I couldn’t love someone who failed to celebrate the news that Liam Neeson is (apparently) dating Pamela Anderson. What ogre would not want to don bells and dance to the harmonies of the couple’s (apparent) happy union?
“Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments,” Shakespeare wisely ventured. “Oh, oh, I love her so,” the Ramones later followed up.
The general merriment has something to do with how unselfconscious they seem. They look like the sort of neighbours you’d trust to feed your cat while you’re in Marbella. Unquestionably glamorous. Startlingly good looking. But approachable in a way that, say, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton never seemed.
Age is a factor. For all the attention lavished on youthful stars, the online public can’t help coming over all blubby when a 58-year-old glamour puss looks to have hooked up with a 73-year-old geezer. There is hope for us all. Right? Well, there is hope for all of us who look like Pamela Anderson or Liam Neeson.
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It also helps that both actors, currently appearing in the hit Naked Gun sequel, deserve their bit of happiness. Neeson lost his wife, Natasha Richardson, in a freak skiing accident in 2009. Last year he waved off rumours about romantic attachments by claiming he was “past all that”.
Anderson, unavoidable face of the 1990s, has, throughout her career, endured consistent sexist sneering – and no little abuse – from men who demonstrate not a smidgen of her dignity. “It’s never too late to start again,” she told Tara Brady in these pages earlier this year. “It’s never too late for your career. It’s never too late to be the victor and not the victim.”
Quite right. And that stands for both of them. But what if it’s not true? What will we do? They may as well cancel Christmas.
As I write, we are still required to insert the odd “apparently” and the occasional “it seems”. Fortunately the celeb sites have detailed the relationship’s progress with the diligence that Kremlinologists once brought to the positioning of Politburo members on May Day.
As long ago as last October People magazine was picking up signs of imminent fraternisation. “With Pamela, first off, I’m madly in love with her,” Neeson told that publication. “She’s just terrific to work with. I can’t compliment her enough, I’ll be honest with you. No huge ego.”
Wait? What? “Madly in love”? It’s as if the CIA missed footage of Lee Harvey Oswald taking practice shots from the Texas School Book Depository in early 1963. The information was right there.
[ Pamela Anderson: ‘I felt like life was really like death for me’Opens in new window ]
Anyway, it seems nobody took him literally. In May this year Anderson talked cryptically about a relationship that was “professionally romantic”. On July 22nd they were seen sharing an embrace on the red carpet. By August 2nd a “source” was pushing back against rumours that the “romance” was a PR stunt.
“It’s very sincere how they feel,” the alleged “insider” was telling Page Six. “That is the truth. They’re not going to show up on the red carpet and be adorable just to be fake. That’s not either of them.”
Confirmation that the press were getting desperate came with the “news” that Joely Richardson, Neeson’s sister-in-law, had placed seven hearts beneath an Instagram post showing the (apparent) couple sharing a bucket of popcorn. Well, that settles it. Book the church. Declare a bank holiday.
All this comes as Anderson manages a wave of conflicting reactions to her decision, which she spoke about in 2023, to no longer to wear make-up – precipitated by the death of her long-time make-up artist, Alexis Vogel, a few years earlier – on red carpets and at gala events.
The fact this was felt worth reporting says something grim about contemporary attitudes to women. (We apologise for mentioning it again.) How awful that, after decades of primping and painting, she should dare to look ... oh, I don’t know, just 10 years younger than we know her to be.
Some mainstream media overreacted by declaring her a hero, but there was also a deal of negative reaction from bottom-feeding dunderheads on social media. “We don’t have to do the industry standard, which everybody was so horrified when I decided I didn’t need a glam team for certain events,” Anderson said last month.
So that also feeds into the public’s desire for her relationship with Neeson to be real and to blossom. We are here dealing with a real-life version – if the red carpet counts as real – of those couples we yearned to get together on our favourite TV shows. They are Tim and Dawn from The Office. They are Lorelai and Luke from Gilmore Girls. They are Daphne and Niles from Frasier.
Only, unlike the last example, the show won’t go down the drain when (if) they do definitively link up. Tell me that is so.
