Dying TV star's marriage grips Britain

A British reality TV star who is dying of cervical cancer got married yesterday in full glare of the cameras - a wedding extravaganza auctioned off to the highest media bidder to pay for the education of her young sons.

Jade Goody, the star Britons used to love to hate and now can't praise enough, has tied the knot with fiance Jack Tweed, according to her spokesman, Max Clifford.

Goody, 27, and Tweed, 21, received a standing ovation from 200 guests once they were married at the Down Hall Country House Hotel in eastern England, he told reporters. "It was just a very beautiful, very moving service," Clifford added.

The ceremony has received overwhelmingly positive coverage in the British media and marks a turnaround for Goody, a brash and buxom star who went from being the vulgar, in-your-face posterchild for British boorishness to an exemplar of bravery following her cancer diagnosis.

While there were the usual trimmings of a celebrity wedding - a helicopter, a fancy hotel, a television crew, a reported million pound ($1.4 million) deal to secure photo and video rights to the ceremony - the circumstances were far from typical.

The bride, 27, is bald from chemotherapy and carried a pouch for painkillers concealed in her designer dress; the groom is on probation after assaulting a teenage boy with a golf club.

Although Tweed is under curfew, he was given special dispensation by Britain's Justice Ministry allowing him to spend yesterday evening with his bride.

"It might be their only night together," Clifford said.

Now known to most Britons simply as "Jade," Goody was plucked from obscurity to play in Big Brother, a British reality show, in 2002. Her eye-popping gaffes - she infamously complained of being "an escape goat" and questioned whether English was spoken in the US - made her so mocked that her old south London school defended itself by saying she wasn't a typical pupil.

Goody cashed in on her notoriety with an autobiography, fitness videos and a line of perfume, but her clashes with Bollywood actress Shilpa Shetty, during the filming of Celebrity Big Brother in January 2007, saw her branded a racist and ejected from the show in disgrace.

Agencies

(China Daily 02/23/2009 page6)