Butter wouldn't melt ... Bjork at Live 8 in 2005. Photograph: Shizuo Kambayashi/AP
It was revealed today that the Queen came over all sulky during a session with American portrait photographer Annie Leibovitz (though not as sulky as first appeared). It seems that this right royal tantrum was provoked when Leibovitz instructed her to remove her crown. Reacting in such a fashion, her maj was only obeying one of the time-honoured commandments that govern the behaviour of the rich and famous - exercising the divine right to spit dummy out of pram at the slightest provocation.
Here follows some of my favourite celebrity tantrums. Please feel free to suggest some of your own.
Nothing like a spot of long-haul travel to fray the nerves. So it proved with Bjork as she passed through Suvarnabhumi airport in 1996. Greeted by a French television crew, Iceland's greatest export (puffin pie notwithstanding) hurled herself at reporter Julie Kaufman and proceeded to whale the tar out of her. The reason for Bjork's sudden cat fit? She objected to Kaufman addressing her son, Sindri, with the words, "Welcome to Bangkok."
It never took much to send Frank Sinatra into full-on tantrum mode. One morning he walked into his office at the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas, started screaming and swearing, ripped the telephone out of the wall, broke some windows and set the room on fire. The cause of his annoyance? The colour of the telephone clashed with the new orange sweater that he was wearing. Quite understandable really.
Elton John's hissy fits are a thing of legend. Perhaps the most famous of Reggie's Little Moments occurred in the late 70s when he was staying at The Inn on the Park in London. After staying up all night gorging himself on cockles and cocaine, he was a major huff waiting to happen. Ringing up his office, he tore a lengthy strip off the receptionist who eventually plucked up the courage to enquire what was wrong. "It's too fucking windy outside," Elton raged, "and I want someone to do something about it."
Interviewing the Bee Gees on his chat show in 1997, Clive Anderson was in particularly insolent form. Noting that the band had once considered the name "Les Tosseurs", Anderson quipped, "You'll always be tossers to me". Without further ado, the three Gibb brothers marched out of the studio.
In 1994, reportedly irked that girlfriend Kate Moss had made unflattering remarks about the size of his manhood, Johnny Depp lost his rag and ran amok in the presidential suite at New York's exclusive Mark Hotel. By way of novel excuse, Depp later blamed the extensive damage on, "a dog, a rat, an armadillo and a cockroach the size of a baseball running wild."
Top jazz drummer Buddy Rich had a temper like a hacksaw and it was customary for him to subject members of his band to almighty post-gig bollockings. The most extreme of these tantrums make Derek & Clive routines sound like outtakes from an Enid Blyton audio book.
Michael Winner once checked into a flight at Heathrow airport to find that he was booked into business class rather than his customary first. His dander went up when the check-in clerk refused to meet his demand for a free upgrade. "Do you know who I am?" Winner roared. At which the clerk turned to a colleague and calmly remarked, "Can you help this gentleman? He appears to have forgotten his own name."
In 2005, Russell Crowe's infamous temper blew up when he found himself unable to call home from his Manhattan hotel room. Storming down to reception, he picked up a telephone and lobbed it at the concierge causing, "a laceration and severe pain." Crowe was reportedly sued for $11m but later settled out of court.
According to the sales assistant who tried to serve her, actor Melanie Griffith came over all nuclear in an LA Apple store when informed that there were no pink iPod minis in stock. "I was quite impressed to see her walk into the store," said the assistant. "Then she started using me as a doormat. So I told her that her last movie sucked and that she should get the hell out."
In May 2007, Britney Spears got into a strop on a United Airlines flight en route from LA to Miami. Six minutes before take-off, after loudly berating a stewardess, she demanded to be let off the flight. The reason? The plane did not have leather seats.
