LOS ANGELES — Anyone following the goings-on of Mary-Kate Olsen in the weekly glossies knows 
that she is 19, that she attends New York University, that she has battled anorexia and that she 
dates a Greek shipping heir.

They also know that she smokes, thanks to the fact that in September alone she has appeared in 
at least three celebrity magazines fishing for a cigarette or holding a Marlboro pack in one hand 
and a cigarette in another while shopping in Los Angeles.

Such images of stars smoking off-screen were relatively rare five years ago, but with the 
proliferation of celebrity magazines and the competition for candid pictures, more shots of celebrities 
smoking are being published, magazine editors, photographers and stars’ publicists say. And with 
smoking bans pushing smokers outdoors, “if you’re going to smoke, you’re going to get caught,” 
said Gary Morgan, a founder of the photo agency Splash News.

It is too early to document whether this kind of exposure can influence young readers to light up, 
but some anti-smoking groups have voiced concern. Overall smoking rates have been down since 
the mid-’90s, but existing research has shown a direct correlation between on-screen smoking and 
the onset of smoking in teenagers. Anti-smoking experts say that seeing celebrities smoking off-screen 
would have the same effect.

One study, by researchers at Dartmouth College, found that adolescents who viewed the most 
smoking in movies were almost three times more likely to take up smoking than those who viewed 
the least.

Anti-smoking groups that track the entertainment industry say the incidence of smoking scenes in 
movies, including those aimed at young people, was the highest in the year ending in April that it 
has been since 1994, and the increasingly common depiction of movie stars smoking in real life 
can only make things worse.

“It says, 'Cool people smoke,’ ” said John P. Pierce, director of the cancer prevention program at 
the cancer center at the University of California, San Diego.

Although paparazzi pictures of celebrities smoking are still the exception to the rule, they are 
becoming almost as routine as shots of actors walking around with cups of coffee or cuddling toy 
chihuahuas. In addition to the photos of Olsen (Star, In Touch, Us Weekly), recent depictions 
have included Leonardo DiCaprio inhaling as he squints from a balcony (People), Kate Hudson 
contemplatively holding a butt at one of her husband’s concerts (Us Weekly) and Kevin Federline 
taking a drag while holding hands with his pregnant wife, Britney Spears (In Touch), who gave 
birth last week.

Cigarettes are an indelible part of the Hollywood culture. On-screen, actors use cigarettes to 
shape a character; off-screen, if they smoke, sometimes it’s their own image they’re embellishing.

“Whether it hurts or helps, it’s largely pegged to your cinematic persona,” said Steven Ross, 
a professor of history at the University of Southern California who has written books on Hollywood 
and its influence on society. “If you have Clint Eastwood smoking, everybody will think he’s manly,” 
he said. “Or a femme fatale, Sharon Stone, people would think it’s sexy. But if you have a clean 
and wholesome image, smoking makes you less wholesome.” Many celebrities would rather keep 
their smoking to themselves. Morgan, of Splash, said teenagers in particular worry about getting 
in trouble with a studio or a network.

“A few times people say, 'Please don’t use a picture of me smoking’ because their core audience 
is teenagers,” he said. “Teenage girls are not supposed to be smoking.”

But those who represent celebrities seem resigned that their clients are going to be seen smoking 
because of the pursuit of photographers and the celebrity news media.

“It’s part and parcel of this insane celebrity infatuation,” said the publicist Ken Sunshine, whose 
clients include DiCaprio and Ben Affleck, a favorite paparazzi target who most recently was 
described in Us Weekly as stopping “for two cigarettes while his pregnant wife hit the restroom” 
at a Wendy’s.

Michael Pagnotta, a spokesman for Olsen and her twin sister, Ashley, said smoking was a private 
choice, and “you have to respect that.”

Stanton A. Glantz, director of the Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education at the 
University of California, San Francisco, said celebrities should be aware of the influence they can 
have on young fans, adding that magazines are culpable, too. “There’s also an editorial decision 
made to show the picture of people smoking,” he said. “They’re all playing a role.”

Editors and photographers, however, said that pictures of famous smokers is not something they 
set out to get or show. One reason for the higher profile of cigarettes, some suggested, is that 
many newsmakers – the ubiquitous Lindsay Lohan, for instance – belong to a young, partying 
Hollywood that also happens to fall in the college age group, with one of the highest proportions 
of smokers (24 percent).

Joe Dolce, editor-in-chief of Star, said that 70 percent of the photos that run in the magazine 
are street shots, and “I only show people doing what they do.”

Of his responsibility to his readers, who he said tend to be women in their late 20s and early 30s, 
“I’m not a moral arbiter,” he said. “The readers are smart enough. If they choose to smoke, they 
understand the consequences.” But Larry Hackett, deputy managing editor at People, said his 
publication has run only three such pictures so far this year because “we do try to avoid it at all costs.”

“We’re sensitive to the notion that it might encourage some people to do it,” he said. Officials 
with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and prevention say the prevalence of cigarette smoking 
among middle- and high-school students has not changed much from 2002 to 2004 after dramatic 
drops – it stands at 8 percent for middle-school students and 22 percent for high-schoolers – 
and they cite among the factors slowing the rate of decline the frequency of smoking in film.

Various efforts are afoot to counter smoking in movies. Glantz at UC, San Francisco, has led a 
project, Smoke Free Movies, that won the support of the American Medical Association and 
public health advocates in seeking that any movie that shows tobacco use get an automatic 
R rating and for anti-smoking ads to run beforehand. The group also wants to prevent tobacco 
companies from benefiting from product identification by banning the showing of cigarette 
brands on films. (Under a 1998 agreement that limits how tobacco companies can market 
cigarettes, product placement is no longer allowed.)

So far the efforts have gained no traction in Hollywood because of censorship concerns. 
Directors and writers said smoking usually fits the needs of the character and film. But in
  “Scene Smoking: Cigarettes, Cinema & the Myth of Cool,” a 2001 American Lung Association 
documentary about smoking in film and television, Rob Reiner, the director and actor, noted 
that much of the on-screen smoking stems from the fact that the actors in the film smoke 
themselves. “Usually what it is, is that the actor in real life smokes, so he finds a way of utilizing 
his addiction,” he said.

In the documentary, Jack Klugman, who portrayed cigar-smoker Oscar Madison in “The Odd Couple” 
and was a smoker himself who suffered from oral cancer, spoke of the unintended powers of fame. 
He said he got hooked after seeing his idol, actor John Garfield, smoke. He mimicked him to the point 
that “I took the drags like he did, I threw away the cigarette like he did, I held it in the way he did.”

“He not only influenced me,” Klugman said in a raspy, barely audible voice. “I smoked like him.”