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Tatler Asia
12 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Tatler Asia
Nicole Kidman at 58: 8 incredible fashion moments stitched with confidence and elegance
The feminine force Nicole Kidman's appearance at the 2025 Critics Choice Awards marked a departure from typical red carpet glamour. She arrived in an oversized, tan-coloured power suit from Saint Laurent's Spring 2025 collection, complete with exaggerated shoulder pads and matching wide-leg trousers. The masculine silhouette was counterbalanced with feminine details: gold jewellery, soft wavy hair and black slingbacks, creating a fusion of power and femininity. The sensual bombshell At the 2025 Golden Globes, Nicole Kidman delivered her most sensual look yet in a custom Balenciaga Haute Couture creation. The one-shouldered gown featured iridescent silver, crystal-and-rhinestone-embroidered mesh with a dramatically low back achieved through near-invisible transparent netting. Completed with a voluminous, sky-high ponytail inspired by the '60s and Studio 54 glamour, this 'sex kitten' look made a powerful statement about age, sexuality and confidence in Hollywood. The avant-garde artist Nicole Kidman's arrival at the 2025 Palm Springs International Film Festival was nothing short of striking. Her custom Loewe mermaid gown featured a handcrafted, sculptural bodice made of iridescent mother-of-pearl shell accents—a feat of artistry, with each shell shard carefully pieced together by hand. More than just a red carpet moment, it was a statement of intent: Kidman continues to embrace fashion as art, positioning herself as both icon and connoisseur. The ethereal heroine At the TIME 2025 Women of the Year Gala, Nicole Kidman embraced the emerging Boho 2.0 trend in a custom Chloé creation by creative director Chemena Kamali. The delicate, blush-hued silk gown featured an intricate lace-trimmed bodice and cascading tiers of ballerina-like tulle. The brilliant styling moment came when she later layered a black cropped jacket over the ethereal gown, creating a compelling visual narrative between romantic femininity and modern authority. The vintage vixen During promotion for her series Expats , Nicole Kidman demonstrated her ability to reference fashion's past without looking costume-y. Her retro Balmain ensemble featured a black bolero jacket over a top with rose-shaped buttons paired with a flouncy, high-waisted white mini skirt adorned with polka dots. The look expertly navigated the delicate line that polka dots present, avoiding childishness while landing squarely in elegant territory. Styled with classic black pumps and a chignon, it was a modern tribute to mid-century glamour. The modern minimalist Nicole Kidman's appearance at the Omega Her Time event in Paris proved her savvy understanding of influence. Her crisp white Valentino two-piece set—a boxy crop top and voluminous A-line midi skirt worth nearly US$6,000—was strategically paired with US$73 Charles & Keith slingback pumps featuring whimsical red rose-shaped heels. This high-low styling wasn't accidental but brilliantly calculated, creating a viral fashion moment that democratised glamour. The romantic lead For the Babygirl Los Angeles premiere, Nicole Kidman was abloom, wearing a custom Balenciaga Haute Couture strapless gown covered in pink and ivory organza petal flowers and cinched with a black bow belt. The unabashedly feminine look, which paid homage to Cristóbal Balenciaga's Spring 1964 collection, challenged conventional notions of what a seasoned actress should wear, proving her status as a true fashion provocateur. NOW READ Your next read: 8 provocative books curated by Natalie Portman Angelina Jolie turns 50: 9 movies that crown her as true Hollywood royalty 5 millennial songs from film and TV that shaped the rhythm of our lives Credits This article was created with the assistance of AI tools
Irish Times
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Liza: A Truly Terrific Absolutely True Story review – Her Oscars wheelchair long gone, the star is sharp and witty in this enjoyable doc
Liza: A Truly Terrific Absolutely True Story Director : Bruce David Klein Cert : None Starring : Liza Minnelli, Mia Farrow, Michael Feinstein, Lorna Luft, Joel Grey Running Time : 1 hr 44 mins Anybody concerned about Liza Minnelli after her delicate appearance at the Oscars three years ago – friends deny she needed the wheelchair provided – will be reassured by her consistently sharp and witty performance in this hugely enjoyable documentary. There are some curious omissions. Nothing on her superb early film performances in The Sterile Cuckoo and Charlie Bubbles. No Arrested Development. Nothing on Arthur, for heaven's sake. If the tight focus on the 1970s can be forgiven, few fans will feel short-changed. Some of Minnelli's recollections are curious. Talking heads run through the array of drugs wolfed down at the legendary disco Studio 54: Quaaludes, poppers, cocaine. 'Nobody did drugs,' Minnelli then says. 'They just didn't.' The film-makers do her the service of not immediately cutting to the famous image of a man in the moon sniffing white powder from a spoon that hung above the dancers at the Manhattan nightspot. READ MORE Elsewhere the subject is, for the most part, stirringly frank, not least about the pressures of growing up as the daughter of Judy Garland . Bruce David Klein, an unfussy director, drags out notorious footage of Garland literally pushing Minnelli about the stage in an early performance together. One contributor is frank enough to suggest that, though (or perhaps because) daughter was devoted to mother, Garland's death in 1969 meant she 'didn't have to worry any more'. Just three years later, Minnelli broke out from the shadow with her incendiary performance in Cabaret. She has remained a star ever since – even if good roles were sporadic. The film has sad stories to tell about Minnelli's marriages, but there is often grim humour in the footage. Announcing the break-up of her engagement to Desi Arnaz jnr, she attempts to buoy the press by declaring that she is now in love with Peter Sellers. One doesn't need a PhD in celebrity lore to guess how that turned out. Michael Feinstein, a loyal friend of the subject's, minces no words about her last husband, David Gest. 'You should only speak good of the dead,' he says. 'David Gest is dead – good.' For all that, there is no sense here of Minnelli being a tragic figure. One can easily understand how endless comparisons with her mother weary her. On the evidence of this likable doc, she remains smart, charming and greatly, greatly loved. Liza: A Truly Terrific Absolutely True Story is available on digital platforms
The Guardian
13-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Liza: A Truly Terrific Absolutely True Story review – dazzling glamour and true grit
To watch this indulgent but madly watchable documentary about the life and times of Liza Minnelli is like snorting a pound of uncut showbiz glitter through a rolled-up copy of Variety off Joel Grey's naked back on the Studio 54 dancefloor – though as ever with documentaries about celebrities facing the destructive power of drink and drugs, there is no mention of the limelight and praise addiction which they are expected to maintain. I was sorry that Minnelli's marvellous, underrated film New York, New York with Robert De Niro is passed over relatively quickly – conveying the wrong impression that, aside from the iconic song, it's a blip on her CV – and sorry also that her late-masterpiece comic performance on TV's Arrested Development gets hardly a mention. But otherwise this is a richly sympathetic and thoroughly enjoyable portrait of an authentic queen of American musical theatre and movies; there is some wonderful modern-day interview footage of Minnelli, talking with waspish candour about herself, and apart from a slight vocal tremor, very robust. There is a great moment when, after having a FaceTime conversation with Mia Farrow, Minnelli is shown looking sharply at her own face in the little box in a corner of the screen: she instinctively frowns, pouts, assessing herself. That voice, with its unmistakable little gulp, or chuckle or suppressed sob that surfaces in the middle of an extended musical line, emerges as an extension of the way she talks with the media and – as far it's possible to see this – in private. She got this weaponised vulnerability and superpower-fragility, you must assume, from her troubled mother, Judy Garland. We see the famous (or notorious) moment when they appeared together at the London Palladium and Judy started grabbing Liza's microphone, pushing it closer to her mouth, suddenly aware of competition, wanting to school her on stage – or embarrass her. The imperious and shrewd sense of how things are going to play on camera no doubt comes from her late father Vincente Minnelli, who also showed her Louise Brooks's hairstyle just before she did Cabaret, a look that Liza adopted for the rest of her life. From her unofficial godmother, the writer and dancer Kay Thompson, Minnelli learned the never-say-die ethos of the show going on, from Charles Aznavour she learned to dramatise the grit, the sorrow, the interior melancholy of a song. From designer Roy Halston she got the clothes. Then Broadway legend Bob Fosse and composer and lyricist John Kander and Fred Ebb gave her the role of a lifetime in Cabaret's brilliant, sexy and thrillingly damaged survivor Sally Bowles, a persona which she was able to modify and reproduce in various forms for the rest of her career. And what of the un-hilarious tragicomedy of Minnelli's marriages? The star herself gets this film's biggest laugh with her wearied response: 'Give me a gay break …' Her first husband was singer-songwriter Peter Allen ('She was devastated when she found Peter in a compromising situation with another man'); her second was producer Jack Haley Jr, son of Jack Haley from The Wizard of Oz ('Dorothy's daughter marries the Tin Man's son!'); her third was a carpenter and sculptor Mark Gero, about whom we learn nothing other than his civilian status, and the fourth was the manipulative David Gest, who was not candid about his gay existence. (Someone has to write a musical about these four men: The Four Husbands of Liza Minnelli.) There is an awful poignancy in Minnelli's attempts to have a baby, which were heartbreakingly unsuccessful. Like Garland, Minnelli has a gay fanbase which is passionate in its emotional connection and connoisseurship – and perhaps coming to terms with this, and compartmentalising it alongside her own heterosexual identity, is something which Garland actually managed rather better than her daughter. Otherwise she had doomed relationships with Desi Arnaz Jr, in the face of opposition from his mother, Lucille Ball, and with Peter Sellers – all amazingly unworkable situations, like the six impossible things that the White Queen could believe before breakfast. Perhaps, in the end, Liza Minnelli's authentic relationship was with the audience. Liza: A Truly Terrific Absolutely True Story is on digital platforms from 16 June.
USA Today
13-06-2025
- Entertainment
- USA Today
'Call Me Izzy' review: Jean Smart transcends a middling Broadway play
'Call Me Izzy' review: Jean Smart transcends a middling Broadway play Show Caption Hide Caption Hack's co-stars talk off camera relationship 'Hacks' co-stars Jean Smart and Hannah Einbinder reveal to USA TODAY what their relationship is like in real life. NEW YORK — It's impossible to ever truly upstage Jean Smart, the incomparable 'Hacks' star and six-time Emmy winner. But boy, does a toilet try. For 85 fitfully moving minutes, a porcelain throne is the shag-covered centerpiece of 'Call Me Izzy,' an uneven new Broadway play that opened June 12 at Studio 54. Dramaturgically, it makes a wee bit of sense: Our heroine, Isabelle Scutley (Smart), is trapped in a low-income Louisiana trailer park with her abusive husband, Ferd. Their teensy bathroom is her only refuge where she can safely scrawl her poetry, which she does – surreptitiously and often – on rolls of bath tissue. But aesthetically, surely there must've been better ways to convey Isabelle's dire straits than plopping a potty centerstage. It's one of the myriad jarring choices that distract from Smart's otherwise beautiful leading turn, telling a conventional but necessary story of a woman's late-in-life liberation. Written by Louisiana native Jamie Wax, the one-person show begins with what could be a spoof of an awards-bait prestige drama. Smart, donning an unkempt wig and terrycloth robe, stands alone in Isabelle's bathroom as she wistfully names the shades of her toilet bowl cleaner: 'Blue … azure … sapphire … swirlin' cerulean … lapis lazuli.' The intent well may be to give us a peek into Isabelle's creative mind, and the heartening ways that she finds poetry in the mundane. But the entire exercise is so perplexingly self-serious, and only becomes sillier when Isabelle squats in her latrine to recount her life story. Much of the play's first half unfolds in similarly obvious fashion, as Isabelle secretly enrolls in a creative writing class and wins a fellowship that could be her bus ticket to a new life. It's hardly a surprise when Isabelle tells the audience conspiratorially that she's started an affair with her professor. But Smart, with her mischievous glint and bone-dry delivery, manages to wring laughs from even the most groan-worthy one-liners. ('He is surprisingly passionate and so polite. I keep expecting him to say, 'Please pass the vagina?'') Wax's writing is riddled with clichés, although he occasionally hits on something uniquely powerful or harrowing. In one crushing scene, Isabelle recalls the first time that Ferd hit her and how he wept in her arms afterward. But rather than abhorrence, she was shocked by the 'closeness' she felt to him in that moment: 'That power, that healin' after a bad episode. It's a dangerous drug.' Sarna Lapine's production never quite coalesces, from Mikiko Suzuki MacAdams' scattershot scenic design – a grab bag of lawn chairs, baskets and forest silhouettes – to the folksy underscore music that pervades nearly every dramatic revelation, courtesy of T. Bone Burnett and David Mansfield. As for Smart, she elevates the show in every sense imaginable. Returning to Broadway for the first time in 25 years, the soft-spoken actress delivers a richly textured performance that brings Isabelle to vivid life, in all her strength, humor and resourcefulness. No matter how often Ferd strikes and belittles her, Isabelle always manages to brush herself off and turn her pain into art. But eventually, his decades of mistreatment come spilling out of her, and Smart's palpable grief for a life and family lost is devastating to witness. After a mawkish beginning, the play somewhat redeems itself through earned emotions and an ambiguous ending that begs discussion. It's never wise to bet against Smart, who ultimately deserves a far better vehicle for her Main Stem comeback. But even if these powder-room reveries aren't a royal flush, 'Call Me Izzy' still has a lot in its tank. 'Call Me Izzy' is now playing at Studio 54 (254 W. 54th Street) through Aug. 17.
The Guardian
13-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Call Me Izzy review – Jean Smart is better than her one-woman show
We seem to be in the midst of a solo show boomlet on Broadway, with established screen actors testing their mettle via the downright athletic feat of carrying a production alone. On Sunday, the Succession actor Sarah Snook won the Tony for best actress in a play for her 26 roles in The Picture of Dorian Gray; two years earlier, Jodie Comer won for her equally kinetic solo performance in Prima Facie and just this week, John Krasinski's (mostly) solo show Angry Alan opened off-Broadway. The appeal is clear: the one-man show is a flex, a feat of performance under a significant amount of pressure. It takes a village, always, but it all comes down to the person on stage. Luckily for Call Me Izzy, writer and journalist Jamie Wax's debut play on Broadway, that person is Jean Smart. The 73-year-old actor, most famous, at least at the moment, for her starring turn on the Max comedy Hacks, possesses the kind of seasoned verve and magnetic presence that is never less than fun to watch, even if the material can't match her. Like her Emmy-winning Hacks character Deborah Vance, Smart is making the most of a late-career renaissance, surfing a wave of goodwill to the bright lights at Studio 54 for her first Broadway role in a quarter century, where she plays a woman with starkly different means – though no less resilience. Those means are strikingly – one might say a little too strikingly – sparse. We first meet Isabelle Scutley, neé Fontenot, in the fall of 1989, cleaning the toilet in her trailer's bathroom – her home's one source of privacy and the stage's one consistent set (stocked with period-specific cleaning supplies by scenic designer Mikiko Suzuki MacAdams). Her vocabulary and bank of literary references, recited from memory in reveries shaded, in this staging by Sarna Lapine, by elegiac blue light (lighting design Donald Holder) are expansive; her words, in Smart's convivial, conspiratorial delivery, are truncated, as is her life in the small town of Mansfield, Louisiana, where she was born and where she has always remained. Once a promising student with a preternatural gift for language, Izzy was whisked to the trailer park by a marriage at 17 – such was 'the natural order of things', she tells us – and has been beaten down ever since. Her husband Ferd, which in Izzy's thick Louisiana drawl mutates to Irv, Erd or Thurd with each mention, is an alcoholic pipe fitter with a vicious mean streak. (Smart, who grew up in Seattle, worked with a dialect coach; as a midwesterner, I am simply unfit to judge the accuracy of the results.) He hates when she reads, spits on her dreams, rages when she has a personality and refuses to call her by her desired name, Izzy. Smart plays him, via Izzy's inner monologue, with a skin-crawling sneer. For an unspecified number of years, Izzy has turned inward, writing poems on toilet paper in the bathroom with her eyebrow pencil and hiding them in her Tampax box – the one place Ferd would never look – the Tampax box then concealed by a piece of fabric, as they are too poor even for cabinets. (In the way of Hollywood these days, Smart's character is a vague age somewhere between 40 and her own.) Stalled out in survival mode, an escape hatch emerges via a new friend named Rosalie and a library card, her 'secret ticket to anywhere'. Reading gives way to a romance with Shakespeare's sonnets (and more recitation), to validation, recognition, acclaim and a collision course with Ferd's willingness to physically beat any self-worth out of her. There's an inherent charge to seeing Izzy, as imbued with Smart's natural charisma, break free; the script is peppered with wizened, self-deprecating cracks that Smart relishes: 'I can fake an orgasm but I can't fake a hug worth shit,' she quips. But there's also an inescapable discomfort to milking such abject need, to hearing such graphic descriptions of physical abuse, for the sympathy of Broadway audiences at hundreds of dollars a pop. Smart is, obviously, a gifted comic actor and extremely compelling storyteller, but her gravity cannot overcome the nagging sense that this story – an indisputably genius writer overcomes indisputably dire circumstances via grit and the power of education – is the theatrical equivalent of the poverty porn that has baited Oscar voters for years. Smart, as ever, imbues her characters with rough edges and idiosyncrasies, world-weariness coupled with an endearing naivety; her plaintive, rueful delivery of a brief description of reconciliation after a beating, how his regret provoked a feeling of closeness akin to a drug, hints at a more complicated version of the woman than on the page. It's easy to cheer for Smart, and as evidenced by rounds of pitying applause at Studio 54, a little too easy for this show.
