Is there anything more galling than a celebrity activist? We all know the type: the bajillionaire who flits in their private jet from one or another of their collection of mansions scattered on multiple continents, to take to the stage and scold us about consumerism or climate change. The gazillionaire for whom the average worker’s wage is a rounding error on their tax return, hectoring us to donate to their pet cause.
AC/DC singer Brian Johnson had a gutsful of these well-heeled finger-waggers: “When I was a working man, I didn’t want to go to a concert for some bastard to talk down to me that I should be thinking of some kid in Africa.” Just spend some of your own vast wealth, Johnson admonished. Ordinary people can’t afford it: celebrities can.
Above all, they should shut the hell up about it.
As it happens, many celebrities who aren’t Bono or Bob Geldof did and do just that: they quietly and generously use their wealth to benefit others without constantly hogging publicity for it.
One such was the late George Michael.
Not only did he secretly donate sales of some of his songs to charity, but he also often worked undercover at homeless shelters and once gave a stranger £25,000 to cover their debt after overhearing her conversation.
When Lynette Gillard went on the game show Deal or No Deal, she talked about how she wanted money to fund IVF treatment after trying unsuccessfully to conceive for 13 years. The next day, a caller to Channel 4 offered to stump up the full 15 grand, on condition of anonymity. Gillard gave birth to a baby boy, Seth Logan George Hart, on the very day George Michael passed away – and the secret of his donation was leaked.
Michael also volunteered at a homeless shelter, again asking for anonymity, as well as setting up a trust fund to provide grants to disabled children and adults. He also donated the royalties from his 1996 hit “Jesus To A Child” to the charity Childline, and more: “Over the years he gave us millions,” said Childline founder Esther Rantzen.
Everyone’s favourite, Keanu Reeves, is also known for his quiet generosity.
The John Wick star runs a private charitable foundation that aims to help positive projects like cancer research and kids’ hospital wards. However, he hardly ever speaks about it.
“I have a private foundation that's been running for five or six years, and it helps aid a couple of children’s hospitals and cancer research,” Keanu said in a Ladies Home Journal article from 2009.
“I don’t like to attach my name to it: I just let the foundation do what it does.”
Reeves also famously gifted Harley Davidsons to crew on The Matrix when he found out how little they were paid and has turned down multiple lucrative roles in Marvel films – while jumping at the chance to cameo as a talking tumbleweed on The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge on the Run.
Here in Tasmania, former ’60s pop idol Ronnie Burns for many years ran a refuge for traumatised children on the property he owned near Cradle Mountain. Movie star Christian Bale has established a similar development in California.
The development is designed with a powerful objective: making sure brothers and sisters in foster care don’t have to be separated. That’s a big deal because studies show that more than half of foster children with siblings end up separated, and in some cases, the number can be as high as 80 per cent. For children already facing the trauma of leaving their parents, losing their siblings too can be devastating.
“And so you imagine the trauma of that, you know? But added trauma to being taken from your parents, and then you lose your siblings, you know, that’s just something that we shouldn’t be doing,” Bale said in an interview with CBS Sunday Morning.
The project includes 12 homes for families, two studio apartments for young adults transitioning out of foster care, a citrus grove and garden, play areas, and a large community center packed with resources – a learning lab, multipurpose rooms for activities, offices for case managers, and even a full kitchen for shared meals […]
The village is expected to open early next year, with trained foster parents ready to provide care for the children who move in.
And he’s not making us endure some insufferable, back-slapping concert or godawful charity single to pay for it.
