There's twouble in the Twitterverse!

After famously beating CNN to 1 million followers last April, Ashton Kutcher has been the undisputed king of Twitter, gaining more followers than anyone else on the micro-blogging site. But are his days as Twitter's most popular user numbered?

Britney Spears is slowly closing in on Kutcher – and the gap between their number of followers gets smaller every day. (At the time of this posting, Kutcher had 4,890,797 followers; Spears had 4,878,516). While Kutcher is the only person who Tweets on his account (several times each day), Spears only sporadically posts on her Twitter account, along with her manager Adam Leber.

Now, the big question remains: If Spears does beat Kutcher, will she ding-dong ditch his doorstep the way Kutcher promised to do to CNN honcho Ted Turner?

Vera WangWhen Jennifer Lopez was one half of the ill-fated pairing affectionately known to the world as 'Bennifer,' she asked famed bridal designer Vera Wang to make her a wedding dress. As we all know, the wedding never actually took place. Now, several years later, Wang is spilling the beans about her doomed collaboration with "Jenny from the Block." She says:
It took eight months and we made three dresses. It pushed me out of my own box and comfort zone.This story does have a happy ending, though. Wang eventually made a less frilly number for Jennifer's marriage to Marc Anthony. She says nowadays many celebrities are looking for simpler dresses for their big day and it's always surprising when rock stars want the most traditional gowns.

Wang is currently being honored in “20 Years, 11 Dresses,” a museum-style retrospective of wedding gowns at Bloomingdale's on 59th Street in New York.

Claudia Schiffer just welcomed baby number 3! The supermodel mom gave birth to a baby girl at London’s Portland Hospital yesterday. A statement from the couple said: "Claudia Schiffer and Matthew Vaughn are proud to announce the birth of their baby daughter who was born on Friday May 14 in the early afternoon."

Claudia and Matthew are proud parents again! (Getty)The baby's name hasn't been revealed yet, but she's expected to let everyone know the name of the new baby sister to Caspar, 7, and Clementine, 5, in the coming week. Will it be another "C" name?

Claudia, who married Matthew in May 2002, has previously spoken about how motherhood made her reassess her attitude to work. She said: "I used to work every single day and travel round the world. I worked weekends, I never took one second off. When I met my husband I said, 'You know what, this is important. I'm not going to work weekends any more.' And when I had kids, I became even more careful. Modeling work is fine because you can do one day here, two days there, you're never long gone."

Congrats to the happy family!

The King met the King during Thursday’s “Larry King Live” on CNN. In his first interview since being released from prison, Tip told Larry King about what he took from the experience, his job behind bars, plans to get married to fiancée Tiny, being a father to his six children, and his thoughts on his Takers co-star Chris Brown and former girlfriend Rihanna

B.o.B stopped by “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” to perform “Nothin’ on You” with Bruno Mars and “Lovelier Than You,” T.I.’s favorite song off his debut The Adventures of Bobby Ray. His album falls to No. 12 in its second week on the Billboard 200, while he scores his second Hot 100 top 10 with “Airplanes.”

Diddy sets off his Last Train to Paris album with a bang. Fireworks, helicopters, and exotic whips are just some of the over-the-top embellishments found in Puff’s big-budget video for “Hello Good Morning” co-starring Dawn and Kalenna. Throw in a superstar director, Hype Williams, features from T.I. and Rick Ross, and cameos by Swizz Beatz and Rico Love, and you’ve got yourself a movie. Let’s go!

Nas’ ex-wife, R&B singer Kelis, was spotted in London wearing a Givenchy Gold Studded leather jacket ($2,176) from the Resort 2010 womenswear collection. The jacket features black leather embellished with gold toned round ball studs. For the outing, Kelis carried a Spring/Summer 2010 collection Vivienne Westwood Heart Shaped 4863 Ebury black bag (approx. $888), which was made from leather and has a large gold toned orb on the front. She was also rocking a pair of Fall 2009 collection Adidas by Jeremy Scott Mickey Mouse sneakers (about $300).

In the latest in a series of promotional posters for the hit vampire drama True Blood, HBO is hinting at things — namely werewolves — to come.

Joe Manganiello has signed on to play werewolf Alcide Herveaux, a season 3 love interest for Anna Paquin‘s Sookie Stackhouse.

In the books by Charlaine Harris that the show is based on, Alcide helps Sookie search for her beloved vampire beau Bill Compton (played by Stephen Moyer), who went missing at the end of season 2.

Sookie isn’t the only one getting a love interest. Southland star Kevin Alejandro is joining the cast as well to play Jesus, who will catch the eye of Lafayette, Bon Temps flashy short-order cook. Could he be another wolf in sheep’s clothing?

True Blood‘s third season premieres June 13 on HBO.

There's a new celebrity cat in town!

Katy Perry took to Twitter to announce that she and fiancé Russell Brand recently purchased a new cat together – an adorably tiny kitten named Krusty.

Perry and Brand each have a cat of their own – she Kitty Purry, he Morrissey – but the couple told PEOPLE in February that their fuzzy felines just don't get along. Perhaps Krusty will be the peacemaker this growing family needs?



Calling Krusty a "third child," cat-crazy Perry told Twitter followers over the weekend she was "proud" of the furry acquisition. Here's wishing the couple at least nine lives of happiness with their new pet! 

Anne Hathaway's boyfriend has been accused of stealing a valuable painting. Actor Adam Shulman -- who began dating the Alice in Wonderland actress in 2008 -- allegedly walked off with a mural painted by street artist Mr. Brainwash (AKA Thierry Guetta) and legal action is being threatened.

Mr. Brainwash poses at an opening for his recent Los Angeles show. (Getty Images)Ownership of the piece has been claimed by Ken Hart of H&H Building, but he has promised not to press charges should it be returned.

Hart said: "If he brings me back the art, it's over. But if he doesn't, I'm going to the police to report it stolen!"

This is not the first time one of Anne's boyfriends has been in trouble with the law. In 2008, her ex-partner Raffaello Follieri was sentenced to four-and-a-half years in prison after pleading guilty to fraud charges.

She has since spoken about her choice in men, saying: "You do have to give me credit because as far as relationships crashing and burning goes, come on, I did pretty great. I mean, scorched that earth!"

First Joni Richardson endured the death of her daughter-in-law, Diff'rent Strokes star Dana Plato, in 1999. Now almost exactly 11 years later, Plato's son, Tyler Lambert, committed suicide at the age of 25.

"It's a shame that such a talented human being would do this with his life," Richardson tells PEOPLE. "He had all the opportunities in the world and we just can't understand it."

According to Richardson, her grandson, a cameraman and amateur songwriter, had long struggled with his mother's premature death at age 36. Plato died of a prescription pill overdose on May 8, 1999. It was around the time of Mother's Day, Richardson notes, making the anniversary that much harder.

Lambert died of a gunshot wound to the head on May 6. At the time, Richardson claims, he had been experimenting with drugs and alcohol, a factor she believes contributed directly to his death.

"He was talking so sweet to me on the phone that morning," she says. "But you never can tell what's in their mind."

She adds that Lambert's body is being cremated, and there will be no memorial.

"Our lives have just been wrapped around him," Richardson says. "It's just devastating."

Guess she was thirsty. Rihanna and her friends spent a staggering £15,000, or $22,000, on alcohol in just three hours.

Rihanna knows how to party. (PacificCoastNews)The "Rude Boy" singer headed to London nightclub Mahiki after playing a sold-out show at The O2 Arena on Monday night and treated her huge entourage to champagne, vodka and Jagermeister.

One fellow reveller said: “She turned up with a massive entourage of about 70 people. She ordered thousands of pounds worth of alcohol, including Krug champagne, huge bottles of Grey Goose vodka and trays of Jager-bombs.”

The 22-year-old pop star had her own private dancefloor and partied until the early hours, at one point dancing to one of her own songs.

A source told the Daily Star newspaper: “She had a section of the dancefloor cornered off just for her and when the DJ played her song ‘Rude Boy’ she started gyrating with a bunch of men.”

The Barbados-born beauty stayed at the club with her entourage until around 4:30 am before heading back to her hotel.

A source said: “When she left she was clutching a half-drunk bottle of Mount Gay rum. She took it into her car, saying it was a souvenir as it’s made in her home country, Barbados.”

Two of the biggest rap stars in the world will share the bill for two nights only. Eminem and Jay-Z have teamed up for a couple of concerts in September.


Jay will open for Eminem at Comerica Park in Em’s hometown of Detroit on September 2, and the tables will be turned when Slim Shady opens for the Brooklyn MC at New York’s Yankee Stadium on September 13.

An official announcement was made on Wednesday (May 12) during the third inning of the Detroit Tigers vs. New York Yankees baseball game at Comerica Park in the Motor City.

“We got so much love for our hometowns and we wanted to stretch the genre of hip-hop music and show that it can play live audiences, so we’re gonna do two concerts—one here in this stadium, Comerica, and then we’re gonna do Yankee Stadium,” said Jay.

Hov wrapped his Blueprint 3 tour in March and Eminem will release his new album Recovery on June 22. The rappers have collaborated in the past on “Renegade” off The Blueprint and performed together at a private concert for the DJ Hero video game last summer.

“We’ve done things together. We’ve done smaller shows, but I don’t know if we’ve ever done anything this big between me and him,” shared Em. “But yeah, it’s going to be exciting.”

Jay-Z performed “Empire State of Mind” at Yankee Stadium during the World Series, but this will be his first time headlining the famed venue. “That’s like a dream. You dream of playing Madison Square Garden and then you say, ‘Maybe I can play Yankee Stadium,’ but it’s so far out there,” he added. “I’m overwhelmed by the idea that we can play [Comerica] and play Yankee Stadium back to back. It’s just a great thing.”

Love is blind in the video for Alicia Keys’ “Un-thinkable (I’m Ready),” the third single from The Element of Freedom. Alicia’s character falls in love with a white man played by actor Chad Michael Murray, but racial tensions keep the lovers from expressing their feelings toward each other. The Jake Nava-directed clip flashes between the past and present to show that such apprehensions still exist. But will love conquer all?

Usher had Oprah and her audience saying “OMG” when he performed his No. 1 single with will.i.am on Monday’s “Oprah Winfrey Show.” Also, find out who Usher has been popping bottles (of milk) with lately, below.

Drake falls dangerously in love in the suspenseful mini-movie for “Find Your Love,” the second single from his debut album Thank Me Later (June 15). The Canadian singer-rapper’s search for love takes him to Kingston, Jamaica, where he finds the beautiful Maliah Michel. The only problem? She’s already taken. A Jamaican gang, led by dancehall artist Mavado, is in hot pursuit of Drizzy, and in the end, only one man can have her heart. Who will bite the bullet?

Watch the uncensored version of the Anthony Mandler-directed video below.

Rihanna and Lady Gaga have taken the fashion world by storm with their bold sense of style, but before them was Kelis. While the “Bossy” singer’s influence on today’s female pop stars remains a hot topic of conversation, Kelis is sounding off to Rap-Up.com about her impact on music’s leading ladies.


When asked whether she had heard the Internet chatter comparing her style to that of Rihanna and Lady Gaga’s, Kelis responded, “Yeah. I tried not to see, but it’s noticeable.”

Although it may ruffle her fans’ feathers, the “Acapella” songstress says she’s flattered by the comparisons and attributes the similarities to her peers’ ages. “They’re really young. What else are they supposed to do?”

Kelis explains that this is not the first time an artist has been accused of “swagger jacking.” Borrowing fashion and recycling trends has occurred many times before her. “I’ve been around for a long time and that’s what artists do; we take from each other and we recycle,” she states. “And quite frankly, it may not even be them. It might be stylists that have been around as long as I have and are like, ‘Hey, let’s recycle this on these younger artists.’”

But she shrugs off the controversy. “I’m not offended by it. I don’t really have much feeling about it, honestly. It just keeps me on my toes and allows me to continue moving forward, so it’s cool. I really don’t see it as a bad thing. I guess it means I’m on the right track.”

While she has no beef with her fellow fashionistas, you won’t find her listening to their music on her iPod. “I can’t say that I do. I’m familiar with it, like I know it. I don’t live in a hole. If I’m at a party and they play it, I enjoy it. I get it.”

Kelis’ new album Flesh Tone arrives in the U.K. on May 17 and July 6 in the U.S.

Robin Thicke works the morning shift, doing it in the shower, the bedroom, and the kitchen—all before noon—in the steamy video for “It’s in the Mornin’,” his Teddy Riley-produced collaboration with Snoop Dogg from Sex Therapy.

Colombian hottie Manuela Arbeláez is the object of Robin’s desire in the Gil Green-directed clip, which was filmed in Malibu. Snoop watches the sun rise over the Pacific Ocean with his own companion in the back of his Snoop DeVille.

And when it was all over, both men went back to their beautiful wives and families. All in a day’s work.

That's not just some tourist dropping into an art gallery in New Orleans's French Quarter.

On Saturday, the day before Mother's Day, Sandra Bullock visited A Gallery for Fine Photography with her baby boy, Louis, and friends.

The Big Easy has a special significance for Bullock and Louis, who born there nearly four months ago. Adopted in January, Louis's happy arrival in Bullock's home was announced April 28.

Residents of the city have welcomed the actress's news with open arms.

Former New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin offered his congratulations, saying, "Since Hurricane Katrina, Americans have prayed for us, given their time as volunteers in our community and demanded that no other city ever go through what New Orleans experienced. Sandra Bullock has become one of us. We wish this new mother every success."

Ludacris and Trey Songz are teaming up by popular demand. Luda has chosen his steamy collaboration with the R&B heartthrob as the third single from his Battle of the Sexes album. And what better place to shoot a video for a song called “Sex Room” than at the Palms Casino Resort in Sin City? Trey channels Teddy Pendergrass, while Chris Robinson is in the director’s chair once again.

“The video concept is really about sensuality,” said Robinson. “[Ludacris] really wanted to do something different, he wanted to do something visually beautiful, really appeal to the ladies.”

Go behind the scenes of the Vegas shoot below.

Sex Room ft Trey Songz(Behind the Scenes) from DTP TV on Vimeo.

Jeezy hasn’t even announced an official first single yet, but he’s already moving up his album release.


The ATL rapper is giving the people what they want by rushing his fourth major label album TM103 into stores a week earlier than expected on June 15, Rap-Up.com has learned. He clears the way for Eminem’s Recovery on June 22 and now prepares to face off against Drake’s Thank Me Later on the new date.

Christina Aguilera is gearing up for a powerhouse tour that will feature not one, but two of music’s biggest voices.


The pop superstar, who releases her new album Bionic on June 8, has announced dates for a 20-city North American trek, which kicks off July 15 in Uncasville, Conn., and winds down August 19 in Irvine, Calif.

Her labelmate Leona Lewis will also appear on all North American dates, for which tickets go on sale to the public beginning May 21. All fans who purchase tickets at LiveNation.com through June 4 will receive an email to download Aguilera’s new album on June 7, the day before it hits stores.

Christina Aguilera North American Tour Dates

July 15 – Uncasville, CT – Mohegan Sun Arena
July 17 – Darien Center, NY – Darien Lake Performing Arts Center
July 18 – Bristow, VA – Jiffy Lube Live
July 20 – Toronto, ON – Molson Canadian Amphitheatre
July 22 – Camden, NJ – Susquehanna Bank Center
July 24 – Detroit, MI – DTE Energy Music Theatre
July 25 – Chicago, IL – First Midwest Bank Amphitheatre
July 28 – Wantagh, NY – Nikon at Jones Beach Theater
July 30 – Holmdel, NJ – PNC Bank Arts Center
July 31 – Boston, MA – Comcast Center
August 3 – Pittsburgh, PA – First Niagara Pavilion
August 5 – Atlanta, GA – Aaron’s Amphitheatre at Lakewood
August 7 – West Palm Beach, FL – Cruzan Amphitheatre
August 8 – Tampa, FL – Ford Amphitheatre
August 10 – Dallas, TX – Superpages.com Center
August 12 – Houston, TX – Cynthia Woods Mitchell Pavilion
August 14 – Phoenix, AZ – US Airways Center
August 15 – San Diego, CA – Cricket Wireless Amphitheatre
August 18 – Mountain View, CA – Shoreline Amphitheatre at Mountain View
August 19 – Irvine, CA – Verizon Wireless Amphitheater

Lena Horne, who was the first black performer to be signed to a long-term contract by a major Hollywood studio and who went on to achieve international fame as a singer, died on Sunday night at New York-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center in New York. She was 92 and lived in Manhattan.

Her death was announced by her son-in-law, Kevin Buckley.

Ms. Horne might have become a major movie star, but she was born 50 years too early, and languished at MGM in the 1940s because of the color of her skin, although she was so light-skinned that, when she was a child, other black children had taunted her, accusing her of having a “white daddy.”

Ms. Horne was stuffed into one “all-star” musical after another — “Thousands Cheer” (1943), “Broadway Rhythm” (1944), “Two Girls and a Sailor” (1944), “Ziegfeld Follies” (1946), “Words and Music” (1948) — to sing a song or two that could easily be snipped from the movie when it played in the South, where the idea of an African-American performer in anything but a subservient role in a movie with an otherwise all-white cast was unthinkable.

“The only time I ever said a word to another actor who was white was Kathryn Grayson in a little segment of ‘Show Boat’ ” included in “Till the Clouds Roll By” (1946), a movie about the life of Jerome Kern, Ms. Horne said in an interview in 1990. In that sequence she played Julie, a mulatto forced to flee the showboat because she has married a white man.

But when MGM made “Show Boat” into a movie for the second time, in 1951, the role of Julie was given to a white actress, Ava Gardner, who did not do her own singing. (Ms. Horne was no longer under contract to MGM at the time, and according to James Gavin’s Horne biography, “Stormy Weather,” published last year, she was never seriously considered for the part.) And in 1947, when Ms. Horne herself married a white man — the prominent arranger, conductor and pianist Lennie Hayton, who was for many years both her musical director and MGM’s — the marriage took place in France and was kept secret for three years.

Ms. Horne’s first MGM movie was “Panama Hattie” (1942), in which she sang Cole Porter’s “Just One of Those Things.” Writing about that film years later, Pauline Kael called it “a sad disappointment, though Lena Horne is ravishing and when she sings you can forget the rest of the picture.”

Even before she came to Hollywood, Brooks Atkinson, the drama critic for The New York Times, noticed Ms. Horne in “Lew Leslie’s Blackbirds of 1939,” a Broadway revue that ran for nine performances. “A radiantly beautiful sepia girl,” he wrote, “who will be a winner when she has proper direction.”

She had proper direction in two all-black movie musicals, both made in 1943. Lent to 20th Century Fox for “Stormy Weather,” one of those show business musicals with almost no plot but lots of singing and dancing, Ms. Horne did both triumphantly, ending with the sultry, aching sadness of the title number, which would become one of her signature songs. In MGM’s “Cabin in the Sky,” the first film directed by Vincente Minnelli, she was the brazen, sexy handmaiden of the Devil. (One number she shot for that film, “Ain’t It the Truth,” which she sang while taking a bubble bath, was deleted before the film was released — not for racial reasons, as her stand-alone performances in other MGM musicals sometimes were, but because it was considered too risqué.)

In 1945 the critic and screenwriter Frank Nugent wrote in Liberty magazine that Ms. Horne was “the nation’s top Negro entertainer.” In addition to her MGM salary of $1,000 a week, she was earning $1,500 for every radio appearance and $6,500 a week when she played nightclubs. She was also popular with servicemen, white and black, during World War II, appearing more than a dozen times on the Army radio program “Command Performance.”

“The whole thing that made me a star was the war,” Ms. Horne said in the 1990 interview. “Of course the black guys couldn’t put Betty Grable’s picture in their footlockers. But they could put mine.”

Touring Army camps for the U.S.O., Ms. Horne was outspoken in her criticism of the way black soldiers were treated. “So the U.S.O. got mad,” she recalled. “And they said, ‘You’re not going to be allowed to go anyplace anymore under our auspices.’ So from then on I was labeled a bad little Red girl.”

Ms. Horne later claimed that for this and other reasons, including her friendship with leftists like Paul Robeson and W.E.B. DuBois, she was blacklisted and “unable to do films or television for the next seven years” after her tenure with MGM ended in 1950.

This was not quite true: as Mr. Gavin has documented, she appeared frequently on “Your Show of Shows” and other television shows in the 1950s, and in fact “found more acceptance” on television “than almost any other black performer.” And Mr. Gavin and others have suggested that there were other factors in addition to politics or race involved in her lack of film work

Although absent from the screen, she found success in nightclubs and on records. “Lena Horne at the Waldorf-Astoria,” recorded during a well-received eight-week run in 1957, reached the Top 10 and became the best-selling album by a female singer in RCA Victor’s history.

In the early 1960s Ms. Horne, always outspoken on the subject of civil rights, became increasingly active, participating in numerous marches and protests.

In 1969, she returned briefly to films, playing the love interest of a white actor, Richard Widmark, in “Death of a Gunfighter.”

She was to act in only one other movie: In 1978 she played Glinda the Good Witch in “The Wiz,” the film version of the all-black Broadway musical based on “The Wizard of Oz.” But she never stopped singing.

She continued to record prolifically well into the 1990s, for RCA and other labels, notably United Artists and Blue Note. And she conquered Broadway in 1981 with a one-woman show, “Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music,” which ran for 14 months and won both rave reviews and a Tony Award.

Ms. Horne’s voice was not particularly powerful, but it was extremely expressive. She reached her listeners emotionally by acting as well as singing the romantic standards like “The Man I Love” and “Moon River” that dominated her repertory. The person she always credited as her main influence was not another singer but a pianist and composer, Duke Ellington’s longtime associate Billy Strayhorn.

“I wasn’t born a singer,” she told Strayhorn’s biographer, David Hajdu. “I had to learn a lot. Billy rehearsed me. He stretched me vocally.” Strayhorn occasionally worked as her accompanist and, she said, “taught me the basics of music, because I didn’t know anything.”

Strayhorn was also, she said, “the only man I ever loved,” but Strayhorn was openly gay, and their close friendship never became a romance. “He was just everything that I wanted in a man,” she told Mr. Hajdu, “except he wasn’t interested in me sexually.”

Lena Calhoun Horne was born in Brooklyn on June 30, 1917. All four of her grandparents were industrious members of Brooklyn’s black middle class. Her paternal grandparents, Edwin and Cora Horne, were early members of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and in October 1919, at the age of 2, Lena was the cover girl for the organization’s monthly bulletin.

By then the marriage of her parents, Edna and Teddy Horne, was in trouble. “She was spoiled and badly educated and he was fickle,” Ms. Horne’s daughter, Gail Lumet Buckley, wrote in her family history, “The Hornes.” By 1920 Teddy had left his job with the New York Department of Labor and fled to Seattle, and Edna had fled to a life on the stage in Harlem. Ms. Horne was raised by her paternal grandparents until her mother took her back four years later.

When she was 16, her mother abruptly pulled her out of school to audition for the dance chorus at the Cotton Club, the famous Harlem nightclub where the customers were white, the barely dressed dancers were light-skinned blacks, Duke Ellington was the star of the show and the proprietors were gangsters. A year after joining the Cotton Club chorus she made her Broadway debut, performing a voodoo dance in the short-lived show “Dance With Your Gods” in 1934.

At 19, Ms. Horne married the first man she had ever dated, 28-year-old Louis Jones, and became a conventional middle-class Pittsburgh wife. Her daughter Gail was born in 1937 and a son, Teddy, in 1940. The marriage ended soon afterward. Ms. Horne kept Gail, but Mr. Jones refused to give up Teddy, although he did allow the boy long visits with his mother.

In 1938, Ms. Horne starred in a quickie black musical film, “The Duke Is Tops,” for which she was never paid. Her return to movies was on a grander scale.

She had been singing at the Manhattan nightclub Café Society when the impresario Felix Young chose her to star at the Trocadero, a nightclub he was planning to open in Hollywood in the fall of 1941. In 1990, Ms. Horne reminisced: “My only friends were the group of New Yorkers who sort of stuck with their own group — like Vincente, Gene Kelly, Yip Harburg and Harold Arlen, and Richard Whorf — the sort of hip New Yorkers who allowed Paul Robeson and me in their houses.”

Since blacks were not allowed to live in Hollywood, “Felix Young, a white man, signed for the house as if he was going to rent it,” Ms. Horne said. “When the neighbors found out, Humphrey Bogart, who lived right across the street from me, raised hell with them for passing around a petition to get rid of me.” Bogart, she said, “sent word over to the house that if anybody bothered me, please let him know.”

Roger Edens, the composer and musical arranger who had been Judy Garland’s chief protector at MGM, had heard the elegant Ms. Horne sing at Café Society and also went to hear her at the Little Troc (the war had scaled Mr. Young’s ambitions down to a small club with a gambling den on the second floor). He insisted that Arthur Freed, the producer of MGM’s lavish musicals, listen to Ms. Horne sing. Then Freed insisted that Louis B. Mayer, who ran the studio, hear her, too. He did, and soon she had signed a seven-year contract with MGM.

The N.A.A.C.P. celebrated that contract as a weapon in its war to get better movie roles for black performers. Her father weighed in, too. In a 1997 PBS interview, she recalled: “My father said, ‘I can get a maid for my daughter. I don’t want her in the movies playing maids.’ ”

Ms. Horne is survived by her daughter, Gail Lumet Buckley. Her husband died in 1971; her son died of kidney failure the same year.

Looking back at the age of 80, Ms. Horne said: “My identity is very clear to me now. I am a black woman. I’m free. I no longer have to be a ‘credit.’ I don’t have to be a symbol to anybody; I don’t have to be a first to anybody. I don’t have to be an imitation of a white woman that Hollywood sort of hoped I’d become. I’m me, and I’m like nobody else.”

Nicole Kidman dons a black bikini, sparkly kaftan and floppy sun hat to film poolside scenes for "Just Go With It" in Maui, Hawaii. Dressed in a coral pink sun dress, Jennifer Aniston joined Nicole for to film more scenes for the romantic comedy.


Jay-Z jetted from “SNL” rehearsals in New York City to Boston just in time to catch the Cleveland Cavaliers take on the Boston Celtics in Game 3 of the Eastern Conference semifinals during the 2010 NBA Playoffs at the TD Banknorth Garden on Friday (May 7). Mrs. Carter was right by her man’s side in a pair of red heels and matching sunglasses.


Celebrities attend the Ana M Grand Opening Launch Party, hosted by Christina Milan, in West Hollywood. Regis Mijatovic, ex partner of Christian Audigier, is the owner of the new boutique with a clothing line designed by French artist Anthony Noble.




La Toya Jackson and a friend out shopping in Brentwood, CA. Upon leaving La Toya posed for photos with a fan and hopped into a Ferrari.



Christina Milian took a stroll through sunny Beverly Hills with her two-month-old daughter Violet Nash. The new mom will celebrate her first Mother’s Day this Sunday.


Can you get it up? Rihanna put on her hard hat and rode a pink tank during the opening night of her U.K. tour at LG Arena in Birmingham, England.



Following a whirlwind promo tour for The Back-up Plan, Jennifer Lopez catches up on family time Friday, taking daughter Emme, 2, to the carousel at a Monaco park.


Now that's a close shave, Oprah! The media mogul takes a razor to pal Dr. Phil McGraw's signature moustache while taping her talk show in celebration of the 10th anniversary of her magazine, O, at Radio City Music Hall Friday.



Toni Braxton traveled overseas to promote her new album Pulse. The sultry singer hit the red carpet at the 2010 Duftstars Fragrance Awards in Berlin, Germany, in a light blue Grecian gown



Eve posed for photos and signed autographs for fans at Journeys in New York City on the final stop of the Gumball 3000 rally.


A dressed-down Halle Berry – who recently announced her split from Gabriel Aubry – keeps it casual while making her way through LAX Friday.


Gisele Bündchen holds tight to 4-month-old son Benjamin Thursday during a family outing with stepson Jack (not pictured) to the Color Me Mine pottery store in Santa Monica, Calif.

Mary J. Blige helped inspire young women with her encouraging words during STRONGER: Girls’ Empowerment Day at Time Warner Center in Manhattan.

While Apple’s iPad is currently the hottest new gadget on the scene, there aren’t too many cases that provide protection and present luxury at the same time. Louis Vuitton plans to introducing their high-end solution with the release of iPad cases that feature their classic patterns. These sleeve cases will be available in Monogram and Damier Graphite with a price of (approx. $365), however they won’t be available until 2011.

In other LV related news, based on a study by Millward Brown Optimor, Louis Vuitton is regarded as the worlds most powerful luxury brand and has a value of $19.78 billion, which is more than double the worth of its closest competitor Hermes. No wonder Louis Vuitton is everywhere.