As we wait with bated breath to learn the paternity of January Jones’ upcoming spawn and celebrate the birth of Ryan Philippe’s surprise baby with one-time paramour Alexis Knapp, PopEater feels like it is time to celebrate celebrity baby mamas and the men who gave them the title. Hallmark doesn’t make a card saying “Thank you for being my baby mama,” so this will have to suffice.
1. Elizabeth Hurley and Steve Bing – Baby daddy Steve Bing, real estate mogul and film producer, tried to beg out of being the father of Hurley’s son Damian. Proof that someone that looks like Bing got to sleep with someone who looks like Liz doesn’t seem like a bad deal to us. DNA tests finally proved paternity.
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Baby, Baby Mamas
“Harry Potter” star Emma Watson says she plans to return to Brown University to complete her degree.
The British actress who plays Hermione (hur-MY’-nee) Granger in the “Harry Potter” series tells The Virginian-Pilot that she remains enrolled at Brown even though she’ll study at England’s Oxford University in the fall.
She says intends to return to Providence in 2012 to complete her studies at the Ivy League school.
The 21-year-old Watson left Brown earlier this year, saying she wanted to devote her time to the final “Harry Potter” film and other acting opportunities.
The final chapter in the series premiered last week, setting box office records. It took in an estimated $168.6 million domestically from Friday to Sunday. That beats the previous best opening weekend of $158.4 million for 2008′s Batman blockbuster “The Dark Knight.”
Brown, Emma Watson
MARLBORO, Vt. – The late violinist and violist Philipp Naegele, in the closing essay of a booklet devoted to marking this years 60th anniversary of Marlboro Music, sets his sights on one particularly beloved apple tree. Old and weather-beaten, comely and gnarled, it stands in the middle of the Marlboro campus, surrounded by green hills. Naegele, who came to Marlboro at the very beginning, saw this old yet ageless tree as a survivor whose gift for adaptation and re-rooting mirrored that of Marlboros founders, whom he describes as uprooted idealists from post-war Europe. Six decades ago, they turned this former dairy farm into an oasis of musical idealism and chamber music.
Naegele died this January at age 83 but the tree is still standing. In recent years, Marlboro has been thriving under the directorship of pianists Mitsuko Uchida and Richard Goode.
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Music, Music Haven
When Harry met Sarah … well, let’s just say he roared, while she whispered. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2, the climax to the eight-film franchise from the J.K. Rowling saga, grossed a wizardly $168.55 million, according to early studio reports, to win the box office weekend and quite a few other records besides. Meanwhile, the Sarah Palin documentary The Undefeated, playing on about a dozen screens (compared with DH2‘s 11,000) in such conservative bastions as Grapevine, Texas; and Orange County, California, amassed perhaps $75,000 though it’s hard to tell because the film’s distributor hasn’t released actual or estimated totals.
Harry Potter, Potter
Jean-Yves Thibaudet is often typecast as a French pianist. The term denotes not only geographical origin – he is a native of Lyon – but an ensuing repertoire specialty as well. Never mind that he plays a wide array of music, including brilliant performances and recordings of Liszt, Gershwin, and Mendelssohn, among others. The stereotype is this French thing that I have been battling since I was a baby, the pianist said with a laugh recently.
When Thibaudet appears at Tanglewood this week, he will play nothing but Ravel – the French composers entire corpus of piano music. First the solo music, spread over two evenings at Ozawa Hall (July 20 and 21); then both of the piano concertos, part of an all-Ravel Boston Symphony Orchestra concert on July 24, with Emmanuel Krivine conducting.
If theres one composer in all thats special to my heart and always will be, its really Ravel, Thibaudet said.
The pianists connection to the French composer goes back to his early years at the instrument and runs through his career.
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