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Hot Or Not: Miranda Kerr's Black Floral Leather Bag!Source: http://www.posh24.com/miranda_kerr/miranda_kerr_brings_a_ray_of_sunshine_to_west_hollywood
Sheridan Smith made her name with a girl next door turn in Gavin and Stacey. Now her star has risen in the West End – from Legally Blonde to Hedda Gabler. Dustin Hoffman sees her future in Hollywood. Here, she tells Megan Conner about the most incredible 12 months of her life
Exactly 12 hours before I'm due to meet Sheridan Smith, the actor takes to her Twitter page. "Oh I can't stop crying. Hate myself sometimes, just can't be myself. I can only play characters. Wish I had more confidence when I'm being me," she writes. Within minutes, a stream of her some 310,000 followers are tweeting furiously.
"Omg, don't beat yourself up!" they say. "Stop stop stop that now," another instructs. One user, @Londontheatre1, has some helpful advice: Smith should draw on the strength of her characters, Ronnie Biggs's long-suffering ex-wife in the ITV drama Mrs Biggs, or Elle Woods, the ditsy sorority chick who ends up going to Harvard in the musical Legally Blonde. "Put your Charmian or Elle head on," they say.
I scroll down Smith's feed. "How embarrassing, the worst interview. I was so nervous!" her earlier post reads. Another reveals she has filmed the Jonathan Ross Show that day. "Watched it for years, never dreamt I'd be on it. I'm scared," she admits, drawing an emoticon sad face.
The next day I await Smith's arrival for lunch in a north London pub. My expectations of a bubbly pint-sized blonde – a sort of northern Barbara Windsor but with proper acting chops – are fading away. It's a busy day in the pub – two weeks before Christmas, and there is a large office party to our left having lunch – but Smith shrugs me off when I ask if we should find a quieter spot. "Oh no, no. People can never work out where they know me from," she says, extracting herself out of her fake-fur coat. "They just come up and chat with me like mates. They think they've had a pint with me somewhere."
She says this is because she has "a common face", while I suspect people fail to make a connection between Smith and her fame because she doesn't quite believe in it herself. And maybe that's because she didn't have any drama school training. None of this changes the fact that she is leaping, higher and higher, towards becoming a household name. In the past 12 months, she has worked on 11 projects (six television dramas, four films and one play).
The highlights were Mrs Biggs – six hours of gripping television in which Smith was able to showcase her impressive dramatic range – and a moment this autumn, when the 31-year-old trod the boards as the lead in Hedda Gabler, often considered the "female Hamlet". Smith, who is unusually young to be acting the part, had never come across the play, and was so overwhelmed by the gravitas of the role that she began to suffer crippling panic attacks before she even stepped out of her dressing room. Again, the reviews proved she had little to worry about. "Like many gifted actors she pulls off the apparently impossible: she makes detail dominate the stage," wrote Susannah Clapp in this paper, while the Telegraph declared: "The great thrill of the night is Sheridan Smith, revealing herself as an actress of truly tremendous talent and range."
"It started as terrible, terrible stage fright," says Smith of the anxiety that took hold, "and it still hasn't really gone away. But what did I expect? It was a part that required me to go on and shoot myself eight times a week, to have a full-on breakdown each day."
Since finishing the eight-week run, she has barely taken a break. The morning after her last show, she went straight on to filming Panto!, the ITV comedy drama written by comedian John Bishop which aired three days ago. "It was just the tonic I needed – something a bit fun and silly," she says. Wasn't she tempted to have a holiday? "People did say that, but I just thought: 'Where am I going to go? Who am I going to go with?' I live on my own, with my dogs. And it was so much fun anyway."
After Panto! she hit The Powder Room, a London-based film about a group of female night-club toilet attendants that will be released next year. Again, there was no time to recuperate. "I remember them scrubbing off the fake tan I had to wear for Panto! and the next day I was on a movie set at 6am." She smiles when I look aghast. "It is so surreal," she says. "It is so… schizophrenic. You sort of forget who you are, in a way."
She admits to becoming something of a "nervous wreck" as we approach the year's end, which half explains the Jonathan Ross situation. "I just feel like I really ballsed it up, you know?" she says, making a "Have I?" face. At the time of writing, I genuinely don't know – the show was aired after my deadline – but she says: "Oh well, I've gotten over it now anyway. But I was a bit baffled by being asked to go on it in the first place. I didn't want to do it because I'm shy, insecure, and I feel like you have to have funny stories and anecdotes on those shows."
I point out that the very fact that Ross invited her on alongside Paralympians Ellie Simmonds and Jonnie Peacock, two of the greatest achievers of the past 12 months, suggested she deserved her place. Her ever- rising star, and the fact that she is so widely loved, is why we've put her on our final cover of the year, I say. "I know. But it's odd. It's like, the more successful… the bigger the parts I get… it's like I'm going to get found out. Because I've always felt I'm blagging it."
As sMITH is THE daughter of a country and western duo, there was always the possibility that she herself would want to perform from a young age. At the age of six she began to join her parents, known as the Daltons, on stage. "They grafted really hard," she remembers, "all over Lincolnshire. It was seven nights a week and that was the only job they did." By the time she was 11, her school drama teacher had advised that they take her for an audition at the National Youth Music Theatre and Smith ended up performing with them during her summer holidays, flying to New York first for a show called Pendragon, before taking parts in Bugsy Malone and Stephen Sondheim's Into The Woods in London.
At 16 she decided to quit school and moved into a house-share in the city with five other girls, who included S Club 7's Hannah Spearritt. "We were so young!" she remembers now. "We had no money, we couldn't get into a pub, and we couldn't cook, so we lived on jam sandwiches."
It is a credit to her ability that she has found herself in a "normal job" only once over the past 15 years – in a burger van off the motorway, which she "loved, because we served loads of bikers and I could say: 'Do you want sauce with that, love?'" She hams up her weathered Lancashire accent, and you sense she was playing dress-up even then, always learning on the job, in a sense. "Because that's what I did. I wasn't trained."
In the formative years of Smith's television career, on sitcoms such as The Royle Family (in which she played Ralf Little's girlfriend) and Two Pints of Lager and Packet of Crisps (in which she starred for eight years) she didn't feel like an imposter at all: "I was just plodding along like a jobbing actress, and it felt comfortable." Now it bothers her that she didn't go to drama school. "My agent and I made a conscious decision that this year I would try and break into drama, but I honestly didn't know if I could do it," she says. "Of course I've surprised myself, but it feels strange. If I was to describe it, I feel like a little duck gliding along, with my legs going faster than my brain."
She believes it was Flare Path, Trevor Nunn's 2011 theatre production, for which she won her second Olivier award (the first was for Legally Blonde), that lead to offers of more serious roles. She had mainly played "slappers and chavs in comedies, and although it was great, you can get typecast," she says. The play, which was supposed to be a vehicle for Sienna Miller's glittering stage career, saw Smith steal the show, winning rave reviews, and one night, a visit from a certain Dustin Hoffman to her dressing room.
"He came to tell me how he thought I acted from the heart," Smith says. Some time later he invited her to appear in Quartet, his directorial debut about a group of retired opera singers (played by Dame Maggie Smith, Pauline Collins, Michael Gambon and Billy Connolly) that will be released on New Year's Day. It's a gentle tickler of a film that will appeal to the crowd that turned out for The Exotic Marigold Hotel, but after Smith's stellar year her part seems small, not making the best of her talent at all.
In 2013 she will tackle Shakespeare, starring as Titania in Michael Grandage's A Midsummer Night's Dream opposite David Walliams, who cast her in the recent BBC adaptation of his children's book Mr Stink. "I'm a sucker for punishment, aren't I?" she says of the six-month run which will start in the summer, "but I'm just so grateful that people believe in me. It's not like I'm choosing these things, even saying I can do them. People are just being lovely and saying: 'I bet you could challenge yourself to this.'"
She is, she admits, at risk of never stopping, with work for the first half of next year also lined up (a film and a television project that she can't talk about now). It would, she realises, be scarier to stop than to just keep going, although at some point she'll need to find a work-life balance because she would like to get married and have kids. At the moment her personal life is "nonexistent". She isn't dating but "I wish I had someone," she sighs. She is coy when I ask her about being photographed stepping out with Amy Winehouse's ex Reg Traviss earlier in the year, dismissing it as: "Nothing. Nothing at all. We're just mates. But I'm enjoying kissing a few frogs, let's say."
She has been in a "couple" of serious relationships and dated James Corden on and off for two years but: "A lot of things are about timing, aren't they? I was a lot more wild back then, too. I wasn't someone who was in a frame of mind of settling down when I was with James." She didn't attend his recent wedding, but they are still friends. "I think when you've loved someone that much it doesn't ever go away. It wasn't right, but I knew he would be a fantastic husband and dad, and I want the best for him always."
She still describes playing Corden's screen sister Rudi in Gavin & Stacey as one of her most fun roles to date, and I tell her my favourite scene of the whole series has to be the rap they perform together in the car park, complete with the intricate handshake. She laughs. "I think we had been practising that on holiday! We had been in Mauritius and we were by the pool doing it every day."
Her sense of comedy probably comes from her dad. At a recent event where he was Smith's guest, he told the press that no one would ever be good enough to walk his daughter down the aisle, so that's why he was walking her up the red carpet. She describes the Smith clan – which also includes her mum and older brother, who is in a band – as "tight-knit", citing the death of her brother Julian to cancer when Smith was eight and he was 18 as the reason for being closer than most. Later she will tell me how she has started to "use" her grief in her crying scenes, something she feels "terrible" about. "But also happy," she adds, "because he is living on, somehow, in my performances." This, she feels, is better than trying not to confront his death at all, which she did for many years: "And it was odd, because I started to feel like I was denying him."
We go on to talk about a grief scene in Mrs Biggs, and it strikes me that out of all the projects Smith threw her heart and soul into this year, this is the one of which she is proudest. "It was such a special job, the best role I might ever have, and so I worked really hard on it. I gave up drinking," she adds just as the party next to us start to clink their glasses. "I just thought that if I'm in every scene of something I won't drink – I can be a bit of a party girl – and you know, I've stuck with it."
She goes on to reveal that this now means she hasn't consumed a drop of alcohol all year. And it is only later, when I'm transcribing our interview, that I remember: when Smith arrived at the pub, she sat down and spent some time really deliberating whether she should treat herself to a glass of red wine (she didn't). That tells me that, as the remaining wintry nights of 2012 draw in, maybe this sensitive, self-effacing soul is beginning to take stock of all she has achieved this year and finally start celebrating.
Quartet is released in cinemas on 1 January
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2012/dec/30/sheridan-smith-television
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The post Robert Pattinson Clubbing in London on Christmas Eve Without Kristen Stewart appeared first on Celebrity news.
Reality star confirms on her blog that she and Kanye West are expecting.
By Jocelyn Vena
Kanye West and Kim Kardashian
Photo: Getty Images
For Kim Kardashian and her boyfriend Kanye West, 2013 really will live up to the motto "new year, new beginnings." Just one day after Yeezy announced that Kim is pregnant with their first baby, the reality TV star opened up about the Kimye baby news on her blog.
"It's true!! Kanye and I are expecting a baby," she wrote on Monday (December 31) in a post titled "New Year, New Beginnings." "We feel so blessed and lucky and wish that in addition to both of our families, his mom and my dad could be here to celebrate this special time with us." (West lost his mother, Donda, in 2007, while Kim's dad passed away in 2003.)
While the statement was short and sweet, she added, "Looking forward to great new beginnings in 2013 and to starting a family. Happy New Year!!! Xo."
Kimye get baby love from their pals!
And Kim is ready to celebrate her baby news. The reality TV starlet still plans to ring in the new year in Las Vegas. Sources tell TMZ that she will still hit up a party at 1 Oak in Sin City on Monday night, as scheduled. A rep for the club had not responded to MTV News' request for comment as of press time.
Kanye announced on Sunday night at his show in Atlantic City that he and his lady love are expecting a bundle of joy. It is reported that Kim is approximately 12 weeks along. Yeezy told the crowd at the Revel in AC to "make some noise" for his "baby mama."
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Sheridan Smith made her name with a girl next door turn in Gavin and Stacey. Now her star has risen in the West End – from Legally Blonde to Hedda Gabler. Dustin Hoffman sees her future in Hollywood. Here, she tells Megan Conner about the most incredible 12 months of her life
Exactly 12 hours before I'm due to meet Sheridan Smith, the actor takes to her Twitter page. "Oh I can't stop crying. Hate myself sometimes, just can't be myself. I can only play characters. Wish I had more confidence when I'm being me," she writes. Within minutes, a stream of her some 310,000 followers are tweeting furiously.
"Omg, don't beat yourself up!" they say. "Stop stop stop that now," another instructs. One user, @Londontheatre1, has some helpful advice: Smith should draw on the strength of her characters, Ronnie Biggs's long-suffering ex-wife in the ITV drama Mrs Biggs, or Elle Woods, the ditsy sorority chick who ends up going to Harvard in the musical Legally Blonde. "Put your Charmian or Elle head on," they say.
I scroll down Smith's feed. "How embarrassing, the worst interview. I was so nervous!" her earlier post reads. Another reveals she has filmed the Jonathan Ross Show that day. "Watched it for years, never dreamt I'd be on it. I'm scared," she admits, drawing an emoticon sad face.
The next day I await Smith's arrival for lunch in a north London pub. My expectations of a bubbly pint-sized blonde – a sort of northern Barbara Windsor but with proper acting chops – are fading away. It's a busy day in the pub – two weeks before Christmas, and there is a large office party to our left having lunch – but Smith shrugs me off when I ask if we should find a quieter spot. "Oh no, no. People can never work out where they know me from," she says, extracting herself out of her fake-fur coat. "They just come up and chat with me like mates. They think they've had a pint with me somewhere."
She says this is because she has "a common face", while I suspect people fail to make a connection between Smith and her fame because she doesn't quite believe in it herself. And maybe that's because she didn't have any drama school training. None of this changes the fact that she is leaping, higher and higher, towards becoming a household name. In the past 12 months, she has worked on 11 projects (six television dramas, four films and one play).
The highlights were Mrs Biggs – six hours of gripping television in which Smith was able to showcase her impressive dramatic range – and a moment this autumn, when the 31-year-old trod the boards as the lead in Hedda Gabler, often considered the "female Hamlet". Smith, who is unusually young to be acting the part, had never come across the play, and was so overwhelmed by the gravitas of the role that she began to suffer crippling panic attacks before she even stepped out of her dressing room. Again, the reviews proved she had little to worry about. "Like many gifted actors she pulls off the apparently impossible: she makes detail dominate the stage," wrote Susannah Clapp in this paper, while the Telegraph declared: "The great thrill of the night is Sheridan Smith, revealing herself as an actress of truly tremendous talent and range."
"It started as terrible, terrible stage fright," says Smith of the anxiety that took hold, "and it still hasn't really gone away. But what did I expect? It was a part that required me to go on and shoot myself eight times a week, to have a full-on breakdown each day."
Since finishing the eight-week run, she has barely taken a break. The morning after her last show, she went straight on to filming Panto!, the ITV comedy drama written by comedian John Bishop which aired three days ago. "It was just the tonic I needed – something a bit fun and silly," she says. Wasn't she tempted to have a holiday? "People did say that, but I just thought: 'Where am I going to go? Who am I going to go with?' I live on my own, with my dogs. And it was so much fun anyway."
After Panto! she hit The Powder Room, a London-based film about a group of female night-club toilet attendants that will be released next year. Again, there was no time to recuperate. "I remember them scrubbing off the fake tan I had to wear for Panto! and the next day I was on a movie set at 6am." She smiles when I look aghast. "It is so surreal," she says. "It is so… schizophrenic. You sort of forget who you are, in a way."
She admits to becoming something of a "nervous wreck" as we approach the year's end, which half explains the Jonathan Ross situation. "I just feel like I really ballsed it up, you know?" she says, making a "Have I?" face. At the time of writing, I genuinely don't know – the show was aired after my deadline – but she says: "Oh well, I've gotten over it now anyway. But I was a bit baffled by being asked to go on it in the first place. I didn't want to do it because I'm shy, insecure, and I feel like you have to have funny stories and anecdotes on those shows."
I point out that the very fact that Ross invited her on alongside Paralympians Ellie Simmonds and Jonnie Peacock, two of the greatest achievers of the past 12 months, suggested she deserved her place. Her ever- rising star, and the fact that she is so widely loved, is why we've put her on our final cover of the year, I say. "I know. But it's odd. It's like, the more successful… the bigger the parts I get… it's like I'm going to get found out. Because I've always felt I'm blagging it."
As sMITH is THE daughter of a country and western duo, there was always the possibility that she herself would want to perform from a young age. At the age of six she began to join her parents, known as the Daltons, on stage. "They grafted really hard," she remembers, "all over Lincolnshire. It was seven nights a week and that was the only job they did." By the time she was 11, her school drama teacher had advised that they take her for an audition at the National Youth Music Theatre and Smith ended up performing with them during her summer holidays, flying to New York first for a show called Pendragon, before taking parts in Bugsy Malone and Stephen Sondheim's Into The Woods in London.
At 16 she decided to quit school and moved into a house-share in the city with five other girls, who included S Club 7's Hannah Spearritt. "We were so young!" she remembers now. "We had no money, we couldn't get into a pub, and we couldn't cook, so we lived on jam sandwiches."
It is a credit to her ability that she has found herself in a "normal job" only once over the past 15 years – in a burger van off the motorway, which she "loved, because we served loads of bikers and I could say: 'Do you want sauce with that, love?'" She hams up her weathered Lancashire accent, and you sense she was playing dress-up even then, always learning on the job, in a sense. "Because that's what I did. I wasn't trained."
In the formative years of Smith's television career, on sitcoms such as The Royle Family (in which she played Ralf Little's girlfriend) and Two Pints of Lager and Packet of Crisps (in which she starred for eight years) she didn't feel like an imposter at all: "I was just plodding along like a jobbing actress, and it felt comfortable." Now it bothers her that she didn't go to drama school. "My agent and I made a conscious decision that this year I would try and break into drama, but I honestly didn't know if I could do it," she says. "Of course I've surprised myself, but it feels strange. If I was to describe it, I feel like a little duck gliding along, with my legs going faster than my brain."
She believes it was Flare Path, Trevor Nunn's 2011 theatre production, for which she won her second Olivier award (the first was for Legally Blonde), that lead to offers of more serious roles. She had mainly played "slappers and chavs in comedies, and although it was great, you can get typecast," she says. The play, which was supposed to be a vehicle for Sienna Miller's glittering stage career, saw Smith steal the show, winning rave reviews, and one night, a visit from a certain Dustin Hoffman to her dressing room.
"He came to tell me how he thought I acted from the heart," Smith says. Some time later he invited her to appear in Quartet, his directorial debut about a group of retired opera singers (played by Dame Maggie Smith, Pauline Collins, Michael Gambon and Billy Connolly) that will be released on New Year's Day. It's a gentle tickler of a film that will appeal to the crowd that turned out for The Exotic Marigold Hotel, but after Smith's stellar year her part seems small, not making the best of her talent at all.
In 2013 she will tackle Shakespeare, starring as Titania in Michael Grandage's A Midsummer Night's Dream opposite David Walliams, who cast her in the recent BBC adaptation of his children's book Mr Stink. "I'm a sucker for punishment, aren't I?" she says of the six-month run which will start in the summer, "but I'm just so grateful that people believe in me. It's not like I'm choosing these things, even saying I can do them. People are just being lovely and saying: 'I bet you could challenge yourself to this.'"
She is, she admits, at risk of never stopping, with work for the first half of next year also lined up (a film and a television project that she can't talk about now). It would, she realises, be scarier to stop than to just keep going, although at some point she'll need to find a work-life balance because she would like to get married and have kids. At the moment her personal life is "nonexistent". She isn't dating but "I wish I had someone," she sighs. She is coy when I ask her about being photographed stepping out with Amy Winehouse's ex Reg Traviss earlier in the year, dismissing it as: "Nothing. Nothing at all. We're just mates. But I'm enjoying kissing a few frogs, let's say."
She has been in a "couple" of serious relationships and dated James Corden on and off for two years but: "A lot of things are about timing, aren't they? I was a lot more wild back then, too. I wasn't someone who was in a frame of mind of settling down when I was with James." She didn't attend his recent wedding, but they are still friends. "I think when you've loved someone that much it doesn't ever go away. It wasn't right, but I knew he would be a fantastic husband and dad, and I want the best for him always."
She still describes playing Corden's screen sister Rudi in Gavin & Stacey as one of her most fun roles to date, and I tell her my favourite scene of the whole series has to be the rap they perform together in the car park, complete with the intricate handshake. She laughs. "I think we had been practising that on holiday! We had been in Mauritius and we were by the pool doing it every day."
Her sense of comedy probably comes from her dad. At a recent event where he was Smith's guest, he told the press that no one would ever be good enough to walk his daughter down the aisle, so that's why he was walking her up the red carpet. She describes the Smith clan – which also includes her mum and older brother, who is in a band – as "tight-knit", citing the death of her brother Julian to cancer when Smith was eight and he was 18 as the reason for being closer than most. Later she will tell me how she has started to "use" her grief in her crying scenes, something she feels "terrible" about. "But also happy," she adds, "because he is living on, somehow, in my performances." This, she feels, is better than trying not to confront his death at all, which she did for many years: "And it was odd, because I started to feel like I was denying him."
We go on to talk about a grief scene in Mrs Biggs, and it strikes me that out of all the projects Smith threw her heart and soul into this year, this is the one of which she is proudest. "It was such a special job, the best role I might ever have, and so I worked really hard on it. I gave up drinking," she adds just as the party next to us start to clink their glasses. "I just thought that if I'm in every scene of something I won't drink – I can be a bit of a party girl – and you know, I've stuck with it."
She goes on to reveal that this now means she hasn't consumed a drop of alcohol all year. And it is only later, when I'm transcribing our interview, that I remember: when Smith arrived at the pub, she sat down and spent some time really deliberating whether she should treat herself to a glass of red wine (she didn't). That tells me that, as the remaining wintry nights of 2012 draw in, maybe this sensitive, self-effacing soul is beginning to take stock of all she has achieved this year and finally start celebrating.
Quartet is released in cinemas on 1 January
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2012/dec/30/sheridan-smith-television
The 6 Hottest Celeb Girls of 2012!
Demi Lovato's Hair Makeover: Which Color Do You Like Better?
Which Disney Starlet Do You Think Will Get Married First?!
Fashion Battle: Who Was Best Dressed At The X Factor Party?Source: http://www.posh24.com/demi_lovato/omg_demi_lovato_and_wilmer_valderrama_evoke_feelings_in_paradise
Do Taylor and you learn to love each other in this movie?
Sure! I give him my daughter! That’s love. You could even say this entire thing is a love story between Edward and Jacob.
What’s your favorite memory of this experience?
One time Peter stole a bike, it was hilarious! Or when we filmed in Brazil, it was like saying “We’ve done this for years and now we’re in Brazil,” Kristen and I were wearing bathing suits in front of 6,000 Brazilians with water guns and cameras.
What was happening?
We were filming in the jungle, we had to make out and pretend we were in a waterfall.
How do you deal with the paparazzi and the madness that follows you everywhere?
You learn to live with it. If you look at the cameras, the flashes blind you. You can’t even smile around these people.
This success came over too fast, did it make you grow up faster than people your age?
When you’re making movies like these, and there’s people waiting for you outside your hotels, you’re living a very unusual life. You’re actually scared of not being a normal person because you don’t get to meet new people very often. I don’t know if I’m growing faster than people my age. I don’t feel different than my friends. I’m just myself.
Do you believe in the power of love, a love that lasts a lifetime like in the movies?
Definitely, yes. It sounds cheesy, but I see it with my parents. My dad met my mom when she was 17 and they’re still happily together.
That’s not cheesy.
No, it’s rather cute, especially when most of the kids at my school had parents going through divorces. So it was great seeing my parents sticking together.
Do you ever get privacy anymore?
I can manage in London, actually. It’s so different. In America it’s much harder.
What’s been your biggest lesson so far? Has something happened that made you change the way you see things forever?
I believe in keeping your family and friends close, because they’ll treat you the same no matter what. Real relationships are not affected by whatever happens in life. Knowing that you’ll always keep something special no matter what happens is something that has made an impact in my life. That’s one of the biggest lessons I’ve received in life.
Source: http://robpattinson.blogspot.com/2012/12/rob-interview-with-seventeen-magazine.html
Conductor, composer and choirmaster who co-presented Music Time for BBC television
The conductor, composer and choirmaster Ian Humphris, who has died aged 84, inspired countless young musicians, either in person or via his many radio and TV appearances. From 1970 he co-presented, with the singer Mari Griffith, Music Time for BBC TV, and went on to present and compose for Music Makers, Music Workshop and Words and Pictures on BBC radio. Those of us who grew up with those programmes rather took for granted the remarkable inclusivity of them. Everyone can sing a tune, was the premise, everyone can play something even if it is only a triangle. Therefore music is for all of us.
It was that philosophy that led Ian to the London Centre for Young Musicians, where from 1978 until 2000 he was head of choral studies and singing. His commitment to the accessibility of music-making led him to donate large quantities of his own choral arrangements and compositions to their community and youth music library.
Born in Clacton, Essex, Ian was the son of a shipping clerk father. When he was accepted into the Royal Academy of Music, London, for violin, piano and composition, he was the first in his family to go beyond school education. Although he won many prizes at the RAM for composing, it was as a freelance singer that he entered the music business. His innate musicality and his ability to blend – socially as well as vocally – made him a valued member of ensembles such as the Ambrosian Singers, the Purcell Singers (under Imogen Holst) and the Baccholian Singers of London, with whom he recorded and toured extensively.
Principal among these vocal ensembles was the Linden Singers, which he joined in 1950, eventually becoming their co-director and conductor. The group was constantly in demand for TV appearances, live radio broadcasts and concert tours, and became a great breeding ground for future stars of the profession. As the demand increased, Ian continued to provide dozens of vocal arrangements for the Lindens, contributing significantly to their distinctive style.
It was this ability to produce reams of music under pressure, as well as an easy charm, that led Ian to his broadcasting career. Amateur adult performers, too, benefited from his care. In 1966 he became the NatWest Choir's first professional conductor, a post he held for 40 years. In 2007 he acquired a cottage in Suffolk where, naturally, he formed a choir, the Halesworth Festival Voices. Under his leadership they performed two choral concerts a year, the most recent in October, and he was planning their next season at the time of his death.
Earlier this year when I needed some dance band arrangements for the score I was writing for the film Hyde Park on Hudson, I knew exactly where to turn. Ian's work was of course graceful and impeccable, but most typical was his presence at the recording session – as dapper as ever, offering words of support and camaraderie to the musicians.
In 1960 he married Jean Mitchell. She died in 2009. Ian is survived by two daughters, Caroline and Susan.
• Ian William Humphris, musician and broadcaster, born 29 November 1927; died 16 November 2012
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2012/dec/31/ian-humphris
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Robert Pattinson Drinking Alone Without Kristen Stewart On Christmas Eve …
Against the backdrop of the Twilight franchise reaching its inevitable end, Robert and Kristen Stewart are following a similar fate. The two haven't been photographed together much since promotion winded down for the last movie and Robert was caught …
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Sam Riley: My Kristen Stewart Jokes Don't Translate Well!
On his costar Kristen Stewart: “At 19, I think I would have wanted to be that famous, but now that I'm older and settled I wouldn't like it at all. Actually, I wouldn't mind the money.” On working with Angelina Jolie in Maleficent: “They said …
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The post Robert Pattinson Drinking Alone Without Kristen Stewart On Christmas Eve … appeared first on Celebrity news.
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With her hit Fox series "New Girl" all set to resume its second season on January 8th, Zooey Deschanel garnered herself a little welcome attention by covering the February 2013 issue of Glamour magazine.
The soon-to-be 33-year-old actress looked fashionably fabulous in a Prabal Gurung dress with a Louis Vuitton necklace for the Ellen von Unwerth shot front page while joined by Miley Cyrus' ex model flame, Justin Gaston, in the accompanying feature spread.
Meanwhile, a few tidbits from Miss Deschanel's interview are as follows. For more, be sure to pay a visit to Glamour!
On working on her own terms:
"I just realized I am happier and do better work if I'm doing what I believe in."
On not shying away from voicing her thoughts:
"I've never had a problem saying my opinions about things," she said, adding, "I never stop myself from doing something because I'm afraid of what people might think."
On getting along with other gals:
"I did go through this period where girls would be mean and I had a lot of guy friends. But I've found as an adult the importance of having female and male friends."
Source: http://celebrity-gossip.net/magazines/covers-magazine-february-2013-782853
Source: http://www.gossipcop.com/kim-kardashian-pregnant-celebuzz-blessed-lucky-announcement-website-blog/
Source: http://www.gossipcop.com/emmylou-harris-hit-and-run-car-accident-crash/
Alexander Korda Alexander Mackendrick Alexander Payne Alexandra Quinn
With her hit Fox series "New Girl" all set to resume its second season on January 8th, Zooey Deschanel garnered herself a little welcome attention by covering the February 2013 issue of Glamour magazine.
The soon-to-be 33-year-old actress looked fashionably fabulous in a Prabal Gurung dress with a Louis Vuitton necklace for the Ellen von Unwerth shot front page while joined by Miley Cyrus' ex model flame, Justin Gaston, in the accompanying feature spread.
Meanwhile, a few tidbits from Miss Deschanel's interview are as follows. For more, be sure to pay a visit to Glamour!
On working on her own terms:
"I just realized I am happier and do better work if I'm doing what I believe in."
On not shying away from voicing her thoughts:
"I've never had a problem saying my opinions about things," she said, adding, "I never stop myself from doing something because I'm afraid of what people might think."
On getting along with other gals:
"I did go through this period where girls would be mean and I had a lot of guy friends. But I've found as an adult the importance of having female and male friends."
Source: http://gossipcenter.com/zooey-deschanel/zooey-deschanel-covers-glamour-february-2013-783047
Celebs Sitting In A Tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G!
Weekend Special: Hot Celebs & Their Fave Drinks
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Nina Dobrev Talking Engagement Rumors: "I'm Not Going To Pull A Miley!"Source: http://www.posh24.com/celebrity_couples/why_we_love_ian_somerhalder_and_nina_dobrev
As an action woman in a medium ruled by men, the Oscar-winning director has always bucked convention. But does her new film about the hunt for Bin Laden defend the use of torture?
Next month, the new Kathryn Bigelow movie about the hunt for Osama bin Laden opens in British cinemas. It's called Zero Dark Thirty and it arrives in eye-catching style, trailing a great noisy convoy of criticism, praise and controversy.
When production was first announced, several Republican politicians and various rightwing groups accused the film of being a propaganda weapon for the re-election of Barack Obama; the idea was that a film about the apprehension and killing of Bin Laden would reflect well on the president.
The conservative watchdog Judicial Watch claimed that the Obama administration had unfairly and improperly given Bigelow and her writer-co-producer, Mark Boal, access to classified information. And a Republican-directed pressure group, involving former CIA officers, created a media campaign that attacked Obama's "dishonourable disclosures".
In the event, Obama swept to victory without any help from the film and when it was finally released in America earlier this month the flak came not from the right but the left. Almost as one, America's liberal intelligentsia spoke out to denounce Zero Dark Thirty for implicitly supporting the practice of torture by suggesting that it led the American secret services to Bin Laden, whereas the available evidence shows no such thing.
"In addition to providing false advertising for waterboarding," the New Yorker's Jane Mayer wrote, "Zero Dark Thirty endorses torture in several other subtle ways." Her colleague Richard Brody argued that the film not only inaccurately provided a justification for torture but that it deliberately removed any context that might have explained the jihadist cause.
"If you fall under the movie's sway," he declared, "you become complicit in its chain of suggestions and association." Other commentators were not nearly so delicate. Michael Wolff called Bigelow "a fetishist and a sadist" who had produced "a nasty piece of pulp and propaganda".
Bigelow has defended her film as a neutral action film whose authenticity lies in its attention to visual and atmospheric detail, rather than historical record. "The film doesn't have an agenda and it doesn't judge," she said. "I wanted a boots-on-the-ground experience."
She made a similar point about her previous film, the Oscar-winning The Hurt Locker, when some observers noted that it took no position on the Iraq war. And there is little doubt that over the course of her career, Bigelow has proved herself to be a visceral entertainer while steadfastly resisting the temptation to proselytise.
She doesn't want to change the world. She doesn't even want to change cinema. She just wants to expand its experiential limits. As she has put it: "I've spent a fair amount of time thinking about what my aptitude is and I really think it's to explore and push the medium. It's not about breaking gender roles or genre traditions."
As one of the very few women directors in Hollywood to build a substantial body of commercial work, she has had to carry the weight of feminist expectation, especially as in some respects Bigelow is a feminist out of Hollywood central casting.
Tall, striking and athletic, she is physically tough and emotionally independent. A youthful-looking 61, she is single and lives alone. She thrives in the kind of adverse working conditions that even the most macho of male directors would think twice about undertaking. And even her leisure pursuits – climbing Mount Kilimanjaro in subzero temperatures, for instance, because, she said: "I like to be strong" – sound like endurance tests of character.
But Bigelow has never really been a feminist film-maker. Early in her career, she made Blue Steel, a thriller about a female cop that subverted conventional images of male dominance, yet even then her interests appeared more semiotic than ideological.
Instead, she has been described as a "Hawksian" woman, like Lauren Bacall in To Have and Have Not, a beauty who is happiest hanging out with the boys. Several of her films have either had all-male casts or have – as in the case of Point Break, the finest surfer heist movie of all time – featured only minor female parts.
As she once said: "I never make a decision about a role with feminism as a criterion." Nonetheless, the decision to focus the narrative of Zero Dark Thirty on an independent-minded female CIA agent is one that's further riled some of the film's critics, who have seen it as a means of concealing the dubious morality of American interrogation techniques behind a progressive tale of female empowerment.
Maya, as the agent is called, is based on a real person, but her part in locating Bin Laden has been enhanced for dramatic reasons. The film prides, and indeed sells, itself on its authenticity, but it also demands artistic liberty. Bigelow, wrote the critic David Denby, wants "to claim the authority of fact and the freedom of fiction at the same time".
This may be so, but perhaps Maya is also a version of the director herself. She is driven to the point of obsession with completing her task and Bigelow has spoken of her own all-consuming approach to film-making. Once she begins a project, she said: "There will be an urgency and then I can do nothing else but that."
Yet she did not start out with the intention of becoming a film-maker. She was born in northern California to a librarian and paint factory manager who dreamed of becoming a cartoonist. Having studied at the San Francisco Art Institute, she got a fellowship to the Whitney in New York.
She lived in downtown Manhattan when it was rough and ready and was part of a conceptual art collective that put her in touch with the likes of Susan Sontag and Philip Glass. She and Glass made a living by moving into old print factories and turning them into lofts.
It was during this period that she experienced an epiphany at a double bill of Mean Streets and The Wild Bunch. By her own account, the visual energy of the two films "took all my semiotic Lacanian deconstructivist saturation and torqued it. I realised there's a more muscular approach to film-making that I found very inspiring".
It may come as no surprise to learn that she studied film theory as a graduate student. The upshot was that she decided painting was "a more rarefied art form with a limited audience" and that film was "this extraordinary social tool that could reach tremendous numbers of people".
It was in 1978, while still on her graduate course, that she made a short film, The Set-Up, about two men in an alley beating each other up. On this occasion, she did have a political message. Discussing the meaning of The Set-Up's violence, she once said: "You think that the enemy is outside yourself – a police officer, the government, the system – but that's not really the case at all. Fascism is very insidious, we reproduce it all the time." Doubtless her latest critics would agree.
She sent the unfinished film to the director Milos Forman, who was then a professor at Columbia University's film school. He liked what he saw, immediately offering her a scholarship.
Beginning her career in feature films with 1982's The Loveless, a moody reworking of the Marlon Brando classic The Wild One, she went on to make a series of distinctive genre films, including Point Break and the futuristic thriller Strange Days. But it wasn't until 2008's The Hurt Locker that she gained the widespread recognition that her industry reputation and body of work deserved. (She was the first woman to win the best director Oscar.)
Much was made of the fact that The Hurt Locker, a relatively low-budget movie, competed for awards, and particularly the Oscar for best film, against the mega-budget Avatar, directed by James Cameron, who is Bigelow's ex-husband. The couple were in a two-year marriage from 1989 to 1991, but it apparently ended amicably enough because Cameron wrote Strange Days, which was released in 1995.
As it turned out, Bigelow beat her ex to the Academy award, but it perhaps says something about the limits of her commercial appeal that The Hurt Locker was the lowest grossing best picture winner for half a century. This is the Bigelow paradox: her instincts are populist but her intellect is not. For all her vitality, she is drawn away from the mainstream, where she can give voice to the misfits, oddballs and idiosyncratic ideas that populate her films.
One of the ironies of the Zero Dark Thirty saga is that it began life as a film about the failure to catch Bin Laden. Had the Marines not intervened at Abbottabad, Bigelow might have produced a cultishly admired film with a short life. Instead, she has to make do with a box-office success and a big stink.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/theobserver/2012/dec/30/profile-kathryn-bigelow-film
Aleksandr Dovzhenko Aleksandr Sokurov Aleksei Balabanov Alektra Blue
Source: http://robpattinson.blogspot.com/2012/12/merry-christmas.html
Aleksei Balabanov Alektra Blue Alessandro Blasetti Aletta Ocean
More touching than overwhelming, Zaytoun is a well-meaning drama about the developing friendship of a 12-year-old Palestinian orphan, Fahed (Abdallah El Akal), and an Israeli fighter pilot, Yoni (Stephen Dorff), who is shot down on a mission over Lebanon in 1982. Fahed's ambition is to visit for the first time his family's long-deserted farm in Israel and plant an olive tree nurtured by his late father. To achieve this he overcomes his hatred of Israelis and frees Yoni, a PLO prisoner facing likely torture and death, and helps him cross the border. It's a fraught, somewhat unlikely journey, less exciting and complex than it might have been, followed by a rather laboured, uneventful sojourn in Israel. The most engaging aspect is the daily routine of Fahed's life as he fights to survive in battered Beirut.
Zaytoun is the work of Eran Riklis, the Israeli director who made the excellent Lemon Tree, a modern version of the story of Naboth's vineyard, which also centred on the preservation of a cherished tree that symbolised the continuation of Palestinian culture. It starred the formidable Hiam Abbass as a middle-aged Palestinian widow fighting to protect her West Bank lemon grove from the Israeli defence minister, who is moved into an adjoining house. Both films are highly schematic, but Lemon Tree is a tough, pessimistic movie with a core of resilient hope, while Zaytoun is a piece of ecumenical wish-fulfilment.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2012/dec/30/zaytoun-review
Aleksandr Dovzhenko Aleksandr Sokurov Aleksei Balabanov Alektra Blue
Robert Pattinson Fesses Up to Exactly What He Looks For in a Woman 
Is Kristen Stewart Spending Christmas With Robert Pattinson? The Answer Is... 
Kristen Stewart on Being in Public With Rob Pattinson: "He's So Recognizable and I'm Not"