it was only then that he was sent to live with his mother. They lived together for only a few months, after which Osama went back to live with an uncle. Alia Ghanem later married another Saudi businessman, but she did remain in contact with her son.13 SUBHA TULFAH AL-MUSSALLAT (mother of SADDAM HUSSEIN, dictator of Iraq) Subha’s husband, Hussein al-Majid, either died or abandoned the family before Saddam’s birth. Subha considered having an abortion, but was talked out of it by a midwife. She gave birth to Saddam in a mud-brick house outside Tikrit belonging to her brother, Khairaillah al-Talfa. Subha, in a deep depression, could not take care of her newborn son, so she left him with Khairaillah. Saddam did not live with his mother until he was three years old, when Khairaillah was imprisoned for taking part in an anti-British, pro-Nazi uprising. By this time, Subha had married her first cousin, Hasan al-Ibrahim, known as ‘Hasan the Liar’. Hasan refused to send his stepson to school and forced him to steal chickens and sheep. At the age of 10 Saddam, wanting to go to school and fed up with his stepfather’s abuse, ran away from home to live with his uncle Khairaillah. Despite her indifferent parenting, when Subha died in 1982 her son ordered a huge shrine built at government expense in Tikrit to honour the ‘Mother of Militants’.
– F.B.
14 MOVIE STARS WHO FELL IN LOVE ON THE SET
23 ACTORS AND ACTRESSES WHO TURNED DOWN GREAT ROLES
15 FILM SCENES LEFT ON THE CUTTING ROOM FLOOR
37 FAMOUS WRITERS WHO WORKED FOR THE MOVIES
8 MEMORABLE LINES ERRONEOUSLY ATTRIBUTED TO FILM STARS
17 MOVIE STARS AND HOW THEY WERE DISCOVERED
PATRICK ROBERTSON’S 10 TALES OF THE MOVIES
ANTHONY BOURDAIN’S 10 GRITTIEST, MOST UNCOMPROMISING CRIME FILMS
STEPHEN KING’S 6 SCARIEST SCENES EVER CAPTURED ON FILM
10 MOVIES THAT WERE PART OF HISTORY
WILLIAM FRIEDKIN’S 10 FAVOURITE MOVIES
KEVIN MACDONALD’S 10 FAVOURITE DOCUMENTARIES OF ALL TIME
WALTER MATTHAU’S 10 FAVOURITE COMEDIES OF ALL TIME
© The Inflatable Crowd Company, Inc
SEABISCUIT INFLATABLE EXTRAS
14 Movie Stars Who Fell in Love on the Set
1.-2. VIVIEN LEIGH and LAURENCE OLIVIER
Cast as lovers in Fire over England (1937), Leigh and Olivier had little difficulty playing the parts convincingly. They were both married when they became powerfully infatuated with each other. Leigh was the opposite of Olivier’s cool, calm wife, and he was a contrast to her intelligent but rather dry and unromantic husband. The affair was ill-timed: Olivier’s wife was about to give birth and she guessed what was going on. At the christening party for his newborn son, Olivier stepped outside with Leigh and returned with lipstick on his cheek. On the set they were known as ‘the lovers’. This was all too true for Olivier, who complained to another actor that he was exhausted. ‘It’s not the stunts,’ he groaned. ‘It’s Vivien. It’s every day, two, three times. She’s bloody wearing me out.’ He also felt guilty, ‘a really wormlike adulterer, slipping in between another man’s sheets’. Eventually the two passionate actors divorced their respective spouses and married in 1940. Twenty years later they divorced, and Olivier married his third wife, actress Joan Plowright.
3.-4. RONALD REAGAN and JANE WYMAN
Jane Wyman had a hard time getting going with Ronnie, as he was known on the set of Brother Rat (1938). Even before they were cast as lovers she had noticed him around the studio and suggested, ‘Let’s have cocktails at my place.’ He innocently replied, ‘What for?’ Wyman didn’t realise how straightlaced Ronnie was – although she was divorcing her husband, she was still officially married. When they finally began dating, they discovered they had little in common. She liked night-clubbing; he jabbered away about sports. Wyman loathed athletics, but she took up golf, tennis and ice-skating to be near Ronnie. ‘She’s a good scout,’ Reagan told his mother after one date. Reagan lived near his parents and visited them every day. Jane found his devotedness and general goodness intimidating. It wasn’t until the sequel to Brother Rat – Brother Rat and a Baby (1940) – that they began to date seriously. While their courtship was romantic, the proposal, Wyman recalled, ‘was about as unromantic as anything that ever happened. We were about to be called for a take. Ronnie simply turned to me as if the idea were brand-new and had just hit him and said, “Jane, why don’t we get married?”’ They were wed in 1940 and divorced in 1948.
5.-6. KATHARINE HEPBURN and SPENCER TRACY Having seen Tracy’s work, Hepburn got him to act opposite her in MGM’s Woman of the Year (1942), in which they would play feuding columnists who fall in love. The first time they met she said, ‘I’m afraid I’m a little tall for you, Mr Tracy.’ Their producer, Joseph Mankiewicz, turned to Hepburn and said, ‘Don’t worry, Kate, he’ll soon cut you down to size.’ After a few days of sparring on the set – at first Tracy referred to his co-star as ‘Shorty’ or ‘that woman’ – an attraction began to develop between them. Tracy was married and, although he lived apart from his wife, was a Catholic who wouldn’t consider divorce. As the pair fell in love, their relationship was treated with unusual respect by the gossip columnists and was rarely referred to in print. One of the great Hollywood love affairs, their romance lasted 25 years, until Tracy’s death in 1967 from a heart attack. Explaining the phenomenal success of their screen chemistry, Hepburn said, ‘Certainly the ideal American man is Spencer. Sport-loving, a man’s man … And I think I represent a woman. I needle him, I irritate him, and I try to get around him, yet if he put a big paw out, he could squash me. I think this is the sort of romantic ideal picture of the male and female in the United States.’
7.-8. LIZ TAYLOR and RICHARD BURTON
The furor that attended the Burton–Taylor affair during the making of Cleopatra (1962) in Rome was as bombastic as the film they were starring in. Newspapers all over the world carried photos of the courting couple. Taylor was married at the time to Eddie Fisher, her fourth husband; Burton was also married. In her memoirs, Taylor recalled their first conversation on the set. After the usual small talk, ‘he sort of sidled over to me and said, “Has anybody ever told you that you’re a very pretty girl?” And I said to myself, Oy gevaldt, here’s the great lover, the great wit, the great intellectual of Wales, and he comes out with a line like that.’ Chemistry prevailed, however, and soon there was electricity on-screen and off between the two stars. There were breakups and reconciliations, stormy fights and passionate clinches, public denials and private declarations, Liz’s drug overdose and Richard’s brief affair with a model. ‘Le Scandale’, as Burton called it, grew so public that Liz was denounced by the Vatican and accused of ‘erotic vagrancy’. Liz wondered, ‘Could I sue the Vatican?’ During one love scene, director Joseph Mankiewicz yelled, ‘Cut! I feel as though I’m intruding.’ Burton and Taylor married for the first time in 1964, divorced, remarried, and finally redivorced
