Author:
Susan
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Date Posted: 16:56:08 10/29/05 Sat
>Fans and celebrity leeches are often obnoxious.
>Especially the leeches who will stop at nothing to get
>some attention from every famous person that they meet.
Amazingly, there are some celebrities who really enjoy fan attention without being conceited. I was surprised recently by a blog written by Brian May's (the guitarist from Queen who wrote some of their best songs, IMO, including We Will Rock You) mourning the recent death of a loyal fan who would camp outside their venues for days ahead of time whenever Queen would be playing there--she followed the band wherever they went, and, since she didn't have a job, the band actually brought her food! BTW, May actually maintains the website himself. (I love when celebrities do their own sites--hint hint.) He's a very down-to-earth and intelligent guy (he actually has a Ph.D. in astronomy), and it's a really interesting read if you like him: http://www.brianmay.com.
>Since celebrities terrorize me, I've never been
>obnoxious to anyone famous or even semi-famous.
Sometimes I wonder if my very presence is obnoxious to them! I never know what to say when I meet a celebrity--I mean, "You're so great; I love your work," is so obvious I feel like a doofus saying it. But what else can you say when you have only two seconds to make a connection with someone? (I did once have a boyfriend who had natural knack for making conversation with famous people--he made friends with quite a few; they were always the ones asking *him* to hang around for a while. I'll never forget getting to spend time with my hero, the late Gene Clark of the Byrds, because of him! We saw met him three times, and he used to remember us and always invited us to hang out on his tour bus. In the process, I also got to meet music legends Blondie Chaplin and Rick Danko!)
>On the other hand, I know a novelist who loves meeting
>people at book fairs. He finds it very gratifying when
>someone tells him how much he or she has enjoyed one
>of his books.
I guess you have to be pretty secure in yourself to be able to accept compliments gracefully.
>Obnoxious... facetious... It can be easy to confuse
>the two...
But one doesn't necessarily imply the other. Perhaps I should have said "ironic" instead of facetious.
>To confess the truth, I'm not sure I'd read his
>memoirs. I just don't want to know too much about my
>favorite artists' private lives.
I'm kind of torn in that respect. If I found out something really negative about the person, I'd really regret reading their bio. That actually happened to me while researching another favorite actor I was planning to write a bio about. (And there are a couple of musicians I really like whose bios I was warned off reading if I wanted to keep my admiration for them in tact.) With David Warner, I've never gone out of my way to find out information about him, but whenever I happen across an article, an interview, or a website, I do read it, and I'm happy to say I haven't found out anything about him to lower my opinion of him. On the contrary, the more I know about him, the more I like him. (Maybe I should quit while I'm ahead! I like him just a bit too much as it is!) He's very articulate and witty and intelligent, and he seems like a truly nice, down-to-earth person as well. So I would have no reservations at all about reading a memoir written in his own words (no ghost writers, please!).
BTW, I'm not saying this applies to David Warner, but I think most celebrities with a flair for writing aren't above embellishing their stories a bit. I've heard David Niven had a tendency not to let the truth get in the way of a good story, for example. (Compelling Sheridan Morley to write a nasty posthumous counterbiography just to burst Niven's carefully constructed bubble for us all.) And I've started reading the autobiography of another one of my heros, Emlyn Williams. (It took him two volumes just to get up to the age of 30!) On a website about him, I found a posting from some relative of his who complained that in his bios he changed a lot of things from the way they really were, left out a lot of people, etc. But I really don't care; as long as he's not completely fabricating a new life for himself, a celebrity isn't under any obligation to reveal every last detail of his life to the public, and however much of Emlyn's story is true, it's a gorgeous piece of literature.
So of course I would love to read DW's memoirs, whatever he writes in them! He definitely doesn't seem like the type to write unsavory tidbits about other actors. Rather, from the interviews he's given, he seems more inclined to speak well of people or not to speak of them at all. Yet he can be a little curmudgeonly, like when he complained in Starlog about having to play an English "stereotype" with the name "St. John" in Star Trek V, but at least he's truthful about how he feels. He's not one of those corporate Hollywood people who has to put a positive spin on everything. He's a straightforward, genuine person who seems to tell it like it is. I admire that.
>I enjoy reading biographies and memoirs, but the older
>I get, the more uneasy I'm becoming about them in
>general. Everybody is entitled to at least some
>privacy, unless they're monsters like Saddam Hussein
>or J. Edgar Hoover!
That's why I like the idea of DW writing his own version--then it's his decision to keep as much or as little of his privacy as he wants!
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