Beckhams hate smell of failure
He may not be able to bend a soccer ball the way he used to, but British football star David Beckham still smells good.
Beckham and his pop-star wife Victoria are banking on that fact as they prepare to unveil a set of new fragrances, dubbed “intimately Beckham for Him” and “for Her,” for men and women in September.
Some are questioning whether there’s still a market for anything the glam couple endorses.
The Beckhams, who married in 1999, have spent most of a decade in the perpetual glare of celebrity photographers’ flashbulbs.
But Beckham quit as England soccer captain after the team’s lackluster performance in the summer’s World Cup tournament and has since been ditched from the England squad.
Victoria, once a singer with the multimillion-selling Spice Girls, made a poorly received solo album in 2001 and recently switched her attention to developing a line of designer jeans.
Accent tough? Fuggetaboudit
British actor Hugh Laurie, who won a Golden Globe for his role on the Fox medical drama, “House,” says doing an American accent is truly hard. “I haven’t identified a single word that is pronounced the same in America as it is in England,” the 47-year-old actor tells Entertainment Weekly magazine in its Aug. 25 issue. “It’s as if you’re playing left-handed. Or like everyone else is playing with a tennis racket and you have a salmon. I moan about it a lot.”
Her name is Madonna
In her ongoing concert tour, Madonna may rise from the stage on a mirrored cross while wearing a crown of fake thorns to sing “Live to Tell,” but she insists it isn’t “disrespectful toward the church. German prosecutors appear to agree, seeing as they have decided against opening an investigation. A crowd of about 45,000 packed Duesseldorf’s LTU Arena Sunday night to watch the first of two German concerts on the singer’s worldwide “Confessions” tour.
She flies, forsooth
Like a generation of American college undergraduates, Chinese actress Ziyi Zhang (“Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon”) had to read “Hamlet” when she was attending China’s Central Academy of Drama. But the 27-year-old actor didn’t reread the Shakespearean tragedy to prepare for the upcoming film “The Banquet,” which is based loosely on the play. “I didn’t want to be affected by the original,” Zhang told the Chinese Web site Sina.com. “After all, this is an adaptation.” “The Banquet,” directed by Xiaogang Feng, is set in ancient China.
Notable quote
Humble Paris Hilton, giving Blender magazine her reaction to her album, “Paris”: “I, like, cry, when I listen to it, it’s so good.”
The birthday bunch
Actress Vera Miles is 76. Satirist Mark Russell is 74. Actress Barbara Eden is 72. Actor Richard Sanders (“WKRP In Cincinnati”) is 66. Country singer Rex Allen Junior is 59. Singer Linda Thompson is 59. Country fiddler-singer Woody Paul of Riders in the Sky is 57. Actress Shelley Long is 57. Singer-actor Rick Springfield is 57. Guitarist Dean DeLeo (Stone Temple Pilots) is 45. Actor Jay Mohr is 36.