Marina Hyde on Prince Andrew being chauffeured back into the royal fold by Prince William (1m24s); how Shallow Hal almost broke Gwyneth Paltrow’s body double (8m29s); and pop sensation Olivia Rodrigo contemplates overnight pop superstardom, plagiarism and growing up in public (21m17s)
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When Paltrow put on a fat suit for the Farrelly brothers’ blockbuster, an unknown acting student was hired as her body double. Two years later, Ivy Snitzer was starving to death
Ivy Snitzer has screen presence – even on Zoom – with her safety pin earrings, nose piercing and reddish-purpleish hair. Yet no one saw her face in the hit film. Now 42, and an insurance agency owner in Philadelphia, Snitzer was Gwyneth Paltrow’s body double for the role of Rosemary in 2001’s Shallow Hal. While Paltrow wore a fat suit for scenes featuring her face, Snitzer’s body was used for closeups of Rosemary’s arms, torso and thighs.
At the time, 20-year-old Snitzer was a Los Angeles-based acting student with aspirations to become an actor or comedian. “Mostly, I just wanted to be funny,” she says. One day, a friend from her improv class called her up because he had heard about “this thing”. To this day, Snitzer doesn’t know the wording of the Shallow Hal casting call. Without asking any questions, she drove with her friend to a room where casting directors “took a bunch of pictures”. A day later, Snitzer had a callback – she was invited to sit down with the film’s directors, the Farrelly brothers, and “just talk”.
Continue reading...Assembly, Edinburgh
Erin Armstrong performs well as the 70s Scottish singer Lena Zavaroni but the show’s structure distracts from her anguish
She had everything: fame, fortune and barrels of talent. She was even set to be “the greatest singing talent since Cher”, says her manager in this new drama. But like so many other child stars, 70s singing sensation Lena Zavaroni’s life led to tragedy.
In Tim Whitnall’s play with songs, we race through Zavaroni’s rise to the heights of celebrity, beginning with her appearance at the age of 10 on TV talent show Opportunity Knocks, and then to her death at the age of 35. It is a tale of anorexia, stolen childhood and sorrow, but there is an unshakable sense of detachment about this production, directed by Paul Hendy.
At the Assembly, Edinburgh, until 28 August
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Continue reading...Since a misjudged anorexia storyline in Skins, television has continued to glorify and glamorise eating disorders. I am so relieved that Netflix’s hit teen drama has finally got it right
When I look back at my teenage years, I remember being hungry. In the tangle of GCSE exam panic, awkward adolescence, angst and first love, I decided I had to take charge of my life in the only way I knew I properly could. At 16, I made the very active decision to stop eating. Lunchtimes stretched out into blank space. Before going to restaurants, I compulsively checked menus in search of the smallest thing I could stomach and still go unnoticed. Calories listed on the back of food packets demanded attention. Numbers, values and sums swarmed and swamped my head. Food was an all-consuming obsession, but I was empty.
The desire to avoid eating informed almost every decision I made. I came late to dinner plans, parroting that “I wasn’t that hungry” or that “I’d eaten at home”. I’d shamefully tip full plates of food into the bin, pretending I hadn’t let any go to waste. But however hard I pushed myself to skip snacks or adjust the levels of what I was allowed – and not allowed – to eat, my struggle was an internal, quiet and solitary one.
Continue reading...In today’s newsletter: The number of patients both in and seeking support has risen drastically since 2015 – the reasons why are complicated
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Good morning. About 1.25 million people in the UK have an eating disorder, and that number, say psychologists and campaigners, is rising sharply.
The reasons why people experience conditions like anorexia and bulimia are complex and, despite their prevalence, still not well understood. Nor can experts fully explain why their numbers are increasing so quickly – including among children. Experts stress these conditions are treatable. People can and do make full recoveries, but the key can be getting early treatment – and that is often not happening.
Economy | The Bank of England has warned businesses and households that the cost of borrowing will remain high for at least the next two years as it raised interest rates for the 14th consecutive time to 5.25%.
Climate | Four Greenpeace activists have been arrested after ending their rooftop protest at Rishi Sunak’s Yorkshire mansion, which they mounted to “drive home the dangerous consequences of a new drilling frenzy”. The campaigners draped the prime minister’s Grade II-listed manor house with an oil-black fabric on Thursday morning.
Retail | Budget retailer Wilko has said it plans to appoint administrators in a move that could put 12,000 jobs at risk. The chain, which has about 400 stores, said that it had appointed the advisory firm PricewaterhouseCoopers in recent months to try to find a buyer.
Governance | The UK’s parliamentary ombudsman has found that the Foreign Office “failed to notice signs of torture” when officials visited a British academic imprisoned in the United Arab Emirates.
US news | Pop star Lizzo has spoken out in response to several of her tour dancers levelling allegations of sexual harassment against her, calling their claims “sensationalised stories”. Earlier this week, a lawsuit filed by three of the singer’s tour dancers alleged that Lizzo created a hostile work environment between 2021 and 2023.
Continue reading...Some urgent cases waiting more than 12 weeks for treatment, according to children’s commissioner for England
Children with “serious and potentially life-threatening” eating disorders are not being given timely access to care, the children’s commissioner for England has warned, as analysis shows the number starting treatment has more than doubled in six years.
According to the charity Beat, about 1.25 million people in the UK have an eating disorder such as anorexia or bulimia, of whom 25% are male.
Continue reading...Todd Haynes animated the impossibly slender doll to show what drove the singer to her early death. The film has more in common than you might expect with Greta Gerwig’s blockbuster
Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, out next Friday, is the most anticipated film of the year. Yet, for all the hype, this is not the first time Barbie has found herself cast as the lead in a film. Much like mumblecore queen Gerwig herself, Barbie first arrived on screen as an insurgent outsider. Back in 1987, Todd Haynes, later the director behind contemporary classics such as Carol, Safe and Far from Heaven, cast a downmarket version of the popular doll in the title role of Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story. The underground classic charts the rise and tragic demise of singer Karen Carpenter and her breezily Californian musical stylings, using whittled down Barbie-style dolls to illustrate the worsening anorexia that eventually led to her untimely death in 1983. Thanks to a spot of litigation from the Carpenter estate, this long out-of-circulation film is today most likely to be watched on iffy YouTube bootleg.
Superstar draws a parallel between these two American icons – Carpenter and Barbie – and dramatises the former’s decline against newsreel footage of America at war. Early in the film, a tank firing off rounds is intercut with a domestic scene of Karen complaining about how unflattering her maxi dress is, while her mother’s spindly plastic limb snakes a measuring tape around her daughter’s waist and pronounces the measurements as if delivering a decree. Set in a time before anorexia was widely understood, these dolls’ domestic sphere was a psychological war zone.
Continue reading...After spending her childhood fighting an eating disorder, the new Labor upper house MP is wanting to change the dialogue on community mental health
Emily Suvaal vividly remembers the smell of the adult psychiatric unit to she was admitted at age 16 for treatment of anorexia.
She recalls the lino flooring, the metal-framed bed, the hole in her door where the lock had been removed, the 12-foot-high metal fence she attempted to climb over during a desperate and futile escape plan and the fear.
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Continue reading...New NHS research reveals the direct effect of the cost of living crisis on people’s mental health. The most vulnerable must be protected
The first thing that came to mind when reading the obituaries of Milan Kundera, the author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, was not the man, but the title of his book. The unbearable lightness of being could be an apt way to describe the precarious nature of many people’s lives across the UK right now: unbearable, treated lightly by those in positions of power, but ultimately still being in the world, if hanging on only by a thread.
Food insecurity has now been linked by the NHS to the rise in eating disorders, and this is interesting for two primary reasons. First, the new research overturns commonly held stereotypes. It had long been assumed that this illness affected affluent, white, middle-class women and girls. The new findings prove this is not the case, with the rise occurring in people from low socioeconomic backgrounds, who are disproportionately black and from ethnic minorities. This is striking, and will no doubt have a profound effect on the way we diagnose and treat eating disorders in the future.
Dorothy Dunn is a freelance journalist
In the UK, Beat can be contacted on 0808 801 0677. In the US, the National Eating Disorders Association is on 800 931 2237. In Australia, the Butterfly Foundation is at 1800 33 4673. Other international helplines can be found at Eating Disorder Hope
Continue reading...Changes to the online safety bill will order platforms such as TikTok to protect young users from harm or injury
Social media firms will be ordered to protect children from encountering dangerous stunts and challenges on their platforms under changes to the online safety bill.
The legislation will explicitly refer to content that “encourages, promotes or provides instructions for a challenge or stunt highly likely to result in serious injury” as the type of material that under-18s should be protected from.
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