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The first time Googoosh was asked to write a memoir, the request came from Iran’s Islamic Republic interrogators. Their goal was for the pop superstar to relay a “cautionary tale.” This, of course, did not sit right with the beloved diva who was the Olivia Newton-John of Iran’s music world until the Islamic Republic of Iran was established in 1979 — and all female performers were banned from singing in public.
“I didn’t want to cooperate with them,” Googoosh tells me as she reflects on the sham memoir the agents tried to get her to write. “I hated to tell my story to them.” Decades after refusing to put her name on a government-sanctioned lie, Iran’s biggest pop star has finally broken her silence. Her new book, “Googoosh: A Sinful Voice,” was not a choice, she writes, but a “necessary duty.”
The lyrical story chronicles her life from birth to the present, including Googoosh’s four marriages and moments of joy and despair spent under decades of house arrest while Tehran was rocked by war. It’s shockingly candid, revealing multiple abortions, drug abuse (including her own) and chilling moments of suicidal ideation. “If people hate me when they read it, it’s OK. That was my life,” Googoosh says. She asserts she didn’t want to write something just to be pleasant. She also considers her home country tenderly, and in her book notes, “Iran is part of my being. You can take Googoosh out of Iran, but you can’t take Iran out of Googoosh.”
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Googoosh’s book chronicles her life from birth to the present, including her four marriages and moments of joy and despair spent under decades of house arrest in Tehran.
(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)
Faegheh “Googoosh” Atashin was born in 1950 in Tehran to parents who were Azerbaijani Iranians. Googoosh wasn’t even potty-trained when she began performing as a toddler at cabarets as orchestrated by her showman father. She was mostly self-taught, imitating other famous singers. Soon she was in films and by the ’70s she was Iran’s most famous pop export, performing on international stages alongside Ray Charles and Tina Turner. Her infectious vocals, whether upbeat disco bops or heartwrenching ballads, became imprinted on the national consciousness. Ultimately her career was cut short. She writes: “The revolution swept across my homeland like a raging storm, unraveling the delicate fabric of a world once interwoven with tradition, modernity, and poetry. Almost overnight, the shimmering parties, the premieres of daring boundary-pushing films, and the intoxicating rhythm of music and freedom were replaced by fear, uncertainty, and darkness.”
On a recent fall afternoon, I met with Googoosh and her co-writer, Tara Dehlavi, on Zoom. Googoosh appears as chic as ever with her signature honey-gold hair slicked to the side and impeccable Covergirl-worthy shimmery makeup that makes the 75-year-old look decades younger. Googoosh mentions many famous writers over the years have reached out wanting to work with her on a memoir, but Dehlavi is not a known writer; she’s instead a soft-spoken 39-year-old former clinical psychologist whose exile from Iran has placed her in France most of her life.
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“I said let’s write it in English,” Dehlavi tells me. She adds the reason she wanted Googoosh to write her memoir was that so much of it was untold, including how at age 50 she made a miraculous comeback. “I proposed, let’s please share your story with the world … and future generations. Because there have been many documentaries made about you but nothing from you yourself,” Dehlavi says.
(Brian Bowen Smith/Simon & Schuster)
Googoosh places full responsibility for the memoir’s existence on Dehlavi. “With Tara, I opened my heart,” she says. “I was free to talk about myself.”
Since settling in the West in 2000 — first Canada, then Los Angeles where she still resides — Googoosh has enjoyed multiple tours, including performances at the Hollywood Bowl, Madison Square Garden and the Sydney Opera House. Her fame is as solid as ever, thanks to a loyal diaspora full of fans old and new. Last spring, not only did she star in Ed Sheeran’s music video “Azizam” (she appears in the final seconds, where Sheeran is launched from the endless festivities of his Persiophile fever dream back into the recording studio. There, Googoosh tells him in Persian, ‘Azizam, let’s go write a hit song, hurry up!’), the song was released a week later with her vocals for a Persian version. Like everything she touches, it was a huge hit.
Googoosh admits her star has not yet dimmed, not even in her 70s. “For 21 years they closed the bottle, and all of a sudden, the bottle is opened and [out] I popped!” Googoosh says with her signature smile as one of her beloved Pomeranians pops up on her lap.
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It turns out Dehlavi was the perfect person to have asked her to chronicle her life — and perhaps the only one who could have gotten that eventual yes. “Actually her mom is my very best friend from when she was 13 years old,” Googoosh says. “They are a part of my family.”
Dehlavi did not expect to be a key part of the team, a project that would essentially encompass the whole of her 30s, but it’s clear this would not have gotten done without her. “There were times where I jokingly felt I was worse than the interrogators in Evin [Prison],” she says. “But I just wanted to be the project manager on this. … I just got scared if we found a ghostwriter, her voice would get lost in translation and so I got more and more protective of that voice. I was just like a bodyguard — I can’t just let anyone take Googoosh’s voice as the narrator.”
As a protector of Googoosh’s story, she recalls double-checking if the star really wanted to share some more revealing anecdotes. “She was like, ‘We’re either going to write this memoir or we’re not,’” Dehlavi says. “Just like in her art, where she goes all in, and feels the lyrics, the words, the music, it was the same with this book. She was like — I either speak or I stay quiet and I don’t write this.”
In their decade of drafting, Dehlavi and Googoosh wrote two other versions of the book until they got to this one — the version that finally felt right.
Googoosh admits her star has not yet dimmed, not even in her 70s.
(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)
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The result is a memoir that is poignant without being distractingly ornate. Chronological chapters are interspersed with glimpses into Googoosh’s horrific time incarcerated in an Islamic Revolutionary Court makeshift prison, where she was among detainees who at times looked to her legacy, and songs, for light amongst the turmoil. The book operates in a similar way as we journey to what we know is a happy ending — Googoosh getting her voice back to not just sing again but to tell us this long-awaited story.
“I was thinking my story was not important for people, especially for foreigners,” Googoosh shares with me. “But I was wrong.”
One of the most moving parts of the book is how it ends, with the specter of a protest slogan linked with Iranian women’s rights activism, “Woman, Life, Freedom,” alluded to, adding to the noble grandeur and potent ambition you somehow sense throughout the project. Dehlavi agrees. “I think both Googoosh and I through her story and through her memories knew that inevitably it would shine light on the struggle of women in Iran,” she says.
In the final pages, Googoosh notes that women in Iran are currently not allowed to record music or sing solo in front of a male audience. She writes with the same aching longing you hear in her ballads, the acknowledgement of pain, but the steadfast belief in something bigger and better — in this case, her “hope that my story can break down the silence that surrounds my people’s plight, especially our women. I pray that very soon, they, too, will have reclaimed their voices.”
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Khakpour was born in Iran and raised in Greater Los Angeles. She is the author of five books, including most recently, “Tehrangeles.”
A family and friends gather for a naming-day ceremony at a Danish seaside hotel, but an unexpected appearance by one uninvited attendee (Trine Dyrholm) ruptures the veil of bland, happy-clappy familial unity in director Mads Mengel’s gutsy, well-wrought debut feature, The Guest.
The most audacious move here may be Mengel and co-screenwriter Christian Bengtson’s choice to write something that will inevitably invite comparisons with Festen (The Celebration), arguably the most notorious Danish-language film of the last 30 years, which similarly revolved around a bougie gathering disrupted by angry revelations. But there’s a savvy 2026 vibe about the way the film refuses to create florid melodrama out of quotidian crisis, and instead observes with generosity as the characters grope awkwardly toward emotional détente and mutual forgiveness.
The Guest
The Bottom Line
When wetting the baby’s head goes too far.
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Venue: Karlovy Vary Film Festival Cast: Simon Bennebjerg, Trine Dyrholm, Josephine Park, Peter Gantzler, Petrine Agger, Mette Klakstein Wiberg, Kristine Kujath Thorp, Buster Lund Luscher Director: Mads Mengel Screenwriter: Christian Bengtson, Mads Mengel
1 hour 40 minutes
Festen-alumnus Dyrholm, having a bit of a career moment with outstanding performances both here and in the recent The Girl With the Needle among others, leads a uniformly excellent cast in a work that deserves celebration on the festival circuit and beyond.
Dyrholm’s Vibeke is technically the first person we meet, although she’s seen only in shadow at first as she smokes and drives while her unattached seatbelt, caught outside by a closed door, clatters on the road. This is the kind of unsafe driving her son Karl (Simon Bennebjerg) so deplores, a point of contention later on in the story when he will steal her car keys in interest of her own safety and that of others.
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But well before we get to that flashpoint, the film introduces Karl, effectively the film’s protagonist, as he arrives at the swanky resort with his wife Emilie (Mette Klakstein Wiberg) and their infant son Elliot (Buster Lund Luscher). The young family, who’ve chosen this new, secular tradition instead of a christening to welcome their child to the world, are there a day before the ceremony to meet up with core family members.
As this advance party settles down for dinner, a table that includes Karl’s sister Rikke (Josephine Park) and Emilie’s parents Frank (Peter Gantzler) and Kirsten (Petrine Agger), there’s a surprise: Vibeke is coming, courtesy of Rikke’s invitation. Karl is quietly furious and seems determined to turn her away, even when she shows up minutes later. Poor Frank and Kirsten look on confused, determinedly polite in their insistence that all family members should be welcome.
Bengtson and Mengel’s economical script carefully dripfeeds backstory as the film unfolds to explain that Karl hasn’t spoken to his mother in years, that Rikke has taken over all the daily mom management and that she’s very worn out by it. Even so, she insists Vibeke is regularly taking her medication and isn’t a problem these days, although to Karl every weird anecdote and moment of emotional intensity is an augur of impending chaos. Rikke counters that their mother is just “big, that’s her personality not her condition.”
Interestingly, that specific condition is never named throughout, although armchair diagnosticians might spot many of the signs of bipolar disorder. But the film’s emotional focus on the person and her actions rather than the label is also very contemporary, reflecting a more holistic, inclusive mindset and approach to dealing with mental health issues.
Which is all fine and dandy, until Vibeke duly does skip a dosage and starts getting manic. One of the first signs of chemical imbalance arrives during the ceremony on the beach, when Vibeke carries little Elliot much further away from the shore than anyone wants, creating a panic. From there it just gets worse as Vibeke picks up on the censorious feeling emerging from the other party guests, who had found her so charming the night before when she’d led everyone to the casino to play roulette and diverted a bunch of partying teenagers from the room next to Karl and Emilie so they could get some sleep. When the toasts at the formal dinner begin, Vibeke’s mood darkens much further, and if we’ve all learned one thing from Festen, it’s be very afraid when a Dane gets up to make a toast.
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Cinematographer David Bauer’s nimble-footed lensing and use of natural light does indeed hark back considerably to the look of those Dogme 95 movies back in the day, as does the naturalistic editing style deployed by Louis Emil Ramm Seeberg. But there are plenty of sins against the rules of cinematic chastity that marked that movement, such as the ample space made for Lasse Aagaard’s affecting, low-key score that amps up the anxiety as Vibeke starts to spiral.
That said, Mengel keeps things simple in sonic terms when it really counts, letting the musicality of Dyrholm’s deep, sonorous voice ring out on its own in the big monologue scenes. She is, as ever, utterly mesmerizing but the performance is made even more powerful by the muted, expressive reactions of the rest of the cast as they look on, frozen like deer in the headlights of the car crash of pseudo-christening. Moments of levity puncture the gloom, but the final feeling is one of numbed sorrow and pity for all these kind, fallible people, just trying to do their best.
Rhea Seehorn was nervous about whether “Pluribus” would be recognized by Emmy voters Wednesday when nominations were announced. So she was jubilant when she and the surreal sci-series on Apple TV scored 18 nominations, the most for a first-year drama.
“I’m just so grateful,” the actor said in a phone interview. “People were like, ‘Why were you nervous?’ Honestly, you never actually know. I’m just so thrilled for the show, my co-stars, the production design, the editing, the writing, the music, the sound. I haven’t moved from my couch since they first announced everything because I’m still trying to call everybody on the show.”
Seehorn received a nomination for lead actress in a drama series for her portrayal of cynical Carol Sturka, a fantasy romance author who finds herself in a mystifying situation after a virus seems to have wiped out most of Earth’s population. The series was created by Vince Gilligan, who created the acclaimed series “Breaking Bad” and co-created its spinoff “Better Call Saul,” which also featured Seehorn.
The actor compared her experience of being nominated for “Pluribus” to “Better Call Saul,” which earned her two supporting actress nominations: “ ‘Better Call Saul’ was such a family that supported and cheered each other on, and I’m so grateful I have that environment again. People could not be happier for each other, and we get to celebrate the show together.”
She added, “The only part that feels different is that it’s my first nomination as a lead. It’s the process of Vince writing this for me and seeing the mountain which he wanted me to climb and going through that process. The whole thing has been its own journey, so ending up with awards and nominations, and being so well received by critics and fans is not lost on me.”
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The series has been applauded for its mix of drama, comedy and strangeness in its portrait of a woman coming to terms to what seems like an impossible dilemma.
“I love the storytelling, how much Vince and I would drill down on making this as authentic as we could in terms of an everyman who has to deal with an insane situation,” Seehorn said. “Most of us are just not heroic or leaping off the couch to go save the world. And Carol is dealing with immense grief and confusion in an utter dystopian crisis. I love the humor and the drama that comes out of us being as realistic as we can with her amidst an unrealistic event.”
Fans of “Pluribus” have been relentlessly curious since the finale in December about when the second season will launch.
“I don’t know anything about that,” Seehorn said. “I don’t have to keep secrets because I’m not great at keeping them, and I know nothing. I don’t know what I’m doing with an atom bomb in the driveway. I can’t wait to find out. The writers want to have the same quality and reward the intelligence of the fans and never phone a single thing in. So their process is their process.”
In a roundabout way, the fact that I don’t have a strong attachment to The Wizard of Oz as a film (my late mother loved it, so that memory is deeply rooted in me, but the movie itself never did much for me) contributed directly to how amusing I found Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass to be. This comedy spoofs the plot of the classic fantasy movie, though the jokes are largely about Hollywood. The humor is big and broad, with some of the jokes really landing. Others? Not so much. Still, more than enough do to warrant a recommendation.
Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass gets a lot of mileage out of sending up show business, even if the observations, while funny, are not particularly new. Besides the deluge of jokes, there’s also a lot of likably broad characters to spend time with, especially our lead. They make the 90 minutes and change spent together with them go down very easy.
Sony Pictures Classics
For Gail Daughtry (Zoey Deutch), her life as a small town hairdresser is perfect. Engaged to her high school sweetheart Tom (Michael Cassidy), she’s the picture of happiness, at least until a trip to a celebrity book signing. There, Tom meets and ends up sleeping with his “celebrity pass,” a term Gail wasn’t even really previously aware of. Feeling betrayed, Gail impulsively joins her co-worker and friend Otto (Miles Gutierrez-Riley) on a trip to Los Angeles. There, a psychic convinces her that the can save her marriage by sleeping with her own celebrity pass: Jon Hamm (Jon Hamm).
Journeying through Tinseltown in a manner that recalls Dorothy’s adventure in Oz, Gail and Otto won’t have to find Hamm alone. Joining forces with talent agency assistant Caleb (Ben Wang), down on his luck paparazzo Vincent (Ken Marino), and actor John Slattery (John Slattery). As they search for Hamm, some for their own purposes, they meet other celebrities, while also being hunted by a group of Italian assassins after a case of mistaken identity. Eventually, they come across Hamm, and the moment of truth is at hand.
Sony Pictures Classics
Zoey Deutch dives headfirst into a broad comedy like this, absolutely relishing the opportunity to get silly again. She’s able to make Gail a babe in the woods but also someone you laugh with, not at. It’s a wildly enjoyable turn. Deutch started out in comedies and was always a talented comedic actress, so it’s a pleasure to watch her back at it. Miles Gutierrez-Riley and Ben Wang get some very funny moments, while Ken Marino is a reliable comic presence. Jon Hamm and John Slattery are delighted to be sending up themselves, with amusing results. Supporting players here, in addition to Michael Cassidy, also include Kerri Kenney, Richard Kind, Thomas Lennon, Joe Lo Truglio, Fred Melamed, and more, plus some cameos.
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Filmmaker David Wain, again co-writing with Ken Marino, continues to make it look easy. Few can make a silly comedy like Marino and Wain, especially as they pack their flicks with extra bits that only subsequent viewings reveal. Is Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass on the same level as Wet Hot American Summer or They Came Together? No, not quite. At the same time, is this, scattershot approach and all, funnier than most other 2026 releases? You bet. Marino and Wain have a hit rate that allows some of the jokes to miss, as you only have seconds to wait before the next one, which probably will hit.
Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass is very amusing, and occasionally hilarious, even if not as many jokes land as you might expect. Zoey Deutch is great in the lead role, David Wain is in his comfort zone, and the laughs come hot and heavy. If you’re a Wain fan, this new movie should be a must see.
Sony Pictures Classics
Sony Pictures Classics
