Author: Bradley Chadwick

Most celebrity interviews about cosmetic surgery have a point where the topic abruptly and smoothly shifts to “healthy living” and “good genes” and stops there. That’s a game Elaine Paige has never really played. She has been open in a way that is still surprisingly uncommon in the culture surrounding British entertainment and theater. She acknowledges having Botox. She discusses the neck. She states unequivocally that she will “cross that bridge when she comes to it.” It’s nearly disarming. Conversations about Elaine Paige’s plastic surgery have been going around for years, primarily because of how well-preserved she appears. At 69,…

Seeing someone deal with a chronic illness in public while strangers argue over whether or not they’ve put on weight is a certain kind of cruelty. While cameras roll in her Houston home and fans share their observations online, Danielle Busby has been navigating what doctors describe as a complex, overlapping web of fibromyalgia, autoimmune disorder, migraines, and nervous system damage. There have been some positive observations. Others, not so much. When Danielle Busby discussed her weight gain on camera during OutDaughtered Season 9 in 2023, it became a hot topic. She informed a friend that she had put on…

The way the internet treated Brittany Cartwright’s body is extremely unsettling. Uncomfortable in the precise, nauseating sense of witnessing a group of strangers dissect a woman who was, as it turns out, barely holding herself together behind closed doors, rather than in the general, hand-waving sense. Almost as soon as Brittany Cartwright returned to television after giving birth to her son, Cruz, in April 2021, her weight gain became a topic of public conversation. The remarks were unrelenting. It was cruel to compare her to her castmates. She acknowledged that she sobbed when she was compared to other women’s bodies…

Imagine a dance journal that, in a single night, goes from being full to empty. Amy Dowden experienced the same thing in May 2023, the day before her honeymoon, when she discovered a lump in her breast. She was thirty-two. There was no warning or build-up before the subsequent diagnosis of grade three breast cancer, which turned out to be two distinct types, ductal and lobular, occurring simultaneously. It just touched down. And the life she had built since she was eight years old in Caerphilly, class by class and competition by competition, was put on hold. Over the past…

A face you’ve seen since childhood has a certain kind of familiarity. Lizo Mzimba possesses that trait. He was just there for a generation of British viewers who grew up in the late 1990s and early 2000s, standing in front of those vivid Newsround sets with their enormous graphics and cheery primary colors, explaining the world to a ten-year-old without making them feel inferior. It’s more difficult than it seems. Surprisingly, searches for “Lizo Mzimba weight loss” are now showing up in browser suggestion boxes all over the nation. This is due to an algorithm that picked up on a…

A specific type of public scrutiny follows women into their darkest hours. For months, Erika Kirk, a widow, mother of two, and CEO of one of the most talked-about conservative organizations in America, has been under constant scrutiny. People found time to discuss her body despite the grief, the public appearances, the political burden she now bears, and the never-ending comment sections. They did, of course. Since Erika Kirk’s profile blew up after her husband, Charlie Kirk, passed away, the discussion surrounding her weight gain has been raging on social media sites, Facebook groups, Reddit threads, and Threads posts. It’s…

Only the internet can produce a certain kind of cruelty that is quick, anonymous, and totally unaffected by the consequences. More than most, Nelly Furtado is aware of this. Last year, when pictures of the Canadian pop star started making the rounds on social media, the reaction was swift and unpleasant. The comment sections were filled in. Videos titled “Nelly Furtado’s Weight Gain Shocks The Internet” received hundreds of thousands of views. Suddenly, many people who hadn’t given her much thought in years had strong opinions about her body. It was a mess, to put it simply. It’s interesting, and…

Some members of a particular generation possess a certain level of poise, a kind of unassuming dignity that doesn’t perform, doesn’t elicit sympathy, and doesn’t reach for the dramatic moment even when it has already arrived. It has always been Michael Aspel. A cancer diagnosis was handled by the man who spent decades calmly breaking news, entertaining guests, and flashing that broad, comforting smile on British television in a manner that was similar to how he handled everything else: with measured calm, a brief acknowledgment, and then a return to getting on with things. In the fall of 2002, the…

A certain kind of honesty, the kind that has nothing left to prove and no need to soften the edges, comes only with age. In his eighties, Jimmy Tarbuck, the Liverpudlian comedian who once commanded the London Palladium stage with the carefree confidence of a man born to it, has evolved into a genuinely honest person who may be more captivating than a performer. He was diagnosed with prostate cancer in February 2020, but his illness hasn’t stopped him. If anything, it has given him clarity. When the news arrived, he was eighty years old. You can picture the scene:…

Before the silence that ensued, Liza Tarbuck made a final statement on her BBC Radio 2 show that was halfway between a question and a promise. “I’ll see you, won’t I? Yes, I will see you the following week. She spoke softly, as she usually does: warmly, without drama, and with that certain cadence that her Saturday night listeners had grown accustomed to. The next week, she didn’t return. or the following week. The internet concluded that something had to be wrong with her health at some point between the happy farewell and the mysterious absence. There is no concrete…