Women we love to love and women we love to hate

Why is it that Jennifer Lawrence, Michelle Obama and Adele get all the love, while Anne Hathaway, Taylor Swift and Peaches Geldof get it in the neck?

Famous women we love to love: Michelle Obama, Jennifer Lawrence, Meryl Streep, Mila Kunis and Adele. Photographs: Rex Features; Getty Images

As the dust begins to settle on awards season, it becomes clear that some famous women get a lot more love than others. Rightly or wrongly, there are those whom everyone wants to make their instant best friend, and those who get it in the neck. Why is Adele so robustly likable, while the equally successful Taylor Swift often comes across like a wounded deer? Why would so many of us run into the nearest pub to neck shots with Jennifer Lawrence, and leave Anne Hathaway waiting in the car? Using deeply scientific methodology, we've uncovered the reasons behind this puzzling phenomenon.

Five women we love to love

Meryl Streep

The thing is, you don't always want a celeb to be "down to Earth" or "just like us". Mariah Carey's need for a staff member to carry her drink and prop up the bendy bit of her straw is what makes me love her so much. In politicians, it might be unbecoming to live a life of gross opulence, but showbiz is different. Which is why some journalists were so distraught when Meryl Streep, promoting The Iron Lady, baked them a pie and washed up afterwards. A small screening was held for some female writers, after which Meryl got out the Marigolds in the kitchen of a house in Islington. "You're Meryl Streep!" they tried to say to her. "We love you! We want our most fabulous movie stars to live massively glamorous lives that we cannot begin to dream of! Roll your sleeves back down and please take my chair!" Then again, Streep was equally resplendent in a recently released image with Hillary Clinton, her arm around the former secretary of state, trying to take a photo of the pair of them on her iPhone. The fact is that neither rubber gloves nor mobile phone selfies can lessen the dignity of Streep. Such joie de vivre, coupled with such accomplishment, makes her a goddess.

Jennifer Lawrence

Since the Oscars, there is one question whispered in the dark corners of Hollywood more than any other. And that is: has Jennifer Lawrence been out for a Bacardi Breezer with Jack Nicholson yet? If you haven't seen the footage of the 22-year-old being chatted up by the veteran actor after she won the best actress Oscar, then get thee to YouTube immediately. Her face! Her hands! Her shocked howl! While you're there, you might as well watch every other clip of her from the ceremony: tripping on her dress, or bewildered by the red carpet fashion people. The press conference at which she admits she's a bit too sloshed to focus on the questions, only to get brilliantly annoyed when somebody asks if winning the Oscar means she's peaked too soon. (Somehow, her annoyed response is also very warm.) Everything seems so unrehearsed and so genuinely funny, as if she had somehow slipped this far through the film industry without anyone remembering to put her name down for media training. I mean, really – maybe she has? I don't know anybody who watched that and didn't want to become Jen's best friend as a matter of some urgency.

Michelle Obama

After Michelle Obama had her hair cut into a trendy fringe, she pointed at her forehead and told a CNN reporter, "This is my midlife crisis, the bangs. I couldn't get a sports car, and they won't let me bungee jump." Oh, you can just imagine her and Barry O together, exuding droll wit as they snuggle up by the fire in the White House den, wondering how to deal with the latest insurgency from their pesky kids that they just love so goddamn much. And as for the healthy eating campaign, given that half the food sold in the US appears to be fashioned purely from E numbers and polystyrene, that's not a twee first lady hobby, that's humanitarian crisis work. She also gets away with doing dance routines with Tina Fey on Saturday Night Live because, unlike David Cameron for example, she can actually dance. Yet you can also fully believe her when she says, "I never cut class. I loved getting As, I liked being smart. I liked being on time. I thought being smart is cooler than anything in the world." And thus the geek shall inherit the Earth. (We aren't even going to mention her arms. Those high-fiving, fist-bumping, glorious arms.)

Mila Kunis

Because you can just imagine her wanging out to World of Warcraft, the game she plays online, anonymously, against total strangers (she had to stop using the voice command after somebody recognised her). Because she was recently interviewed by a bumbling boy from Radio 1 who asked if she would go to the pub with his mates in Watford and she was all, hell, why not, I'm the person who says yes to everything – what are we drinking? She went on to lecture him about beer. (Famously, she also went to a Marine Corps ball in North Carolina after a soldier, then serving in Afghanistan, put a video on YouTube asking her to be his date.) Because her Ukrainian family left the Soviet Union to move to LA when she was seven, to escape communism and antisemitism, and she describes her first day at her American state school as making her feel deaf and blind. Because she joined an after-school acting class for fun and realised that everyone in LA was beautiful so she'd better work on her comic timing instead. Because she criticises the Republican party, saying things like, "I may not be a practising Jew, but why we gotta talk about Jesus all the time?"

Adele

Blessed with the kind of smile that sets her whole body off laughing, and then sets everybody else's off with it, Adele is queen of the fantasy BFFs. Do you know any woman who'd turn down a night on the sauce with her? Anyone who doesn't think that if they could just have her in their bedroom at seven o'clock on a Friday night, in control of the white wine, the Elnett and the minicab booking, that life would somehow never be cheerless again? She always regales with stories such as the time she went to see the Spice Girls at the 02 and puked out of the car window all the way home. We need a new word for laddishness, for this is womanishness nowadays. In fact, this awards season really felt dramatically different because of women such as Adele and her twin soul Jennifer Lawrence talking like humans, not zombies. The jokes, the laughter, the immediacy of their response: it was no longer a PR schmoozefest. Adele brings to celebrity what Mo Mowlam brought to politics.

Five women we love to hate

Celebs we love to hate: Taylor Swift, Kate Winslet, Keira Knightley, Peaches Geldof and Anne Hathaway. 

It's such a shame that wanting people to like you always has the opposite effect. I mean, is there something so wrong with Anne Hathaway's desire to bring happiness and be popular? Truth be told, it can get a bit exhausting. I once sat near her in a restaurant, where she zealously introduced herself and her friends to each waiter, as if he were a cherished member of their social unit and not just some bloke paid to carry a tray. People who have worked with her have said similar: that the constant praising of movie minions with, "You did such a good job there! Well done!" can grate. And if that's in sunny LA, think how well it would go down over here. The solution is for Hathaway to spend a year in sarky Manchester, where her attempts to go jogging will be thwarted by 324 days of rain, and if she so much as thinks about telling a Mancunian barmaid that she has poured those lagers fantastically well, she will swiftly learn an aloofness not taught in any American drama school.

Taylor Swift

Taylor Swift is a massively successful singer-songwriter, whose own hard slog as composer and performer has taken her to the top. When Kanye West dissed her at an awards ceremony, everyone swung to her defence. But then she kept banging on about it. And when Tina Fey and Amy Poehler made a joke about her love life at the Golden Globes, she started going on about that, too, saying that there was "a special place in hell reserved for women who don't help other women", which was a bit ironic, given how many of Swift's songs place her in the role of victim of other terrible slutty types. It has been said that women are not hard-wired to respond to damsels in distress in the same way men are, so all this "white dress scorned virgin" stuff can get a bit lost on us. The real problem here, though, is that Swift has achieved so much, so young, by herself, and is trying massively hard to be a grown-up. One is reminded of a line from her hero, Bob Dylan: "Ah, but I was so much older then/I'm younger than that now." We predict that the Taylor of five years' time will have learned to knock back a nice Malibu and pineapple, and laugh at herself a bit. And maybe quit the princess-who-can't-sleep-on-a-pea routine.

Keira Knightley

When I interviewed Joe Wright, director of many of Knightley's films (Pride And Prejudice, Anna Karenina, Atonement), he told me he loved working with her because she was so much fun to muck about with on set. Obviously, her acting talent was the top draw, but what he really raved about was what a massive laugh she was. I must admit I was surprised, and found myself wondering if the misapprehension all comes down to bone structure. Are we somehow programmed to associate those sculpted cheeks and pouted mouth with someone who can't tell a decent joke? If you look at Lawrence, Adele and Streep, none of them has such a pronounced bone structure as Knightley, Hathaway or Angelina Jolie, and none of them receives such scorn. In polls, men tend to rate Knightley more highly as an actor than women do. Does this mean women equate bony with moany? Or does Knightley just need to unleash a cheery grin and tell some of those knob gags on primetime telly?

Peaches Geldof

Look, the Scientology phase was hard to love, we'll give you that much. And the documentary where she set up a magazine and was rude to her staff because they weren't cool enough or, like, didn't have Nick Cave's mobile number was a bit mortifying. And the shoplifting accusations didn't bode well – but why should they? Can you honestly say you didn't spend your teens and early 20s lurching from one bad decision to another, retrospectively grateful that the paparazzi didn't notice you and Channel 4 couldn't spare the budget to give you a chatshow? It's taken me years to get through all the hair bobbles I nicked from Selfridges at that age. Besides which, Peaches and her husband had a baby shortly after I did and quite clearly love theirs more than I do mine. I thought I was gushy by uploading a new picture every day, but they upload one every 12 to 14 minutes. Instagram is breaking under the weight of Peaches' love for her little grub – and, seeing as she's up the duff again, it will have to migrate to new servers when she has the second. Don't even worry about all the exposure making those kids a mess, because the statute of limitations on genetic inheritance means that third-generation rock'n'roll kids are 100% predetermined to become accountants.

Kate Winslet

Lots of people love Kate Winslet. She is a hugely accomplished actor who hasn't yet killed anyone that we know of. And yet there are many who would rather donate their eyes to neuroscience than read another magazine profile stating that our Kate is just a normal gal who served bangers and mash at her first wedding, or that she doesn't knacker herself out down the gym, why, she's just happy with her curves! This, my friends, is one of the many reasons it is so brilliant that she has now married for a third time, and to someone who happens to be Richard Branson's nephew and works on his space travel programme and has legally changed his surname to Rocknroll. The lives and loves of Kate Winslet are becoming as epic as those of Elizabeth Taylor, making her a real vintage Hollywood dame. I mean, you're either hosting a meat and potato party or you're an Oscar winner whose soulmate goes to work on a spaceship. You can't be both. Kate is now fully lost to us, the people – and I for one am in awe of her marriage to that intergalactic adventurer. She has saved us from having to hear about the cumberlands and the maris pipers ever, ever again.