All posts tagged: Lena

Lena Dunham Has Welcomed Her First Child Via Surrogate

Lena Dunham Has Welcomed Her First Child Via Surrogate

Lena Dunham has revealed she’s welcomed her first child – a baby girl – via surrogate. The Girls creator wrote about her journey to parenthood alongside her husband, Luis Felber, in an op-ed for Vogue published on Wednesday. The Famesick author has been candid over the years about her reproductive health struggles, including a yearslong battle with endometriosis and undergoing a hysterectomy. The 40-year-old said her daughter arrived 13 days late “in the face of a solar eclipse and a meteor shower”. “I sat on a hospital bed, between the legs of a woman I hadn’t known a year ago, waiting for a glimpse of this person who I had been waiting for with something related to patience, but also none at all,” she wrote. “I was so focused on our surrogate – in awe at her concentration, her period of quiet followed by what sounded like a roar – I forgot to look down until I heard our baby’s cry. I saw her face, gasping just as she did,” Dunham recalled, saying her midwife …

Lena Headey: 'Before Intimacy Co-Ordinators, I Was Thrown To The Wolves'

Lena Headey: 'Before Intimacy Co-Ordinators, I Was Thrown To The Wolves'

Lena Headey has claimed she was “thrown to the wolves” when she was starting out as an actor Over the last decade, intimacy co-ordinators have become increasingly commonplace on the sets of TV shows and films, helping actors and directors navigate scenes involving sex or nudity, which might put them in vulnerable situations. These co-ordinators became more prevalent in the 2010s, in light of the Me Too movement, which saw women calling out the industry-wide harassment, misconduct and abuse that had gone unchecked for decades prior. While these are crew members who traditionally stay in the background, in Lena Headey’s new series Intimacy, she’s dragging the subject right to the forefront. In the eight-part BBC Sounds audio drama – which she also directed and wrote – Lena portrays Liza Simmons, a former actor who has taken a step back from the industry after a troubling experience, to retrain as a therapist and, later, an intimacy co-ordinator. However, when working on a new project, Liza is unexpectedly reunited with a figure from her past, causing her to …

Lena Dunham, ‘Famesick,’ and the Limits of Self-Exposure

Lena Dunham, ‘Famesick,’ and the Limits of Self-Exposure

Recently, idly researching, I happened upon a Vanity Fair video from about a decade ago in which a 29-year-old Lena Dunham, wearing a shiny olive blazer with her cropped hair swept into a quiff, speculates what the future will bring. “In 2025, I think that feminism is no longer a dirty word,” she says confidently. “I think that we’re probably on our second female president? If our president’s not female, they’re definitely down with calling themselves a feminist because they recognize it’s the sexy thing to do and it’s gonna get them laid. Our first female president’s gonna be Hillary Clinton, unless there’s a real last-minute dash by Viola Davis.” It might be enough to make you weep: the blithe optimism, the cutesy cheek, the Buzzfeed-esque title (“Lena Dunham: 8 Thoughts on Feminism”), the corporate–meets–Hot Topic styling, the ease with which Dunham proclaims that things will only get better. Were we ever so young? When the video was published, Dunham’s precocious HBO show, Girls, was heading into its penultimate season, its creator having long since …