The HR department has killed day-to-day divadom. No longer can you tell your co-worker that her hair needs a good brush; nor can you explain to Richard from accounts that his tan brogues and shiny blue suit sting your retinas. That might upset them. People would be a lot more presentable if you could say these things, but you can’t. Nobody can.
French actress Eva Green, who starred as James Bond’s love interest in Casino Royale, seems to have escaped the great diva slap-down. She was at London’s High Court this week suing White Lantern Films over a $1 million fee for a film that never got made. It seems Green and the producers had artistic differences over the budget, location and preparations. As if it couldn’t get more Hollywood, she was questioned about text messages in which she called colleagues “devils,” “evil” and “inexperienced, pretentious morons.”
My personal favorite, though, was the message in which she referred to crew members “peasants from Hampshire.” When asked about it she said, “I have nothing against peasants,” adding that these comments were merely her “Frenchness coming out.”
Inevitably, Green has been branded “hysterically gobby.” But the only issue I can see with Eva Green is that she is part of a dying breed. She is the last of the real Hollywood stars, so passionate about the quality of her films that she would “rather eat tumors” than work with idiots. Nowadays, yoga and face masks are about as Hollywood as it gets.
In the days of casual cocaine use and misogyny, the list of Hollywood divas was as long as your arm. They even had their own awards, where the Hollywood Women’s Press Club handed out the Sour Apple trophy, in recognition of entertainers who exhibited rude or difficult behavior on set. It was an honor, accepted by many a star, including Sean Penn, Ryan O’Neal, Joan Rivers and Bruce Willis. Only Doris Day and Frank Sinatra were able to claim three Sour Apples over their prolific careers.
The awards died off in the early 2000s and it seems inevitable that our divas will one day die off with them. Those who remain are of a certain age, with none that I can think of below forty. But what a glamorous last stand. Mariah Carey has canceled interviews because she’s “not a morning person.” Kanye West, now as canceled as a Mariah interview, often compares himself to Christ. The deplorable Gwyneth Paltrow, who makes candles that smell like her vagina, gained my reluctant respect after saying she’d “rather die than let my kids eat Cup-a-Soup” and that she’d prefer to “smoke crack than eat cheese out of a tin.”
Divadom is really a form of therapy. Look at Green, who claims that her reactions were merely “an emotional response’ to perceived difficulties. Some of us scream at an undeserving waiter but later regret it. Others pay $200 an hour to be told that it’s a response to unresolved childhood trauma. Buying your colleagues some flowers and coffee to say sorry for your behavior seems like the more economical option.
Instead of divas, we are now plagued with the confessional star, ironically more obnoxious than plain and simple obnoxiousness. They write memoirs, not to tell us about the fun stuff — the sex, the drugs, the rolling around on a mattress of cash — but instead to share the pain and hardships of being a stinking rich star. Pamela Anderson is the latest to deploy this particularly lucrative shtick, claiming that her new book and Netflix doc will see her “taking control of the narrative for the first time” rather than, you know, simply cashing in. Baring all then baring your soul seems to be the new Hollywood playbook.
The unfortunate truth for these stars is that nobody really cares about their struggles, because we all struggle. What we don’t do is frolic around on yachts making saucy flicks. Tell us more about that. Just don’t try to make us feel sorry for you. Think about Meghan Markle and her claim to have been the most hounded woman in Britain. I’d have far more sympathy for her if she simply yawned that she’d got a bit sick of weird be-tweeded palace bumblers trying to control her life. But Duchess Difficult doesn’t like being called a diva. She’s a victim, remember?
Eva Green is smart, talented and beautiful. The only thing that could possibly make her sexier is some unapologetic villainy. In her next film contract, she should demand a quivering on-set intern whose only job is to light her cigarettes. Otherwise, we’ll be stuck with the self-pitying nonsense that divadom so perfectly belittles.
This article was originally published on Spectator Life.
