Category: Johnny Depp

He’s famous for loving booze — and now actor Johnny Depp is to launch his own brand of Caribbean rum in a gambit which may rake in a fortune.

I hear that Depp, 60, who owns an island in the Caribbean, is in the advanced stages of developing a dark rum. This is not an endorsement deal — he owns the company (which he founded with a friend of 30 years). And the brand is going to be ‘authentic and personal’ to the star in flavour, taste, and look.

The label design is still being finalised, but it’s thought it will have personal touches, including artwork based on his tattoos. Specifically, three hearts inked on his arm representing the loves of his life — former partner Vanessa Paradis and their children Jack and Lily-Rose — and a skull and cross-bones, a nod to his most famous role: Captain Jack Sparrow.

The release date is yet to be announced, but a Depp rum would sell briskly to his large fan base — and a financial bonanza could be just what he needs. Depp said in court in 2020 he’d lost his $650 million fortune due to alleged financial mismanagement — and wild spending. In an interview he said he’d been insulted by claims he’d blown $30,000 a month on wine as ‘it was far more’.

More recently, he’s attracted controversy due to links with the Saudi regime, which helped to fund two of his movies.

Now he has the chance to change his fortunes. Fellow actor George Clooney paved the way with his Casamigos tequila, which became the fastest-growing super-premium tequila brand in the U.S., and was bought by Diageo for $1 billion in 2017.

Depp has largely stepped away from the big-money blockbusters, following ugly legal battles with ex-wife Amber Heard. He directs but does not act in his latest project Modi, a low-budget movie about artist Modigliani. Before that he appeared in Jeanne du Barry, a French film.

Depp told a court he’d never return to the Pirates Of The Caribbean series. A source close to the actor told me last year he’d fallen out of love with acting. ‘He says he isn’t interested in speaking someone else’s words. He is interested in authentic expression of himself, through art and music at the moment.’

Depp remains the face of Sauvage, a Dior men’s fragrance. In January last year, Bernard Arnault, the CEO of LVMH, which owns Dior, said the star continued to be a strong driver of sales, justifying their decision to renew his contract in 2022, despite the controversies. ‘You’ve probably seen the ads. That’s working very well,’ Arnault said.

Depp was described as having addictions to drugs and alcohol by a doctor during his 2018 libel case against The Sun newspaper. He termed his use ‘self-medication’. ‘I am not some maniac who needs to be high or loaded all the time,’ he insisted.

Ready for his close-up: Cillian’s beauty secrets

Cillian Murphy, who won the Best Actor Oscar for Oppenheimer, had a secret weapon in his arsenal: Tom Ford bronzing powder.

His stylist and groomer Gareth Bromell somewhat indiscreetly confirmed that he gave Murphy’s pale Celtic skin a boost by dusting it with the bronzer. He said: ‘The powder doesn’t have any glitter or shimmer, or anything like that, which I think is very important for male clients. You want them to look sunkissed, but you don’t want them to look like they’re wearing make-up.’

Murphy also spends ten minutes wearing an LED mask (supposed to improve the appearance of your skin) before walking the red carpet. On Wednesday it was announced he’d picked up a £2 million a year endorsement deal with Versace, with the fashion house saying he’d worn Versace ‘through the awards season’. Which may be partly true, but he was in a Celine suit on Jimmy Kimmel at the end of February, Saint Laurent a few days prior to that — and wore custom Zegna to the BAFTAs.

The nasty-neighbours-plus-kitchen-porn TV subgenre continues to boom. Line Of Duty’s Martin Compston started filming Fear, for Prime Video, this week. It’s about a couple who move to a beautiful house in Glasgow, but their neighbour makes their lives a nightmare. It will air next year.

That’s what I call a visible panty line

Tempers have been fraying in a most undignified way over Emily Blunt’s greatly debated Schiaparelli ‘underpants dress’, which she wore on Oscars night.

Blunt’s veteran stylist of 18 years, Jessica Paster, appears to have become thoroughly fed up with people opining that the gown, which in addition to its controversial ‘Y fronts’ detailing also featured elevated shoulder straps, is ‘ridiculous’ or ‘ugly’.

She told one poster on Instagram disdainfully: ‘You have absolutely no sophisticated taste.’ She was blunter still with another critic, telling her: ‘This is a fashion piece, not a Walmart piece!’ To a third she said simply: ‘I think ur a cow.’ Whatever happened to rising above it?

Paster, who uses the Instagram moniker ‘high heelprncess’ was more tactful when interviewed by Vanity Fair, saying she had offered Blunt a choice of three dresses and this was the one she went for. ‘Emily knew this one would be talked about, and that’s fine with her.

‘Sometimes we don’t play it safe. At this point of years of being with Emily, we can go have fun with fashion. Did I know that people were going to talk about the shoulder? Absolutely. Do I care what anybody else has to say? Absolutely not.

‘Me? I think that people that know fashion, like fashion, like things that are interesting, were going to like it. And I know the people that like some things that are very classic were not going to like it.

‘At the end of the day, she looked absolutely beautiful. It was such a beautiful dress.’

Incidentally, the magazine —known for its cosy relationship with stars — described the sequinned VPL as ‘an eye-catching mid-section embellishment’.

Madonna doesn’t have much to say these days about her ‘British period’, when she lived in London with husband Guy Ritchie… but perhaps its influence on her tastebuds has been lasting.

At her Oscars party, held in manager Guy Oseary’s house, guests including pop star Taylor Swift and actor Cillian Murphy were offered a curry buffet. This included chicken masala, naan bread, and vegetable samosas, although, some of the guests left rather a lot on their plates.

Can Havers play his own grandfather? You be the judge

Actor Nigel Havers is playing his grandfather — the judge who sentenced Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be hanged in Britain — in the forthcoming prestige ITV drama A Cruel Love: The Ruth Ellis Story.

The network confirmed that Havers was on the cast last month, but has kept quiet about his precise role — and the family connection which will make it so fascinating.

I hear that he is going to play his grandfather Sir Cecil Havers, who was the trial judge in 1955. A jury took just 20 minutes to find Ellis guilty of murdering her lover, who she had shot five times, and he passed sentence.

Ellis was hanged in HMP Holloway on July 13, 1955. She was 28.

There were widespread protests and the novelist Raymond Chandler, who was at the time living in Britain, wrote about the ‘medieval savagery of the law’.

In an interview in 2010, Nigel Havers said that his grandfather had always regretted the outcome, feeling that it had been a crime of passion which could have resulted in a sentence for manslaughter rather than the mandatory death penalty for murder.

He added that his grandfather had written to the Home Secretary recommending a reprieve, but received a curt refusal. It was later revealed that Cecil Havers sent money to Ellis’s son every year from her death until the judge passed away in 1977.

Ellis, a nightclub hostess and sometime prostitute, killed her boyfriend, the racing driver David Blakely, in April 1955 outside the Magdala pub in Hampstead.

On trial at the Old Bailey, prosecutor Christmas Humphreys asked: ‘When you fired the revolver at close range into the body of David Blakely, what did you intend to do?’

She replied: ‘It’s obvious when I shot him I intended to kill him.’ In 2003, the verdict was referred to the Court of Appeal. Michael Mansfield QC argued that Ellis was suffering from ‘battered woman syndrome’ after being ‘disgracefully treated’ by Blakely and said that the judge and barristers had misinterpreted the law.

The Court, however, ruled that the verdict should stand.

Lucy Boynton — who played Freddie Mercury’s girlfriend Mary Austin in Bohemian Rhapsody — will play Ellis in the four-part ITV drama. It is based on the book A Fine Day For Hanging.

Barbie casts a long shadow but Noah Baumbach, the film’s co-writer and husband of its director Greta Gerwig is wasting no time in stepping out from it — and into the spotlight.

Baumbach started work on a new movie of his own this week — in London — flying out right after the Oscars. George Clooney, Emily Mortimer and Adam Sandler will star in the as-yet-untitled Netflix picture.

The streamer is also behind his wife’s next project: a two-film Narnia epic. She’s still working on the script.

Curtains for Cowell’s Vegas show

Is the end of the talent show nigh? It can be revealed that Simon Cowell’s Las Vegas variety show — America’s Got Talent Presents… Superstars Live — is to close just three months after it was renewed for another year.

The stage show, which is based at the MGM Luxor Resort in Vegas, will conclude in May. It has enjoyed a run of more than two years — and one of the prizes on America’s Got Talent was the chance to perform on the show.

Luxor’s owners MGM said in a statement: ‘It has been an honour to collaborate with the AGT team to bring the talent from one of television’s most exciting competition shows to the Las Vegas Strip and we hope to work together again in the future.

‘We have loved being home to these world-class entertainers, and wish all of these incredible performers the best of luck as they continue their careers. We’ll be proudly cheering them on.’ Major stars from America’s Got Talent appeared as headliners on the show, including autistic pianist-singer Kodi Lee, dance troupe Light Balance and magician Dustin Tavella.

One Vegas entertainer revealed some of those involved were ‘stunned’ by the news and had no inkling that the show was ending. The insider said: ‘People had planned out their lives, and year, to remain in Vegas and work on the show. On the face of it things were going well. Sure, weekends were the busiest nights, but the footfall over the week shows was not bad.’ But they added: ‘Since January there has been a noticeable dip overall, aside from Superbowl week.’

Cowell described landing the show in 2021 as one of the highlights of his career. He was even awarded the key to the city, for his contributions to the industry in Vegas. Sources say the live experience is being ‘supersized and reimagined’ for other cities in the U.S. and around the world.

Monty Don admits TV gardening shows are a bit of a con.

‘You can’t garden in a hurry — it can’t be done,’ he told Radio 5 Live’s Colin Murray.

‘I’ve worked in TV for 36 years and done every possible permutation of gardening programme, including makeovers, and while they might make good TV they make terrible gardening.

‘You simply can’t “makeover” a garden.

You can change it, but it’s slow and it takes time and you can’t force that change — you have to go with the speed of the natural world.’