Topic
The picture is the part the internet kept. These stories follow what the record shows about the years that came afterwards.
20 stories published.
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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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