ULYSSES THE GINGER TOM IS THE NEW STAR OF CANNES

Ulysses with Oscar Isaac in a scene from the film

   A new star has been born at this year's Cannes Film Festival----a ginger tom cat named Ulysses. 
   Ulysses appears throughout the Coen Brothers new film Inside Llewyn Davis and is tipped to follow in the footsteps of Uggie the dog, who starred in the Oscar-winning The Artist two years ago. 

  Ulysses provides a running theme throughout the film, which is a tale of a young folk singer struggling to make it in 1961 Greenwich Village, New York.

  Inside Llewyn Davis, which stars Oscar Isaac, Carey Mulligan and Justin Timberlake, has already been hailed by critics as the best of the Cannes festival so far.
Speaking at a press conference, the directors joked the cat had been included to make up for a lack of plot. "The film doesn't really have a plot," Joel Coen said. "That concerned us at one point; that's why we threw the cat in."
 Ulysses, he said, had not been easy to direct.  "Dogs want to please you but cats only want to please themselves," he said. "They're not easy to train or to control."

SHIRLEY MACLAINE WAS QUITE A RAVER!

 Well, who would have guessed it? It turns out Shirley MacLaine was quite a raver in her younger days. 
 During her 38-year open marriage to businessman Steve Parker, which ended in 1982, the actress was rarely without a lover, she told the Daily Telegraph.

with Dean Martin in 1969

  She slept with many of her leading men, including Robert Mitchum and Yves Montand. And there were romances with world leaders like Canadian Premier Pierre Trudeau and Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme. "I was never possessive with my husband nor him with me," said MacLaine, 79. "That's why I had so many affairs. Most of the men I was with wanted to get married. I was married already and stayed that way precisely so it wouldn’t become an issue.”  She had a huge crush on Dean Martin and went to his house to tell him, but ended up having a drink with him and his wife.
  She claims to never have had her heart broken but her bed-hopping did result in other injuries. In her 50s she had a facelift and ruptured her stitches during an especially intense orgasm. "He was a composer, he was bisexual and I knew it and he didn't love me at all." She grinned widely at the memory.
  MacLaine also had a fling with actor Danny Kaye who was rumoured to be gay. "He wasn't," she said. "Or maybe a little. I don't know."
  Why was she so popular with bisexual men? "Well, they weren't gay with me," she said.

CUMBERBATCH: ASSANGE WOULDN'T SEE ME

  Benedict Cumberbatch is a big fan of Julian Assange----but the WikiLeaks founder is no fan of the actor.

Julian Assange

     Assange refused to meet Cumberbatch or help him with his portrayal of him for the movie The Fifth Estate, which has just finished shooting.

Cumberbatch as Assange

    "He didn't want to condone the film because he thought---hopefully erroneously when he sees the end product---that the project would castigate him and portray a negative side of his enterprise," the busy Cumberbatch told me when we talked at the Corinthia Hotel in London where he was promoting Star Trek Into Darkness. 

    "He didn't want to meet me because he feels the source materials we've based the movie on were poisonous to his account of the events. When he sees it I hope he feels that it's more balanced. I think he will. I hope he will."

     The Fifth Estate tells Assange's story from 2007-2010 and ends with the leaking of the U.S. diplomatic cables. 

     "We're still trying to understand the impact of WikiLeaks and what he has given the world with that extraordinary idea to create an anonymous whistle-blowing website," said Cumberbatch. "It was an amazing thing to re-investigate someone who has been mired in controversy and actually realise that he was profoundly gifted and should be celebrated."

BEYONCE---WHAT A PERFORMANCE!

Picture: Theo Kingma

 What a performance from Beyonce! And I don't mean her concert at London's 02 Arena, but the press conference she gave at the Corinthia Hotel just beforehand. 
  It was set for 5pm so at 7A.M her lighting, sound and production team moved in accompanied by six burly security guards. All day they worked at putting up reflectors and lights to ensure she would look her best in photographs and, as the time of her arrival approached one of the guards asked for ropes. 
 "What for?" he was asked. "Crowd control," he replied. "People tend to get very excited when they see Beyonce."
  He was told that people attendng the press conference were hardened journalists who were unlikely to be impressed by celebrities, whom they see most days. 

  "Ah," said the guard. "But this is Beyonce."

  With no ropes in place, Beyonce finally arrived an hour and ten minutes late and proved to be if not down to earth, then at least friendly and accommodating, willingly answering questions about her life and career.

   Her daughter Blue is 16 months old and she admits that at first it was difficult for her to deal with both her career and motherhood.

    “After giving birth there’s a moment of rediscovery when you are making sure you still have your goals and still take care of yourself as a woman,” she said. “That was something I struggled with----making sure I was still this strong woman and also making time for my child and balancing the two.”

  Baby Blue and husband, rapper and composer Jay-Z, whom 31-year-old Beyonce married five years ago, are with her in England on her current concert tour which she is calling the Mrs. Carter Show World Tour in tribute to her husband, whose real name is Shawn Carter.

  “I’m calling it that because I feel like I have grown and I am a married woman,” she explained. “It is my name, it is who I am and I am proud of it. It is my daughter's name and it feels like who I am right now.”

 
    She has a routine she goes through before every concert and she described it: "I say a prayer with everyone in the band, we do a stretch, I sit in my massage chair while they do my hair and makeup and I have an hour of peace and I have a playlist I listen to everyday and that's my ritual and it takes me a few hours." 

  No wonder her concerts rarely start on time!

CAREY'S CRAZY AUDITION

Carey Mulligan and Leo DiCaprio in The Great Gatsby

 The sparkly British actress Carey Mulligan has revealed that the audition she went through for the role of the very American Daisy Buchanan in The Great Gatsby was "the craziest audition I have ever done."
   Carey, 27, was one of many actresses, including Keira Knightley, Natalie Portman and Scarlett Johansson, who were vying for the role in Baz Lurhmann's sumptuous, $125 million remake of F. Scott Fitzgerald's classic novel.
   "It was in a loft somewhere in New York and usually auditions are just a camera, you and the casting director or whatever," she told me when we talked at New York's Plaza Hotel the other day. "This was at least three cameras---one 3-D camera, one guy walking around with a camera and Baz had a hand-held camera. Then were were two photographers taking pictures of the whole process and I instantly hated everything I was wearing. 
  "I was like, why am I here? It was really scary. Then we started playing scenes and Leo (DiCaprio) was playing Gatsby but he was also playing Tom Buchanan because although we had all those cameras we had no other actors so he'd be sitting down being Gatsby and then he'd jump up and stand behind the camera and be Tom and it was amazing.
  "We did a scene where Daisy drops her lighter and she is panicking and he picked up the lighter and lit my cigarette and improvised as Gatsby, saying all these things to me under his breath like, 'Daisy, I love you' and 'Daisy calm down" and he helped me so much.
  "We spent about an hour-and-a-half together auditioning and I loved it and I walked out thinking, 'If nothing else ever happens I've acted with Leonardo DiCaprio.
  " And then Baz called me that evening and asked me to come back in the following morning to do more of a screen test."

  As Daisy, Carey is following in the footsteps of Mia Farrow who co-starred with Robert Redford in a 1974 version and Betty Field, who appeared with Alan Ladd in 1949. Mira Sorvino co-starred in a 2000 TV version opposite Toby Stephens.

TOO SEXY FOR SAUDI ARABIA

  This handsome. dreamy-eyed Arab posing with a camel is believed to have been deemed too sexy for Saudi Arabia.

  Omar Borkan Al Gala, a poet, actor and now internet sensation, is one of three men forcibly removed from a culture festival in Saudi Arabia after religious police declared the men to be "too handsome". According to Arabic language newspaper Elaph a festival official said the three Emiratis were taken out on the grounds they are too handsome and there were concerns that female visitors could fall for them.
 Until now the identities of the three illegally handsome men has been unknown, but web speculation now suggests that one of them could be Omar Borkan Al Gala.
Though far from being confirmation, on his Facebook page Al Gala posted a link to an article about the deportation with the comment: "This is what written in newspapers in over the world :)"
Elsewhere, in a typical post the poet writes: "The beauty of a woman must be seen from in her eyes, because that is the doorway to her heart, the place where love resides."
 If Al Gala is not the handsome man mentioned he has done nothing to dampen the rumours that he is - instead choosing to continue to post his smouldering photographs.

IN CANCUN: A GOURMET BREAKFAST...FOR $1.50

Photos: Theo Kingma

While guests at the Ritz-Carlton in the Mexican holiday resort of Cancun start the day with a buffet breakfast costing the equivalent of $35 those in the know gather a couple of hundred yards down the street where a more basic and tastier breakfast can be had for about one-twentieth of the cost. 

 By the side of the road Sergio Manuel Torres and his wife Guadalupe del Carmen Gasca serve delicious pork and chicken tortillas and sandwiches, lathered with guacamole and chili out of the trunk of an old taxi. His customers include

security guards, hotel staff, other taxi drivers and a few tourists.
  Then when the food is gone as it inevitably is, Sergio goes back to his other job of driving a taxi.