Nibbling parmesan and pears with movie stars | Letter

As a former movie journalist, I loved Catherine Shoard’s piece at the discredited Clint Eastwood “interview” and the craft of movie journalism (The just right, the dangerous and the unpleasant, 4 June) – and will handiest counsel readers to the interview scene in Notting Hill.

The reality in reality is stranger than even that fiction. My personal profession incorporated, at the one hand, a real, solo, hour-long interview with Clint Eastwood for an Oscars complement of this very paper in 1993, however, at the different, too most of the movie pageant roundtable interviews that Shoard describes.

I will bear in mind handiest 3 issues of their favour. First, that every so often some other member of the ill-assorted world staff would ask a query it’s worthwhile to by no means have introduced your self to pose (“So, Nicole Kidman, why did you and Tom Cruise not have children of your own?”). Second, that they might infrequently throw up a just right enjoy, as in Venice, when Donald Sutherland swept all of the team as much as his lodge bed room, to sprawl at the rumpled sheets nibbling his favorite parmesan and pears.

Third, that there may have been no higher coaching for my provide position as a ancient biographer, assembling profiles of celebrities who, being on reasonable some 400 years useless, are in no place to respond to any questions in any respect.
Sarah Gristwood
Deal, Kent