2.11 PM Tuesday, 19 March 2024
  • City Fajr Shuruq Duhr Asr Magrib Isha
  • Dubai 05:07 06:20 12:29 15:54 18:33 19:47
19 March 2024

Mariah Carey asks fans to pray for sick hubby

Published
By AFP

Singer Mariah Carey has asked fans to pray for her rap artist and actor husband Nick Cannon after he was admitted to hospital suffering from mild kidney failure.

Tweeting a picture of her cuddled up with Cannon in his hospital bed, feeding him a drink through a straw, the Grammy-winning artist said the situation was "serious" but said he was fighting to recover.

"Please pray for Nick as he's fighting to recover from a mild kidney failure," she .

The tweet was accompanied by a picture of the couple which showed Cannon wearing a beanie hat, swaddled beneath a pillow.

Elaborating on her website, Carey joked that the situation was a role reversal from last year, when she was in hospital to give birth to their twins.

"Last year it was me attached to the machines (after having dembabies) and Nick was there with me through it, and now here we are," she wrote from Aspen, Colorado, where the couple were on holiday when the health scare occurred.

"We're trying to be as festive as possible under the circumstances but please keep Nick in your thoughts because this is very painful. They tried to kick me out of the hospital but here I am pon de bed with Mr. C."

Carey and Cannon married in the Bahamas in April 2008. It was the second marriage for Carey, whose five-year union to legendary music producer Tony Mottola ended in divorce in 1998.

"We're doing OK but we're "straaaaaanded in Aspen". #DramaticDivaPlace (I know, we could be in a lot worse places) but the truth is as long as we're together, we're OK," she said.

"I'm not trying to make light out of the situation because it's a serious moment that's very tough on all of us so please keep us and our family in your prayers."

Carey, 41, has sold 175 million records since the start of her singing career in 1990. She is the third best-selling female artist of all time, according to the Recording Industry Association of America.

Also Read:

Demi Moore opens up on love after Kutcher split

Actress Demi Moore, who recently ended her six-year marriage to Ashton Kutcher, says her worst fear is finding she is "not worthy of being loved".

In an interview conducted just one week after Moore filed for divorce in November, the Ghost star opened up to her friend, British photographer Amanda De Cadenet, for the February edition of Harper's Bazaar magazine.

Moore, 49, did not directly address her split with Kutcher, the 33-year-old star of US television comedy Two and A Half Men.

The marriage foundered after a San Diego woman went public about a brief fling she allegedly had with Kutcher.

"What scares me is that I'm going to ultimately find out at the end of my life that I'm really not lovable, that I'm not worthy of being loved," Moore said in a wide-ranging conversation with De Cadenet about insecurities.

"That there's something fundamentally wrong with me... and that I wasn't wanted here in the first place."

The marriage was Moore's third, and the 16-year age difference between her and Kutcher made them the subject of constant media attention.

Moore also reflected on what freedom meant to her.

"Letting go of the outcome. Truly being in the moment. Not reflecting on the past. Not projecting into the future. That's freedom. Not caring more about what other people think than what you think. That's freedom," she said.

"To not be defined by your wounds. Somebody wrote something to me that said, 'Don't let your wounds make you become someone you're not.' That's really powerful. And not taking life too seriously."

The actress, who has recently lost weight and alarmed media by her thin appearance, also said she has had a "love-hate" relationship with her body but that now she accepted it.

"When I'm at the greatest odds with my body, it's usually because I feel my body's betraying me, whether that's been in the past, struggling with my weight and feeling that I couldn't eat what I wanted to eat, or that I couldn't get my body to do what I wanted it to do," she said.

"I think I sit today in a place of greater acceptance of my body, and that includes not just my weight but all of the things that come with your changing body as you age to now experiencing my body as extremely thin - thin in a way that I never imagined somebody would be saying to me, 'You're too thin, and you don't look good'."

Moore and De Cadenet are executive producers of a new TV interview series called The Conversation that is due to premiere on US cable channel Lifetime later in 2012.

 


Pippa plans wild birthday party for Duchess Kate

Duchess Catherine will complete three decades on this planet on January 9 and there are plans of wild celebrations on the grand occasion.

Pippa Middleton and Kate's brother-in-law, Prince Harry, have teamed up to give Kate a rocking party in London with an 80s theme.

“In many ways this is going to be Kate’s last chance to let go like she did back in the old days, when she and William first met,” the Daily Star quoted a royal insider as telling Grazia magazine.

“The party has been months in the planning.

“Pippa and Harry have been in the thick of it and have recruited a bunch of friends to help,” the insider said.

“It’s going to be a party of clashes,” the source was quoted as saying.

“On the one hand there are all these exquisite royal trappings, and on the other Pippa is planning to top off the party with karaoke sessions.

“Kate needs to enjoy herself while she can though, so she can be forgiven for belting out a few Duran Duran and Madonna numbers on her birthday,” the source added.

 


Meryl Streep says playing Thatcher was daunting


She's a double Oscar winner with a knack for accents, but Meryl Streep says playing Margaret Thatcher was a challenge — although her own experience helped her understand the struggles faced by Britain's first female prime minister.

Streep is transformed into the divisive politician who reshaped Britain in "The Iron Lady," which had its European premiere in London on Wednesday, just across the River Thames from the Houses of Parliament.

"It was extremely daunting, because I'm from New Jersey," Streep said in an interview ahead of the event. "And yet as an outsider, I felt something of what she might have felt."

Streep, who won Academy Awards for "Kramer Vs. Kramer" and "Sophie's Choice," said her youthful experience as one of a handful of women at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire helped her understand Thatcher's isolation. In 1970, Streep spent a term as an exchange student at the men-only college, which became coeducational in 1972.

"There were 60 of us and 6,000 men, and I had a little flashback to that moment," Streep said. "And so a little bit of my emotional work was done for me."

Streep, 62, has been nominated for a Golden Globe and looks likely to get a 17th Oscar nomination for her spookily accurate performance as Thatcher, who led Britain from 1979 until 1990.

As prime minister, Thatcher fought a war with Argentina over the Falkland Islands, saw the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall and the implosion of communism and was branded the Iron Lady by Soviet journalists for her steely resolve.

She presided over the decline of Britain's industrial might and trade union power and the birth of a free-market culture with new winners and many new losers.

That historical drama is only glimpsed in "The Iron Lady," which depicts the now 86-year-old Thatcher, widowed after the death of husband Denis (Jim Broadbent), looking back on her life as a provincial grocer's daughter rising to the top of a Conservative Party dominated by wealthy men.

Streep said while the film has been called a political biopic, "I was interested in it precisely because it wasn't really that."

"It's a subjective imagining," she said. "It's not the God's-eye-view chronicling this side, that side, the politics of it. It's a very deep look at a whole life — from the end of it."

"The Iron Lady" is more a domestic drama than a political one, but Thatcher remains a polarizing figure and the film has been criticized by her enemies and allies alike. Foes feel it is too sympathetic, while supporters and friends dislike its depiction of the former leader as a frail old woman with dementia.

Former Conservative Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd said the film "has a rather ghoulish quality about it."

"All the flashback scenes show a woman suffering from a form of dementia, but that lady is very much alive," he told the Evening Standard newspaper. "That should have given them pause to wait."

Director Phyllida Lloyd ("Mamma Mia!") has defended the film's approach. The script by Abi Morgan ("Shame") was partly inspired by a book by the politician's daughter Carol Thatcher in which she described her mother's mental decline.

Streep said the criticisms were misguided.

"If Margaret Thatcher suffered from a lung problem and I coughed, or if she had something wrong with her legs and I limped, no one would scream," she said. "The particular stigma attached to mental frailty in our culture speaks more about the person who's saying it's shameful.

"Is it shameful? I don't think it is. I don't think things need to be hidden away."

Streep is also fascinated by the venom Thatcher provoked — she's still either loved or loathed by most Britons — and the film gently asks viewers to consider whether the fact that she is a woman played a part in the strong responses.

"She was called the most hated woman in Britain because of policies that lots of people who are still in the political world helped her construct, and they don't endure the same hatred," Streep said. "She was hated for her hair and her handbag and her clothes and her manner and the fact that she changed her voice.

"It was really outsized, the bloodlust, and that's interesting."

Streep said the film's most provocative idea is that it asks audiences to regard this iconic political figure as human — just like ourselves.

"I do think we have historically looked at our own lives through the bodies of kings and queens and important people," she said. "Is 'Hamlet' really about the prince and his princeliness, or is it about his existence? Is 'King Lear' really about a grumpy old man who used to be a despot, or is it about existence?

"That's certainly how I went into it, to find me in this story. And my friends, and my mother — women of that generation who lived through a change in the way women were regarded and their place in society."