ALISON BOSHOFF: Prince Harry may spare royal feelings if book title has double meaning 

Supporters of Prince Harry and his wife Meghan think commentators are quite wrong to conclude that the title of his forthcoming memoir — Spare — indicates that the book will be a score-settling Exocet aimed at the Royal Family.

Most people here believe that ‘spare’ is a reference to the phrase ‘an heir and a spare’; and that Prince Harry will pour out feelings of rejection and isolation which will reflect badly on the rest of the royals.

The Spanish-language version is subtitled ‘En La Sombra’ meaning ‘in the shadows’, which tends to suggest the same.

However, Team Sussex say that Spare will be all about what Meghan would call ‘compassion in action’.

Columnist Elaine Lui, a Canadian TV personality who has worked with Meghan’s friend Ben Mulroney and is also close to Meghan’s bestie, the Soho House executive Markus Anderson, says we should look at how the word spare is used as a verb. She said: ‘It is actually a really kind verb. It involves effort. When you spare time or money or thought for someone, you’re making an effort and more often than not it’s a helpful effort.’ 

She adds: ‘In some cases, to spare is also to save. You can spare someone the trouble of having to do something that isn’t pleasant, something potentially harmful. Spare and save are interchangeable in that context.

‘There can also be benevolence associated with sparing someone. ‘I didn’t want to ask her about that because I wanted to spare her feelings.’

‘And all of those ideas also apply to Prince Harry, given his personal evolution and the mission he and Meghan Markle have set for themselves and their work.’

We shall see, come January 10, who has the right end of the stick.

Depp’s fling with married British lawyer fizzles out

Has the ‘yo-ho-ho’ gone out of Captain Jack Sparrow’s stranger-than-fiction romance?

Actor Johnny Depp, 59, was dating London lawyer Joelle Rich, 37, a privately-educated mother of two.

The pair were seen shooting each other tender glances during his court case this spring in Fairfax, Virginia, and Rich was spotted travelling to court with Depp by car. When news of the liaison broke last month, it was said that they enjoyed ‘off the scale chemistry’.

However there was no sign of the actor when Rich attended a family wedding in Ibiza last weekend and sources in New York believe that the relationship is fizzling out — and may actually already be over.

A pal of Depp’s says: ‘Are they still an item? We are not talking about a normal couple here. It’s not a big, stable, committed love affair and I’m not sure that it ever was.

‘I don’t know if they are together in any way at this point. Certainly I don’t believe it is a serious romantic relationship, or even an exclusive one.’

The source added: ‘Firstly, he has just come out of a massive legal battle [with ex-wife Amber Heard], so who would want to commit after that? It has been an extremely traumatic period for him.

‘Secondly, he’s Johnny Depp and I don’t think a standard committed relationship is going to be his thing.’

London friends of Rich say that her plans for a divorce from husband Jonathan are still progressing.

Joelle and Jonathan have two children and lived together in a £1.5 million house in North London. They were married in 2011.

Since the trial, in which Depp sued Heard over an article she wrote for the Washington Post, the actor has spent a few months in France making the French language film Jeanne du Barry, in which he plays Louis XV.

Since that wrapped last month he has taken up his music career again, playing dates in the U.S. with guitar hero Jeff Beck, and planning a UK tour next year with Alice Cooper in supergroup Hollywood Vampires.

Rich remains a partner at UK law firm Schillings and is said to earn £250,000 a year. She met Depp in 2018 when the company was hired to sue The Sun for libel, after the tabloid called him a wife-beater.

He lost his libel action, but the tables were turned in the U.S. trial. It ended with humiliation for Heard, who was ordered to pay him £9.2 million in damages.

Law Society guidelines state that a relationship between a solicitor and client is acceptable as long as there is no conflict of interest. There is no suggestion that such a conflict existed in this case.

Katherine’s D of E award is one of a kind

Superstar singer Katherine Jenkins will be the first — and only — recipient of a charity award approved by the Queen just before she died.

I can reveal that on November 21, Jenkins will be given the Variety Club Duke of Edinburgh Gold Heart award at the Variety Club Showbusiness Awards in London.

BBC news reader Huw Edwards, who broke the news of the monarch’s passing, will do the honours.

Prince Philip was a supporter of Variety, the Children’s Charity, for more than 70 years and after his death in 2021, the organisation decided to create a special one-off Gold Heart award as a tribute.

Charity chairman Professor Jonathan Shalit wrote to the Queen on August 1 — and received a reply on August 31 saying Her Majesty was pleased the award was to be given in her husband’s memory. She died eight days later.

Jenkins was named the biggest selling classical artist of the century by radio station Classic FM and in September recorded the first version of God Save The King for BBC Radio 4, in a church in Sussex. The opera singer, who holds an OBE, has performed for the Royal Family numerous times.

Variety aims to change the lives of disabled and disadvantaged children in the UK. Prof Shalit says: ‘We are delighted and proud to be able to present this award.’

James Corden is walking away from his role as a chat show host on CBS’s Late Late Show after eight years and relocating to London, where he will be concentrating on writing and acting.

In an interview last week he said he’s scripted a film about motherhood and magic and asked ‘one of the most famous women in the world’ — a ‘peerless icon’ — to make a comeback in it. Who could he be talking about?

The smart money is on actress and singer Barbra Streisand, 80. The pair became friends after she appeared on Carpool Karaoke back in 2018. But Streisand has not been in a film since the 2012 comedy The Guilt Trip.

The Good, The Bad . . . and The Emily

Actress Emily Blunt goes from My Fair Lady to Annie Get Your Gun in The English, a six-episode Western coming soon to BBC 2.

Blunt, 39, plays Lady Cornelia Locke, who arrives in a frontier town in 1890 seeking justice for her dead son.

She falls for Eli Whipp, a Pawnee ex-cavalry scout, who wants to claim land which is rightfully his.

Of her costumes, Blunt says: ‘My God she looks out of place. She’s a complete fish out of water when she first arrives. She’s in this beautiful, lacy, pale pink dress . . . in this dust-ridden, violent, masculine world. Her costumes, and how they go from pink to red to purple, are like the bruising of her journey.’

The drama had been due to shoot in Kansas and in Alberta, Canada, but Covid caused complications — and in the end Almeria, Spain, stood in for the Wild West.

Enthusiasts will remember ‘spaghetti westerns’ such as A Fistful Of Dollars and The Good, The Bad And The Ugly were also made there.

Poor Hugh Jackman has discovered an embarrassing downside to his ‘bulking up’ regime, as he prepares to play Wolverine for the final time, in Deadpool 3.

Hugh admits that he has twice split his trousers on stage on Broadway, where he is starring in a production of The Music Man.

Sir Tim’s an eternal optimist

Nobody could accuse Sir Tim Rice of giving up easily. He’s about to try to get a musical version of From Here To Eternity airborne again, nearly ten years after its disappointing West End debut.

The revival, at the Charing Cross Theatre, has its Press performance on Tuesday. It previously opened in 2013, to mixed notices, and closed six-and-a-half months later.

Since then, the show has been rewritten — and gained four new songs. Sir Tim, channelling Winston Churchill, remarked: ‘If you like your musicals soft and fluffy, this show is not for you. We have nothing to offer but danger, betrayal, heartbreak, hope, blood, sweat and tears!’

That could actually be a description of the old rogue’s complicated personal life. He and wife Jane had two children, Eva and Donald, but split up over his affair with singer Elaine Page — although they never actually divorced.

Sir Tim went on to romance artist Nell Sully, by whom he has a daughter; and in 2016 it emerged that he had fathered another daughter by young academic Laura-Jane Foley.

From Here To Eternity is based on the book by James Jones, written in 1951 and set in a U.S. army base in Hawaii just before the attack on Pearl Harbor. The 1953 film won eight Academy Awards (including best supporting actor for Frank Sinatra).

Rice told The Stage of the current revival: ‘Nobody knows anything, that’s one of the great rules. But it’s got a good story, and story is king.’

Never minD fairies at the bottom of the garden — I’ve got dinosaurs!

Edward Scissorhands famously created a topiary dinosaur with his bare hands. And that film’s director, Tim Burton, is clearly fascinated by the beasts — he has a ‘dinosaur garden’ at his home with a dozen life-sized, hand-painted Jurassic creatures . . . including a 25ft Tyrannosaurus Rex.

The garden (and its oversized occupants) are concealed behind high walls at Burton’s Oxfordshire country home, but the writer of his new TV project, Wednesday, caught a glimpse during a chat with the director recently. Alfred Gough, showrunner of the forthcoming series about the youngest member of the Addams family, reveals: ‘We FaceTimed — and Tim, in a classic Tim Burton frame, was outside in his dinosaur garden!’

Wednesday is the film director’s first venture into television and Netflix want the show to feel like an eight-hour Tim Burton movie.

For his part, Burton has been taking a hands-on approach with the production. His go-to costume designer Colleen Atwood created the clothes, including an iconic Morticia dress for actress Catherine Zeta-Jones.

And he’s been directly involved with details ranging from the big (the main monster is based on one of his drawings) to the small (Jenna Ortega, as the teenage Wednesday, sports a fringe . . . which Burton trimmed himself).

Explaining his love for the creepy clan, the director said: ‘I think all families are strange and the Addams Family is very symbolic of how I feel about them, because I’ve never met one that doesn’t have some strange qualities.’

He added: ‘I particularly love Wednesday. I’m obviously not a teenage girl, but I think in a past life I might have been, because when I read this, I just felt like she shares my world view.’

The series starts on Netflix on November 23.