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The late actress Mala Powers in 1962. PHOTO: AP

Actress Mala Powers, who found fame in a string of hit 1950s films, has died after suffering complications from leukemia, it was reported on Wednesday. She was 75.

Powers, who was best remembered for playing Roxane in the 1950 screen version of classic French tale Cyrano de Bergerac, died on Monday at the Providence St. Joseph Medical Center, the Los Angeles Times reported.

The hospital was not immediately available to comment.

Powers was born in 1931 to journalist parents who moved to Hollywood, where their daughter began training as an actress at an early age.

She had bit parts in several 1940s films but it was not until 1950 when her career took off.

Her performance in Cyrano de Bergerac earned her a Golden Globe nomination while she also earned glowing reviews for her portrayal of a rape victim in Outrage.

Her other films included Edge of Doom, Rose of Cimarron, City Beneath the Sea, City That Never Sleeps, Bengazi and The Storm Rider.

US entertainment giant Walt Disney is teaming up with Yash Raj Films in India to make animated movies using the voices of Bollywood stars, the companies announced this week.

The tie-up "marks the first time for both companies to enter in a co-production to produce films in India," a statement issued by Disney said.

Disney Studios chairman Dick Cook said the partnership would "create exceptional animated films in the Indian language that are culturally relevant for the avid movie-going audiences in India and around the world."

"Animation is a new and rapidly expanding area in India, and the collaboration between Disney and YRF Studios will bring the very best in story-telling and cutting edge technology together," he added.

Each film in the alliance would be overseen by Yash Raj's Aditya Chopra, who will work with an "array of leading local talent," according to Disney.

The Wall Street Journal reported that Disney has struggled to make money in India, which has a vast domestic film market, but believes an animated story featuring well-known Indian stars could be a commercial hit.

The new venture's first project will be an animated tale featuring the voices of Bollywood stars Saif Ali Khan and Kareena Kapoor, tentatively titled Roadside Romeo and due for release next year.

Firebrand director Michael Moore this week accused the US government of harassment over an investigation into a trip he made to Cuba earlier this year for his latest film.

The US Treasury is probing whether Moore broke a 45-year-old US trade embargo on Cuba by taking a group of rescue workers from the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks to the island for medical treatment during filming of Sicko.

"This is a form of harassment," Moore said, adding: "We are going to fight this and we are going to be very aggressive to find who is behind this."

In a letter to the US Treasury on Monday, Moore's lawyer David Boies said his client had been unfairly discriminated against and demanded an explanation.

Moore, who won an Oscar for the 2002 film Bowling for Columbine, was last month asked to explain the purpose of the trip and give details including departure dates and names and addresses of those who went.

The group of rescue workers were suffering from medical conditions believed to be connected to their jobs clearing debris from the site of the World Trade Center in New York in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks.

Sicko looks at the state of the US healthcare system.

English filmmaker March Forby plans to start shooting a movie this fall on the failed attempt by the 19th-century Hawaiian royal Princess Kaiulani to restore Hawaii's deposed monarchy.

Former Hawaii resident Q'orianka Kilcher, who played Pocahontas in Terence Malick's 2005 epic The New World opposite Colin Farrell, will star.

Forby will be joined by producers Nigel Thomas and Lauri Apelian of Matador Pictures, the team behind British director Ken Loach's Irish civil war film The Wind That Shakes the Barley. That film took the Palme d'Or award at last year's Cannes Film Festival.

The Hawaii film, being made with a US$9 million budget, will mark Forby's directorial debut.

Forby, who also wrote the script, plans to tell the story from Kaiulani's perspective.

"It's as much about the growth of a young woman into a stateswoman as it is about the demise of a nation. She's the cinematic way to tell that story,'' he said.

Kaiulani, who was of Hawaiian and Scottish descent, was 17 when US-backed businessmen overthrew the Hawaiian monarchy. The princess sailed to Washington, DC, from England, where she was studying, to lobby US President Grover Cleveland and the US Congress to put Hawaii back under monarchic rule. Cleveland was sympathetic, but Congress stood by the provisional government in Honolulu. Hawaii was made a republic in 1898.

— agencies
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