Kate Beckinsale sets hearts racing in little lace dress at Spirit Award nominations

By Daily Mail Reporter

Last updated at 10:56 PM on 29th November 2011

Kate Beckinsale earned herself a best dressed nod as she arrived to announced the Independent Spirit Award nominations in Hollywood today.

The 38-year-old actress, who has a daughter Lily, 12, with ex Michael Sheen, cut a stylish figure as she posed in a thigh-skimming lace dress and nude heels.

She joined actor Anthony Mackie and organiser Sean McManus at The London hotel for the early morning event.

Leggy lady: Kate Beckinsale attended the Independent Spirit Award nominations in Hollywood today

The British actress, who is married to director Len Wiseman, will next star in Underworld Awakening the latest installment of her big budget action franchise, but today took time out to lend her support to independent film.

Beckinsale revealed that silent movie The Artist and the doomsday drama Take Shelter were both up for five nominations each, including best picture.

Also in the running for best picture were the cancer tale 50/50, the action thriller Drive and the family dramas Beginners and The Descendants.

And the nominees are: The brunette was joined on stage by actor Anthony Mackie

A black-and-white throwback to early Hollywood, The Artist also earned a lead-actor nomination for Jean Dujardin as a silent film star whose career crumbles as the sound era takes over in the late 1920s.

The film grabbed directing and screenplay nominations for Michel Hazanavicius, along with a cinematography slot for Guillaume Schiffman.

Take Shelter star Michael Shannon earned a lead-actor nomination as a family man who comes unhinged amid visions of a coming apocalyptic storm.

Co-star Jessica Chastain was nominated for supporting actress, while Take Shelter also received nominations for director Jeff Nichols and a prize for emerging producers for Sophia Lin.

In good spirits: The pair posed up together on the red carpet before taking to the podium

Other lead-actor contenders were Ryan Gosling for Drive, Demian Bichir for the immigrant drama A Better Life and Woody Harrelson for the police story Rampart.

The lead-actress field included Michelle Williams as Marilyn Monroe in My Week with Marilyn.

Also nominated were Lauren Ambrose for the single-mom story Think of Me, Rachael Harris for the road-trip comedy Natural Selection, Adepero Oduye for the teen drama Pariah and Elizabeth Olsen as an escapee from a cult in Martha Marcy May Marlene.

Blonde ambition: Michelle Williams has been nominated for an Independent Spirit Award for her role in My Week With Marilyn

Snubbed: The Descendants received numerous nominations but George Clooney was overlooked

Independent Spirit Awards - Key nominations

Best Feature
50/50 - Producers: Evan Goldberg, Ben Karlin, Seth Rogen
Beginners - Producers: Miranda de Pencier, Lars Knudsen, Leslie Urdang, Dean Vanech, Jay Van Hoy
Drive - Producers: Michel Litvak, John Palermo, Marc Platt, Gigi Pritzker, Adam Siegel
Take Shelter - Producers: Tyler Davidson, Sophia Lin
The Artist - Producer: Thomas Langmann
The Descendants - Producers: Jim Burke, Alexander Payne, Jim Taylor

Best Director
Michel Hazanavicius - The Artist
Mike Mills - Beginners
Jeff Nichols - Take Shelter
Alexander Payne - The Descendants
Nicolas Winding Refn - Drive

Best Screenplay
Joseph Cedar - Footnote
Michel Hazanavicius - The Artist
Tom McCarthy - Win Win
Mike Mills - Beginners
Alexander Payne, Nat Faxon, Jim Rash - The Descendants

Best Female Lead
Lauren Ambrose - Think of Me
Rachael Harris - Natural Selection
Adepero Oduye - Pariah
Elizabeth Olsen - Martha Marcy May Marlene
Michelle Williams - My Week with Marilyn

Best Male Lead
Demián Bichir - A Better Life
Jean Dujardin - The Artist
Ryan Gosling - Drive
Woody Harrelson - Rampart
Michael Shannon - Take Shelter

Best Supporting Female
Jessica Chastain - Take Shelter
Anjelica Huston - 50/50
Janet McTeer - Albert Nobbs
Harmony Santana - Gun Hill Road
Shailene Woodley - The Descendants

Best Supporting Male
Albert Brooks - Drive
John Hawkes - Martha Marcy May Marlene
Christopher Plummer - Beginners
John C. Reilly - Cedar Rapids
Corey Stoll - Midnight in Paris

Presented by the cinema group Film Independent, the Spirit Awards will be handed out the day before the Academy Awards, at an afternoon ceremony on Feb. 25. The show will air later that night on IFC.

The Spirit Awards nominations are one of the first key honours on the long road to the Oscars, which often are dominated by big Hollywood films but generally include many nominees from the independent film world.

Last season's top winner at the Spirit Awards, Black Swan, also was a hit with Academy voters, earning a best-picture nomination there and winning the best-actress Oscar for Natalie Portman.

Notably absent from the Spirit Awards lineup was Academy Award winner George Clooney, considered a strong prospect for a best-actor nomination at the Oscars for The Descendants.

Like Crazy, the top winner at last January's Sundance Film Festival, was completely overlooked, receiving no nominations.

The stars of Woody Allen's romantic fantasy Midnight in Paris - among them Owen Wilson, Rachel McAdams and Oscar winners Marion Cotillard and Kathy Bates - missed out, too. But their relatively unknown co-star, Corey Stoll, picked up a supporting-actor nomination for his scene-stealing role as Ernest Hemingway.

Clooney's young co-star Shailene Woodley, who plays his daughter in The Descendants, earned a supporting-actress slot.

Nominees in the supporting categories included Christopher Plummer for Beginners, Oscar winner Anjelica Huston for 50/50, Albert Brooks for Drive and John Hawkes for Martha Marcy May Marlene, who won the supporting-actor prize at last season's Spirit Awards for Winter's Bone.

Along with Hazanavicius and Nichols, directing nominees were Mike Mills for Beginners, Alexander Payne for The Descendants and Nicolas Winding Refn for Drive.

Spirit Awards nominees were chosen by panels of film professionals. Members of Film Independent, who include filmmakers and movie fans, are eligible to vote on the winners.

Eligible films must have production budgets of no more than $20 million and meet independent-cinema criteria that include uniqueness of vision and original, provocative subject matter.


Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-2067777/Kate-Beckinsale-sets-hearts-racing-little-lace-dress-Spirit-Award-nominations.html#ixzz1f8tAW4te

Heat Wave: Michelle Williams is hot stuff as Marilyn

By Baz Bamigboye

Last updated at 10:39 AM on 30th September 2011


How marvellously appropriate that Simon Curtis’s movie My Week With Marilyn has a pre-opening credit sequence with Michelle Williams portraying Marilyn Monroe singing Heat Wave.

She’s wearing a slinky gold lamé gown that shifts as her hips swing. ‘We’re having a heat wave,’ she sings softly. ‘A tropical heat wave, the temperature’s rising, it isn’t surprising . . . ’

The Irving Berlin number, which Monroe sang in the movie There’s No Business Like Show Business, goes on to mention something about her anatomy making the mercury jump to 93.

Temperature is rising: Michelle Williams as Marilyn Monroe in a scene from My Week With Marilyn

Wiggling a come-hither finger at a couple of male dancers, the scene captures Monroe’s heat and allure perfectly. The crazy thing is that, for a couple of seconds, your mouth drops open because you think it might be out-takes of the real Norma Jean.

But it’s all Michelle Williams: the voice, the hair, the pout, the sashay are all part of her sensational interpretation.

When I saw the actress on set last November she told me she wanted to bring to the screen ‘a kind of sensitivity that those who loved her [Monroe] would spend the rest of their lives trying to describe’ - and that’s just what she’s done.

The film’s title alludes to the friendship that developed between Monroe and Colin Clark, an Eton-educated toff hired as an assistant to Laurence Olivier during the making of The Prince And The Showgirl at Pinewood Studios - where My Week was also shot - in the late Fifties.

That wiggle: The slinky gold lame dress shifts as her hips swing

For a short while, Monroe was able to be herself around Clark, and the pair went off on a jolly jaunt, skinny-dipping and visiting Windsor Castle.

It was a brief respite from the private pain Monroe tried to mask.
All that and more comes through in Williams’s portrait.

She not only gives us Monroe, the world-renowned star, but also switches between two other roles: Elsie Marina (the character she plays in The Prince And The Showgirl) and the lost girl who is Norma Jean.

Eddie Redmayne, as Clark, is the glue that holds things together, but the movie is also about the clash of cultures that arises between Williams’s Monroe and Kenneth Branagh’s Olivier.

It’s electrifying watching these two titans (Williams and Branagh are bound to get Oscar nominations) who speak the same language but are unable to communicate.

Monroe envies Olivier’s stature as an actor; he wants some of her stardust to rub off on him (though it would be nice if she was punctual on set, while she was at it).

Branagh’s performance is often hilarious as he spits and splutters over his leading lady’s behaviour. But there’s also something poignant, as the film hints at the insecurities that bedevil even the most confident and successful of people.

Clark’s diaries, upon which Adrian Hodges has based his screenplay, note that soon after Olivier shot The Prince And The Showgirl he was sent John Osborne’s The Entertainer, which not only redefined his career, but British theatre.

Titans: Sir Laurence Olivier and actress Marilyn Monroe on the set of The Prince And The Showgirl. Kenneth Branagh plays Olivier in the new film

Another strand running through Curtis’s gorgeous movie (produced by David Parfitt, Harvey Weinstein and BBC Films) concerns ageing and celebrity.

There’s a heartbreaking moment when Julia Ormond, as Vivien Leigh, remarks she’s 43 and no one, including her husband Olivier, will love her for much longer.

It’s interesting to note that today some of our biggest female movie stars are well into their 40s, if not older - though many still feel the need to hide or deny that.

And then there’s Judi Dench, in a class all by her beautiful self, refusing to get caught up in such nonsense. She portrays Sybil Thorndike, a grand dame then as Judi is now, offering sympathy to the blonde bombshell who couldn’t fathom our quaint ways.

The movie has its world premiere at the New York Film Festival on October 9 and opens here on November 25.


Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-2043538/Heat-Wave-Michelle-Williams-hot-stuff-Marilyn.html#ixzz1ZVbFVeQo

Kelly Rowland is reunited with Beyonce and Michelle Williams at her album launch, five years after their split

It's pure Destiny: Kelly Rowland is reunited with Beyonce and Michelle Williams at her album launch, five years after their split

By Mike Larkin

Last updated at 12:23 PM on 27th July 2011


The Spice Girls did it, All Saints did it and Girls Aloud are rumoured to be doing it for their ten year anniversary.

So maybe there is still hope to see Beyonce, Kelly Rowland and Michelle Williams wiggling their hips in unison again and singing about paying their bills.

The girls, who played their final show as a trio in 2006, were reunited when Kelly's former bandmates flocked to the launch party of her new album Here I Am.

Celebrating: Kelly Rowland held a launch party for her new album in NYC, which her former bandmates attended

Supportive: Beyonce and Michelle Williams, both dressed in black, showed support for their friends

All dressed in black, they harped back to their Destiny's Child era when they wore matching outfits.

Kelly and Michelle opted for LBDs, while the Crazy In Love star headed out in a one-sleeve playsuit.


The New York event was held at the Moet Rose Lounge at the top of The Standard Hotel in honour of Kelly's third album efforts on her quest for solo stardom.

Earlier in the day, she made another bid to boost her career at a special hand-printing ceremony.

Stealing the limelight: Although it was Kelly Rowland's night, all eyes were on Beyonce

Blast from the past: Trio arrive at Fashion Rocks concert in 2005 all wearing black

The singer showed she still knows how to work an audience when she stuck her hands in wet plaster at Planet Hollywood in NYC.

Wearing a pair of tiny hot pink, the 30-year-old drew a crowd to the Times Square event.

And hopefully her fans will now know where she is again, after a horrific period in her career that saw her sack Beyonce's father Matthew Knowles as her manager in 2009 and get axed by her record label months later.

She has struggled to emerge from her former bandmate Beyonce's shadow, despite scoring early solo chart success with the likes of Dilemma in 2002.

That's a handy promotional tool! Kelly Rowland plugs new album at hand printing ceremony

It's hard Work: The singer held up her album for photographers but was briefly spotted without it

Things certainly seem to be on the up for the sexy soul singer, as she has landed a spot as a judge on the revamped version of the UK edition of X Factor.

She will be hoping the extra exposure will help her new album fly off the shelves when it is released in the UK.

The record has had a difficult birthing process. It was originally meant to be released under the title Kelly Rowland last September.

However it was pushed back four times. with Kelly declaring it unfinished the month it was due to come out.

It has finally been released, and contains the work of a hodge-podge of writers and producers including Jermaine Dupri and Rico Love, while the likes of Sean Paul provide guest vocals.

It has been released to mix reviews, with some critics panning it and others strongly recommending it.

Fingered: Kelly signed her special block of plaster with her finger before victoriously showing it off

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-2019198/Destinys-Child-Kelly-Rowland-reunited-Beyonce-Michelle-Williams-album-launch-years-split.html#ixzz1TJHHwix8