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Affleck avoids ‘f' word in reference to J-Lo

 “Classy” choice of words, Ben.

Accepting an award from the liberal People for the American Way Foundation, Ben Affleck didn't use the f-word — as in fiancee — when referring to Jennifer Lopez. “I only accept it in the hopes that the absurd amounts of publicity that I received lately, that as far as I can tell is chiefly because I have a pretty girlfriend, that's what I did, I am a champion of the American way with a pretty girlfriend — bring it on, paparazzi, news at 11 — in the hopes that some of that publicity might be pointed at something more significant, something more positive, productive and meaningful,” Affleck said, according to an Associated Press Television News tape. The actor made the remarks while accepting a Spirit of Liberty Award Tuesday night in Los Angeles. Lopez and Affleck, whose recent film “Gigli” bombed after abysmal reviews, had planned to marry Sept. 14 before abruptly calling off the wedding. It would have been the third marriage for Lopez, 33, and the first for Affleck, 31. Since then, media scrutiny has intensified, with everyone wondering, will-they-or-won't-they? When they bought a pickup truck in Georgia and attended a Red Sox game in Boston, it was news. Affleck and Lopez also co-star in the Kevin Smith movie “Jersey Girl,” set for release next year.

Necklace owned by Eva Peron auctioned for $466,700

Photo: A necklace which once belonged to Argentina's legendary former first lady Eva Peron

An antique ruby-and-diamond necklace worn by Eva Peron, Argentina's most famous first lady, was sold Wednesday for $466,700 (U.S.), more than double the pre-auction estimate. The necklace, which dates from the late 19th century, was bought by a member of the jewelry industry in Asia, according to Christie's auction house.

The necklace is closely linked to Ms. Peron, who died in 1952. She was seen wearing it in official Argentine postage stamps. She was born in poor, rural Argentina. An actress, she married Juan Domingo Peron in 1945. He became the country's leader and the couple dominated Argentina. Until her death from cancer a few years later, “Evita” was revered by some as a saint and loathed by others as power-hungry and ruthless. Her life story was made into a musical and a movie.(AP/The Globe)                                      Photo: Eva Peron

Kidman wins libel damages

Oscar-winning actress Nicole Kidman accepted an apology and undisclosed damages on Tuesday from a British newspaper group to settle a libel suit over an article alleging that she had an adulterous affair with actor Jude Law. The settlement with News Group Newspapers, publishers of The Sun tabloid, is the second for Kidman over the same allegations. Kidman's lawyer told the High Court libel hearing that a story published in The Sun in March implied that the 37-year-old actress had initiated an affair with Law, leading to the breakdown of his marriage to actress Sadie Frost. "The publication of the article caused damage to the claimant's personal and professional reputation and she has suffered considerable embarrassment and distress," lawyer Keith Schilling said. News Group Newspapers, editor Rebekah Wade and journalist Victoria Newton accepted that the allegations in the report were untrue and apologized to Kidman. Tuesday's settlement followed an almost identical deal in Kidman's favour in July when Associated Newspapers, publisher of the Daily Mail, granted her undisclosed damages and an apology for a similar article. Kidman, who filmed the yet-to-be-released Cold Mountain with Law in Romania, said in a statement on Tuesday: "I am glad that this has finally been resolved." The actress said she would donate the damages from both cases to Fara, a charity that helps Romania's abandoned children. The Globe/AP

World Art Celebrities Journal Honors Sharon Gee

Photo: British artist Sharon Gee

Synopsis of Ms. Gee’s Biography:

 
Photo: Twilight by Sharon Gee

Born in England near Tunbridge Wells, Kent, followed by a move to East Anglia, Sharon attended Downham Market Grammar School, where she obtained her ‘A’ Levels. She then continued her studies at Norwich City College of Further and Higher Education, pursuing her flair for languages and specialising in both French and German. Sharon is now a professional artist and lives and works in London.

Sharon has a natural ability to be creative and this is clearly demonstrated in her art. Employing design in its simplest form, her style is unique. "The simple, direct vision of this artist should surprise and delight both the general public and collectors alike." - S Sinsley - Art Historian, Critic and Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago - Chicago, 25 March 2000 Sharon’s deeply held belief is that the five senses - sight, sound, touch, taste and smell - and a great awareness of the beauty of nature can evoke strong images and emotions. Life is a gift - if we can learn to appreciate all the wonderful things on offer, then we will have the key to life and inner harmony.

This appreciation brings optimism to a world in which there is much sadness. Nature is the healer - it soothes, replenishes, regenerates. In all her work, Sharon draws upon the influence and inspiration of life itself.
 Sharon’s first one-woman exhibition took place in the UK in 1998 at McNeill Fine Art Gallery, Radlett, Hertfordshire. In 2000, she was launched internationally with a six-week solo exhibition, The Power Of Passion, at Collins Fine Art, Chicago, USA. Sharon has also taken part in several joint shows including The Modernists exhibition at McNeill Fine Art in 2000. Her works are already held in many individual collections, including the painting, White Lace, which is now in the private collection of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother. Another of her paintings, The Rose, is owned by the English Rugby Football Union and this currently hangs in the grounds of the English national stadium. Sharon has also been mentioned in the Culture section of The Sunday Times by Art Editor, Richard Brooks and featured in the London Evening Standard. Alongside leading representatives from the Tate Modern, the Guildhall School of Music and the French Variety Club, Sharon is a patron of Young Masters of Arts, a new international arts project aimed at pursuing a fusion between the visual arts and music to promote youth excellence. Sharon is committed to art and the discovery of new and exciting ideas and techniques. Her progress in the art world has been rapid.

Visit Ms. Gee’s website at: http://www.sharongee.com/index.htm

Yoko Ono sentimental doing Lennon compilation

Photo: Yoko Ono stands by a poster of John Lennon at the premiere of the DVD containing 20 songs and previously unreleased footage of Lennon

Yoko Ono says compiling a new DVD of John Lennon's solo work was one of the hardest jobs she's ever done. "It was very hard for me to work on this, because there were many footages that reminded me of my life with John," Ono told the audience at a preview screening Tuesday of Lennon Legend.

Lennon Legend features 20 of Lennon's songs, illustrated with a mix of restored promo clips, new animation and previously unseen footage of the couple. "Sometimes it made me feel less professional about it, and I wondered if I could go through it," Ono said. As executive producer of the disc, she helped comb through videotapes, home movies and newsreels for footage of the couple in performance, at home in New York City and at the beach. Lennon was shot to death outside his New York City apartment building on Dec. 8, 1980. He and Ono were married in 1969.  "His life was a very driven one, a very compressed one," the 70-year-old Ono said.  "In his very short life, he did a lot for us." Lennon Legend, a companion to a 1998 album of the same name, will be released Oct. 27 in Britain on Parlophone and Nov. 18 in the United States on Capitol. AP

Real James Bond dies

Retired Lieutenant Commander Patrick Dalzel-Job, whose wartime exploits made him a model for the fictional super spy James Bond, has died at 90, his son said on Thursday. The cause of death was not announced. During the Second World War, Dalzel-Job commanded one of the naval teams led by Bond's creator, Ian Fleming, in undercover raids on occupied Europe. Dispatched to Norway, Dalzel-Job saved the people of Narvik from a Nazi reprisal bombing raid by arranging for them to be evacuated in fishing boats. He was threatened with a court martial, but reprieved when the Norwegian king awarded him the prestigious Knights Cross of St. Olaf, First Class. Peter Jemmett, a member of Fleming's unit, said later that when Fleming's first Bond novels appeared in the 1950s, colleagues immediately recognized Dalzel-Job in the 007 character. "In contrast to a number of people who have claimed that they were the James Bond, Patrick has never made any fuss about it," Jemmett said.

Dalzel-Job later acknowledged that Fleming had told him he was the basis for Bond, but added: "I have never read a Bond book or seen a Bond movie. They are not my style ..... And I only ever loved one woman, and I'm not a drinking man." That woman was Bjorg Bangsund, who was a schoolgirl when she joined Dalzel-Job and his mother in sailing his schooner Mary Fortune as far as the Russian Arctic in 1939. In June 1945, Dalzel-Job returned to Norway searching for the girl, and married her within three weeks. Dalzel-Job had volunteered for military service when the war broke out and, with his knowledge of Norwegian waters, was ordered to help organize the landing of the Allied North-West Expeditionary Force in Norway, using mainly small local craft. His evacuation — against orders — of the people of Narvik in May 1940 prevented large numbers of casualties; just four Norwegians died. In 1943, he was involved in an unsuccessful attempt to attack the dry dock at the Norwegian town of Bergen using four midget submarines. After training as a parachutist and diver, Dalzel-Job later collected enemy intelligence in France and Germany; in 1945 he accepted the surrender of the German city of Bremen.-AP

By RAY CONLOGUE

But if that is just Bruckheimer's way of saying that Blanchett stole the movie, he is entirely right. Early reaction to Veronica Guerin has focused almost entirely on Blanchett's performance, with a good deal of Oscar talk going on. Taken together with her performance as the queen of England in Elizabeth five years ago, Veronica Guerin has sealed Blanchett's reputation as the most formidable of the new crop of actresses. But when it's put to her that way, during a recent visit to the Toronto film festival, she is surprised. "I don't think about the evolution of the creature, the actress. I've been out of drama school for eight or nine years. That's enough time for a lot to happen to any one." Of course. Haven't we all done 14 films, two TV series and a couple of dozen theatre performances in the last eight years? Right after graduating?

                                                                                                             Photo: Veronia Guerin

Guerin had not only been warned to stop writing exposes of Ireland's drug lords, she had actually been shot in the leg by a gunman who knocked at her front door. Her response was to take intensive physiotherapy and get right back to harassing the criminals. Having located the ringleader, a murderous fellow named Gilligan who had set himself up as a pretend aristocrat breeding race horses, Guerin went right to his palatial home and knocked on the door. Gilligan stepped out and beat her senseless. That didn't stop her either

Her husband and child also begged her to stop, and she didn't. "You can say she was cavalier," says Blanchett, "but she was trying to change the environment her child was growing up in." She also cuts short any suggestion that a mother has a greater responsibility to keep herself alive than a father. "Lots of policemen with children risk their lives." As an actress Blanchett is a superb technician, and she deployed a variety of devices to approach the role. She listened to tapes of Guerin being interviewed, including some that were made after she was assaulted by Gilligan. "The linguistic process is a way into the character," says Blanchett. "How they intonate, how they breathe...the anger submerged in the voice." She talked to Blanchett's mother, brothers and other relatives, "and they all described a different person, the way people do." She spent a solid month in Ireland hammering away at the accent until nobody could spot that she was foreign. And then she contemplated the fact that Joel Schumacher, the director, wanted Guerin's death to occur at the beginning, with the rest of the film depicting the months before her death. The audience would know that Guerin was heading toward death, but Guerin herself did not. How to play a character who doesn't know that she is going to die, when you the actor do? "It's part of the skill. You have to have a childlike sense of concentration. They say you can be infantilized in this industry, but you have to have the ability to do imaginative play and pretend that what you're doing hasn't happened before," she says. Especially difficult was the scene where Gilligan attacks her. "The only way to play shock is to pretend it isn't going to happen. She didn't knock on Gilligan's door expecting to be beaten. Doing the scene wasn't pleasant. I had on a thin suit and I couldn't pad it because of continuity (she had worn it in a previous scene). And it was raining. Gerry (McSorley, who plays Gilligan) was nervous in case he hit me. And then he did hit me. He hadn't intended it." So here is Blanchett, the camera recording not-entirely-fake blood spurting from her nose and mouth, continuing her plan: to become the "rag doll" that Guerin had described herself as being in the same moment. Never having been beaten up herself, she had prepped for the scene by asking male friends what it was like. "They said an unprovoked beating leaves you with humiliation that turns to rage. I found that interesting."

Blanchett, who is 34 years old, grew up in Melbourne. Her Australian mother and American father were business people, and her grandfather, she recalls, "was a mechanic and illustrator". She studied economics and fine art at university, and with no actors in the family had no real reason to think of herself becoming one. But while travelling in Egypt she picked up a little money working as an extra on an Arabic film. She returned to Australia and attended the National Academy of Dramatic Arts. Straight out the door of the school, she became a fixture of professional theatre in Sydney, a link she has never forgotten (this spring she will return there to play Hedda Gabler in a new adaptation written by her husband, film director Andrew Upton). She hasn't always been fortunate in her choice of films. But in every one that has received so-so reviews - Oscar and Lucinda, Pushing Tin, An Ideal Husband - the critics have been unanimous that her performance was better than the rest of the film. It has been noticed that she can play characters totally unlike each other with seamless and effortless conviction. "Cate isn't a glamour star," says Bruckheimer, who accompanied her to Toronto. "She becomes the character." It almost seems inevitable that, given a non-human character like Galadriel the elf queen in Lord of the Rings, Blanchett would be called on to bring her to life.

Veronica Guerin looks like another of those movies which will attract mixed reviews, in spite of Bruckheimer's declaration that "we didn't want the character to be candy coated. She was flawed." An Irish journalist who wrote a critical biography of Guerin, Emily O'Reilly, was paid 130,000 pounds to be an adviser on the movie but now says that very little of her research was used in it, and that she has no intention of seeing it. Others, allowing that the film in the main is honest, regret what one Dublin critic calls "the shocking dive into sentimentality at the end." Like most actors, Blanchett will not let herself be put in the position of having to criticize aspects of a movie she is in - especially not those aspects, such as the script, over which she had no control. All that she will say now is that "Veronica Guerin is not a documentary, it is a work of fiction." She adds that there is never unanimity about the character of a human being, and that she had to settle on her own understanding of Guerin - "I had to make her three dimensional" - even knowing that some people who knew Guerin would disagree with those choices. We finished our conversation by telephone, since she had to fly off to the west coast to star in Martin Scorsese's upcoming film inspired by reclusive millionaire Howard Hughes. It's called The Aviator, and Blanchett will play the role of Katherine Hepburn, who had a long relationship with Hughes. "And I'll tell you one thing," she says emphatically. "I'm not doing a Katherine Hepburn imitation!" The Globe

Karl Malden to receive lifetime achievement honor