Joan Collins (64) said yesterday she has teamed up with Coronation Street's Jack and Vera Duckworth for a parody of her famous Cinzano advert, and is to make a cameo appearance in the soap's Christmas video in which Jack and Vera fly home from Las Vegas. Vera (Liz Dawn) gets Cinzano spilt all over her on the flight. Collins said: "What they're doing is the same as I did with Leonard Rossiter in the TV ad. I come along and say `Don't worry, darling, it washes out'."
Ivana Trump (48) has divorced her estranged husband Riccardo Mazzucchelli (53) in New York. Trump had asked Mazzucchelli for a pre-nuptial agreement before they wed two years ago. She is now romantically linked with Roffredo D'Aragoan.
Topless model Melinda Messenger (27) is committed to her fiancee Wayne Roberts (22) and says they will marry next year.
"I'm really enjoying what I'm doing but Wayne still comes first. Postponing the marriage was a joint decision," she said.
Elton John's recording of Candle In The Wind 1997, which he sang at the funeral of Princess Diana last month, has entered US pop charts at No 1 and broken the record for first-week sales. The single sold almost 3.5 million copies in the six days since its release. The previous record was held by Whitney Houston's version of Dolly Parton's I Will Always Love You, which sold 632,000 units in a week in 1992.
French Prime Minister Lionel Jospin and four of his ministers drove electric cars to their weekly cabinet meeting at the Elysee presidential palace yesterday, amid anti-pollution measures in Paris.
As Paris commuters submitted to a government decree allowing only half the usual traffic on the roads, Jospin turned up in a green Peugeot 106, powered by electricity.
The 1997 Right Livelihood Award, often called the alternative Nobel prize, was jointly awarded yesterday to Joseph Ki-Zerbo from Burkina Faso, Mycle Schneider of France and Jinzaburo Takagi of Japan, Michael Succow of Germany and Cindy Duehring of the US.