BORES NO MORE
LONDON — Poor Kate Middleton. She’s not just marrying a future king. She’s marrying all of us.
Once upon a time, British subjects gazed upon their sovereigns from afar. Not any more.
Members of the royal family are now Hollywood-style mega-celebrities — their cellulite, receding hairlines and boozy nights out subject to the same relentless scrutiny as other A-listers.
The monarchy has gained in star power, and perhaps lost in dignity, since William’s mother, Princess Diana, burst into the royal family in a blonde blaze of charisma and changed it forever.
On British newsstands ahead of Friday’s wedding, Kate and William beam from the covers of celebrity magazines alongside Catherine Zeta-Jones, singer Cheryl Cole and surgically altered glamour model Katie Price.
It’s easy to forget that it was not always like this.
“When I was growing up I thought the royal family was harmless but a bit boring,” said novelist Monica Ali, whose new book, “Untold Story,” imagines an alternate future for Princess Diana.
“It was really when Diana came on the scene that things started to change,” Ali said. “She divided opinion. A lot of people adored her, some people didn’t like her, but everybody had an opinion about her.
“She brought celebrity into it — for good or for ill.”
“Untold Story,” out now in Britain and published in the United States in June, imagines that Diana didn’t die in a 1997 car crash, but faked her own death, changed her name and rebuilt her life in a small American town.
Ali, whose books include the best-selling London immigrant saga “Brick Lane,” uses the novel to muse on the price of celebrity and the pressures of fame.
“Kate is not just marrying into the royal family,” Ali said. “She is marrying into celebrity. She is entering the game show of the first wives’ club. She’ll be competing with Michelle Obama and Carla Bruni.”
There’s nothing new in a popular desire to read about celebrities, but over the decades our relationship with them has been transformed.
Perhaps it was the rise of the paparazzi, with their long lenses and lack of boundaries. Maybe it was the lowering of social barriers and inhibitions that began in the 1960s. Nowadays, we want to know everything.
Ellis Cashmore, a cultural studies professor and author of the book “Celebrity Culture,” said Princess Diana was a key figure in this transition — and so, even earlier, was the late Elizabeth Taylor.
