John Boorman, after being presented with a BFI Fellowship — the highest honour that the nation’s leading film organisation can bestow — told me that he counts himself lucky that he began his career when he did.
“Could I go off with a few actors into the wilds and make a film like Deliverance now?” the 80-year-old director mused. “If I were to, I’d have the health and safety people crawling all over me, and they’d make damn sure the film turned out mind-numbingly boring and uneventful.”
Jon Voight, the star of the great 1972 film, used to say that, while it helped to save his career, the eight weeks that he spent making it with Boorman came perilously close to ending his life.
Sophie’s choice
Sophie Raworth is training for the London Marathon in deadly earnest. The BBC newsreader pitched up at the Prince’s Trust and Samsung Celebrate Success Awards in a dress that she had rolled up in her rucksack for her eight-mile morning jog to work.
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20 Mar 2013“It was a bit of a military operation,” she told me. “I rolled it up and ironed it when I got to the office. You need to plan ahead.” She is raising sponsorship money for the Prince’s Trust by running her third marathon in a row, having raised £17,000 for Cancer Research and £9,000 for St John Ambulance in her previous runs.
She was coy about how generous her fellow newsreaders were being.
Ruta wants to keep her clothes on
It’s all very well for Rooney Mara to say she is not ashamed of showing off her body, but Ruta Gedmintas, left, the star of The Tudors, tells me actresses should put up some resistance when directors ask them to disrobe.
“It is something we are all up against,” she laments at the launch of the Biker Project at All Saints in Covent Garden. “But it is so much sexier to suggest things than to show them. I am not saying I would rule it out, but it would have to be really relevant to the story for me to do it.”
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Azzaro has a new creative director: Azzaro chose a young unknown to replace Vanessa Seward as its new creative director. Sao Paulo-born Mathilde Castello Branco, 39, will present her first collection for the Paris-based house in January for pre-fall 2012. She was at Lanvin before. {WWD}