28-03-2025
Famous artists have long used Cunard to arrive in New York in style
Authors, actors and musicians have long used the seven days it takes to sail from Southampton to New York on one of Cunard's luxury ships as space to think, contemplate and plan their next work.
The actress and singer Marlene Dietrich wisely followed her friend Noel Coward's advice to 'always be seen, dear...' by timing her entrance to the ship's dining room for maximum effect. There were others who sailed for respite from the business of stardom and who used the seven-day crossing the ocean to create, rather than bask in reflected glory.
David Bowie was one such star. A fear of flying would have scuppered his crucial first US tour in 1972 if he hadn't climbed aboard Queen Elizabeth 2 that September, sailing to the first of his American dates and, on the way, settling down to write songs for what would become his post-Ziggy Stardust album, Aladdin Sane.
But it was Ziggy he was bringing to America's stages, and it was Ziggy who made a full-on, fully costumed appearance in the ship's dining room one evening. Bowie's travelling companion, artist George Underwood, noted that such was the rippling interest that the glam rocker subsequently declined to leave his cabin for the rest of the voyage. At least he would have got some writing done. 'I've bumped into writers, musicians, painters, politicians,' Bowie later said of his several Cunard voyages. 'I wanted to see what it was like to be adrift for seven days. I usually take an enormous number of books with me. I can read all day long and float between two or three books at the same time.'
Other, less bookish rock stars followed in Bowie's wake. The Cure made two transatlantic crossings on QE2 for their US tours of the 1990s, while Sting performed songs from his Broadway musical The Last Ship on board Queen Mary 2 on Tyneside in 2014. James Taylor sang for passengers the same year. 'It sort of makes a connection back to another time and place,' he said of his voyage.
Hollywood is a past master when it comes to spotting the perfect settings for sparkling sophistication, which is why the 2017 world premiere of The Greatest Showman (about a regular Cunard passenger in his day, P T Barnum) took place on Queen Mary 2, with the film's stars Hugh Jackman, Zac Efron, Rebecca Ferguson, and Zendaya walking the red carpet for what was the world's first Hollywood premiere on a passenger ship.
Some of the movie's scenes were filmed on board, too, a feat bettered in 2019 when Steven Soderbergh's Let Them All Talk, starring Meryl Streep, Dianne Wiest and Candice Bergen, was shot entirely on board Queen Mary 2, the cast often improvising their scenes across the luxurious, two-week voyage.
Global pop superstar Ed Sheeran has also enjoyed his Cunard moment in 2016, when his producer, Benny Blanco, inveighled him to climb aboard with his guitar to record his mega-selling third album, Divide, in a recording studio they rigged up on Queen Mary 2. They also managed to squeeze in the filming of a documentary, Songwriter, later shown at the Tribeca Film Festival. Which only goes to show that however glamorous and starlit the setting, when the stars come out on Cunard, they sometimes come out to work, too.
