Scottish singer Susan Boyle, one of the biggest stars of the Internet age, seeks to turn global celebrity into record sales this week with the release of her debut album I Dreamed a Dream. Named after the song from the musical Les Miserables that made her famous, the 12-track album is a mix of pop covers like Madonna’s You’ll See and The Monkees’ Daydream Believer and Christian stalwarts like Amazing Grace.
Weeks ahead of the album’s release, it topped Amazon’s pre-sale charts. Boyle is the church mouse who roared on Britain’s Got Talent last spring, turning the tables on judges and audience members disdainful that a woman over 25 blithe to the rigors of Botox should open her mouth in public. A viral pandemic on YouTube made the Scottish 40-something an international star. This is her dream come true, we are told; never mind that the whirlwind taking her from West Lothian to happy ever after has already landed this psychologically delicate woman in a clinic.
This, then, is no mere bunch of songs; it is a commemorative mug of a major national event, rendered as a silver gewgaw that plays music.
Pirates of the Caribbean star Johnny Depp is the sexiest man on the planet, according to People magazine.
Depp, 46, headed a list of 15, catching People’s attention not so much for his swashbuckling antics in the Pirates franchise, or his freakish charm in Edward Scissorhands, but his softer side as a family man.
The “star has had women swooning since his days as a teen detective on 21 Jump Street. Yet it’s his devotion to his family that really makes the actor so endearing,” People gushed.
Depp’s companion is French singer Vanessa Paradis and he is the father of Lily-Rose, 10, and Jack, seven.
The slightly built actor who often sports a whispy goatee beard and floppy hair beat out 33-year-old actor Ryan Reynolds, costar in The Proposal, and Jake Gyllenhaal of Brokeback Mountain.
Depp also won the magazine’s “Sexiest” honor in 2003.
The Swedish soprano Elisabeth Soderstrom has died at the age of 82, the Royal Swedish Opera announced on Saturday.
She died in a Stockholm hospital on Friday morning.
During a career spanning half a century, the singer performed regularly at New York’s Metropolitan Opera and Covent Garden in London, and made numerous appearances at Britain’s Glyndebourne summer festival.
The Royal Swedish Opera said Soderstrom had “a unique ability to move the audience both through her voice and through her acting.”
She would be remembered particularly for her performances as Tatiana in Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin and the Marshallin in Strauss’ Der Rosenkavalier, the Opera said.
Her name would also long be associated with the role of Marguerite in Gounod’s Faust, for which she won great acclaim with performances in the US and in the former Soviet Union.
Born in 1927, in Stockholm to a Russian mother and a Swedish father, Soderstrom made her debut at the city’s Drottningholms Theater.
She continued to appear regularly at the Stockholm opera while pursuing her international career, and made her final stage appearance as the countess in Tchaikovsky’s The Queen of Spades in 1999.
R ’n’ B singer Chris Brown was praised by a Los Angeles judge on Thursday for making “extremely favorable” progress following his sentence for assaulting ex-girlfriend Rihanna.
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