Latest news with #autobiography
The Guardian
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘All of us felt like we had touched gold': What It Feels Like for a Girl, the BBC's electric coming-of-age tale
When the BBC was casting its adaptation of Paris Lees's autobiography, What It Feels Like for a Girl, it wasn't the only one wrestling with how to find the right actor to play the lead in a biopic. 'Cher did an interview,' smiles Lees, 'and she said: 'We just can't find somebody that's Cher.' I was like: 'Same, girl. I hear your struggles.' So me and Cher have been going through it.' Sitting next to Lees is the actor they went with, Ellis Howard, who you may remember as the sapling Ivan VI in HBO series Catherine the Great, but who you will never have seen being this luminous. 'In the beginning, we were looking for a trans person,' Lees says. She and Howard are sharing a Zoom screen, and it's not so much that they look similar as that they both look so cinematic, they seem to match – 'But then I just knew, the moment I saw Ellis, that this cheeky, cheeky person could do it.' Lees is known in the public eye via a series of triumphant firsts: the first trans columnist for Vogue, the first trans woman to present on Radio 1, on Channel 4. But her early life was harsh, brutal at times. She was relentlessly bullied at school for being gay, and carried the weight of her father's homophobia, expressed in both formless anger and embarrassment. She became a 'rent boy' when she was 14, but was astonished when she read, in a review of her book in Grazia that she'd been abused. 'Then I thought: 'Hang on a minute. What else would you call that?' It took me a while to realise that was abusive. When people are vulnerable, when they're told they're worthless, that they're almost half a person, you seek validation in the wrong places. It makes me incredibly sad, but it was really important to show my perspective at that time, not my perspective now.' Howard's performance is exquisite: subtle and daring, true to the fact that it would be years before the teenage sex work processed as a violation – and at the time Lees was thrilled about earning all those fivers. 'When you force people into the shadows, don't be surprised when they go fucking dark,' Howard says. 'You've got to silence the part of your brain that goes: 'I am an adult, I am a leftwing progressive.' You've got to go to a place of wonderment and curiosity.' Paris Lees's perspective in the book, which comes across as strongly on the screen, is joyful – this is an incredibly buoyant coming-of-age story, as Howard describes. 'When we were cast, all of us felt like we had touched gold, here. Whether it's our queerness, whether it's our class, whether it's the scars we've been given that make us feel so seen by it, everyone came to give it their all. How often do you get these unicorn projects, that feel so alive? It felt so rare.' Lees gives her adolescent self the pseudonym Byron, and their story opens in 2000, when things were bleak as hell for a gay teenager in a suburban, declining bit of Nottinghamshire. But this is very much not how they felt at the time: 'I definitely had a sense that things are getting better,' says Lees. 'We thought this was the end of history. I had this sense that people were living longer, wages were going up, flights were getting cheaper, they were cloning sheep. It felt like there was going to be more democracy, there was hope, there was a future. We were going to get there with gay rights. I didn't dare to believe we'd get there with the other stuff.' It's beautifully told in the drama, through friendships with divas and ketamine in nightclubs, that to be young in that era may have felt like a train wreck, but didn't feel hopeless. Howard, who was born in 1997, chips in, 'I'm nostalgic for a time I wasn't born in. Listening to P talk about the possibility of Blair and Brown, talk about a time when the NHS functioned, when school ceilings weren't caving in on people's heads, maybe I've doctored that into my brain, but I feel like I can remember a time when progress was possible. Although if I'm honest, my political awareness really began with austerity.' If homophobic bullying was a thing of the past by the 2010s, 'God, no one told my fucking school,' he says. 'No one told Norris Green in Liverpool. I was definitely ostracised. I come from a family of 'aaaah' blokes [impossible to fully convey the meaning, or mad charm of that 'aaaah' - sort of aggro and in-your-face]. I just had this unwavering sense of, I won't be bullied. You're not gonna get me. One of the reasons why I felt so seen by the book, is because this is a kid who was resilient to a mythic level. Your conditions can harden you. That was my experience of school, anyway.' The double-edged nostalgia for that time – post-industrial drudgery leavened by the smell of escape – is particularly poignant to watch now. Nobody in 2000 (trust me on this, I was there) would have predicted that 25 years later, trans people would be openly vilified in the media and drag queens castigated as perverts. It feels as if we inched forward to Scandinavia on LGBTQI+ rights, only to hurtle back to Weimar. Lees says it's more complicated than that. 'It feels like there's been a weird reversal. The public conversation in the media and politics has become very toxic. But think back: when did you ever see somebody working in Boots, that was trans, in the year 2000? When was your GP trans? When were trans people ever allowed to participate in life or society? Nobody had a job; you either had to be a prostitute or you had to not be out.' She breaks off – 'I'm a little bit guarded about this, because it's obviously relevant, but I don't want everything I do to be framed within trans activism. I hate it when people call me a trans activist. I'm not involved in activism now. Obviously, I am trans. I can't escape that. I feel like I could have died, somebody could have shot me, I could have been revived on the operating table, and the headline would still be about being trans.' Both Lees and Howard see What It Feels Like … as being an exploration of the marginalisation of poverty at least as much as it is about trans identity – if not more so. Again, it's complicated: sometimes sex and gender identity cancels out class identity, in the sense that Lees thinks 'being trans has possibly opened doors for me that wouldn't have [otherwise] been opened, to a working-class person'. Other times, the world demands that you pick a lane. 'Often times, as an actor, as a writer, I'm thinking, who am I today? Am I this scrappy working-class kid? Or am I the sensitive queer boy? And those things can't reconcile. To be swallowed in this industry, one has to present oneself in a fixed way. Who gets to live authentically is so determined by your class.' She adds: 'It's a really big part of my identity, just coming from a scarcity mindset. When you grow up and you've got nothing, that has a huge effect on how I live my life, how I think about things, my sense of internal safety and security.' 'Drama is so fucking posh,' Lees continues – not with indignation, almost amused, like she knows she speaks for pretty well everyone but the rest of the world are too polite to mention it. 'I'm just so sick of it. We love all the actors with the posh accents, I get it, but let's just make the space for some other people. It's so boring, the Jane Austenness of it all, the comedy of manners; let's have some real messy stories about real shit that happens. I love that we've got so many working-class actors on this show. The only place working-class people are represented is reality TV. I've had enough of the double-barrelled names. Working-class people are lyrical, we're just not given a voice.' And if it's a rare oversight by the class gatekeepers that this messy, exuberant story got on to TV, it also breaks out of a predictable aesthetic. 'It's so gorgeous to be in a working-class project that is extended beyond the kitchen sink, something that has so much colour and is so visually arresting,' says Howard. 'It has a cinematic feel and scale that is normally only lent to middle-class stories [but is here] given to a working-class story set in the Midlands.' The whole thing has been a white-knuckle ride from the start, Lees says, 'A bit like if they said: 'We're gonna take a picture of you naked. It's going to be displayed in public. But don't worry, we're going to get good people in, you'll have lots of creative control.' Are you ever going to be happy with that picture? This is made out of my core memories.' It has led, however, to Lees's relationship with Howard – part spirit-animal, part younger-self transformed – as well as some other beautiful performances. Both single out Laura Haddock as Byron's mother, who Lees says managed to powerfully channel her mum, without necessarily looking very alike. And the ensemble of fallen divas – endearing, spiky performances from Laquarn Lewis and Hannah Jones, was 'such a headfuck for me', Lees says, as 'there are the actual fallen divas, the real people. Then there are the characters that I created, based on them, in the book. Then there's the TV interpretations, and the actors playing them, who formed their own breakaway group. A lot of what you see on screen, that is just them fucking around.' What It Feels Like for a Girl starts 3 June, 9pm, BBC Three.
ABC News
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- ABC News
Hilde Hinton's home for the temporarily defeated
Hilde Hinton's upbringing was marked by the shocking death of her mother when Hilde was just 12 years old. Despite the great grief, there was also a sense of relief for Hilde. She shielded her younger siblings, Samuel and Connie Johnson, from the truth of how and why their mother died. But when Connie also died, decades later of cancer, Hilde was propelled into writing her first novel, in between shifts as a prison officer. Her debut book, The Loudness of Unsaid things, was intensely autobiographical. While Connie never got to read the book, Hilde's brother Samuel finally 'met' their mother through Hilde's writing, and learned all that his big sister had done for them growing up. Now, from her home in Melbourne, where people who need solace freely come and go, Hilde explores in her writing the ordinary things that make life extraordinary. Further information The Opposite of Lonely is published by Hachette. You can watch the episode of Australian Story, which features Hilde's brother, Samuel Johnson, online at ABC iview.
Telegraph
26-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Childhood in the 1960s? Here's why it was positively Victorian
Whoever said 'there's nowhere more remote than the recent past' will reiterate the apothegm a thousand times after reading Homework, Geoff Dyer's buoyant autobiography, about his coming-of-age in the backwoods of Gloucestershire. Born in 1958, Dyer grew up in a Britain where world wars were living memories. Buildings were pocked with shrapnel and weed-choked bomb-sites abounded. Everyone had grandfathers who'd fought on the Somme, or uncles who hadn't come back from Burma. Playgrounds were filled with noisy boys shooting each other with toy guns. Childhood could be rather feral, with packs of children running about unsupervised in the alleys and roads; but then there was little motor traffic in the early 1960s. Few families could afford a Triumph Herald or Ford Anglia. Much of Homework is a nostalgia trip. Dyer waxes lyrical, for instance, about eating Peach Melba and Raspberry Ripple puddings, or procuring from the corner shop an Aero or Milky Way ('the sweet you can eat between meals without ruining your appetite'). It's shocking, looking back, how much white sugar people consumed. 'I loved sugar on and in everything,' says Dyer, remembering the cereals, fizzy drinks and jam. Like red meat and full cream, it was considered 'a source of pleasure and nutrition' not the harbinger of obesity and diabetes it is in the 21st century. We weren't health conscious, you see. We also had terrible teeth. Toothache, mouth ulcers and abscesses were prevalent, and dentists more than happy to be paid by the filling. All adults smoked, everyone 'never not coughing'. Sweet cigarettes were on sale to children: the packs contained educational cards about the Birds of Britain or the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Going for a jog or to the gym was unheard of, and you never saw people drinking bottled water – nor did anyone die in the street or office of dehydration. Regarding exercise, there were heavily chlorinated public baths, but all they were good for was catching a verruca. In general, food was so bad, it must have been done on purpose. Think of the watery stews, lumpy gravy and roasted gristle; the 'evaporated carrots and swamp-boiled cabbage'. The height of gastronomic sophistication was chicken-in-the-basket in pub carparks. If I may add my own memory here, in South Wales we had scampi-in-the-basket. My mother thought she was Elizabeth David when serving Heinz Spaghetti Hoops. Dyer says he was a sickly child, prone to eczema, warts and chesty colds. He had his tonsils and adenoids out – you never hear those procedures mentioned now. Appointments with the doctor or consultant happened instantly, after a quick phone call. With the population some 20 million smaller, the NHS was efficient and unburdened, able to dish out free ointments, tablets, bandages, injections and operations. When Dyer's mother needed a disfiguring mole removing, she was seen at once by Sir Archibald McIndoe, the leading plastic surgeon. Dyer makes other areas of life sound positively Victorian. Streets were visited by tinkers, blade sharpeners, coalmen and ice-cream vans. Houses contained front-rooms that were never used. There was the brown furniture, like big wardrobes, now unsellable in junk shops. Cocktail cabinets contained unopened bottles of Babycham. 'Dead flies showed up blackly in the opaque glass bowl that hung under the light.' What an odd society we were. We used disgusting handkerchiefs rather than disposable tissues; underarm deodorant was yet unknown, particularly for men; children's entertainment was mostly Gerry and Sylvia Anderson's string puppets; and neighbours with mental health issues or other afflictions were openly abused in terms my editors cannot print. Dyer's father was anxious that black immigrants didn't move next door: 'It would lower the value of the house.' Adults did say and think these things, egged on by sitcoms such as Love Thy Neighbour and Till Death Us Do Part. But for all that Dyer quotes Housman – 'The happy highways where I went / And cannot come again' – and lovingly describes the Kodachrome colours in the family photograph album, Homework spends too long with characters such as his father Jack (1919–2011), who must have been the most boring man in England. Dyer Sr creosoted fences, and toiled on an allotment. 'It was a source of pride,' Geoff writes, 'that he wore a jacket and tie to work', as well as on the beach. Jack didn't like books: 'His refusal even to consider reading as something to do was so steadfast as to seem almost principled.' Nor did he like films, or beer in pubs. He partook of two glasses of wine a year. And as for music, he 'would quite happily have gone through life never hearing a note'. Jack's chief pleasure, as his son recalls, was in not spending money. Two words were often on his lips, a contemptuous exclamation: 'How much?' According to a relative, 'he was so mean, even if he had a mouth full of gum boils, he still wouldn't give you one.' He fretted over the 'unavoidable expenses' of running a car: petrol, brake lights, tyres. When it was parked, he removed the rotor arm from the engine to deter thieves. 'Central heating had been invented,' Dyer writes, 'but was not installed in any house that we knew of.' Everything had to be repaired, patched up, bought cheaply. Perhaps this was the spirit of post-war rationing: abundance meant profligacy. Yet Geoff recalls the problem as more than this: Jack was like 'a very slow hard-to-identify puncture', leaking all the fun out of things. Geoff's reaction was to do well at school, pass exams, get to university and get away. Along the journey, we see him having clumsy sex – 'She let me undo her bikini top and feel her t-ts' – and getting drunk on cider and Cinzano. Homework ends with his parents' deaths, both in 2011, by which time Dyer is in his fifties and has long since become a pie-hot writer. He publishes whatever he wants, travels wherever he fancies, secures everything from fellowships to journalism gigs. He has written four novels, and today he's writer-in-residence at the University of Southern California. Bully for him. For though I liked the parts of this memoir that sketch the same territory and era through which I travelled, in the end the rest isn't about very much. That loosened bikini is about it for narrative excitement. There are no sentences to savour in Homework, no perceptions to give you pause or make you gasp. In the total absence of swagger – perhaps this is why Dyer is such a success with committees: he's a safe pair of hands – we're given Barthes or Sontag reincarnated as someone incredibly ordinary. Then again, as regards his father, is Dyer a chip off the old block? There's a strange scene at the end of the book, which goes unexplored, where our author by chance meets an old schoolfriend in Cheltenham, and begins chatting about who is still alive, who has croaked. Yet Dyer must rush away: 'I had one of those cut-price train-specific tickets.' As his parents' sole beneficiary, Dyer was left what, I wondered? It would have been interesting to know the size of his inheritance, after all the descriptions of frantic hoarding – literally, of banknotes under the mattress. One thing I hate: reticent autobiographies.
The Sun
25-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Sun
Hollyoaks legend announces huge career news a year after being sensationally axed from the show
A HOLLYOAKS legend has announced a huge career move a year after being sensationally axed from the show. Last year Hollyoaks underwent a huge shake-up which saw 20 cast members fired in a brutal mass cull. 3 3 3 Even original characters weren't safe from the chop, with Steph Waring - who made her first appearance as Cindy Cunningham in 1996 - losing her job on the Channel 4 soap. Now it seems Steph, 47, is ready to spill the beans on life on and off screen as she's announced her debut autobiography. Sharing the news with fans on Instagram, she said: "It's nearly time… 'My memoir Breaking the Script is coming June 4th. 'This is the story I've never told, until now.' Steph added: 'Most of you know me for playing Cindy Cunningham in Hollyoaks but in real life I've lived a very different story - one that I haven't told until now. 'It's very raw, unfiltered - very unfiltered - real, honest… the hardest but most rewarding thing I've ever done in my life and I can't wait to share it with you all.' After finding out she would be leaving the show last year, Steph confessed she was devastated by the news. She told The Sun: 'In the meeting they read from a script and a tear fell from my eye because I could just feel it in the room. 'They got to the end and said 'And with that, we will be losing Cindy from the show'. I just kept saying 'I don't understand'. 'I was very distraught, I didn't take it well - I was probably the most dramatic person they told. 'I just kept telling them 'I'm an original character'. I was clutching at anything - telling them 'but I was the first person to give birth on the show!' 'I could see the distress I was causing them because they were upset that I was so upset.'
Wall Street Journal
23-05-2025
- Wall Street Journal
‘I Regret Almost Everything' Review: Keith McNally Serves Up Memories
In 2016 Keith McNally had a beautiful wife, five children, a home in London and a thriving empire of eight fashionable restaurants in New York City. One morning in November that year, his world was overturned: He was gripped by a horrific metallic tingling 'like some malignant jellyfish' that clasped itself onto his face. Hours later he woke up in a London hospital. Mr. McNally had suffered a stroke that left his speech slurred and his right side paralyzed. 'Overnight I was confined to a wheelchair and deprived of language.' The loss of words and physical control left him feeling 'buried alive.' His speech returned in days, but the episode catapulted him into an emotional and marital crisis. Within two years, he would attempt suicide with an overdose of pills. Mr. McNally's autobiography, 'I Regret Almost Everything,' is wry, insightful and vulnerable, a courageous book alive with mordant humor and British irony. At the beginning of the book Mr. McNally quotes George Orwell. 'Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.' Mr. McNally doesn't spare himself: failed marriages, business misfires, his mercurial relationship with his brother Brian (with whom he had a fight that ended with a broken cheekbone) are all confronted with appealing honesty. The elegantly frayed patrician style of Mr. McNally's restaurants owes nothing to his background. He was born in 1951 in Bethnal Green, a London neighborhood that was solidly working class in those days. The McNally family lived in a one-story prefab, and he played with his friends in dirt-filled craters left by Luftwaffe bombs. His father was a waterfront laborer and an amateur boxer, his mother an office cleaner who read obsessively and considered herself socially above her husband. Their 'grim and joyless' marriage lasted years and produced four children. Mr. McNally's opportunity for escape came after he left school at 16. He took a job as a bellhop at the Hilton Park Lane hotel, where he was spotted by a guest who offered him a role as a street urchin in a film. Mr. McNally became a fledgling actor, appearing in the satirist Alan Bennett's 1968 play 'Forty Years On' in the West End. After the play's run ended, he began an affair with Mr. Bennett, who was 17 years his senior. McNally had just turned 18. The liaison lasted until Mr. McNally came to America in 1975 with vague plans for making films of his own.
