He started at 12, was a star of Spain’s national ballet at 17 and formed his own company at 20. The gypsy dancer from Cordoba, whose glance has been compared to the slash of a knife, always knew he would be a star. “E Cosi Sexy Che Sembra Una Rockstar,” said an Italian periodical when Joaquin Cortes first took his “New Flamenco” on international tour. It’s the same with concert pianists, who have to perform perfectly night after night after night and can’t make a mistake, can’t fall off the top shelf.” The product is burn-out, listlessness or stage fright. Suicide attempts may follow or the stars may, in extremis, publicly lose their bottle, as Stephen Fry did.Poor Naomi’s problem is this.

Her latest amour seems not to suffer from emotional dissonance in the way she clearly does. “Fantasy then becomes a source of great fear,” says Evans, “which is compounded for those like models and dancers whose professional lifespan is finite.” The concomitant stress can be enormous “It’s high pressure up there These people live under extreme stress. But if the wonderful fantasy becomes reality, that leaves your fantasy nowhere to go but down.”One result can be what the rock star Dave Stewart has branded Paradise Syndrome – an inversion of Murphy’s Law – in which everything goes right and you are left wondering if it would have been better if it hadn’t. Andrew Evans elaborates: “We all have in ourselves the fantasy that we are wonderful and we all have the reverse – that we are useless; both parts are usually far away from reality. But where there’s a dissonance the problems may begin.”Celebrities, in shrink-jargon, have “a lot of split in their fantasy ego structure”. People notice what conforms to the stereotype – and ignore what doesn’t fit.”But a person who becomes a celebrity has to cope with the gap between the public image and their private reality “If the two aren’t too far apart it’s usually not a problem. They only have to correspond marginally to the media stereotype – Oasis as the bad boys on the rock scene, Prince Charles as ineffectual, the Duke of Edinburgh making constant social gaffes.

Born of an unnamed father to an unmarried 19-year-old dancer, brought up by her grandparents and then sent to stage school on money sent home from her mother’s continental tours with a dance troupe called Exotica – she has gone from nowhere to enter the gilded circle of the rich and the famous. It conveys an odd kind of equality on people who can otherwise never be confident of their lovers’ motives.But the rest of us don’t need our celebrities to be real people, says Andrew Evans, a clinical psychologist who specialises in working with artists, musicians and dancers “They’re a projection of a public need. Fame is one of the commodities that economists refer to as “positional goods”. By definition fame is something only a few people can have and it creates a freemasonry among those accorded it. She has even managed to drag her mother Valerie along, too – Campbell senior eventually struck up a relationship with the late Duke of Northumberland.The rich are different from us, the writer F Scott Fitzgerald famously said Yes, they have more money, was Ernest Hemingway’s rejoinder But there is more to it than that. The girl from Streatham – they never fail to point out her south London origins – now earns more than pounds 1m a year.

So far as the tabloids were concerned the point of Naomi Campbell was that she was black, bad and dangerous to know. More serious were her complaints of racism objecting to media epithets like “the Black Bardot” and claiming that blonde, blue- eyed models got more work.It is the stuff of soap. Then there were the moments when drama turned to farce – when she fell off her 10- inch Vivenne Westwood platform shoes at a Paris show or was sacked as an ambassador for an animal rights group after posing at a Milan fashion show swathed in fur. Since she was discovered 11 years ago, she has dated a string of trophy men, including Eddie Murphy, Robert de Niro, Sylvester Stallone, Eric Clapton and Mike Tyson. She broke off her engagement to U2 bass player Adam Clayton amid newspaper reports of shennanigans with girls from an “escort” agency. An unauthorised biography reported suicide attempts after lovers’ tiffs, a taped telephone dirty talk with Sylvester Stallone, and a feud with a rival black model, Tyra Banks.Gossip in the fashion trade is of her legendary lateness, gross arrogance and wild insecurity.

In 1993 she was fired by a top modelling agency after its boss described her as “a manipulative, scheming, rude and impossible little madam who has treated us and our clients like dirt”. Take the case of the supermodel Naomi Campbell, who was back on the catwalk in Paris yesterday after a weekend drama which saw her taken to hospital in the Canary Islands only hours after a blazing row in a five-star hotel with her boyfriend, the gypsy flamenco dancer Joaquin Cortes.
It was only the latest episode in a long saga of tempest and torment. For most of us, life is a process of gradually shedding them. But for a select few the dreams become a reality and the rest of us are not sure if, deep down, we wholeheartedly approve.