Since his appearance on Dancing with the Stars in the US, Chaz Bono has had widespread support, but no one supported him more than his girlfriend, Jennifer Elia.
Now Chaz, the son of Cher, has popped the question to Jennifer on his Emmy-nominated documentary Becoming Chaz, which highlighted Bono’s transition from female to male.
Bono, 42, proposed with an engagement ring in Seattle while filming the one-hour special on his TV show.
“It’s gorgeous. Thank you so much,” Jennifer says of the sparkler. “It’s stunning. It’s huge.”
The show documents the pair and their relationship including the backlash Bono faced from some for being the first transgender contestant to compete on Dancing with the Stars.
“People feel so angry that Chaz is entering their television,” a tearful Elia said on the show.
“People who make change get shot, and I don’t think that’s worth it. This is insane. It’s not worth doing a show if you’re going to get shot.”
Watch the video of Chaz proposing in the video player above.
Kris Humphries has a starring role in his soon-to-be ex-wife’s reality TV spin off Kourtney & Kim Take New York, but his former flame Bianka Kamber says he couldn’t stand Kim Kardashian’s reality TV shows.
Twenty-eight-year-old Bianka, who bears a striking resemblance to Kim, said that Kris refused to watch Keeping up with the Kardashians and labeled the show ‘garbage’ the UK’s Daily Mail reported.
“He would never watch the [Kardashian] show with me. He always bad talked it and said it was a trashy show and that it was garbage,” she said.
“He’d ask “why are you watching that?”
“And he would say, ‘There’s nothing to it… What are they even famous for?” He had absolutely no interest.”
The new season of Kourtney & Kim Take New York will air this Sunday in the US, giving viewers an insight into Kim and Kris’s 72-day marriage.
Kim, who filed for divorce against Kris, is said to be upset with the comments Kris made about her during their relationship, with an unnamed source telling US Weekly he once said that she had a “fat ass”.
“He belittled her in front of people. He’d call her stupid. It was truly sickening,” an unnamed source told the magazine.
“He tried to control Kim by bringing her down… He would say truly terrible things. One time, he said she had no talent and her fame wouldn’t last.”
Watch the clip above of Kim and Kris playfully packing for New York before Kris tells Kim that she “ate too much wedding cake” while trying to lift her up.
See the pictures of Kris’ former flame Bianka Kamber here.
Parents who claim they love all their children equally are lying, a new book has sensationally claimed.
Author and father of two Jeffrey Kluger’s new book The Sibling Effect: What Bonds Among Brothers and Sisters Reveal About Us claims that all parents have a favourite child, no matter how much they deny it.
“Ninety-five percent of parents in the world have a favourite child — and the other five per cent are lying,” Kluger says.
Kluger’s claims are likely to incite angry denial from parents worldwide, but recent research suggests he’s closer to the truth than most people care to admit.
A recent University of California three-year study of 384 sibling pairs and their parents found that 70 percent of fathers and 65 percent of mothers exhibited a clear preference for one child.
Study leaders think the real numbers could be much higher as the study participants knew they were being watched and probably modified their behaviour accordingly.
Another study which asked siblings who they thought their parents favoured found that mothers were more likely to prefer their first-born son, while fathers doted on their youngest daughters.
The research also found that parents were prone to prefer the child that shared their interests or personality traits — for example, fathers are likely to lavish sporty kids with affection, while the arty mother might prefer her quiet and sensitive child.
While most parents will find it difficult to admit they have a favourite, parenting expert Naomi Richards says mums and dads need to stop lying to themselves.
Once you realise that you do favour one child, you can change your behaviour to ensure your other children don’t suffer.
“Try to spend equal amounts of time with all of them,” says Richards, ‘doing something with them that they enjoy. Rather than trying to get the fidgety one to enjoy the cinema, take him kite-flying with a friend. Don’t get the bookish one to take up dancing or roller-skating — go to a museum.
“Accentuating each child’s positives will really help to balance your family dynamic. It just takes practice.”
Your say: Do you have a favourite child?
Video: Is there room for two ‘fun’ parents in a family?
Ravaged by years of alcoholism, Gale Lamont was at rock bottom when she started a very special choir that ended up saving her life.
Three years ago, Gale Lamont spent Christmas alone in a darkened room, surrounded by empty bottles and overflowing ashtrays.
Her 50th birthday was just a month away. She had been trying to stop drinking for 10 years and been in rehab more than 20 times, but the longest she had stayed sober was 75 anxious, miserable days.
Her friends and family were sick of trying to help her, only to see her slide further into the abyss.
“I got to the point I wasn’t going to beat this,” she says. “I was going to die and I was going to meet my maker drunk.”
After two more weeks of solid drinking — she did not leave her couch to change or go to the toilet — Gale called an ambulance to take her to Royal North Shore Hospital, where she had become well-known among emergency department staff.
The psychiatric registrar, aware of Gale’s 22 attempts at rehabilitation, suggested a different option for her 23rd.
In the past, she had tried 28-day programs at private clinics, but this time, Gale went to Selah, a 10-month rehabilitation service run by The Salvation Army.
What happened next was nothing short of a Christmas miracle. Her 23rd rehab worked.
Slowly, over those 10 months, Gale regained the things she’d lost to alcohol over 30 years — her family, her dignity and her identity.
For almost three years now, Gale has been living the fulfilling, sober life which she’d always dreamed of and, this Christmas, she hopes to inspire others to do the same through her choir, the Selah Soul Sisters, which gives a voice to women recovering from addiction.
Selah is a rehabilitation centre for women on the NSW Central Coast, run by The Salvation Army.
Unlike other facilities, which keep patients for 28 days, Selah’s patients stay for 10 months.
The course is designed to not only treat alcoholism and other addictions, such as drugs or gambling, but help women come to terms with their demons. It also supports their return to the community.
It’s not glamorous. Gale was treated like a “princess” at private treatment clinics, but says there are no princesses at Selah.
Women share bedrooms, do housework or gardening and have to learn to get along with each other.
Slowly, Gale walked through the 12 steps — admitting her powerlessness over alcohol, turning her will over to God as she understood him, making amends — and reclaimed her life.
Gale believed it was the Salvos’ emphasis on Christian spirituality that worked for her.
“When I arrived here, I felt compassion,” she says. “In all of those other programs, the emphasis is not on spirituality. And addiction is physical, mental, emotional, but mostly spiritual.
“I could liken it to a candle. Mine was almost out. The whole time I was drinking, I was praying. I would pray, ‘God help me, God help me, God help me’.”
Soon after she arrived, Gale set up the Selah Soul Sisters choir. She had been a talented young singer, but alcoholism had derailed her singing dreams.
This was a way for Gale to find her voice — literally.
After 10 months, Gale “graduated” from Selah, but settled nearby so she could be close to her support network and carry on training the choir.
As Gale says, the Selah Soul Sisters allows women to lift their voices to the heavens in gratitude for the second chance they’ve been given. “It’s very therapeutic,” she says.
“We’re never going to be the Vienna Boys’ Choir, but it shows us, ‘I can do this, I’ve been given this gift.’ And it’s about having fun.”
Read more of this story in the December issue of The Australian Women’s Weekly.
Your say: Have you have any experience with alcoholism or other addictions?
Be one of the first 25 people to sign up to the Simon & Schuster newsletter and correctly answer the competition question to win a free copy of The Dovekeepers!
Alice Hoffman is one of the most popular and memorable writers of her generation, the author of such iconic bestsellers as Here on Earth, an Oprah Book Club choice, and Practical Magic, which was made into a film starring Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman. Now she returns with her most masterful work yet, The Dovekeepers, a triumph of imagination and research set in ancient Israel.
In 70 AD, 900 Jews held out for months against armies of Romans on a mountain in the Judean desert, Masada. According to the ancient historian Josephus, only two women and five children survived the siege. Based on this tragic historical event, Hoffman weaves a spellbinding tale of four extraordinary women, each of whom comes to Masada to escape their past and fulfill their destiny.
Yael’s mother died in childbirth and her father, the greatest assassin of his day, never forgave her for her death. She falls in love with a married man, another assassin, who dies as they flee from Jerusalem, under siege by the Romans. Revka is a baker’s wife who witnesses the brutal rape and murder of her daughter by Roman soldiers. She flees to Masada with her twin grandsons who also witnessed the atrocity and are left mute. Aziza is a warrior’s daughter, raised as a fearless rider and expert marksman who finds extraordinary passion with another soldier. Shirah is the Witch of Moab, born in Alexandria, wise in the ways of ancient magic and medicine, and a woman with uncanny insight and power.
As the desperate days of the siege come to an end and the Romans draw near, the lives of these four women come together. They are the keepers of doves, as well as secrets; about who they are, where they have come from, who fathered them and whom they love. Only fate will decide what truths are revealed and who will survive.
The most ambitious novel Alice Hoffman has ever written, The Dovekeepers is the story of murder, magic, faith, love, loyalty, fate – and one of the most dramatic passages in ancient history.
To read the first chapter of The Dovekeepers click here.
Her son Banjo misses the beach and catching leatherjackets. So Rachel Griffiths’ plan is to pack up, leave Broadway behind and make a new life in Australia. Sharon Krum meets the superstar mum.
When Rachel Griffiths started her acting career in the Victorian community theatre group Woolly Jumpers, she could only dream of her Broadway debut.
Now, she’s adding that achievement to an impressive list of acting honours that includes countless acclaimed television and film performances, as well as a Golden Globe, an AFI and Oscar and Emmy nominations.
The role in the Broadway play Other Desert Cities will keep her in New York over Christmas, but in mid-January, Rachel, 42, and husband Andrew Taylor, an artist, will take their three children, Banjo, eight, Adelaide, six, and Clementine, two, back home for a Sydney summer.
“We will base ourselves there, hang out, become Australian again,” she says, smiling. Fans can catch her in her new movie, Burning Man, set on Bondi Beach.
How do you balance your love of acting with motherhood?
I played a mother for five years on television, which was super satisfying. I loved playing a character who juggled, sometimes well, sometimes badly — it was where I was at. It’s hard [to get the balance] on the long-haul TV stuff. I feel a little bit guilty about doing Broadway because it’s so satisfying for me and I’m not getting home to tuck [the children] in. But my husband and I try to balance our work schedules, so when I was off, Andrew was painting [he has a show in New York this month].
Your TV series Brothers & Sisters has finished its run. Do you miss it?
I miss the cast, but there isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t get a text from Sally [Field] or Matthew [Rhys] or Calista [Flockhart] or Gilles [Marini], so we are still incredibly close and will be forever.
In your new film, Burning Man, you play a sometime lover of a man who is struggling to raise his son after the death of his wife. What was that like?
It’s every parent’s fear, becoming ill and leaving their children behind. The idea of a mother in her prime leaving a family [as in the film] is something you can’t even conceive.
How do you prepare them for that?
I almost died having Clementine. I had a spontaneous uterine rupture and, for three days, I was extremely touch and go. So my husband stared down the long corridor of that for three days. We almost lost her [Clementine], too.
How did you and Andrew recover emotionally from that experience?
That kind of changed me and it changed us. It really did give us that sense that what we have is so fragile, don’t sweat the small stuff and appreciate the family, each other. We have hardly had a bicker since.
The family is moving back to Sydney. Are the kids excited? Do they feel American?
Banjo totally sees himself as Australian. He’ll say he misses the beach and catching leatherjackets, he misses his cousins. I think Addie does [feel Australian], too. Maybe she is more on the fence. They are excited to be going back and know it’s close.
I don’t know any actor who does. It’s an assault, those flashbulbs, you’re hoping you’re not sweating. What I do as an actor is inhabit people and hopefully express quite delicate human states, and that doesn’t have a lot to do with red carpet. But I’ve always enjoyed being pregnant on the red carpet because you have a free pass!
Read more of this story in the December issue of The Australian Women’s Weekly.
Keira Knightley asked for an agent when she was three, starred in a Hollywood blockbuster at 17 and earned an Oscar nomination at 20. Yet, as tells Susan Chenery, self-confidence is a “big problem” for her.
In this gilded room, with its Gothic arches, painted ceiling, wood panelling and balustraded balconies, there would once have been ladies in tall wigs, tiny corseted waists and brocaded gowns.
It is the type of room a Keira Knightley character might inhabit, in one of her many costume dramas. As Elizabeth Bennet, perhaps.
After all, in Pride and Prejudice, she managed to nab Mr Darcy and the magnificent Pemberley. As Georgiana, the Duchess of Devonshire in The Duchess, she lived in the 297-room palace, Chatsworth House.
Yet, today, she is just here as herself. Neat, compact, composed. The salonin which we meet was once one of the great palazzos of Venice, but is now in a rather more prosaic incarnation as the kind of ornate hotel that only the Keira Knightleys of this world get to stay in.
Meeting Keira reveals, yet again, how the big screen magnifies and enhances. As an actress in character, she would fill this room with her own entitlement. In person, she seems far too small for such an extravagant setting.
She is perfectly polite, crisp, straightforward, absolutely professional, personable and surprisingly honest.
It is somewhat startling to discover she is still only 26. She seems to have been writ large on the screen for such a long time.
For Keira, it has been an accelerated journey, which has at times left her feeling overwhelmed and struggling to keep up with the speed of her own ascendancy.
She was only 17 when she became world famous as Elizabeth Swann in the blockbuster franchise Pirates Of The Caribbean.
“I finished the last one when I was 21 and I thought that is quite a large chunk of time for one character. You know, it was wonderful, but at the end of the second film I said, ‘That is it for me’. For me, acting is about changing.”
It looked quite exhausting actually, all that romping around and swashbuckling. “Well, it is an action film, so there was a lot of training. I normally do all of my fight scenes myself if I am doing an action film, so it was a physical challenge.”
Keira famously asked for an agent when she was three years old. Her father, Will Knightley, is an actor and her mother, Sharman Macdonald, is an actress who later wrote screenplays, including The Edge Of Love about poet Dylan Thomas, in which her daughter starred in 2008.
By 20, she had received an Academy Award nomination for Pride and Prejudice — and a lot of unwelcome attention that she just wasn’t ready for.
Being nominated for an Oscar “didn’t make me feel validated at all,” she told an interviewer in Venice. “It never quite seemed real.”
Today, she says, “It never made me feel like I had finally arrived. I didn’t think I deserved it. I still feel I have got a lot to prove, I probably always will.
“And I always believe the negative stuff and never the positive stuff. If there is a bad review, I will find it no matter where I am. Lack of confidence has always been a big problem.”
Read more of this story in the December issue of The Australian Women’s Weekly.
Your say: Do you think celebrities have the same right to privacy as the rest of us?
Millions of women swooned when he played Mr Darcy, but Colin Firth is uncomfortable with the sex symbol tag. He would rather be known as a clown, a dad and a henpecked husband, he tells Susan Chenery.
Well, he still seems like the same old reliable Colin. Looking good, always affable. Still not taking himself too seriously, even though in the year since we last met, he has won an Oscar.
“It doesn’t calm me down, nothing like that calms you down,” he says. “I think you move on from good fortune in exactly the same way you move on from a crisis. It is a similar process of recovery. You have to recover from cataclysmic good fortune. You have to renew your risks, I think.” He pauses. “But I don’t want anyone to take it away.”
A clever, witty man, Colin is the first to see “the absurdity and shallowness” in being an actor.
Besides, “if you have friends and family like I have who keep you on the ground, probably a bit more than I would like to be kept there actually, there is no chance of me getting above myself with the people I know. I’ve tried, believe me.
“Meet my wife [Livia]. You’d understand it if I’m humble. There is no way to get too far above myself with her around.”
He makes it look so easy, as if he is barely making an effort. I have been interviewing Colin Firth regularly since he appeared in Bridget Jones’s Diary in 2001 and he has hardly changed at all.
In spite of the fact that his career has been on a steep upward trajectory in recent years, he still seems to regard it all as a bit silly and frivolous.
“I think actors are essentially juvenile,” he told me in 2003. “There is a retarding element to the job and I also think that it is very difficult to do brilliantly unless your ego is somewhat fractured. I think you have to be a little unstable, probably.
“There’s got to be some screws loose somewhere. I am never quite sure whether I am driven by an infantile tendency to get attention and perform, or something which is quixotic and has a sense of being on a noble mission.”
Nevertheless, in Venice in September, he was still “a little bit dazed” by the Oscar business. “You dream of connecting with people,” he said in an interview with British TV host Piers Morgan.
“Life for an actor is full of unexpected twists and turns, which can lead nowhere. I felt we were doing something that was so personal [The King’s Speech, for which Colin won the Oscar] that this was one occasion where I did have high hopes, but I don’t think I anticipated the breadth of it.”
Colin is in Venice to promote Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, based on the John Le Carreacute; novel about grey men in the grey world of espionage.
Asked what actors and spies have in common, he says, “They are both duplicitous and lonely, dysfunctional people. We have to examine the motives of others and try to inhabit them and see the world from their point of view, which is not naturally yours.
“Whether most actors would stay cool looking down the barrel of a gun in a hostile environment, I don’t know. Learning other languages fluently and keeping a cool head is not most actors I know.”
As an actor who is a staple in commercially intended British films, he has specialised in repressed Englishmen. Yet, in person, his default persona, after the costume and make-up have been removed, is one of humour.
“I learned early on that having a sense of humour is salvation, having a sense of one’s own ridiculousness can keep you sane. The silly side of me is pretty dominant,” he told me once.
Read more of this story in the December issue of The Australian Women’s Weekly.
Can you imagine a world where women sit frightened and alone, too scared to move? A world where a simple trip to the shops could mean another broken bone? A world where the threat of violence is an everyday occurrence?
Sadly, many women don’t have to imagine it. They live it. According to UNICEF, domestic abuse is the most widespread form of violence against women today. It has no boundaries and affects every community regardless of class, culture or background.
Young or old, weak or strong, anyone can fall victim to domestic violence. Even men. In fact MensLine Australia Program Leader, Randal Newton-John said, “Of the men who speak about abuse in their primary relationships, 50 percent report as having ‘experienced’ abuse.”
While most agreed that sexual and physical abuse was a form of domestic violence, the lines for emotional abuse seemed blurred with one in five believing “yelling abuse at a partner” wasn’t that serious.
The reality is any form of threatening or intimidating behaviour from a partner is domestic abuse. It’s a crime of control which can cover many areas:
Emotional: like blaming, humiliating and manipulating
Verbal: like name calling and screaming
Physical: like threatening or actually causing harm, smashing property
Financial: like controlling money and jobs
Sexual abuse
Secrecy, denial and shame are all very real consequences of domestic violence as women try to juggle keeping the peace at home with putting up a front to the outside world.
This can cause devastating mental and physical stress on the body, leading to depression and anxiety disorders, not to mention drug and alcohol dependency.
Not only are children likely to blame themselves for what’s happening at home but they can learn its acceptable behaviour.
Sometimes the effects from living in a violent household can emerge years later. Just look at pop-singer Rihanna’s ex-boyfriend Chris Brown. In 2007 after admitting on TV he witnessed domestic violence growing up, Brown said he’d not only wet the bed in fear but became a “scared and timid” child.
“I don’t want to go through the same thing or put a woman through the same thing my mom went through,” he said. Just a few months later Brown was arrested for the horrific assault on his then-girlfriend, Rihanna.
Weeks after Rihanna’s attack, the world was stunned to see her and Chris back together. She explained it was “unconditional love” that made her stand by her man. “It’s completely normal to go back. The moment the physical wounds go away you want the memories to go away. You start lying to yourself.”
Rihanna admitted she only left after realising the damaging message she was sending out to the world.
One of the most common reasons to stay in an abusive relationship is love. Or rather the belief that the person we first fell in love with, is still there underneath it all. Hanging on to that small amount of hope prevents many women from rebuilding their lives, away from the abuse.
Other reasons are:
Guilt about breaking up the family
Shame, belief that it’s their fault, low self esteem
Denial
Hope that they will change
Fear of further violence
Financial burden
Nowhere to go
“Often an abused woman copes with the shame of the situation by cutting herself off from support networks, which can be dangerous physically and emotionally,” she said.
Tread carefully. Remember the abusive partner has caused significant damage to their self esteem. “Sometimes women have lost the power to judge if what they’re going through is normal or not, so don’t be too challenging,” Anne said.
Make sure your loved one feels safe and trusted. Offer moral support like going to the police station with them or standing by as they ring a helpline. Above all, listen without judgement, show you believe them and reassure them of your unconditional support.
You should also:
Respect their decisions
Tell them about services (listed below)
Protect their safety, especially if they have left the relationship.
If you’re one of the many women too terrified to say or do anything, Anne said it’s a totally understandable feeling. “Many women are going through this, so it’s important to recognise you’re not alone. Find someone you trust to open up to and take baby steps.”
Relationships Australia:
Relationships Australia is just one organisation out of many that can help with domestic violence. From the practicalities of legal advice and accommodation concerns to counselling and support groups, Relationships Australia works closely with help lines and refuges to provide caring and neutral support.
Ph: 1300 364 277
www.relationships.com.au
Ph: 1300 78 99 78
www.mensline.org.au
The National Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault helpline 1800 200526
Lifeline: 131 114www.lifeline.org.au
To support White Ribbon Day on November 25, visit www.whiteribbon.org.au/myoath.
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