‘WELSH songbird’ Charlotte Church has announced she is no longer a millionaire. Clearly growing up was a poor career choice that should have been avoided, as she and these other celebs discovered.
Charlotte Church
Charlotte’s wealth has nosedived from £25 million when she was a child of 11 to less than a million now. Even allowing for her luxury lifestyle, you can’t help but wonder how the f**king hell you spend that much. Charlotte, is your house full of idiotic impulse purchases like a solid gold garlic crusher? Are there a couple of thoroughbred Arabian racehorses you’d forgotten about in the loft? Get down to Cash Converters.
Lindsay Lohan
A dangerous cocktail of age-suppressing drugs administered when she made The Parent Trap aged 12 would have avoided a lot of aggro for Lindsay. Admittedly Mean Girls wouldn’t be the same without her, and arguably it’s morally wrong to keep a normal, healthy young woman in a state of physical and mental retardation, but think how much she’d have saved on coke. At least enough for the deposit on a two-bedroom semi in the current housing market.
Edward Furlong
The phrase ‘went of the rails’ was practically invented for the 13-year-old Terminator 2 star, with his post-Skynet life featuring alcohol, cocaine and heroin addictions, domestic violence charges, prison time, and, for a bit of light relief, a compulsive eating disorder. It’s lucky life imitates art more than art imitates life, as Oscar pointed out, because it would have been a pretty boring film if the Terminator just had to wait outside the offie until John Connor turned up.
Patsy Kensit
It’s fair to say Patsy’s career hasn’t been on an unimpeded stratospheric trajectory. In fact it’s surprisingly hard to remember what she has been in. You know she did Absolute Beginners, because she was in the David Bowie video, and she’s in Lethal Weapon 2, where her character gets outlived by Mel Gibson’s dog. This life of uncertainty and ignominy could so easily have been avoided if she’d somehow not aged since childhood and was still advertising peas.
Rupert Grint
Rupert’s post-Harry Potter career hasn’t quite matched that of Radcliffe and Watson, but gingers are a lot less cute when they grow into adults. The obvious solution was for Rupert to start taking powerful anti-growth hormones back in 2000, so he’d now be an adult trapped in Ron Weasley’s body, which would be ideal for Harry Potter conventions. Instead his last film was M Night Shyamalan’s improbably boring apocalypse film Knock at the Cabin. How he must regret not sticking with signing copies of Harry Potter and the Goblet Eaters of Kazakhstan, or whatever bollocks it was.
Jodie Foster
Critics agree Jodie’s best film is Bugsy Malone, Alan Parker’s gritty depiction of the delightful world of 1930s child gangsters. Sure, she’s notched up a few other fairly popular films like The Silence of the Sheep, but her career’s gone off the boil since the 1970s. If she’d remained 12 years old, perhaps by coming to some arrangement with the Devil, she could still be playing child prostitutes in films like Taxi Driver. Perhaps Scorsese could have used ‘splurge guns’ for Travis Bickle’s climactic rampage, turning the whole film into a Christmas family favourite.
Macaulay Culkin
Macaulay is always cited as the child star who crashed and burned, but really nothing that terrible happened. He’s still getting work and his career is doing brilliantly compared to, say, River Phoenix. Basically he’s just no longer a child actor in an unexpectedly massive box office hit. And even if he had managed not to age beyond ten, Hollywood’s mania for unnaturally prolonging the life of exhausted franchises would mean we’d currently be yawning at the prospect of The Home Alone Chronicles: Rise of the Sticky Bandits – Part 2.
