HOLLYWOOD, CA (Hollywood Today/AFP) 8/1/07 - The producers of two rival Hollywood films are locked in a nose-to-nose row over an infamous Paris wine-tasting event which embarrassed France’s top experts, a report said Wednesday.

Now two films are being made about the debacle, one claiming to present the official version of events and another starring British actor Alan Rickman and reportedly Danny DeVito.

Shooting wraps up this week, and Sonoma will return to a sleepy little town - forever immortalized on the big screen.

Challenge anyone to name the big players in British film and Kate Winslet, Emma Thompson and Alan Rickman are all likely to get a mention.

The actor who played Yosser Hughes in TV's Boys from the Blackstuff and the man who co-wrote Spycatcher probably wouldn't be given a second thought.

But those two are surprise names on a list of the most powerful British film stars and movie-makers in Hollywood today. Winslet, Thompson and Rickman, on the other hand, don't even make the grade.

The list, compiled by the UK Film Council, reveals the country's most successful actors in terms of box office earnings over the course of the past five years. It also lists the most successful directors of the same period.

To qualify for the list, actors must have had significant roles in films with a box office haul of at least £500 million, while directors need to have taken at least a tenth of that with their own projects.

When I suggest to him that his elegant gloominess in films such as Sense and Sensibility and Love Actually has made him a thinking woman’s crumpet, he doesn’t even take it as a compliment. “Well, there you go,” he mutters, as if being lusted after by ladies of a certain age was another of life’s many burdens.

“The big films allow you to do the smaller ones,” explains Rickman, who for many Potter fans is Severus Snape. “It is different playgrounds and one of them has more expensive equipment. It’s great fun to work on films like Potter. It’s just a different use of your acting brain.”

More than 120 actors, writers and directors have signed a letter in today's edition of The Times protesting plans to close Britain's oldest working theater, the Bristol Old Vic, for 18 months.

The Old Vic, which opened in 1766, is a pillar of Britain's theatrical community and has nurtured the careers of generations of great actors including Peter O'Toole and Daniel Day-Lewis.

The signatories to the letter are protesting the theater's decision to stop productions for 18 months for refurbishment. They include Judi Dench, Maggie Smith and Emma Thompson -- who have five Oscars between them -- as well as Alan Rickman and Ian McKellen.

The
programme is subject to change, but at the moment music from such films as 'Calendar Girls', 'Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire', ' Sense and Sensibility', and 'Nanny McPhee' is planned. The star studded cast presenting the music currently features such names as Dame Judy Dench, Alan Rickman, Richard Briers, Robbie Coltrane, Celia Imrie, Gemma Jones, Richard E Grant and Sir Derek Jacobi, to name but a few!

Connors will discuss the book in person on October 14 at the Cheltenham literary festival, with one of Plath's friends, poet and critic Al Alvarez, and actor Diana Quick, who will read a selection of her poetry. In addition, there is a planned concert reading at the Royal Festival Hall for which musicans such as Patti Smith and Alanis Morissette and actors, including Alan Rickman, have been approached to participate.

Alan Rickman will play the lecherous Judge Turpin in the film. He imprisons Benjamin Barker who later returns as barber Sweeney Todd and takes revenge.

My Name Is Rachel Corrie is a one-woman show based on the writings 23-year-old Corrie left behind that tell her story from the time she was a small child to March 16, 2003 when she was killed by an Israeli army bulldozer. British actor-director Alan Rickman and Guardian newspaper editor Katharine Viner adapted the activist's writings for the stage.

When the petition was set up (in 2003), a really small percentage of people with HIV could get medication – certainly less than 5 per cent. Now that figure has risen to more like 25 per cent....... There is still a long way to go.