In September, not long after Britney Spears’s first go at rehab and her divorce from Kevin Federline, she vamped for Allure, the beauty magazine. Drew Barrymore, Vogue’s current cover girl, first graced the magazine’s front in 2005 when many readers still recalled her years of drug abuse. “A cover on Vogue or Bazaar, I think of it as the new celebrity rehab,” said Liz Rosenberg, the publicist for Madonna. “Some people go to Utah,” she said, a reference to the Cirque Lodge detox programme, where Lohan was treated. “Others go to Smashbox and do a photo shoot.”

The audience for such makeovers is not just the ticket-buying public. The glamorous covers are also aimed at movie directors and executives— a very high-end head shot. “A person in a position to greenlight a movie project might say, ‘Oh, I guess she’s turning her life around,’” Rosenberg said.

That is Lohan’s hope, her publicist, Leslie Sloane Zelnik, acknowledged last week. “Her appearance on Bazaar is part of a strategic repositioning,” she said. It is an attempt to recast the actress as the pulled-together antithesis of the bad girl who was scolded in 2006 by a producer for failing to show up on the set of Georgia Rule.

“Right now I just want to find a great script, a great role,” Lohan said in the March issue of Paper. She is shooting Dare to Love Me, a movie about a tango star, but has not completed a movie since starring last summer in the horror film I Know Who Killed Me, which flopped.

... contd.