WALK INTO ANY newsagent or bookshop. Scan quickly and then let your eyes rest on the racks and racks and racks of celebrity-obsessed magazines. On each cover is a face Photoshopped to within an inch of its two-dimensional life. Where do these people come from? How did they come to be this way? How is it that, despite hours and hours of in-depth interviews and red-carpet vox pops, they stubbornly remain shiny and salubriously slick?

Tom Cruise wasn’t always going to be Tom Cruise. He actually used to be a shortish, gawky, orthodontically challenged two-bit nobody slowly going nowhere. Then he had his teeth fixed, and who knows what else, and emerged looking as close as he could dream to a latter-day James Dean in the role of the homogenised white-bread rebel in Top Gun. It wasn’t much longer before he became delectably take-home-able as the white-uniformed fledgling lawyer-officer with God on his side and a baseball bat in his hand in A Few Good Men.