death in the UK

So the british press has spent the past week covering in depth the deaths of two country’s celebrities.

Natasha Richardson died in a freak ski accident on Wednesday. She was sort of my family’s favourite actress, or rather, various members of her family were. (my dad often preferred Vanessa, my mother always like Corin). My mother like Richardson best in the Parent Trap, my father I think would vote for her role in the White Countess, and I liked her best live, in Caberet. My mother once commented that both Richardson and her mother, Vanessa Redgrave, were in their very different ways so stereotypically English. That her death caused such an outpouring of sadness in so many circles in this country suggests my mother had a point.

Yet stereotypically English can apparently mean many things. Richardson had class and style, and she always seemed to carry herself with dignity and discretion in public. She spoke English with a posh accent and her French was fluent. Yet the over the top outpouring of grief over the death of Jade Goody suggests that is not necessarily the image all people in this country connect with.

There are few people on this planet seemingly less destined for stardom than Goody was, and how she turned herself into a multi-millionaire still rather perplexes me. But then, it seems she represented an image many people….respected? Stephan Fry called her a ‘Princess Di from the wrong side of the tracks’ one of the mourners outside her house called her ‘our Essex Princess.’ She notoriously shot to fame by wondering on camera what asparagus might be, and if ‘East Angular’ was abroad. Contrary to all traditional stereotypes of Britishness, she was loud, abrasive and crude, and the public loved it. Perhaps we should not be surprised. The stereotypes of British coolness is both antiquated and classist. Britain has far more Jade Goodys in it than Natasha Richardsons