A History of Glamour, Addiction, and Cultural Rebellion On and Off the Screen
From Humphrey Bogart’s ever-present cigarette to Timothée Chalamet getting caught mid-drag at a Beyoncé concert along with other famous personalities who are known to smoke cigarettes, smoking has followed celebrity culture through nearly every decade of modern entertainment. It’s one of the few habits that has managed to stay visually iconic even as it became medically indefensible — outlasting ashtrays in restaurants, indoor smoking sections, and even, for a while, its own cultural relevance, before resurfacing again in recent years among a new generation of stars who never lived through the anti-smoking ad campaigns their parents did.
What follows is a tour through that history: the tobacco industry’s own early efforts to link cigarettes with famous faces, the golden-age stars whose onscreen habits mirrored their real ones, the musicians who turned smoking into a personality trait, the models who made it look like a job requirement, and the surprising, ongoing comeback the cigarette is having among some of today’s most photographed young celebrities.
The Tobacco Industry’s Own Celebrity Playbook
Long before any of the stars in this article picked up the habit on their own, the tobacco industry was already engineering the connection between cigarettes and public image on purpose. The clearest example dates to 1929, when American Tobacco Company president George Washington Hill hired Edward Bernays — the man later credited as the father of modern public relations — specifically to get women smoking in public. At the time, women smoking on the street carried real social stigma. Bernays’ solution, staged during that year’s Easter Parade on Fifth Avenue, had a group of young women light Lucky Strike cigarettes in public and frame the act as a “Torch of Freedom” — a symbol of equality with men rather than a tobacco company’s sales pitch. Newspapers across the country covered it uncritically, never realizing the demonstration had been organized and paid for by the cigarette maker itself.
The campaign worked. Women’s share of U.S. cigarette consumption climbed through the 1930s, and the following decade brought a wave of cigarette advertising that explicitly used famous faces — actresses, opera singers, and other public figures — to sell packs directly to consumers, decades before regulations began restricting exactly that kind of endorsement. Much of the celebrity-cigarette imagery that feels organic in old photographs of Bogart, Dietrich, or Monroe existed alongside, and was reinforced by, an industry that had every financial incentive to keep famous faces and cigarettes visually linked. Direct celebrity endorsement of cigarette brands is now banned or tightly restricted in most of the world — which is part of why the more recent examples in this article are notable: today’s famous smokers are, for the most part, simply being photographed living their own lives rather than appearing in a tobacco company’s ad campaign.
Old Hollywood’s Cigarette Romance
Long before health warnings appeared on packaging, the cigarette was one of cinema’s most reliable pieces of visual shorthand — for cool, for danger, for melancholy, for sex appeal. No one embodied that more thoroughly than Humphrey Bogart, whose characters in Casablanca, The Maltese Falcon, and The Big Sleep were almost never without a cigarette burning between two fingers or dangling from the corner of his mouth. Off screen, the habit was just as constant, and it caught up with him: Bogart died in 1957 of esophageal cancer at 57, one of the clearest examples of Hollywood’s golden-age romance with tobacco carrying a real cost.
He wasn’t alone. Lauren Bacall, his wife and frequent co-star, appeared alongside him in a now-iconic haze of cigarette smoke that defined their onscreen chemistry. Clark Gable, forever remembered as Rhett Butler in Gone with the Wind, was a lifelong smoker who died of a heart attack at 59, a condition smoking is strongly associated with. Marlene Dietrich built an entire persona around the cigarette as a prop of seduction, rarely photographed without one in the decades she spent as one of the era’s most glamorous stars.
Audrey Hepburn’s relationship with smoking is perhaps the most quietly poignant. The cigarette holder she used in Breakfast at Tiffany’s became one of the most referenced images in film history, and by her own and others’ accounts, it mirrored a real, long-standing habit rather than a purely theatrical one. Marilyn Monroe, too, was photographed smoking throughout her career and appeared in cigarette advertising during the 1950s, when tobacco brands routinely used movie stars to sell packs directly to the public.
And then there’s James Dean, whose entire iconography — leather jacket, brooding stare, cigarette perched between his lips — became shorthand for youthful rebellion after his death in 1955, cementing smoking as a visual symbol of a specific kind of restless, doomed cool that outlived him by generations.
New Hollywood’s Cigarette as Character
By the time Basic Instinct hit theaters in 1992, the cigarette had shifted from a general marker of glamour into a much more pointed piece of character work. Sharon Stone’s interrogation-room scene as novelist Catherine Tramell — smoking with deliberate, unbothered calm while surrounded by detectives — became one of the most replayed moments in 1990s cinema precisely because of how the cigarette was used to signal control rather than vulnerability. Off screen, Stone was for years a real cigar enthusiast, by her own account, close friends with fellow cigar aficionado Sylvester Stallone, before a 2001 brain aneurysm led her to give up the habit entirely.
The pattern held across the decade: directors from Martin Scorsese to Quentin Tarantino used cigarettes throughout the 1990s as visual punctuation for characters meant to read as dangerous, controlled, or morally unmoored, cementing a second generation of cigarette iconography even as real-world smoking rates among American adults were already well into their long decline.
Rock and Roll’s Chain Smokers
If Old Hollywood made cigarettes glamorous, rock and roll made them look inevitable. Keith Richards, the Rolling Stones guitarist famous for outliving expectations, spent decades as one of music’s most photographed smokers, and was characteristically blunt about how hard the habit was to shake. “Lou Reed claimed nicotine was harder to quit than heroin,” Richards told Mojo magazine in his mid-seventies. “It is.” He eventually quit in his mid-seventies after decades of trying, telling a New York radio station simply: “I’ve given up smoking… since October. Done that, been there.”
David Bowie was rarely photographed without a cigarette through much of his career, and smoking was woven into his working method as much as his image — he reportedly encouraged singer Lulu to smoke more in order to deepen her voice for a recording session he produced, the same logic that, decades later, would lead a Hollywood actress to pick up the habit for a very different role (more on that below). Bowie died of liver cancer in 2016 at 69.
Amy Winehouse, whose entire aesthetic — beehive hair, eyeliner, cigarette in hand — drew visibly from the smoky glamour of the 1960s girl groups she loved, was almost never photographed without a cigarette during her career, and her smoking became as much a part of her public image as her voice. Kurt Cobain, too, appeared with a cigarette in countless of the era-defining photographs that shaped grunge’s disheveled, anti-glamour aesthetic — proof that the association between music and cigarettes wasn’t limited to any one genre or decade.
Fashion’s Cigarette Aesthetic
The fashion industry has its own, particularly potent version of this story, and Kate Moss sits at the center of it. Moss was reportedly discovered by a modeling scout at 14 while smoking a cigarette at JFK Airport in New York — an origin story that, whether embellished over the years or not, has become inseparable from the persona she went on to build. Decades of backstage and editorial photography by names like Roxanne Lowit and Sante D’Orazio captured Moss with a cigarette in hand so consistently that the image became a defining feature of 1990s and 2000s fashion photography, and, by her own account decades later, the habit stuck with her well into her forties.
Moss wasn’t fashion’s only visible smoker. Sisters Gigi and Bella Hadid have both been photographed by paparazzi with cigarettes on multiple occasions, part of a broader modeling-world aesthetic in which smoking has long been treated as an accessory to the industry’s particular version of cool, alongside black coffee and little sleep.
When Actors Smoke for the Role — and When It’s Just for Them
Sometimes a celebrity’s association with cigarettes is professional rather than personal, and Nicole Kidman’s preparation for playing Lucille Ball in 2021’s Being the Ricardos is one of the more candid examples on record. Trying to nail Ball’s famously deep, raspy voice despite her own Australian accent, Kidman told her vocal coach the task felt impossible — until, as she explained in an interview with DuJour, “they decided her Lucy needed to have a deep smoker’s voice, so I started smoking.” The habit worked well enough, she said, that she could still slip into the voice “standing on my head” years later.
Other performers have simply been open, publicly and repeatedly, about smoking as a personal habit rather than a professional tool. Rihanna has been photographed and has posted images of herself smoking cigarettes on numerous occasions and has spoken candidly in interviews about enjoying it. Dua Lipa has been photographed by paparazzi with cigarettes throughout her career and has acknowledged in interviews that she has tried, without lasting success, to quit. Daniel Radcliffe has said in past interviews that he enjoys catching people off guard by asking for a lighter, since it isn’t the habit most people expect from the actor best known for playing Harry Potter.
Quitting, Publicly
Not every celebrity smoking story ends in continued use, and some of the more compelling ones are about giving it up in full public view. Barack Obama’s long, well-documented struggle with nicotine spanned decades and multiple attempts to quit before and during his presidency; in the years since leaving office he has maintained that he has stayed cigarette-free, while acknowledging in interviews that the occasional temptation still crosses his mind.
Sean Penn gave up cigarettes after watching his father die of lung cancer in 2001, a decision he’s spoken about publicly as one of the most consequential of his life. Brad Pitt has described quitting smoking during the COVID-19 pandemic after concluding he couldn’t simply cut back — telling GQ in 2022, “I don’t have that ability to do just one or two a day. It’s not in my makeup. I’m all in.” He’s since spoken fondly of the ritual he gave up — a cigarette “in the morning, with the coffee” — while acknowledging his body could no longer handle it the way it once did.
Lady Gaga has been just as candid about the scale of her own former habit. “I’m not smoking anymore, but I’d smoke 40 cigarettes all day long,” she told Apple Music’s New Music Daily, describing quitting cold turkey as “brutal” but permanent: “I swear on my life I’m not smoking cigarettes.” And Keith Richards’ eventual decision to quit in his seventies — after describing nicotine as harder to shake than heroin for the better part of his career — remains one of rock’s more unlikely quitting stories precisely because so few people expected it to happen at all.
The Real Health Toll Behind the Image
It’s worth pausing on the numbers behind all of this glamour, because they’re stark. The World Health Organization estimates that tobacco use kills more than 8 million people worldwide every year, including roughly 1.3 million non-smokers who die from secondhand smoke exposure. In the United States alone, the CDC attributes more than 480,000 deaths annually to cigarette smoking, making it the single leading cause of preventable death in the country, and estimates that smokers lose an average of about 10 years of life expectancy compared to people who never smoked. Roughly one in five U.S. deaths each year is linked to cigarette use.
Those figures sit uneasily next to the names above. Bogart, Gable, Bowie — three of the most photographed smokers of their respective eras — all died of conditions smoking is directly or strongly associated with, at ages that, by modern standards, cut their careers and lives short. The gap between how good a cigarette looks in a photograph and what it actually does to the person holding it is, in a sense, the entire story this article is telling.
The Gen Z Cigarette Renaissance
Perhaps the most unexpected chapter in this history is unfolding right now. After decades of decline — U.S. adult smoking rates fell from roughly 42.6% in 1965 to just 11.6% in recent surveys — cigarettes have been quietly creeping back into youth culture, driven in large part by the same mechanism that made Bogart and Dietrich look effortlessly cool: celebrity imagery.
Timothée Chalamet was photographed with a cigarette at a Beyoncé concert in 2023 and drew immediate public criticism, but he was far from alone. Florence Pugh, Anya Taylor-Joy, Jenna Ortega, and Lily-Rose Depp have all been photographed smoking in recent years, and Dua Lipa has posted her own cigarette photos to Instagram, drawing comments praising the habit as, in one widely shared reply, “super sexy.” Editorial and paparazzi photos of Jeremy Allen White and Lana Del Rey smoking circulated widely on social media in 2022 and 2023, feeding the same aesthetic.
Few current examples are as visible as Sabrina Carpenter’s, one of the most-searched pop stars of the past two years. A widely shared magazine photo series shows her leaning over a sink with a cigarette between her fingers, dressed in a corset made entirely of cigarette packs — a single post that drew more than two million likes — and her music video for “Manchild” features her casually taking a drag on a cigarette wedged between the tines of a fork. Charli XCX has built a related piece of her public persona around the image: she told the BBC that her “Brat” aesthetic essentially came down to a bra-less top, a lighter, and a pack of cigarettes, was gifted a cigarette bouquet for her 2024 birthday, and had cigarettes offered to guests from silver trays at her 2025 wedding. Kylie Jenner drew a similar wave of criticism after a cameo appearance in a Charli XCX promotional video showed her smoking a cigarette on camera, with fans on social media calling the moment “irresponsible” given her large following among younger viewers.
The trend has become visible enough to spawn its own tracking: an Instagram account called Cigfluencers, with more than 81,000 followers, posts a steady stream of celebrity smoking photos — everyone from musicians to actresses caught on set, including Natalie Portman during a film shoot — and its operator has told reporters he’s had no shortage of new material to work with lately. The trend extends past red carpets and into music itself: Lorde and Addison Rae have both released songs referencing cigarettes, and at 2025 festival dates, cigarettes were a visible presence among performers and attendees alike — Paul Mescal and Gracie Abrams at Glastonbury, Doechii at Austin City Limits.
Celebrities are influencers — for good or bad. Those young people who think smoking is OK because of who they see smoking are getting a pull toward trying cigarettes. — Lynn Kozlowski, dean emeritus, School of Public Health, University at Buffalo
Public health researchers see this resurgence as a genuine cause for concern rather than a harmless aesthetic quirk. Much of Gen Z’s relative comfort with cigarette imagery is attributed to timing: the youngest members of the generation largely missed the graphic anti-smoking campaigns of the late 1990s and 2000s, and public health messaging aimed at them in the years since has focused overwhelmingly on vaping rather than traditional cigarettes — leaving an entire cohort with far less firsthand cultural memory of what a cigarette habit actually costs.
Why the Image Still Works
What connects Bogart’s cigarette in Casablanca to Charli XCX’s wedding trays eighty years later is the same basic appeal: a cigarette photographs well. It gives a still image a sense of motion and mood, a prop for restless hands, and — fairly or not — a shorthand for nonconformity that has proven remarkably durable across genres, decades, and generations of celebrity culture. That durability is precisely what makes it a public health concern rather than just a style note; the same visual power that made Dietrich and Moss iconic is, per researchers like Kozlowski, part of what pulls impressionable audiences toward trying the habit themselves.
It’s worth holding two things at once here: the cultural fascination with celebrity smoking is real, long-running, and unlikely to disappear, and the health toll behind so many of these same names — Bogart’s esophageal cancer, Gable’s heart attack, Bowie’s liver cancer — is just as real. The image and the outcome have always existed side by side; the difference now is simply how consistently the image outlives the memory of the outcome.
A Note on Accuracy: Not Everyone Photographed With a Cigarette Smokes
It’s worth being precise about the difference between a viral photo and a documented habit, because the two get conflated constantly in this particular corner of pop culture. Kim Kardashian, for instance, drew significant backlash in 2016 after a GQ cover shoot pictured her with a cigarette in hand — even though she has been publicly and repeatedly outspoken about being a lifelong non-smoker, once posting simply, “Smoking cigarettes is disgusting!” Her father, Robert Kardashian, died of esophageal cancer, a disease strongly linked to smoking, which appears to inform her stance. Zendaya is another frequent search result for “smoking” despite being on the record, via her Malcolm & Marie co-star John David Washington, as never having smoked or had a drink in her life — the clips and images that surface under her name are almost entirely drawn from her performance as Rue, a character who uses drugs, in Euphoria, rather than anything from her own life.
The distinction matters because a single styled photo can outrun the truth by a wide margin, and search interest doesn’t distinguish between a real habit, a costume, and a character. Everyone named earlier in this article, by contrast, is tied to on-the-record interviews, verified paparazzi documentation over time, or their own statements and social media posts — the kind of evidence that separates an actual pattern from a single photograph doing the heavy lifting of an entire narrative.
