\nBaz Bamigboye<\/a><\/p>\n
Last updated at 2:59 AM on 3rd February 2012<\/p>\n
Juno Temple will play the fun-loving Princess Margaret in a movie about how the Queen and her sister celebrated VE Day.<\/span><\/p>\n The 22-year-old actress will portray teenage Margaret as she and Elizabeth sneak out of Buckingham Palace to join the mammoth crowds gathered along the Mall and outside the palace.<\/span><\/p>\n In the film, called Girls\u2019 Night Out, Elizabeth has an innocent romance (this bit is totally fictional, folks!) with a recently returned soldier, who doesn\u2019t realise he\u2019s hanging out with a princess. The pair even go dancing at the Ritz.<\/span><\/p>\n Fun-loving: Juno Temple (pictured) will portray teenage Margaret as she and Elizabeth sneak out of Buckingham Palace<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Margaret was only 14 at the time and her behaviour is that of an excited sibling who enjoys a laugh and a shout.<\/span><\/p>\n The film will shoot on locations in London in the autumn with (as this\u00a0 column revealed last month) Alexandra Roach playing our future monarch, on a rare night when she was able to let her hair down.<\/span><\/p>\n The picture, from Ecosse Films, will be directed by Michael Hoffman, with a nod to Billy Wilder\u2019s Roman Holiday. (That film was actually inspired by Princess Margaret, and starred Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck.)<\/span><\/p>\n Ms Temple has done a string of independent movies but recently she appeared in Christopher Nolan\u2019s The Dark Knight Rises. Ms Roach, meanwhile, plays the young Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady. Meryl Streep portrays Maggie in later years and her performance is a\u00a0 towering achievement that many would like to see rewarded with an Oscar.<\/span><\/p>\n People forget that the last time she won was three decades ago. <\/span><\/p>\n I go to psychics to help me figure out who\u2019ll walk off with the Oscars (well, it\u2019s as good a method as any!). Check out Oranum.com to help you make your own predictions. It\u2019s bonkers, but fun.<\/span><\/p>\n Scott Shepherd will star in Gatz \u2014 a six-and-a-half-hour theatrical event about a man in a publisher\u2019s office who finds a copy of F. Scott Fitzgerald\u2019s 1925 novel The Great Gatsby, begins reading it .\u2009.\u2009. and doesn\u2019t stop till he\u2019s finished. <\/span><\/p>\n There are others in the cast (all from the U.S. theatre company The Elevator Repair Service) and all take part in the story of Jay Gatsby of West Egg and his friends at East Egg. We hear about Jay, Daisy, Nick, Tom and the rest at the Noel\u00a0 Coward Theatre for just 23 performances from June 8 as part of the London International Festival of Theatre.<\/span><\/p>\n There are no signs of Octavia Spencer turning into a wallflower<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Octavia Spencer has won Oscar and Bafta nominations \u2014 plus countless awards \u2014 for her portrait of Minny, a maid who is a wizard cook, in the movie The Help. But in real life, she can\u2019t boil an egg.<\/span><\/p>\n \u2018I just don\u2019t cook,\u2019 she told me this week. \u2018It\u2019s not something I find interesting, and it stresses me out to even think about it.\u2019<\/span><\/p>\n When it\u2019s time to eat she buys a pre-cooked meal or gets herself invited round to her friends Melissa McCarthy (the break-out star of Bridesmaids) or Allison Janney (one of her The Help co-stars) who live five minutes away from Octavia\u2019s Los Angeles home.<\/span><\/p>\n \u2018When an actor tells you he\u2019s killed someone in a scene, it\u2019s just acting \u2014 I hope,\u2019 was the way Ms Spencer explained the gulf between her on-screen kitchen skills and her real-life lack thereof.<\/span><\/p>\n She welcomes the awards season attention \u2014 she just won a Screen Actors Guild best supporting actress gong \u2014 because it allows her to meet Hollywood\u2019s top players.<\/span><\/p>\n \u2018I\u2019m thrilled it has elevated me to a point where I meet the George Clooneys, the Brad Pitts, the Clint Eastwoods \u2014 and Steven Spielberg! \u2014 but I also want to meet the Denzels.\u2019<\/span><\/p>\n At the Golden Globes, and other shows, she has been introduced to Sidney Poitier, Morgan Freeman and Helen Mirren. \u2018The thing is, everybody wants to meet the prettiest girl in the room,\u2019 she said, referring to the actresses who get five months in the public eye during the pre-Oscar shows. \u2018But the test will be when the dance is over.\u2019<\/span><\/p>\n There are no signs of Octavia turning into a wallflower. At the Sundance Film Festival, I saw her in a new film called Smashed. And right after the Oscars, at the end of this month, she will play a blackjack dealer\/entertainer opposite Russell Brand in a movie directed by Diablo Cody (who won an Oscar for\u00a0 writing Juno, and penned the delicious black comedy Young Adult) <\/span>and she will star with Tilda Swinton in Snow Piercer, which is shooting in Europe for four months.<\/span><\/p>\n She\u2019s pleased The Help has resonated with audiences at a time when people all over the world \u2018who are finding their situation no longer tenable, have stood up for themselves and found their voices\u2019.<\/span><\/p>\n Octavia\u2019s also grateful for the friendship that has grown between her and The Help co-star Viola Davis. They\u2019ve developed a sisterly bond and become as close as their screen characters Minny and Aibileen. After they shot The Help, they spoke every other day. Now it\u2019s three or four times a day.<\/span><\/p>\n Michael Crawford is too much of a gentleman to say it out loud, but the award-winning star is none too happy about what Russell Grant is doing to the role he created in the stage version of The Wizard Of Oz.<\/span><\/p>\n Crawford, who gave his last contracted performance as Professor Marvel last\u00a0 Saturday, was alarmed to hear that the show\u2019s director Jeremy Sams, choreographer Arlene Phillips and Grant have changed the show to accommodate a Charleston and a tango, the kind of dances the astrologer was associated with on television\u2019s Strictly Come Dancing.<\/span><\/p>\n Gentleman: Michael Crawford (left) is said to be unhappy about what Russell Grant (right) is doing to his role<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Grant begins his limited three-month stint in The Wizard Of Oz on Tuesday. \u2018It\u2019s making a mockery of what Michael created,\u2019 one senior West End executive told me. \u2018Think about it. This is the man who created the Phantom on stage \u2014 and many other roles. Now he has someone of the calibre of Russell Grant taking over from him. <\/span><\/p>\n \u2018It\u2019s fine at the end of a pier in Bogstandard-On-Sea \u2014 but not the London Palladium!\u2019<\/span><\/p>\n The theatre executive added: \u2018They might as well put Ann Widdecombe in it, too.\u2019<\/span><\/p>\n Ticket sales have dropped 20 per cent since Crawford left and the show now has an advance of \u00a31.8\u2009million \u2014 which is paltry for a theatre of the Palladium\u2019s size, especially when you consider that at capacity it can take in \u00a3700,000 a week.<\/span><\/p>\n John Goodman speaks no French \u2014 apart from \u2018merci\u2019. And Jean Dujardin, his co-star in The Artist, spoke no English when the film was shot.<\/span><\/p>\n Goodman says they were caught in their own silent movie: reduced to using sign language and gestures to make themselves understood.<\/span><\/p>\n Goodman plays studio mogul Al Zimmer (Harvey Weinstein would be his contemporary counterpart) who wants to usher in the talkies \u2014 against the wishes of his leading man George Valentine (Dujardin, whose efforts earned him Oscar and Bafta nominations and a Screen Actors Guild trophy last Sunday).<\/span><\/p>\n Goodman studied Sam Goldwyn and Louis B. Mayer to prepare for the part. \u2018They were tough b*****ds,\u2019 he told me. \u2018Goldwyn came out of Eastern Europe and made his way in New York as a glove salesman. Mayer was dealing scrap iron in Canada. They headed west and made it up as they went along.\u2019<\/span><\/p>\n The actor, who found fame in Roseanne and several Coen brothers\u2019 pictures (he\u2019s a jazz pianist in their latest, shooting soon) sees The Artist as a tribute to the craftsmanship of making movies, something he hopes isn\u2019t becoming a lost art.<\/span><\/p>\n Goodman\u2019s in London, playing a billionaire industrialist in Stephen Poliakoff\u2019s TV drama Dancing On The Edge, which he has been filming with Chiwetel Ejiofor, Matthew Goode and Jacqueline Bisset. David Hare’s latest play, starring Anna Chancellor (pictured), is to be transferred into the recently renamed Harold Pinter Theatre in the West End<\/p>\n<\/div>\n David Hare says he feels \u2018very moved\u2019 that his latest play, starring Anna Chancellor, is to be transferred into the recently renamed Harold Pinter Theatre in the West End.<\/span><\/p>\n Hare heartily approves of the Pinter (which used to be the Comedy), but worries that the mania for renaming theatres may have got out of hand. \u2018Once Ivor Novello\u2019s had a theatre named after him, the bar\u2019s set pretty low, isn\u2019t it?\u2019 Hare sniffed.<\/span><\/p>\n \u2018I can think of at least 200 playwrights in the 20th century who wrote better than Ivor Novello,\u2019 Hare continued of the composer known in his heyday for light musical comedies.<\/span><\/p>\n Hare himself has a theatre named after him \u2014 at a sixth-form college in Bexhill, East Sussex, from whence he hails. \u2018I went to open it,\u2019 he told me. \u2018It\u2019s lovely!\u2019<\/span><\/p>\n The playwright\u2019s new work, South Downs, which opened to rave reviews last autumn at Chichester\u2019s Minerva Theatre, was written as a companion piece to Terence Rattigan\u2019s classic The Browning Version. They ran as a double bill, with Ms Chancellor and Nicholas Farrell playing leading roles in both. <\/span><\/p>\n The productions, directed by Jeremy Herrin and Angus Jackson, had to wait for Chancellor to complete the second series of BBC2\u2019s The Hour before opening. <\/span><\/p>\n Now they will run at the Harold Pinter from April 19. The plays complement each other beautifully and I was totally absorbed when I saw them in Chichester.<\/span><\/p>\n South Downs is set at Lancing, where Hare was a pupil half-a-century ago. The central character is John Blakemore, a precocious and lonely boy who doesn\u2019t understand the rules \u2014 but who feels everybody else does. \u2018It happens in society all the time,\u2019 says Hare.<\/span><\/p>\n Rattigan\u2019s play centres on the brilliant classics master Crocker-Harris (Farrell, who played Tony Blair in Hare\u2019s play Stuff Happens), so Hare wanted to concentrate on a pupil. What links them is an act of kindness. <\/span><\/p>\n In The Browning Version, a boy gives \u2018the Crock\u2019 a translation of Aeschylus\u2019s Agamemnon, while in Hare\u2019s piece the kindness is bestowed on Blakemore (wonderful newcomer Alex Lawther) by Chancellor and her son (Jonathan Bailey).<\/span><\/p>\n Hare is writing two films to follow on from his BBC2 spy thriller Page Eight. Bill Nighy will return, as \u2014 Hare hopes \u2014 will Judy Davis and Rachel Weisz.<\/span><\/p>\n Feminist twist: Lily Collins’ character in the new movie Mirror Mirror<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Lily Collins says new movie Mirror \u2018She ends up saving a prince, just as Lily went to stunt school for a month before filming started in Rebecca Hall and Eric Bana, who will play former lovers forced to work together in a suspense thriller that was originally called Closed, but is now untitled.<\/span><\/p>\n The Working Title\/Focus Features film will shoot in the UK and be directed by John Crowley, of Boy A fame, using a screenplay by Steven Knight, who wrote Eastern Promises and Dirty Pretty Things.<\/span><\/p>\n Jordan Dawes and Matthew Tennyson, two up-and-coming actors who will be part of the company that director Peter Gill is assembling for three short plays by Robert Holman, going under the umbrella title Making Noise Quietly, which will begin performances at the Donmar Theatre from April 19. <\/span><\/p>\n It\u2019s the second play under Josie Rourke\u2019s artistic directorship. She replaced Michael Grandage, whose final production\u00a0 Richard II (with the superb Eddie Redmayne) has its last performance tomorrow, which will be a special tribute to Grandage. <\/span><\/p>\n Others cast in the Holman work include Susan Brown (she\u2019s in HBO\u2019s Game Of Thrones), John Hollingsworth, Ben Batt and Sara Kestelman.<\/span><\/p>\n Daniel Boys, Clive Rowe, Tiffany Graves, Kerry Ellis, Peter Polycarpou and Bonnie Langford (in a special number choreographed by Andrew Wright), who are among those taking part in The Night Of 1,000 Voices. <\/span><\/p>\n![\"Fun-loving:](\"http:\/\/i.dailymail.co.uk\/i\/pix\/2012\/02\/03\/article-2095691-1191876E000005DC-107_634x475.jpg\")
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<\/span><\/p>\n![\"David](\"http:\/\/i.dailymail.co.uk\/i\/pix\/2012\/02\/03\/article-2095691-11918756000005DC-374_306x423.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![\"Feminist](\"http:\/\/i.dailymail.co.uk\/i\/pix\/2012\/02\/03\/article-2095691-1191875E000005DC-404_306x483.jpg\")
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\nMirror, in which she plays Snow White opposite Julia Roberts\u2019s wicked
\nqueen, has a feminist twist to make it more appealing to modern
\naudiences. <\/span><\/p>\n
\n<\/span><\/p>\n
\nmuch as he ends up saving her,\u2019 Lily (pictured in the film) told me in
\nLA.
<\/span><\/p>\n
\n<\/span><\/p>\n
\nMontreal. \u2018I did sword fighting, fencing, martial combat and, during the
\nfilming, my story parallels Snow White\u2019s because I was growing up,
\ntoo,\u2019 said the 22-year-old, whose mother Jill is a friend of mine from
\nthe days when she lived in the UK and was married to Phil Collins.<\/span><\/p>\n