Latest news with #bohemian
Daily Mail
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
EXCLUSIVE Johnny Depp moves to Sussex: Pirates of the Caribbean star snaps up large house after living in the county during Covid in guitarist Jeff Beck's 16th century cottage
He cuts the most bohemian of figures. But it can be revealed that Johnny Depp has joined the gin-and-jag set by putting down roots in the Home Counties, snapping up a large house in the Sussex countryside, near the border with Kent. He was chauffeured from there to the premiere of his new film, Modigliani: Three Days On The Wing Of Madness, last week, which is why he reportedly was a little late. Two years ago, there were reports – which proved inaccurate – suggesting the Anglophile actor had moved to Somerset. In fact, he was holed up in London, in a Soho townhouse and art studio, where he lived for a couple of years. The Daily Mail's Alison Boshoff reported in July last year and recently-published interviews with Depp were indeed conducted in Soho. However, for reasons of peace, privacy and security he's now decided to move out to the country, just like his late best friend, the guitarist Jeff Beck, it can be revealed today. Beck lived in a 16th-century farmhouse in Wadhurst, Sussex; and Depp stayed with him during the Covid pandemic. A friend said Depp said he was 'in the English sticks', which he described as 'very beautiful and wet'. Depp has a huge house in the south of France, where he and ex-partner Vanessa Paradis largely raised their children Lily-Rose and Jack; and a Caribbean island, Little Hall's Pond Cay, where he tied the knot with Amber Heard in February 2015. That relationship unravelled just two years later, and after the divorce came two legal battles over allegations of domestic abuse. Depp lost the libel action which he brought at the UK High Court in 2020, after being called a 'wife beater', but successfully brought a libel action against Heard in a US court in 2022. Depp told the High Court in 2020 he'd lost $650million of the money he made at the peak of his Pirates Of The Caribbean fame, and was left owing $100million in taxes, on account of managers he accused of stealing from him. But friends say, despite unhappy memories of his British court case, Depp feels at home here. Key members of his team, including the CEO of his UK production company, Stephen Deuters, are based here. Depp seems to enjoy East Sussex, and has been spotted at The Middle House pub and hotel in Mayfield. He's also taken a tour of the Folly Wildlife Rescue animal centre in Kent, of which Beck was patron, and was pictured cradling an orphaned badger named Freddie Mercury. Depp was devastated by Beck's sudden death from bacterial meningitis in January 2023. Johnny was reportedly at his bedside. He and the guitarist's widow Sandra gave him a 'green burial' in the grounds of his house in Sussex. And it is perhaps no surprise that Depp is drawn to settling there himself. Johnny may even take a leaf out of his old friend's quieter life as a country gent. Beck supported the local wildlife rescue charity and would be seen chatting to locals and even pottering around the Co-op supermarket - though, of course, villagers said some 'absurdly gorgeous classic car' would be parked wherever he went. When he wasn't recording in his home studio, or touring the world and playing his iconic music to thousands of adoring fans, Beck would even write the occasional letter to Wealden Council. Only his friend Johnny Depp would raise eyebrows in the community, with a taxi driver who once picked up the Hollywood star near Beck's place in Wadhurst - where they had been jamming - telling BBC journalist Victoria Valentine that the actor's 'jangly necklaces' were 'a bit unusual in rural Sussex'. The pair first met in 2016 and began recording the album in 2019 while Depp was also playing with Alice Cooper's supergroup Hollywood Vampires. In 2022 Beck released a full length album, titled 18, with Depp and the pair played a number of live gigs together. Depp gave an interview to Hollywood Authentic where he said: 'There's a couple who very much helped to keep me alive and sane and happy through the weirdness. And that's Jeff and Sandra [Beck's wife]'. Beck, regarded as one of rock's greatest ever guitarists, was ranked fifth in Rolling Stone Magazine's list of the '100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time'. His extraordinary career saw him share the stage with some of music's biggest names – and produce an album as well as touring with Depp in 2022.
Daily Mail
10-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
Esther Freud is back in our picks for the best Literary Fiction out now: MY SISTER AND OTHER LOVERS by Esther Freud, FLASHLIGHT by Susan Choi, THE GIRLS WHO GREW BIG by Leila Mottley
MY SISTER AND OTHER LOVERS by Esther Freud (Bloomsbury £18.99, 288pp) This slim but capacious novel begins with narrator Lucy preparing for a premiere. Although not named, it's obvious that the film is Hideous Kinky, adapted in 1998 from Freud's largely autobiographical debut novel of the same name which featured the then five–year-old Lucy as the protagonist. Lucy's bruising but always engrossing passage from child to adulthood provides the arc here, and we're deeply with her at every moment, whether she's watching Eric and Ernie at Christmas while her beloved sister injects drugs upstairs, or suddenly discovering three previously unknown half-brothers (Freud's father, the artist Lucian, was rumoured to have 30 children). Freud's alternately painful and funny story may cleave close to her fascinating life, but it begs larger questions too as Lucy's insight grows into the lasting legacy of her rootless bohemian upbringing. FLASHLIGHT by Susan Choi (Jonathan Cape £20, 464pp) Spanning decades, oceans and political ideologies, the drama in Choi's epic novel takes place on the largest and most intimate of stages. At the centre are the Kangs: Serk, Anne and Louisa. Though born in Japan, Serk doesn't discover he's ethnically Korean until the end of the Second World War. He subsequently emigrates to America, where he marries Anne and fathers Louisa. Rage, not love, is default in this fractious family, which keeps the novel's first half at a roiling boil. Then a family trip to Japan takes an apparently tragic turn. The truth, however, is far stranger than fiction – cue a spoiler-forbidding plot that draws on an incredible episode in late 20th-century geopolitics. It makes for an expanse of narrative ground to cover, but Choi's startling, bristling characters power this journey, which plays in the reader's mind with cinematic intensity. THE GIRLS WHO GREW BIG by Leila Mottley (Fig Tree £16.99, 352pp) Motley's debut, Nightcrawling – written when she was just 17 – earned her a Booker Prize longlisting. Her ample talent is on display again in this loose sequel, which follows an improvised sisterhood of mostly teenage Floridian moms, 'the Girls'. Shunned by their small town's community, they provide each other with support. But when pregnant, would-be Olympic swimmer Adela arrives, the dynamic is disturbed. Clever Emory, who dreams of college admission, finds in the newcomer the friendship she's been starved of. But the unwitting Adela is on an explosive collision course with the Girls' ringleader, Simone. Motley's tough, vital lyricism drives a fiercely compassionate novel about survival, hope, and love.
The Guardian
10-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Modigliani – Three Days on the Wing of Madness review – Johnny Depp's painter as bohemian badass
Some very cliched roistering, life-affirming wine-drinking, bourgeois-defying artistic shenanigans here from the veteran screenwriting couple Jerzy and Mary Olson-Kromolowski who have adapted a 1980 stage play, Modigliani by Dennis McIntyre, about the Italian sculptor and painter Amedeo Modigliani, known as Modi. Johnny Depp directs and perhaps sees his subject as a bohemian badass not unlike Hunter S Thompson, whom he played in Terry Gilliam's 1998 movie Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas – and perhaps not altogether unlike how he sees himself. It is 1916 in Paris and the brutality of war is destroying the belle époque; Riccardo Scamarcio plays Modigliani, a brilliant, sensual but penniless artist facing poverty and casual antisemitism. Having got into a chaotic affray at a pompous posh restaurant – filmed like a deleted scene from Richard Lester's The Three Musketeers – Modigliani has to lie low from the police and dreams of quitting Paris, to the bewilderment of his quaintly imagined artist comrades Maurice Utrillo (Bruno Gouery) and Chaïm Soutine (Ryan McParland), and his lover (and subject) Beatrice Hastings (Antonia Desplat). But according to his longsuffering dealer Léopold Zborowski (Stephen Graham) he has to wait three days for a certain wealthy collector to hit town – a collector that Zborowski assures Modigliani is interested in his work; this is Maurice Gangnat, played in cameo by Al Pacino. So Modigliani must go to ground, restlessly haunting the streets and the lowlife nightspots pursued by his own demons. This lavishly produced and costumed European co-production is handsomely cast – but the range of talent here feels wasted on what is a fundamentally dated and stereotypical drama, whose Bohemian passion is diluted. Scamarcio does his best and he is arguably the best actor for the job, but there is something rather shallow here. Modigliani – Three Days on the Wing of Madness is in UK cinemas from 11 July.
The Guardian
10-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Modi: Three Days on the Wing of Madness review – Johnny Depp's Modigliani as bohemian badass
Some very cliched roistering, life-affirming wine-drinking, bourgeois-defying artistic shenanigans here from the veteran screenwriting couple Jerzy and Mary Olson-Kromolowski who have adapted a 1980 stage play, Modigliani by Dennis McIntyre, about the Italian sculptor and painter Amedeo Modigliani, known as Modi. Johnny Depp directs and perhaps sees his subject as a bohemian badass not unlike Hunter S Thompson, whom he played in Terry Gilliam's 1998 movie Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas – and perhaps not altogether unlike how he sees himself. It is 1916 in Paris and the brutality of war is destroying the belle époque; Riccardo Scamarcio plays Modigliani, a brilliant, sensual but penniless artist facing poverty and casual antisemitism. Having got into a chaotic affray at a pompous posh restaurant – filmed like a deleted scene from Richard Lester's The Three Musketeers – Modigliani has to lie low from the police and dreams of quitting Paris, to the bewilderment of his quaintly imagined artist comrades Maurice Utrillo (Bruno Gouery) and Chaïm Soutine (Ryan McParland), and his lover (and subject) Beatrice Hastings (Antonia Desplat). But according to his longsuffering dealer Léopold Zborowski (Stephen Graham) he has to wait three days for a certain wealthy collector to hit town – a collector that Zborowski assures Modigliani is interested in his work; this is Maurice Gangnat, played in cameo by Al Pacino. So Modigliani must go to ground, restlessly haunting the streets and the lowlife nightspots pursued by his own demons. This lavishly produced and costumed European co-production is handsomely cast – but the range of talent here feels wasted on what is a fundamentally dated and stereotypical drama, whose Bohemian passion is diluted. Scamarcio does his best and he is arguably the best actor for the job, but there is something rather shallow here. Modi: Three Days on the Wing of Madness is in UK cinemas from 11 July.
The Guardian
07-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Hidden Master: The Legacy of George Platt Lynes review – eye-opening snapshot of New York's queer scene
George Platt Lynes was an American photographer who lived in Paris in the 1920s and then mostly in New York City for the rest of his life; he died in 1955. A gay man who was very out by the standards of the times, he was right in the middle of the one of the most flamboyant bohemian queer scenes of the period. And, man, did he have fun, shagging up a storm and taking nude pictures of beautiful men and women (but mostly men) when he wasn't earning work shooting fashion spreads for Vogue magazine. This documentary, directed by Sam Shahid, introduces his life and work in a deeply respectful, straightforward way, splicing in hundreds of examples of his mostly black-and-white pictures with curators, admirers and some surviving friends and acquaintances. Notable interviewees include portrait artist Don Bachardy, and the painter Bernard Perlin, seen in archive footage given he died in 2014, who was a very close friend of Platt Lynes and the executor of his artistic estate. Like so many other documentaries about dead artists that require cooperation from the deceased's estate, this sometimes gets a little hyperbolic about its subject's talent. Which is not to say that Lynes' work isn't worth exploring and celebrating, not only for its aesthetic merits but also for the way it captures a specific time and place. His commercial work was classical and elegant, tinged with a surrealism he learned first hand from Man Ray himself. His nudes and frankly erotic material are gorgeously sensual with a chilly, sculptural quality whose influence can be traced in later photographers of male nudes like Robert Mapplethorpe. Meanwhile, the snapshot the film offers of New York's queer scene in the 1940s and 50s – a shimmering fever dream of orgiastic (literally) cocktail parties, fuelled by passion and pomp – is an eye-opening delight. Lynes himself was in a long-running menage a trois with curator Monroe Wheeler and writer Glenway Wescott well before the word polyamorous was even coined, let alone 'throuple'. He was also very close to such figures as Gertrude Stein, who scolded him like a granny for dropping out of university, and Christopher Isherwood among others. His encounter with sexologist Alfred Kinsey (which became a friendship) resulted in the Kinsey Institute holding a significant chunk of Lynes' work, including a box marked 'private' that the curators teasingly insist they've never looked in out of respect for Lynes. The latter emerges as an irrepressibly charming figure, although perhaps not without a sinister, manipulative side that the film never really delves into. Hidden Master: The Legacy of George Platt Lynes is in UK cinemas from 11 July.
