THE TELEGRAPH: From Oscar victors One Battle After Another and Sinners to Disney’s hit Kennedy drama Love Story, cigarettes are creeping back on to screens
Oscar Wilde wrote in The Picture of Dorian Gray that “A cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure. It is exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied. What more can one want?” For many years, cinema took the Wildean image of the cigarette as the Platonic idea of sophistication and developed it even further.
Who can forget Sean Connery’s introduction as 007 in Dr No, lighting a Craven A cigarette as he says the words “Bond… James Bond” for the first time on screen, or Humphrey Bogart disconsolately but stylishly smoking in Casablanca as he mourns his lost love, Ilsa, saying: “Of all the gin joints, in all the towns, in all the world, she walks into mine.”
Smoking on screen historically denoted sexiness, class and cool. This was the case when Sharon Stone lit up a cigarette in an interrogation room in Basic Instinct and sneered at the detectives interrogating her: “What are you going to do? Charge me with smoking?”
It was hard, coming of age in the Nineties, not to be impressed by it all, even as we were surrounded by health warnings; by the time I was at university, practically everyone I knew smoked. The only reason I refrained was because I was frankly rubbish at it. » | Alexander Larman | Wednesday, April 15, 2026
”Hollywood’s to blame”. One could turn that around and say ‘thanks to Hollywood’! 😊 Even though I am no longer a smoker, I am sick to death of all the bloody do-gooders around in the West these days. Quite frankly, they are so tiresome!
Do-gooders’ intentions are, I dare say,… ‘good’, but they are frightfully boring and such people are certainly not fun to be around. Also, it must be said that whatever their intentions, people have never been so unhealthy as they are today. When I look back, so many people smoked, yet most people remained relatively slim throughout their lives, and type-2 diabetes was relatively uncommon. These days, this is not the case. Since people stopped smoking en masse, they have satisfied their cravings by eating and drinking instead. People eat like there’s no tomorrow, and they often drink like fish! So, these days, people suffer from obesity, obesity-related diseases, and fatty liver disease instead of smoking-related diseases.
Even though I am no longer a smoker, I smoked most of my adult life — a pack a day. These days, young people want six packs. My generation wanted twenty-packs! 😊
Anyway, all jokes aside, whichever way we lead our lives, we will eventually suffer from something in the fulness of time; it’s almost inevitable. And as my American, long-term, deceased, and sorely-missed partner always used to say: You can’t get out of this life alive! Never were truer words spoken! (He, by the way, was not a smoker. He had stopped smoking aeons before I ever met him.)
I have heard it said that some people associate smoking with poverty, ill health, and an early death. Such negativity! Such pessimism! I don’t. I associate smoking with elegance, class, and style. There's something very alluring about a well-dressed gentleman smoking a cigarette. It looks so sexy, too. After all, isn't that why so many Hollywood movies showed so many actors and actresses smoking? — © Mark Alexander
