Some men are just blessed with an irresistible everyman appeal. Male, female, straight, gay, we understand their currency so implicitly that it shapes the story of stardom. These men feel so comfortable in their fame, so entirely predisposed to being looked at, it’s as if they were guided to it by some strange celestial light. Matt LeBlanc had it for the final three years of Friends; Idris Elba for the first three of Luther; Robbie Williams just after Take That. But nobody embodied that extra special everyman authenticity with quite the fundamental flair of Bruce Willis.
Hearing yesterday of Willis’s early retirement at 67, due to the debilitating communicative disorder Aphasia, felt like the same gut punch as the recent news of the cosmetic procedures which forced Linda Evangelista to step away from the camera. These people were exquisite incarnations of all of us. Their disappearance from public view, however stoic and dignified, is a moment of shared sadness because it prompts a pause for us all to think about the passing of time, the grit in the balm and wisdom of ageing. It’s a reminder that nobody is invincible, however they might publicly present otherwise.
Willis was always a personal favourite, right from his first episodes of Moonlighting as the brute with a heart of gold, the muscle to Cybill Sheppard’s charm. He was brawn and brain, like one of Raymond Chandler’s army of trench-coat clad, weather-beaten Private Detectives transposed to a time when clues were primarily logged in a Filofax. Willis folded a Cary Grant twinkle into the persona of a man on nodding terms with Sylvester Stallone’s personal trainer. Unlike Stallone, he had the air of a man partial to a cigar, steak and whiskey, as well as a protein shake. He made an early receding hairline and unshaven face, fleetingly the hottest physical assets on the planet. Willis was the blue-collar realisation of the American Dream who never quite lost the magical connectivity of his roots, despite one of the most famous marriages (and divorces) in Hollywood, to and from Demi Moore.
Many tried to capitalize on the new fame frame Willis enacted. Jason Statham was our closest direct inheritor, but Willis’s success was tied to the humour and charm of his class as much as his physique. If you come from nothing, laughter is everything. Because jokes are free. His career was joyfully broad. Willis is Christmas, because of Die Hard. He’s the after-life, because of The Sixth Sense. His crowning glory performance, as a prize boxer called Butch in Pulp Fiction, was defined as much by the character’s sentimentality as it was his machismo. That cross-section is Willis’s sweet spot, one which will be deeply missed.
I once spent a highly pleasurable afternoon interviewing another noble progeny of the Willis school of blue-collar stardom, Channing Tatum in a Mexican restaurant in New York. When I asked him if there were any roles he could categorically never play, he replied with a chuckle, “a lawyer, or someone with a college education”. This pathway was laid down by Bruce Willis as a badge of honour. He knew that street knowledge was the most magnetic of all screen tools. His retirement leaves man-sized boots to fill.
Will the last person to leave Tottenham Ikea please get the tea lights?
From Bruce Willis to Bruce Grove and a further everyman icon. Before it repositioned itself as an unusual nightclub hotbed, Spurs FC notwithstanding, Tottenham was all about Ikea. A plate of desultory, yet surprisingly satisfying pale brown meatballs (jam optional) in a tense canteen was the trusted reward for making the harangued trip out to Zone whatever-it-is.
Those Tottenham tea lights are, alas, about to snuff out. This week saw the announcement of the closure of one of those London institutions with which it is impossible not to build a love/hate relationship by stealth. The great blue and yellow warehouse of Meridian Water is a passage to adulthood, a first journey into taste, the blind hope of every betrothal, the tension endemic in each marriage.
Like its Croydon cousin, Ikea Tottenham’s leviathan grip on the capital is worth more than three packets of plain kitchen napkins, a replacement bathmatt and a budget pot-plant. At the top and bottom of the city, these are our city bookends. After Ikea, there is only the provinces.
