Читать книгу The Mega Book of Useless Information - Noel Botham - Страница 10

• When Marlon Brando signed into hotels, he used the name Lord Greystoke, aka Tarzan.

• Batman actor Michael Keaton’s real name is Michael Douglas.

• The largest number of fatalities on a film set is 40, occurring during the making of The Sword of Tipu Sultan (1989).

• Norma Talmadge made the first footprints in the Hollywood Walk of Fame outside Grauman’s Chinese Theater in May 1927.

• Some Like it Hot (1959) was originally called ‘Not Tonight, Josephine’.

• One of the actors in Reservoir Dogs (1992), Eddie Bunker (Mr Blue), was a real former criminal and was once on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list.

• Michael Caine, Sean Connery, Steve McQueen, Cher and Tom Cruise never finished school.

• Brad Pitt once worked as a chicken for the El Pollo Loco restaurant chain.

• Marni Nixon provided the singing voice for Audrey Hepburn’s character in My Fair Lady (1964).

• Screen 6 at Atlanta’s CNN Center has been showing Gone with the Wind twice a day, 365 times a year since the film’s release in 1939.

• Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton first married in Canada in 1964, and then again in Botswana in 1975.

• The first film to show the sex act was Extase in 1932.

• The longest ever interval between an original film and its sequel is 46 years – between The Wizard of Oz and Return to Oz.

• Since 1989, to avoid offending losers, Oscar presenters say, ‘And the Oscar goes to…’ instead of ‘And the winner is…’

• Darth Vader has advertised Duracell batteries.

• Charlie Chaplin first spoke on film in The Great Dictator (1940).

• James Dean recorded an album called Jungle Rhythm.

• Oliver Reed was once a bouncer for a strip club.

• Robert Duvall’s character in Apocalypse Now (1979), Colonel Kilgore, was originally called Colonel Kharnage.

• Bob Hope hosted the Academy Awards a record 16 times.

• As well as the handprints and footprints outside Grauman’s Chinese Theater in Hollywood, you’ll also find casts of Groucho Marx’s cigar, Betty Grable’s legs, Jimmy Durante’s nose, Trigger’s hooves, Harold Lloyd’s glasses and Whoopi Goldberg’s braids.

• Between 1990 and 1995, Holocaust films won four out of five Best Documentary Oscars.

• The Hollywood sign originally read ‘Hollywoodland’.

• Star Wars character Yoda was originally called The Critter.

• John Wayne made an album entitled America, Why I Love Her.

• In Superman, when Superman discovers Lois Lane’s body he lets out a scream, revealing his tooth fillings. Not very in keeping with his invincible image.

• Tom Selleck was originally cast as Indiana Jones.

• Meryl Streep, Dustin Hoffman, Gene Hackman and Burt Lancaster all started out as waiting staff.

• Bruce Willis recently played with his band at the opening of a branch of Krispy Kreme Doughnuts.

• Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell had a car stolen from their drive and didn’t notice for three days.

• Sergeant Bilko’s first name is Ernest.

• Paramount is the only major studio still based in Hollywood.

• After breaking up with his fiancée Winona Ryder, Johnny Depp had his tattoo ‘Winona Forever’ changed to ‘Wino Forever’.

• Mickey Rooney’s real name is Joe Yule Jnr.

• Bix Beiderbecke was the first white jazz musician.

• The melody of ‘Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star’ was composed by Mozart.

• The real name of Batman villain The Penguin is Oswald Chesterfield Cobblepot.

• A total of 364 gifts are given by the lover in ‘The Twelve Days of Christmas’ song.

• Sting’s real name is Gordon Sumner.

• Contralto is the lowest female singing voice.

• Engelbert Humperdinck’s real name is Arnold Dorsey.

• Hank Williams was known as the ‘Drifting Cowboy’.

• Kazatsky is a Russian folk dance characterized by a step in which a squatting dancer kicks out each leg alternately to the front.

• The taboo against whistling backstage comes from the pre-electricity era, when a whistle was the signal for the curtains and the scenery to drop. An unexpected whistle could cause an unexpected scene change.

• ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ is ranked the most difficult national anthem to sing.

• The Writers’ Guild of America Registration Office states that approximately 20,000 movie scripts are registered with the Guild each year and that, of these, less than one per cent are picked up by a studio and made into a film.

Roger Moore is the only English actor to have played the role of James Bond. Sean Connery is Scottish, George Lazenby is Australian, Timothy Dalton is Welsh and Pierce Brosnan is Irish.

• The names of the six Gummi bears are Gruffi, Cubbi, Tummi, Zummi, Sunni and Grammi.

• Whistler’s best-known painting, often called Whistler’s Mother, is actually titled Arrangement in Grey and Black: The Artist’s Mother.

• The names of Popeye’s four nephews are Pipeye, Peepeye, Pupeye and Poopeye.

• The Pac Man video arcade game featured coloured ghosts named Inky, Blinky, Pinky and Clyde.

• The Marlboro Man has appeared in more advertisements than any ad figure in history.

• The Hitchcock film North by Northwest (1959) takes its name from a Hamlet quote: ‘I am but mad north-northwest.’

• Elizabeth Hurley checks into hotels under the name Rebecca de Winter.

• Braveheart (1995) director/producer Mel Gibson was investigated by RSPCA inspectors, who refused to believe the horses on the film weren’t real but mechanical.

• An Oscar statuette is 34.3 cm tall.

• On the set of The Usual Suspects (1995), Kevin Spacey glued his fingers together to keep his left hand consistently paralysed.

• Jane Seymour’s real name is Joyce Penelope Wilhelmina Frankenberg.

• Hollywood actor Tony Curtis is great friends with Harrods owner Mohammed Al Fayed.

• The Roosevelt Hotel, in Hollywood, is apparently haunted by the ghost of Marilyn Monroe.

• Thora Birch, the actress who played Janie in American Beauty (1999), was only 17 during filming and so her nude scene had to be filmed in the presence of her parents and child labour representatives.

• Doris Day’s dog was named after the beer Heineken.

• The Oscar award ceremony has never been cancelled.

• Both Richard Burton and Peter O’Toole have been Oscar nominated a record seven times without winning.

• Disney Studios has the record for the biggest global box-office year of all time, grossing over $3 billion in 2003.

• Marilyn Monroe’s ex-husband Jo DiMaggio had fresh roses delivered to her crypt three times a week for 20 years after her death.

• The real names of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis were Dino Paul Croccetti and Jerome Levitch.

• ‘Her virtue was that she said what she thought, her vice that what she thought didn’t amount to much.’ Peter Ustinov on Hollywood gossip columnist Hedda Hopper.

• A few witty remarks from comedienne actress Mae West:

‘Too much of a good thing can be wonderful.’

‘When I’m good I’m very good, but when I’m bad I’m better.’

‘There are no good girls gone wrong, just bad girls found out.’

‘When choosing between two evils, I always like to pick the one I’ve never tried before.’

• Inscription on Rodney Dangerfield’s tombstone: ‘There goes the neighbourhood.’

• The most copied noses in Hollywood are those of Heather Locklear, Nicole Kidman and Catherine Zeta Jones.

• The longest film title was Night of the Day of the Dawn of the Son of the Bride of the Return of the Revenge of the Terror of the Attack of the Evil, Mutant, Alien, Flesh Eating, Hellbound, Zombified Living Dead Part 2: In Shocking 2-D released in 1991.

• Pete the Pup, a pit-bull mix that appeared in the Our Gang shorts, had a fresh circle drawn around his right eye before every shoot.

• Only 3 dogs have a star in the Hollywood Walk of Fame: Strongheart, Rin Tin Tin and Lassie.

• Cary Grant had been offered the role of James Bond, 007, and refused it before the producers offered it to Sean Connery.

• Marilyn Monroe had six toes on one foot.

• Actor Bill Murray doesn’t have a publicist or an agent.

• During The Empire Strikes Back’s famous asteroid scene, one of the deadly hurling asteroids is actually a potato.

• Rocker Ozzy Osbourne has had two smiley face tattoos etched on his kneecaps so he can talk to them when he’s feeling lonely.

• Oasis singer Liam Gallagher has received the top prize in Nuts magazine’s ‘man boobs’ awards.

• The sound effect for the light sabres in Star Wars was recorded by moving a microphone next to a television set.

• In 1979, Oscar-winning actress Shirley MacLaine used the podium to cheer up her sibling, Warren Beatty, who had lost out for Heaven Can Wait. ‘I want to use this opportunity to say how proud I am of my little brother. Just imagine what you could accomplish if you tried celibacy!’ He was not amused.

• A low-cut gown worn by Elizabeth Taylor in 1969 fetched £98,000 at auction.

• The youngest actor to win an Oscar was 29-year-old Adrien Brody in 2003 for The Pianist. Shirley Temple is the youngest actress. She won a special award in 1934 aged six.

• The song ‘When Irish Eyes Are Smiling’ was written by George Graff, who was German and was never in Ireland in his life.

• Talk-show queen Oprah Winfrey and legendary singer Elvis Presley are distant cousins.

• The estates of 22 dead celebrities earned over £2.6 million in 2004. These celebrities include Elvis Presley, Dr Seuss, Charles Schulz, J R R Tolkien and John Lennon.

• CBS’s fine for Janet Jackson’s ‘wardrobe malfunction’ in the 2004 Super Bowl show was £286,000. This could be paid with only 7.5 seconds of commercial time during the same Super Bowl telecast.

• Kill Bill star Vivica A Fox ruined a diamond-encrusted dress worth $1.5 million with red wine.

• In 1938, Walt Disney won one full-sized Oscar and seven miniature Oscars for his classic Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

• Actor Gary Lucy thought he had paid £6,000 for one of Paul Weller’s guitars at an auction, but got rugs belonging to Madonna instead.

• Nicole Kidman says when she was younger she used to pray she would be turned into a witch.

• Al Gore’s roommate in college (Harvard, class of 1969) was Tommy Lee Jones.

• The trucking company Elvis Presley worked at as a young man was owned by Frank Sinatra.

• Lenny Kravitz says he’s happy Courtney Love is his neighbour – because she runs around naked.

• Britney Spears has more hate websites than Saddam Hussein.

• Calvin Klein model-turned-actor Travis Fimmel had to audition nine times before landing the title role in the new TV series Tarzan.

• Three Oscars have been refused by winners, including Marlon Brando in 1972, who rejected his second Oscar for The Godfather.

• The Strokes star Nikolai Fraiture once shamed his dad when he was caught trying to steal a Luke Skywalker doll from the Macy’s store where his father worked as a security guard.

• Actress Rosie O’Donnell’s lover Kelli Carpenter has founded a new travel company that helps gay and lesbian couples seek out the perfect getaway. R Family Vacations will specialize in gay cruises.

• The first Oscar went to Emil Jannings in 1929 for Best Actor. He didn’t turn up for it.

• US singer Shania Twain has started the day off the same way for the past ten years – with a fruit smoothie made with grapes and ginger.

• Pop hunk Justin Timberlake’s links with McDonald’s have paid off for the fast-food chain – profits are up 12 per cent since the *NSYNC star started endorsing the company by letting them use his ‘I’m Lovin’ It’ tune for TV commercials.

• Posh frocks at the Oscars can mean huge publicity for designers. Valentino estimated that Erin Brockovich star Julia Roberts’s appearance in one of his designs generated some £13 million worth of publicity.

• Jet-setting pop svengali Simon Fuller, creator of Pop Idol, spent £9 million on two aeroplanes and a helicopter because he was sick of flying 90,000 miles a year on commercial airlines.

• Hollywood veteran Jack Nicholson became addicted to baked beans on toast after discovering the snack when serving it to his son, Raymond.

• Malnourished magician David Blaine’s first public meal after his self-imposed 44-day incarceration in a plastic box was a plate of chicken satay at Mr Chow’s restaurant in Knightsbridge, London. He followed this with a big helping of dessert.

• Former basketball ace Dennis Rodman claims the police have visited his Newport Beach, California, home over 80 times because of noise complaints.

• The first Oscar went to Emil Jannings in 1929 for Best Actor. He didn’t turn up for it.

• Dennis Rodman claims he’s pierced his penis three times.

• The Strokes star Julian Casablancas doesn’t own a mobile phone, a computer or a watch.

• During a one-day shopping spree in Japan, US rapper Lil Kim spent £25,000 on clothes – and Barbie dolls.

• Hollywood stars Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher spent the Halloween of 2003 dressed as rival supercouple Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck.

• Model-turned-actress Jerry Hall has appeared on stage 536 times in plays.

• It takes 12 people 20 hours to make one Oscar statuette.

• Indie rockers Coldplay like to keep in touch with their family and friends when they’re touring – their backstage requirements include eight ‘stamped, local postcards’.

• Disney’s The Lion King has become the most successful re-release ever, after three million copies of the new DVD sold in its first two days on release.

• Rocker Sting is Titanic star Leonardo DiCaprio’s next-door neighbour in Malibu, California.

• Dustin Hoffman had to pass up the chance of appearing in a jury for the first time because he had to publicize his film Runaway Jury, in which he plays a lawyer.

• Friends star Courtney Cox is scared of dogs – unless they’re her own. The actress owns three pooches.

• Pop star Jessica Simpson used to keep photographs of missing children under her pillow and pray for them every night when she was a teenager. She also tried to adopt a Mexican baby found in a dumpster when she was 16.

• Ex-pop couple Jessica Simpson and Nick Lachey had a television mounted in their shower.

• When Orson Welles won the Screenplay Oscar for his classic Citizen Kane in 1941, it wasn’t a popular choice. The audience booed.

• American Idol star Clay Aiken is allergic to mushrooms, shellfish, chocolate, mint and coffee.

• There was havoc on the shoot for Atomic Kitten video ‘Ladies Night’ – the British trio hired famous drag queen Lily Savage, real name Paul O’Grady, to star, but Savage stormed out when he discovered he was to be appearing alongside a troop of unknown female impersonators.

• Gravel-voiced singer Macy Gray has puffer fish pets named Justin Timberlake, Muhammad Ali and R Kelly.

• Rap mogul Sean ‘P Diddy’ Combs spends £625 on each of his haircuts. His personal barber sketches out styles before even touching Diddy’s dome.

• Bad-boy rapper Eminem’s two favourite places to tour are Amsterdam, The Netherlands, because of its liberal laws, and London, England, because of its food.

• Actress Gwyneth Paltrow is studying German, as she endeavours to conquer European languages. She’s already fluent in Spanish, Italian and French.

• Super-rich movie beauty Cameron Diaz recently bought a £1.25 Californian lottery ticket – and won £3,125.

• Oscar winner Holly Hunter used to be a poultry judge in her native Georgia.

• Austin Powers creator Mike Myers has two streets named after him in his native Toronto, Canada.

• Crooner Harry Connick Jr. quit smoking when his idol Mel Torme told him he’d never speak to him again until he was nicotine free.

• At £150 for just two ounces, Sex and the City’s Sarah Jessica Parker’s SJJL moisturizer contains gold and silver essence.

• Destiny’s Child singer Kelly Rowland is so turned off by the cuisine whenever she’s in Britain that she will only eat at the country’s Caribbean restaurants and posh eatery Nobu.

• Notting Hill star Julia Roberts once had her own scent created for the Oscars. It cost £4,000 a litre.

• Friends star Jennifer Aniston ate the same lunch – consisting of lettuce, garbanzo beans, turkey and lemon dressing – for nine years.

• Hollywood actor Brad Pitt has topped a survey conducted by American condom makers Trojan as the celebrity women think is most well endowed. Despite his ladykiller reputation, *NSYNC Justin Timberlake didn’t make the list’s top ten.

• Legendary London nightspot Annabel’s welcomed British beauty Elizabeth Hurley onto its management committee in an effort to give the club a sleeker image and encourage younger members to join.

• Soul star-turned-Reverend Al Green was so worried about including words like ‘baby’ and ‘sugar’ in songs on his album I Can’t Stop that he asked for guidance from the congregation at his Tennessee church.

• The longest Oscars ceremony, in 2000, lasted a bum-numbing 256 minutes.

• Spanish crooner Julio Iglesias holds the record for selling more albums in more languages than any other singer.

• One Christmas, Friends stars Jennifer Aniston, Courtney Cox, Lisa Kudrow, Matt Leblanc, Matthew Perry and David Schwimmer gave plasma TVs to crew members who’d worked on the show for less than five years – while those who’d passed the five-year mark received Mini Cooper cars.

• Rapper Ice Cube’s Navigator sports utility vehicle has six television screens in it.

• Before hitting acting success, Everybody Loves Raymond star Patricia Heaton worked in New York as a 6am room-service waitress at the Park Le Meridien hotel.

• Hollywood star Tom Cruise had attended 15 schools by the time he was 14.

• Alfred Hitchcock directed the first talking film ever made in England. It was called Blackmail and was made in 1931.

• Dynasty star Joan Collins’s late father once served as an agent for X Factor’s Sharon Osbourne’s dad Don Arden, who was a singer at the time.

• 24 star Kiefer Sutherland has his family’s Scottish crest tattooed on his back. It’s one of six tattoos the actor boasts.

• Patrick Swayze’s first crush was on a dancer his mother taught, called Ellen Smith. The young girl later changed her name to Jaclyn Smyth and became an original Charlie’s Angel.

• If you decide you don’t want your Oscar, you are supposed to sell it back to the academy for $1.

• Former Destiny’s Child singer Farrah Franklin’s middle name is Destiny.

• Armourers created 9,000 arrows and 3,000 swords for historical epic Alexander starring Colin Farrell.

• Late rapper Tupac Shakur – who was shot and killed at the age of 25 in 1996 – came up with his signature shaven hairstyle because he suffered from premature baldness.

• The red carpet at the 2004 Grammy Awards turned green because the event was sponsored by beer company Heineken.

• Singer Robbie Williams once posed as a beggar in New York’s Times Square and gave £55 to the first person who gave him money.

• The oldest Oscar winner was 81-year-old Jessica Tandy, for Driving Miss Daisy in 1989. Gloria Stuart is the oldest nominee ever, nominated in 1997 for Titanic. She was 87.

• Singer-turned-children’s author Madonna likes to sing ‘Truly Scrumptious’ from hit musical Chitty Chitty Bang Bang to her children Lourdes and Rocco.

• Hollywood star Tom Cruise insists on having his own stuntplane on standby whenever he’s on location filming so he can take off and relax high above the earth.

• Paycheck star Aaron Eckhart has a pet dog named Dirty.

• Wacky screenwriter and director Quentin Tarantino wrote a script called ‘Captain Peachfuzz and The Anchovy Bandit’ as a child.

• San Francisco-based Neil Diamond tribute group Super Diamond are the world’s top covers band – they charge £8,820 per show.

• Destiny’s Child star Beyonce Knowles’s hit single ‘Crazy In Love’ was the best-selling mobile-phone ring tone in Britain in 2003.

• Sugar Ray rocker Mark McGrath has such an intense fear of elevators that he insists on taking the stairs if he has to travel 40 floors or less.

• Judi Dench clocked up the shortest screen time for an Oscar winner. She won Best Supporting Actress in 1998 for less than eight minutes on screen in Shakespeare in Love.

• Hollywood star Bruce Willis holds the record for the biggest payout for voiceover work, after receiving £5.5 million for 1990’s Look Who’s Talking Too.

• A man in Dallas, Texas, spent his entire life savings – £22,105 – on 6,000 seats for people to see Mel Gibson’s movie The Passion Of The Christ, because he believes it will ‘change’ America.

• Scottish band Texas were named after the 1984 film Paris, Texas.

• Mel Gibson and Johnny Depp refused offers by bosses at the 2004 Oscars to present awards because they admitted they’d be far too nervous.

• Rockers U2 use a sound system on tour which weighs 30 tons.

• Hollywood is being hit by a new fad – bio-degradable pants. The two Hobbits Elijah Wood and Sean Astin are fans and hip-hop legend Missy Elliott is meant to be partial to the bizarre bio pants.

• Hit thriller Jaws 2 was originally going to be called ‘More Jaws’, but polling showed audiences assumed a film with that name would be a comic spoof.

• There are still two Oscar categories in which no women have ever won – Best Cinematography and the Best Sound.

• X-Men actor Hugh Jackman turned down a role in Australian soap opera Neighbours at the beginning of his career because he was auditioning for drama schools.

• Inspired by Mel Gibson’s controversial new movie The Passion Of The Christ, replicas of crucifixion nails are selling at select stores around America for £8.94.

• To mark young actor Tyler Hoechlin’s 16th birthday, Tom Hanks – who played his father in Road To Perdition – sent him $16 (£9).

• The Used singer Bert McCracken has a pet Chihuahua named David Bowie.

• Kate Winslet gave birth to baby son Joe with the music of Rufus Wainwright in the background.

• British heir-to-the-throne Prince Charles has launched his own range of shampoos and conditioners under his company Duchy Originals.

• US Rapper Fat Joe is building a specially designed wardrobe in his new Miami mansion to house his 5,000-plus pairs of running shoes.

• Kathy Richards Hilton, mother of hotel heiress Paris Hilton, went to school with pop singer Janet Jackson.

• Potential Oscar winners are told to keep acceptance speeches to 45 seconds – unlike Greer Garson, whose 1942 speech clocked in at seven minutes.

• British pop stars Busted helped cure a boy who was told he might never walk again. Seven-year-old Alex Harris had been wheelchair bound with a rare muscle-wasting disease, but tapped his toes after hearing the band for the first time – and now, four months on, he’s dancing again.

• Hollywood star Tom Hanks’s movies have amassed an impressive total in excess of £3 billion since his film career began in 1980.

• The average cost of making a Hollywood movie in 2003 was £57.2 million.

• Hollywood veterans Sophia Loren, Liz Taylor and Raquel Welch were all considered for the role of Dynasty TV bitch Alexis before Joan Collins landed the part.

• An English town is to name a street after The Darkness front man Justin Hawkins. The rock star’s home of Lowestoft, Suffolk is planning on a Hawkins Way or a Justin Avenue.

• Gleneagles Hotel, the original hotel that inspire John Cleese’s legendary sitcom Fawlty Towers, has been saved from demolition and is being turned into an official tourist landmark in Torquay, Devon, England.

• Cabaret star Liza Minnelli is the only Oscar winner with two Oscar-winning parents – her mum, Judy Garland, was a winner in 1939, and her dad, Vincente Minnelli, in 1958.

• Hotel heiress sisters Paris and Nicky Hilton are each expected to inherit £15.5 million.

• Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson promised two of his Oscars to his children, because they want to use them as bedside objects.

• Bosses at vacuum cleaner company Dyson have treated X Factor’s Sharon Osbourne to a brand new purple hoover, which they’ve created to pick up animal hair and excrement.

• US comedienne Ellen DeGeneres and singer Harry Connick Jr.’s fathers worked on a paper round together as children in their native New Orleans, Louisiana.

• Three generations of the Astin family have acted in director Peter Jackson’s films. Sean Astin played Samwise Gamgee in The Lord Of The Rings trilogy; his young daughter Ali played his child in The Return Of The King, and his dad John Astin appeared in Jackson’s 1996 movie The Frighteners.

• Action hero Harrison Ford was so in love with fiancée Calista Flockhart that he drank out of a cup decorated with their pictures and names.

• Patrick Presley, 31, a cousin of rock legend Elvis, hanged himself while in jail in Mississippi over a fatal car accident.

• Justin Timberlake’s 2003 Christmas show in Dublin, Ireland, sold out in 40 seconds.

• Around 5,800 people on the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ panel vote for the Oscars.

• Playboy magnate Hugh Hefner auctioned off his address book containing the phone numbers of some of the most beautiful women in the world – along with memorabilia including portraits of Marilyn Monroe, Madonna and Brigitte Bardot – to mark the 50th anniversary of the men’s magazine.

• Justin Timberlake was so impressed by Queen’s ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ as a child that he locked himself away in his bedroom for two days straight to listen to the track over and over again.

• Bridget Jones star Renee Zellweger carries two mobile phones around with her – one for calls from England and the other for American calls.

• US talk-show legend Oprah Winfrey sleeps on Frette bed sheets, which boast a very high thread count and sell for up to £1,500 a set.

• Troubled singer Michael Jackson once paid £14,705 to hire two private jets – one for him to travel in and another as a decoy to confuse the press when he travelled from Las Vegas, Nevada, to Santa Barbara, California.

• Funnyman Mike Myers’s wedding ring is his late father’s 1956 Encyclopaedia Britannica Salesman of The Year gift.

• Singer-turned-actress Cher refuses to watch hit movie Thelma & Louise – she turned down Geena Davis’s role.

• The original title of cult TV show Charlie’s Angels was ‘Alleycats’.

• Catwoman star Halle Berry’s stint on American satire show Saturday Night Live was so chaotic that she appeared for the final curtain call with her boots on the wrong feet.

• Supermodel Claudia Schiffer was paid an incredible £200,000 to make a one-minute cameo in Hugh Grant’s film Love Actually.

• Accident-prone Lord Of The Rings star Orlando Bloom has broken his skull three times, both legs, a finger, a toe, a rib, an arm, a wrist, his nose and his back.

• US movie star Billy Bob Thornton once spent 18 months working in a Los Angeles pizza parlour. He was so good he worked his way up to assistant manager.

• The gun that killed outlaw Jesse James sold at auction in Anaheim, California, for £218,750 on 10 November 2003. The winning bid is a new record for a Western history firearm.

• The first thing King Arthur star Keira Knightley bought with her first movie paycheque was a doll’s house.

• US rocker Pink has a ritual every time she releases a new album – she takes a bottle of champagne to New York’s Virgin Megastore and buys the first copy.

• Singer Madonna once worked as a coat-check girl at New York’s Russian Tea Room restaurant, but she was fired for wearing fishnet stockings.

• US singer and actress Jennifer Lopez stores her lavish pink diamond engagement ring in a safe when she’s filming.

• Hollywood star Denzel Washington and his wife Pauletta have a special trophy room in their California home to display all of their accolades. While Washington has won awards – including two Academy Awards – for his acting, his spouse has been honoured many times over as a concert pianist.

• Duran Duran frontman Simon Le Bon has historical controversy in his past – he can trace his family tree back to Europe’s Huguenots who were forced to find refuge in England after being chased out of France by the Catholics for their Protestant beliefs.

• Teenage rap sensation Bow Wow’s monthly allowance was £3,750.

• Roc-A-Fella hip-hop mogul Damon Dash – who owns more than 3,000 pairs of trainers – never wears the same clothes twice, and refuses to write in red ink because it signifies losing money.

• Charlie’s Angels star Cameron Diaz insists on being environmentally friendly even when she’s being ferried to awards shows and events – she uses Los Angeles’ Evo Limo Luxury Car Service, where all vehicles run on natural gases.

• US actress Brooke Shields can trace her heritage back to King Henry IV of France and Lucrezia Borgia.

• Legendary rocker Ozzy Osbourne and opera singer Sarah Brightman used to go to the same vocal coach in London.

• US diva Barbra Streisand insisted on spraying her black microphone white for her performance on the Oprah Winfrey Show so it matched her off-white outfit.

• Magician David Blaine opted to fast in a box above London’s River Thames for 44 days because the number correlates with his birthday, 4 April.

• US rapper Lil Kim’s manicurist charges up to £3,125 a day to wrap her nails in shredded $100 bills.

• Two of US actor Ashton Kutcher’s toes on his right foot are stuck together.

• America’s first reality-TV awards were scrapped because network bosses refused to offer clips to the organizers. Producer Don Mischer has cited lack of network co-operation for his decision to cancel the first Reality Awards.

• More than 2.2 million guests visited Dollywood, Dolly Parton’s theme park, in 1998, making the park the most visited attraction in the state of Tennessee after the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.