Diary – 6 December 2018

I recently returned from several months in Los Angeles working on one of the most popular US TV shows. American Horror Story is a mysteriously scary but fascinating series of interconnecting stories created, produced and written by Hollywood’s latest wunderkind Ryan Murphy. In the past decade, he was the brilliance behind such hits as Nip/Tuck, Glee and my particular favourite, Feud, a fascinating study of the enmity between two great legends of the silver screen, Joan Crawford and Bette Davis. More recently his output has trebled with The Assassination of Gianni Versace, a nine-part series about the tragic events involving the fabled Italian designer, and the mesmerising trial of O.J. Simpson in The People vs O.J. Simpson. The latter was a massive hit and Mr Murphy’s fame continues to soar — he gets a star on Hollywood Boulevard this month. Ryan is endlessly creative, and he decided that one of my characters in the series should be a film star/witch called Bubbles McGee. I adored the name, and the part, for which I wore a silver white bouffant wig redolent of Jean Harlow. Strangely, silver wigs are hard to come by in Hollywood and they only managed to get one. When it came to the death scenes (actors die a lot in American Horror Story), the fake nails embedded in my skull from a ‘nail bomb’ and the blood splattered all over my face took an hour to apply and three days to get rid of. I kept wondering where the congealed blood was coming from in my bath…

I was excited to be working at 20th Century Fox studios, for this was the third time that I had started a project at this iconic studio. When I was 20, I was signed as a contract player by the notorious Darryl Zanuck (cue the #MeToo chorus).