Top Tenor Luciano Pavarotti has revealed that he cannot read music.
Instead, he relies on his ear and his own sign system to learn operatic scores.
"Yes it's true. I don't read music," he told a Milan newspaper.
"I am not a musician. I don't go into the technicalities. The score is one thing and the singing part another. If I have the music in mind and sing with my body then it's fine."
Pavarotti (61) made the disclosure after Vittorio Gassman, an
Italian classical actor, said the tenor was not referring to the musical score as they prepared for a duet.
An actor who played the villain Jaws in the James Bond films has joined forces with a Baptist minister in the US to try and persuade strippers to become secretaries, computer operators - or even plumbers.
Richard Kiel, who is 7 ft 2 in tall, urged 3,000 people at a
Baptist meeting in Hurricane, West Virginia, to reach out to the dancers.
"We can't blame the girls alone for doing this, it's the fault of society," Kiel said. His entreaties - backed by the pastor of
Lighthouse Baptist Church, who offered new jobs, medical insurance and child care to those willing to hang up their G-strings - fell largely on stony ground.
Film actress Jamie Lee Curtis was in the visitors' gallery yesterday to watch her husband, Christopher Haden-Guest (49), take his seat in Britain's House of Lords. He was sworn in as the fifth
Lord Haden-Guest in succession to his father, who died in April 1996.
Malawi's former president and dictator for nearly 30 years,
Hastings Banda, has told his party he wants to quit politics and retire as its life president. Banda told the main opposition Malawi
Congress Party's annual convention that he wanted to let younger politicians take over. Banda is officially 91, but many say he was born before 1900.
His grip on Malawi slipped when he lost the presidency to a former protege, Bakili Muluzi, in the country's first democratic elections in 1994.
Charlotte Brown, sister of President Clinton's accuser Paula
Jones, is working on a book proposal on its way to top publishers offering an "inside view" of her younger sister's sexual harassment allegations, Entertainment Weekly reports.