WOMEN WE LOVE; Kylie Minogue What Better Way to Celebrate Our 25th Year Than to Gather Together 25 Women We Love?
By JANE GORDON
In their own ways, all these women are inspirational, talented, smart, self-aware and life-enhancing. Quite simply, they make our world a brighter place to live in
KYLIE MINOGUE
Kylie is the people’s pop princess, a woman whose strength and courage in the face of illness and heartbreak never fails to inspire us. From her early days as Charlene in Neighbours through a 20-year recording career with album sales topping 65 million, she has lived in our hearts for as long as we can remember. But it isn’t just her music that has moved us, it’s her warmth, her sincerity and her ability to pick herself up, put a smile on her face and get back in that spotlight.
‘I think that experience leaves you living more in the moment, with a stronger sense of your own identity. My friends have all noticed the change; they say I am clearer, more defined now,’ she says.
Cate Blanchett
When the 37-year old Australian actress first emerged on the big screen, we would have said she looked ‘quirky’ or ‘interesting’.
Now she looks beautiful how did that happen, and can we have the secret?
The finest screen actress of her generation, she possesses a chameleon-like quality that makes us believe she is whoever she chooses to play: Elizabeth I, Katharine Hepburn (whom she portrayed in The Aviator, for which she won an Oscar) or Galadriel the Elf Queen in The Lord of the Rings (she joked that she only took the role because of the ears). She is married to playwright and screenwriter Andrew Upton with whom she has two young sons and the pair will shortly return to her first love, the stage, as artistic co-directors of the Sydney Theatre Company.
‘I’m a human being first and an actress second. I think the only way you can possibly act anything is to live your life. And I absolutely live my life.’
Lily Allen
She’s the witty and deceptively sweet voice of the emergent generation, who stormed into the UK charts via her MySpace website. Aged just 21, Lily (Daddy is actor Keith Allen) has an appealing style (trainers and ballgowns) and an ironic take on contemporary street life. She’s rude, rebellious and refreshingly honest, lambasting A-listers from Chris Martin to Madonna. But with an album in the American charts and a front-row seat at this season’s Chanel show in Paris (alongside Victoria Beckham and Katie Holmes) she’s well on her way to joining them. Smile, Lily
, art, language, politics and travel’
Erin O’Connor
Despite her haughty appearance and supermodel status, Erin has a refreshingly down-to-earth view of the fashion industry (she’s said she wants to establish a models’ union to improve their working conditions) and calls herself a ‘freak of nature, a stick with a nose’.
The Walsall-born, working-class 29-year-old was nicknamed ‘Morticia’ at school and didn’t really grow into her looks (she’s 6ft 1in) until she cut her hair short three years into a slow-burn career. She’s as private as she is pragmatic which just adds to her allure and as eloquent as she is elegant: ‘To me, fashion has been the path to education: it has opened doors to history, art, language, politics, travel All of that is embedded in fashion.’
Vivienne Westwood
She may have been made a Dame of the British Empire and have her own multimillion-pound fashion empire, but Vivienne Westwood remains a fashion maverick. From the safety-pin years of the Sex Pistols through the dizzying heights of the 1980s (remember Naomi Campbell’s first fall from grace on those platforms?) to the present day, this true English eccentric has never tired of shocking the establishment although these days they love her for it, as do the countless designers she has inspired.
‘I don’t set out to shock,’ she says, ‘but there is a little devil inside me that rings a bell when I know I am going to do something that will shock.’
Coleen McLoughlin
The sweet-faced schoolgirl, who was propelled into the public eye four years ago as the girlfriend of footballer Wayne Rooney, has subsequently emerged as a style icon and our Wag of choice.
Having put those Juicy Couture tracksuits, Mukluk boots and the label ‘Queen of Chavs’ behind her, she has morphed into a media figure with a fortune (earned from sponsorship, workout videos and books) estimated at around Pounds 6 million. Well-mannered, modest and moral (raised by strict Catholic parents), she has campaigned for people with Rett Syndrome, the condition that her nine-year-old adopted sister Rosie suffers from. Her popularity, she believes, is linked to the fact that the only thing that has really changed about her is her wardrobe (and half of that is from George at Asda).
‘I don’t set out to be a role model I am just me. I think other girls relate to me because I still go out with my mates on Friday and go into town shopping or to the pictures,’ she says.
Julie Walters
She has the kind of perfect comic timing that can move an audience from laughter to tears in a single sentence.
The 57-year-old Golden Globe-winning actress (for her role in the 1983 film Educating Rita) has enjoyed a long professional relationship with Victoria Wood, and roles in recent films such as Billy Elliot, the Harry Potter series and Calendar Girls have consolidated her position as one of Britain’s finest character actresses.
Intensely private, Julie put her career on hold when her three- year-old daughter Maisie underwent treatment for leukaemia (she is now 18 and fully recovered). ‘It was as if I had been asleep for ever and someone had shaken me awake and told me what was important. It put acting in its place,’ she says. ‘Before then I was someone who lived in the future all the time.
Suddenly, though, you are very much in the present with something like that, and you learn that it’s the place you should always live.’
Kate Winslet
The five-times-Oscar-nominated British actress has, despite her extraordinary success, somehow managed to remain ordinary.
And we know that this brilliant woman is made of the same flesh and blood as we are (rather than the skin and bone that constitutes most other A-list actresses).
Versatile, funny and a wonderful ambassador for Britain, 31-year- old Mrs Mendes (second husband is director Sam) is a rare flash of, well, sense and sensibility in La-La Land.
‘It’s time to teach women that it’s important to look as true to life as possible, because nobody’s perfect,’ she says. ‘I don’t want my daughter growing up thinking she has to be thin to be beautiful.’
Oprah Winfrey
The ageless (how can she be 53?) host of the highest-rated talk show in television history has achieved a list of firsts that would stretch from here to Chicago (where she is based). She’s the most philanthropic African-American of all time, the richest self-made woman in America, and the first black billionaire. Throw in an Oscar nomination for her supporting role in The Color Purple (her original ambition was to be an actress), a production company, a couple of magazines, a groundbreaking book club and the establishment of the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls in South Africa, and it’s easy to see why she’s regarded as one of the most influential women in the world.
‘Though I am grateful for the blessings of wealth, it hasn’t changed who I am,’ she says.
Meera Syal
The queen of multitasking is an award-winning playwright, comedian, actress, novelist and occasional recording artist (the cast of The Kumars at No 42 reached No 1 in 2003 with the Comic Relief single ‘Spirit in the Sky’). This bold, brilliant woman – who is only 45 but whose comic reach can extend to 85-year-old grandmother Kumar – was awarded an MBE in 1997. Married to her onscreen grandson and frequent collaborator Sanjeev Bhaskar, with whom she has an 18-month-old son (she has a 13-year-old daughter from her first marriage, too), she’s also an expert at balancing a successful career and a fulfilling private life. ‘You have 22 different things on the go and hope that two of them land. The exhausting thing is keeping the balls in the air,’ she says. ‘I do turn a lot of work down because it’s about quality of life and finding a balance. It’s a cliche, but the only thing that matters is the people you love and who love you back.’
Jane Shepherdson
The woman behind the ‘fast fashion’ movement that turned Topshop into the most influential clothing brand in Britain started out as a Topshop buyer and ended up at the very top of the clothing chain. Her sudden resignation last year was rumoured to have been provoked by the decision of Philip Green boss of retail firm Arcadia, which owns Topshop to employ Kate Moss to design a fashion range for the store, although Jane (loyally) denies it.
Jane, 43, lives in London with her lawyer husband, and has yet to make an announcement about her next move; but we’ll be following wherever she leads.
‘I don’t like to compromise. And I don’t really like being told what to do,’ she says. ‘I like to have a certain amount of freedom in which to operate and to try things.
And I really value ideas and creativity above everything else literally above everything else.’
Kate Moss
We know that we should disapprove (and sometimes we do), but Kate Moss never fails to fascinate us, thanks to her luminous beauty and ability to look fabulous in absolutely anything (she’s been credited with popularising everything from Ugg boots to skinny jeans). Croydon’s finest export now 33 and mum to four-year-old daughter Lila Grace has flown the flag for Brit style for the past decade. She’s the world’s best-known supermodel, the face that fronts a thousand advertising campaigns (Rimmel, Dior, Louis Vuitton, Burberry, Belstaff), the woman we long to look like (if not live like just how can she party so hard and still look so good?). And now we can (almost): she’s treating us to a slice of her super-cool style by designing a range of clothes for Topshop.
Dolly Parton
This high-camp pocket Venus has even bigger assets than the two she’s most famous for. As well as a quick wit and a towering talent, she has turned 25 number one songs, 100 million in album sales and seven Grammys into a multimillion-dollar empire with more than 100 relatives on the payroll.
Dolly attributes her longevity as a performer to her clean living (she’s a teetotal non-smoker) and to her happy marriage to Carl Dean, whom she met as a teenager. Her only vice, it seems, is cosmetic surgery she once joked, ‘If I have one more facelift I’ll have a beard.’ But she’s not daunted by getting older. Now in what she refers to as her ‘sexties’ (she’s 61), she says, ‘I’m not going to let the numbers keep me from being creative, inventive, alive and exciting. As long as I’ve got my health and an audience, I’ll be out there doing it till I fall over.’
Jane Tomlinson
In 2000, when Jane Tomlinson was diagnosed with incurable metastatic breast cancer and given a maximum of two years to live, she didn’t give up or give in, she got on her bike literally. In the following years the 42-year-old mother of three has cycled 4,200 miles across America, completed a full Ironman (4km swim, 180km bike ride and full marathon within 17 hours), two half Ironmans, three London Marathons, the New York Marathon and three London Triathlons. Along the way she has raised more than a million pounds for charity and perhaps equally important she has boosted the morale of hundreds of other cancer patients.
‘When you are faced with your mortality,’ she says, ‘you cannot put off things you feel deep down you can achieve. You lose control of elements of your life, but you reach the point where there is no next year. If you want to do something, you’re not going to get another opportunity.’
The Queen
Elizabeth ll possesses all the qualities we wish we had: dignity, humanity and humour (one is often amused) in the face of being matriarch to the mother of all dysfunctional families. Responsible, reliable and, sometimes, just a little stern, she is also the titular mother to an entire nation. The Queen’s unwavering, unchanging profile (hair, handbag, sensible shoes) during a reign that has spanned some 55 years (she is now 81) has given us a focus and a deep-seated security that is the envy of the rest of the world. Even those who question the notion of a monarchy in a 21st- century democracy admire Her Maj. Long may she reign over us!
Ann Widdecombe
Ann Widdecombe is the virgin queen of British politics (she once remarked that ‘a hot bath, a strong whisky and a detective novel’ were preferable to sex). By far the most amusing and endearing woman in Parliament, the 59-year-old Conservative MP is an outspoken supporter of traditional family values and a romantic novelist in her spare time (when asked how, as a single woman, she could write about romance she replied, ‘How many murders did Ruth Rendell have to commit to write about murder?’). She may never have forged a close relationship with a man, but she clearly understands them she noted that when she went blond she became acutely aware that men talked to her ‘more slow-leee’.
J K Rowling
Our admiration for Harry Potter’s 41-year-old creator is not just based on her magnificent rags-to-riches story (penniless single mum becomes the first writer to achieve US-dollar billionaire status, and the only British woman to make the Forbes 2007 list of the superrich), but also on the way that she has changed the world’s reading habits.
Literary snobs might question her title as Greatest Living British Writer (conferred on her by The Book Magazine last year), but anyone who can make reading cool among young boys deserves our eternal gratitude. She’s a worldwide phenomenon who has raised our national morale and our children’s reading age.
Tamara Mellon
Tamara Mellon, 37, is the tiny but towering force who transformed Jimmy Choo shoes from a little-known label to a power brand that is a byword for glamour (Jimmy Choos feature in BeyoncE lyrics and Sex and the City scripts). Now a multimillionaire and celebrity in her own right, Tamara is the queen of the red carpet and tireless girl about town who dreams of helping women everywhere walk tall but keep their feet on the ground.
‘If little girls read about princesses being rescued by princes, they’ll grow up like I did, thinking that if they meet the right man everything will be OK,’ she says. ‘Girls need to learn that they must take responsibility for their own lives.’
Nigella Lawson
It’s difficult to think of any other woman who makes all those ‘most beautiful’ lists (usually voted for by men) and still retains such a broad appeal to her own sex. We love 47-year-old Nigella because she is clever, curvaceous and charismatic; because she has taught us how to eat not just how to cook and how to live with the consequences. Ironic, indulgent and empowering, Nigella presses all the requisite buttons for a generation of British women who appreciate not only her food and her shape but, crucially, the dignified manner in which she has steered her way through tragedy.
‘I feel very protective of the right to be happy because, God knows, things happen that you have no control over,’ she says. ‘So to try to make yourself unhappy when you’re happy is a waste of life.’
Camila Batmanghelidjh
This energetic, inspiring 44-year-old is the founder of the charity Kids Company, whose radical approach to caring for deprived and disturbed children is a reminder that good can triumph in an imperfect world.
Camila overcame severe dyslexia to become a psychotherapist before going on to establish the South London-based charity, and through the ‘healing powers of robust compassion and gentleness’ she has given hope and support to countless damaged children, helping to turn their lives around via visionary new drop-in centres: ‘The way I see it,’ she says, ‘some people invent vacuum cleaners. I’m a social inventor.
I have invented a carefully honed system that turns hardened young criminals into responsible, productive members of society.’
Helen Mirren
The pretender to the throne is as comfortable in her own skin as she is in the Queen’s – particularly, it has to be said, when that skin is naked. Now 61, she has been taking her clothes off on stage and screen to great acclaim for more than 30 years (to celebrate her 50th birthday she posed nude on the cover of the Radio Times).
Awarded a DBE in 2003, she was, she joked, wary of taking on the role that won her this year’s best actress Oscar because she didn’t want to upset the sovereign and have her damehood taken away from her. Strong, sexy and worldly wise (she once said that the ‘greatest gift’ any girl could have was financial independence), she’s a role model for us all.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
The politician, writer and filmmaker, whose beliefs have made her a target for Islamic fundamentalists, lives under a permanent threat of death. This Somali-born Dutchwoman (she obtained asylum in the Netherlands in 1992) rose to international prominence in 2004 as the writer of the film Submission.
Forced into hiding after her collaborator, Theo Van Gogh, was murdered by a radical Islamist, she remains an outspoken critic of Islamic fundamentalism.
Ayaan, 37, upholds free speech and ‘the right to offend’ and, having endured female circumcision as a child, is a passionate opponent of the custom.
‘I have my ideas and my views and I want to argue them,’ she says. ‘It is our obligation to look at things critically.’
Marge Simpson
Since The Simpsons began in 1989, Marge’s ceaseless crusade to be a good wife to her feckless husband Homer, and a loving mother to her three children, has gained her a unique place in our hearts. She isn’t just the moral compass for her flawed family and the townsfolk of Springfield, she is a moral compass for women in the real world, even if she does dye her big hair blue (Homer once revealed that Marge, approximate age 38, has been as ‘grey as a mule since she was 17′).
Loving, kind and compassionate, she is an inspiring homemaker who manages to nourish her family on Homer’s meagre income (she pads his food with sawdust) and takes pleasure in the most mundane of tasks.
Emma Thompson
It’s almost impossible to match the sexy and sophisticated Emma Thompson of today with the rather po-faced bluestocking who entered our consciousness on the arm of first husband Kenneth Branagh.
Now she is as beautiful as she is brainy (she has won Oscars for acting and screenwriting), and a wonderful reminder that women can flower at any age she’s just turned 48. Perhaps her personal happiness as mother to adored daughter Gaia and wife to actor Greg Wise has given her the confidence to realise that looking good isn’t ‘counter-feminist’ behaviour. That said, it certainly isn’t the be-all and end-all for Emma: ‘It’s so unbelievably tedious that women still think they have to be thin, but I haven’t got the energy to get as angry about it as I used to,’ she says. ‘I just think, "This is stupid, and if you can’t see that, well, what’s to be done?" ‘
Sylvie Guillem
The 42-year-old French dancer is known as ‘Mademoiselle Non’ because of her refusal to compromise and her insistence (rare in the world of ballet) on negotiating her own contracts and choosing her own roles, co-stars and choreographers. We like her style! Long and lean, she trained as a gymnast before enrolling at the Paris OpEra Ballet School and eventually becoming, at 19, the protEgEe of the late Rudolf Nureyev.
Independent and occasionally outrageous (she would only pose for Vogue on condition that the pictures, in which she was naked and wearing no makeup, were not airbrushed), Guillem has a prodigious talent that allows her to move between classical and modern dance; she is the ‘superballerina’ of our time.
‘I have always been full of contradictions,’ she says. ‘I am shy but I love the freedom of the stage. I need reassurance but at the same time I don’t want it. I hate being afraid but I can’t help wanting to frighten myself.
That is how you grow.’
AND NOT FORGETTING
JUDY FINNEGAN The original (and best) housewife-sofa-star.
ZARA PHILLIPS A young royal capable of more than just Olympic partying.
EVELYN LAUDER Creator of the inspirational breast cancer Pink Ribbon Campaign.
JILLY COOPER Who put the pun into fiction.
SERENA WILLIAMS The comeback queen of tennis.
BARBARA CLARK Herceptin heroine who fought for British women’s right to have the breast cancer drug.
KARREN BRADY Who broke through football’s glass ceiling to become managing director of Birmingham City FC.
GWEN STEFANI The multitasking pop diva – designing, performing and bringing up baby on tour.
BREE VAN DE KAMP The Desperate Housewife who showed us that perfection is achieved at a terrible price.
SCARLETT JOHANSSON The star who put character (and curves) back into Hollywood.
DAME KELLY HOLMES The front runner who went for gold.
DUCHESS OF YORK Prodigal royal who worked her way out of debt (and disgrace).
WENDY COPE A poignant poet with a talent to amuse.
DAME TANNI GREY-THOMPSON The medal-winning athlete with the courage to overcome any disability.
CHARLOTTE CHURCH The angel who found her own voice.
JENNIFER SAUNDERS AND DAWN FRENCH The godmothers of contemporary comedy.
Have we missed out any of the women you love? Send your choices, and why you love them, to you.co.uk
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