When I was 17 years old, I wrote Elliott Smith a fan letter.

It was the year 2000, and I was a high school senior in Dallas. I had never written a fan letter to anyone, but I felt connected to Elliott, despite the fact that we didn’t really have that much in common.

He was, after all, a man in his 30s who had tattoos and wore an assortment of black band tees, while I was a teenage girl who shopped at Abercrombie & Fitch. He sang about drinking and drugs; I hadn’t even tried my first beer.

He had the aura of a defiant nonconformist, while I was a pleaser and overachiever, writing for the school paper, singing in the choir, and joining an endless stream of extracurriculars and clubs to pad my college applications.

But Elliott seemed like the quiet type, and so was I, with high social anxiety and low self-esteem. He seemed like an outcast, and I often felt out of place and lonely in the Texas suburb where I grew up, even with family and friends around me.

He seemed sad; I was a bit sad too.

But what really mesmerised me most about Elliott was his vulnerability. He laid himself so bare in his music, and when I listened to his songs, it felt like reading a diary. It wasn’t just the lyrics – it was his soft singing style, his careful finger-picking, the way he layered vocal tracks so tenderly. I felt like I knew him, like I was a friend he trusted with his secrets.

I wanted to reach out to Elliott to thank him, and convey how important his music was to me. I found an address for his record label, Kill Rock Stars, in the liner notes of one of his CDs, and I mailed the letter. And then I waited.

Months passed, and no response. Maybe I sent it to the wrong address, I thought. I never really expected to hear back, but I did wonder if he even got it.

Graduation came and went. I headed off to college. Elliott didn’t release any new albums.

And in 2003, he died violently and tragically at the age of 34.

The subject line read “Fwd: Elliott Smith biography.” My former boss had passed along a message that was sent to my old work email – the one associated with my maiden name, which no one had called me in years. It was 2023, and I had recently turned 40.

The email was from a writer named Jamie Fisher, who said she was working on a biography about Elliott Smith.

“I’m wondering if you’re the same Kirby Van Amburgh who wrote a fan letter to him around 2000,” she wrote. “His family still has the letter, and I was wondering whether you got a response.”

I sucked in my breath. This means Elliott got my letter! I thought. He must have read it, right? And if he kept it, maybe it meant something to him.

I responded to Jamie immediately. Even though I hadn’t gotten anything from Elliott, she still wanted to talk to me, so we set up a time to chat on the phone the next week.

Before our phone call, Jamie also sent me a photo of my letter to Elliott. It was handwritten on notebook paper, both sides. In the letter, I wrote that I was a 17-year-old girl who had bought all of his CDs.

I think your music is really addictive. It’s so original and creative. I’ve never heard anything like it.

I shared that I liked to play the piano and guitar and sing. I told him that he was an inspiration to me, that listening to his music encouraged me to create my own style.

I try to write my own songs and make them as unique and personal to me as your work is to you.

But I didn’t want to be a musician as a career, I said.

I praised him some more and said that even if my letter never reached him, it was OK.

You are worth the time it took to write this, and you’ll keep kicking ass.

I told him he was incredible and thanked him. I signed it with a “Sincerely.”

If Elliott did in fact read the letter, I could see why he kept it. I’m sure it was refreshing to get something so wholesome.

In the days that followed, I went up into the attic and pulled out my old high school diaries, skimming the pages for mentions of Elliott. I had written about him several times: I journalled about buying my first Elliott Smith CD and hearing the spidery notes of Speed Trials trickling through the speakers of my Magnavox boombox. And I wrote about my letter, saying, “I hope he gets it. I hope he likes it!”

When we finally got on the phone, Jamie asked if I had continued with my writing or music, and I told her about my winding career path: I was a teacher for several years, then worked at a nonprofit for the next decade. I had dabbled in freelance writing here and there, but it never went anywhere. At one point, I wrote a novel for kids, but it was never published.

I told her I had recently transitioned to a job as a writer for a market research company, which I really enjoyed because I got to write every day, albeit in a different way than I envisioned when I was 17.

I talked about my songwriting and how I was in a musical duo with my friend Todd in the early aughts. We put out an EP, some singles, and even a couple of music videos, filmed in Todd’s backyard. It was all just for fun, but it was also a bit stressful sharing my songs and putting myself on display like that.

I explained that creative writing – both on paper and in music – was emotionally difficult for me. Unlike writing for business, when I wrote anything personal, I felt an intense fear of being exposed. I put so much of myself in my fiction, essays, poems and songs. I was terrified of releasing them for public consumption because any rejection of my creative work felt like a rejection of me as a person. Perhaps that’s why I was so in awe of Elliott: he shared so much of himself in his art, in a way that I never quite could.

After a while, Jamie paused and said that she didn’t reach out to me just because of the book. There was another reason.

“Elliott wrote you a response.”

I literally burst into tears.

He did? I choked out. Jamie started crying too.

She said that Elliott’s letter was in the box with my letter. She didn’t know why he never sent it. Maybe he didn’t have a stamp and then forgot about it. At any rate, it was there, waiting to be found.

Jamie read the letter to me over the phone.

Dear Kirby, I read your letter and it made me happy – thanks.

Elliott wished me success with my writing, whatever success meant to me personally. He talked about his love of reading and recommended an author he was really into at the moment, Mikhail Bulgakov. He shared that he sometimes secretly wished he was a writer instead of a musician, as his music so often diverged from mainstream tastes.

He thanked me for adding a little brightness to his day.

I’m glad you see creativity in yourself, the world needs as much of it as it can get, so go out and kick ass!

He signed it with a heart.

After my call with Jamie, I felt a surge of inspiration. Since having my daughter three years earlier, I had stopped going to my writing group, and I hadn’t written a song or even played my instruments in a long time. But now I felt the urge to return to my writing and music, even if for no other purpose than bringing me joy.

In the months that followed, I brought my guitar down from the attic. I played Old MacDonald Had A Farm for my daughter over and over, building the calluses back up on my fingers. I wrote her an original song about handwashing, Scrubbly Bubs and Bubs and Scrubs (which was well received). Last year, along with my husband and two other dads, I played a three-song acoustic set of Raffi covers for our kids’ class at school. It was thrilling to see them laughing and clapping and dancing, a crowd of generous and adoring fans.

I rejoined my writing group. I wrote a little book about potty training for my daughter (which was less well received). I revisited a short story about alien abduction that I had initially drafted and abandoned several years earlier. I wrote a bad poem about the lizards on my back porch. I wrote this essay. Now I write and write and continue to write.

After I told one friend about Jamie’s call, he asked if I was upset that I never got the letter when I was a teen. I said no. Strangely, I was almost thankful that Elliott never sent the letter. It felt like his words were meant for me at age 40, not age 17. I received his encouragement when I really needed it – not when I was already full of excitement and hope and possibility, but later in life, when I needed to be reminded of the spark inside of me.

I wrote to Elliott years ago to thank him. And in a way, I wrote this to thank him again.

“Nobody Broke Your Heart, an intimate biography of Elliott Smith by Jamie Fisher, will be released by Penguin Random House on Aug. 25.

Do you have a compelling personal story you’d like to see published on HuffPost? Find out what we’re looking for here and send us a pitch at pitch@huffpost.com.

As the youngest daughter, you may get labelled as the baby of your family even long after becoming a grown adult.

“A youngest daughter may be simultaneously protected as the baby, expected to be emotionally accommodating as a daughter and discouraged from separating too far from the family,” said Linda Yoon, a therapist and founder of Yellow Chair Collective, which specialises in multicultural therapy.

And this infantilising label can have consequences. While eldest daughters often get saddled with adult responsibilities too early, youngest daughters can also deal with family obligations they never asked for or wanted.

“In therapy, youngest daughters often come in struggling with independence, self-trust, boundaries,” Yoon said.

Here are the most common issues youngest daughters talk about in therapy, according to therapists – along with tips on how to break free from these birth order expectations:

“Youngest daughters may grow up with parents and older siblings constantly advising, correcting, protecting or deciding for them,” Yoon said. “Even when this comes from love, it can quietly communicate: ‘Other people know better than you.’”

Licensed psychologist Lisette Sanchez said she sees youngest daughters deal with what is known as learned helplessness, or a learned dependence on other people, often older siblings or family members who took care of life tasks and made decisions on the youngest daughter’s behalf.

“Everyone else is there for you. So you didn’t get a chance to do that, which then can lead to the domino effect of struggling with individuation, constantly seeking reassurance from others and people-pleasing,” Sanchez said.

As a result, Sanchez said, youngest daughters can struggle with making even simple decisions, like deciding which restaurant to eat at, and feel discouraged about their indecision. They may think, “Why can’t I do this? Why is this easier for other people? What’s wrong with me?” Sanchez said.

There is an assumption that only eldest daughters become parentified with adult responsibilities, but this is not always the case, especially when older siblings leave home and stop answering their families’ calls.

Jessica Lan, a licensed marriage and family therapist, said that in some families, “the youngest daughter may be the person who remains particularly connected to the parents while older siblings have established more independence and firmer boundaries.”

“The youngest daughter may become the one who is more available, checks in on everyone, coordinates family time or steps in when something needs to be handled,” Lan said.

“I work with many first- and second-generation Americans. I also see many situations where older siblings have reached a point of burnout, go to therapy to work on boundaries and redefine their role within the family. As those older siblings begin stepping back from responsibilities they have carried for years, the youngest sibling may end up carrying more of the family responsibilities.”

Yoon said a youngest child may become the family’s source of emotional relief and feel pressure to appear cheerful even when she is not.

“When they become depressed, angry, serious or exhausted, the family may respond with discomfort because they are no longer performing their familiar role,” she explained.

Youngest daughters can spend so much energy helping their family feel better that they don’t learn what their own true values and desires are.

“They can feel compelled to mediate or smooth things over because they experience conflict as something that needs to be fixed,” Lan said. “Along with that, they may have trouble identifying what they actually want for themselves because they are focused on what their parents or siblings need from them.”

To fight this pressure to perform a fake version of yourself, Yoon said, youngest daughters need to give themselves “permission to be complex, not simply pleasant” and to “share feelings with people who do not require you to entertain or reassure them.”

If you believe your birth order has you struggling with your personal relationships, try to set aside time to reflect on which expectations are ones you decide matter – or what you feel like you must do to please your friends and family.

Sanchez recommended that youngest daughters do a “rules inventory” where they reflect on the rules they live their life by, and then go back and label whether this is “a rule that your family sets, your culture set or that you set.” If too many rules are ones that were thrust upon you, it might be time to reevaluate how you show up for others for your own peace of mind.

Yoon said the biggest healing lesson for a youngest daughter is learning how they can stay connected to their loved ones “without making their voices smaller or shrinking themselves.”

If you’re a youngest daughter struggling to trust her own decisions, try making small decisions without consulting anyone, Yoon suggested.

“Let yourself make imperfect choices and learn from them,” Yoon said. “Replace ‘What should I do?’ with ‘What do I already know?’ to build self-trust.”

In his book How To Prevent Dementia, neurologist Dr Richard Restak wrote: “I strongly suggest that if you are 65 years old or older, that you completely and permanently eliminate alcohol from your diet”.

He said that’s because it’s a “direct neurotoxin” and could increase your risk of falls.

And according to America’s Centre for Disease Control (CDC), we should consider striking some foods off the list, too.

But do those stand in the UK?

Here, we asked Dr Giuseppe Aragona, a GP and medical adviser for Prescription Doctor, about whether he agrees with the guidance here.

The CDC said that people aged 65+ are more likely to become hospitalised from bacteria like Salmonella and Listeria.

“Some foods are more likely to spread harmful germs, including undercooked meat and eggs, unpasteurised milk and cheese, and unwashed produce,” they wrote.

Therefore, they suggested people in that age group might want to consider that the following could pose a higher risk to them:

1. Raw or undercooked poultry or meat,
2. Unheated deli meat, cold cuts, hot dogs, and fermented or dry sausages,
3. Refrigerated pâté or meat spreads,
4. Premade deli salads, like potato salad, egg salad, tuna salad, or coleslaw,
5. Raw or undercooked sprouts like alfalfa or bean sprouts,
6. Unwashed fresh fruits and vegetables,
7. Cut melon left out for more than two hours,
8. Unpasteurised juice or cider,
9. Unpasteurised (raw) milk and dairy products made from unpasteurised milk,
10. Soft cheese made from unpasteurised (raw) milk,
11. Unheated cheese sliced at a deli,
12. Raw or undercooked (runny) eggs, and foods that contain raw or undercooked eggs, like cookie dough or eggnog,
13. Raw or undercooked fish or shellfish, including sashimi, sushi, and ceviche,
14. Refrigerated smoked seafood (except in a cooked dish),
15. Raw dough or raw batter made with raw (uncooked) flour.

Dr Aragona said that mostly, the reasoning behind these entries stands.

“I would broadly agree with the principle behind the CDC list,” he said.

“As we get older, changes in the immune system mean that an infection which might cause a relatively short-lived episode of diarrhoea and vomiting in a younger adult can sometimes become much more significant in an older person, with a greater risk of dehydration, hospital admission and, with certain organisms such as Listeria, Salmonella and pathogenic E. coli, invasive or systemic infection”.

The doctor added that this might be especially relevant for people who are frail or have other health conditions, “although I would be careful not to imply that everyone becomes suddenly vulnerable on their 65th birthday, because the degree of risk varies considerably between individuals”.

He said that for him, the foods he’d be most concerned about include:

1. raw or undercooked meat and poultry,
2. raw or lightly cooked eggs,
3. raw shellfish and fish,
4. unpasteurised milk and dairy products,
5. raw sprouts, and
6. certain chilled ready-to-eat foods such as pâté and cold deli meats.

That’s because “these foods can become contaminated with organisms such as Salmonella, Campylobacter, E. coli and Listeria, and the important point is that some contamination cannot be detected by looking at, smelling or tasting the food”.

“I would also add an important UK-specific nuance around soft cheeses, because the advice can easily become over-simplified,” Dr Aragona told us.

“It is not accurate to say that someone over 65 needs to avoid all Brie, Camembert, blue cheese or other soft cheeses; the key distinction is whether the product is made from pasteurised milk and, in some circumstances, how it has been stored and handled.”

In the UK, it’s been illegal to sell raw milk in supermarkets since 1985. But it’s not against the law to sell it in other places in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland.

“Similarly, I would not want the advice to become so restrictive that people are discouraged from eating nutritious foods such as fruit, vegetables, eggs, fish or dairy altogether,” the GP continued.

“The sensible approach is generally to modify how these foods are prepared and stored rather than simply avoiding them; for example, washing produce properly, keeping chilled foods at the correct temperature, observing use-by dates, preventing cross-contamination between raw and ready-to-eat foods, and cooking higher-risk foods thoroughly can substantially reduce the risk while allowing people to maintain a healthy and varied diet.”

Lastly, the expert ended, the person eating the food matters, too.

“I would… distinguish between someone who is a healthy, active 65-year-old and someone who is considerably older, frail, immunosuppressed or living with significant medical conditions, because the latter group may reasonably need to take a more cautious approach.

“Overall, I would agree with the CDC’s approach, but I would present it as risk reduction rather than a list of foods that people over 65 are forbidden from eating.

“The aim should be to reduce exposure to foods where the consequences of contamination could be serious while preserving a nutritious, enjoyable and varied diet, and I think that distinction is particularly important because overly restrictive food advice can itself have unintended consequences for nutrition, enjoyment of food and quality of life.”

Back in 1992, Disney’s flick Aladdin brought in $504 million dollars which, in today’s money comes to over a billion US Dollars. A huge part of the success of the film, of course, was Robin Williams’s incredible performance as Genie.

Speaking to Variety, longtime Disney animator and co-director of Aladdin, Ron Clements said: “On the first day of recording [Genie’s intro] we had script pages written in Robin’s improv style and storyboards illustrating some of the visual metamorphosing we were planning. He started out recording the script as written a few times, then took off in a multitude of directions…

“And he was consistently hilarious. At one point, we had to remove the genie’s lead animator, Eric Goldberg, from the recording stage because his uncontrollable laughter was messing up takes”

Despite this, the actor actually agreed to be paid relatively little for his pivotal role.

Robin recorded around 30 hours of written and improvised dialogue for Aladdin and he revealed to New York Magazine that he did this because he wanted to “leave something wonderful behind for the kids.”

Business Insider explains: “Williams took a hefty pay cut and agreed to be paid $75,000 for his work on the Disney film instead of his usual fee of about $8 million — but there was a catch. Williams did not want his voice used to merchandise products.”

“I don’t want to sell stuff,” Williams later told New York magazine. “It’s the one thing I don’t do.”

The execs agreed to this deal, Robin said on the Today Show, adding: “The one thing I said was I will do the voice. I’m doing it basically because I want to be part of this animation tradition. I want something for my children. One deal is, I just don’t want to sell anything — as in Burger King, as in toys, as in stuff.”

“Then all of a sudden,” he added, “they released an advertisement — one part was the movie, the second part was where they used the movie to sell stuff. Not only did they use my voice, they took a character I did and overdubbed it to sell stuff.”

Perhaps surprisingly, Disney apologised in the form of a Picasso painting valued at $1 million (sure why not), a self-portrait of the artist as Vincent Van Gogh.

According to Artnet, the painting clashed with Robin’s interiors and his friend Eric Idle recommended he burn the painting on live TV.

Of course, he didn’t do that but he did return for the third Aladdin film as well as starring in Disney’s movie Jack and Bicentennial Man.

If anybody would like to apologise to me in the form of a very expensive art work, please feel free.

We’ve written before at HuffPost UK about how different the pitch for Pretty Woman – originally called 3000 – was from the film we know now.

Don’t get me started on the extremely unlikely source material for Dirty Dancing 2, either.

As it turns out, the first version of Pixar’s Monsters Inc was almost unrecognisable from the film that eventually hit cinemas as well.

For instance, the original script didn’t include lovable protagonist Sulley (at least not in his monster form).

Instead, an early plot focused on a 30-year-old accountant.

Speaking about the film’s origins, Pete Docter, the director of 2001’s Monsters Inc, said on Jeff Goldsmith’s Creative Screenwriting podcast: “Well, my idea was that what it was about was about a 30-year-old man who is like an accountant or something.

“He hates his job, and one day he gets a book with some drawings in it that he did when he was a kid from his mum, and he doesn’t think anything of it, and he puts it on the shelf and that night, monsters show up. And nobody else can see them.

“He thinks he’s starting to go crazy; they follow him to his job and on his dates, and all this – and it turns out these monsters are fears that he never dealt with as a kid.”

A bit like fellow Pixar hit Inside Out, which includes personified emotions, each of these monsters would have represented a different one of the office worker’s fears.

As soon as he was healed from one of the fears these monsters symbolised, it would go away. This was actually a little bittersweet, as the original plot’s main character grew close to some of his new companions.

While I have you, here’s another fact about the first movie: Boo actually had a real name all along. Eagle-eyed fans spotted a detail suggesting she was called Mary, like the child actor Mary Gibbs, who voiced her.

Real-life Mary has since voiced characters in Inside Out, though she was only two years old when she starred in Monsters Inc.

Famed screenwriter Aaron Sorkin has lamented what he sees as America’s demand for politicians who feel like the average Joe, calling for an end to the “glamorisation of dumbness”.

During a new interview with Esquire, Sorkin was asked if he still felt like the US is dealing with a “huge, huge dumb problem”, as he’d said back in 2019.

The politically-minded Hollywood veteran explained why he thought little has changed, stating: “We need to get over our infatuation with the outsider, with the plainspoken person that you want to have a beer with.”

Citing his own work, Sorkin continued: “The characters I write are all smarter than I am. I did not blaze any trails as a scholar. People who are smarter than I am don’t make me feel bad about myself, they don’t make me feel inferior. And certainly a president – I need the president to be smarter than I am.”

Sorkin added that, in his eyes, “there are millions upon millions of voters who seem to have a mass debilitating inferiority complex and feel like a smart president, Obama for instance, is looking down his nose at everyone else, or he’s a Poindexter, or he’s not a real man”.

“Right. He eats arugula,” interviewer Michael Sebastian cracked, harking back to one of the trifling complaints conservatives had about Barack Obama‘s alleged elitism.

“We got to knock that off,” Sorkin said. “There has been a glamorisation of dumbness.”

While the Oscar winner didn’t mention anyone in particular, his take definitely echoed the way he described US leader Donald Trump in a 2017 interview with The Hollywood Reporter.

Explaining why he had no interest in putting a Trump-esque character in the reboot of The West Wing, Sorkin called the Republican president “a really dumb guy with an observable psychiatric disorder”.

Growing up, I always heard the same dietary advice: go for brown rice where possible, and if you can, choose low-fat dairy.

However, speaking to HuffPost UK previously, Melissa Jaeger, a registered dietitian at MyFitnessPal, said: “The nutritional gap between [brown and white rice] isn’t that huge.”

And a new paper has suggested that full-fat options might not be as bad for us as I first thought, either.

Published in the Journal of Nutrition, the study authors found that eating full-fat options seemed to confer benefits without expected negative side effects, like increased “bad” cholesterol and weight gain.

In this study, researchers split 74 participants with overweight or obesity into three groups:

• low-dairy, calorie-restricted diet,
• energy-neutral diet with three daily servings of dairy,
• unrestricted diet with three daily servings of dairy.

They also followed Canada’s food guide. All dairy consumed was full-fat.

After 12 weeks of observation, the scientists didn’t see any difference in weight gain or “bad” cholesterol levels between the low-dairy group and the one that consumed three full-fat servings a day.

In fact, those in the three-serving group had better blood pressure and improved levels of vitamin D, calcium, and protein.

This, despite the fact that full-fat dairy contains saturated fats – lipids which have been linked to higher rates of heart disease.

Another older review published in the European Journal of Nutrition found that those who consume full-fat dairy are no more likely to develop heart disease and type 2 diabetes than those who stick to a low-fat or fat-free dairy diet.

Study author Professor Harvey Anderson said that one answer could lie in the dairy matrix hypothesis, which suggests that the physical structure of the fats in dairy products affects how they’re absorbed.

“With dairy products, it’s got two proteins – casein and whey – that are bound together with fat and with nutrients mixed in,” he said.

The professor added that this structure leads to a slow, steady release of nutrients and could potentially make its health benefits bigger than the sum of its parts.

The British Heart Foundation (BHF) said on its site that “the science around milk and dairy foods is more complex than once thought,” adding that the dairy matrix hypothesis seemed to hold in some research.

However, the BHF ended: “The evidence remains mixed, and choosing lower-fat milk can help if you’re cutting calories or trying to reduce saturated fat.”

Madonna is unquestionably one of the greatest and most impactful pop artists of all time – not to mention one of the most controversial.

One area that the Grammy winner has always managed to express herself is through her music videos, something which she’s carried on right up to the present day, with her recent Confessions II short film.

Sex, religion and occasionally even violence have all been featured prominently throughout her attention-grabbing music videos, sparking debate, inciting boycotts and opening up important conversations in the process.

As the Queen of Pop celebrates her 68th birthday, we’re looking back at all the times her music videos have been at the centre of controversy…

With her debut album, Madonna bagged herself a decent-sized fanbase thanks to her catchy tunes and unique sense of style, as showcased in the videos for Borderline and Lucky Star.

However, it was in the video for the title track from her second album, Like A Virgin that she’d show the world what she was really about.

Filmed in Venice, Like A Virgin shows Madonna singing and dancing provocatively in a gondola, while flirting with the ideas of sexuality and religion, which would go on to become recurring themes in her videos and photo-shoots.

If only the people up in arms back in 1984 knew what she would have in store just a few short years later…

Watch the Like A Virgin video in full here.

Conservatives in the US were unimpressed when they discovered that the biggest star in America was planning to release a track sung from the perspective of a pregnant teenager.

In the song’s accompanying clip, Madonna acts out the message of the song, playing a young woman struggling to pluck up the courage to tell her father she’s pregnant.

While some critics suggested the track and video promoted or encouraged teen pregnancy, it wound up being at the centre of a debate about whether or not it had anti-abortion sentiments.

Madonna herself refused to be drawn in on the debate at the time, with her long-suffering publicist Liz Rosenberg insisting: “She’s singing a song, not taking a stand. Her philosophy is people can think what they want to think.”

Watch the Papa Don’t Preach video in full here.

The Open Your Heart music video sees Madonna portraying a stripper at a peep show, dressed in one of the most memorable and recognisable outfits of her career, a black bustier and fishnet tights.

While MTV was initially reluctant to air the video because of its sexually suggestive content, it also provoked a debate among feminist critics about whether or not her portrayal of a sex worker was objectifying or empowering, because of the way it subverted the male gaze.

At the end of the video, Madonna befriends a young boy, with whom she runs away with, though the inclusion of a child in a video with otherwise sexual themes also proved divisive.

Watch the Open Your Heart video in full here.

When it comes to Madonna’s music videos, none have brewed up a controversy in the same way as Like A Prayer.

With Madonna performing in a negligee in front of burning crucifixes and having sex on an actual altar, interspersed with images of stigmata and crying saints, the video was condemned by the Vatican and famously cost the star a deal with Pepsi (which she was still paid for, even thanking them when Like A Prayer scooped the Viewers’ Choice at the 1989 VMAs).

Often lost in the discussion about Like A Prayer’s religious elements is the fact the video also deals with racial tensions, depicting a Black man who is falsely accused of murdering a white woman, who he had actually been trying to assist after she was attacked.

Watch the Like A Prayer video in full here.

In Justify My Love, Madonna is seen exploring a hotel – in which many guests are seen in a variety of sexual poses, including suggested BDSM and orgies – in a dream-like state, wandering the corridors and laughing as she goes.

The racy video was clearly too much for MTV, who announced that they would not be airing the clip, with many other networks following suit.

Madonna took the controversy all the way to the bank, though, releasing it on VHS as a “video single”.

She commented at the time: “Why is it that people are willing to go and watch a movie about someone getting blown to bits for no reason at all, and nobody wants to see two girls kissing and two men snuggling?”

Watch the Justify My Love video in full here.

We think Madonna might have sensed she was onto a winner with Justify My Love, and as the 90s continued, so did the singer’s pushing of the envelope when it came to sexual imagery and themes.

All of this came to a head with the release of her polarising photo book, titled simply Sex, which was accompanied by the album Erotica and the music video for its title track.

Like Justify My Love, Erotica ended up being banned by MTV after being played just three times.

Madonna – who performs the song as her alter-ego, Mistress Dita – said at the time: “MTV plays to a huge audience and a lot of them are children, and a lot of themes I’m exploring in my videos aren’t meant for children, so I understand that they say I can’t show it.”

Watch the Erotica video in full here.

By the mid-90s, public opinion of Madonna was at an all-time low, with her Erotica album, the film Body Of Evidence and the documentary Truth Or Dare (or In Bed With Madonna, as it was referred to in the UK) turning off a lot of her more casual fans.

What followed was a touch of image overhaul for the singer, which included the release of softer ballads like I’ll Remember, Secret and Take A Bow, as well as the more experimental Björk co-write Bedtime Story.

Once the dust was settled, though, Madonna stirred things up once again, lampooning the whole debacle and her public persona in the track Human Nature, and its latex-heavy music video.

Watch the Human Nature music video in full here.

After her Bedtime Stories album, Madonna went through some big professional and personal changes. Work-wise, she bagged a Golden Globe for her lead role in Evita, as well as her first ever Grammy for Ray Of Light, heralded by many critics as her best ever album.

Meanwhile, she also became a mother, and began living in the UK with husband Guy Ritchie, then best known for gangster films like Lock Stock and Snatch.

The two collaborated just twice, once on the ill-fated remake of Swept Away and a second time in the music video for What It Feels Like For A Girl, which saw Madonna picking up an elderly woman from a retirement home and giving her the car ride from hell, eventually intentionally crashing the car into a lamp-post.

Like Erotica and Justify My Love before it, the video wound up being banned by MTV, while Madonna said she intended for it to “open dialogues”.

Watch the What It Feels Like For A Girl video in full here.

Even Madonna clearly felt she’d crossed a line with the original cut of the American Life video, which centred around a fashion show laden with imagery relating to war and disaster.

Eventually, this supposed staged disaster becomes real, when the star crashes her car through the catwalk, wreaking chaos.

Finally, she hurls a grenade onto the runway, which is caught by a George W Bush lookalike (in one of two versions of the video which have since leaked online), who uses it to light a cigar.

Due to the political climate at that time, Madonna later decided to cancel the video altogether, saying at the time: “Due to the volatile state of the world and out of sensitivity and respect to the armed forces, who I support and pray for, I do not want to risk offending anyone who might misinterpret the meaning of this video.”

The uncut video was finally released on Madonna’s official YouTube channel 20 years later, in April 2023.

Watch the director’s cut of the American Life video here.

Even into her 50s, (or, you might argue, because she was in her 50s) Madonna was still sparking debates about censorship with her use of sexual imagery, as she discovered when she released the MDNA cut Girl Gone Wild in 2012.

The video, which depicts nude men in various situations, as well as imagery relating to S&M and the Catholic church, was censored not by MTV this time, but YouTube, who allowed only users over the age of 18 to watch it.

A full 20 years after Justify My Love, Madonna was still being forced to defend her provocative videos, saying of the backlash: “I’m supposed to be a Girl Gone Wild in the video… how can I go wild and not grind?”

Watch the Girl Gone Wild video in full here.

When it came to the video for a song that had already become the biggest talking point of her 14th album, Madame X, Madonna once again teamed up with Swedish director Jonas Åkerlund, who previously helmed Ray Of Light, Music, Bitch I’m Madonna and, perhaps most crucially, the original American Life video.

On God Control, Madonna sings about the need for gun law reform in the US, illustrated in the song’s video, which shows the singer becoming the victim of a shooting at a disco, in scenes reminiscent of the Pulse night-club massacre in 2016.

The video’s graphic content ended up dividing opinion, with several survivors of real-life shootings, including Pulse, criticising Madonna for her choice to feature so much violence.

She said shortly after its release: “Seeing the reality, and the brutality of things makes you wake up. This is really happening. This is what it looks like.

“Does it make you feel bad? Good, ’cause then maybe you will do something about it.”

Watch the God Control music video in full here.

In a job where a regular day of work might involve bunching your genitals into a drawstring bag or spending 12 hours in a sweaty costume (not all of which allow you to pee easily), actors are pretty used to unusual requests.

Even among the most seasoned pros, however, some scenes are a step too far.

Some actors will never go nude for a role, for instance, while others won’t co-star alongside certain other big names. Often, the reasons are unique to a specific script or storyline.

Here, we rounded up seven scenes actors flat-out refused to film:

Charlotte Rampling stars as Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam in Denis Villeneuve’s recent Dune movies.

But the actor had previously been pitched the role of Paul Atreides’ mother, Lady Jessica, in director Alejandro Jodorowsky’s doomed ’70s adaptation.

His version lasted 14 hours and was meant to have a star-studded cast including Salvador Dalí, Orson Welles and Mick Jagger, though it never got released.

Speaking to IndieWire, Frank Pavich, who made an award-winning documentary about the abandoned project, said Jodorowsky had seen Charlotte Rampling in a movie and “thought she would be perfect” for the part.

Charlotte, who met the director without having read the script, later found out about a scene where Harkonnen enemy Rabban the Beast “gets his army, the Algerian army, to pull down their pants in front of the [Atreides’] palace and shit.

“So there’s going to be a scene of 2,000 extras defecating at once,” Pavitch added. “So here’s Charlotte Rampling, she agrees to meet with [Jodorowsky], she gets the script, she reads the script, and she says, ‘I can’t be in a movie where there’s 2,000 extras defecating on screen! I need to be in a movie that people are actually going to see! Who the hell is going to see this movie?’.”

However, Charlotte hasn’t publicly spoken about the scene.

She told IndieWire: “I loved this book, and I loved the character of Jessica. [Jodorowsky] was unable to do it, and the next one was the David Lynch one, which I was not in”.

When Anna Kendrick’s character, Beca, leaves college in Pitch Perfect, she joins a record label where she works under music executive Theo.

Speaking to Harper’s Bazaar UK about the film, she said: “Originally the music executive was supposed to be my romantic interest, but I said no to that, because I thought that would be kind of fucking problematic.”

She added that she also turned down an ending that involved the pair kissing: “I was like, ’Can no one else [see it]?’. Once I said it, everybody was like, ‘I guess so’. And they still wanted to have a version at the end when we kissed, and I still said no.”

He replied, “No. Before they started shooting, back in 2008, one of the producers did ask if I would be interested. I said, ‘You do know, don’t you, that Aragorn isn’t in The Hobbit? That there is a 60-year gap between the books?’.”

During an episode of Hot Ones, the actor recalled: “For some reason, [the filmmakers] caught a wild tiger shark. And they were like, ‘It’s in this cage, so it’s docile!’ And I’m like, ‘It’s a fucking tiger shark.’ And it was like a seven-foot tiger shark.”

She added: “I was on [dolphin movie] Flipper, we had fucking rubber dolphins. You can do this with a goddamn rubber dolphin; you don’t need a real-ass shark in the middle of the fucking ocean with chum in it. And maybe I lost my mind, and maybe I yelled all of that.”

Even as Nick in Gone Girl – the original book of which was recently voted the best thriller of the 21st century by a New York Times poll – Ben wouldn’t sacrifice his Boston Red Sox fandom.

Speaking to The New York Times, the actor said that he got into “a legitimate fight” over the cap with director David Fincher about the issue.

“I said, ‘David, I love you, I would do anything for you’,” the Oscar winner recalled. “’But I will not wear a Yankees hat. I just can’t. I can’t wear it because it’s going to become a thing… I will never hear the end of it. I can’t do it, and I couldn’t put it on my head’.”

As a compromise, he wore a New York Mets cap, neutral ground he likened to “Switzerland”.

Speaking on Waitrose’s podcast The Dish, Ian’s Ted Lasso co-star, Phil Dunsten, said: “It was in the script that [Ian would say], ‘You know, it’s gonna be a tough game for Richmond because Tottenham are a great side’.

“And [Ian] was like, ‘I can’t say it. I’m just not going to say it. I’m sorry.’ And he was really lovely. He was just like, ’You’re going to have to change it because I can’t say that.”

In an interview with The Daily News, the acting legend said that director Frank Darabont “thought I should be blowing that harmonica that Andy gave me” in jail. He said this was meant to draw his former fellow prisoner’s attention when the pair arrived on the beach of Zihuatanejo.

“And I refused,” he said, adding it was “sort of asinine, sort of cliched, sort of unnecessary and overkill”.