Streisand pitches women’s heart health
In an elegant white tent at her oceanfront Malibu compound, Barbra Streisand sang and former President Bill Clinton spoke to a crowd gathered to raise funds for women’s heart health.
Guests paid as much as $100,000 per couple to support the Barbra Streisand Women’s Heart Center at the intimate fundraising dinner Thursday at the home Streisand shares with her husband, James Brolin.
The singer donated $10 million to create the research and treatment facility at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and solicited million-dollar donations from wealthy friends she called personally.
Streisand said she was motivated to contribute to women’s heart health because she “can’t stand inequality, whether it’s about civil rights, gay rights or gender discrimination.”
Heart disease kills more women each year than all cancers combined, but most of the research on the disease for the past five decades has been conducted on men.
“Even in scientific research, women are still treated as second-class citizens,” Streisand said, “and to me, that’s just unacceptable.”
Law, Radcliffe provide cheap shows
Jude Law, Judi Dench and Daniel Radcliffe are among the A-list actors signed up for a new London theater troupe, which hopes to attract new theatergoers by offering hundreds of 10 pounds ($16) tickets for each performance.
Simon Russell Beale, Sheridan Smith, David Walliams and Ben Whishaw are also part of the company formed by director Michael Grandage, who led the award-winning Donmar Warehouse troupe for a decade until early 2012.
On Friday Grandage announced a five-play, 15-month season beginning in December with a production of the musical “Privates on Parade.”
Future productions include new play “Peter and Alice” by John Logan; Shakespeare’s “Henry V” with Law in the title role; “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”; and a production of Martin McDonagh’s “The Cripple of Inishmaan” starring Radcliffe.
The birthday bunch
Actor Peter Lupus (TV’s “Mission: Impossible”) is 80. Singer Barry Manilow is 69. Comedian Joe Piscopo is 61. Mark Linn-Baker (“Perfect Strangers”) is 58. Director Bobby Farrelly (“There’s Something About Mary”) is 54. Actor Thomas Haden Church (“Sideways,” “Wings,” “Ned and Stacy”) is 51. Actor Greg Kinnear is 49. Actress Kami Cotler (“The Waltons”) is 47. Actor Jason Patric is 46. Singer Kevin Thornton of Color Me Badd is 43. Actor-comedian Will Forte (“Saturday Night Live”) is 42.