Madame Depardieu and the Beautiful Strangers
Antonia Quirke
Language: English
Pages: 220
ISBN: 0007182767
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
A razor-sharp and achingly funny memoir of the men and movies that shaped one woman's life...
A unique memoir, 'Madame Depardieu and the Beautiful Strangers' is the story of how a young female film critic's love-life is affected and nearly ruined by her obsession with male movie stars. As her increasingly hapless hunt for the right man unfolds and her television and newspaper career unravels, our heroine finally begins to understand that difficult truth: that life is not like the movies.
Entwined with the narrative of her real-life love affairs is a kaleidoscope of digressions on great screen actors -- her dream-life with Gerard Depardieu, a personal ad seeking out Tom Cruise, a disastrous climactic encounter with Jeff Bridges. It's a helter skelter ride through love and the movies which reads like a screwball comedy. And the screwball is our heroine, who seems to know everything about movies and the human heart, and nothing about anything else.
Written in a fresh and utterly engaging voice, 'Madame Depardieu and the Beautiful Strangers' is both moving and hilarious, a bittersweet and endearingly honest one-off.
Mathematical Circus (Spectrum)
simultaneously hard and soft like all the great movie stars, with whom I felt I was going to be permanent friends, and who in fact set me up with a Canadian who lived alone, bald as Kurtz, in a condemned house on Plimsoll Road in Arsenal which he had decorated with the most staggering murals of Ganesh and Shiva and Vishnu and other gods whose names he must have told me but I have since forgotten, and who comforted me the day I was diagnosed with cervical cancer by making me watch In the Heat of
with Basinger from a post-coital conversation into that lovelier thing, an intimate conversation in bed, just by turning on his side (heavily and quickly). Remember? That moment – when you realise that there are greater intimacies than sex – that's the moment, just there, with your cigarettes, so often, when love starts. It goes without saying that he's a complete sex bomb. That very natural body that looks like it's never struggled against its DNA … only his head. Crowe's the only current
the photograph's eyes, lashed out furiously at a table, and thinking what the hell, I can do anything picked up a chair and broke its back off by smashing it against the floor, and then leaned up against the wall, panting. I got a glimpse of what I would be like as an actress: a nightmare. Acting was shocking. It was more than just the power of having other people look at me, or the power of being another person. It was the utter freedom and violence and irresponsibility available. Don't think
on at you and try to pick you up for five hours?’ (This is definitely one of my top ten fantasies, knowing that it's in the bag but making Dreyfuss go on talking really well, occasionally bustling off to get more drinks or a volume of poetry which he's been quoting from.) ‘No,’ says Jonathan, ‘he's the guy you meet at a party who's supposed to surprise you by being unexpectedly ardent in bed.’ ‘I think he'd be really great in bed. The best of the lot, probably.’ ‘What you mean is that he'd be
what happened to someone wholly free of triviality! His films were so whimsical, so apparently uncharacteristic, full of fairy-tale images of crows distributing dandelions or inventors turning into wolves, that they were doubly powerful to all of us, sitting there next to their unsmiling, purposeful creator. I unreservedly loved those films. They were beautiful. His colleagues couldn't get over his Stakhanovite work ethic, his Thatcherite hours. His stamina. And as Tom's girlfriend it seemed I