Celebrity Scene - The Buzz

Designers fire up Mad Woman

MAD Men's curve queen, Christina Hendricks, was very much on display at the Emmy Awards, in an off-the-shoulder, off-the-front lavender gown from Zac Posen. Many female stars borrow dresses for these awards shows from various big-shot designers, who are usually happy to get paid with just a mention on-air. But when the Daily Record, a Scottish paper, asked Hendricks last week whose dress she would wear, she didn't know, and sounded a little bitter: "People have been saying some nice, wonderful things about me. Yet not one designer in town will loan me a dress. They only lend out a size 0 or 2. So I'm still struggling for someone to give me a darn dress." She's size 14.

Yoko refuses to Let It Be

YOKO Ono continues to fight off the cruel-but-fair label "forgotten but not gone" by staging more and still more "celebrations" and "commemorations" of John Lennon. Her latest scheme: a "series of events" in Iceland to mark what would have been his 70th birthday. Yawn. John was born Oct. 9, 1940. Yoko is still cashing in at 77.

Shia brings LaBeouf to the box office

SHIA LaBeouf is Hollywood's "best value" actor, says Forbes mag, which calculates these things. They mean he generates more box-office revenue per $1 of salary than any other of the 36 big stars the mag measured. His ratio is 81:1. Hmm. But does he really deserve credit for the success of the Transformers movies? Those big stupid machines didn't get paid at all, and many people bought tickets just to see them. (I say nothing of Megan Fox.) Anyway, I'm sure that right now LaBeouf's agent is sending copies of the Forbes story to every studio head on earth. Anne Hathaway came second, the mag said, at 64 box-office dollars per paycheque dollar. Daniel Radcliffe, at $61, was third. Then came Robert Downey Jr. ($33) and Cate Blanchett ($27).

So, we'll mark you in the 'not a fan' box?

POOR Taylor Swift is probably still in therapy over that Kanye West thing, and now Chris Robinson of the Black Crowes has made his own unprovoked assault on her. "I find it embarrassing that adults are like, 'Taylor Swift is very talented.' She's not," he told the lads' mag Nylon Guys. "She might be cute, but she's horrible." I suppose Taylor will, in the immortal words of Liberace, cry all the way to the bank.

You'd be lucky to be a piece of LaBeouf, pal

WHY not? It's worked so far: Kellan Lutz, one of the principal himbos of the Twilight movies, insists, to Us mag, that he's more than just another pretty face: "It's nice to be one of the guys that can help sell a movie by taking his shirt off... (but) by no means do I want to be a piece of meat for the rest of my career."

Fanning 16 going on 56

YOUNG Dakota Fanning says she's insecure about being a movie star. You have to suspect she's heard about how Macaulay Culkin was all washed up by age 13. Dakota says movie acting "is what I want to do for the rest of my life, but I think that everything can end tomorrow. You have to live your life for the moment and not take it for granted." She's 16.

Grass wasn't greener on other side of couch

BELIEVE it if you can: Mary Louise Parker, who stars as a suburban mom who's also a grass dealer on the cable show Weeds, tells Vanity Fair she has never smoked dope: "I was hanging around a lot of musicians, so I definitely had access to drugs. It just never appealed to me. Everybody was doing it, and I didn't want to be part of the crowd. There was no part of me that wanted to fit in." She did, however, once have a marijuana lollipop, she says. But "I didn't feel anything."

Andrews' demands blow out b-day candles

NO sound of "happy birthday" for Dame Julie. A BBC plan to do a big special to celebrate the 75th birthday of Julie Andrews -- admit it, you loved The Sound of Music -- has been scrapped, after it turned out she would want a big payday for the project. How's that for ego? Anyway, the potential ad revenue wouldn't cover the sum she wanted, so the whole thing's dead. The best part of this story is the headline in the Telegraph newspaper: "Dame Julie Andrews: The tills aren't alive for the sound of her 75th birthday."

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition September 9, 2010 A48