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Being Davina. Nigel Goodall
Читать онлайн.Название Being Davina
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781843586845
Автор произведения Nigel Goodall
Жанр Биографии и Мемуары
Издательство Ingram
According to the school’s internet website, it is an excellent place of learning that suffers an unfair comparison with the neighbouring St Paul’s, but if your daughter goes there today she is as good as in university and, at the time of writing, it would cost you £3,490 per term. Today, the school has 707 girls from ages 10 to 19. Just a slight difference to when Davina was there, with such other famous pupils as Kate Beckinsale, Samantha Bond, Sophie Ellis Bextor and one of Davina’s own classmates Nigella Lawson. But perhaps the most distinguished former pupil was Julie Tullis, who became the first British woman to attempt to scale Everest and to climb K2, the second highest mountain in the world and arguably the hardest.
Lawson, on the other hand, would probably have been someone Davina knew well. One of the UK’s most influential food writers with a growing international reputation and several bestselling books to her name as well as the Channel 4 series Nigella Bites, she read Medieval and Modern Languages at Oxford. She went on to pursue a successful career in journalism, becoming deputy literary editor of the Sunday Times. With a successful freelance career writing for the Guardian, the Daily Telegraph and The Times Magazine in Britain, she was equally successful in the States with Gourmet and Bon Appetit.
Her love of cooking and food had begun at home, but soon became part of her working life when she started a restaurant guide in The Spectator and a food column for Vogue magazine. Her first book, How To Eat, was published to critical acclaim in 1998 and established her relaxed attitude to food and eating, won her a wide and dedicated audience, and was, in fact, the basis for her successful Channel 4 series. The second series, interestingly enough, was accompanied by a tie-in book of the same name, which stayed in the bestseller lists for several months and helped to take worldwide book sales past the 1.5 million mark.
In 2000, things got even better when Lawson introduced a whole new generation to the art of baking with another bestseller, ironically titled How To Be A Domestic Goddess, which in turn won her an Author of the Year nomination at the British Book Awards. Eight years earlier, she had married fellow journalist and broadcaster John Diamond, who was diagnosed with throat cancer in 1997 and died in 2001. Today, she lives in London with their two children, Cosima and Bruno, and her second husband, art collector and advertising guru Charles Saatchi.
Kate Beckinsale, of course, was six years younger, so the likelihood of Davina knowing her is remote. Unlike Lawson and Davina, Beckinsale went on to scale the heights of Hollywood. Born on 26 July 1973, to Judy Loe and the late actor Richard Beckinsale, to this day she has spent most of her life in London. In 1991, she made her acting debut in a television World War II drama, One Against the Wind. It was after leaving Oxford University’s New College, where she majored in French and Russian literature, that she knew she wanted to be an actress.
During her first year at Oxford, Beckinsale landed herself a role in Kenneth Branagh’s big-screen adaptation of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing (1993). She subsequently appeared in a few notable but low-profile films, including Cold Comfort Farm (1995), Shooting Fish (1997) and The Last Days of Disco (1998). Although her first major American film, Brokedown Palace, in 1999 almost went unnoticed, it was when she was cast in Pearl Harbor, one of the highest-grossing films of 2001, that Beckinsale found herself placed among FHM’s 100 sexiest women in the world and firmly in the frame for even greater success in such films as Serendipity (2001), Underworld (2003), Van Helsing (2004) and The Aviator (2004).
Even though school may have had its difficulties, remembers Davina, outside, ‘I had so much love from my dad and my stepmum, and my mum and my grandparents, but, when I look back at myself, I’d just try and give myself a little cuddle. I don’t think anything could change the situation; we all make the best of things – I think I was a bit of a lost kid more than anything else.’
Lost or not, not all the tokens of her teen years would be so easy to dispose of. The stylised alien based on the original 1979 movie creature tattooed on her bottom is one of them. It’s not surprising she had it done in the first place when you consider that the film and its creature are still regarded as one of the benchmarks of modern science-fiction horror. In fact, not since the heyday of George Lucas’s 1977 Star Wars trilogy had a movie burst so violently into the popular consciousness as Alien had in 1979. Even though the sheer horror of the original movie has long been dissipated by the alien’s own appearance in comic books and toy stores, Davina still wanted it removed: for no other reason than she now simply hated it. Unlike the rose on her wrist that she had done when she was 18 and feeling worse for wear, or the horns engraved on each hip when she was in Los Angeles, the alien tattoo, ‘just frightens the living daylights out of me’.
Perhaps to Davina, it has the same effect as if Frankenstein’s monster had looked in the mirror. Although the creature in the film was clearly a man in a suit, it was still enough to horrify. Based on the monster created by HR Giger for the movie, the tattoo sported a grotesque exterior resembling a cyborg turned inside out and an elongated head that was not so subtly phallic in nature. The double rows of teeth and back protrusions helped complete the sense of dread. In the end, though, Davina decided it would be less painful to leave it where it was, no matter how scary. So she kept it as a reminder of what she calls her misspent youth.
By the time Davina was 16, she had left school with nine O levels, two A levels and she could speak French fluently – certainly enough qualifications to follow her classmates into university. But, rather than do that, she decided she only wanted to think about finding fame as a rock singer. Of course, as she would soon discover, that wasn’t so easy. It wasn’t easy then, and it certainly isn’t any easier now; if it was, then there would be no need for television talent shows like Pop Stars or The X-Factor. She may have been singing with a band while she was at school, but perhaps she now wondered whether that would bring her the kind of fame and fortune she so desired. Instead, she decided a good alternative would be a stint as a singing waitress at the Moulin Rouge in Paris, although Hello magazine reported that according to some sources she failed her audition.
The Moulin Rouge is still the most famous of all cabarets in the world. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, it has been one of the most legendary monuments of Paris. Edith Piaf, Yves Montand, Ginger Rogers, Lisa Minnelli and Frank Sinatra are just a few of the names to have played cabaret at the venue. It is also where topless dancers take audiences on a travelogue across the ages and continents with performances of folklore histories from all over the world. And of course it is the only place on earth where one can see the real French Can-Can.
Whether Davina failed her audition or not, by the time she returned home to London, she had already tried her hand at modelling, which still appears to be an almost traditional route chosen by many pretty young girls in their bid for fame and fortune. At first, it appeared to be a good way for her to get noticed, and there seemed no reason why she shouldn’t succeed. She did, after all, have all the right criteria for what she thought was needed to become a successful model. What she hadn’t counted on, perhaps, was that, strangely enough, she considered herself to be too short and fat for the catwalk. As she herself admits, ‘I was the world’s most unsuccessful model at 16.’
Perhaps she felt that, if she couldn’t become a model herself, then she could help others who could. And so what would be better than to go and work as a booker for Models One, an agency in Covent Garden that had started up in 1968 with just three models on their books. Today, it is a very different story. Models One is one of the largest and most successful