In 2011 Clint Eastwood was going to direct the third version of the movie A Star is Born. Beyoncé would play the role that had already embodied Judy Garland and Barbra Streisand in the two previous films and the director of Unforgiven offered the male protagonist, the star of the already settled and mature, Bradley Cooper, who was on the crest of his success, in the middle of the Resacón trilogy in Las Vegas. But the actor rejected it. He hesitated a few moments, and said no to Eastwood: at 36 he had then “had not lived enough.”
That same 2011, People magazine named Bradley Cooper the sexiest man in the world and his media coverage was soaring both for his million-dollar box office films and for his relationship with the actress Renée Zellweger that had supposedly begun -because they never reached give an official confirmation- after the filming of File 39, three years before. That same year, as soon as the shooting of Resacón 2 finished He flew from Thailand to his home in Philadelphia to continue taking care of his father, who has lung cancer? Two weeks later, he died in his arms. In that moment, his life changed completely. His way of looking at the world and moving in it, too. And that included his work and his place and aspirations in the industry.
He changed the big productions for small films, with unequal success, but that have given him the prestige he was looking for, with friends he previously considered idols (Eastwood, Robert De Niro) and three Oscar nominations included, for The Good Side of Things, The great American scam and The sniper. He also played on Broadway the role for which he began to dream of being an actor with only 12 years old: The Elephant Man. Although in his personal life continued the persecution of the paparazzi, attracted by the secrecy and fame of their girlfriends: after Zellweger, he maintained a two-year relationship with Zoe Saldana, then with the model Suki Water house until in 2015 he met his current partner, the Russian model, Irina Shayk, formerly of Cristiano Ronaldo, with whom last year he had a daughter, Lea.
In the interviews, Bradley Cooper always shields himself as soon as he intuits a personal question, not only about his romantic life, but about any question that goes beyond his work. For a while it was not like that, in the years around its takeoff, between 2009 and shortly after that lucky and fateful 2011, he lavished himself in the media talking about his sobriety.
He revealed that in 2004, after hitting bottom, he left the alcohol and drugs he believed to be hooked by a question of insecurity and low self-esteem in his early years in Hollywood. “I was so worried about what others thought of me, how I presented myself to the world, how I would survive my day to day life. I always felt like a stranger. I only lived inside my head. I thought that I was not going to live up to my potential and it scared me. I thought it was going to ruin my life,” he confessed. The Hollywood Reporter in 2012.
Later, he increasingly limited his interviews. Cooper was totally devoted to his career, to living all that he lacked when Eastwood offered him the role of A StarWas Born. But in 2015 he felt he could interpret it. “Honestly, I could see it in my face, I felt it,” he told The New York Times in an interview this summer, weeks before the world premiere of A Star is Born, the movie that Eastwood was going to direct and, in the end, the own Bradley Cooper turned into his opera prime behind the cameras, but also in front of them. The film that could take him to the Oscars along with his female co-star, the singer Lady Gaga. He presents it now as his greatest personal confession because everything in it speaks of him: from his vision of art corrupted by business, to the fight against addictions and the idea that love does not cure everything.
“The stories that you see in this movie come from a deeply personal place and it’s the only way I know to communicate with people,” he said in the same interview in The New York Times, justifying and shielding his privacy and also his way of understand the cinema. “I do not know Martin Scorsese as a human being, nor do I want to know him, but I think his films are very, very personal and affect me,” he continued. “And my hope is that by creating this story [A star is born] you will learn a lot from me.”
A discreet couple
Little is known about the discreet life of Bradley Cooper and Irina Shayk. They began their relationship in the spring of 2015. She had just broken off her relationship with Cristiano Ronaldo, who reported a lot of fame but little love as she herself confessed later. That has been one of the few occasions when the Russian model has spoken about her feelings. So secretly took everything that when she became pregnant with his daughter Lea tried to hide it until in the parade of Victoria’s Secret his figure was evident.
The couple does not usually lavish themselves on social acts. They live on horseback between Los Angeles and New York and the few times they let themselves be seen is pushing the cart of their child. Irina has remained in the background during the promotion of the movie A star is born in which the actor has walked through the red carpets of the hand of Lady Gaga.
Let it be known that they have not married although she has been wearing a spectacular engagement ring for more than a year.
