9 Of The Worst Celebrity Breakups And Other Hollywood Celebrity Gossip

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Radio 2 brings back long-lost Hollywood in new show

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Forgotten interviews with late Hollywood stars including Gene Kelly, Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire are to be broadcast by Radio 2 after being unearthed in a family archive.

The conversations, featuring the biggest stars of the silver screen, were originally recorded by the saxophonist and radio presenter Benny Green and broadcast in part in the 1970s.

The interviews, which were saved in his personal archive along with transcripts of other conversations, have now been retrieved by his son, Leo Green.

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Green will now present a “Hollywood Special” for Radio 2 as part of its Christmas schedule, with material from Frank Sinatra, Judy Garland and Barbra Streisand.

The two-part series will be a mixture of music and interviews, intended to explore the “greats of the silver screen”.

A BBC source said the material would be drawn partly from Benny Green’s personal collection and partly from the corporation’s archive.

The majority of the original interviews were recorded for a 26-part series called Hooray for Hollywood, written by Benny Green for Douglas Fairbanks Jnr to narrate and were aimed at celebrating 50 years of musicals.

Benny Green, a saxophonist, worked from the BBC from 1955 until 1998, when he died aged 70.

His son Leo told the Telegraph: “These songs, stories and voices deserve not to be sat in a cupboard somewhere gathering dust. The artists we’ll hear from are some of the greatest performers of all time.

“When some of my friends' dads passed away, they got left a set of golf clubs and a few ill-fitting suits.

“I have been fortunate enough to have been left an incredible and historical archive and I’m really excited to have the chance to share these interviews and celebrate both the Great American Popular Songbook and Hollywood with Radio 2 audiences.”

The two-part programme will be broadcast on December 24 and 26 as part of the festive schedule, which will also include “Michael Sheen’s 80s”.

The show, presented by actor Michael Sheen, will explore the music of his teenage years, including Alison Moyet, Tears for Fears, U2 and the Cult.

He said: “I was 11 in 1980 and every day of that decade, every crush, every fight, every hope and every heartbreak is inextricably linked for me to its music. It is as much a part of me, I realise now, as the experiences that shaped my life.”

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Hunger Games star Jennifer Lawrence is bringing Hollywood back to earth

Jennifer Lawrence, whose film The Hunger Games: Catching Fire opens tonight, is one woman who is treating the Hollywood machine with all the discourtesy it deserves

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Jacki Weaver: The worst mother in Hollywood

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If you don’t think Oscar nominations can redefine a career, have a word with two-time Academy Award nominee Jacki Weaver. Three years ago, the 66-year-old Sydney-born actress wouldn’t have given a second thought to the decisions of the Academy voters. Having seized her first Hollywood breaks with award-winning performances in Stork (1971) and Caddie (1976), as well as Peter Weir’s outback drama Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), she soon faded from the international spotlight and spent the next 40-odd years building a theatre career in Australia. But in 2010, everything changed.

First-time writer-director David Michôd emailed Weaver with a role in his feel-bad thriller Animal Kingdom. It was a part he’d written specially for her. She was to play the smiling, entirely lethal matriarch of a screwed-up Melbourne crime family.

Planting overly intimate smooches on the mouths of her grown sons, then setting them against one another with chilling jollity, she made an impression too rapacious for the Academy to ignore and was nominated as best supporting actress.

Jacki Weaver and Sullivan Stapleton in Animal Kingdom

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Two years later she was nominated again, this time for her performance as a frazzled housewife dealing with the return of her son from a mental health clinic in David O Russell’s rom-com, Silver Linings Playbook.

“I really did not expect that one!” she admits happily when we meet at the Toronto Film Festival. I suggest it may have helped her Oscar cause that the two roles couldn’t have been more different. “I like to say I went from being the worst mother in the world to the best,” she chirrups.

In person, Weaver is equally hard to pin down. A tiny powerhouse at just a hair over 5ft tall, there’s something both gentle and devilish about her. In Peter Landesman’s Parkland, she’s back to being the worst mother in the world, or something like it. The film is an earnest docudrama about bystanders thrust into the spotlight on a fateful day in American history – November 22 1963.

Of all the roles available there’s only one part you can imagine Weaver playing: Lee Harvey Oswald’s insane mother, Marguerite. Her appearance in the movie is late, her scenes relatively few, and she looks a fright, whether being interrogated about her son’s role in the assassination, or putting him in the grave. “I keep warning my husband it’s not a date role!” Weaver says.

Jacki Weaver as Marguerite Oswald in Parkland (credit: Claire Folger)

Her husband is the actor Sean Taylor. He’s Weaver’s fourth, though she has been married five times – twice to the Australian broadcaster Derryn Hinch. During the Silver Linings Playbook awards campaign, she gave Hinch a candid interview on national television, opening up about being abused by a family friend, and giving him a mischievous answer to the question, “Why did we break up again?” “Because I ran off with another man – and I’m sorry – but he was lovely,” she told him.

Although her track record on husbands may indicate that she’s trying to emulate Elizabeth Taylor, Weaver’s lack of vanity suggests otherwise. In Parkland, she wears dowdy costumes that, as our critic Robbie Collin quipped, look like something “scavenged from Les Dawson’s drag trunk”.

“We just tried to look as much like the real woman as possible,” she offers. “There are videotapes of my character talking to the press, and there’s a wonderful book written by Jean Stafford, called A Mother in History. All of my dialogue is pretty much verbatim.

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Hollywood Baby Boom! Kelly Clarkson Isn't the Only Star Who's Expecting

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robert pattinson shocked over kristen stewart affair

celebrity news. Twilight star Robert Pattinson has been left in shock and is devastated after his girlfriend and fellow twilight star Kristen Stewart has allegedly been cheating on him. The twilight star is being comforted by his friends over the affair. read the full story on in2town magazine

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