Who's in

They fork out the most for Witherspoon

Thirty-one-year-old Academy Award winner Reese Witherspoon commands $15 million to $20 million a movie, placing her at the top of The Hollywood Reporter's annual list of the highest-paid actresses.

Angelina Jolie came in second with similar salary demands, though the animated Beowulf earned the 32-year-old actress far less - just $8 million.

Cameron Diaz was third, with a $15 million-per-movie price tag. Nicole Kidman dropped to fourth place, two spots lower than last year, with an asking price of $10 million to $15 million a movie.

Renee Zellweger and Sandra Bullock also get $10 million to $15 million paychecks. So does Julia Roberts, who hasn't appeared on the big screen since 2004. Her next film, Charlie Wilson's War, is due in theaters in December.

Horror's King talks tasty tunes

Stephen King's taste in music is more eclectic than scary. The best-selling author reveals his seven picks for the "best albums of the year" in Entertainment Weekly's December 7 issue.

"In truth, your Uncle Stevie was disappointed with this year's new music, very disappointed indeed, and his year-end list reflects that," King writes. "I could only find seven albums I wanted to mention ..."

His No 1 pick is Steve Earle's Washington Square Serenade, followed by Wilco's Sky Blue Sky, Mika's Life in Cartoon Motion and Lyle Lovett and His Large Band's It's Not Big It's Large.

Of Lovett's album, King says: "This is a terrific Texas swing album, but of course not everybody likes Texas swing (or even knows what it is). What makes it special is Lovett's vermouth-dry vocals and his equally dry wit."

King's fifth choice is Ozzy Osbourne's Black Rain - "finest heavy metal record of the year; a true speaker-buster" - followed by John Fogerty's Revival and Southern Culture on the Skids' Countrypolitan Favorites.

Sopranos star's school of rock

Steven Van Zandt says that in developing a curriculum to teach a new generation the history of rock and roll, he tried to put himself in the place of the students who would be learning from it.

"Make it fun. Look at kids going to school ... and taking that energy from the music, you know, history, and taking that energy into their other classes," Van Zandt said in an interview that aired Sunday on ABC's This Week.

Van Zandt, guitarist for Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band and a former cast member of The Sopranos, is the founder of the Rock and Roll Forever Foundation. He said he's never really repaid what music has done for him, but the new course is a start.

"The history of rock and roll is a history of, certainly, 20th-century America, from there on, anyway. All the cultural impact that it had with civil rights and women's rights and all that other stuff. Well, this is what's going to last. This is what's going to, you know, be here long after we're gone," he said.

Kidman: My sex education was clinical

Oscar winning actress Nicole Kidman says she learned about the facts of life from gruesome videos her parents would bring back from the hospital.

Her father was a biochemist and her mother was a nurse. Kidman believes she and her sister learned the facts of life from the videos and volunteer work at the hospital where their mother worked.

She said: "We'd do our homework, help out in the ward, empty bedpans. It's why I'm very at ease around sickness. My parents would bring home films of someone being operated on, and we would have to watch it. That's how we learned about sex, that's how we learned about everything."

Agencies

(China Daily 12/04/2007 page18)