The Runaway Actress

Just take it slowly, she told herself, hoping she wouldn’t trip over the ridiculously long dress. Nice and slowly.

Waiting for her cue backstage, she wondered how long it would be before she could sneak home. There was a party after the show – several parties – and she’d been invited to all of them but she could think of nothing worse.

‘You’re on!’ a girl backstage suddenly yelled at her.

‘Oh!’ Connie yelled back, venturing forth onto the stage where she was greeted by wave after wave of applause. The host had stepped to one side and the microphone was left for Connie. Walking up to it, she dared to look out into the audience, which was a great mistake because her heart rate doubled almost instantly. It was one of the reasons that the theatre had never tempted her. A live audience – there was nothing scarier.

She cleared her throat and began. ‘Being a supporting actor is no mean feat. It’s often as strenuous and time-consuming as being a lead and yet these vital roles are often overlooked. Not so tonight. We are here to acknowledge and celebrate five fabulous actors in supporting roles.’ She stepped to one side and looked to the screen, which had been set up on the stage to show clips from the five different films. As the lights dimmed, Connie sneaked a look out into the audience. There was Jeff, with a blonde to his right and a brunette to his left. In his element, as usual. And there was Harvey Andreas. She’d really fallen for him. What a mistake that had been, she thought, thinking of Harvey’s inability to commit to just one woman at a time.

As the clips continued, Connie realised, with awful certainty, that she had probably dated about five per cent of the audience there tonight. What a depressing thought. And not one single Prince Charming amongst them. Not one.

As the clips finished and the house lights came on, Connie stepped up to the microphone and opened the envelope and saw the name she had been dreading.

Out of all the nominations …

‘And the winner is—’ she said.

A one in five chance and he had to go and win it!

‘Forrest Greaves!’

There was a huge round of applause and she saw the dark-haired actor stand up from his seat and make his way to the stage. He was tall, fit and desperately handsome – your typical love rat – and he had double-timed Connie with some low-life extra on the set of her last film. She still couldn’t believe it. Whilst he’d been sending enormous bunches of flowers to her trailer, he’d been sleeping with Candy in his. The press had had a field day with it and Connie was still coping with the fallout because Candy was about to have his baby and hadn’t wasted any time parading her enormous naked body in front of the glossies.

And now the awards. It was unbearable.

‘Hey, gorgeous!’ Forrest said as he sidled up to her on the stage and leant forward for the obligatory kiss, his hand – unseen by the audience because they were standing behind the podium – copped a quick feel of her bottom.

She threw him a heated glare as he stepped back, thrusting the award at him and moving to one side as he gave his acceptance speech. She was not going to make it easy for the press to get a photo of the two of them together.

Once it was over, the two of them left the stage together and, as soon as they were away from the cameras, Connie felt Forrest’s hand on her bottom again.

‘HEY!’ she yelled. What was it with men and her ass? She couldn’t remember putting out an advert in the newspapers saying, Men – please grab my ass whenever you pass.

Forrest’s hands leapt in the air. ‘Only appreciating what was once mine.’

‘You gave up all rights to that when I caught you with that sleaze in your trailer,’ Connie said.

‘That was a misunderstanding,’ he said. ‘I told you at the time. My zip was stuck. She was helping me fix it. I swear we weren’t a couple until after you broke up with me! I swear, Connie!’

‘God!’ Connie said. ‘Can you hear yourself ? You might’ve fooled the judges on the panel tonight but you’re the worst actor I’ve ever met.’

Connie didn’t bother returning to her seat. She’d had more than enough for one evening. She found a nice member of staff who called a cab for her and showed her out of a quiet exit where she could make an escape without the clamour of fans and photographers.

Once home, Connie struggled with the dress fastenings. It was more difficult than she’d imagined and it took several minutes of yoga-like twists before she was free and could wriggle out of the skintight fabric. She shook her head upside down, ruffling her hair as she often did when she was stressed.

What a night, she thought. It was the end of a long and taxing week but next week would be just as bad and the week after that wouldn’t prove any less demanding with parties, ceremonies, press junkets and rehearsals. She hadn’t had a break for months – years. Her agent just kept on putting her up for role after role. It was what she’d asked for in the beginning but she’d made ten films in the last four years and she was exhausted.

Kicking off her impossibly high heels, she sighed and pulled on a cool linen dressing gown before making her way to the kitchen. She needed wine: a nice big glass of something very expensive to take the edge off the evening.

Opening her fridge, she was greeted by a positive jungle. Everything was green. It was the usual problem: a fridge full of food but absolutely nothing to eat. Connie groaned at the sight of it. It was all part of the latest LA diet but, however healthy it was, Connie couldn’t help wishing she could just sit down with a hamburger and fries like a regular person. But hadn’t her agent told her to watch her weight?

‘You’re piling it on again, Connie,’ he’d told her last week. ‘This industry doesn’t tolerate fat.’

Fat! FAT? Connie had never been more than nine stone in her whole life and, at five foot eight, that was positively skeletal. Sometimes she wondered what it would be like to live a normal life. To get up and not have to worry about what the papers were saying about you, to choose your food because it was what you wanted to eat, and not to be constantly told what you were going to be doing for the next year – the next decade.

Grabbing the bottle of wine, Connie padded through to her living room, her feet sinking into the luxurious white carpet she’d chosen for the whole house. It was an enormous room that overlooked the vast swimming pool and gardens, and Connie had filled it with beautiful antiques, from the Regency mahogany sideboard to the satinwood table. A nineteenth-century chandelier hung from the centre of the room. It would have looked more at home in an English Georgian manor house rather than in her very modern Hollywood home but Connie had fallen in love with its sparkling teardrop crystals and insisted on having it.

Her bedroom was the same. Reached by a Gone with the Wind staircase, the room was stuffed with the very finest money could buy because what else did she have to spend it on? There was a vast French rococo bed in antique gold, an enormous gilt mirror that bounced the light back from the balcony doors and an exquisite brass-inlaid secretaire in that she locked away all her personal documents.

Finishing her wine and heading upstairs to her bedroom, she removed her dressing gown and realised that she was still wearing her diamond choker. She unfastened it and returned it to its blue velvet box. She’d bought it as a special gift to herself after she’d heard she’d been nominated for an Oscar. Most actresses hired their jewellery for Oscar night but Connie had wanted to wear something that was hers – something that she could keep. She remembered the gentlemen from the jewellers who had turned up at her house with a selection of necklaces for her to choose from. There had been an amazing egg-sized sapphire pendant, which had reminded Connie of the colour of the ocean. There was a square-cut emerald necklace, which had looked dazzlingly bright when she’d tried it on against her pale skin. Then there’d been the rubies – twelve blood-red stones nestling in a lace of sparkling diamonds. But, in the end, Connie had chosen the diamond choker. It was breathtaking in its simplicity and could be worn with so many of her gowns.

Brushing her fingers over the stones, she closed the box and took it to the vault in the corner of the room. There, it joined a family of jewels from Connie’s favourite garnet earrings to platinum watches and rings set with every stone imaginable. There was even a diamond tiara in there. Connie had worn it just once.

Taking a quick shower and smearing her face with the latest skin-tightening cream that promised to keep her looking like a nineteen-year-old, Connie slipped between the silky sheets of her bed, her head crashing onto the pale pillows. She felt as if she could sleep for a fortnight. Or for ever.

Closing her eyes, she thought about her beautiful home filled with beautiful things. She had more than any young woman had a right to and she knew how lucky she was, she really did.

‘So why am I not happy?’ she whispered into the dark night.

Chapter Three

Connie woke up with a start. There was somebody in her house and that somebody was shouting. Really, really loudly. She groaned and turned over, hiding her head under her duvet. Why oh why had she given her personal trainer a key to her house?

‘Up, up, up!’ he cried as he took the stairs two at a time. ‘Sleepyheads don’t get fit!’

‘I don’t want to get fit. Not this morning,’ she said to herself. ‘I want to sleeeeeeep!’

‘WAKE UP!’ he shouted as he entered the room – all six foot five of him.

‘I’m awake!’ Connie said.

‘I want twenty stomach crunches right now!’

Connie muttered something under her breath.

‘What was that, sweetie? You want to do fifty?’ he said with a naughty grin.

‘Go away, Danny!’ Connie said, sitting up in bed, her red hair tousled and tangled.

‘You don’t pay me to go away. You pay me to get your ass moving! Come on,’ he said, clapping a pair of enormous hands together.

Connie sighed. She loved Danny dearly. He was loyal and sweet and always made her laugh, but there were certain mornings when she wished he didn’t exist.

Ten minutes later and they were in the basement gymnasium and Connie was being put through her paces. It was a rude awakening and she really should have been used to it by now because Danny had been turning up three times a week for the past four years.

‘Your body is your business,’ she would silently chant to herself whilst pounding on the running machine. ‘You have to keep in shape,’ she’d repeat with each stretch on the rowing machine.

But if only her body was her business. The trouble was, everyone seemed to have something to say about her body. Her trainer, her agent, her publicist – to say nothing of the press who regularly snapped her from all angles and then ran headlines such as ‘Podgy Connie Piles on the Pounds’. The unhappy truth was that acting was about more than her ability to inhabit a role and convince an audience that her emotions were real. It was about how she looked both on screen and off and that pressure could sometimes be unbearable.