We asked a panel of experts to tell us who they thought wielded real power in Britain as style icons and commercial faces, in music, film, sport and the gossip columns.
We looked at how many times a celeb had been named in the media; who had the big magazine covers (across 18 key UK monthly and weekly titles) and who got the most entries on UK Google. To qualify for the Power 50, celebs had to have an extra dimension that put them in the public eye, whether it was old-fashioned star quality, serious advertising appeal or a fascinating personal life. Points were awarded and Style’s Power 50 was born.
The experts: the Sunday Times Style team, plus the celebrity photographer Richard Young, the casting director Celestia Fox, the fashion stylist Katie Grand and the brand-affinity consultants Elaine Foran of TLC Faces and Simon Seward of Touchdown Communications.
1 KATE MOSS
Ad campaigns 14; magazine covers 15; earnings this year £30m
Why she is the queen of all she surveys, by Kate Spicer
The 32-year-old, 5ft 6in piece of flesh, bone and blood called Kate Moss has transcended all the rules of modelling, celebrity and fame. She can make top-of-the-hour news alongside international politicians, terrorists and natural disasters — most venerable dames of the sphere would have to die in mysterious circumstances to get the billing Kate did after allegedly enjoying the smell of some powder in a recording studio.
Ostensibly just a style icon — if you can be just one of those — she does not do charity work, rarely speaks publicly and has no officially aired opinions on anything. It’s the Jackie Kennedy philosophy: never explain, never complain. Keeping a Garbo-like mystique has meant that, even when caught with her pants or nose down, Kate retains a dignified and aristocratic aloofness. Which is why sustenance for the millions of hungry Kate-watchers comes not from her words, but from her much-papped and much-analysed deeds.
One of the most-watched women in the world, she is the ultimate trendsetter. Take skinny jeans. She liked them, and we liked the way she looked in them, so we all went out and bought them, whether we looked good in them or not. Mindful of that, Philip Green has recruited Kate to design a line for Topshop. She may not be a designer, but her face, her body, her style and her silent charisma all combine into a singular skill of making people buy stuff. Buy anything. That’s why she currently stars in 14 ad campaigns, which are said to make her about £30m a year. And still her agency turns down far more big campaigns than it accepts. A model-agency source says: “I know for a fact she is given first dibs on everything out there.”
Kate can shift anything with which she appears to be associated. Not just skinny jeans, hot pants and waistcoats. Everything: fags, vodka, pole dancing, troubled musicians/actors/heirs, trendy-but-nerdy magazine publishers, orgies, cocaine... One might draw the line at politicians, but I don’t suppose she would go there anyway.
I was talking to someone in her social circle recently about the allegations that she has a formidable and wide-reaching sexual appetite. The Primrose Hiller was saying something along the lines of, “Poor Kate, those tabloid bastards, leave her alone, imagine, revelations, blah, blah, blah, embarrassment, shame... ” Every time another debauched, decadent strand of Kate’s fun-looking life is exposed, our ideas of morality, of right and wrong, shift. Orgies and swinging have had a terrible image for years; now, they’re hot again, with widely publicised penthouse parties in Mayfair catering to an aspirational set who feel so inclined. From orgies to crackheads, Kate has legitimised what was previously thought of as a sin and made it seem desirable, even hip. As Karl Lagerfeld said to me this summer: “There are others like that, but they bore me to death.”
As a model, she is no longer a blank canvas; her public image is her value. This has been played on in two campaigns. Her recent television ad alluded to her losing her contracts and getting a great new one, with Virgin Mobile. Ha ha. In the Rimmel one, which came out days before the cocaine allegations, Kate goes from partying all night to a cab on the way to the office. I asked Rimmel about the blatant reference to Kate’s private life (the cab story would hardly have worked with Claudia Schiffer), and its answer was: “We don’t talk about Kate.” Nobody who knows her or works with her does: it’s part of her carefully managed mystique.
But if you twist their arm, people who know her say how normal she is. On the few occasions I’ve been in the same room as Kate, I’ve been surprised by how small she is, and thought she seemed slightly vulnerable. She has a nervy, flirtatious way of moving, honed by years of playing to the camera, but there is no doubt she is mesmerising. “She is lit from the inside,” says Martin Deeson, a journalist who interviewed her in the late 1990s, when she still spoke to the press. “I’d never really found her that attractive, so I wasn’t intimidated about interviewing her” — and this is typical: Kate is a woman’s woman, not a man’s woman — “but when I did, it was hard not to stare at her face. Suddenly, you could understand all that stuff about Helen being the face that launched a thousand ships. When I asked her, as someone who lived in first-class cabins and hotel rooms, what was the one thing she always carried with her, she replied, ‘Neat vodka.’”
In her book The Lives of the Muses, Francine Prose says: “Every historical period re-creates the muse in its own image.” Sphinx was the name of a sculpture of Kate by the young British artist Marc Quinn, who said of her: “She is a contemporary version of the sphinx. A mystery. There must be something about her that has clicked with the collective unconscious to make her so ubiquitous, so spirit-of-the-age.”
2 MADONNA
At 48, she is living proof that you are never too old to be a global pop icon. Hod-carrier arms aside, her body is astounding, and she has just completed the biggest tour in history by a female artist, grossing a reported £103m, with a global audience of 1.2m people. In the UK, we happily paid £160 each to see her prance, with age-defying agility, in high heels and a sweaty leotard. Rumours of trouble in her alpha/beta marriage to Guy Ritchie keep us reaching for those gossip rags, and she still has the power to shock. Whether it is yoga, kabbalah or krumping, Madonna doesn’t so much start trends as popularise them — and on a global scale.
3 DAVID BECKHAM
It hasn’t been a vintage footballing year for Becks, but his earnings off the pitch are more than enough to keep Victoria in handbags and heels. The former England captain is reported to get £40m for his three-year endorsement deal with Gillette, and has lucrative contracts with Adidas, Pepsi and Motorola. As a style icon, he can still do no wrong. Who else can dress like an extra from Oliver Twist (as Becks did at the recent Venice Film Festival) and survive with his fashion reputation intact? And who else could be the face of contemporary British masculinity despite having the voice of a neutered gerbil?
Her fame has endured longer than the public usually allows. Twenty years and 30 Top 10 singles on from Charlene in Neighbours, Kylie, 38, is the undisputed queen of British pop. Is it because she’s tiny? Her global clout is in inverse proportion to her size. Whatever her success, she is always cute. But her position on this list is really explained by her willingness to fit the times. Her 2005 world tour, Showgirl, was pure glitz. Post-breast cancer, she is different. More human, more now.
5 ANGELINA JOLIE
As one half of Hollywood’s sexiest power couple, Jolie, 31, now commands tens of millions of bucks per film. She may be a mother of three (with her two adopted orphans and now Brad’s love child, Shiloh), but the improbably pillow-lipped one’s headline-prone sex drive — and intriguing dark side (remember the blood vials?) — keeps her in the “everyone talks about” league. This reputation is cleverly offset by her growing portfolio of international humanitarian work. Women admire her, men fear her, Hollywood wants to cast her, the mags want to photograph her. No big advertising deals in the UK, but that just adds to her credibility.
6 BRAD PITT
This singular bundle of talent, looks, likeability and commercial pulling power is the only man to make the top 10 in the lucrative US endorsements market. Box-office gold, he appeals to men and women. But he is not too proud to take a rotten-toothed supporting role in Snatch. Like Frank Sinatra before him, he has high-profile relationships with women at their zeitgeist moments: Juliette, Gwyneth, Jennifer, and now Angelina. He may look a tad pussy-whipped into Unicef-pleasing shape, but whatever their motives, the two are undeniably a force for good. Altruism and philanthropy are essential assets for the Noughties mega-celeb.
7 VICTORIA BECKHAM (click here)
After enjoying huge box-office success with both Pirates of the Caribbean films and Pride and Prejudice, the Oscar-nominated actress was recently dubbed the 45th-most-powerful person in Hollywood, and is riding high as Britain’s most bankable actress. This swashbuckling beauty has true global appeal. Next year, she joins the elite group of Hollywood actresses with lucrative beauty contracts when she replaces Kate Moss as the face of Chanel’s perfume Coco Mademoiselle (a deal rumoured to be worth at least £500,000 a year). Although she is emerging as one of the great modern beauties, her looks attract controversy — she has been dogged by rumours of lip-plumping injections and accusations of anorexia. She is also beginning to play the red-carpet power-couples game, trading in the Calvin Klein hunk Jamie Dornan for the chiselled actor Rupert Friend. She knows the game and she’s playing it masterfully.
9 JENNIFER ANISTON
Magazine covers 12; earnings this year £10m; Nike deals that never happened 1
Homey and safe. you gotta love her, says Shane Watson
Apparently, your cortisol levels drop by 30% when you read romantic fiction. Nobody has measured the effect of watching Jennifer Aniston on screen yet, but she has to be the cortisol-suppressant to end them all. Watching that girl (and she’ll always be a girl in our eyes) is like drinking red wine under the duvet, or guzzling Häagen-Dazs out of the tub — it feels good in an uncomplicated, homey, safe sort of way.
She isn’t mesmerising, dazzling or any of those adjectives regularly applied to more starry actresses, and that is precisely what we love about her. She was the hot one in Friends, and yet she was never threatening, because you can see that underneath all that grooming is a bit of a monkey face, with rather too strong a jaw line, and someone who wants to be liked, someone who is nice to little girls and remembers birthdays. Jennifer has, since she signed up to play Rachel in Friends, been the official torchbearer for the quintessential good American girl, but she’s no Reese Witherspoon. She’s the one who married Brad Pitt, making every nice girl’s dream come true, but then the fairy tale ended badly. Recently, she hooked up with Vince Vaughan, but now that looks unsatisfactory.
Jennifer is just the right side — the wobbly side — of successful and happy. You can’t help but root for her, because she is that most seductive of screen personalities: easy on the outside, not so easy on the inside, the opposite of smug and together. We’re not talking Robert Downey Jr, but then we’re not talking Mary Tyler Moore, either.
In the end, it’s a chemical thing. Some magical combination of the camera loving her, perfect comic timing, the nippiest little figure, a great iconic role in probably the most successful TV series of all time — that’s what makes Jennifer eminently watchable. Your dad, your mum, your young niece, there isn’t anybody who isn’t charmed by her — and you can’t say that of many people, let alone Hollywood actresses.
Gorgeous George — the perfect jaw line, the honeyed skin, the spaniel eyes, the liberal politics. Clooney, who won best supporting actor at this year’s Oscars and was nominated for best director and best original screenplay, has considerable box-office pulling power for British audiences. What has raised him from mere television hunk to Hollywood hero is not just his matinee-idol looks and skills as a thespian, but his readiness to speak out on issues that matter. Not just speak out, in fact, but talk sense. First he criticised the Bush government over the Iraq war. Then he took the UN to task over the continuing atrocities in Darfur. All that, and he can make the girls swoon, too — now that’s what we call influence.
11 NICOLE KIDMAN
Hollywood’s second-highest-paid actress (at $17m per flick) and the face of Chanel No 5 since 2004, Nicole, 39, has continually pushed up her price tag despite a couple of recent turkeys (The Interpreter, Bewitched) — her best actress Oscar for The Hours still carries clout with casting directors. Her own plot line — the alleged marriage of convenience to Tom, her second to ex-drug addict country singer Keith Urban — and enduring style-icon status have kept Heat happy, but her aloofness and consistently clean nose isn’t enough to inspire mass obsession.
12 PARIS HILTON
Earnings £5m; Google mentions 4,920,000; magazine covers 4
She's a contemporary genius, says Bryan Appleyard
Paris Hilton is much misunderstood. She is seen as the distilled essence of mere celebrity, famous for absolutely nothing more than being famous. Named after a hotel and projected onto the global A list by an internet porn video in which she has desultory sex with Richard Salomon (former boyfriend of the Benihana heiress Devon Aoki, but you knew that, didn’t you?), she has since had to do little more than turn up and be papped. She can’t sing, she can’t act, she can’ t dance, she can’t even, judging by the video, do sex very well. She is merely a celeb; enough said.
Well, no. Paris is a contemporary genius. Like many geniuses, she doesn’t know how she does it — indeed, she doesn’t know anything very much — but what she does is extraordinary. Bascially, she is a brilliantly constructed blank sheet. She can’t do anything, because she isn’t anything. Or, to be exact, she is not a person, she is a platform. She is not a product, she is the shelf on which it rests. She is not the heroine of blogged rumours, she is the internet browser that summons her from cyberspace. This is her job. Just as models are mere dead-eyed carriers for clothes, so Hilton is the empty carrier for the entire culture of pallid, inattentive distraction.
Look at her. Bumless, absurdly sculpted hair, crazy make-up, hooded eyes and a nose that seems to have had a ball-bearing stitched into its tip — this is not a person but a “pretty lady” drawn in crayon by a six-year-old. And look what she does. She is a shelf bearing products. The internet video that shows her reversing her Range-Rover into a Honda Civic is not about her, it’s about the cars. After being stopped for drunken driving, she said: “I was just really hungry and I wanted to have an In-N-Out burger.” Not just a burger, note, but an In-N-Out burger.
The genius of Paris lies in her seamless self-insertion into the marketing ecosystem. To her, perfumes, clothes and burgers are trees, rivers and mountains — natural features of the landscape, of the only world she knows or can imagine. She has raised the celebrity stakes; she is the prophet of the post-human future.
13 CHARLOTTE CHURCH
There’s something of the eternal barmaid about Charlotte Church, and it’s got nothing to do with the fact that she has the dress sense of a 45-year-old. Her appeal lies in her earthy naturalness and good-humoured defiance (not for her the tormented teen routine). When she turned 18, she couldn’t wait to start spending her earnings from more than 10m album sales worldwide. Then she went on to torture her parents and titillate the gossip rags with a string of unsuitable boyfriends, before settling down with Gavin Henson. She’s a natural diva, whose willingness to feud, most notably with the Girls Aloud crew, is matched by her unwillingness so far to slim down to a size zero. Her pop career and chat show have not matched her classical success, but Charlotte, unpretentious and unfazed by celebrity nonsense, is in it for the long haul.
14 JOHNNY DEPP
With a string of A-list ex-fiancées (Kate Moss, Sherilyn Fenn, Winona Ryder), a rock band, a number of arrests and undisguisable box-office beauty, Johnny, 43, could have any front page or ad campaign he liked. But the publicity-shy family man doesn’t like playing the fame game. Highly selective in his career moves, Johnny now focuses on scripts his two kids will approve of and was paid $20m for the latest, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest. A close friend of the late Hunter S Thompson, a long-term collaborator with Tim Burton and a huge fan of The Fast Show, Johnny is a man whose idiosyncrasies win him deep respect, a steady supply of quirky roles and a loyal fan base. On credibility alone, he would top this list.
15 BRITNEY SPEARS
Britney has gone from southern schoolgirl, who, despite dating the hot hunk Justin Timberlake, vowed not to have sex before marriage, to a deflowered (by Justin, no less), twice-married, fully fledged white-trash diva, complete with a trailer-park complexion, recalcitrant husband and fondness for junk food and tracksuits. Britney ranks as the eighth-bestselling female artist in history, but her real power lies in the car-crash lifestyle that keeps her in the headlines. She tearfully denied she was a bad mother after nearly dropping her eldest son, Sean Preston, on his head, and being photographed driving with the toddler on her lap. After producing baby number two, she’s now working on her comeback. She is one of the most talked about people of all time and, frankly, we’re hooked.
16 JAMIE OLIVER
He is a bully of the best kind, pushing around cabinet ministers and exposing any duplicitous lip service in his attempts to introduce healthy eating to an ever-fattening Britain. The boy got power, a surreal amount of power given that 10 years ago he was a low-ranking chef at the River Café. From zero to genre-busting, emotionally honest TV chef, to multi-millionaire humanising face of Sainsbury’s, to saviour of the homeless and hopeless with his Fifteen Foundation, to the campaigning force he is today, a hero with the clout to close junk-food manufacturers and open doors at No 10. He and Jools (you know you’re famous when the nation’s on first-name terms with your wife) are bona-fide celebrities. And on top of that, he’s got a nice little sideline in private catering — Jo Wood’s 50th, Brad’s 40th, meals for friends in hospital. At 31, he is possibly Britain’s youngest national treasure.
17 WAYNE ROONEY
As the brooding man-child of British football, Wayne often has the nation’s hopes resting on his sturdy shoulders. It is a lot of responsibility, and he constantly spins on a hero/villain axis — his World Cup sending-off, for instance, called into question his temperament and judgment. His on-pitch moodiness is matched by his off-pitch dark side. His vices include gambling (he is said to have owed £700,000 to bookies) and ageing prostitutes, but the granny-shagging Neanderthal is humanised by his delightful girlfriend Coleen, a good, solid girl with a healthy taste for shopping. He’s about as pretty as a pit bull, so don’t expect him to nick Becks’s contract with Gillette; but endorsements with Coca-Cola and Nike have taken his earnings to an estimated £11.2m a year.
18 ELTON JOHN
Almost ready to pick up his bus pass, Elton John, now 59, may have grown out of notoriety (the bulimia, the tantrums, the ‘Is he, isn’t he? He’s a screaming diva — of course he is’) but with a personal wealth of £205m (and estimated earnings of £30m last year), he’s quite the bankable commodity, with shows on Broadway and Vegas and, of course, his closet- clearing jumble sales. Elton’s perma-position as the alternative queen of England is all about the friends he keeps, the parties he throws and the money he spends, spiced up with the occasional outburst, for which he is then forgiven after a bout of charitable extravagance.
19 ROBBIE WILLIAMS
The pesky kid with spunk showed his value as an emerging star when his departure from Take That spelt curtains for the band and his fellow boybanders’ careers. Now 32, he has 45m sales from his 10 albums. His old-school approach to entertainment is loved the world over; he sold 1.6m tickets for his world tour in the fastest time ever. Sometimes it feels like the only person who doesn’t love Robbie is Robbie himself (and the United States, which he has thus far failed to seduce). Yes, he has that essential celebrity allure of car crash in waiting, a genuine troubled star who is not afraid to emote, a modern-day Judy Garland from the Potteries. His latest album, Rudebox, with its left-field electropop pretensions, has gone down predictably badly. But Robbie will survive it.
20 SCARLETT JOHANNSSON
She does both indie and blockbuster. She’s a millionaire but refuses a bodyguard. She has signed a million-dollar deal with Reebok but claims not to like exercising. She is curvaceously libidinous in a sea of sex-starved anorexics. She gives great red carpet, though they say she wore a nose ring to a private A-list party on New Year’s Eve. There is no end to the intrigue of Scarlett Johansson. Since her 2003 breakthrough role as Charlotte in Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation, this Hollywood superstar and face of L’Oréal has done it all on her own terms. And that is why the 20-year-old’s story is only just beginning.
21 THE ROLLING STONES
Earnings last tour £86m; biggest single audience 1.5m; A&E visits 1
Bourgeois posers who do nothing but get their end away, says Giles Coren
Forgive me for asking this — I am 103 and thus not old enough to remember — but were the Rolling Stones ever cool? Because I can’t for the life of me imagine how they could have been. Even when they were young, they were greedy, bourgeois posers in stupid clothes. Since then, all they’ve done is got scrawnier and wrinklier, and poked their frantic little penises into young girls who don’t know any better.
I can’t imagine that anybody ever liked their music — that ghoulish, middle-class, white-boy pastiche of R&B, such an insult to the tradition of the blues. Such a fraudulent exploitation of a noble idiom by ambitious young breadheads. How can a man who went to the LSE stand there and sing: “I can’t get no satisfaction”? Mick Jagger doesn’t talk like that. He is the Al Jolson of rock: a grim parody of black entertainment performed for the smug enjoyment of the tittering classes.
And the lifestyle has always been more rotten than the music: the glorification of casual sex, the drug-taking, the partying, the indulgence of every vacuous and diseased aspect of an indolent and unrestrained life that the Stones’ particular corner of popular culture celebrates so unremittingly.
I hate that preposterous grunter Richards who fell out of the coconut tree. Do not ask what a human being was doing climbing a coconut tree; ask what a monkey has been doing all these years playing a guitar.
I hate those women they hang out with. All those ex- and current wives, with their rictus grins and big cash settlements. And I hate Bill Wyman, even though he’s not even in the band any more, for marrying a woman who caught his eye when she was 13. And I hate all the airhead offspring, with their fashion lines and their parties and their daft-arse hippie posturing from the starting point of vast ill-gotten wealth.
Most of all, I hate the way every time a member of the Rolling Stones is the subject of a newspaper article, the headline is always, always, some dreadful pun on one of their song titles. Charlie Watts accidentally drops his underpants in the loo and it’s “Jumpin’ Jock Flush!”; Keith Richards endorses a range of smooth-edged furniture, and it’s “Sympathy for the Bevel”. It’s only rock’n’roll — not to mention antisocial attitudes, sexual incontinence and repetitive thundering dross — but I hate it.
22 BEYONCE
Her indisputable talent is one thing; the phenomenal efficiency with which it has been used is another. The ultimate pushy parents gave up the day job and worked on making their all-singing, all-dancing daughter into a megastar, and by 16 she was well on her way, with her first album with Destiny’s Child. An A list of collaborators, carefully chosen film roles in box-office smashes and continuing success both with Destiny’s Child (40m album sales to date) and her more recent solo career will only make her rise and rise. As a couple, she and Jay-Z are the king and queen of urban music. By all accounts, underneath her dignified (if not always wisely styled) public exterior is a sincere, well-balanced woman.
23 CATHERINE ZETA-JONES
She’s either loved or loathed by the British public, but CZJ has steadily climbed the Hollywood hierarchy through acting ability and sheer ambition. An Oscar for best supporting actress in Chicago has secured her A-list status, which now commands a £6m pay packet, and her marriage to Michael Douglas (“the love of my life”) has helped to elevate her to the ranks of Tinseltown royalty. She tops this up with one of the fattest wads of endorsements — as a one-time girl-next-door with Hollywood gloss, she has high selling power. Her aptitude for old-school glamour has secured her an extremely lucrative, high-profile deal with Elizabeth Arden. But how long will it all last? She has just been dumped as the face of T-Mobile in the States, and, at 37, with an unchanging story line and highly litigious tendencies, she is of rather less interest to the British gossip mags than she used to be.
24 BONO
As Mick Jagger said of him in 1999, well before Bono’s altruism went off the Richter scale: “He’s a poet. He’s a philosopher. And last night, I think I saw him walking on water.” Bono. He exists in a dimension alongside the likes of Bill Clinton, Al Gore and Bianca Jagger: a dimension where you personally edit a UK broadsheet, wearing yellow wraparound shades. Appearing beyond the reach of such cheap notions as popularity and party politics, this Gulf Stream gypsy punts his off-the-scale celebrity and charisma on an epic scale, not just for acclaim but for mankind, for the planet, for good. His extraordinary fame is down to being lead singer of the world’s most successful rock band (according to Rolling Stone magazine, they grossed £82m last year), but even that fact is eclipsed by his ability to say, “Get me George Bush/Kofi Annan/Tony on the phone. Now!”
25 JADE GOODY (click here)
