Conversations with celebrities

There’s a new racket in Hollywood these days, according to CNN: celebrities auctioning off their babies’ photos to the highest bidder, usually a high-profile magazine.

The latest payoff is a whopping $14 million for photos of Knox and Vivienne Jolie-Pitt, the already famous three-week-old twins born to celebrity couple Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt. People magazine won the auction war and copies of the magazine with the famous babies on the cover have hit the newsstands. This obsession with celebrities has never been this intense, according to CNN.

After seeing this, I dug up the numerous photos I have of myself with celebrities. I came up with some fairly recent ones and alongside them my notes on the circumstances under which I met them and my impression of them. 

I chose three very interesting personalities to feature here: Ralph Fiennes, Liam Neeson and Hugh Jackman.  I chose them because I got to know them a bit better than the others I have met because I spent some quality time with them. Coincidentally, I met all three on separate occasions in Shanghai. 

I met Ralph Fiennes at a small dinner party in Shanghai three years ago hosted by TV personality Yue Sai Kan for the cast of The White Countess, which was being filmed in Shanghai.  The charismatic Fiennes mesmerized me no end.  The first thing he did was to correct my pronunciation of his name. “Call me Rafe,” he said, saying that “Ralph” is the way it is spelled but it is pronounced “Rafe” (with a long A). What struck me most about him were his bright blue eyes and the way he made eye contact with people. When he spoke to me, he looked straight into my eyes like I was the only person in the room.  He was very softspoken, never drawing attention to himself.  Curiosity drove me to ask him a lot of questions and he joked, “Is this an interview?”

I was seated between him and Natasha Richardson (his leading lady in the film) during dinner and therefore was privileged to continue my informal interview with him.

He was rumored to have ended a controversial 11-year relationship with Francesca Annis, an English stage actress 18 years his senior, and did not wish to speak about it. He preferred to talk about his professional life. In Schindler’s List, he played Amon Goeth,  a terrifying camp commandant; in Maid in Manhattan, he played a US senator who falls in love with J. Lo; in The English Patient, Juliette Binoche nursed him back to life; in The End of the Affair, he was Juliannne Moore’s obsessed lover. He played all his roles with impeccable artistry and explained to me that because of his unusual family life (he is the oldest of six siblings), he has a remarkable grasp of people’s weaknesses, their idiosyncratic thought processes, their troubles.  He applies this to his roles and the outcome is always a fascinating performance.

He had a lot of chemistry and rapport with Binoche and Moore, not so much with J. Lo. “She was very matter-of-fact, very professional. After each take, she retreated to her corner and did not socialize much.”

The next evening, we were again together at the Calvin Klein launch and the swinging  party afterwards. He was the big star but did not act the part. He danced with every lady who had the guts to ask him to dance and accommodated everyone who wanted to take a photo with him. While the party was in full swing, he asked me if he could hitch a ride with me back to his hotel as he had an early-morning shoot, and I wanted to say, “ I could take you all the way to Timbuktu if need be!”

When two lady friends saw that I was leaving the party with Fiennes, they intercepted me and asked if they could ride with me, too. I couldn’t refuse them so that broke my chances to be alone in the car with Fiennes.  Or so I thought. There was yet again another opportunity to be alone with him, but that’s another story.

The Shanghai Film Festival in 2006 was celebrity studded and I was invited to attend it. I arrived in Shanghai days before the gala night and attended the big party, again hosted by Yue Sai Kan, where I met Liam Neeson, Natasha Richardson, Andie McDowell, Sigourney Weaver and Suzanne Sommers, to name a few.

Surprisingly, Natasha Richardson, Liam’s wife, remembered that she already met me the year before and she introduced me to her husband, Liam.  I found him polite but a bit aloof.  My impression of him changed the next day when I found myself in a private conversation with him during a press conference for the cast of The White Countess.

While the rest of the media was in the auditorium waiting to interview the cast, which was the opening film of the festival, I felt I wanted some coffee so I slipped out and went to the coffee room. Neeson was there sipping green tea and, having recognized me from the party the night before, invited me to sit next to him. I had a very pleasant conversation with him and found in him a kind of depth so unusual in people of his profession. To break the ice, I told him that his Oscar for his performance in Schindler’s List was well deserved. He corrected me and said he was nominated but did not win. It was won that year by Tom Hanks for his performance in Philadelphia.

We covered so many topics, like: he was sipping green tea because coffee gives him palpitations. He took up boxing when he was nine years old and he continued to box until he was a teenager. He won for three consecutive years the Youth Heavy Weight Champion of Ireland. He first set foot on stage at age 11 in a school play that he accepted because the girl he fancied was in it, too. What inspired him to be an actor? He said he used to sneak in the church of Ian Paisley, who gave inspiring sermons in a very stirring manner. He thought that he was such a good actor to move his parishioners in this manner. It was Paisley’s Sunday performances that inspired him to be an actor. In 1973, his first film break came when he landed the role of Jesus Christ in Pilgrim’s Progress. There was no stopping his rise to stardom, especially after he made Schindler’s List in 1993.

What surprised me about Neeson is his stable marriage to Natasha Richardson, Vanessa Redgrave’s daughter, whom he married in 1993.  They support each other in their careers and try to work out a schedule that will not keep them apart for a long time. “I have nothing to do in Shanghai at this time but I came to support Natasha whose film is the opening number,” he said. He loves nature and loves the sea.  On that note, I invited him to come to the Philippines and enjoy our beautiful beaches and private islands. He promised he would come one day.

After the gala night, I joined a dinner party at The M on the Bund (a popular restaurant in Shanghai) and at my table were Hugh Jackman and his wife, Deborah Lee. Jackman was in Shanghai to promote X-Men, where he plays Wolverine.

What struck me about Jackman were his spirituality and his sense of family. “Twice a day, preferably at sunrise and at sundown, I sit down for a few minutes and try to be calm. I get in touch with my five senses and listen without judgment. Meditation is like the ultimate rest. It’s all about the pursuit of nothingness. It’s better than the best sleep you’ve ever had. It’s quieting the mind, and yet it sharpens everything, especially your surroundings. It keeps life fresh. The more you practice, the deeper the experience gets.”

Jackman teaches his children (Oscar and Ava, two multi-racial children that he and his wife adopted) what he has learned in the School of Practical Philosophy, where he has been going since 1991: how to make this world a better place to live in and how to be of service to others.

I could not help but think about these three unique celebrities and considered myself lucky to have met them. For all that they are, they are sensible, normal human beings with deep Christian morals and values.