Internationally recognised art and literary critic, writer and cultural producer. Published in ELLE, Glamour, Esquire and Cosmopolitan; member of the Union of Writers.
I saw another one of those lists the other day. You’ve seen them. ‘Stars Who Grew Up in the Countryside’. It’s a reliable bit of content, always does the numbers. It gives us a nice, warm feeling. The idea that fame hasn’t completely disconnected these people from the soil. That they’re still, somewhere deep down, ‘real’.
But then you actually look at the names on the list. And you have to ask yourself, what are we really talking about here?
What does that label, ‘country girl’, even mean on the ground?
Because on this particular list, you have Taylor Swift right next to Dolly Parton. And that, right there, is the whole problem in a nutshell. One grew up on a Christmas tree farm that was more of a weekend hobby for her stockbroker father, a property he bought from a client. The other was born in a one-room wooden shack in Tennessee, one of twelve children, and the doctor who delivered her was paid with a sack of cornmeal.
And we’re supposed to put them in the same box? Label them with the same tag?
It feels a bit like those ‘country-style’ loaves you get at the supermarket. They’ve dusted some flour on top and given it a rustic-looking wrapper, but it was baked in the same industrial unit as everything else. It’s a manufactured idea of the countryside, sold to people who live in the city. It’s a fantasy.
And this list is selling the same kind of fantasy. The idea of a simple, wholesome, rural upbringing as a kind of moral seasoning for a celebrity’s backstory. It’s a cliché. And like all clichés, it flattens a dozen different, complicated realities into one easy-to-swallow pill.
Look at the other names. You have Charlize Theron. Yes, she grew up on a farm in South Africa. But her story isn’t a heartwarming tale of overcoming humble beginnings. It’s a horror story of addiction and violence that happened to take place on a farm. To lump her into a cosy listicle about ‘beauties from the village’ feels… obscene, almost. It completely ignores the brutal reality of her experience in favour of a neat biographical detail.
Then you have someone like Eva Longoria, who grew up on a ranch in Texas and talks about learning how to skin a deer. That’s a real, specific, deeply practical relationship with the land. It’s about survival and skill. That’s a world away from Laetitia Casta having idyllic childhood memories of her brother putting her bare feet in cowpats on her family’s place in Normandy.
One is about necessity, the other is about nostalgia. They are not the same thing.
At first, I thought this was just another lazy piece of celebrity fluff. But the more I looked at it, the more it felt like a symptom of something bigger. There’s this weird need, especially with successful women, to give them a ‘grounded’ backstory. To reassure us that they haven’t got too big for their boots. As if a woman can’t just be brilliant or ambitious on her own terms; she has to have this earthy, ‘authentic’ origin story to make her palatable.
And what for? Does knowing Monica Bellucci grew up in a village in Umbria change our understanding of her screen presence? Does it matter that a Russian blogger came from a town outside Leningrad?
The whole exercise seems to be about tracing these women back to a point of origin, as if that’s the most interesting thing about them. But it’s not, is it?
Actually, scrap that. The most important thing about every single person on that list isn’t where they came from. It’s the fact that they left.
They all had a drive so powerful that it took them from a farm in Tennessee, a ranch in Texas, a village in Italy, or a hamlet in an Orenburg Oblast and propelled them onto a global stage. That’s the real story. The grit, the ambition, the sheer bloody-mindedness it takes to make that journey. That’s the common thread. Not the incidental scenery of their childhoods.
I’ve read a thousand press releases and biographies that try to romanticise this stuff. But the romance is a lie. For every one who makes it out, there are thousands who don’t. For many of these people, the countryside wasn’t an idyll they reluctantly left behind. It was a cage they had to escape.
So the interesting question isn’t ‘what did the countryside give them?’. It’s ‘what were they trying to get away from?’. Now that would be a list worth reading.
