Australian golfing legend Greg Norman has tied the knot with his third wife, interior designer Kirsten Kutner, at a secret ceremony in the Caribbean, reports said yesterday.
Norman, 55, said the barefoot beach ceremony was on a private island with a small gathering of family and friends, in an interview with New Idea magazine widely previewed by the Australian press yesterday.
“To me she is the most beautiful woman in the world,” Norman said of his new wife, 14 years his junior. “She looked stunning.”
Mother-of-two Kutner added: “We just wanted something very intimate with just us and the family. It was very relaxed, a beautiful family reunion.
“I feel very proud to be by Greg’s side, to take his name and to support him in every way I can.”
Norman announced his engagement to Kutner, a long-time friend, just a month ago, and a friend told the Sunday Telegraph newspaper the nuptials had been deliberately low key, with little notice given to guests.
“It was a simple yet romantic ceremony,” the friend said.
Norman split from tennis player Chris Evert, his second wife, at the end of last year. His first marriage, to flight attendant Laura Andrassy, ended in 2007 after 25 years.
In entertainment industry news, Dino de Laurentiis, producer of some of Italy’s best-known films including works by Federico Fellini and Roberto Rossellini, has died in Los Angeles aged 91, Italian media reported on Thursday.
The Oscar-winner also produced several famous films in the US, including Serpico with Al Pacino in 1973, Three Days of the Condor with Robert Redford and Faye Dunaway in 1975 and Ridley Scott’s Hannibal in 2001.
“Cinema has lost one of its greats,” said Walter Veltroni, an Italian lawmaker and former mayor of Rome who founded the Rome Film Festival.
“The name of Dino de Laurentiis is tied to the history of cinema,” he said.
De Laurentiis was born on Aug. 8, 1919 in Torre Annunziata near Naples and moved to the US in the late 1960s. His parents were pasta makers.
He started out in film aged 20 and became one of the leading producers of Italy’s post-war cinema boom and the neo-realist genre.
De Laurentiis produced more than 500 films over his entire career.
Polish composer Henryk Mikolaj Gorecki, famous for his Symphony of Sorrowful Songs, including one about a woman who was held prisoner by the Gestapo, died Friday following a serious illness. He was 76.
Gorecki passed away in the cardiology ward of a hospital in his home city of Katowice in southern Poland, Joanna Wnuk-Nazarowa, the director of the Polish Radio Orchestra in Katowice, said.
Wnuk-Nazarowa said she and another Polish composer, Krzysztof Penderecki, had visited Gorecki in the hospital on Wednesday.
Gorecki is best known internationally for his Symphony No. 3, Op. 36, for a soprano and orchestra — the Symphony of Sorrowful Songs — which was published in the US in 1992. It later became a best-selling recording, reaching the top of the classical music charts in both the US and the UK.
The composer is survived by his wife, piano teacher Jadwiga, his daughter, pianist Anna Gorecka-Stanczyk, and his son, composer Mikolaj Gorecki.
And from news of the recently deceased, to news of the living dead. An Australian film festival director Friday defended his decision to screen a banned “gay zombie porn” movie after his home was raided by police.
Richard Wolstencroft, head of the Melbourne Underground Film Festival (MUFF), said Thursday’s search was fruitless for police because his copy of LA Zombie had been destroyed.
“Police searched for a copy of the film, but we destroyed ours after the Melbourne Underground Film Festival screening in September,” Wolstencroft said. “We thought that police might come for the screening. But they didn’t. We don’t understand why they came after all this time.”
Canadian director Bruce LaBruce’s LA Zombie, featuring necrophile aliens, homosexual sex and full-frontal male nudity, was pulled from the Melbourne International Film Festival in July after objections from censors.
But Wolstencroft said he decided to hold a “public disobedience” screening in September, describing the film as an important work on schizophrenia.
The hour-long, wordless film, starring French porn star Francois Sagat, depicts a schizophrenic homeless man who is convinced he is an alien zombie sent to roam the streets of Los Angeles in search of dead bodies and gay sex.
“We thought the interdiction was ridiculous and decided to hold a public disobedience screening,” Wolstencroft said. “Bruce LaBruce has been a guest at our festival in the past.
LA Zombie was shown at Switzerland’s Locarno festival in August, where some of the audience walked out, according to one reviewer.
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