Caroline Phillips

Journalism

Caroline Phillips
“Caroline Phillips is a tenacious and skilful writer with a flair for high quality interviewing and a knack for making things work.”

Caroline Phillips

Journalism

All articles from 1994

Born to be outrageous

Evening Standard | 19 Dec 1994

JO CORRE spent much of his childhood in a dustbin. Jo, 27, is the son of fashion designer Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren, the punk poseur who managed the Sex Pistols. The first time Jo jumped into a dustbin was with his brother Ben, to retrieve the toys Malcolm had thrown away because he wouldn’t tidy his room. ‘Once we’d discovered this place where you found loads of other stuff as well, we were, like, always in the dustbins,’ says Jo. ‘Most parents wouldn’t let their children play with us because we were really dirty.’

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Who’s afraid to be fat?

Evening Standard | 18 Dec 1994

Big is beautiful for comedy actress Miriam Margolyes. Failure certainly does not frighten her and success means having another helping of smoked salmon.

SUCCESS means never having to say you’re hungry, according to Miriam Margolyes. ‘I get nervous when food is taken away from from me,’ she says, firmly preventing the waiter from clearing the table. The 51-year-old comedy actress has risen in the last few years via voice-overs and BT commercials, her one-woman show Dickens’ Women and a truckful of character roles in films and television to become one of the most sought-after character thespians in the business.

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Happy to be on an island in the sun

Evening Standard | 29 Nov 1994

STUART Carroll, 42, was head of litigation and a senior partner at Nabarro Nathanson, a leading London law firm. He ran major cases of commercial litigation – acting for disputing governments and sports and entertainments personalities. He earned a salary in the hundreds of thousands. ‘More,’ says Stuart, ‘than a chief executive of a publicly quoted company earns.’ And there he was in the glossy corporate brochure – looking serious, professional, highly motivated and dangling his glasses authoritatively. But now he’s ‘taking off’ the rest of his life. He has stopped working – forever. ‘I hated the English winters, going to work in the dark and coming home in the gloom. So I’m living on an island where the climate makes me feel alive.’

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The panic and passion of Stephanie Cole

Evening Standard | 7 Nov 1994

STEPHANIE Cole collects relations. She discovered her twin cousins when she was 11, her father when she was 21 and her half-sister when she was 38. As if this weren’t extraordinary enough, she was also expelled from school for throwing a book at her Latin teacher, once suffered so badly from agoraphobia she couldn’t walk to the shops, and became a Buddhist. We meet in her north London flat. Stephanie, tall with a massive jaw, piercing blue eyes and stern headmistress’s face and clothes, spits out her gum, makes a cup of instant coffee with dried skimmed milk, shoos away her cats and talks in a deep, self-assured, direct voice. She is an intense, likeably formidable and surprisingly unsmiling woman.

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A Champagne socialist with designs on the South Bank

Evening Standard | 2 Nov 1994

SIR Richard Rogers, architect of Lloyd’s headquarters and the new Channel 4 building, the Pompidou Centre in Paris and the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, has been an international force for more than two decades. Right now, I feel as though I’ve been waiting almost that long to see him.

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Did I infect Freddie? Who knows?

Evening Standard | 28 Oct 1994

JIM Hutton was the ‘husband’ of the late Freddie Mercury for seven years before the legendary Queen singer died of Aids in 1991. Jim is talking about their ‘marriage’, being diagnosed as HIV positive four years ago, his book Mercury and Me, about watching Freddie die and being evicted from the £4 million mansion that Freddie left to his former lover Mary Austin – according to Jim, on condition that he could remain there.

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Anger, envy and the hidden Cliff

Evening Standard | 24 Oct 1994

CLIFF RICHARD, the Nice Guy of Pop, is a man of hidden violence. A man who thinks he has the potential to commit any of the crimes he has ever read about. When he was young, he says, he might have been able to murder somebody. Sometimes he puts his hands under his bottom when people ask him questions, just to stop himself hitting them.

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My little girl spends hours trying to wash away the memory of what he did

Evening Standard | 12 Oct 1994

ON CHRISTMAS Day last year 10-year-old Elizabeth was sexually assaulted by a family friend. Her assailant, Barry, 50, was convicted after a week-long case which ended on 30 September. He’s now on bail, awaiting sentencing on 21 October. Elizabeth, meanwhile, cries inconsolably in her bedroom with the Phil Collins poster; often she won’t sleep in her own bed or close her eyes all night. She has an IQ of 168, but recently flunked her exams. She goes to the lavatory 50 times a day and, at night, walks along the corridor in her flannel pyjamas, clutching her soft toy rabbit, and spends three hours in the bathroom. Her father thinks she’s trying to wash away her dirty feelings.

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The scandalous mistress of the castle

Evening Standard | 12 Oct 1994

AT AYTON Castle, Lady Christine de la Rue, in red jumper and jodhpurs and wearing dusters on her feet, is skating around what appears to be 27 miles of wooden hall floor. A polishing trick she picked up at the Pucci Palace in Florence. The fire is blazing, sandwiches are laid out on the grooms’ table in the hall – where they play ping pong and do Scottish reels – and Highland terriers scamper about.

The mistress of Ayton Castle, Berwickshire, is a colourful character with a past as dramatic as her castle.


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I’d hate to be remembered only as John Mortimer’s ex

Evening Standard | 21 Sep 1994

PENELOPE Mortimer, who has written 11 novels, a bitchy biography of the Queen Mother, two volumes of autobiography, had six children by four men, been sexually abused by her father, attempted suicide and had lung cancer, is frightened she’ll be remembered only as the ex-wife of the creator of Rumpole, that “Ex-Wife of John Mortimer” may be engraved on her tombstone. And she resents that.

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Whenever I married, I married for life. But things have gone desperately wrong

Evening Standard | 9 Sep 1994

DINAH Sheridan, star of Genevieve, The Railway Children and mother of Conservative Party chairman Jeremy Hanley, has lunched with Noel Coward, stayed with Sir John Gielgud, once had a stroke and was baptised aged 41. She’s also had both hips replaced, married four times, lost her three day- old child, had a nervous breakdown, addressed the Tory faithful and met nearly all the Royal family.

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Pilgrimage of a political wife

Evening Standard | 1 Sep 1994

JONATHAN Aitken’s wife, Lolitzia, was meditating for a week in an isolated Buddhist retreat when her husband rang to break the news of his promotion to the Cabinet. Lolitzia, a Swiss heiress and one of London’s most important society hostesses, was with pilgrims on Holy Island reportedly sleeping in a traditional wooden box designed to keep the body’s energies flowing. This wasn’t how we’d imagined the wife of Jonathan, newly appointed chief secretary to the Treasury, former TV-am big wig, biographer of Nixon and financier. But, speaking for the first time, Lolitzia says she spends up to two months a year looking for her spiritual ‘essence’. How does Jonathan regard these trips? ‘Maybe deep down he thinks I’m a bit cranky. But everyone has the right to be.’ She laughs. ‘I didn’t sleep in a box on Holy Island. I’m worried I’ll seem to be really wacko.’

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Caroline’s favourite articles from 1994

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