Behaving badly and making an exhibition of yourself is all part of being a celebrity, but sometimes what they get up to defies belief. Here are the worst offenders…
Read on for our guide to the top 10 finest sex addicts, drug fiends, bad girls and silly boys ever to have appalled and delighted us.
10: Daniella Westbrook
Spending a fortune every day on drugs is sadly commonplace among the rich and famous, but Daniella Westbrook distinguished herself from her coke-addled peers by snorting so much of the stuff that part of her nose actually fell off. Pictures of her notorious nostril made her a tabloid sensation, but the ex-EastEnder has since stopped nuking her sinuses and found love with a multi-millionaire partner. Aww.
9: Wayne Rooney
Acclaimed as a genius on the football pitch, Wayne Rooney isn’t quite so bright when it comes to his sex life. His stunningly unsubtle visits to a brothel led to an inevitable scandal and all-too-detailed accounts of his bonkathons with a middle-aged prostitute known as ‘Auld Slapper’. The soccer prodigy even left a note for one of the women reading: ‘To Charlotte, I shagged u on 28 Dec. Loads of love, Wayne Rooney’. He’s such an old romantic.
8: Leslie Grantham
Perhaps identifying too strongly with his character Dirty Den, Leslie Grantham horrified BBC bosses (and anyone with a weak stomach) when he started using a webcam in his dressing room to show his naked, aroused body to a woman online. The story broke just months after his return to Albert Square, and Grantham was forced to apologise to his co-stars after it was revealed that, as well as waving his willy around, he’d also told his virtual lover that most of the cast were ‘w***ers’ and actress Jessie Wallace was a ‘vile dog’. Oops.
7: Winona Ryder
You’d really think being a Hollywood A-lister would mean you didn’t have to go shoplifting for hats and handbags, and even Winona Ryder didn’t seem to quite know what she was doing when security guards caught her stealing accessories from a department store in 2001. A confused-looking Ryder told staff she was ‘preparing for a film role’, and then found herself an object of media ridicule during the ensuing trial. The moral of the story? Don’t be a slightly bonkers film star who steals hats for no good reason.
6: Angus Deayton
‘Do not adjust your set, my face really is this red.’ So said Angus Deayton on Have I Got News For You, following revelations that he’d been enjoying cocaine-fuelled romps with a call girl in 2002. His tenure on the show was swiftly brought to an end after the tawdry, regrettable and deeply amusing scandal hit the front pages, and not even his star turn as a hotel receptionist in the Fat Slags movie has managed to resurrect Deayton’s career.
5: Robert Downey Jr
The constantly disgraced Robert Downey Jr has long been Hollywood’s most reliable hellraiser. He’s been arrested many, many times for (depending on what day it is) carrying firearms, being intoxicated on illegal drugs, drink driving, violating probation, and for breaking into a house he mistook for his own. He’s also great at sabotaging his career, and got himself fired from hit series Ally McBeal after his drug use resulted in yet another arrest. As the man himself said, ‘I’ve always felt like an outsider in this industry. Because I’m so insane I guess.’
4: George Michael
In 1998 a pop star went to the toilet and was reborn. A men’s room may be a very unlikely place for a career turnaround to take place, but George Michael suddenly became much more interesting after his arrest for lewd conduct in a public loo. He soon revelled in the notoriety, chatting to Michael Parkinson about gay sex and releasing a music video in which dressed in a tight police uniform, he sang about ‘servicing the community’ and danced in a toilet. That’s the way to go-go!
3: Pete Doherty
Celebrity drug addict Pete Doherty was once, fleetingly, known for being a singer. His former band The Libertines were touted as the Next Big Thing, and Doherty himself was the fresh-faced darling of the NME. Then all that crack and heroin really began messing things up, and Doherty was soon stealing from his bandmates, fleeing from rehab clinics, falling in love with Kate Moss, doing time in jail and looking really, really sweaty all the time. The only shocking thing he could do now is have a shower and keep out of the headlines for longer than a week.
2: Paris Hilton
There’s nothing like a scrappy home-made porn film to turn you into a global phenomenon, as Paris Hilton discovered when some fuzzy footage of her having sex was leaked to the internet. It swiftly became the talk of the universe, humiliating the eminent Hilton family but making a bona fide star of the heiress herself. And she wasn’t the only one to benefit from the ‘exposure’. Her co-star in the film, Rick Solomon, became a millionaire overnight from sales of the official video. Nice work, if you can get it.
1: Hugh Grant
A-listers are often brought low by lust, but what makes this the daddy of scandals is that it was just so unlikely. Hugh Grant was the foppish, floppy-haired darling of the British acting establishment when, one evening in 1995, he left his pampered universe to explore the seedy side of LA. He was duly arrested for soliciting the streetwalking strumpet Divine Brown, and the most unflattering mugshot in the world was the woeful result. Mr Grant, we salute you!
