Six degrees
Dame Edna Everage was due to give her Hong Kong possums a final farewell yesterday, before retiring from the stage after a 57-year outing. Adored by many, the dame has had her ups and downs. During a stint as agony aunt at Vanity Fair, she responded to a reader who had asked if she should learn Spanish by saying: 'Forget Spanish ... Who speaks it that you are really desperate to talk to? The help? The leaf blower?' The magazine was forced to apologise when actress Salma Hayek voiced her fury over the article. The 'gigastar' responded by saying Hayek was only jealous because Dame Edna had been first choice to play Frida Kahlo ...
The Mexican artist sought solace in art from the lifelong pain caused by a traffic accident at the age of 18, which left her with multiple broken bones, a snapped spinal column and a pierced uterus. Promiscuous by the standards of the day, it is telling that the artist depicted the monkey - a symbol of lust in Mexico - as protective and comforting in her work. Her stormy marriage was peppered with affairs on both sides. Among Kahlo's many lovers were Leon Trotsky and Josephine Baker ...
The 'Bronze Venus' was sleeping on the streets of St Louis when she was hired to join a Vaudeville act at the age of 15. A move to France catapulted her to superstardom. During the second world war, Baker's fame allowed her to move relatively freely through Europe and she was enlisted as a spy for the French Resistance, writing anything relevant she overheard at parties in invisible ink on sheet music or sewn into her underwear. She died after suffering an aneurism, in bed, surrounded with glowing reviews of a gala held in her honour, financed by her friend and patron Grace Kelly ...
Kelly retired from movies aged 26, when Prince Rainier of Monaco - who banned her films in the principality - proposed. The prince was in need of a tourist attraction for his cash-poor nation and the wedding would not have happened had Kelly's father not agreed to pay a dowry of US$2 million. Things could have gone very differently had her parents allowed her to marry her previous fiance, the twice-divorced Oleg Cassini ...
The 'Secretary of Style' to Jackie Kennedy, Cassini became synonymous with the 'new look' of the 1960s - not an obvious route for a man born a Russian count, whose family was forced to flee for their lives during the Russian Revolution. Cassini's clean cuts changed the way Western women dressed and his legacy includes a popular suit named after its inspiration, Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band ...
The phenomenally successful 1967 Beatles album led to a phenomenally awful 1978 film of the same name. What the producers said would be 'this generation's Gone With The Wind' turned out to be, in the words of Newsweek, 'a film with a dangerous comparison to wallpaper'. This could have come as a surprise considering the varied cast, which included Aerosmith, Frankie Howerd, Bobby Womack and Edna Everage.
