Happy 40th Harry. But has all the pain been for nothing?

Turning 40 is a big moment for anyone. In many ways, it’s a point of reckoning, a time to stop and take stock – and set a path for the future.

By 40, there are no more excuses: whatever road you are on, whatever your successes or failures, they’re all down to you. Life at 40 is your own responsibility, your own making. No more blaming Mum or Dad for f***ing you up, as the poet once said, or hiding behind youthful inexperience.

Also, no more faffing around: you’re more than halfway through your threescore years and ten. Chop, chop: clock is ticking.

For Prince Harry, his 40th birthday today comes at the end of a process that began when he and Meghan quit the UK for a new life in California.

It’s been a painful, protracted uncoupling. The bruising interviews have been given, the memoir’s been written, the dirty laundry has been aired. Bridges have been burned that may never be rebuilt. For better or for worse, Harry is now well and truly his own man.

Of course, not all his privileges have been left behind. Some of the less onerous, such as his share of a £19million trust fund left by the late Queen Mother to her great-grandchildren, remain.

Harry told the BBC that he is ‘excited’ about turning 40. I’ll say: he’s due to inherit a reported £8 million from that fund.

But it’s not just great-Granny’s money tying him to the auld country. A poll in today’s MoS suggests that a third of Britons support him returning to royal duties on a permanent basis. Interesting. To me, this shows that there are plenty of people who still have a soft spot for Princess Diana’s youngest boy.

I used to be one of them, but I’m not sure any more.

I always felt desperately sorry, not just for Harry but for William, too, after they lost their mother in such terrible circumstances.

And as much as I admire and respect Charles and Camilla, I can see the couple’s behaviour during the difficult years of Charles’s marriage to Diana can’t have been easy for the boys, to put it mildly. Understandably, Harry is a wounded soul. But being in great pain does not confer the right to inflict the same on others – nor by doing so is your own suffering necessarily alleviated. Part of being a grown-up is realising this, and trying to end the cycle of unhappiness rather than perpetuate it.

Harry, though, has done the opposite. He has visited a terrible revenge on his father and the Queen, and turned on William and Kate for no obvious reason other than, perhaps, their decision to side with the King. No wonder neither William nor Charles want to see him. In particular, Harry’s behaviour has been utterly toxic in light of the King and the Princess of Wales being treated for cancer. If he really is the kind, thoughtful soul his supporters claim, in his heart he must know this to be true.

And yet, while I despair of his methods and actions, part of me understands why he wanted to leave. And though many sought to blame Meghan, I don’t believe it was ever really about her. It was about Harry and his damaged relationship with his family – and his desire to break his own generational curse. For that, I can’t help but grudgingly respect him.

It takes huge courage and determination to go against people’s expectations – and in Harry’s case, the nation’s. That he has done so is testament to his strength of character. That he did it so viciously and so vindictively, though, is not.

Should he be contemplating an ‘official’ return to the UK? I don’t think so. That would be a step backwards and mean all that pain was for nothing. He needs to find his own way forward. His decision not to update his autobiography, Spare, was a step in the right direction. But he’s got a long way to go to prove he has a new role to play without exploiting past capital.

Harry, I wish you the happiest of birthdays. May it mark the start of a new and more positive chapter in your life – and for all the royals.

EMMYS 2024

The 2024 Emmys are taking place this evening in Los Angeles, with controversial Netlix Baby Reindeer among the frontrunners.

I send all nominees my warmest best wishes, by being nominated you are already a winner.

Back to Black review – woozy Amy Winehouse biopic buoyed by extraordinary lead performance

Sam Taylor-Johnson’s best film to date is more interested in romance and creativity than demons or blame

‘A movie with the simplicity, even the naivety, of a fan-tribute’ … Back to Black. Photograph: Dean Rogers

The last time Sam Taylor-Johnson directed a movie about drugs it was A Million Little Pieces in 2019, based on James Frey’s notoriously inauthentic memoir of addiction – and the last time she made a film about a music legend it was Nowhere Boy in 2009, about John Lennon.

Now she brings the two together in what’s easily her best work so far: an urgent, warm, heartfelt dramatisation, scripted by Matt Greenhalgh, of the life of Amy Winehouse, the brilliant London soul singer who died of alcohol poisoning at 27 in 2011. It’s a movie with the simplicity, even the naivety, of a fan-tribute. But there’s a thoroughly engaging and sweet-natured performance from Marisa Abela as Amy – though arguably taking the rougher edges off. The only time Abela is less than persuasive is when she has to get into a fight on the north London streets of Camden.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rYzIOBwyhIU

And Jack O’Connell is a coolly charismatic and muscular presence as her no-good husband and addiction-enabler Blake Fielder-Civil. O’Connell can’t help being a smart, capable screen presence and makes Blake a lot more sympathetic and less rodenty than he appeared in real life – and yet part of the (reasonable) point of the film is that he was a human being, afraid that Amy would leave him for another celebrity, and that media images are misleading.

There’s a lovely, if faintly sucrose scene in which the already boozed-up Blake first meets Amy in The Good Mixer pub in Camden Town (already famous for its association with 90s cool Britannia and Blur) – buzzing with his horse-racing winnings and airily unfazed when the already entranced Amy challenges him to a game of pool while he cheekily lets her (and us) assume he doesn’t know who she is. But of course he does and even one-ups her in musical knowledge in compelling her to admit that she has never heard, or heard of the Shangri-Las’ Leader of the Pack, which he puts on the jukebox and extravagantly mimes to. There is a growing sadness in the realisation that this ecstatic first meeting is the first and last time they will ever be truly happy together.

Marisa Abela and Jack O’Connell as Amy and Blake in Back to Black. Photograph: Landmark Media/Alamy

Perhaps any movie about Winehouse is going to suffer in comparison with Asif Kapadia’s compelling archive-mosaic documentary Amy from 2015, which delivered the woman herself and also gave a clearer idea of her demanding musicianship and professionalism, far from the tabloid caricature of nonstop drugginesss. But this film tries to intuit the part that romance played in Amy Winehouse’s life and the narrative of unhappiness that it created in her work: a poisonous wellspring of inspiration.

And Taylor-Johnson’s film is also much more sympathetic to Winehouse’s father Mitch, the cab driver estranged from Amy’s mother who came back into her life to help manage her career and famously counselled against her going to rehab.

Eddie Marsan and Lesley Manville in Back to Black. Photograph: Landmark Media/Alamy

Mitch comes across better here because he’s played with bullish charm and schmaltz by Eddie Marsan – very funny in the scene where he infuriates Amy by coming to an important meeting and siding with the record business execs against her. I actually wonder if an equally good film called Mitch could be made simply about that lonely, complex figure.

Back to Black is essentially a gentle, forgiving film and there are other, tougher, bleaker ways to put Winehouse’s life on screen – but Abela conveys her tenderness, and perhaps most poignantly of all her youth, so tellingly at odds with that tough image and eerily mature voice.