We all enjoy our privacy, but some celebrities really enjoy it. These infamous recluses completely disappeared from the public eye.
ATI CompositeFrom left: Emily Dickinson, J.D. Salinger, and Stanley Kubrick.
When we think of infamous recluses, the story of Howard Hughes is often the first that comes to mind. In 1947, the eccentric aviation genius and movie producer locked himself in a screening room for four months eating chocolate bars and drinking milk while living in his own filth. His lifestyle wouldn’t get any less strange over the next several decades.
However, stories like Hughes’ aren’t all that uncommon among those who live their lives in the public eye.
Like the great aviator, all of the famous people below have lived as hermits at one point or another. For them, whether they hated the constant attention or were simply extreme introverts, they took their quest for solitude to some truly extraordinary heights.
Bettie Page
Gerard Van der Leun/Flickr
The titillating, black-banged pinup queen was one of the most photographed people of the 20th century. She helped spearhead the American sexual revolution, moving from a (mostly) innocent lingerie model to bondage and S&M fetish photoshoots.
Then in 1957, she abruptly retired and went into seclusion, becoming one of the most famous recluses of her time. Her life became so secretive for so long that many were surprised to hear of her passing in 2008 because they believed that she was already dead.
What was Bettie Page up to all this time? As it turns out, she moved to Florida and became a born-again Christian. However, the new religion didn’t mix well with her developing paranoid schizophrenia.
On three different occasions, Page assaulted or threatened acquaintances or family members with knives. At least two of these times she claims that God inspired her to do it. As a result, she spent some time in a mental institution, furthering her seclusion from the rest of the world.
She remained a recluse until her death, only making one public appearance, in 2003. The occasion? Playboy’s 50th-anniversary party.
Stanley Kubrick
Thierry Ehrmann/Flickr
The enigmatic director of such films as A Clockwork Orange and 2001: A Space Odyssey had an undeniable reputation for reclusiveness. Stanley Kubrick was an artist of great privacy who detested the Hollywood publicity machine.
In fact, Kubrick did everything he could to get away from the glitz including a permanent move to the U.K. In 1978, he moved to Childwickbury Manor in Hertfordshire where he would spend the majority of his time until his death in 1999.
The 18th-century building was a giant complex where he could exercise all of his creativity, housing all of the director’s research (of which there was plenty) as well as numerous sketches and photographs.
Kubrick’s refusal to grant interviews made him so inaccessible to those outside his inner circle that an impostor was famously able to impersonate him in the press because so few had actually seen the genuine article.
While Kubrick hated to be photographed and embodied the very definition of “private,” he was not without friends who would attest to his character. Jack Nicholson states that Kubrick was “…very much a family man” and actor pal Matthew Modine recalls, “he was just a menschy Jewish kid from the Bronx who was hiding behind a curtain.”
After Kubrick died in 1999, he was buried on the grounds of Hertfordshire. The family respected his legacy of privacy, allowing only about 100 people to attend the funeral.
