Forsooth, 'tis a beauteous new Barbarella


(by James O'Brien)
SHE won an Oscar as the sixteenth century heroine of Shakespeare In
Love - but when it comes to dream roles, Gwyneth Paltrow has revealed
she is rather more bondage than Bard.

Determined to shed her reputation as Hollywood's Corset Queen, the
26-year-old star nurses a secret desire to play the part that
established Jane Fonda as a serious sex symbol more than 30 years
ago - 41st Century temptress Barbarella.

Paltrow revealed her ambition when the British editor of Talk, a new
American magazine that has taken the US media by storm, invited a
host of cinema stars to pose as the characters they would most like
to play on screen.

Having first found stardom as the bodice-bound star of Jane Austen's
Emma, she had been expected to exercise her enthusiasm for rib-
crunching corsetry. But instead, she insisted that Fonda's
intergalactic secret agent, who was ever ready to utilise her
physical charms in the interests of a mission, was top of her list.
With the help of a long, blonde wig, chain-mail mini dress, thigh-
length transparent PVC boots and a pout more suited to centrefolds
than costume dramas, she certainly looks the part - even if she
declined to repeat the striptease that catapulted Fonda, now 61, to
fame in the 1968 film directed by her then husband, Roger Vadim.

Paltrow's other choices in a photographic feature entitled Give Me
My Dream Roles, by top photographer Patrick Demarchelier, are in a
similar vein. She donned a microscopic black bikini top, stockings
and a basque to pose as the whip-wielding fictional muse of erotic
author the Marquis de Sade.

Her final choice was Betty Page, the cult Fifties pin-up credited
with bringing bondage into the bedrooms of America.

But it is Barbarella she would most like to play, a decision which
left film critic Barry Norman baffled. He said: "It made Jane Fonda
into a sex kitten and maybe Gwyneth hopes it could do the same for
her.

"But the film itself is remembered chiefly for the fact that Fonda
took her clothes off a lot, and if she has ambitions to make serious
films, this would be a very strange choice indeed."

Other stars invited to reveal their dream roles included former wild
child Drew Barrymore, who portrayed Esther Williams and Jean Harlow
before fitting a moustache to pitch for the lead in any forthcoming
biopics of screen legend Douglas Fairbanks Senior.

But Rupert Everett scored the cheekiest entry. He is already writing
a script based on his dream role as a bisexual James Bond.

The Paltrow pictures are the latest in a long line of Talk editor
Tina Brown's photographic shocks. She was the editor of Vanity Fair
when it put a picture of a pregnant Demi Moore on the cover and she
caused a rumpus during her stewardship of the New Yorker by
introducing photographs to its pages for the first time.

But she insists that Talk, which has enjoyed one of the most
clamorous pre-launch hypes in publishing history, is not just
another celebrity magazine, of which 125 were launched in the States
last year.

She said: "The tyranny of which celebrity you're going to negotiate
to have when the movie opens is an incredibly dull tyranny. One
wants that glamour - attractive, fun exciting - but by and large,
the magazine is not that."Despite being America's most eagerly-
awaited media event in years, the launch issue displays Brown's
British roots, with articles by author Martin Amis and playwright
Tom Stoppard.