‘We knew we were risking our careers’

How Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga leapt into the unknown to remake ‘A Star Is Born’ for the modern age

On an April night in 2016, Bradley Cooper watched life give art a much-needed kick in the pants. The actor was at a charity gala hosted by Sean Parker, the Napster billionaire, at his modernist mansion near Beverly Hills. He was ready for an evening off: after an extraordinary hot streak that had seen him nominated for three acting Oscars in as many years, the Hangover star’s last three films had flopped – and his latest project, a third remake of William Wellman’s quintessential Hollywood romance A Star Is Born, just couldn’t seem to propel itself off the launch pad.

Following a tortuous two-year casting process that had, at various times, involved Russell Crowe, Will Smith, Leonardo DiCaprio, Christian Bale, Tom Cruise and Johnny Depp, Cooper had been lined up by the film’s initial director, Clint Eastwood, to play the male lead: a fading rock icon who discovers, then falls in love with, a young woman whose voice he thinks could conquer the world.

But just before Cooper was cast, his co-star-to-be, Beyoncé Knowles, had dropped out – and now Eastwood had too, unprepared to spin his wheels while other films were waiting to be made. Cooper had told Warner Bros he’d direct the thing himself if they’d let him, but the studio knew they needed the right pairing of actor and actress for it to work – and the right voice to sell the lightning-strike moment when the waning legend realises he’s just heard the future.

Then Cooper heard it himself. The party’s surprise last act that night was Stefani Germanotta, also known as Lady Gaga, who prowled on stage and purred the Edith Piaf torch song, La Vie en Rose. Now, sitting in a marble-floored salon overlooking Venice’s Bacino di San Marco, Cooper, 43, flashes back to that fateful night.

“When she came on and started singing, time stopped,” he says. “And the next day I went and saw her.” He turns to the 32-year-old Gaga, perched on the sofa beside him. “I don’t know if I told you then, but I thought, ‘You’re going to be in the movie, and that song is how I’m going to meet you.’”

Two-and-a-half years later, Cooper and Gaga are at the Venice Film Festival, on the morning after the world premiere of their modern-day take on A Star Is Born – in which Gaga’s character Ally, an as-yet-undiscovered genius singer-songwriter, does indeed perform La Vie en Rose in a smoky dive bar to an audience in which sits Cooper’s Jackson Maine, equal parts smitten and inspired.

We are on the first floor of Comic chemistry has never been sexier than in this vintage Leo McCarey screwball comedy about a divorcing couple whose relentless feuding unintentionally reignites their spark. The brief encounter, the flame rekindled and the slow-burn of commitment. Over two decades, Richard Linklater’s trilogy explored three very different types of love, with a couple who made you believe in the entire hat-trick. The hottest pairing of the noir era first came together in this sultry wartime romance. Bacall’s screen test was so steamy that studio bosses insisted the scene was written into the script.

RC