The female celebrity smoking list

Welcome to Back of the Napkin, musings from Serviette for the cultured world. Today, a corner of the internet devoted to one of cinema’s increasingly endangered props: the cigarette.

Among the many comprehensive crowdsourced lists that exist online is a particular boon: The Female Celebrity Smoking List. It is a website—now only accessible via The Wayback Machine—of such magnificent specificity that encountering it feels a little like discovering an obsessive stranger’s filing cabinet left unlocked. (One can disapprove of cigarettes and still admire the scholarship. Taste, after all, has always depended on paying unusually close attention to things other people might dismiss as trivial.)

It catalogues, alphabetically, a list of actresses who have publicly admitted to or have been observed smoking. On a certain celebrity’s page, evidence is organized by her preferred cigarette brand and miscellaneous information, followed by “proof she has smoked (or quit) ‘in real life’”—a detailed list of press coverage and quotes that allude to her habits. The distinction between smoking on screen and smoking “in real life” is treated with something approaching scholarly rigor.

Winona Ryder, for example, smokes in the following films (and not just these):

Celebrity (1998) (smoking review)

Darwin Awards, The (2006) (smoking review)

Girl, Interrupted (1999) (smoking review)

Heathers (1989) (smoking review)

How to Make an American Quilt (1995) (smoking review)

They are all followed by a “smoking review,” which is a thrilling critique of how and when the actress in question smokes in a scene. “No visible exhales. Looks very IRL,” reads a portion of the critique for her cigarette’s cameo in Celebrity (1998). “Griffith has one good drag, Neuwirth smokes with a holder, often biting on it when not puffing. Ryder has three great scenes, with some nose exhales and smoke talk.”

There is also a list of photos of her smoking. Ryder apparently gave up smoking in March 1995, according to The Guardian. But she was back on the cancer sticks soon after. “‘I’m sick of this ‘Winona smokes’ thing,” Ryder told USA Today in Apr. ’97. “I smoke like once in a while socially.”

If you’ve read this far and are still wondering “Why this, of all topics?” There is something reassuring about discovering that someone has bothered to preserve all of this. The internet was once exceptionally good at producing archives no sensible institution would think to commission: fan pages, lists, databases. The Female Celebrity Smoking List belongs to that noblest tradition.

There are worse habits than paying too much attention. Sometimes that means determining whether Winona Ryder’s inhale in Celebrity looked “very IRL,” a judgment that sounds frivolous until you realize it is also a tiny act of preservation, fixing a gesture before it disappears into the general blur of cinematic memory.