Fans of Dusty Springfield, the 1960s pop star famous for her husky voice and blond beehive hairdo, gathered in the rain yesterday to attend her funeral.
Springfield, once described as Britain's finest white soul singer, died last week at the age of 59 after a five-year battle against breast cancer.
To the sounds of her greatest hit You Don't Have to Say You Love Me, a crowd of well-wishers and fans watched as a horse-drawn carriage brought her coffin to a church in the riverside town of Henley-on-Thames, west of London, where she lived for the past six years. A bouquet of flowers on the coffin spelled out "Dusty".
Pop singers Elvis Costello, Kiki Dee and Lulu attended the service.
Meanwhile, Hollywood actors Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman were among mourners gathering to pay their last respects to legendary film director Stanley Kubrick at his funeral near St Albans, Hertfordshire. Kubrick died at the age of 70 last Sunday.
World-renowned Russian cellist and conductor Mstislav Rostropo- vich has said in an interview that he would give no more performances in his native land because he was not appreciated there.
Rostropovich, a friend of President Boris Yeltsin and Nobel Prize-winning author Alexander Solzhenitsyn, said he had been stung by critics who accused him of "fastening onto any opportunity" to come and play in Russia.
The Paris-based Rostropovich told the weekly newspaper Vek: "I shall perform only where people want to listen to me and listen to me with pleasure, not where I am dismissed as `finished'."
The mighty Elvis Presley Enterprises yesterday lost the latest round of a David-and-Goliath legal wrangle to stop a London trader from using the "king's" name on his souvenirs.
Three judges at the Court of Appeal in London rejected a challenge by EPE, of Memphis, Tennessee, to an earlier court ruling in favour of Sid Shaw, who runs a memorabilia shop called Elvisly Yours in London's Piccadilly Circus.
A jubilant Mr Shaw said: "In history David beat Goliath once - I have had to do it twice."