Who's in
Natural born traitor
Hong Kong star Tony Leung (pictured) has had a very busy New Year. As the male lead of Ang Lee's new movie Lust, Caution, he has been shunting from location to location in Shanghai.
The cast and crew have been working round the clock to finish production by the end of January. Work had been slow, the director reportedly said, but he wants to finish shooting before the Chinese New Year season kicks in and everyone heads home for the family reunion.
Leung is the busiest of the cast and he often juggles multiple projects. For Lust, he had been working mostly on soundstage and only recently filmed on location. Leung easily switched into the role of a traitor during the Japanese occupation of Shanghai, said insiders.
Not so for Lee-Hom Wang, the hip-hop idol who plays second fiddle in the movie. He had to go through some 40 takes before the director said "That's a wrap."
Hong Kong lovebirds nesting in land of milk and money
Nicolas Tse is making movies day and night so he'll have "enough money to buy milk" for his baby when it arrives in May.
Hong Kong teen idol Tse, who had an on-again off-again relationship with Cecilia Cheung before marrying her last autumn, is sending his three-month pregnant wife to Canada soon. He will take a few days off over the Spring Festival to join her.
His grandmother, who is in her 90s, lives in Canada and it will be a gathering of four generations before long.
Cheung, whose pregnancy was confirmed by father-in-law Yin Tse, a movie star from the previous generation, has already put her busy schedule as a movie star on hold. When Nicolas is on location, she moves in with her mom.
Funny thing happens to the evil emperor
After the ruthless emperor in Curse of the Golden Flower, Asian superstar Chow Yun-fat's another hit on the New Year's screen will be The Post-Modern Life of My Aunt, a romantic comedy in which he plays a swindler who falls in love with his potential target.
The romantic love story genre is never a hard task for Chow, who plays convincingly a warrior trapped in his un-conceded love in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.
The film will premiere in early March. Chow will challenge himself with three other films in 2007, in which his roles cover a wide range from an ancient emperor, a soldier, and a pirate of Caribbean.
Oprah Winfrey targeted in $1.5m extortion scheme
Oprah Winfrey is the richest woman in the United States, and some people want a piece of her wealth by extorting her.
Keifer Bonvillain, an Atlanta man, has been charged with trying to extort $1.5 million from the popular talk show host over tapes of telephone calls between him and a Winfrey employee that he said would embarrass the popular US talk show host, according to court documents and media reports.
A criminal complaint filed in the District Court in Chicago does not identify Winfrey, but refers to an "Individual A", as "a public figure and the owner of a Chicago-based company". She was later identified by local newspapers as Winfrey.
Bonvillain first wrote to his target in October and said an employee was saying "awful things" about the individual. He then wrote to her business on November 17 and said he had tapes of conversations with the employee that would be embarrassing. He later threatened to sell his tapes to tabloids and demanded $1.5 million to hand them over to her party.
The FBI was called in to monitor the conversations, and Bonvillian was arrested on December 15.
Pop princess delights in her new direction
Since starting post-graduate studies last September, Vicky Zhao (Zhao Wei, pictured) has gone through some big adjustments. No more around-the-clock shooting, no more publicity tour. Well, very few.
The busy actress-singer wants to concentrate on the biggest project at hand beefing herself up with knowledge.
Zhao is working on her master's degree at the famed Beijing Film Academy, where she completed a bachelor's degree some years ago before her career took off with the role of a fun-loving princess in a costume comedy series.
Like many movie stars, what she really wants to do is to be a director, which is her current major at the Academy. "I didn't know the workload would be so heavy. But I've never missed a single class. There's so much to learn," she told a Beijing newspaper.
Changing her life from that of a hot ticket on the celebrity scene to an early-to-bed, early-to-rise student took some doing, but she is living it.
"It's healthy to have a routine in my life." And she says she may even consider becoming a teacher.
In the current atmosphere of celebrity madness, that sounds like a step down.
China Daily
(China Daily 01/09/2007 page18)
