Reel News

Screen legend Olivia de Havilland is to be honored in Hollywood. PHOTO: AP

Oscar organizers will honor Academy Award-winning screen legend Olivia de Havilland at a special ceremony next year, they announced this week.

The 89-year-old actress -- who starred in such classic films as

1939's Gone with the Wind, in which she played Melanie Hamilton -- will be the subject of a tribute to be held in Beverly Hills on June 15, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences said.

Double Oscar winner De Havilland, the sister of actress Joan Fontaine -- the star of Alfred Hitchcock's Rebecca -- was born in Tokyo in July 1916 of British parents who later moved their family to Los Angeles.

De Havilland made her screen debut as Hermia in Max Reinhardt's A Midsummer Night's Dream in 1935 and won

recognition for her role

opposite swashbuckling actor Errol Flynn in Captain Blood later the same year.

Italian screen legend Claudia Cardinale, Oscar-winning director Roman Polanski and Spanish star Victoria Abril are due to be special guests at an upcoming film festival in the Amazon jungle city of Manaus, Brazil, organizers said.

Exotic climes beckon Roman Polanski. PHOTO: EPA

The event will the second annual World Adventure Film Festival -- "dedicated to the human spirit of adventure" -- staged in Manaus.

The festival features a

competition of eight international films based on adventure, another of eight ethnic and wildlife

documentaries, and a competition of short films from Amazonas state and elsewhere in Brazil.

Canadian director Norman Jewison, whose films include The Thomas Crown Affair, will head the features jury.

What the Snow Brings, a Japanese film directed by

Kichitaro Negishi, swept the Tokyo International Film Festival on Sunday by winning three key awards, including the best movie title.

The three awards -- the Tokyo Sakura Grand Prix, the Best Director Award and the Best

Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role -- were announced at the closing ceremony of the nine-day event.

"With this film, I tried to focus on family relations which are one of the traditional themes of Japanese movies," Negishi told the ceremony.

"I would like to dedicate this film to Japanese film directors who have developed the Japanese film industry," he said.

The film stars Japanese actors Yusuke Iseya and Koichi Sato, who won the best performance by an actor award. It focuses on the relationship between brothers and a younger brother's recovery of hope which had been lost in his dissipated urban life.

Australian movie heartthrob Heath Ledger has become a father for the first time after his fiancee, Michelle Williams, gave birth to a baby girl, Extra entertainment

television said this week.

The pair are the parents of a daughter named Matilda, who was born in New York, a syndicated US television celebrity show reported.

Ledger, 26, and 25-year-old Williams, who formerly starred in the US television soap opera Dawson's Creek, have not yet set a date for their wedding.

The two have been dating since they met on the set of their movie Brokeback Mountain, which is set for release in December.

Actor Gerard Depardieu is ending his film career, a

newspaper quoted the popular Frenchman as saying.

"I have nothing to lose. I have made 170 films. I have nothing left to prove. I am not going to hang on like an idiot," Depardieu, one of France's best known actors at home and abroad, was quoted as saying by Le Parisien Dimanche newspaper.

"I'm in the process of stopping filming," said the portly star of films such as Cyrano de Bergerac, Green Card and Jean de Florette.

Wal-Mart Stores came to Manhattan for a peak at a movie about itself.

But before it got the chance, a Wal-Mart consultant was told to leave the theater after the director accused him of trying to secretly record the film.

Minutes into the premier of the film, Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price, the director, Robert Greenwald, said he spotted the consultant pointing his open cell-phone toward the screen. A

confrontation ensued in the lobby. "Get out of here," Greenwald

yelled, according to the director and a Wal-Mart spokeswoman. "This is a disgrace."

The spokeswoman, Mia Masten, said she and two consultants had bought tickets to the screening "to find out what they were saying so we can correct it." Masten said the consultant who was asked to leave, John Marino, was trying to call her because she was running late.

"Why would we record it?" she said, "We bought tickets."