Madonna movie set for Oscar race

30 June 2011 Last updated at 10:46 GMT Madonna made her directing debut in 2008 with the short film Filth and Wisdom, which she also wrote Madonna's film about the life of Wallis Simpson is to be released during film awards season, it has been announced.

Harvey Weinstein, who recently acquired the rights to W.E, said he wanted to give it a "prominent release date."

The film is set for its US premiere in December, putting it in line for Academy Awards consideration.

Abbie Cornish is set to star in the movie, which tells the story of the romance between King Edward VIII and American divorcee Mrs Simpson.

A wider release in the US is planned for the middle of January.

"Madonna beautifully interweaves past and present in W.E," Mr Weinstein said.

"It's a very smart film, and a stunning feature directorial debut. I'm incredibly excited about this movie and I wanted to give it a prominent release date."

Madonna, best known for her pop career, made her directing debut in 2008 with Filth and Wisdom, which she also wrote.

The release was premiered in Berlin, and received some poor reviews from critics, including The Guardian's Peter Bradshaw who branded it "dumb and tacky".

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Lady Warhol

30 June 2011 Last updated at 07:49 GMT By Ian Youngs Arts reporter, BBC News Andy Warhol bought seven wigs for the sessions. Photo: Christopher Makos 1981 www.makostudio.com Photographs of Andy Warhol in ladies' wigs and full make-up have gone on display in the UK for the first time. His friend and collaborator Christopher Makos, who took the photos, talks about working with the patriarch of pop art.

Warhol's impassive, enigmatic stare is the same in most of the 349 frames that Makos fired off at the Factory studio over two days in 1981.

But using seven different wigs and little else, the artist transformed himself into a series of striking female alter-egos.

There is the starlet with the stylish blonde bob, the rock chick with the wild brown mane, the socialite with the busy black nest and the fallen idol with the distressed bleached curls.

They are all obviously Warhol, but also quite unnervingly, convincingly not.

Then aged 53 and one of the most famous artists in the world, he was toying with his own identity and the notion of how changing your appearance could change the way you are seen by others.

"We played with this idea of how people would perceive Warhol," Makos says.

"When you put make-up on a man and change the way he looks and put a wig on, it completely changes the way you look at a particular person."

Some have said that with these sessions he was trying to get closer to heroines like Marilyn Monroe, Liz Taylor and Joan Collins, whom he depicted in his famous silkscreens.

Some think he was exploring his feminine side. Makos thinks he was stepping into the characters of the rich female collectors who paid $25,000 a time to commission a portrait from Warhol.

They certainly show another side to one of the most celebrated and ubiquitous artists of modern times, and four of those images have gone on show at the Lowry gallery in Salford.

They hang alongside Marilyn, Liz and Joan in an exhibition called Warhol and the Diva, examining the artist's fixation with image and celebrity culture.

Makos (left) became a regular collaborator. Photo: Christopher Makos 1981 www.makostudio.com

The photos also appear in Makos' book Lady Warhol and an accompanying free iPhone app.

The series, titled Altered Images, was Warhol's homage to Marcel Duchamp's alter ego Rrose Selavy, who was photographed in a ladies' hat and fur collar by Man Ray in the 1920s.

It was just another step in Warhol's creative process, says Makos, who describes working with the artist as being like "being on a non-stop date".

"When artists get together they like to play and be creative and Warhol was one of the biggest playmates, and I was lucky enough to play in his sandbox for a while," he says.

Makos met Warhol after working as an assistant to the playwright Tennessee Williams. "I wasn't a very good assistant. I lost his typewriter," he admits.

By the mid-1970s, Makos was making a name for himself as a photographer and met Warhol at an exhibition opening. "I barely knew who Andy Warhol was at that time because I was quite young", he says.

The pair started working together and Makos became a member of Warhol's inner circle at The Factory.

"He was a lot of fun," Makos recalls. "He was very dedicated, a hard worker. He didn't know when to stop. There were no weekends or holidays.

"It was called The Factory for a reason. It was an assembly line of things going on, whether it was book publishing, painting, making movies, doing interviews, there was always something going on."

Warhol was one of the first to take the growing obsession with celebrity, the sensational and the mass-produced and turn it into art. He amplified it, played with it and reflected it back to the world.

"He was fixated by American pop culture," Makos says. "He was fixated by what people found interesting.

"He loved looking at the New York Post every day. People are fascinated by those headlines and so was he. And he turned a lot of that into art.

"He would have loved this world today of the internet and texting and immediate responses and reactions to things.

"I'm curious as to how he would have dealt with this in terms of art. I'm sure everything you see on your monitor or your mobile phone he would have taken and made silkscreens of. It's a wild notion."

Next year, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York will stage a major exhibition examining Warhol's influence over the last 50 years on 50 artists, including Makos, an acclaimed photographer in his own right.

A 1967 self-portrait sold for $17.4m (?10.8m) in February

"Warhol's like a rock star," Makos says. "He's a big icon. I always say the best career move is to drop dead. He did that and that was a big career move.

"After Warhol died [the prices for] his works went sky high and they're still going sky high. It's wild."

Just this year, three of Warhol's works have sold for $38.4m (?23.5m), $20m (?12.2m) and $17.4m (?10.8m).

"He'd be surprised and he'd be annoyed that he wasn't getting that kind of money when he was alive," Makos continues.

In his lifetime, Warhol's $25,000 portrait fee was much less than the amounts commanded by contemporaries like Roy Lichtenstein and Robert Rauschenberg, Makos says. "That always used to aggravate Andy.

"But the bottom line is that almost anybody knows the name Andy Warhol."

Warhol and the Diva is at The Lowry in Salford until 25 September. Christopher Makos' new book Tyrants and Lederhosen, a collaboration with Paul Solberg under the name The Hilton Brothers, will be published in October.

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Crowne Prince

1 July 2011 Last updated at 01:14 GMT By Tim Masters Entertainment correspondent, BBC News Tom Hanks is reunited on the big screen with Julia Roberts in Larry Crowne Tom Hanks takes on the roles of writer, director, producer and star for his new film Larry Crowne. After more than 30 years in the business, what does he really think of Hollywood?

In Larry Crowne, Hanks plays an amiable ex-Navy man who is "downsized" out of his job at a big American store.

One minute he is skipping into work to ELO's Hold on Tight, and the next he is shown the door by his superiors.

"Timing's a bitch," says one of them, with a crocodile smile.

Burdened by a mortgage, and with time on his hands, Larry Crowne signs up at the local college to get some qualifications and re-invent himself.

"What we try to deal with is the fight against cynicism," says Tom Hanks, when we meet during his recent visit to London for the Larry Crowne premiere.

"Cynicism and sadness and bitterness can enter into the fray particularly when you've lost your job and when you've done everything right, and you still find yourself in these kind of straits."

Rom-com reunion

Although there is much in Larry Crowne that chimes with today's tough economic times, Hanks began developing the story years earlier with Nia Vardalos (My Big Fat Greek Wedding).

Tom Hanks hints at Toy Story 4

He also drew on his own experiences of attending college as a teenager in the 1970s.

"I only went to three years of college and two of them were at a community college much like the one that Larry goes to," recalls Hanks.

"I started when I was 17, and there were people in class who were twice as old as me and had families and once had businesses."

Larry Crowne reunites Hanks on-screen with Julia Roberts, who plays college lecturer Mercedes Tainot. The pair had previously worked together on 2007's Charlie Wilson's War.

Both actors had starred in some of the biggest romantic comedies of the 1990s. In Larry Crowne, Hanks's character develops a crush on on Roberts's public-speaking teacher - just as her marriage is falling apart.

"I'm in my 50s so that's not exactly fertile territory for romantic comedy," laughs Hanks.

"In Larry Crowne we do it in the way it happens in real life - you just happen to bump into somebody and it turns into one of the greatest things that ever happens to you.

"It's not so much boy meets girl, it's more a man meets woman story - not exactly the nature of old school rom-coms."

Julia Roberts plays a teacher who gets romantically involved with scooter-riding Larry Crowne (Tom Hanks)

This is Hanks's second shot at movie writing and directing after 1996's That Thing You Do!

His breakthrough movie was in Ron Howard's Splash and he went on to to star in '80s comedies The Money Pit, Bachelor Party, Big and Turner & Hooch.

He won an Oscar in 1994 for Philadelphia and again the following year for Forrest Gump.

Other key films include Sleepless in Seattle, Saving Private Ryan, Cast Away, Road to Perdition and the Toy Story series.

He most recently reprised the roles of Woody in Toy Story 3 and Robert Langdon in Angels and Demons.

After such a long career, I ask him, what is Hollywood really like?

"Hollywood is exactly like high school," Hanks says. "With money!"

He adds: "It's filled with just as much pettiness, sadness and jealousy as well as fun and senior proms and parties."

And how has he survived more than three decades in showbiz? "I laugh more than I shake."

Larry Crowne opens in the UK on 1 July

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Ticciati to direct Glyndebourne

1 July 2011 Last updated at 07:55 GMT Robin Ticciati is principal conductor of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra British conductor Robin Ticciati is to become Glyndebourne Festival music director from January 2014.

The 28-year-old will take over from Vladimir Jurowski, who in 2001, aged 29, became the festival's youngest musical director.

Ticciati, who makes his debut at New York's Metropolitan Opera this year, will be the the seventh director in the festival's 77-year history.

He said Glyndebourne offered "unrivalled opportunities".

"Creating opera with such talented artistic teams and world class musicians in an organisation that places great emphasis on detailed musical preparation is a genuine privilege," he added.

Ticciati, who will be 31 when he takes over, is principal conductor of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and balances orchestral and operatic performances.

This year he will be conducting The Marriage of Figaro at the Salzburg Festival and Don Giovanni in Glyndebourne.

Glyndebourne general director David Pickard said Ticciati would continue Glyndebourne's "long tradition of artistic excellence and innovation".

"None of us will forget the excitement when, as a 21-year-old assistant conductor on Die Zauberflote in 2004, Robin Ticciati stood in the pit at Glyndebourne for the first time and conducted the overture."

Those present at that rehearsal "were in no doubt of his exceptional talent", Mr Pickard added.

The Glyndebourne festival of opera, founded in 1934, presents six productions each year.

This year's festival, which runs from 21 May to 26 August, includes new productions of Wagner's Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg and Handel's Rinaldo.

Glyndebourne on Tour, which Ticciati directed from 2007 to 2009, takes three productions around the UK each autumn.

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Moss wedding shuts off villages

1 July 2011 Last updated at 16:38 GMT The bride and groom have paid for additional policing at the wedding Roads have been closed in the Cotswolds for the wedding of supermodel Kate Moss and guitarist Jamie Hince.

Guests and residents must use permits to enter Little Faringdon, Oxfordshire and Southrop, Gloucestershire.

Gloucestershire County Council confirmed it had closed the road outside St Peter's Church, Southrop.

No details have been officially released about the venue but it is believed the model will tie the knot at the church later.

The couple are believed to be planning a festival-themed party, with celebrations lasting three days.

No-fly zone denial

It is understood that a reception and wedding party will take place in a series of marquees which have been erected behind the model's mansion with a metal fence outlining the perimeter of her estate.

Kate Moss met Jamie Hince in 2007

Among the expected guests are photographer Mario Testino and fashion designers Stella McCartney and Dame Vivienne Westwood.

Gloucestershire Constabulary said: "The bride and groom have agreed to pay towards additional policing in order to reduce the impact on the taxpayer."

The spokesman added: "Our priority is to ensure there is minimal disruption to the village due to this event.

"This is due to the potential for a large increase in numbers of people and vehicles in the village."

Moss met The Kills band member in 2007.

The Civil Aviation Authority has denied press reports of a no-fly zone in effect around the property.

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Modern art auction fetches £108m

30 June 2011 Last updated at 09:06 GMT Francis Bacon's Crouching Nude and Andy Warhol's Debbie Harry were among works sold A contemporary art auction has made ?108.8m - a London record for such a sale, auction house Sotheby's has said.

The top lot was Francis Bacon's Crouching Nude, which made ?8.3m, while there were artist records for Germans Sigmar Polke and Georg Baselitz.

An Andy Warhol electric pink acrylic and silkscreen ink on canvas of Blondie singer Deborah Harry went for ?3.7m.

The previous London contemporary art auction record of ?95m was achieved at Sotheby's in 2008.

The second most expensive lot was an early untitled painting by celebrated New York artist Jean-Michel Basquiat which went for ?5.4m.

Some 34 works from the Duerckheim private collection of post-war German art sold for a total ?60.4m.

'Remarkable' collection

The Duerckheim Collection, which belonged to German industrialist Christian Duerckheim, is considered to be the most significant German art of the 1960s and 1970s to come to market.

Among Duerckheim lots were Gerhard Richter's 1024 Farben, from 1974, which sold for ?4.3m while his Madchen im Liegestuhl sold for ?4.1m.

Mouth by Gilbert and George, from Dave Stewart's collection, fetched ?145,000

Richter's photorealistic work Schwestern, from 1967, was bought for ?2.5m by a German collector who has announced he will lend the painting to the Kunstmuseum Bonn.

Sotheby's chairman of contemporary art Cheyenne Westphal, said Wednesday night was the night "German art went global".

"The strong results of the remarkable Duerckheim Collection represent a triumph for German art and reflect the extraordinary works offered," she added.

The record-breaking works by Polke and Baselitz were also part of the collection.

Polke's Dschungel - or Jungle - fetched ?5.8m, smashing his previous record of ?2.7m, while Baselitz's Spekulatius achieved ?3.2m.

Early Damien Hirst spot painting Dantrolene (Being God for Dave) - owned by Eurythmic Dave Stewart - went for ?1.1m.

Hirst's 1992 Acridine went for ?601,000 and Mouth, by Gilbert and George, sold for ?145,000. Both were also owned by Stewart.

All sale prices include the buyer's premium.

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Jessie J cancels summer festivals

Jessie J has promised to "make it up" to her fans for cancelling a string of appearances after she broke her foot in two places last month.

The star needed surgery on Thursday and was ordered to rest after having the operation.

Among the shows affected are T In The Park, Lovebox and the iTunes festival.

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I was so excited about the summer and I'm as upset as you all are. But unfortunately these things happen. I have to remain positive and I promise I will make it up later in the year

Jessie J

She said: "Sorry doesn't feel enough to say, I am devastated for my fans that I know have been waiting to see me and working hard for tickets."

Her injury didn't stop the singer performing at Glastonbury last weekend.

Jessie J ignored doctors' advice to skip the festival and performed through the pain as she appeared on a specially-made gold throne on The Other Stage.

T in the Park festival director Geoff Ellis said: 'I am gutted. She was someone I was really looking forward to seeing and I'm sure a lot of T in the Parkers were too.

"We wish her a speedy recovery and hope to welcome her next year."

'Remain positive'

The star found out she had a broken foot last Thursday, two weeks after falling off a stage platform while rehearsing for a London concert.

She was originally told that she had ripped a ligament.

"I was so excited about the summer and I'm as upset as you all are," she added.

"But unfortunately these things happen. I have to remain positive and I promise I will make it up later in the year."

In a tweet she added: "I'm still in hospital. I had major surgery not a in and out thing :( in alot of pain still."

Jessie J begins her own headline tour in October.

She's then supporting Katy Perry on her California Dreams US tour in November.

The singer went to number one earlier this year with her single Price Tag featuring American rapper B.o.B and also topped the BBC's Sound of 2011.

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