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Kidman to join Spielberg on Cannes festival jury

The jury, whose job it will be to pick a winner of the 2013 Palme d'Or award, at next month's Cannes Film Festival is taking shape with organisers announcing this week actress Nicole Kidman will be on the panel alongside Steven Spielberg.

Published: 24 April 2013 08:54 CEST

Kidman to join Spielberg on Cannes festival jury

Photo: Robyn Beck/AFP

Hollywood actress Nicole Kidman and director Ang Lee will join Steven Spielberg next month on the Cannes film festival jury, organisers said on Wednesday.

Australian Kidman won the best actress Academy Award for her portrayal of author Virginia Woolf in "The Hours" while Taiwan-born Lee was named best director earlier this year for his fantasy epic "Life of Pi".

Lee, who has spent almost his entire professional career abroad, also won a best director Oscar for the gay cowboy drama "Brokeback Mountain", while his kung fu epic "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" won best foreign language film.

The other jury members named were: Indian actress Vidya Balan; Japanese director Naomi Kawase; Lynne Ramsay, Scottish director of "We Need to Talk About Kevin"; French actor/director Daniel Auteuil; Romanian director Cristian Mungiu; and actor Christoph Waltz.

Waltz picked up this year's best supporting actor Oscar for his role in the Quentin Tarantino-directed "Django Unchained", having won the same award in 2010 for his performance as the Nazi officer in Tarantino's "Inglourious Basterds".

The jury, headed by Spielberg, will award the coveted Palme d'Or to one of the 19 films in competition at the May 15-26 festival.

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New songs mark sixth anniversary of French star Johnny Hallyday's death

Hallyday, blessed with a powerful husky voice and seemingly boundless energy, died in December 2017, aged 74, of lung cancer after a long music and acting career.

After an estimated 110 million records sold during his lifetime – making him one of the world’s best-selling singers -Hallyday’s success has continued unabated beyond his death.

Almost half of his current listeners on Spotify are under the age of 35, according to the streaming service, and a posthumous greatest hits collection of “France’s favourite rock’n’roller”, whose real name was Jean-Philippe Leo
Smet, sold more than half a million copies.

The two new songs, Un cri (A cry) and Grave-moi le coeur (Engrave my heart), are featured on two albums published by different labels which also contain already-known hits in remastered or symphonic versions.

Un cri was written in 2017 by guitarist and producer Maxim Nucci – better known as Yodelice – who worked with Hallyday during the singer’s final years.

At the time Hallyday had just learned that his cancer had returned, and he “felt the need to make music outside the framework of an album,” Yodelice told reporters this week.

Hallyday recorded a demo version of the song, accompanied only by an acoustic blues guitar, but never brought it to full production.

Sensing the fans’ unbroken love for Hallyday, Yodelice decided to finish the job.

He separated the voice track from the guitar which he felt was too tame, and arranged a rockier, full-band accompaniment.

“It felt like I was playing with my buddy,” he said.

The second song, Grave-moi le coeur, is to be published in December under the artistic responsibility of another of the singer’s close collaborators, the arranger Yvan Cassar.

Hallyday recorded the song – a French version of Elvis’s Love Me Tender – with a view to performing it at a 1996 show in Las Vegas.

But in the end he did not play it live, opting instead for the original English-language version, and did not include it in any album.

“This may sound crazy, but the song was on a rehearsal tape that had never been digitalised,” Cassar told AFP.

The new songs are unlikely to be the last of new Hallyday tunes to delight fans, a source with knowledge of his work said. “There’s still a huge mass of recordings out there spanning his whole career,” the source said.

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