Elton John's jibes at the expense of celebrity chums shows his lighter side in a star-studded Audience With . . ., to be shown by ITV next weekend. It features the Spice Girls, Pet Shop Boys and many other celebrities. Claudia Schiffer, Cher, Sting, Timothy Dalton and Kathleen Turner turned up to watch.
Fidel Castro's dissident daughter, Alina Fernandez Revuelta, had harsh words for the Cuban President in an interview with La Nacion yesterday. "I won't weep when my father dies . . . I couldn't count on him."
Film director Adrian Lyne, suspected that his decision to bring Vladimir Nabokov's novel Lolita to the screen once more might be controversial. The movie has made its world screen debut in the San Sebastian film festival in Spain before going on general release in Europe.
"I adore the novel," Lyne (55) said. "I read it when I was 20, when I looked for the `dirty bits' and I was disappointed. I reread it at 40 and I found it extraordinary."
President Vaclav Havel of the Czech Republic is suing an advertising company for five million koruna ($150,000) after it used his likeness in a poster campaign containing offensive language.
The posters, advertising a shoe company, depict a sculpted bust of Havel (60) being licked by a terrier dog, alongside an offensive slogan written in English. The image is a pun on the name of his wife, former actress Dagmar Veskrnova. The diminutive version of Dagmar is "Dasenka" in Czech. And "Dasenka" is also the name of a terrier in a popular children's book.