Imagine seeing nine films in a week, none of them – in your view – worth a damn. The Mail's critic Chris Tookey sat through four turkeys, and nothing with more than two stars, from Monday to Friday. How do you cope with something like Salvage, British "sci-fi horror on a few cheap sets all too obviously borrowed from Brookside"? Especially when, "at 130 minutes, it's insanely long". Alas, poor Chris. Salvage only lasts 81 minutes. Let's put the missing 49 down to insanity overload.

• Daily Mail
• Science fiction and fantasy
• Newspapers & magazines

Peter Preston
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If you thought Fleet Street had learnt its lesson about tittle-tattle following the McCann debacle, think again

The debacle of the Kate and Gerry McCann coverage developed because UK reporters arrived in Portugal and reprocessed stuff from Portuguese papers as though it was established truth – not cops, tipsters and freelances gabbing away in some local bar. Because the story was out there, far from night lawyers and the harsh legal disciplines of Fleet Street, they relaxed and resolved that anything went.

A hard, expensive lesson, well learnt? Let's ask President Sarkozy and Carla Bruni, double-banked for matching dalliances on Twitter without a proper attribution in sight. Or Kate Winslet and Sam Mendes, who apparently broke up months ago so quietly that none of the "friends, sources or insiders" who prattled away across endless pages last week noticed at the time. Or Sandra Bullock, suddenly struck by the new "Oscars curse" as a Miss Bombshell surfaces from a jungle of tattoos to describe her own nights of passion with Sandra's husband to the usual slew of online gossip sites.

Truth, fiction? The difficulty is that nobody much knows or cares, and everybody thinks they can take a chance. Even BBC News relays "unconfirmed US reports of difficulties in [Ms Bullock's] marriage".

Unconfirmed reports? The McCanns were knee-deep in them. Jon Venables – unable to comment, let alone sue â€“ was buried by them. Presidents, models, actors, tattooed ladies … ?

When Professor George Brock looked at the future of news in his inaugural City University lecture last week, he talked trust and verification, "the difference between qualified professionals on the inside of the machine and amateurs outside". And too much fluff gives that game away.

• Madeleine McCann
• Carla Bruni-Sarkozy
• Nicolas Sarkozy
• Sandra Bullock
• Kate Winslet
• Sam Mendes
• Newspapers & magazines

Peter Preston
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Nothing empowers women more than a good education and career, but since cinema began they have been unable to resist copying the fashions that give models and Hollywood stars allure

Growing up in 1950s Britain we learned that there was something dodgy about glamour. My home-loving mother pursed her lips at the bright blond hair and confident up-slick of black eyeliner sported by a friend's mum who was into amateur theatricals.

To the headmistress of our all-girls grammar school, fashion was at odds with high-mindedness. She was famous for not allowing her teaching staff to wear lipstick. In the 1950s she waged guerrilla warfare against the wearing of "paper-nylon" petticoats, designed to give a sticking-out effect to the skirts of summer dresses. These were frequently confiscated from sixth-formers and hung like scalps on pegs outside her study, a shameful warning to those lower down the school. Glamour got a girl into trouble.

There was a great deal of gender confusion in the academic girls' schools of that time. What Germaine Greer called an "absurd version of masculine uniform" was often policed with vigour: gymslip-type tunics over collared shirts and masculine ties, precise regulations stipulating skirt lengths and the thickness of stockings. Yet we were still supposed to be "ladylike", to dress quietly and neatly and always to wear hats and gloves in the street.

The stringent rules generated a sub-culture of opposition. Could you get away with a black bra, pale pink nail varnish or Clearasil on adolescent acne? Many girls breathed a sigh of relief when they left school and could pile on mascara with abandon. But just as glamour was losing the allure of the forbidden, along came second-wave feminism, warning about the dangers of turning ourselves into sex objects.

Glamour has gone in and out of fashion since the late 1960s. It was back with a vengeance in the 1980s, albeit against a backdrop of the considerable gains women made in education and the labour market during that decade. Was this a "backlash" or something different? Naomi Wolf and, most recently, Natasha Walter have argued that, bolstered by the beauty industries, the pressures on young girls to look good can be damaging and relentless.

It is tempting to ask whether glamour, once an escape for women, has now become a prison? But adult women aren't simply prisoners, dupes or victims, and there can be a playfulness around glamour, exemplified by many women performers, for instance: Mae West, Marlene Dietrich, Madonna, Courtney Love, and currently, the gloriously bonkers Lady Gaga.

As soon as you think or write about glamour you enter dangerous territory. Are we talking about artificiality and the lure of false values? About gold-digging seducers or women on the make? What about the ethics of fur or diamonds; or cosmetic surgery and the problems of body dysmorphia in the young? Is the idea of glamour exclusively western and white?

The word glamour wasn't used much before 1900, and originally meant something akin to sorcery, or magical charm. It became a buzz word in the early 20th century, often associated with exotic places, and new forms of fast travel. Men could be glamorous, as well as women: one thinks of pilots (RAF crew were often known as "glamour boys"), rally drivers, Rudolph Valentino, or Ivor Novello. But by the 1920s and 1930s the idea of glamour was tightly bound up with modernity, and particularly with Hollywood.

Its screen stars wore slinky dresses in lustrous satin, sparkled in lamé, diamonds and sequins, muffled themselves in soft fur. Think of the women cocooned to the tips of their ears in fur, drifting through the foyer in the film Grand Hotel (1932), or Marlene Dietrich, memorably described as "a Venus fur-trap", in Josef von Sternberg's Blonde Venus. An alternative to wrapping yourself in fur was writhing on it. Another stock image pictured stars at their dressing tables, in silk kimonos and surrounded by an array of cosmetics and perfume bottles.

Hollywood cinema exercised a potent influence on young women in Britain between the wars. No wonder the "picture palace" was described as a "dream-factory". Aspirations, patterns of courtship, clothes, hairstyles and makeup were all influenced by the cinema. New magazines such as Girls' Cinema, Miss Modern, Film Fashionland and Woman's Filmfair brought the latest fashions from the United States to Britain and carried adverts for Hollywood-inspired cosmetics.

Moralists were uneasy about the appeal of American glamour, but it was unstoppable: "factory girls looking like actresses" became a sign of the times. During and after the second world war the research body Mass Observation explored new trends in clothing and appearance. Observers were dispatched to the East End of London where they spied on young girls hanging around the "toilet" counter in Woolworths, or applying makeup in the ladies' lavatories in Stepney. Fashions in fur, nail varnish, hats and even hair clips ("red or diamanté and shaped like ribbons or bows") were carefully recorded. "Glamour is the keynote" to the appearance of women in the East End, one observer noted, and "the Hollywood influence is much in evidence".

Cinema, then, acted as a powerful kind of informal education in the inter-war years. It widened horizons and raised aspirations. In the words of film historian Annette Kuhn, it "extended imaginings of what a woman could be". Female audiences were entranced by strong, sexually confident women, often ambitious and powerful, certainly aware of their charms.

Actresses such as Barbara Stanwyck, Jean Harlow and Dietrich played some wonderfully assertive – sometimes transgressive – roles. Dietrich's performances in the Sternberg films were a high point of cinematic glamour. Whether resplendent in jet and coq-feathers, sashaying down the corridor of the night train in Shanghai Express, or alluring in feathery fronds that positively pullulate in The Scarlet Empress, Dietrich's sexual self-possession was inescapable. It was clearly born of experience ("It took more than one man to change my name to Shanghai Lily"), which put it firmly beyond the pale of respectability and conventional virtue.

Glamour's slide away from respectability continued after the war. With the impact of Christian Dior's New Look in the 1950s, class and elegance were in, and glamour started to look tacky. The coronation of Elizabeth II encouraged nostalgia for old-fashioned forms of femininity. Women's magazines became obsessed with the ceremonial attire of princesses and peeresses; class, debutantes and deference gained a new lease of life.

Domestically oriented magazines tended to avoid using the word glamour, which was becoming tarnished by its growing associations with cheesecake photography, pin-up nudes, or scantily dressed models in soft-porn magazines. Many in middle-class England looked askance at the bosom-flaunting antics of Diana Dors or Sabrina, oozing disapproval of "good-time girls" who might be dismissed as "no better than they looked" or "all fur coat and no knickers". Young ladies were not supposed to draw attention to themselves, and what was glamour about if not self-assertion? "Don't make yourself look cheap" was the advice given by many a mother to a daughter bent on cosmetic makeover at the end of the 1950s.

In the 1960s, with the cult of youth, dolly birds, duffle coats and Carnaby Street, the signs and symbols of what was now regarded as old-fashioned glamour – red lips, ample curves, rich furs and complex, musky perfumes – were discarded by the young as outdated, or worse, as suggestive of "kept woman" status.

Fur became environmentally and ethically suspect and lips went a whiter shade of pale. Feminism's critique of glamour gained momentum, although it was never an uncontested orthodoxy. One black activist, Claudia Jones (founder of the Notting Hill carnival), had promoted beauty contests as a way of validating non-white standards of appearance. Even so, the Miss World competition at the Albert Hall in 1970, where (white) feminists famously disrupted the proceedings, hurling flour, stink bombs and plastic mice at the compere, Bob Hope, has achieved the status of a landmark in history.

Does glamour empower women, or turn them into objects? It is important to remember that women practise glamour, they are not simply the object of the male gaze. And, historically, glamorous women were just as likely to be seen as dangerous to men as victims themselves. Glamour can represent self-assertion, sexual confidence, playfulness, pleasure and delight. But in the end, nothing empowers women so much as a good education and a well-paid job.

Carol Dyhouse is a research professor at the University of Sussex. Her new book, Glamour: Women, History, Feminism, is published by Zed Books, at £19.99

• Women
• Social history
• Feminism

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The Pirates of the Caribbean actress on her new BBC thriller, getting revenge on bullies, and her dream of being cast as an Austen heroine

You recently starred in the BBC's Small Island. And you were in Pirates of the Caribbean as a voodoo princess. You are often described as a chameleon. Is this how you see yourself?

I do, completely. It is disconcerting. I have many different sides; I can be the life and soul of the party – or a wallflower. But what I love about being an actor is the leap into being someone else. I think my roles have been wonderfully varied. Not one has been racially stereotypical, and I have purposely chosen them like that.

Your latest role is in the BBC2 thriller Blood and Oil, by Guy Hibbert, set in the Niger Delta. Tell us about the character you play. Is she like you?

Alice Omuka is young, gung-ho and naive – a PR with an international oil company. She goes on a journey that shakes the foundations of her world and everything she believes in. I identify with her integrity – I like to think of myself as a person of high moral standards. I relate to her naivety too. But the main difference between us is that she had a privileged upbringing and I didn't. It was just me and my mother, growing up in Finsbury Park, north London. I didn't have a father figure [Naomie's parents are both Jamaican – her father was absent].

Alice makes an adoring tribute to her father in the film. How did that make you feel?

I loved making that speech. It was beautiful. I had only known Bankole Omotoso (playing my father) a short while but he was wonderful – intelligent, charming, generous – the kind of father I would like to have had. When I made that speech, it was for him. And for my granddad too – an amazing man – no longer alive, but once a big part of my life. He would come by my primary school and pass me sweets through the gate. And when I was only three he took me to Jamaica on his own. I can't imagine how that must have been. I was the most clingy child. I must have given the poor man sleepless nights. He'd feed me condensed milk which must explain my sweet tooth now.

Did you visit Nigeria to make the film?

It was shot in South Africa. But after the film I was interested in going to Nigeria. I seem to have an affinity with Nigerians. I went to stay with a Nigerian friend – from a similar background to Alice. And we had the incredibly privileged experience of being driven around Lagos by chauffeurs and VIP entrance everywhere. We'd come home at four in the morning and people would serve us food. It was one of the best holidays of my life.

Did you get any sense of the corrupt Nigeria of the film?

Corruption is a daily part of life there. As soon as we arrived we had to bribe people to let us out of the airport's car park. But it is important to point out, as my Nigerian friends did, that at least corruption in Nigeria is out in the open. In a way, it is almost more honest. In other societies – perhaps even our own – it is underhand. We are only now discovering how our MPs cheated on expenses. But how many years has that been going on?

What was your childhood like in Finsbury Park?

I had a great time but I was upset I didn't live on a council estate. My best friend did. We used to jump off roofs. We had so much fun. Finsbury Park was warm and multicultural. I never experienced racism. We had wonderful Stroud Green Road with its Jamaican food: yams and jerk this, jerk that. For Jamaicans it is a home from home. And it still holds a special place in my heart.

When you visit Jamaica do you feel British?

No – I feel a deep connection with Jamaica. It is reassuring to see people who remind me of my aunts and uncles – even their mannerisms are the same.

Who has influenced you most in life?

My mum. She is my inspiration. She had me when she was 18. She had a job in the Post Office but made a commitment to herself that, once I was old enough to go to school, she'd go to university. I'd sit in on her lectures and colour in, in the corner. We used to do our homework together. She got a degree in sociology but what she had always wanted was to become a writer. She was the first writer to have a black sitcom, Us Girls on BBC1. Mum always said that you can achieve absolutely anything. There may be obstacles but only see them as challenges – they can be overcome with hard work. And that is an amazing, empowering belief to instil in your child.

Speaking of challenges, you have talked about being bullied at school. How did you retaliate?

The best revenge is to make a success of your life, to show people that are trying to teach you that you are worthless that you are worth a lot more. That was my retaliation.

And you succeeded. You got into Cambridge and left with a 2.1 in political and social science.

I did not enjoy Cambridge. But I shouldn't blame Cambridge alone. I wasn't ready for university or for the wrench of leaving home. It was a big cultural shock. But I recently saw a guy from university who said: "Naomie, you have been bashing Cambridge, saying it was awful and that you felt like an oddball. And you know what? We were all struggling." I realised that was true. I'd somehow thought I was unique.

What did going to Bristol Old Vic theatre school teach you?

The wonderful thing about drama school is that it stretches you in a way the industry doesn't. I played a Swedish tulip and the Virgin Mary.

What unlikely role do you dream of playing?

I wrote a dissertation about black people in 18th-century Britain. I have always been a huge fan of Jane Austen novels – the romance of it. My dream is to be in a period drama.

And if you were to be a Jane Austen heroine?

I'd be Elizabeth Bennet.

• Naomie Harris

Kate Kellaway
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The chief appeal of this self-consciously smart romantic comedy is in its fashionable locations

Based on Alain de Botton's novel Essays in Love, this self-consciously smart romantic comedy begins with Duncan, a London architect, writing a farewell note, then recalling the assorted girls who drove him to suicide. Woody Allen is clearly Kemp's model, and the self-pitying protagonist sees his life as a theme park, recording his disastrous life as sideshows. The girls are attractive enough, though only Naomie Harris has much life, and the film's chief appeal is likely to reside in its numerous fashionable locations.

• Comedy

Philip French
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Endearing teenager Thomas Turgoose gives a touching performance in director Tom Harper's confident feature debut

The endearing Grimsby teenager Thomas Turgoose, who made such a mark as the 12-year-old lad fallen among Lincolnshire neo-Nazis in Shane Meadows's This is England, gives a touching performance as David, a lonely lad living with a boozy father on a caravan site in Norfolk and experiencing an edgy brother-sister relationship with Emily (Holliday Grainger), a pretty redhead a year or so his senior and infinitely more mature. The pair spend the summer jumping from caravan to caravan, like wild boys of the road leaping from boxcar to boxcar in Depression America, and rolling around on the cliffs. Their idyll ends when Emily's slatternly mother wants to send her to live with her father, and David conspires to hide her in a concealed cave. But their plan goes wrong, first dangerously when the police intervene, then tragically, as David misreads Emily's affections. It is beautifully photographed in a manner that alternates between the romantic and the realistic by Robbie Ryan (who shot Andrea Arnold's Red Road and Fish Tank) and perceptively scripted by Jack Thorne; Tom Harper's feature debut is a confident work of considerable promise.

• Drama

Philip French
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The Piano by Jane Campion (1993)

If I hadn't seen The Piano when I did, I may never have made a feature film. I've been making little films since I was eight – I begged my father to buy me a Super 8 camera after he took me to see Doctor Dolittle with Rex Harrison – but for a long while I thought I wanted to make documentaries. I found cinema incredibly inspiring, but I wasn't hearing any voices that felt like my voice in that world. It was a bit like being a singer and hearing wonderful music, but feeling there was nothing in your range. When I first saw The Piano I suddenly felt, my goodness, this is something I could do. It was almost a lack of confidence, before. But seeing the film, the power of its imagery and the delicacy of the way that emotion was handled in it, it felt in tune with who I was as a person and who I was as a filmmaker. It made me see film as a possibility for myself.

I first saw it in a cinema on the King's Road with the man who was to be my husband. We'd only recently met. At that point I knew I very much wanted to have children, and here was a film exploring the relationship between a mother and a daughter. I was excited, but my boyfriend didn't really get it at all. He found it slow and uninspiring. Still, I remember in that moment feeling an incredible connection with the film.

It's really influenced me in a lot of specific ways, beyond giving me the feeling I could go out and do this. It has sunk in at a very deep level. There were shots in Bleak House that were directly inspired by The Piano. The way the humvees move across the desert in Generation Kill, these very still, tranquil shots – they're very like the shots of the piano on the beach. Even more recently, in Nanny McPhee, there are silhouette shots that are very like those of Holly Hunter being carried in across the waves. Anna Paquin who played the little girl is now in True Blood with Alex Skarsgård, who I cast in Generation Kill. She's so, so brilliant in the film and is now working with Alex. I love that.

It's been really interesting to me revisiting the film now that I've had children. It plays very differently, I've found other layers in it, about that closeness and the language between a mother and a daughter. They're a bit young now, but I look forward to the day when I can sit down and watch it with my daughters. I think they'd get a huge amount from it.

Susanna White's next film, Nanny Mcphee and the Big Bang, is released on 26 March

• Jane Campion

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Her joy in winning an Oscar for The Blind Side has been tainted by her husband's alleged infidelity. Will the savvy actress let misery get to her?

'A lot of times girls are raised to be little princesses," Sandra Bullock has complained. "Keep your legs crossed and your hands folded in your lap." Primness is not the Bullock way.

She may have grown up with a love of ballet dancing, but she also devoured television shows starring the oddball comics Carol Burnett and Jerry Lewis. They were "brilliant", she thought, and Bullock still bemoans the fact that comedy is "the least respected art form".

Now America's latest Oscar-winning leading lady – she won the best actress award for The Blind Side, in which she plays a mother who mentors a poor teenager with ambitions to be a football star – the friendly goofball who has become Hollywood royalty, has been forced to take her most public pratfall yet. The alleged affair of her husband, Jesse James, has rocketed Bullock to the top of the most-searched-for internet terms for days in succession. It's a tawdry business, of course, involving a lot of tattoos (sported by James and his putative love interest), but it has extra crowd-appeal because of the clean-cut image the actress projects.

When an announcement on Thursday made it clear that "due to unforeseen personal reasons" Bullock's publicity trip to support the opening of The Blind Side had been cancelled, a wave of shock surged through her admirers. Star-watchers had already cooked-up a toxic "Oscar curse" theory following news that Kate Winslet was separating from her husband, Sam Mendes, and have been amazed to see such speedy confirmation of the spurious formula.

What an Oscar win may do to chances of wedded bliss need only concern an elite few. The wider lesson seems to be, don't ever gush about your relationship. Thanking James as publicly as Bullock did for riding sidecar alongside her career could now be viewed as provoking the gods. The truth is, though, the actress usually tried to answer questions about her husband of five years in a tone of frank realism.

"I know the beast well enough to know what won't be put up with," she once said. "And I know the honesty of the beast, and that's incredibly admirable in that it doesn't curb itself, whether the camera is on or off. God bless any human being who says, 'I don't care what anyone thinks of me; this is the job at hand.'"

Since James's involvement with Michelle McGee, the tattooed lady in question, went global, he has issued a statement apologising to his wife and to his three children.

"I am truly very sorry for the grief I have caused them," said the 40-year-old TV bike show host, adding that most of the reports about his misdemeanours were "untrue and unfounded".

Bullock, who is five years his senior, met James in 2003 and married him in 2005. This, despite the fact she claimed she was "never the kind of girl who said, 'One day, I am going to be a beautiful bride, and I am going to have a family.' I wanted to work and support myself and make my parents proud."

The actress felt she was stuck on a rom-com "treadmill" and her new relationship coincided with a period in which she was able to reassess her career, take a long break and then land a role in a thoughtful, award-winning film such as Crash. Though she's always been adept at defending less impressive fare. Bullock has admitted that Hollywood is a publicity game she is good at playing. "I've done movies in which I was embarrassed by my performance, or might not have cared for a co-star," she confessed recently. "Then I'd have to tell lies, like, 'Oh, we love each other; everything was perfect.'"

Certainly the star has fed her fans the same line more than once. Her decision to forswear rom-coms is marked by exceptions to the rule. She only made Two Weeks Notice, she explained, because she so admired co-star Hugh Grant, and then was forced to take up her role in The Proposal opposite Ryan Reynolds because it was such a good script.

Born in Virginia to a German opera singer mother, Helga Meyer, and an American voice coach father, John Bullock, she has described a childhood in which musicians and dancers were her idols. A poster of Nureyev graced her bedroom wall and her high-school years were tame. "I didn't have a teenage or early-20s experience that was free and without worry. I missed the screw-everything, have-a-good-time phase. I was worried if I didn't stay on track and work, work, work, I was never going to accomplish anything," she said. Her mother urged her to "Be original!" but Bullock recalls what she really wanted was a pair of Levi's straight-leg jeans so she could just blend in. "All my mom had for me was green velvet bell-bottoms from Germany."

Her girlish dream of becoming the ultimate girl next door has come true, yet this is only half the story. Like many actors who appear "ordinary" on screen, Bullock is a fairly extreme creature, honed beyond belief. She has a full-time job keeping up with her round of running, Pilates and spinning with her trainer, Eden Paul, before she even starts acting. Those who have met her speak of her supercharged energy levels and larger-than life gestures. On screen, however, rather like Jennifer Aniston, she is contained and transformed into an All-American babe, claiming the Miss Congeniality title of her 2000 hit film.

Bullock beguiles those who work with her too. After The Proposal, co-star Reynolds described her as "the ultimate catch, no matter what – age, particularly with her, is completely irrelevant", while the film's director, Anne Fletcher, is just as enamoured with her star. The actress's faultless comic timing, Fletcher believes, comes with a faith in the perspective of her character.

Bullock's decision to warm up for the Oscar ceremony this month by turning up in person to receive her Razzie for worst performance of the year is further evidence of her disarming charm. The award was made for her portrayal of a mad crossword-compiler and stalker in All About Steve, a performance which the renowned US critic Roger Ebert wrote started "as merely peculiar, moves on to miscalculation and becomes seriously annoying".

The attentions of a real female stalker played a part in Bullock's own life in 2007 when a deranged fan, Marcia Valentine, attempted to run over her husband several times outside their California home. It was a strange incident in a marriage which had so far featured in the newspapers only in relation to the couple's long custody battle with James's ex-partner, Janine Lindemulder. Bullock, who is stepmother to Chandler, Jesse Jr, and Sunny, was reported to have written to the judge who was ruling on the case, arguing: "I know the term 'stepmother' carries many connotations, one of them being a 'glorified babysitter'… My commitment and responsibility to Sunny… goes beyond that." A month ago the verdict went in their favour.

Bullock has a second home in Austin, Texas, and seems to have fallen in love with the Lone Star state. "The minute I step on the soil there, there's the sound of the cicadas and a smell of the wet earth that harmonises my body," she has said and her roots in the area now include an eco-friendly bistro and an adjoining general store and bakery. "I wanted a place that was communal, like the olden days," the actress explained. "I want to know the names of everyone – the customers, the people who work there."

And there is plenty of bonhomie left for people she doesn't know. Bullock has made £2m in donations to the Red Cross, one after 9/11 and the other following the Indian Ocean tsunami.

As a fresh Oscar-winner, Bullock will be hoping to capitalise on the chance for more meaty roles, although two of the films in her upcoming slate, rom-coms called The Sprinkler Queen and One of the Guys, suggest it may be some battle. Acting, she had said, got better once she took more time choosing her projects. "I enjoy it now, even more so, because I pick only what is worth leaving home for. Do you know what I mean? People don't realise that when you make a film, you're gone."

The hope would be that Bullock can salvage a personal life from the current tangle. If not, she must wish that the public honour her early attempts to keep her marriage private. "A friend of mine once said: 'If you invite People magazine to the wedding, they should be allowed to come to the divorce,'" Bullock once quipped.

• Sandra Bullock
• Oscars

Vanessa Thorpe
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No 85 Judy Garland (1922-69)

She narrowly missed being "born in a trunk" on tour because her vaudevillian parents had gone off the road to manage a cinema with music hall acts in Grand Rapids, Minnesota. From taking the stage at the age of two, she remained in showbusiness up to her sudden death at 47 of an accidental drug overdose combined with illiberal use of alcohol while fulfilling nightclub engagements in London.

When she was four, her father had to relocate to Pennsylvania after importuning young male members of his staff. After working in a second-rate singing act with her older sisters and changing her name from Frances Gumm to Judy Garland, she was taken to Hollywood at the age of 13 by her fiercely ambitious mother (whom she later called "the real Wicked Witch of the West").

The biggest studio in town, MGM, added her to its roster of juvenile performers raised on the premises, the brilliant fellow child of vaudeville, Mickey Rooney, among them. Within three years she became a major star, playing Dorothy, the wide-eyed Kansas farm girl in The Wizard of Oz (1939), singing the anthem of belief in a better future, "Over the Rainbow", as the embodiment of an America emerging from the Depression.

Judy was under five feet tall, a sprightly figure, vivacious and pretty rather than beautiful, her pale skin accentuated by the bright red of her lips in the old three-strip Technicolor. She was a marvellous singer, dancer, comedienne and actress, and the greatest concert performer of her time. In the American Film Institute's 1999 list of the 10 greatest female stars, she was placed eighth, behind Hepburn (Katharine), Davis, Hepburn (Audrey), Bergman, Garbo, Monroe and Taylor, and ahead of Dietrich and Crawford.

From her heart-breaking cameo appearance as a teenage fan singing "You Made Me Love You" to a portrait of Clark Gable in Broadway Melody of 1938 to her final MGM film, Summer Stock, she appeared in a string of fine films, nine of them with Mickey Rooney, three with her second husband, Vincente Minnelli, and three times each with Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire. (Sadly, she had to drop out of two Astaire pictures at the last minute.)

She was vulnerable, touching, kindly, loving, wholly lacking in malice, occasionally petulant in a good cause, and demonstrated her lack of talent for guile whenever she entered upon some well-intentioned intrigue. She was never more endearing than as the resilient Esther Smith holding her middle-class family together through the happy problems they confront in Minnelli's Meet Me in St Louis and singing "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas", the most poignant seasonal song of the second world war. In the Minnelli film that followed, The Clock (first of her three non-musicals), the tender romantic comedy of a brief wartime romance, she proved she could get by without a hit song to help her.

Garland paid a terrible price for this success, as she became addicted to the pills given her to stay perkily awake, to get to sleep, to kill her appetite in order to slim. Her troubled family life, bouts of depression, and doubts over her appearance and self-worth (MGM boss Louis B Mayer called her "the little hunchback") created a sense of insecurity and a need to be loved that never left her. She had five badly judged marriages and periods of incapacity: dropped out of films, cancelled concerts (or walked out during them), attempted suicide, and confronted immense tax debts.

MGM, who had exploited her, ended her contract in 1950. She appeared in only one film in the next decade, three in the early 1960s, and then no more. But that one picture in 1954, George Cukor's musical remake of A Song Is Born, in which she played a rising young actress married to a sinking matinee idol (James Mason), proved to be the peak of her career. A work of considerable depth, it brought her an Academy Award nomination. Unfortunately, she was beaten by Grace Kelly in the dull, rarely revived The Country Girl. The same happened seven years later, when she was nominated for best supporting actress in the straight role of a German housewife giving evidence at a war crimes tribunal in Judgment at Nuremberg. Rita Moreno won for West Side Story.

Since Garland's death there has been no slump in her reputation. On the contrary, her legend has steadily grown among the public at large and in the gay community. During her lifetime, gay men admired and identified with her courage and endurance, and these past 40 years they've elevated her to an unequalled iconic status. Derived from The Wizard of Oz, the term "friend of Dorothy" (or FOD) was for many years a carefully guarded euphemism in homosexual circles, until in the 1980s it began to be used openly and jocularly. People have also taken particular note of the fact that Garland's death and funeral coincided with the Stonewall riots of 1969.

Garland on Garland "If I am a legend, then why am I so lonely? Let me tell you, legends are all very well if you've got somebody around who loves you."

Groucho Marx on her failure to win an Oscar for A Star is Born "The biggest robbery since Brink's."

Gene Kelly "The finest all-round performer we ever had in America was Judy Garland. There was no limit to her talent. She was the quickest, brightest person I ever worked with."

Her songs In 1997 the American Film Academy in its list of "100 Years, 100 Songs", included four of hers: "Over the Rainbow" (at No 1), "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas", "The Trolley Song" and "Get Happy".

Essential DVDS Broadway Melody of 1938 (1937), The Wizard of Oz (1939), Babes on Broadway (1941), For Me and My Gal (1942), Girl Crazy (1943), Meet Me in St Louis (1944), The Clock (1945), The Harvey Girls (1946), Easter Parade (1948), Summer Stock (1950), A Star Is Born (1954)

Philip French
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As Hugh Grant's recent spat with Matthew Freud shows, there are few things more embarrassing than middle-class punch-ups

Why can't middle-class men fight properly? Lack of practice, obviously, and there is something reassuring in our security that, 99% of the time, when someone calls you a Bad Name Out Loud, it'll be roller-soothed by politesse, hypocrisy, our freakish terror of making a fuss and someone nearby, wafting, scented, murmuring: "Come on, darling, he's not worth it." But, every so often, the oil poured on troubled waters suddenly licks into flame: and, oh, the hideousness, when, in a throng of the kind of people who aren't used to anything "kicking off", it kicks off.

I have to say that Hugh Grant gets my vote. At least he threw a punch. This almost redeems him for having been at Annabel's last week to, as the papers said, "toast the birthday of the socialite wife of a casino billionaire". Many bad words there. But then someone asked Grant if he wanted to meet the "PR guru" Matthew Freud, two feet away; and Grant, who had known him for 20 years but once fell out with him over a... oh God, life's too short, replied succinctly. He used the word we can't say here, but predictive texting prefers it as "aunt". It is, used rarely enough, beautiful: plosive, fricative, as cutting and dismissive as forgetting your wife's name. "Hugh, do you want to meet Matthew Freud?"

"Why would I want to speak to a aunt?"

Already, I can see the kick-off. Two senior journalists from this paper once did it in front of me; and it is enthralling, that sudden fast segue from passive-aggressive to aggressive-aggressive, with bad ties. They squared up, in that educated but wary way – yelling, with fleck and spittle, "Try and hold me back, Euan," while offering their elbows for me to hold back (nope, busy, there was a girl), then danced around each other but with a hat stand in the way. The barman – East End, done it all, charmer, no teeth – actually started laughing.

Freud didn't have a hat stand handy, but he had some chocolate cake. He smeared it on Grant's white shirt. "I saw a lot of white shirt and before I could stop myself it was all brown," he said, failing to quite match the heft of Pericles's address to the Athenians. Grant lamped him. The club gave Grant a new white shirt: perhaps the only reason I might ever have entertained for ever going to Annabel's ("Sorry, I've just vommed on my shirt. Can I have a new one? Cheers."), and Grant stayed and partied. Freud left, and then sent out some tweet or twitter message, gloating about what he'd done. With chocolate cake. It wasn't even as funny or brawny as Grant's faux–tussle with Colin Firth (down, girls) in that Bridget thing.

I'm glad we're still not in the mad days of duels. Pistols, swords, daggers. Real death. But I also think I'm glad Grant hit him. It's warmly reminiscent of those Second World War films where the Brit hero is being genteely elbowed away from some lecherous Yank by his own wife (tweeds, pin-tucked blouse, waft of Coty Chypre, murmuring "Come on, darling, he's not worth it"), then turns back and roundhouses him.

There is hope. Thanks to Hugh. I think we quite like the men who hit, rather than those who use confections. Wouldn't you prefer a Prescott or a Brown behaving abominably but at least using a bit of muscle? Over someone such as a – well, imagine a former PR guy, or pasty George Osborne. Smearing the brown stuff and then running away, tittering, and tweetering, like a girl.

There is hope.

• Hugh Grant
• Matthew Freud

Euan Ferguson
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Witches prance around pentagrams in the cellar in this effective 70s horror pastiche

Making a pastiche of a 1970s horror flick is one way of dispensing with the necessity of explaining why a student's telephone isn't working, when she arrives to spend the evening at a sinister mansion on the outskirts of an American university town. The hosts are a creepy old guy (Tom Noonan, the serial killer in Michael Mann's Manhunter) and his weird wife (onetime Warhol and Corman star Mary Woronov), and the baby they've hired a cash-strapped undergraduate to look after turns out to be their old mother. The well-sustained build-up is unusually extended, and the sudden bloody climax the film's title anticipates is a diabolical gathering during a lunar eclipse, which sees witches and warlocks prancing around pentagrams in the cellar. The heroine, a sort of "Rosemary's Babysitter", is left with a bun in the coven. Effective retro stuff.

Philip French
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