My favourite Diana Ross story:
When staying in a hotel for a longer-than-usual period of time, she would request a fresh bunch of roses every day, and when the new bunch was delivered to her room she would cut the heads off the still pretty fresh old bunch, (and this line I remember exactly from where I read the story) “presumably so that nobody else would be able to enjoy them”.
I have heard that Christopher Reeve was not well liked by some, though I think everyone in the Superman series had good times with him.
And he died a few years ago, and I never heard anything but positive things after that.
Carrot Top is pretty much universally despised.
It’s a fun read:
I forget who the opera diva is - I think it may be Kathleen Battle - who is notorious for being a prima donna with no time for “the little people.” The story I heard, FWIW, was that she was riding in a limo and didn’t like the music on the radio. So she used her cellphone to call her agent, who called the limo firm, which called the chauffeur, to tell him to change the station!
I remember reading this article about her. In particular, I remember this bit, “After her appearances at the San Francisco Opera this season, the backstage crew sported T shirts that read: I SURVIVED THE BATTLE.”
Edited to add, that it mentions the limo story, except it says that she thought the air conditioning was on too much, so that she was cold.
Jose Canseco seemed to get along with other non-baseball celebrities on The Apprentice, but he is much hated in the sport.
Does Tom Cruise drag his Scientologist belief along with him on sets and interviews?
Yes, and if you google “Richard Gere Pretty Woman” you get 674,000 hits.
Not usually, I think. From what I’ve heard, most directors love working with him. Kubrick often avoided “big names” because of their egos, but was highly recommended to put Cruise in Eyes Wide Shut(I think Spielberg recommended him).
[Re Katherine Heigl complaining about sexism in Knocked Up]
Not that I know anything about anyone involved, but I think it’s a lot easier for to say that when you’re Seth Rogan --who’s worked with the director and a good chunk of the cast on a bunch of times already – than if you’re a one-shot actress who’s not best buddies with the director/producer. Again, I don’t know Mr. Rogan, maybe he really would have welcomed feedback, but it’s not hard to imagine a guy who would say that after the fact, but if a woman actually did speak up, would call the woman an uppity b*tch.
I didn’t really think Knocked Up was any more horribly sexist than the next semi-adolescent fart-jokes movie, but this sounds an awful lot like “Gosh, if she didn’t like the sexual harassment, she could have said something. I mean, just because I could have fired and blacklisted her is no reason to keep quiet, right?”
Just because I want to inject some positivity into the thread (sorry if anyone thinks of this as reverse thread-shitting), I’m going to tell this story:
In early spring1994, AIDS Project LA decided to have a big party at the Universal Amphitheatre to recognize and show some appreciation for some of the heavy hitters who had contributed time, talent, money and visibility to the cause of AIDS awareness and research. Eisenberg was there, First Lady Hilary Clinton was there, I think Geffen was there. Lots of musicians and dancers and actors were on hand to perform for the event. For two of the acts, Sarah Brightman and Liza Minnelli, several southern California choral groups were brought in to provide backing vocals. I was in one of them (Orange County’s Pacific Chorale).
We arrived several hours before the event was to begin, and had our rehearsals. We were then sequestered in a huge tent in the parking lot, given cold fried chicken box lunches, and told to get into our performance clothes as best we could (a couple of It Happened One Night-style clothesline-and-blanket partitions were furnished to provide a modicum of privacy as we changed), and then wait until called to file onstage and perform. It was almost stiflingly hot within the tent, and maddeningly, if one looked through gaps in the canvas, one could see a VERY nice reception area set up, with all manner of good things to eat and drink for the celebrity performers and guests. The hours ticked by, and we sat around and stood around and sweated (personally, I was also regretting the box lunch, which had apparently been fried in the most indigestible oil available in the market).
Maybe twenty minutes before we were to be called, Liza Minnelli entered the tent, stood up on a chair, and told us how grateful she was to all of us for what we were doing, and how honored she felt to be performing with us that evening.
It didn’t make me any less hot and sweaty; it didn’t ease my heartburn from the chicken; she could have been blowing smoke up all of our asses; but it was an expression of APPRECIATION that no one else involved with the event had thought to make, and one that I will never forget. To this day, no matter what kind of spectacle she may make of her personal life, no one is allowed to say anything bad about Liza Minnelli to me.
My SIL grew up next to him during the 70’s and says he was the stereotypic, grumpy, “Get off my lawn!” kind of guy. And he used to ride a little minibike around his property while wearing a bathrobe. Go figure.
So, he’s not putting on an act in (Bleep) My Dad Says, then?
My understanding is that Cruise is famously kind to everyone he works with, no matter where they are on the totem pole, and that it’s one of the reasons he’s been so successful.
Anyone who has spent any time in the world of bluegrass has a story about Ralph Stanley being an asshole.
That isn’t to say they’ll tell it. Bluegrass people are immensely respectful of their elders, especially legends like Stanley, and are the types to never say a harsh word about anyone. In fact, I can’t think of any other bluegrass artist I ever worked with who was the least bit unpleasant, and there aren’t many I haven’t spent some time around.
But in moments of honesty, the Dr. Ralph stories start to come out. It’s hard to say if he became such an ass as he got older or if he’s always been that way. (People who have been around for that long certainly aren’t going to talk.) He’s obsessed with cashing in on his legacy, he feels he’s owed a much greater degree of respect than he gets (even if there’s no one in bluegrass who gets more respect), and thinks everyone should be suitably impressed by every little honor anyone bestows on him (hence the “Dr.” thing). He has no problem doing shows under his own name even though his hack son will be doing lead vocals for at least half the show and he’s been too arthritic to play a banjo for almost a decade now. (At least a quarter of the show will be Ralph rambling about his favorite subject, which is the awesomeness of Ralph Stanley.)
[This is my story, by the way.](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=3696127&postcount=53\)
I wonder why you thought that. You sound like the ‘source’, a ‘friend’ of Marv Albert’s who, after Mr. Albert took a few bite out of his girlfriend a few years ago, protested (paraphrasing) “well, I’ve known Marv, and I never saw him biting anyone - heck, he never tried to bite ME”.
Google “William Shatner jerk” and you will get 821,000 results.
I don’t think we can go by Google search results - I googled “earth flat” and got 227,000,000 results. 
The trouble is, you can Google just about anybody + “jerk” and get lots of hits.
I just Googled Tom Cruise, Arnold Schwarzegger, George Clooney and Scarlett Johansson + “jerk” and got the following, respectively:
877,000
1,560,000
625,000
4,080,000
such a bitch? 
The problem is, Google returns hits that have nothing to do with a celebrity’s personal qualities or how they’re regarded in the industry. They return a hit for just any old time that the word “jerk” comes up along with the celebrity’s name, regardless of the reason why it shows up. For example, let’s say Cher calls David Letterman a jerk. Google will return lots of hits on “Cher + jerk”, but many of those hits will be in reference to Letterman.
To show how out of whack this system of assessing personalities is, Rosie O’Donnell produced only 956,00 hits, and I just can’t imagine that Scarlett Johanson is four times as disagreeable as Rosie O’Donnell is.
Oops. I didn’t mean for “such a bitch :D” to show up under the hit count. Editing is sometimes not my friend. 