The Star Online: Entertainment: Movies
The Star Online: Entertainment: Movies |
| I had a double mastectomy, says Angelina Jolie Posted: 14 May 2013 12:21 AM PDT REUTERS - Oscar-winning actress Angelina Jolie said on Tuesday that she had undergone a preventive double mastectomy after finding out she had a gene mutation that leads to a sharply higher risk of both breast and ovarian cancer. Jolie (pic), writing in the New York Times, said her mother's death from cancer at 56 and the discovery that she carried the BRCA1 gene mutation led to her decision out of fears she might not be around for her six children. "We often speak of 'Mommy's mommy', and I find myself trying to explain the illness that took her away from us. They have asked if the same could happen to me," wrote Jolie, 37, in the editorial My Medical Choice. "I have always told them not to worry, but the truth is I carry a 'faulty' gene," she added. Her doctor estimated that she had an 87 percent risk of breast cancer and a 50 percent risk of ovarian cancer. "Once I knew this was my reality, I decided to be proactive and to minimize the risk as much as I could. I made a decision to have a preventive double mastectomy," she said. Three months of surgical procedures were completed at the end of April, throughout which Jolie continued to work. She said her partner, Brad Pitt, was by her side throughout, and thanked him for his love and support. She said she was revealing her decision to help dispel the shadows that still hang over cancer and to enable other women to get testing and make informed treatment choices, as she had. "The decision to have a mastectomy was not easy. But it is one I am very happy to have made," she said, adding that her chances of developing breast cancer had dropped from 87 percent to 5 percent. Spokesmen for Jolie and Pitt, one of Hollywood's biggest power couples, were not immediately available for comment. Jolie, who won a best support actress Oscar for her work on Girl, Interrupted in 1999, is raising six children with Pitt. The couple got engaged last year. |
| DiCaprio, Christie's raise US$32 million for environmental causes Posted: 13 May 2013 09:22 PM PDT NEW YORK (Reuters) - Actor Leonardo DiCaprio and Christie's auction house raised nearly US$32 million for environmental causes on Monday at a charity art auction. DiCaprio, the star of the new film The Great Gatsby, organized the so-called The 11th Hour Auction along with his foundation and Christie's to protect the last wild places on Earth and their endangered species. The 33 works of art, many of which were created for and donated to the auction by the artists, sold for US$31.74 million in spirited bidding in a packed auction house. Art collectors from around the globe also placed bids by telephone. "All I can say is thank you, thank you, thank you," DiCaprio told the audience at the end of the auction, which raised more than double the pre-sale estimate. In addition to the sale, which set records for 13 artists including Carol Bove, Joe Bradley, Mark Grotjahn, Raymond Pettibon and Mark Ryden among others, a US$5 million matching donation for three of the lots and US$1.15 million in other donations raised the overall total to nearly US$38 million. At the opening of the auction, DiCaprio, who has supported environmental issues through his foundation since 1988 and also produced and narrated the 2007 documentary The 11th Hour about the state of the environment, urged the audience to dig deep into their pockets. "Bid as if the fate of the planet depended on us," he said. And they did. All of the 33 works were sold and many fetched prices that were three or four times their pre-sale estimates. The top lot of the sale was an oil on cardboard mounted on canvas by Mark Grotjahn called Untitled (Standard Lotus No. II, Bird of Paradise, Tiger Mouth Face 44.01), which sold for US$6.2 million as two determined bidders pushed up the price. Zeng Fanzhi's The Tiger, an oil on canvas, fetched nearly double its high estimate with a price of US$4.8 million, and Bharti Kher's sculpture The Skin Speaks a Language Not Its Own, went for US$1.7 million. Each of the three works had a pre-sale estimate of US$1.5 million to US$2.5 million. DiCaprio donated Ocean V by Andreas Gursky, which sold for US$600,000, and he bought an acrylic on canvas by Takashi Murakami for US$700,000. A portrait of DiCaprio painted by Elizabeth Peyton sold for US$1 million. Loic Gouzer, international specialist at Christie's and the head of the sale, said many of the works were of a quality never seen at auction before. A panel of environmental experts and the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation will decide which conservation projects will benefit from the proceeds of the sale. Gouzer said he and DiCaprio had approached the artists and explained what they had hoped to accomplish with the auction, which they have been planning for a year. "We explained that we wanted great works and they were very reactive because of the cause. The artists are very sensitive to the fact that we are destroying our planet," Gouzer said in an interview ahead of the sale. |
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