Series
You remember the photograph. Here is what the record says came afterwards.
13 stories published.
Start here · Part 1
Their love story began on the set of Cleopatra and produced two marriages, two divorces, eleven films and a correspondence that outlived them both. Here is the documented sequence — and what happened after the second divorce.
8 min read
Part 2
Harry and Meghan announced they were stepping back on an Instagram post in January 2020. Eleven days later Buckingham Palace set the terms. Here is the documented sequence, and what each side has actually said on the record.
6 min read
Part 3
They met on a film set in 1989 and married on Christmas Eve 1990. In February 2001 a publicist announced the separation in a few lines, and neither has ever given a detailed public reason. Here is what the record does say.
5 min read
Part 4
In January 2005 they announced their separation in a statement they wrote together. Twenty years on, the parts of that story that are documented and the parts that were invented are still routinely confused.
5 min read
Part 5
Two marriages inside one group, both ended within three years of each other, and the biggest song of the period was sung by an ex-wife to lyrics written by her ex-husband. The documented sequence.
5 min read
Part 6
Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz built the most successful comedy in television history, owned the studio that made it, and ended their marriage the day after they finished shooting.
5 min read
Part 7
Lauren Bacall had never made a film when she was cast opposite Humphrey Bogart in 1944. What followed is one of the few Old Hollywood romances that the record does not complicate.
6 min read
Part 8
An actor hospitalised by his own make-up, an actress set alight by a special effect, and a sixteen-year-old lead who was already on studio-supplied medication. The documented aftermath of the most-watched film ever made.
6 min read
Part 9
On 27 March 2022 Will Smith walked onto the Academy Awards stage and struck Chris Rock during a live broadcast. Everything that followed — the win, the apology, the resignation, the ten-year ban — is on the record.
5 min read
Part 10
Two photographers stood metres apart in Times Square on 14 August 1945 and shot the same embrace. One frame became LIFE's most reproduced image. The other belongs to the public — and the woman in it said it was not her choice.
4 min read
Part 11
Star Trek was a ratings failure that ended in 1969. What happened to the people in the publicity photographs is stranger than the show: a NASA recruitment contract, an internment-camp childhood made public, and a ninety-year-old captain who actually went to space.
4 min read
Part 12
He left a marriage of twelve years, was dropped by his record label and his agency, and won an Academy Award while the marriage was already over. The documented sequence of the most destructive love affair in mid-century Hollywood.
5 min read
Part 13
The photograph taken outside the courthouse on 9 October 1973 is the strangest divorce picture in American celebrity history. Here is the documented sequence that produced it — and what Priscilla Presley did with the next fifty years.
4 min read
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