Allan Cubitt, the writer of The Fall – BBC2’s highest-rating drama launch in eight years – arrives first, early for our interview. He is a slightly rumpled-looking man, with kind brown eyes. Next is Gillian Anderson, aka DSI Stella Gibson, tiny and chic in high heels, her manner immediately friendly and later quite fierce. I …
The Countess of Carnarvon is golden, healthy, sporty and jolly, with such a charmingly retro way about her, she puts me in mind of John Betjeman’s famous paean to the tennis-plying Miss Joan Hunter Dunn, “furnish’d and burnish’d by Aldershot sun”. Her voice is creamy and rich, and she has a ready, robust laugh that …
Kirstie Allsopp shares her Notting Hill home in west London, a hotchpotch of different styles and influences, with a bevy of boys: her property-developer partner, Ben Andersen, their seven-year-old and five-year-old sons, Bay and Oscar, as well as her stepsons Hal and Orion by Ben’s ex-wife, Theresa. All this “boysyness” is offset by Allsopp’s battalion …
Kim Cattrall is as demure in person as she is wild on screen, at least as the gal who is still her best-known character: the sexiest beast from Sex and the City, Samantha. I find her sitting on a dining room’s pretty curved banquette, like an indoor cabana designed for Marie Antoinette, which is rather fitting …
Our interview was such fun! And with a very, what I call, Miranda Moment. At one point, I almost fell off my chair – something that Miranda, at least in her eponymous show, does a lot. Could this be “method” interviewing? We meet in a photographic studio in Fulham, south-west London. Miranda lopes down the …
Ruth Jones talks about life after Gavin & Stacey, celebrity dilemmas – and how she lost four and a half stone. Ruth Jones is standing in a burnt out (apocalypse-chic) attic looking like a creamy-skinned, voluptuous siren from the 1950s – think, Jane Russell. She’s had hours of hair and make-up and is wearing a …
Ginny Dougary FT MAGAZINE November 2012 Dasha Zhukova addressed a roomful of architecture critics at the ICA in London earlier this year, announcing the latest move in her mission to bring contemporary art and culture to Moscow. It was the first time, she tells me afterwards, that she hadn’t read from notes, and although this …
The domestic goddess has her hair in curlers and is showing me her bunion scars. Only someone as beautiful as Nigella Lawson, you can’t help thinking, would be so insouciant about exposing her flaws. Our whole conversation seems dedicated to her persuading me, and by extension all other less goddessy types, of her long list …
The last time I met Mitch Winehouse, his daughter was alive and on the road, or so he believed, to recovery. That was at the end of 2009, and he had agreed to be interviewed to promote a TV documentary, called My Daughter Amy. Now, three years on, it is coming up for the sad …
What would be the right setting in which to interview the queen of English rock? A gothic ruin? In the crook of a tree, perhaps, in an ancient oak forest? On the set of Miss Havisham’s cobwebby dining room? All would seem more appropriate, certainly, than the banal, style-free zone of a room in the …