De Niro, Barrymore and Beckinsale set for Italian remake
-list Hollywood talent including Robert de Niro has joined the cast of Everybody’s Fine, a remake of Italian family drama Stanno Tutti Bene.
The Taxi Driver star will work alongside Drew Barrymore, Sam Rockwell and Kate Beckinsale in the upcoming movie.
According to Variety, the starry cast will begin shooting the drama, written and directed by Kirk Jones, in Connecticut later this month.
Jones, who wrote and directed Waking Ned as well as helming recent children’s film Nanny McPhee, joined the production after Hollywood Gang Productions and Cecchi Gora USA agreed a deal to remake Giuseppe Tornatore’s 1990 movie Stanno Tutti Bene.
The original movie saw Sicilian retiree Matteo Scuro journeying to the Italian mainland after the death of his wife to visit his five estranged children, who live in Turin, Milan, Rome, Naples and Florence.
The upcoming remake, a Miramax Films project, will see De Niro following a similar path as he attempts to reconnect his family following the passing away of the matriarch only to discover that each of his grown children - with Barrymore, Beckinsale and Rockwell believed to be attached for some of these roles - are living lives far from the idyllic situations he had imagined.
De Niro can next be seen in Righteous Kill, reuniting with Heat co-star Al Pacino for a tale of linked murder cases which took places decades apart.
Beckinsale turns her back on sexy roles
Kate Beckinsale has vowed not to take any more glamorous movie roles - declaring her time as a “sex-bomb” is over.
The 34-year-old star began her acting career in Kenneth Branagh’s 1993 version of ‘Much Ado About Nothing’ but graduated to action-packed adventures including ‘Underworld’ and ‘Van Helsing’.
But Beckinsale is now determined to turn her career around and prove herself as a serious actress.
She says: “The sex-bomb thing is totally fun but you want to take the red shoes off sometimes. I’ve been wanting to do something more dramatic.
“I don’t regret any of my movies but I do have a certain embarrassment about one or two of them.”
Kate Beckinsale’s ex love Michael Sheen
Kate Beckinsale still loves her ex Michael Sheen.
The ‘Van Helsing’ star admits Michael - who she has a nine-year-old daughter Lily with - will always holds a special place in her heart.
Kate - who is now married to director Len Wiseman - said: “I love Michael, he is fantastic. It shouldn’t have necessarily have gone on forever with us, but he is one of my favourite people ever.
“Michael loves Lily, I love Lily and Len loves Lily. Everyone is nice. I do feel like that has been my major achievement in the last decade.”
Kate split from ‘Blood Diamond’ Michael in March 2003.
The actress met Len on the set of ‘Underworld’ - in which Michael also starred - that same year and the pair married in 2004.
Stars in Orbit: Siriano, Beckinsale and the Bionic Woman
The Planet Gossip satellites see everything, and I give you the best sightings from around the world—and occasionally even beyond it.
FIERCE PHOTO: Project Runway winner Christian Siriano, posing for pics with Reichen Lehmkuhl and Rex Lee at the 20th anniversary party for Mark’s Restaurant in Los Angeles.
GLAM BAM: Bam Margera, taking in the Element Eden fashion show in downtown L.A.
TOP SHOPPER: Kate Beckinsale, picking up tops from Helmut Lang and Jenni Kaye, a pair of Skinny jeans and Stella McCartney platform shoes at L.A.’s Elyse Walker.
HAIRY SITUATION: Reiko Aylesworth, getting her hair done by Steve Lococo at the B2V Borrelli-Vo salon in West Hollywood at the same time as the original Bionic Woman, Lindsay Wagner.
BEST OF PUCK: Katie Lee Joel, presenting Wolfgang Puck with Chef of the Year at the Culinary Institute of America’s Augie Awards gala at Pier Sixty in NYC.
Kate Beckinsale : ‘journalists Are Just Like Us’.
Kate Beckinsale : ‘journalists Are Just Like Us’….
Kate Beckinsale was stunned to discover journalists lead similar lives to the stars they write about, after researching for her new role as a reporter.
The British actress plays a newshound who exposes a Cia informant in Nothing But The Truth, and spent time with real-life Los Angeles Times writers to prepare for the part.
She says, “I went to the La Times to follow around some to the journalist girls there. I was so sure I would see all the different ways their jobs were so unlike mine. I was more struck by the similarities.
“It’s such a vocational profession where you’re passionate about your work and you’re married to another journalist, or someone who is passionate about journalism. It felt very similar.”
In seperate news the Underworld star was so shocked the first time she saw an opossum she dragged her daughter out of bed to stare back at the wide-eyed “monster”.
Beckinsale had no idea what an opossum was before she moved to Los Angeles a few years ago.
And as the Underworld star watched the nocturnal creature intently studying her, it reminded her of Sir Anthony Hopkins’ serial killer character Hannibal Lecter.
Beckinsale accidentally set cat on fire
Kate Beckinsale accidentally set her cat on fire as she prepared for the red carpet at January’s Screen Actor’s Guild awards.
The pet was saved by the actress’s six brave dressers who put out the flames by leaping on the furry inferno.
Beckinsale tells talk show host David Letterman: “We were getting ready for the SAG awards and my husband was lighting some candles. All of a sudden my cat walked past and there was this giant ball of light.
“The six gay men who were helping me get ready jumped on the cat and put it out.
“He’s a very furry Persian cat and he’s stupid, so I don’t think he realised anything had happened. But he lost quite a bit of his tail, and the smell. And I had to go to the SAG awards smelling.”
Kate Beckinsale: more interesting from behind
Here was Kate Beckinsale arriving at a recording of The Late Show With David Letterman t’other night.
And as you can see from this picture here (Fig.1), she was wearing a really quite boring, yet tightly gripping, striped dress. If something can, indeed, be both boring and gripping.
Well, actually Kate’s outfit was both boring but gripping. Because when she turned around (Fig.2), she revealed that ooh! It had a weird one-shoulder thing. And double ooh! Her shoes were slingbacks with slightly ker-azy heels.
Blimey. I might have to go and have a lie-down now
Kate Beckinsale refers to her private parts as “Pharaoh’s tomb”
Saucy Kate Beckinsale says her best asset is so private she can’t name it out loud or show it in public.The Brit actress, 34, made the cryptic comment by saying: “Mmmm. My best feature is unfortunately a private matter… I’m told it’s spectacular.
“But you can’t really walk it down the red carpet. But what can I say?”
Beckinsale paid herself the cheeky compliment during an interview with US beauty magazine, Allure. The actress, who appears on the front cover of the March issue, also refers to her nether regions as “Pharaoh’s tomb.”
Complaining she was called a “slut” when she split from Brit actor Michael Sheen to begin her romance with director husband Len Wisemen, she says: “Boyfriends? In my life I have had three. Three.
“Only a handful of people have seen into the Pharaoh’s tomb.”
The actress gave the candid interview as she promotes her new movie, Nothing But the Truth. In the film she plays a fictionalised version of former New York Times reporter Judith Miller, who was jailed in 2005 for contempt of court for refusing to identify the person who leaked the name of CIA agent Valerie Plume.
Beckinsale takes the opportunity to look back at her life - professionally and personally. At one point she confesses she was so fed up with acting she considered quitting Hollywood to become a doctor. She says: “I was at the point where I was wondering whether the work I was doing was sustaining me intellectually.
“I’d had enough of the ludicrous questions like: ‘Have you had your boobs done?’ Or: ‘Have you slept with Colin Farrell?’”
The actress, who claims she’s done neither, says: “I had done a number of press junkets where the questions were not very intelligent, and if you get somebody who’s a bit slow and stupid, it’s the most boring thing ever.
“I had quite a few of those.”
The daughter of late sitcom star Richard Beckinsale, Kate describes coming to Hollywood and the baptism of fire that she received. She says: “I sort of ended up in Los Angeles by accident.
“And it was sort of terrible to be jostled into this position of a fame-hungry starlet, which is so honestly not me.
“In fact I could use a bit more of that because I am such a hermit. So I allowed myself to get really bothered.”
Beckinsale says she was also bothered with the public and critical reaction to the box office failure Pearl Harbor - the 2001 romance that starred Ben Affleck. She says: “People still say to me: ‘What was it like being in such a huge flop?’
“The amount of hatred and vitriol was surprising.”
The actress confesses that she hid behind Affleck’s back during filming because “I was scared of people yelling at me on the set.”
While doing Pearl Harbor, Beckinsale says her body was scrutinised to the extent that she had to wear fake boobs on a daily basis.
“Adjusting my breasts for every shot,” she says. “Yes, they gave me these things to put in my costumes - they looked like cutlets, chicken cutlets - to make me voluptuous.
“They’re sort of rubberised, horrible, medical-looking things, and between takes I’d take them out and leave them on some table, and I couldn’t even remember to put my boobs back in.
“They were turning up everywhere.”
Beckinsale’s breasts were not the only parts of her body commented on. She says: “Seventeen people in suits are looking at your upper arms and going: ‘She really needs to be in a gym’.”
The actress is equally revealing about her love life, confessing that husband Len Wisemen “worships” her. She says: “I have a husband who literally worships me. And he cleans the house and blow-dries my daughter’s hair.”
The couple - that has been married since 2004 - live in Los Angeles with Beckinsale’s daughter Lily. She had the nine-year-old with her ex-lover, fellow British actor Michael Sheen, 39.
Sheen and Beckinsale ended their nine-year relationship shortly after they worked together on the 2003 film Underworld, which was directed by Wisemen. The actress gave birth to her daughter soon after giving up studies at Oxford to focus completely on acting.
“I was doing two things that require 100 per cent commitment; movies and a double honours at Oxford, which is no small thing,” she says. “And then I got pregnant and never again did only one thing at a time in my life.
“It was like: ‘Oh my God, I’m like the Virgin Mary’.
“Well, I wasn’t the Virgin Mary, obviously. But we’d [she and Sheen] been careful. I wasn’t so much horrified as, you know, just blindsided.”
Beckinsale was 25 when Lily was born and had been with Sheen for the previous five years. The two actors never married. “Michael is not so much the marrying kind,” she says.
But while marriage wasn’t on the cards, parenthood was readily accepted. Beckinsale says: “There was never a question of not having her. Michael is head over heels in love with her.”
Now a young mum, the actress continued her career but felt vulnerable when actor Jeremy Northam, she alleges, shouted at her on set. It was seven months after her daughter’s birth and she was playing a deceived wife in The Golden Bowl, released in 2000. “I definitely felt plain,” she says about the role. But, she says: “I don’t respond great to being yelled at.”
Sheen - her boyfriend at the time allegedly wasn’t best pleased either. He apparently visited the set during the alleged shouting incident and, according to the claims of Beckinsale, punched Northam. She says: “I was so mortified. I thought: ‘Now Michael’s going to jail and I’m going to have to bake that cake and put the file in it’.
“But it all became very sort of British and gentlemanly between those two, with handshaking all around.”
She added: “Michael’s Welsh, you know.”
Beckinsale says that the birth of her baby daughter and the sleepless nights that came with it changed the type of acting roles she sought. She says: “I think that’s why I gravitated toward slightly broader…um, more conceptual kinds of movies, Underworld and Van Helsing [both action fantasy horrors].
“That was as much as I could actually give.
“But you’re actually more of an animated figure. It does go against the grain, as an actor.”
Taking those roles also had an impact on her family life as Beckinsale’s relationship with Sheen came to an end. “One of us had to end it,” she says. “It was kind of a mess.”
The “mess” was the fact that Beckinsale had fallen in love with Wisemen, the couple’s Underworld director. The film was released in 2003 and she said at the time: “If you meet somebody who makes you feel like you’ll die if you’re not with them, there’s not much you can do about that.”
Now though the “mess” has eased into a happy extended family, according to the actress. She says: “People come over for Thanksgiving and we’re all there and Michael and Len are doing karaoke.”
The two men are actually working on the next part of the horror series, Underworld: Rise of the Lycans, which Beckinsale calls “the little franchise in our family.”
Acting runs in her blood. She was born in London in 1973 to actors Richard Beckinsale and Judy Loe. Her father was a beloved sitcom actor famous for his roles in Seventies UK TV shows Rising Damp and Porridge. But the elder Beckinsale died suddenly of a heart attack in 1979. He was 31. His daughter was five.
From then on she gained recognition during her childhood years for her writing talent. At 14 she won the WH Smith Young Writers prize for poetry. Poet laureate Ted Hughes presented the award to her. One of the winning poems was called Nine Left, One Departed.
“It was a fairly surreal poem about someone cutting off my toe and sucking my soul out of it,” Beckinsale says. “But the next year I won the award again, for short stories.
“They were mainly about some form of death. One was a bit like the film The Sixth Sense.
“It was about a girl who is having some sort of breakdown and is seeing dead people.”
Kate didn’t just inherit her father’s famous name and acting talent she also received his DNA - slightly tilted eyes, a genetic throwback to a great-great grandparent on her dad’s side. “It’s funny,” Beckinsale says, “because these days everyone just assumes I’m so British through and through.”
It is this British appearance that won the teen a role in Kenneth Branagh’s Much Ado About Nothing. The film was based on Shakespeare’s play and starred actors Keanu Reeves, Denzel Washington and Branagh’s then wife, Emma Thompson.
At 19, Beckinsale found herself sharing a Tuscan castle with some of Hollywood’s finest. She says: “[It was] the most miraculous first job. And no one had a trailer - no one. Denzel didn’t have a trailer.”
Each morning movie hunk Reeves drove her to the set because Beckinsale couldn’t - and still can’t - drive. “We had a great script and lovely people, and I fell in love with everyone,” she says.
Although Beckinsale resumed her studies at Oxford University where she was reading French and Russian literature, she eventually gave it up to concentrate on acting full time. Now the actress juggles her career while raising her daughter, maintaining a marriage and friendly relations with her ex-lover. She says: “Acting requires so much delving into yourself and exposing yourself, so it’s sensible to be wondering: ‘Do I still want to be doing this?’
“But I enjoy the work, and everything is so solid at home.
“I don’t care if they say I have buttock implants, or not. I don’t care. Go ahead.
“That’s the nice thing about getting to the age I am. I could have said I didn’t care before - but secretly I did. And now I really don’t.”
Beckinsale says she is so secure that she doesn’t mind her husband prolonging an old joke about her teeth, first started by Affleck on the Pearl Harbor set. Back then Affleck teased his co-star about the size of her teeth comparing her to the talking horse Mr Ed, popular on US TV in the 1960s.
Wisemen apparently told his wife that peanut butter was spooned into the horse’s mouth so the animal moved his lips constantly and appeared to be speaking. But Beckinsale says she takes the teasing in her stride. She says: “Len will say: ‘Let’s put some peanut butter on Kate’s teeth and send her off to work’. And off I go.”
Kate Beckinsale to star in big screen version of ‘Rising Damp’
Actress Kate Beckinsale is set to star in the film version of the 70’s British sitcom ‘Rising Damp’ according to reports in the actor’s newspaper ‘The Stage’.
Beckinsale will play the female lead in the move, Ruth Jones, a role made famous in Yorkshire TV’s original version by Yootha Joyce. The plot of the movie is being kept hush hush but it is rumoured that it will be set in a decaying tennament block in the Upper East Lower Middle Side of New York’s famous Bourbon Street.
“It’s going to be such great fun” said Beckinsale, hid behind dark sunglasses and twitching nervously. “The cast is amazing, the script is fantastic and the money I’m getting just mental.”
Also cast in the movie is Morgan Freeman who will play Philip Smith, Brad Pitt who will play Alan and Leonard Cohen, who will reprise his role of Rigsby, the grouchy landlord who tries to get into Miss Jones’ pants.
Kate Beckinsale is honoured
LA Confidential magazine held a pre-Oscars luncheon honouring Kate Beckinsale yesterday.Now, don’t get me wrong: Kate Beckinsale is, I’m sure, a perfectly lovely woman, and a pretty decent (or is that “pretty, decent”?) actress. And she’s also a Brit Done Good, of course. But a whole luncheon in her honour?
Sometimes I don’t really get Americans.
But, back to that luncheon: because here’s what Kate was wearing to it. A Twiggy-inspired black and white retro look, accessorised with a ridiculously handsome husband (technical name: Len Wiseman).
Len let the side down slightly wearing a too-smart shirt, jacket and shoes with his jeans - but then, he is American. And as we all know, I don’t really get Americans.
Still: bravo, Kate. Now all you have to do is, erm, win an Oscar. Onwards and upwards!