I am at breakfast at Brennan’s, a big old family restaurant in the French Quarter of New Orleans. I’m sipping a brandy milk punch, their cure for a hangover from too many Hurricane cocktails the night before, and I’m supping turtle soup.

Susan Boyle is not afraid to look right at you. It’s a little disarming at first. As her brown eyes pierce me she’s searching for the connection. Communication is important to her.  It’s what drives her, because her whole life has been a miscommunication. She has been misjudged, misunderstood, labelled, bullied.

His eyes are a restful melting brown. He sits tensely in his stiff backed sofa in a Japanese minimalist hotel in Amsterdam. Exhausted from an overnight flight he looks like he needs a fluffy pillow. He’s here to receive a movie award and talk to me about his portrayal of the world’s most seductive animated cat – Puss – full name Puss In Boots, who first appeared in Shrek as an outlaw cat and whose solo movie has been in preparation since 2003.

All Sarah Jessica Parker has to say is ‘How are you?’ and you feel she knows you. She feels like a friend. She’s unfathomably familiar and empathic. Not just because we’ve seen her endlessly as Carrie in Sex And The City but because she has an uncanny ability to relate to vulnerability everywhere: Whether lonely and looking for love in Manhattan, juggling a job, a husband and kids as she did recently in I Don’t Know How She Does It, or as the mother of a rebellious 15-year-old in her new movie New Year’s Eve.

Carrie Fisher’s house is like the witch’s house in Hansel and Gretel. In the winding path leading up to it there are grassy verges with giant toadstools. And on the porch a wooden bird swings with a key in its mouth. There are stained glass churchy looking windows that make the light inside dappled and spooky. There’s a moose head over the fireplace, tan leather couches, vintage tapestry candlewick cushions, oak carved picture frames and owls. One wall is covered in oil paintings of Victorian cats and poodles. Everywhere there’s glass baubles and fairy lights, hand-painted lamps .

The first time I met Julianne Hough she was in sequin hot pants on the set of the ill-fated Burlesque. Even then there was something about her that stood out. She was relentlessly polite and talked with gratitude about her background as a dancer on Dancing With The Stars, America’s Strictly, and as soon as she heard my British accent, she was keen to bond with me about her years spent at Italia Conti in London and how in awe she was of Leona Lewis who was a few years above her. She played up the fact she was an interesting mixture of extremes. Giggling, ‘I’m literally in my bra and panties at the start of that movie. My dad is going to have to cover his eyes.’ Her father and the rest of her family are Mormons from Utah.

Dannii Minogue is wearing a sleek navy dress with a small peplum, newly cropped hair, a fringe which perches over her orbital sparkling blue eyes. She is tiny but alpha. She looks like she’s channelling both Audrey Hepburn and Victoria Beckham, both of whom she honours as style icons in her book Dannii: My Style. The dress is from her own range Project D, a collection that manages to be on trend without being trendy, simple, womanly, marketable. She looks in control at the Stella shoot– she always does – but soft, empathic. A quality which has been emphasised since having her baby Ethan just over a year ago with Kris Smith, rugby player turned model, who she met in a nightclub, Space, in Ibiza in 2008.

Michael Bublé and I are lying on his bed in his suite in the rock and roll hotel the Sunset Marquis in West Hollywood. Bublé likes beds. He often cosies up with his grandparents and sings to them when they’re all lounging on a big bed. He is in jeans and a soft grey T-shirt, striped socks, pale brown eyes, and is not afraid to look at you. He is not afraid for you to see him. When we lie down he cuddles a pillow in front of him. I have seen fat people do that. He’s not fat. He is in part insecure and the rest of him is superbly relaxed .

There is nothing that can give a better glimpse into Michael Jackson himself than meeting his mother Katherine. They have the same whispery high voice. The same hunted look. The same air of a person who has endured much, yet has a sense of naivety. More than anything else there is a feeling that she is not quite of this world. I am inside the Jackson house. The décor is chintzy faux Versailles with moments of 1970s browns and oranges. There are paintings of princesses, lots of sculptures of giant hands, galloping horses and the odd giraffe. There is a Lladro style ornament depicting Michael Jackson holding up the world with doves and children. It’s ornate and sentimental, a bit like Michael.

When I heard that Hugh Jackman’s new movie Real Steel was about giant robots who box to the death I was worried I would hate it. It turns out to be an unexpected delight. Instead of being dull macho, techno, Jackman’s screen charisma manages to fill it with heart, warmth. It’s more about a father son rebuilding their dislocated relationship through the experience of rebuilding a robot. Of course Jackman can give steel warmth. He can give singing and dancing on Broadway machismo. And at his most testosterone fuelled as Wolverine in X-Men, he can give raw vulnerability. He is made up of conflicting extremes.

I am waiting for Jessica Alba in her cutesy cottage-style office in Los Angeles. Her company makes eco-friendly baby paraphernalia, which fits in with her image of über earth mother. I hear the screams of what terms out to be Honor, her three-year-old IMPLORING ‘Mummy, don’t leave me, don’t leave me.’ Alba is unfazed.

Louis Walsh is walking towards me across a quiet restaurant in a Dublin Hotel. Nothing about him looks like Louis Walsh. There’s no naughty twinkle, no smile. There’s a greyness to his skin that comes when people haven’t slept for weeks. He looks like a ghost of Louis Walsh, and at least two stone thinner. We sit down and he confirms that it’s true. “None of my clothes fit me, and I didn’t get to sleep till around 3.30am and I’d taken a sleeping pill.”