You see, your mortgages really need $15m.So you toss and turn, and you wonder if you kept up the diet today – and the diet is a lifetime of self-abuse for the sake of all the fat pigs who’ll pay $8.50 for a piece of you. Right, watch that paranoia – as your shrink says ($50,000 a year). And if you’re lonesome, who else is going to understand you – or share your ridiculous dinner – except maybe some other idiot who wants to be a movie star. So you likely end up married to someone as poor, paranoid and famished as you are.Over the years, these couples have come and gone – Joan Crawford and Franchot Tone; Tyrone Power and Annabella; William Powell and Carole Lombard; Olivier and Leigh; Barbara Stanwyck and Robert Taylor; Crawford and Douglas Fairbanks Jr; Cary Grant and Betsy Drake; Orson Welles and Rita Hayworth; Steve McQueen and Ali MacGraw I don’t mean that “real” marriages were impossible.

There have been Hollywood people who kept one wife and put all the money in real estate, and became pillars of the community Bob Hope, for one. But as Bob Hope always said, no one took him seriously.Of course, marriage isn’t always necessary. There are living arrangements that serve as “marriage pending” and which by-pass the prenuptial contracts (and a serious pre-nuptial is at least $100,000 a head these days).So Tom and Nicole gave it their best shot, with two adopted children, scientology on their side – and the big European gamble. That’s Eyes Wide Shut, for which they moved their family and their entourages to England, and for which they forsook a couple of pictures each just to accommodate Kubrick’s gradual pace.They endured more than that.

For it was a time of terrible gossip, with talk of psychologists hired to teach them about marriage and sex, and moments in the prolonged shooting when wry technicians called out insults from the dark For Tom and Nicole that picture had to perform It had to have grandeur and Oscars. God knows how far their dreams had calculated whether they both needed Oscars from it. But when Nicole did The Blue Room in London, famously if briefly naked, between Eyes Wide Shut’s shooting and its opening, it was piling the money on one number – get ready for me. She can’t have seen the film at that point, or guessed how badly it wasted her.Nothing can ever save actors and actresses except the show. They are ready to live for a couple of hours on the screen, and take all the rest of the nonsense. But this film was very bad, and they looked like fools for indulging it. I know, there are critics still who say what a subtle poem to fidelity it is So be it They have their comeuppance now..

Zit cream, men’s briefs and breakfast cereal kept director Roy Andersson sane and solvent during his quarter-century of silence. He was once the toast of the international festival circuit; the most celebrated cinematic Swede since Ingmar Bergman. Then he went bankrupt, endured a crippling crisis of confidence, and scuttled back home to lick his wounds and plot his comeback. Zit cream, men’s briefs and breakfast cereal kept director Roy Andersson sane and solvent during his quarter-century of silence. He was once the toast of the international festival circuit; the most celebrated cinematic Swede since Ingmar Bergman.

Then he went bankrupt, endured a crippling crisis of confidence, and scuttled back home to lick his wounds and plot his comeback.
“Sometimes,” he says, “it was difficult to keep the vision, to convince myself it was worth it, to keep on going until the film was complete.” Songs from the Second Floor, his first movie for 25 years, opens in this country next week It took four years to shoot It has only 45 cuts It has a musical score by Benny from ABBA. Its star is a non-professional actor named Lars Nordh, a great grey mudslide of a man whom the director spotted pushing a trolley around his local branch of Ikea. It is also that rarest of cinematic creatures, a surrealist masterpiece.Now aged 58, Andersson consoles himself for his long absence with thoughts of Luis Buñuel “He didn’t do his best work until he was in his seventies. I’m just at the beginning of my career.” And not for the first time.