Little and Large

T. S. Eliot was happily married to Valerie Fletcher for years, but it is only his relationship with Vivien Haigh-Wood that people want to hear about. (‘My nerves are bad tonight. Yes, bad. Stay with me. / Speak to me. Why do you never speak? Speak.’) Lauren Bacall’s second husband was Jason Robards — but who cares about him? In her memoirs and on chat shows it’s Bogie, Bogie, Bogie. Dame Plowright must be irritated to be eclipsed in the Larryographies always by Scarlett O’Hara. So it goes. It is as if there is room only for a single grand passion in a celebrity’s life, and though Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman were divorced in 2001 and have since moved on to new partners, they still belong together in the public mind.

Before they met, according to Iain Johnstone, Cruise was the ‘semi-innocent, semi-naive’, apple-cheeked star of Risky Business, Top Gun and Cocktail. All he had to do was face the world and smile. After the split from Kidman his pictures have become darker, more frantic, as if we are witnessing the cold wrath on the other side of the orthodontics — Magnolia, Minority Report, and leaping up and down dementedly on Oprah’s sofa. Ostensibly he was expressing his love for Katie Holmes, with whom he now has a daughter named Suri, which is Hebrew for ‘Go Away’. The effect was an embarrassing stunt that rivalled the time Michael Jackson dangled his baby out of the window.

As for Kidman, the performances of this ‘frizzy-haired young Australian’ (though she was born in Hawaii) have much improved in recent years, since she shook off the effects of Cruise’s portentousness. I adored the manic theatrical energy of Moulin Rouge, hooted at her toucan beak in The Hours, and was impressed by the experimental style of Dogville.