Taylor Swift to star in Cats movie
Taylor Swift is to take her first lead acting role in the film adaptation of Andrew lloyd Webber’s Cats, directed by Tom Hooper. Swift, 28, has one significant screen credit to her name: She voiced the environmentalist Audrey in the 2012 animation The lorax. She is expected to actually appear on screen — albeit wearing paws and whiskers — in the film, which will begin production later this year in london.
Full details of the casting have yet to be announced, but it seems likely Swift will take the role of Grizabella, the once glamorous, now mangy puss whose showstopper, Memory, is perhaps the musical’s most enduring tune. The part was originated and made famous by Elaine Paige, and more recently played by X Factor winner leona lewis and Nicole Scherzinger, formerly of the Pussycat Dolls.
Swift’s love of felines has been well documented; she owned two Siamese-tabby mixes and currently has two Scottish Fold cats, called Olivia Benson and Meredith Grey. Both had cameos in Deadpool 2 — on a T-shirt worn by Ryan Reynolds’s character.
lloyd Webber’s musical was loosely adapted from TS Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats and concerns a tribe of felines called the Jellicles who, one night, must make “the Jellicle choice” and decide which of them shall be resurrected after a trip to the Heaviside layer. The show opened in the West End in 1981, where it ran for 21 years. It was on Broadway for 18 years and has had multiple runs around the world.
Bowie’s first demo track discovered
long before Aladdin Sane or Ziggy Stardust, a skinny 16-year-old with ambitions to be a saxophonist agreed to do lead vocals on a demo track, in a small studio in south london. Now the only known recording of the resulting session, with David Bowie singing I Never Dreamed with his first band, The Konrads, has resurfaced in an old bread basket, and is expected to fetch £10,000 at auction.
The record company evidently failed to recognise the potential of the voice that would become one of the most famous of the 20th century. The Konrads did not win the longed-for audition with Decca, although the record company did give them a trial later that year — and turned them down — soon before Bowie left the band citing artistic differences.
The tape was rediscovered by David Hadfield, who was slightly older than the other Konrads, and who was both their drummer and manager. He found it when moving home, stashed in an old bread basket that had belonged to his grandfather along with a host of other material including booking forms, photographs, promotional sketches, letters and bills, in a loft above the garage.
Hadfield, who went on to make a career in the music industry, recalled that Konrads’ agent, Eric Easton, who also managed another obscure young band called the Rolling Stones, asked them to make a demo, so he booked a session at RG Jones in Morden. Bowie, then David Jones, before he changed his name to avoid confusion with the Monkees’ teen idol Davy Jones, and a few other band members.
Remake of Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Television’s habit of twinning teenagers with vampires, which became so voguish more than 20 years ago with the success of the TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, just will not lie down and die. The show, which starred Sarah Michelle Gellar as Buffy and the English actor Anthony Head in the role of charming “watcher” Rupert Giles, is now to be re-booted, it has been announced.
According to entertainment industry journal the Hollywood Reporter, an unnamed black actor has been lined up for the lead role in a “contemporary” version of the story.
The drama, created by Joss Whedon, was first broadcast in 1997 and won devoted followers around the world, following as it did in the supernatural wake of the teenage vampire film The lost Boys, a cinematic hit with young audiences a decade earlier in 1987. When Buffy finished battling the undead in 2003, the Twilight series of films based on the books of Stephanie Meyer took up the ghostly reins. Whedon will executive produce the series, penned by Agents Of SHIElD writer, Monica Owusu-Breen.