Brad Pitt
Hollywood's A-listers — including Brad Pitt, Tom Cruise and Jay Leno — own a disproportionate number of Ducati's limited-to-500 Superleggeras ($65,000) and Desmosedicis ($72,500), just 1,500 of which were made.
Hollywood's A-listers — including Brad Pitt, Tom Cruise and Jay Leno — own a disproportionate number of Ducati's limited-to-500 Superleggeras ($65,000) and Desmosedicis ($72,500), just 1,500 of which were made.
"If you go back to celebrities who rode motorcycles in the '40s, like Humphrey Bogart, and in the '50s and '60s, with Elvis Presley and Steve McQueen, and you then look at all the stars riding today, motorcycling is something they see as an expression of themselves," says David A. Morris, author of Motostars: Celebrities and Motorcycles. "They feel that no one is looking at them as a celebrity anymore. They're bikers. It's not George Clooney. It's George, the guy who rides the Indian."
For a Knight and Day movie stunt exhibition in 2010, Tom Cruise took a cruise on a motorcycle next to Seville's cathedral. The actor owns the $92,000 Vyrus 985 C3 4V Italian sport bike and a $50,000 Confederate Motorcycles Hellcat.
The star posed with his BMW motorcycle during a photo shoot.
From left, Dennis Hopper, Peter Fonda and Jack Nicholson. Fonda and Hopper repurposed the motorcycle as a vehicle for a new generation's more nuanced rebellion when they chopped, stretched and raked a bunch of Harleys they'd bought at a police auction and set off on a drug-addled journey across the country to film Easy Rider.
Then came 1968's Naked Under Leather, in which Marianne Faithfull came to represent the sexually independent ideal of women's motorcycling much as Brando had for men. (True to the title, Faithfull wore nothing under her one-piece leather catsuit.)
Elvis Presley got into the act in 1964's Roustabout playing a brawling, Honda-riding singer
By the time Peter Fonda turned up as the leader of a fictionalized Hells Angels-style club in Roger Corman's The Wild Angels (1966), a steady harvest of biker B-movies from Corman and even Russ Meyer delivered an unswerving message: Motorcycles were trouble.
Canadian model and actress Helfer is among the many in Hollywood who favor bikes.