve really noticed an improvement since I’ve been more ‘on it’ with food – like eating salads and stuff. I’m even into juicing.”
Kate Moss and a soft drink: who would have thought it?
What we need to cheer us up through the interminable Brexit saga is the levity of a satirical performer such as Rory Bremner or, going back, Mike Yarwood. While Bremner has confined himself to low-key stage shows, Yarwood would have once been expected to make the public giggle at the lighter elements of such a great political upheaval.
His impressions of Harold Wilson and Edward Heath commanded an audience of 28 million for a 1977 Christmas special. But Yarwood, 77, is now retired, living on his own in a flat in Surrey. The pressure of his success had led him to heavy drinking and, in 1985, the break-up of his marriage to Sandra, a dancer.
Comedian Jon Culshaw, a great admirer, calls in to see Yarwood regularly. “He loves talking about the old days,” says Jon, “Mike was the ultimate professional – his former colleagues say he used to stay in character, ad-libbing and inhabiting a persona for hours.”
Plans to celebrate the life of Roald Dahl with a commemorative coin were rejected by the Royal Mint because the libidinous author was “not regarded as being of the highest reputation”, it has been revealed.
But Roald’s youngest daughter Lucy retains only rosy memories of a fun-loving father who filled his children’s lives with adventure.
Lucy Dahl recalls how Roald would bundle his kiddywinks in the car to chase hot-air balloons, or wake them in the night to search for foxes.
“He absolutely hated children being bored,” says Lucy, 53. “He loved gambling and taught us all how to play blackjack as soon as we could count.
“The unavoidable part of our lives was school. Dad always encouraged us to ‘liven it up a bit’. He would tells us, ‘Remember, the trick is to never get caught. If you do get caught, you’re a silly ass’.”
Richard E Grant thinks he’s had the last laugh on the drama school teacher who described him as “weird-looking” and certain to have no future on stage. He recalls: “When I was leaving, the guy who was head of the school told me, ‘You have some talent but you have a very long face and you’re never going to make it as an actor’. But he died from alcoholic poisoning! Ha!”
Incidentally, the 61-year-old is a teetotaller, so when he was cast as a drink-sodden student in Withnail And I, the film’s director made him down a bottle of champagne and half a bottle of vodka during the course of a night so he would know what it feels like to be drunk.
He hasn’t touched a drop since.
Reports that David Cameron has finally finished his memoirs are premature. “Not quite, but I’m nearly there,” the former PM tells me, adding that he expects the book to emerge “very soon” after March 29, the date Britain is due to leave the European Union.
Cameron admits that he was easily distracted when beginning the project but denies suffering writer’s block, merely being careful not to “rush” to the finish. “You only do this once and I want to get it right.” Many of the recollections are based on an audio diary he kept while in Downing Street, which have been transcribed by his friend, the Tory peer Daniel Finkelstein. HarperCollins is paying Cameron £800,000, and I hear that Finkelstein will get £100,000 for his efforts in turning DC’s musings into purple prose.
Jacob Rees-Mogg is bemused by the upswing – and subsequent downturn – in his popularity. “It puzzles me,” muses Moggy, polishing his monocle. “But the great thing to remember about political life is that the people are like fireworks. Off they go, they blaze and they come back down again.”
Just a thought on the reliability of Boris Johnson: While at Oxford, he was accused of copying a Greek translation from a textbook. The putative PM admitted to his tutor: “I’m terribly sorry. I’ve been so busy I didn’t have time to put in the mistakes.”
The secret of a happy marriage is to keep your man fulfilled in the dining room but not with anything too exotic, believes Mary Berry, who will soon celebrate her 53rd wedding anniversary with husband Paul. “He often says, ‘ Why are you bothering with all these fancy recipes? I just want stews, pies and roast dinners’. He means the dishes his mother made him,” muses Mary. “I’m afraid it’s true, the key to a happy relationship lies in your husband’s stomach.”
Society places too much emphasis on success, believes Emma Thompson, citing the early deaths of George Michael and Amy Winehouse as a warning to others.
“I find the concept of ‘success’ flat and uninteresting,” declares Emma, 59. “We don’t care enough about the importance of failure and disappointment.
“What’s much harder to deal with is the inner voice of self-criticism. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t have it but you can’t allow it to drown you out.
“You have to make friends with it. That niggling inner voice has caused me depression in the past. My friend calls it **** FM – the channel in your brain that says you’re not worthy. You need to be able to access the knob that muffles it out.”
Presumably for that she can rely on her husband Greg Wise.
In contrast to his more unsettled days, when he could be prone to periods of pomposity, Sir Elton John doesn’t like to flaunt his knighthood. He says: “I never tell people to call me Sir, and it’s not ‘Don’t you know who I am?’ I hate that. Unlike Sir Ben Kingsley. Or Shirley Bassey – who insists on being called Dame Shirley. I love Shirley and she is a real Dame so I don’t mind. But Sir Ben I’m not so sure about.”
A bit of a shock to learn that the lovely Jenny Agutter, who will resume her role as the sensitive nun in a Call The Midwife special on Christmas
Day, can be prone to road rage. Jenny, 65, who first found fame as one of the Railway Children, admits: “I’m a very impatient person. Recently I started shouting at a bad driver. He wound down his window laughing and saying, ‘It’s Roberta from
The Railway Children!’ I drove away sheepishly.”