OnMilwaukee.com - Milwaukee, USA - Angela Bassett has landed the role of slain rapper Notorious B.I.G.'s mother in the heavyweight's biopic.

The actress, who portrayed Tina Turner in What's Love Got to Do with It, has signed on to portray Voletta Wallace in the planned movie.

Bassett says she jumped at the chance to be a part of the project after taking a look at the script, which she insists does a ""wonderful job of bringing his life to the page.""

She adds, ""It's flashbacks, starting at the funeral, through the eyes of different characters in his life.""

The role comes less than a month after Bassett was honored

PR Newswire (press release) - New York, NY, USA - Marcia Gay Harden will appear in person at a Washington news conference on Monday, April 28th to speak out about accidental injury to children. At the same event, Safe Kids USA will release a new report tracking the children's accidental injury death rate in the U.S. since 1987, highlighting how the nation is doing when it comes to keeping kids safe.

Release of this report coincides with the kick-off of National Safe Kids Week, April 26 to May 4, 2008 and the 20th anniversary of Safe Kids Worldwide. Safe Kids also will share a list of the top 10 safety tips

Entertainment Weekly - USA - Eddie Izzard (The Riches) told Newsweek that he is eyeing a possible career in European politics. ''We've got to make it work in Europe," the 46-year-old comedian told the magazine for its issue hitting newsstands on April 21. ''People are very worried about sovereignty and the loss of sovereignty. I think the stakes are if we don't make the European Union work, then the world is screwed. End of story.'' Izzard just finished shooting Valkyrie, which stars Tom Cruise, and he voices a character in the upcoming Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian. His Istandup comedy act, ''Stripped,'' will open on

San Francisco Chronicle - CA, USA - Pamela Anderson caused a stir at a Malibu, Calif., fair on Saturday when she went braless and flashed her flesh-colored panties while straddling a unicorn. (Photos)

Some even thought the buxom former "Baywatch" babe wasn't wearing any underwear under her white summer dress.

One local who snapped shots of Anderson at play says, "It really did look like she wasn't wearing any underwear; I had to look twice!

"I eventually dismissed the idea she'd come to a kids' funfair without wearing any panties. I mean, who would do that?"

Anderson, who also wore sexy high heels for her jaunt on the carousel and swigged

Elmira Star-Gazette - Elmira, NY, USA - She has already stepped into Tina Turner's teetering stilettos for her 1993 Oscar-nominated turn in "What's Love Got to Do With It."

Now, Angela Bassett is delving into another musical icon, slain rapper The Notorious B.I.G. (Christopher Wallace), by playing his mother, Voletta Wallace, in "Notorious." Jamal Woolard plays the street hustler turned rapper, who was gunned down in 1997 in Los Angeles while leaving a "Vibe" magazine party. The murder remains unsolved.

"Notorious" looks back at Wallace's life "in terms of being a father, a son, being a citizen," she says. "The story will leave us something positive about someone who

Arizona Daily Star - Tucson, AZ, USA - Broadway in Tucson has turned to the tried and true for its 2008-09 season.

The presenting organization, entering its fifth year in the Old Pueblo, has little that's new on the schedule.

"Grease," a musical that first made it big in 1972, and which had a not-too-well-received revival on Broadway last year, will be swinging through next spring.

And "Jesus Christ Superstar," Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice's 1971 rock 'n' roll retelling of the last days of Christ's life, stops by late this year.

Actor Chazz Palminteri will bring his one-man show, "A Bronx Tale," to Tucson in January. The story of Palminteri's

Hartford Courant - United States - Tracey Ullman gets credit for putting her comedy mark on Sunday nights, if only because her old Fox variety show helped introduce " The Simpsons," still going strong in its 19th season.

But her profile rises even more with her marvelously realized new show. "Tracey Ullman's State of the Union," a series of only five episodes that starts tonight on Showtime, celebrates her skills as master impressionist and her recently acquired U.S. citizenship.

The British comedian has lived in the States for 25 years, so she has a lot to draw on for this deftly constructed series. Each episode is set up

New York Times - United States - Julie Andrews’s memoir is full of crisp locutions like “poor unfortunate” and “banished to the scullery” and “trivet,” a characteristically precise term that the dictionary defines as “an iron tripod placed over a fire for a cooking pot or kettle to stand on.” It opens with a soppy poem she wrote about England, but what follows is a decisively unsoppy account of a typically dismal English childhood, complete with cramped lodgings and brutish relatives, which Andrews tells briskly and without self-pity.

Trivets come into it because, as is so often the case with the theatrically well-to-do, Andrews has refashioned herself out