News: Annette Benning

After this week’s Running With Scissors, Benning will be teaming up again with its writer/director Ryan Murphy for his Watergate political drama Dirty Tricks. Playing journalist Helen Thomas – a Washington Press Corp veteran who reported on the White House for 40 years from 1960 through to 2000 – she’s unlikely to have an especially prominent role, but her presence even in a small part in a film is always a good sign of quality.

After that she’s likely to be taking a more major role in a new adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s classic play A Woman of No Importance. Whether this will be a period-set costume drama or a modern update is as yet unknown, but her co-stars will include Sean Bean and Lindsay Lohan.

News: Lindsay Lohan

This week’s Bobby is yet another step on the path to Lohan estabilishing herself as a serious, grown-up actress, rather than merely yet another former child star turned alcohol-fuelled tabloid-fodder, and most agree that she makes a decent job of it.

Just shown at the Sundance Film Festival is another grown-up movie, Chapter 27, which revolves around the life of Mark David Chapman, played by the often rather good Jared Leto, in the days leading up to his murder of ex-Beatle John Lennon in 1980 (a mere six years before Lohan was born), and she’s getting ready fortaking the lead in serious thriller I Know Who Killed Me, about a girl who develops twin personalities after avicious kidnapping.

She’ll also be going literary in her bid to be taken seriously, first cropping up alongside Sean Bean and Annette Benning in Oscar Wilde adaptation A Woman of No Importance, before starring alongside Keira Knightley in The Best Time of Our Lives, about Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, and opposite Oscar nominees David Strathairn, Ellen Burstyn and Ann-Margaret in The Loss of a Teardrop Diamond, from a screenplay by Tennessee Williams – not to mention Cyrano de Bergerac-based romantic comedy Speechless.

First of all, though, she’ll star opposite Jane Fonda as yet another rebellious teenager in teen comedy/drama Georgia Rule – during the filming of which the youngster immitated her character by getting so out of control she was officially reprimanded by the production company for failing to turn up to shoots thanks to her all-night partying. Tut tut…

News: Bob Hoskins

Playing to type as the seemingly psychotic studio boss in this week’s Hollywoodland, Brit hero Hoskins will be cropping up on the telly in this Christmas’ all-star feature-length BBC One adaptation of The Wind in the Willows as Badger, alongside Little Britain‘s Matt Lucas as Toad, The League of Gentlemen‘s Mark Gatiss as Rat, Lee Ingleby as Mole and Imelda Staunton. He’ll also be returning to TV and period Hollywood for the 1920s-set mini-series The Englishman’s Boy, based on the book by Guy Vanderhaeghe, for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, where he’ll play a movie producer desperate to hunt down a former Western star. Fingers crossed for a UK screening at some point…

In terms of the movies, Hoskins will take on a more challenging role than usual inthe low-budget Ruby Blue, as an elderly man whose friendship with an eight-year-old girl arouses all kinds of unsavoury local suspicioons when she goes missing. He will then appear alongside Sean Bean in British movie Outlaw, following a modern-day vigilante group out to right the wrongs of an unjust society, with another Brit flick, Sparkle, also due out next year, with Hoskins starring alongside The West Wing‘s Stockard Channing and Buffy the Vampire Slayer‘s Anthony Head in a tale of a young Scouser who heads to London to become a rich woman’s toyboy. Perhaps most interesting, however, is Citizen Brando, about a young Tunisian boy’s search for the American Dream through the films of Marlon Brando, which Hoskins is co-producing.