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Hollywood celebrities were cropping up so often on TV talk shows last week that you would have thought it was Oscar time. They were grieved, of course, over the tragic death of Princess Diana. But they were also eager to gripe about the paparazzi, whose aggressive tactics may have played a role in her death. Elizabeth Taylor called them murderers. Tom Cruise recounted how he and his wife Nicole Kidman had been chased by photographers through the very same Paris tunnel. Everyone from George Clooney to Whoopi Goldberg chimed in; boycotts were advocated; legislation proposed. Some stars reportedly even want to investigate the private lives of tabloid editors, to give them a taste of their own medicine.

There was a self-serving side to all this, of course. Hollywood stars would like nothing better than to cow the press into docility, thus clearing the way for nonstop coverage of their thriving careers, happy home lives and unflagging concern for the spotted owl. Yet in this instance, Hollywood perfectly tapped into the public mood. The week of mourning that followed Diana's death also saw an outpouring of revulsion at paparazzi tactics, prompting a fresh round of self-appraisal by publications that use their photos and, tacitly at least, condone their excesses.

Paparazzi--the celebrity photographers who trail stars looking for shots of them in unguarded moments--have been around for decades, dogging the tracks of people like Elizabeth Taylor and Jacqueline Onassis. But the game has grown increasingly fierce in recent years, as media outlets devoted to celebrities have proliferated, and new technology, such as digital photo transmission, has come into use. And lately, the absence of wars and other world crises (as well as skimpier budgets for covering foreign news) has forced many photojournalists to do celebrity work just to make a living.

There's big money to be made. Two weeks before Diana's death, the Globe tabloid ran eight pages of photos of her and Dodi Fayed on their vacation off the island of Sardinia, and boasted in a note to readers of paying $210,000 for them: "It was a big payday for photog Mario Brenna, who stands to make as much as $3 million worldwide." Lured by such sums, paparazzi are resorting to ever more aggressive tactics--sometimes even provoking confrontations with stars in order to catch their temper tantrums on film. "About a year ago there was a real increase in invasive kinds of pictures," says Valerie Virga, photo editor for the National Enquirer, "people really going over the edge to get the picture--climbing roofs, scaling buildings, super-super long lenses into people's backyards. We've turned down hundreds of pictures over the last year for that reason."