The early 2000s movie that actors and directors call one of the best of the 21st century
The New York Times posed that question recently, polling some 500 notable directors, actors and Hollywood players to compile a list of the 100 best films of the 21st century. The result – a polarizing and comprehensive tour of modern movie magic – was published this month.
Among the varied titles that made the list, one 2000s flick emerged as a favorite among actors and directors alike. "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," Michel Gondry's 2004 heartbreak epic, landed at No. 7 on the list, just behind No. 1 pick "Parasite."
Is this the best movie of the 21st century? 500 Hollywood power players think so.
Among the big names who voted for it were Australian actress Toni Colette, "Succession" star Brian Cox, and horror film director Robert Eggers.
The movie, which stars Kate Winslet and Jim Carrey, turns the classic rom-com formula on its head, imagining if a recently split couple had the power to erase all memories of one another. The resulting film is a heartwrenching exploration of how we are shaped by love and the inevitability of pain as an accompaniment to vulnerability.
"It's really smart. It's deeply moving. And it's funny. You can get all those three, which is rare," author Dennis Lehane wrote of the movie alongside his vote for the list.
Our 40 favorite movies of the past 40 years, from 'Back to the Future' to 'Get Out'
"It's very much about how love finds a way. And I don't mean that in the sunny Hallmark way. I mean that in the messy, sometimes destructive, sometimes self-destructive way," wrote Lehane, a novelist and screenwriter whose books, such as "Mystic River" and "Shutter Island," have been adapted into popular films.
Other stars who cast a ballot for "Eternal Sunshine" included "The Help" star Bryce Dallas Howard and "Barbie" actor Simu Liu. Rachel Zegler, who was born just three years before the movie was released, also listed it as one of her favorites, as did novelist Curtis Sittenfeld.
That the film has a cult following among even A-listers is no surprise. Since its early 2000s release, it has become an unbreakable part of the cultural vocabulary. Pop star Ariana Grande's most recent album, "Eternal Sunshine," drew heavily from the themes of the film, her music video for one of the tracks even recreating scenes from the movie.
With Carrey in a rare serious role, and a star-studded supporting cast including Kirsten Dunst, Elijah Wood and Mark Ruffalo, the movie's grasp on the bodily violence of heartbreak continues to earn it new fans.
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Elle
5 hours ago
- Elle
I Tried to Make Sense of the Convoluted Ending to ‘Untamed'
Spoilers below. As Untamed makes clear, as often as it can, the wildlife are far from the most violent creatures in Yosemite National Park. Humans are always the most dangerous beasts. The new Netflix limited series shares this thesis with any number of contemporary dramas, post-apocalyptic, crime-focused, or otherwise. (Yellowstone and The Last of Us—which, like Untamed, also concern the consequences of grief—spring immediately to mind.) Thus, there's a level to which Untamed is predictable by default. Despite the show's gorgeous visuals, solid performances, and compelling opening, we know the kind of lesson we're in for. Still, Untamed is ultimately less successful than its Hollywood brethren, in part because the threads of its various crimes fail to coalesce in a satisfying manner. The big twists don't land as pulse-pounding revelations. Instead, they manage to be rote, frustrating, and convoluted all at once. By the time National Park Service Investigative Services Branch agent Kyle Turner (Eric Bana) leaves Yosemite behind in the final episode, we're left wondering what, exactly, we're supposed to have learned from his experience. Untamed primarily addresses three main mysteries within the national park, each involving a death or disappearance: the death of Jane Doe/Lucy Cooke, the death of Caleb Turner, and the disappearance of Sean Sanderson. Over the course of the series' six episodes, Kyle digs deeper into the Cooke case, but it isn't until the finale that all the secrets are laid out for the audience. These details are revealed in such a whirlwind (and yet anticlimactic) manner that it's easy to confuse them. If you're left squinting at your screen by the time the credits roll, let's retrace our steps. Here's what we learn by the end of Untamed. At the beginning of the series, a woman tumbles to her death off the edge of El Capitan, an infamous vertical rock formation in Yosemite. (The New York Times accurately referred to this inciting incident as 'a deceptively high-adrenaline start' to the series. What comes next is, generally, much less thrilling.) Slowly, Kyle begins to work with ranger Naya Vasquez (Lily Santiago) to uncover Jane Doe's identity: She is a half-Indigenous woman named Lucy Cooke, formerly known as Grace McCray, and she went missing for the first time many years ago. Back then, Kyle assumed that her father, an abusive man named Rory Cooke, killed her. But when her adult body shows up off El Capitan, Kyle is forced to reexamine the facts of her case. A DNA test soon reveals that Rory Cooke was not, in fact, Lucy's biological father. And when a random boy shows up at the park ranger headquarters with a photograph of 'Grace McCray' (a.k.a. Lucy) as a child, Kyle begins to understand a much more convoluted story is at play. Still, he's initially convinced that wildlife management officer Shane Maguire (Wilson Bethel) had a role in her death. Kyle has good reason to despise (and suspect) Shane, as we later learn, and his theories are all but confirmed when he discovers video footage of Shane on Lucy's phone. The two of them were indeed involved in an illegal drug operation from within Yosemite, but, as it turns out, Shane didn't kill Lucy. Her father did. In the finale, Kyle finally travels to Nevada to locate the abandoned church seen in the boy's photograph of young 'Grace.' Next to the church, he finds a crumbling home occupied by a senile woman named Mrs. Gibbs. Further inspection confirms Kyle's worse suspicions: Mr. and Mrs. Gibbs kept a group of foster children locked in their basement, barely fed, in order to secure continued government funding. When Kyle finds Native American etchings carved into one of the walls, he understands that Grace was one of these children. Kyle then meets with a casino employee named Faith Gibbs, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Gibbs, who confirms that Grace is Lucy Cooke, and that Lucy ran away at some point after realizing her 'dad,' a cop, was never coming back to get her. So, who's the cop? And did he kill Lucy? Next—though I'll admit it's not clear to me exactly how—Kyle draws the investigation directly back to his own park rangers. Paul Souter (Sam Neill) is Yosemite's chief park ranger, and as such, he's Kyle's boss and close friend. (He was also, once, godfather to Kyle's now-deceased son, Caleb.) After reexamining Lucy's DNA test results, Kyle realizes that Paul's daughter, Kate, was scrubbed from the list (despite being in the park's system thanks to her prior arrest). He thus surmises that Paul is the 'cop' Lucy once claimed would rescue her. Perhaps Kyle puts the pieces together thanks, in part, to Paul's own suspicious behavior. After Naya kills Shane in the penultimate episode (after Shane himself almost kills Kyle), Kyle wants to continue to pursue Lucy Cooke's case. Paul discourages him from doing so, claiming Kyle should move on with his life. In refusing to do just that, Kyle finally turns on wheedles the full story out of him. Paul was indeed the father of Lucy Cooke. After having an affair with Lucy's mother, an Indigenous woman named Maggie who later died of cancer, Paul refused to acknowledge Lucy's existence. (He was afraid it would destroy his marriage and ruin his reputation.) Maggie raised Lucy with her abusive husband, Rory, until she died. Her last wish was for Paul to 'get Lucy away from Rory.' Paul did so by giving Lucy the name 'Grace McCray' and placing her under the Gibbs' foster care in Nevada. ('I thought Lucy would be safe there,' Paul tells Kyle in the finale. I have a hard time buying this coming from a cop, but it doesn't seem Paul is the most thorough investigator on the planet.) Kyle tells Paul he'll need to run ballistics on Paul's hunting rifles, and Paul panics. He initially tries to pretend he's lent his rifles to friends, and so one of them might have killed Lucy. But he can't lie to Kyle, and he soon admits that he chased Lucy throughout Yosemite after Lucy started extorting him for money. When that extortion turned into kidnapping—Lucy kidnapped Sadie, Paul's granddaughter, as a bargaining chip—Paul became desperate. He managed to get Sadie back home after she was abandoned on a ridge inside Yosemite, but he continued to pursue Lucy, wanting to 'make her listen somehow.' After firing a warning shot in her direction, Paul accidentally hit Lucy in the leg with a bullet. Believing she was being hunted, Lucy fled—but was soon attacked by coyotes. Tired, injured, and ready to stop her running, she decided to let herself fall off El Capitan. Upon learning this, a horrified Kyle demands that Paul 'make this right' by owning up to his crime. But Paul claims he can't, and when he realizes Kyle will try and 'make it right' for him, he pulls his pistol on his old friend. Kyle calls his bluff and continues walking away. At last, Paul instead turns the gun on himself, pulling the trigger and falling, dead, into the river below. But wait! Lucy and Paul's aren't the only awful, preventable deaths to have taken place in Untamed's Yosemite National Park. Five years before the series' events, Kyle suffered his own loss: the death of Caleb, the young son he shared with his now ex-wife, Jill Bodwin (Rosemarie DeWitt). We learn midway through the show that Kyle discovered Caleb dead in the park after he went missing from camp. But it isn't until the finale that we learn who killed Caleb: a missing person named Sean Sanderson, whose case Kyle never solved. Jill killed him! Or, rather, she had him killed. Alas, here's where Shane finally factors into the story, beyond the red-herring drug operation he ran with Lucy: In one of the finale's more shocking revelations, Jill reveals to her husband, Scott (John Randall), that she hired Shane to kill Sean Sanderson. Who is Sean, exactly? Apparently just some random, horrible man who sought to prey on children. Some important backstory: After Caleb's death, Shane surveyed footage from motion-capture cameras he had placed throughout the park in order to track wildlife migration. It was from one of these cameras that he first spotted Sean stalking Caleb. Shane then brought this footage to Kyle and Jill, telling them they should 'let him kill' Sean in retaliation for his crime. Kyle refused this offer, in part because he wanted 100-percent confirmation that Sean had killed Caleb—and he could only be certain after he'd arrested Sean and brought him to trial. But Jill couldn't live with the unpredictability of a courtroom. So she hired Shane to blackmail and kill Sean behind Kyle's back. Kyle only discovered Jill's secret after Sanderson was reported missing, Jill tells Scott. 'More than anything, more than losing Caleb, it was me betraying Kyle that ended us,' she says of their consequent divorce. Nevertheless, Kyle agreed to lie on Jill's why he never 'solved' Sanderson's missing-persons case. As he later tells the lawyer pursuing a wrongful death suit for the Sanderson family: 'Sometimes things happen that just don't make sense.' Finally, the series ends with Kyle escaping Yosemite National Park. After being placed on suspension thanks to his earlier fight with Shane, Kyle decides to give up his park ranger job together and leave Yosemite in the dust—at last moving on from the place of Caleb's death. In giving up his vigil, Kyle promises the apparition of his son that he'll always take a piece of Caleb wherever he goes. He turns over his horse (and, by extension, his trust) to Naya, who seems eager to take up Kyle's mantle. It's a touching moment, seeing Kyle take ownership of his grief and choose to move forward with his life. But it's unclear how exactly he plans to do so, nor how the destruction wrought within his inner circle—Caleb's death, Jill's betrayal, Paul's corruption, Shane's violence—has shaped him now. Has he decided that the best path forward is to leave it all behind? Or, like Lucy, will he realize that there's no escaping the past? Maybe he's simply driving out of the park to find a good therapist. That, dear reader, should be every viewer's earnest hope.
Atlantic
9 hours ago
- Atlantic
Why No One Knows What's Happening Tonight
About a year and a half ago, I was scheduled to play a concert in Vermont when word came that the gig would be canceled due to an approaching nor'easter. I checked out of the hotel early, lobbed my suitcase into the rental car, and hightailed it to New York as menacing clouds darkened the rearview mirror. Brooklyn had been home for the better part of two decades, but after a move to the Pacific Northwest, I was returning as a tourist, and the show's cancellation augured a rare free evening in the city. There was just one problem: How was I going to figure out what to do with my night on the town? This used to be easy. You grabbed The New Yorker, The New York Times, Time Out New York, or The Village Voice and checked out the event listings. When I graduated from college and moved to the city in 2003, Time Out quickly became my bible, syllabus, and road map. The listings guided me through the cobwebbed bowels of St. Mark's Church and into the Ontological-Hysteric Theater hidden within, where Richard Foreman's mind-bending plays made an indelible impression on me. The listings brought me to Southpaw to hear Neko Case's bloodshot voice; to the Village Vanguard for Jason Moran or Paul Motian; and to a tin-ceilinged basement bar in Park Slope, where I saw a baby-faced Sharon Van Etten sing her earliest songs, and then bashfully hand out CDs burned with her demos, rich with high-frequency hiss from the tape deck onto which she'd recorded them. But over the past decade, event listings have all but disappeared. The New York Times killed its weekly arts listings at the end of 2016, and its online arts-and-entertainment guide remains frozen, like a butterfly pinned and dried, in March 2020: 'New York Arts Institutions Closed Because of Coronavirus' reads the top headline. The Village Voice folded in 2018. (It has recently been revived but has no listings section to speak of.) The New Yorker 's Goings On About Town section was slashed in 2023 to just a page or two, now offering one recommendation per discipline. And Time Out, that veritable doorstop of weekly listings, now previews one or two concerts a month. From the June 2025 issue: Is this the worst-ever era of American pop culture? This is, in part, a familiar story about declining ad revenue, about changing pressures and priorities in the journalism business. When listings began to disappear, many imagined that the internet would simply fill the void—that artists and their fans (as well as nonprofit institutions and their audiences) would find new ways to connect. But a world in which clicks are dollars has led to an ouroboros of cultural journalism in which what is already popular must be written about—which increases its popularity, which means it must be written about, which increases its popularity—and a social-media ecosystem in which artists, no longer able to rely on legacy media for visibility, must create content to please an algorithm instead of their fans or themselves. As mainstream culture grows ever narrower, once-robust subcultures are struggling for survival. Perhaps social-media influencers are today's critics and curators, but even as our feeds promise 'discovery,' they mostly serve us what we already like. We have no idea what we're missing. The listings were my lodestar. And that star's orbit was maintained, at least in part, by a journalist named Steve Smith. Smith was a music editor at Time Out New York from 2001 to 2014. He'd gotten his start at a classical radio station in Houston, introducing Brahms symphonies by day and playing in a rock band in biker bars—he was the drummer—by night. This stylistic mishmash would become a trademark of his sensibility. When we spoke last month, Smith mentioned Karlheinz Stockhausen; the Clash; Billy Idol; John Zorn; John Coltrane; Scandinavian metal; Kronos Quartet; Kiss; Steve Reich; Emerson, Lake & Palmer; and Beethoven—all within the first 10 minutes of our conversation. Time Out 'was a magazine that was basically nothing but the listings,' Smith told me. 'Nobody said, 'Oh, that obscure thing that's happening on a loading dock in Tribeca? No, that's too weird.' I was basically told, 'List what's interesting; list what people will want to know about.'' A coveted red asterisk denoted a critic's pick. 'I had the privilege,' he said, 'of making a difference in the lives of a number of composers and performers. And that, to me, was the most gratifying piece of the job.' One of the lives he changed was mine. The first review I ever received as a singer-songwriter, for a set at Tonic, was written by Smith, for his blog Night After Night. A 33-word listing in Time Out came soon after—a blurb that would remain in my press kit for years. In 2009, he interviewed me for a New York Times Sunday Arts & Leisure profile. The morning after the story ran, Lincoln Center called my manager and offered me a debut on its American Songbook performance series. Who reviewed that concert for the Times? None other than Steve Smith. These listings weren't just a boon for artists like me—they were also a teeth-cutting opportunity for cub journalists, one that demanded brutal concision. Smith, a master of the miniature, stood on the shoulders of those such as Robert Christgau, a longtime Village Voice music editor and the self-proclaimed dean of American rock critics. About a Patti Smith show, from the April 7, 1975, issue: 'Funny, frightening, and just polished enough, Smith shifts from rock and roll to poetry reading like someone who really believes in street literature.' In its heyday, the Voice 's newsroom reverberated with the chaotic counterpoint of freaky choristers, all covering New York City with an obsessive commitment to hyperlocalism: Scenesters haunted hardcore shows at warehouses in Brooklyn; theater nerds ventured to East Village basements for experimental one-acts; dance lovers frequented Lower East Side nightclubs to cover bawdy performance art and contortionist spectacles. Here was a newspaper that, through dogged documentation of small and sometimes-fragile artistic microclimates, came to wield wide-reaching influence over national aesthetic trends as it championed unknown artists like Smith, the Talking Heads, Philip Glass, and so many others. That New York media have turned away from the local in favor of established celebrities may ultimately result in its irrelevance. Sixteen years after that first profile in the Times, I am fortunate to still be making a living playing music. But mine was a transitional generation: I came of age just in time to benefit from the old models and media apparatuses, only to watch them crumble around me. Few emerging musicians today could dream of a two-sentence blurb previewing a Monday-night set at a small club on the Lower East Side, let alone a thousand-word profile. The demise of listings is 'tangled up with the erosion of review coverage,' the jazz critic Nate Chinen told me, while stressing that 'the fundamental utility of a publication is bringing people out' to see a gig: 'The immediate danger is that artists play and people don't know about it.' Chinen would know. He wrote the jazz listings at The New York Times from 2005 until 2016. Those blurbs, he understood, could mean the difference between a standing-room-only show and one where the musicians outnumbered the audience. Today, it's harder than ever for aesthetically adventurous artists to make ends meet. Some have left the business, and others limp along, subsidizing their income with teaching gigs and odd jobs. Meanwhile, pop stars are doing great. The decline of listings followed the broader trend toward 'poptimism,' a critical movement that began as a corrective to the white-male-dominated popular-music journalism of the late 20th century. In a now-canonic broadside published in 2004, the critic Kelefa Sanneh argued that the snobbery of those white-male critics was bathed in racism and sexism, and often resulted in the neglect of music by women and people of color. Poptimists believed that music that was actually popular—the guilty-pleasure radio hits we wail in the car, many of them performed by nonwhite, nonmale artists—ought to be treated with the same reverence granted to the art rockers. Fair enough! But what Sanneh and like-minded critics could not have anticipated was the extent to which their goal would collide with the economic imperatives of internet-based journalism. In the 21 years since Sanneh's essay was published, poptimism has become the status quo in mainstream music criticism, reaching its apotheosis in 2023 with USA Today 's hiring of a full-time Taylor Swift reporter, Bryan West, who would go on to file—you may want to sit down— 501 articles about Swift during her Eras Tour. In such a climate, it's easy to forget that poptimism was once driven by the impulse to lift up marginalized voices. Indeed, much of today's cultural coverage reflects a different societal more, one in which, as the political philosopher Michael J. Sandel has written, we measure the value of people's contributions to the common good solely by 'the market value of the goods or services they sell.' In other words, covering what's popular doesn't just serve journalism's economic bottom line; it also expresses our beliefs. In a society in which dignity and status accrue to the powerful, it's no wonder that outlets once dedicated to nurturing subcultures now publish endless paeans to celebrities. A reader might object: Aren't you just complaining about the cultural version of natural selection? If niche genres can't hack it in today's algorithm-driven world, maybe they deserve extinction. But if they are allowed to die, popular music will also suffer. The terms highbrow and lowbrow conceal a broader ecology in which the raw materials of art move easily from one genre to another. Classical composers have long ransacked folk music to furnish their symphonies with great tunes. Similarly, there would be no Beatles' White Album without Karlheinz Stockhausen's tape music, no Rosalía's Motomami without the vocal arrangements of the Pulitzer Prize–winning composer Caroline Shaw. If we want the next Billie Eilish to be able to work with the next Attacca Quartet, we should ensure that lesser-known artists enjoy a bare minimum of support. To look at a page of event previews was to understand how a collection of artists related to one another. This, according to the opera critic Olivia Giovetti, was one of Smith's great gifts as an editor. 'He crafted listings,' Giovetti told me, 'in such a way that drew out and illuminated the connections between artists, so that the reader came to understand that if they enjoyed that Victoire show at Le Poisson Rouge, they might also dig a yMusic concert at Rockwood Music Hall.' You may not have heard of either group, but you likely know the Metropolitan Opera, where Victoire's founder, Missy Mazzoli, is headed with her adaptation of George Saunders' Lincoln in the Bardo, and you've probably heard of Paul Simon, who tapped yMusic to join him on his farewell tour in 2018. The loss of listings is, in this sense, the loss of a whole world, which historians, too, will have to contend with. Take any issue of The New Yorker from the first 98 years of its existence, and the Goings On About Town section offers a rich snapshot of the city and its subcultures. The same was true of the Times. 'On any given day,' Chinen told me, 'there would be a review of a New York–based dance company at the Joyce Theater, a Ben Ratliff review about a koto player at Issue Project Room, Jon Pareles reviewing an indie-folk artist at Joe's Pub. It was this incredibly robust account of a thriving arts community in a city that, right or wrong, considers itself to be the center of the universe. That's the garden. That's the plant mix that existed.' How will historians write the story of a city that no longer maintains a record of its own cultural life? In this new paradigm, I, like so many others, feel shackled to my Instagram account, resentful that it has become my personal marketing and public-relations departments, yet resigned to its relative efficacy as a mouthpiece. (I tried to opt out, taking a full year off from the internet and another six months away from social media, returning only when my manager begged me to do so. 'The phone has stopped ringing,' he said bluntly.) So yes, amid the gallimaufry of links, photos, and screen caps, I post bite-size songs: here, a William Carlos Williams–inspired lament for the tariff-burdened penguins of Heard Island; there, a setting of a Craigslist ad for free reptiles. A lot of my work is sober and politically minded, but I think it's important to hold on to laughter and absurdity too. Still, those miniature tunes, delivered algorithmically, often bypass my own Instagram followers, landing instead in the feeds of total strangers. For them, these songs are divorced from the broader footprint of my work, which has included oratorios about homelessness and railway travelogues documenting a divided America. Cultural journalism once created that context. Spencer Kornhaber: Taylor Swift is having quality-control issues What's to be done? Performing-arts institutions could work together to underwrite their own weekly listings website or print publication, with their financial contributions scaled according to their budget so that small operations aren't left out. Sure, there would be challenges, namely a blurring of the line between advertising and editorial. Ideally, a group of writers and editors would produce listings with total independence, shielded from pressure by funders. The other solution—plausible or not—is for outlets such as the Times and The New Yorker to reverse course: to recognize that their listings were a public good serving artists, audiences, and arts presenters alike. The societal benefit of a comprehensive guide to the cultural sector can't be readily calculated on a balance sheet. For now, Smith is still serving as the secretary, the minute keeper, the town historian for the creative-music community in New York. After Time Out, he spent two years at The Boston Globe as an arts editor, and then bounced between various jobs covering music back in the city, including a five-year stint writing listings for The New Yorker. He's now a copywriter at an arts institution. Still, he maintains a Substack newsletter, Night After Night, which shares the name of his old blog, the one on which he gave me my first review. Each week, Smith compiles a roundup of notable events in music that lives beyond that narrow mainstream. When I asked him when he returned to writing listings, he said, 'I never really stopped.' Although a comprehensive digital archive of Time Out does not exist, The New Yorker is searchable back to its inaugural issue, published in February 1925. Like any good elder-Millennial narcissist, I did a quick search of my name to look for its first mention in Goings On About Town. There it was, in the issue for April 27, 2009. What else was happening? That week, Nathan Lane and Bill Irwin were starring in a production of Waiting for Godot; Steve Wilson was at the Village Vanguard; Judy Collins was at Café Carlyle; Carnegie Hall featured appearances by Zakir Hussain, Kronos Quartet (playing the compositions of Terry Riley, Philip Glass, and Osvaldo Golijov), and the soon-to-be opera superstar Eric Owens; Chick Corea was leading an all-star band at Lincoln Center; and Lou Reed was holding court at the Gramercy Theatre.
New York Post
12 hours ago
- New York Post
Spice Girl Melanie C stuns on romantic island getaway with Australian model boyfriend
Spice Girl Melanie C – aka Sporty Spice – looks as fit as ever in these candid new vacation photos. The 90s pop legend, 51, escaped to the island of Mallorca for a romantic getaway with her partner, Australian actor and model Chris Dingwall. Advertisement The loved-up pair each shared a carousel of photos from the vacation on Instagram, with Melanie looking absolutely ripped in a tiny two-piece black bikini – and in another snap, relaxing on a boat while reading a book about the history of ecstasy use in dance music. 4 Spice Girl Melanie C shared photos from her romantic vacation with model Chris Dingwall. @melaniecmusic / Instagram Fans and friends were full of praise for the star in the comments section. 'Seeing Melanie look this healthy and happy melts my heart,' one longtime fan wrote. Advertisement 'Gorgeous to see you so happy and relaxed,' wrote UK broadcaster Kate Thornton. 'You're both so cute together. Love seeing you enjoying moments of love,' another fan gushed. 4 The pop singer captioned her Instagram carousel 'a slice of paradise.' @melaniecmusic / Instagram Dingwall is originally from Sydney but travels the world as a model signed to Ford Models and Chadwick. Advertisement The pair went public at Wimbledon in London last July, days after they were spotted walking hand-in-hand at the iconic Glastonbury festival. But they had been quietly dating for months before that: Melanie's frequent visits to our shores earlier in 2024, ostensibly for DJing gigs, also doubled as quality time with Dingwall as the pair shared romantic getaways in resorts across Brisbane, Byron Bay and the Whitsundays. 4 The 90s pop icon showed off her toned body in the photos. @melaniecmusic / Instagram Since those early days the pair have become more open about their relationship, with Melanie C even professing her 'love' for Dingwall on social media in January after he wished her a happy 51st birthday. Advertisement Furthering her Aussie connection, Melanie C will soon appear as one of the celeb coaches on the next season of Seven's music contest The Voice alongside Ronan Keating, Richard Marx and Kate Miller-Heidke. She was based in Bondi while she lived here to film the season, and also made a surprise appearance at a Sydney gay club in April, filming scenes for a new music video. 4 The couple first went public in July 2024. @melaniecmusic / Instagram Melanie C is undoubtedly the most private of the five Spice Girls when it comes to her love life, largely keeping her relationships out of the public eye since a string of romances with high-profile musicians. She has a teenage daughter from a longtime relationship with ex-partner Thomas Starr. The pair split in 2012 after a decade together. After that, Melanie dated her manager, Joe Marshall, for seven years before they split in 2022.
