Women Affairs

As if 2007 could get any worse for Lindsay Lohan, now this: Moviegoers tagged her with the year's worst performance by an actress. Fifty-eight per cent of voters in an online poll by AOL's web site Moviefone gave Lohan that dubious honour for her turn as a woman escaping a sadistic killer in the box-office flop, I Know Who Killed Me. The poll, which tallied more than 3.8 million votes, had more bad news for the starlet, who recently spent a brief stint in jail for drunken driving and cocaine possession and also attended voluntary rehab. Another of Lohan's films, Georgia Rule, finished second among voters for biggest waste of $10 spent on a movie ticket. The No 1 biggest waste? Norbit, a slapstick comedy starring Eddie Murphy, whose performance in the movie was the runaway pick for worst by an actor. Voters were given five choices in each poll category. Two box-office smashes were voted the most worthy of the price of a ticket: The blood-soaked ancient war epic 300 edged out...

Helen Barlow Ever since her debut as a femme fatale in Bernardo Bertolucci's The Dreamers, a film that had red-blooded men watching an art movie for the first time in their lives, Eva Green has been immortalised on the internet as one of the sexiest, shapeliest screen stars since Greta Garbo. Yet for the 27-year-old French actor, whose actor mother was part of the French New Wave, the idea of being known for her hourglass figure was far from desirable. "I'm not going on the internet any more," she protests in her posh-sounding British accent, a hangover of perfecting her English to appear in Casino Royale. "I went on the net two years ago, and I saw some very nasty things and it's scary. People warned me that this was going to happen, but even then seeing shots of me being completely naked or just parts of me was just horrible. So much of it's taken out of context." Green is not the most forthcoming of interviewees and given her regal stature she cou...

Jano Gibson and Andrew Hornery After the loud claps of thunder and torrential rain came the screams. "Nicole! Nicole! Nicole!" yelled photographers and fans lining the red carpet at last night's Australian premiere of the fantasy adventure film The Golden Compass at the State Theatre. "It's nice to be able to show up and just say thank you to the fans, and also thank you to the country actually," said Nicole Kidman, who plays the glamorous but sinister scholar Marisa Coulter in the movie adaptation of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy. Dressed in body-hugging, shiny silver pants and jacket, and holding an umbrella, Kidman signed autographs for some of the hundreds of fans who turned out in the rain with traffic closed on Market Street and Pitt Street. Kidman revealed she was drawn to playing the role after receiving a personal appeal from Pullman. "[He] wrote me an amazing letter telling me that when he was writing the novels he had me in ...

Cate Blanchett will get two shots at an award and Russell Crowe stars in a movie in line for best film when the Golden Globes are handed out next month. Blanchett has been nominated for best actress for her reprisal role as England's virgin queen in Elizabeth: The Golden Age, and is in line for a best supporting actress award for playing Bob Dylan in Todd Haynes' I'm Not There. American Gangster, co-starring Crowe, is in the running for best film and a Golden Globe best actor award for star Denzel Washington. Two movies set against different wars, Atonement and Charlie Wilson's War, dominate the nominations, with Atonement earning seven nods including best drama. Experts said the Golden Globe nominations did little to define leaders in the Oscar race. Still, there were clear winners such as drama Atonement, comedy Charlie Wilson's War and musical Sweeney Todd, and one chief loser, Into the Wild. David Poland of website Movie City News was pointed when asked what the...

Nicole Kidman has taken another step up the celebrity ladder with the unveiling of her very own wax work at Madame Tussauds. Draped in a glamorous floor-length red gown, Kidman's wax work has taken its place at the world-famous museum alongside models of fellow Hollywood A-list celebrities including Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. Despite her long career as an actress, it is the first time the museum has created a Kidman wax work. Designers spent about three months creating the figure, unveiled overnight in London, based on thousands of photographs of the Australian actress. "Nicole is wearing a stunning floor-length red dress which really emphasises her flawless beauty and grace, idolised by so many women around the world," Madame Tussauds spokesman Ben Lovett said. "There's no mistaking that she is a hugely popular global celebrity and we are delighted to be unveiling her." Kidman's latest film, The Golden Compass, opens in Australia on December 26. On l...

After drugs and rock 'n' roll, sex has caught the eye of the police in Pune. The Crime Branch last week unearthed a major Internet-based sex racket of countrywide proportions involving models -turned-television actresses - three were arrested. The action followed last month's arrest of two Mumbai-based models and a tout from the film industry, and the detention earlier in the year of over 150 young people in a rave party that had set off a chain of narcotics seizures, all of which the police said were signs of lifestyle crimes coming to booming Pune, some 170 km from Mumbai. The latest arrests came after a complaint against a website, chamadi.com, by Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha city chief Sandeep Khardekar. The police said models from various cities across the country had posted their cellular phone numbers to offer "escort" services to "discerning gentlemen". The website invites successful men who were pressed for time, and could not manage long-term r...

An arrest warrant has been issued for actress Hayden Panettiere in Japan as a result of her Save the Whales protest in the country according to E! News. "I learned today that I have an arrest warrant out for me in Japan because of what I did for Save the Whales," Heroes star Panettiere told E!. Panettiere was part of a group who tried to prevent the slaughter of a group of whales and dolphins by fisherman near Taiji in southwestern Japan. The group of activists was involved in a confrontation with the fishermen after they paddled on surfboards to try and reach a pod of dolphins before it was driven into a nearby cove and massacred. Video footage of the clash shows the fisherman using the boat's propellers to halt the surfers' progress and even lashing out at them with a boat hook, eventually forcing them to return to shore. Panettiere said she did not know what repercussions the arrest warrant would bring, but said it would not put her off doing something similar agai...

Greg Truman Horror movies tend to keep Australian actress Melissa George up at night. She is not spooked watching them. Rather, she's wary of being haunted by her decision to act in them. That's not to say blood, guts and ghosts haven't been kind to George, the 31-year-old former Home and Away star and Logie winner. Her impressive, nearly decade-long march toward the top tier in Hollywood has been aided by a few high-profile roles in scary flicks, most notably the hit 2005 remake of The Amityville Horror. Her star was still ascending when she starred alongside Clive Owen and Jennifer Aniston in the mildly successful suspense film Derailed in 2006 but flickered with the release this year of Turistas, a flabby horror movie set in Brazil. Now George is in the schlock-light again, fighting off vampires alongside Josh Hartnett in 30 Days of Night, director David Slade's take on the stunning graphic novel by Steve Niles and Perth's Ben Templesmith. Produced by Hollywood h...

Best Actress Nominee Cate Blanchett tonight played down the Oscar hype surrounding her latest portrayal of Queen Elizabeth I. Speaking at the London premiere of Elizabeth: The Golden Age, Blanchett put Academy Awards talk surrounding her reprisal of the role which won her a Best Actress nomination in 1998 down to the "time of year". "Oscar who?" Blanchett said in a red-carpet interview with Sky News. When pressed on the film's chances at the awards next year, Blanchett said: "I don't know. Who knows? "In the end, when you reprise a role, you just hope the film is going to stand on its own two feet, which I think this does. "That's all you can hope for really." Blanchett, her Australian supporting cast, Geoffrey Rush and Abbie Cornish, and the film's editor, Jill Billcock of Melbourne, had been early front-runners for Oscars, which will be awarded on February 24. But the movie's hopes were hit by negative reviews in America ear...

Nicole Kidman has begun piling on the pounds - not because she's pregnant, but for her next movie. The 40-year-old Australian movie star has already added 4.5kg to her svelte frame and plans to double her weight gain in coming weeks before she starts filming The Reader. "She is naturally very slim and loves to run and swim so she is always very toned," an unnamed close friend of Kidman's told The Mail on Sunday newspaper. "The part she plays demands that she gets fatter throughout the movie as her character slips into middle age. "Nicole was originally planning to use prosthetics but was told by the director, Stephen Daldry, that it would be more realistic if she gained the weight." Kidman is following in the footsteps of fellow actress Renee Zellweger, who packed on more than 13kg to play Bridget Jones in two movies by chowing down on pizza, peanut butter sandwiches and fast food. Kidman's new diet includes drinking daily protein shakes and eating ...

The father of iconic French film star Catherine Deneuve was a low-level Nazi collaborator during World War II, according to a new, unauthorised biography. Deneuve, who is 64 next week, emerges from the biography, which she tried to block, as a calculating and unhappy person, driven by money and an obsessive need for privacy. The actress, who has been described on numerous occasions as the most beautiful woman in the world, is usually presented in France as a warm and rather scatty person, beneath an icy, controlled exterior. But the author, Bernard Violet, a respected investigative biographer, claims that this image is a "legend" constructed by Deneuve herself. Recent revelations that Deneuve had made public appearances for cash for a dubious Algerian businessman were not an isolated case, according to the book, Deneuve, L'Affranchie (Deneuve, the free woman). However, the book's main revelation is on Deneuve's father, Maurice Dorleac, who was also an a...

Charlize Theron has an Oscar, a Golden Globe and a Screen Actors Guild award. Now she is Esquire magazine's "sexiest woman alive." Past winners of the title include Jessica Biel, Angelina Jolie and Scarlett Johansson. The issue featuring Theron hits newsstands October 16. Theron talked with the magazine about growing up on a farm, her political interests and her work, including her latest movie, In the Valley of Elah, a murder mystery set among US troops newly returned from Iraq. "I wanted to make the movie precisely because it evades formulas about guilt," the 32-year-old actress said. "I'm drawn to ambiguity." Theron also candidly discussed her least favourite film, Reindeer Games. "That was a bad, bad, bad movie," she said. "But ... I got to work with John Frankenheimer. I wasn't lying to myself - that's why I did it." Theron won an Oscar for her role in Monster. Her screen credits also include North Country and The C...

Actress Halle Berry may have won an Oscar, but she says she is frustrated at still having to convince movie studios of her ability because she is black. "It doesn't matter that I have an Oscar, an Emmy, a Golden Globe and a Silver (Berlin) Bear," Berry, who is pregnant with her first child, said during an interview at a Manhattan hotel to promote her new movie Things We Lost in the Fire. "I shouldn't have had to try so hard to be considered. I should have to stop convincing studios I am right for it -- it should be on my acting merit," she said. Berry was the first black woman to win an Academy Award for best actress, winning the 2002 Oscar for Monster's Ball. In her latest film she plays Audrey Burke, a widowed mother of two who asks her husband's friend, Jerry Sunborne, to live with them. She helps him overcome heroin addiction while Sunborne, played by Benicio Del Toro, helps her come to terms with her husband's death. Berry said her first que...

Melinda Houston says spunky, sassy Sonia Kruger is Dancing with the Stars' best asset: a great second banana. All care, no responsibility. High profile, low risk. Not too many TV celebs these days actually like being referred to as the second banana ("We're a team! It's a team effort!"), but not only does the role have a long and honourable history, it has to be one of the best gigs around. If you pick your first banana wisely - or at least the vehicle in which you both appear - you get to enjoy ratings success, and much that goes with it (such as a nice fat pay packet, and secure employment) without having to worry about those ratings. It's not your show, after all. Sure, you may have to take the blame when little things go wrong, but, as long as you're not the headliner, no one can say that, ultimately, success or failure is your responsibility. And, in the meantime, you have a prime-time spot, you get to make the funny with the experts, you get to bask ...

Devin Gordon In her new film, Jodie Foster kills eight people. The two-time Oscar winner plays public-radio host Erica Bain, who survives a brutal attack in New York's Central Park during which her fiance is killed. After she heals, she slowly transforms into a vigilante and puts herself on a collision course with the thugs who attacked her. Foster says the film, The Brave One - directed by Neil Jordan (The Crying Game) - appealed to her not only for its resonance with Taxi Driver, the nightmarish 1976 film that made the teen actress a star, but also for its exploration of living with fear in post-9/11 New York. To me, the lead character in this movie is New York. Was it always set there? Originally, it was set in Anytown USA, meaning, wherever it would be cheap to make - Toronto or something. But I just felt you couldn't do this movie without talking about New York and how that has changed. We all love New York, but sometimes you hate it, too. Erica's somebody whose show i...

RAQUEL MARIA DILLON Following Michelle Rodriguez's court appearance yesterday, it is evident that she might go to jail for violating a probation in a drunken driving case again by failing to complete her community service and not following the an alcohol education program. She was in court to answer to the latest claims by the city attorney's office, which said the former "Lost" actress submitted a document stating she performed community service on Sept. 25, 2006, but later admitted she was actually in New York City that day. The document was required as part of the 30 days of community service Rodriguez was ordered to serve for violating probation in a 2003 drunken driving case, according to court papers filed Thursday in Los Angeles County Superior Court. If she is found to have violated terms of her probation, Rodriguez could face between 477 to 537 days in county jail and a $2,000 fine. Rodriguez, 29, kept quiet in court as her attorney, Richard Beale, argued tha...

Best known for her bandaged costume in The Fifth Element, apart from her adrenaline-pumping action sequences in the Resident Evil series, Milla Jovovich is back once again. This time she reprises her role as Alice in the third series of Resident Evil: Extinction. An actress, a model, a fashion designer and a musician, she’s all this and more. BT catches up with the star for an exclusive interview. Here she talks about her work, life and impending motherhood. How did you originally become a part of this project? My younger brother was a big fan of the game and we used to play all the time together. I thought it would be fun to be in these movies that were his favourite game so I asked my agent if they were making Resident Evil films and found out they were so I went and auditioned. Why do you keep coming back to this character? I love action films and I’ve always loved sci-fi. I never thought that it would end up being this many films, but at the same time it’s fun for me. I think it’s ...

Keira Knightley might be one of the most sought after actresses today, but the star reveals that success hasn’t come easy for her. The 22-year-old actress admitted that her first years in the industry were lonely and she took the strain of malicious comments. “When I was 17, 18, 19, I felt incredibly insecure. I went through a period of thinking I looked weird and skinny, and that’s 10 times worse when you’re being written about,” the Daily Express quoted her, as telling Vogue magazine. “When it first starts happening, I defy anybody not to look at every review that says you’re rubbish and not to look at every picture that says you’re wearing the wrong dress,” she added. Keira said that to get away from criticism, she buried herself in her work, but even that didn’t stop critics from doubting her suitability in Pride And Prejudice. Celebrity Beauty Products, Bath & Shower , Fragrance , Best Buys , Gift Sets , Hair Care , Makeup , Men's Grooming , Shaving & Hair Removal ,...