The complete archive
Start with what is newest, follow a subject, or search for a person, film, photograph or moment. Every story is part of the archive and links back to the documented record behind the picture.
50 published stories
50 results
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
She recorded four albums, headlined a Las Vegas residency and toured the world while a Los Angeles court controlled her money and her medical decisions. Here is the documented sequence, from the 2008 petition to the day a judge ended it.
8 min read
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
One of the most photographed marriages of the 2010s ended in a filing that took twenty-one months to finalise. The court record says what happened; almost everything else said about it does not appear in any document.
6 min read
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
They met as children on a television show, dated through the peak of both careers, and broke up in 2002. What followed — a single, a video and two decades of coverage — is one of the clearest documented cases of a breakup being turned into product.
6 min read
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
John Lennon told the others he was leaving in September 1969 and was persuaded to say nothing. Paul McCartney announced it six months later in a press release he wrote himself — and then sued the other three to get out.
7 min read
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
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
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
Carole Lombard raised over two million dollars in a single evening in Indianapolis, boarded a plane home, and was killed with her mother and twenty other people on a Nevada mountainside.
6 min read
Mike Todd died in a plane crash in March 1958. By September, his widow Elizabeth Taylor was involved with his best friend, Eddie Fisher, who was married to Debbie Reynolds. The public chose a side immediately.
5 min read
Tina Turner walked out of a Dallas hotel on 1 July 1976 hours before a show. In the divorce she gave up the royalties, the houses and the recording contracts, and kept the two words she performed under.
6 min read
Cher filed for separation in 1974, married Gregg Allman four days after her divorce was final, and then returned to CBS to co-host a variety show with her ex-husband for another two years.
5 min read
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
Kanye West took the microphone from a nineteen-year-old on live television in September 2009. What followed — an apology, a reconciliation, a song, a recorded phone call and a leak — is one of the most litigated pop-culture disputes of the century.
5 min read
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
Madonna and Sean Penn married in August 1985 in front of a press corps in helicopters. The divorce file, the withdrawn 1987 petition and a sworn 2015 declaration are the only parts of this marriage that are documented.
4 min read
Slash walked out of Guns N' Roses in October 1996. Axl Rose kept the name, spent fourteen years making one album, and turned down his own Hall of Fame induction. The reunion tour grossed over half a billion dollars.
4 min read
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
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
One photograph posted to Reddit in September 2012 turned a cat named Tardar Sauce into a trademark. Six years later, a jury in California awarded her owners $710,001 against a coffee company that went too far.
4 min read
Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck called off a wedding in 2003, spent seventeen years apart, married in Las Vegas in 2022 — and the divorce petition arrived on their anniversary, to the day.
7 min read
The marriage lasted two years. The litigation lasted eight, ran across two countries, survived one disqualified judge, and outlived the divorce itself in a fight over a French vineyard.
7 min read
Two couples separated inside one studio while a third marriage collapsed outside it. Nobody quit. The songs are addressed, by name, to the people standing on the other side of the glass.
7 min read
Oasis ended backstage at a French festival on 22 August 2009, minutes before the band were due on stage. The brothers argued in public for fifteen years — then posted the identical announcement on the same morning.
7 min read
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
Amsterdam, March 1969: John Lennon and Yoko Ono married in Gibraltar, checked into the Hilton, and let reporters into the room every day for a week. Within eighteen months the Beatles were in the High Court.
4 min read
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
A joint statement in June 2022, a custody agreement signed in a Barcelona courtroom, and a track that broke streaming records within twenty-four hours. What is on the record about the most-streamed break-up of the decade.
4 min read
Two ceremonies in two days, an estimated thirty million television viewers, and a studio contract that ended with the vows. What the record shows about the wedding that invented the modern celebrity royal.
4 min read
Dorothea Lange stopped at a pea-pickers' camp, shot five frames and drove on. The woman in the picture spent the rest of her life objecting to how it was used.
5 min read
The same underlying dispute was tried twice, on two continents, under two legal systems — and produced results that appear to contradict each other. The reason is in the procedure, not the drama.
4 min read
The engagement interview, the separation announced in Parliament, the television interview that shook the monarchy, and the inquiry that found the interview itself was obtained by deception.
3 min read
Orville Wright pre-set the camera and asked a lifeguard from the local lifesaving station to squeeze the bulb. He squeezed it at exactly the right instant — then never looked through a viewfinder again that day.
5 min read
The wedding at San Francisco City Hall took minutes. The marriage lasted nine months. What DiMaggio did afterwards is the part almost nobody gets right.
3 min read
In 1950 a sitting United States senator stood up and called a film star a threat to the nation. Twenty-two years later, another senator apologised for it in the same chamber.
3 min read
Apollo 8's photographic checklist was full of lunar craters. When the Earth appeared over the horizon, the crew scrambled for colour film — and briefly joked that the shot was not scheduled.
4 min read
The permit was for twenty years. Gustave Eiffel saved his tower by making it too useful to dismantle — and the construction photographs show a structure that was never meant to last.
4 min read
Before it stood in New York Harbor, the statue filled a workshop off the rue de Chazelles — a hand the size of a room, a head that tourists paid to walk into.
3 min read
Arthur Conan Doyle published them as evidence of the supernatural in 1920. The cousins who made them finally explained how in 1983 — and one of them never fully recanted.
4 min read
Annie Edson Taylor was a widowed schoolteacher who calculated that surviving the Horseshoe Falls would make her rich. She survived. It did not.
3 min read
Told to think up a comedy make-up, Chaplin walked into the Keystone wardrobe, borrowed trousers from one actor and shoes from another, and came out as a character he would play for twenty-six years.
3 min read
In photographs of ENIAC, women are shown setting switches and plugging cables. For decades many of those pictures were published without their names.
4 min read
Apollo 17's crew had the Sun behind them and a hand-held Hasselblad. The result went round the world before the astronauts did — and it is free for anyone to use.
3 min read
Titanic leaving Southampton on 10 April 1912, photographed from the quayside by a local postcard publisher who had no reason to think the picture mattered.
4 min read
No photographer captured the Gettysburg Address itself. But a crowd plate held by the National Archives turned out to contain the president — spotted by an archivist in 1952.
4 min read
More people survived the Hindenburg than died in it. What did not survive was public confidence in the airship — because for the first time, cameras and a radio reporter were already there.
4 min read
Georges Méliès burned his own negatives and ended up selling toys in a Paris railway station. A hand-coloured print of A Trip to the Moon turned up in Barcelona in 1993 — fused into a single lump.
4 min read