It is both an amusing and sadly telling story about modern filmmaking that it has been announced that some of the best-known British stars working today are supporting a green rider becoming commonplace in the industry. Riders, for the uninitiated, are clauses that well-known actors have included in their contracts for decades, and have gradually shifted from the amusing (demanding a certain number of close-ups per day, for instance, or, in the case of Jack Nicholson while filming Batman, time to attend Los Angeles Lakers games, all paid for by the studio) to the worthy.
Today, you are less likely to find demands for ridiculous perks and more insistency on diversity, inclusion and no nudity on set. Otherwise, no star.
Yet the latest green rider, which has already been signed up to by more than 100 British actors including Bill Nighy, Hayley Atwell and Mark Rylance – as well as some of the industry’s most reliably annoying bandwagon-jumpers, naming no names – would make the life of the average star miles away from the creature comforts that they are used to. “Examples of sustainable actions you can take” include taking trains, not planes, for European travel, flying economy to reduce emissions and, where possible, using their own clothing and make-up, as well as bringing their own cutlery or dishes to set.
If this wasn’t draconian enough, one of the FAQs, possibly anticipating pushback from actors, says: “I am worried about signing up to a Green Rider and being called a hypocrite when the actions I take in my own life are not always sustainable.” While the answer given on the Equity website is breezily reassuring – “Don’t worry, nobody expects you to be perfect! We all lead complicated lives and often do not have affordable, sustainable options available to us” – it does appear to nullify the good intentions from the outset.
But I, for one, would be mildly disappointed to find myself squeezed next to my favourite star the next time that I’m on an EasyJet flight. They are, after all, supposed to be glamorous figures on a different plane to us.
Thankfully, there are many other figures in the entertainment industry who have fully embraced the path of old-school excess, and lead the kind of cartoonish lifestyles that inspire a mixture of admiration, envy and, in many cases, hilarity. Here’s just a small sample of the unreconstructed celebrities who have spent, spent, spent, and have contributed enormously to the gaiety of nations with their profligacy and absurdity.
Leonardo DiCaprio’s endless yacht holidays
On paper, Leonardo DiCaprio is exactly the kind of actor who would unhesitatingly sign up to a Green Rider; his social media bio describes him as an “actor and environmentalist”, and he is well known for his support of worthy ecological causes. It is unfortunate, then, that he is equally renowned for travelling round the world in the company of vastly younger women in super yachts.
On one recent Italian holiday, he chartered the $190 million, 318-feet long Vava II, as well as using helicopters to ferry him and his guests between Vava Voom (as it surely must be nicknamed) and the nearby port of Santorini. There are persistent rumours that the main reason why DiCaprio didn’t win the Oscar he so richly deserved for The Wolf of Wall Street was that many Academy voters felt that he was simply playing a variant on his real-life existence, and it is hard to think of many other environmentalists given to quite such lavish (and far from sustainable) holidays.
Kim Basinger’s Brazilian psychic
Today, Kim Basinger is regarded as an Oscar-winning stateswoman of cinema, but three decades ago her lavish requirements on set were so infamous than one 1993 Washington Post article was headlined “When Bad Things Happen to Bad Actresses”. She first became notorious for spending $20 million on buying most of an entire town – Braselton, Georgia – in 1989, cheerily saying that it held a special place in her heart because it was where her sexual awakening took place. Half a decade later, she and her fellow investors were compelled to sell it for a mere $1 million as she faced bankruptcy from her notorious decision to pull out of the controversial film Boxing Helena.
Yet Basinger had not endeared herself to Hollywood through her antics on the romantic comedy The Marrying Man, in which she demanded Evian to wash her hair in, attempted to shut down production so that she could consult a psychic in Brazil and memorably informed the film’s screenwriter Neil Simon – the legendary Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright – “whoever wrote this doesn’t understand comedy”. No wonder one studio executive hissed “she’s so hated it’s unbelievable.”
Jon Peters’s plane full of roses
Basinger also had a brief affair with uber-producer Jon Peters on the set of Tim Burton’s Batman, adding herself to a string of conquests including Barbra Streisand (who the then-hairdresser to the stars seduced by saying “you’ve got a great ass”) and the supermodel Vendela Kirsebom, who Peters famously wooed by hiring the Sony corporate jet to deliver flowers to her.
Fabulously wealthy because of a fortuitous stake that he has in any Superman films that are made – although Man of Steel’s producer Christopher Nolan loathed him so much that he had him banned from the set – Peters is nonetheless irritated both by his dismissive nickname of “Hairdresser Jon” and by media fascination with his eventful romantic life; in one of the few interviews that he has given over the past decades, with the Hollywood Reporter, he was eventually driven to tell the interviewer: “You’ll have to do your research. I can’t even remember anymore”.
Bono’s flying hat
U2’s frontman has always struggled with combining his undeniable dedication to charitable causes with a sanctimony that can tick over into absurdity. At one gig, Bono clicked his fingers meaningfully a number of times between songs, saying “Every time I click my fingers, a child in Africa dies.” Inevitably, a heckler then shouted “Well stop f___ing doing it then!” But the story, perhaps more than any other, that has led to widespread ridicule of the man born Paul Hewson is the tale of how, before a concert that he was about to perform with Pavarotti in Italy, he realised that he was missing his favourite black trilby.
The apparently “panic stricken” Bono then paid £1,000 for it to be delivered to him – first class, naturally – but the item was given an upgrade of sorts when the flight crew, fearing that it might be damaged, moved it into the cockpit, where it travelled alongside the captain. Upon its arrival it was transported by courier to the singer, who duly performed at a concert – a charity benefit for homeless Iraqis – while wearing his treasured headgear.
Nicolas Cage’s king cobras
There are so many stories about Nicolas Cage’s reassuringly unhinged extravagance that to recount them all would take up an entire book. Some of the best include his outbidding Leonardo DiCaprio on a dinosaur skull, only to have to return it to the Mongolian authorities when he discovered that it was stolen; purchasing a haunted house in New Orleans, the LaLaurie Mansion, and wistfully saying it an interview that “I bought it in 2007, figuring it would be a good place in which to write the great American horror novel. I didn’t get too far with the novel”; and buying a string of rare and exotic items that include everything from the Shah of Iran’s Lamborghini for half a million dollars to two albino king cobras.
Embarrassingly, and inevitably, the extent of his spending became common knowledge when he was investigated by the IRS for vast amounts of unpaid tax, forcing him to take on any film role that he could in order to pay off his enormous debts. Little wonder that a solvent Cage told GQ last year that “I’m just going to focus on being extremely selective, as selective as I can be. I would like to make every movie as if it were my last.”
Elton John’s flower habit
The tales of Elton John’s drug-fuelled absurdity in the Seventies are legion, and much-repeated, not least by the man himself; perhaps the greatest one is that of a coked-up Elton calling up his manager from the United States and demanding that they do something about the bad weather outside his hotel room. Yet even after he went sober, his extravagant tendencies remained intact, as could be seen by a court case in 2000 over a contract dispute with his record label.
During the cross examination, an incredulous barrister asked him whether it was possible that Sir Elton had spent £293,000 over a 20-month period on flowers, the singer replied “Yes, I like flowers”, and, when questioned about the sheer amount of money that he had lavished on self-indulgence, he said – in the days before he had young children – “I have no one to leave the money to. I’m a single man. I like spending my money.”
Johnny Depp’s cannon ashes
Today, Johnny Depp’s reputation has been dealt severe – if not quite terminal – blows by the very public breakdown of his marriage to Amber Heard and subsequent court cases, but back in his heyday, when he was king of Hollywood, he earned a fortune from the Pirates of the Caribbean films, which he duly put to very individual use. In addition to spending a vast amount on private islands, yachts and wine (he did not disagree with a court assessment that his alcohol bill was $30,000 a month), he spent $3 million on a cannon to scatter the ashes of his friend, the writer Hunter S Thompson, from Thompson’s Colorado farm.
When asked about the wisdom of such an expense at the time, Depp shrugged and said “All I’m doing is trying to make sure his last wish comes true. I just want to send my pal out the way he wants to go out.” Had he known about the subsequent career downturn he was about to face, perhaps he might have invested in a rather cheaper means of honouring the man he so memorably played in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
George Lucas’s fire engine
The billionaire creator of Star Wars might be one of the wealthiest filmmakers in Hollywood, but, unlike many of the other figures on this list, George Lucas leads a relatively modest life in public; the outfit that he is usually associated with is a flannel plaid shirt and a pair of blue jeans. Yet he also has his own flourishes, especially when it comes to his California headquarters of Skywalker Ranch; perhaps the most notable of these is that his $100 million ranch has its own private fire department, complete with fire engines and 14 full-time firefighters on call. This might sound hubristic, but not only were they invaluable when a fire broke out at Skywalker Ranch in 2013, but Lucas is more than happy to lend out his firemen when required for natural disasters such as wildfires.
Celine Dion’s waterpark
As befits a woman who made nearly $700 million from two residencies in Las Vegas, Celine Dion has an enormous amount of money to spend, and cheerfully does so; some of her most over-the-top demands have included the provision of a $2.5 million humidifier at her hotel in Las Vegas, “to keep her vocal chords warm and prevent the climate from drying out her skin”, and her owning literally thousands of pairs of shoes, which she has to store in a Vegas warehouse.
Yet perhaps her quirkiest, and most oddly endearing, extravagance is her creation of a full-blown water park at her Miami home, which boasted two swimming pools, water slides and water cannons; it needed 500,000 gallons of water to operate, which eventually led to the diva being fined by the state for excessive use of resources. Yet she remained unrepentant. She once told an understandably astonished Jonathan Ross that “Some people do drugs and go out every weekend. I built a waterpark.”
Elizabeth Taylor’s diamonds
When the iconic actress and her on-again/off-again husband Richard Burton were paid a million dollars each for Cleopatra, Burton joked that “the price of food is going up.” Taylor, never a stranger to a pithy remark, added: “And diamonds, too.”
The notorious spender, who apparently spent “a thousand dollars a minute”, was famed for her love of luxury glamour, purchasing 200 mink earmuffs from Manhattan’s Bergdorf Goodman, hiring a yacht just for her dogs with Burton, and owning a $1.1 million diamond ring. The ring, dubbed The Taylor-Burton Diamond, was at one point the most expensive diamond in the world, and was so heavy that Taylor had to wear it as a necklace.
Beyoncé & Jay-Z’s birthday Barbie
Jay-Z nearly qualified for this list on his own account, given his penchant for spending a lot of money on expensive alcohol – a canny move in the long term, as his investment in Armand de Brignac champagne has greatly enhanced his already considerable fortune.
Yet the piece of truly epic frivolity that he and his wife Beyoncé indulged in – topically, given the vast success of the new film – was to spend $80,000 on a bespoke Barbie doll for their daughter Blue Ivy for her first birthday, which came complete with 160 sparkling diamonds embedded in white gold. Yet set in the context of their expenditure, this was almost unremarkable; Blue Ivy’s birthday party itself cost a fortune, with a birthday cake that set them back around $2,000 and over $80,000 being spent on pink and white roses, to make it an affair to remember.
George Best’s ‘booze, birds and fast cars’
Amidst the studied and absurd frivolity of contemporary entertainers, there is something reassuringly old-school about the antics of the footballer George Best, a celebrity who appeared to be genuinely enjoying what he did. In addition to buying nightclubs, restaurants and boutiques seemingly on a whim, he had a particular penchant for the company of beautiful women, once remarking: “I used to go missing a lot. Miss Canada, Miss United Kingdom, Miss World.”
And although his alcoholic excess contributed to an early death at the age of 59, he was able to make perhaps the definitive statement about the ups and downs of such a sybaritic and self-indulgence lifestyle, when he declared that: “I spent a lot of money on booze, birds and fast cars. The rest I just squandered.”
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From Elizabeth Taylor to Johnny Depp: 12 jaw-dropping tales of celebrity excess - The Telegraph
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