Caroline Phillips

Journalism

Caroline Phillips
“Caroline Phillips is a tenacious and skilful writer with a flair for high quality interviewing and a knack for making things work.”

Caroline Phillips

Journalism

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Michael, loneliness and the the fan who stalked him

Evening Standard | 24 Jun 1992

Michael Crawford is not an obvious sex symbol. But there’s something about him that attracts 140 fan letters a day – and a year ago caused an obsessive female fan in LA to follow him fanatically for three months. ‘Each night I drove home from the theatre and a car pulled out from behind the hedge and started to follow me. I was on my own and the audience had gone,’ he says, wringing his hands and looking down as he does throughout most of the interview. ‘I used to come off the freeway by a different exit each night to try to lose her.

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Love and the man who gets 500 letters a week from girls

Evening Standard | 17 Jun 1992

Last month Phillip Schofield took over from Jason Donovan, one of the world’s biggest singing stars, in the leading role in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat at the Palladium. Before Schofield stood in for him for six weeks in January, he had only ever sung in the bath, and his previous stage experience was limited to two stage productions and a walk-on part in a children’s variety show.

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Yes, Fergie is still my friend

Evening Standard | 16 Jun 1992

This week ‘Madame’ Vasso, Fergie’s Greek clairvoyant with the blue pyramid, is starting up a new telephone helpline service. She has 10 Mercury Premium Rate service lines on which, for 48p a minute, she will explain how to use crystals and pyramids, and give advice on loneliness, anxiety, love, health and money.

She says she’s doing it ‘to help people’. She also intends to start a ‘candle’ phone line soon. ‘To tell people how to use candles for problems with love and depression.’ How do you use a candle for love? ‘If people are very depressed, you should light the candle and say Our Father’s prayer.’ Vasso will make 15 per cent of the 48p from each phone call. ‘Nothing,’ she calls it.

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Of Maya, marimba and a giant banana

Evening Standard | 8 Jun 1992

They say in Mexico City that the pigeons drop dead from the sky when they hit the smog. Aldous Huxley once said he had never felt so bad tempered as he did during a week’s stay there.

Can it be that bad? Our taxi driver guide immediately takes the matter into his own hands and, ignoring red traffic lights, drives us in his yellow VW Beetle beyond the polluted city to Teotihuacan, the first great civilisation of central Mexico, which existed between AD 100 and 600.

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A very public and very private Ivana

Evening Standard | 5 Jun 1992

The photographers stand four deep. Bagpipes are being played. The crowds, drinking champagne, are packed together like second-hand paperbacks. Michael Caine has been invited, so has Terence Stamp and, oh, here’s Jeffrey Archer.

‘Clear a space. She’s coming through,’ says one of the security men in the Waterstone’s bookstore in Harrods.

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I have been unfaithful about 20 times in each marriage. That’s three times a year. But if it was only three, it was a bad year

Evening Standard | 2 Jun 1992

I’ve been unfaithful numerous times. I honestly can’t remember how many. Maybe 20 times in each marriage. About three a year for each marriage,’ laughs the man with the husky voice and drink-veined nose laughs. ‘But if there were only three, that was a bad year!’

The man talking to me was first married at 19 to early love Nora Ann Simmonds, by whom he had a son, then for 11 years to actress Tarn Bassett, who bore him a daughter and, most famously, for 10 years to Maggie Smith, with whom he had two sons. For the last 18 years he has lived with actress Patricia Quinn.

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Daddy dearest I never knew you

Evening Standard | 2 Jun 1992

Wearing a spray-on black catsuit, she puts her feet on the table and lies back, stretching into a supposedly feline and sexy pose. During our hour-long interview, she proceeds to demolish her parents. They are Ronald and Nancy Reagan.

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13 children lost

Evening Standard | 18 May 1992

THE nursery stands ready and the crib has been redecorated in new broderie anglaise. It is the crib Cherry Roomes slept in as a child. Now it awaits the arrival of a miracle.

To date Cherry has lost 13 babies. Anne, Jane, Megan, Edwina, Emily and Eleanor survived long enough to be named. Megan lived for three days and Eleanor for seven and a half months.

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Cher’s pop corn

Evening Standard | 7 May 1992

Picture that over-sized meat abattoir, Wembley Arena. People are eating toffee popcorn instead of doing drugs.

White jean beclad thirtysomethings are sipping beer out of plastic bottles. And nobody is smoking in the no-smoking auditorium.

The only sniff of something really ‘way out’ here are the neon exit signs.

This is the first night of sex queen Cher’s two-night stand in Wembley.


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Jilly, jealousy and how two people can hurt each other

Evening Standard | 30 Apr 1992

Best-selling author Jilly Cooper has been talking ingenuously about love, jealousy, betrayal, trust, hurt, sex, toyboys, mistresses, money and affairs. ‘I always feel God is up there peeling a heavenly banana skin to throw under my feet,’ says Jilly, who once appeared to have it all and had the image of a frothy party girl.

‘Whenever I’m happy, I always get terribly excited. You might as well be excited because life’s such a bugger. But whenever I’m happy, I always start to shake waiting for something bad to happen.’ She looks around. ‘There’s probably a tiger lurking under the piano.’

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Pop art

Evening Standard | 30 Apr 1992

Piers Jackson lies on the floor with his knees in the air and Jade Jagger sits on them. Jade, heavily pregnant, is wearing a brick dress, brick jacket with fresh daisy in the button hole, ruby cross round her neck, and bare legs.

The unmarried former wild child and daughter of Mick and Bianca Jagger has arrived to put the finishing touches to the exhibition she is having with Piers, the father of her child. But this won’t be the sort of exhibition a 20-year-old girl normally has after daubing for just three years.

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