She's 36, single, and not afraid to talk about her childless status. In an interview for Cosmopolitan magazine, the Hollywood actress Cameron Diaz attacked society's assumption that all women want to have children. "I think women are afraid to say that they don't want children because they're going to get shunned," she told interviewer Lizzi Hosking. "But I think that's changing. I have more girlfriends who don't have kids than those who do. And honestly? We don't need any more kids. We have plenty of people on this planet."
Is that a no to children for Diaz herself then, asked Hosking. The star, who recently broke up with model Paul Sculfor, and has never married, replied: "I never say never . . . I could end up adopting half a dozen kids or I could end up being the next 'octomum' . . . Or I might just make my nieces and nephews take care of me when I'm 80."
The actress, who has dated younger men such as the singer Justin Timberlake in the past, added: "What's changed from 10 years ago is that now I want a man who knows who he is. Someone who understands himself, has already dealt with his issues and who can say, 'I see where I've been foolish before and I'm not going to be like that again'." So someone who's been through his "boy" period? "Exactly."
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Diaz, whose latest film, My Sister's Keeper, showcases her as a mother of three whose family is torn apart by her daughter's battle against cancer, also wants children to be taught to feel good about their bodies and to reject plastic surgery.
"I was in England recently and I caught this programme [The Sex Education Show on Channel 4] about a woman going to schools and showing kids 25 sets of real boobs and one set of fake ones . . . It was amazing. And I was like, that's what we need to do. We need to inform kids that it's not real for everyone to look a certain way . . . We're so inundated with images of what we should look like."
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So is she planning to age naturally? "Yeah, and it's an effort. But I think we have to be confident and accept ourselves for who we are. I think the biggest power a woman has is over her body."
Star who prefers the grotty life
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David Mitchell may have won awards for his TV comedy shows, but he still lives in an ex-council flat in a grotty part of London, with an old telly and a lodger. Peep Show, which casts Mitchell and Robert Webb as university friends - Mark, a pedantic loan manager, and Jez, an irresponsible musician - has had a seventh series commissioned. Hollywood beckons, but Mitchell isn't tempted.
"The people I want to make laugh are British," he told The Guardian. "I love all the elements of how British society lends itself to comedy - its pompousness and self-loathing and class system and cynicism." Single for seven years, he "sort of hates the dating thing". So what he's sometimes "ended up doing is . . . very pissedly getting off with someone. And the next day it's, 'Oh no! Why did I do that?' "
Betrayed at 16 by my parents
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The journalist Lynn Barber has shamed her elderly parents in her new book, calling her father, "intelligent but socially untamed" and referring to her mother's "beta-minus brain". Why did she do it? Barber revealed all to The Daily Telegraph.
When an older man picked up the then 16-year-old Barber at a bus stop and, months later, offered to marry her, Dick and Beryl Barber urged their daughter to abandon her plans to study at Oxford. "You don't need to go to university if you've got a good husband," Beryl told her daughter.
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Barber felt betrayed and on looking into her boyfriend's past, was horrified to discover that he already had a wife and children. If she's forgiven him, she hasn't forgiven her parents: "I found them odd then; I find them odd now."