Christopher Lee – aka Counts Dracula and Dooku, Scaramanga and Saruman – knighted for services to drama and charity

Finding oneself opposite a tall, baleful celluloid vampire would have most people reaching for a head of the most pungent Spanish garlic, a large crucifix or a sharp stake.

The Prince of Wales, however, opted for a ceremonial sword, even as the 1.95-metre (6ft 5ins) vision of Count Dracula leaned worryingly close to the royal neck.

Fortunately, the prince had little to fear. Christopher Lee – aka Counts Dracula and Dooku, not to mention Lord Summerisle and the Duc de Richeleau – had been invited to Buckingham Palace today to receive a knighthood for his services to drama and to charity.

The 87-year-old is one of cinema’s most prolific actors, appearing in more than 250 films over the course of a career that has so far spanned 61 years.

After making his name by poking blood-red contact lenses into his eyes and false fangs into his gums for a series of Hammer Horror films, Lee went on to play the urbane laird of the pagan manor in The Wicker Man and the bounteously nippled, bling-packing assassin Francisco Scaramanga in the James Bond film The Man With the Golden Gun.

More recently, the actor has lent his imposing frame and limpid tones to the roles of the evil Middle Earth wizard Saruman in the Lord of the Rings, and the evil space wizard Count Dooku in the final two Star Wars films.

Lee, whose mother was an Italian countess, will next be seen in Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, in which he plays neither a vampire nor a wizard but the Jabberwock.

Actor Dennis Hopper has cancelled travel plans to focus on his treatment, manager says

Hollywood star Dennis Hopper has been diagnosed with prostate cancer and has cancelled travel plans to focus on treatment, his manager said.

The 73-year-old Easy Rider star is being treated in a “special programme” at the University of Southern California, his manager Sam Maydew told the Associated Press. “We’re hoping for the best,” Maydew said when asked about Hopper’s condition and prognosis.

Among the appearances cancelled was a trip to the Australian Centre for the Moving Image in Melbourne, which is set to open an exhibition of his photography next month. Hopper was scheduled to hold a master class on “the artistic process” there.

“Obviously his health is the number one priority and we wish him a very speedy recovery,” centre director Tony Sweeney said. “We are saddened that Dennis won’t be with us to share in the moment and we look forward with even greater determination to delivering an exciting and successful exhibition”.

Hopper was briefly hospitalised for dehydration late last month in New York after suffering flu-like symptoms and stomach pains.

Famous for his starring role in the 1969 hippy road film Easy Rider, which he helped write, Hopper appeared in numerous westerns and nearly 200 other films and television shows stretching back to 1955. He was nominated for Academy Awards for the Easy Rider screen play and for his supporting role in the 1986 basketball movie Hoosiers. He recently finished shooting the second season of the television show Crash, based on the 2004 movie.

Stage makeover planned for 1988 Tom Cruise vehicle about a bartender who dreams of shaking things up with his own cocktail bar

The mania for turning movies into musicals continues apace with the news that boozy Tom Cruise classic Cocktail is to get a stage makeover.

The film’s screenwriter, Heywood Gould, told the New York Post that he was at work on a script during a 20th anniversary party for the movie.

The 1988 original starred Cruise as a talented stick-swizzler who relocates to Jamaica with Bryan Brown’s grizzled mentor to try and raise the money to fund a classy new bar called Cocktails and Dreams.

“I am writing it as we speak,” said Heywood. “[Producer] Marty Richards is on board and he’s working on the score. It’s far too early to talk about casting. We haven’t approached anybody yet. But I do like Katie Holmes.”

Holmes, now married to Cruise, would presumably be earmarked for the girlfriend role played by Elisabeth Shue in the original. But Gould may face competition from another movie-turned-musical: producers of the Broadway version of Finding Neverland are reported to have set their sights on Holmes for the Kate Winslet role.

Ten movies made into musicals in the past decade

The Producers: Ran and ran and ran until the only thing left to do was turn it into another film.

Dirty Rotten Scoundrels: John Lithgow and Norbert Leo Butz helped to rake in 11 Tony award nominations in 2005.

The Wedding Singer: Toured the UK in 2008, but never made it to the West End.

When Harry Met Sally: Luke Perry and Alyson Hannigan failed to reignite the magic in 2004.

Dirty Dancing: Currently playing in the UK, US and Germany.

Lord of the Rings: On an endless world tour.

Sweet Smell of Success: Short-lived but acclaimed hack-filled toe-tapper.

Spider-Man: Bono and the Edge have written the music. Julie Taymor directs. Alan Cumming stars as the Green Goblin. The limber hero has still to be announced.

High Fidelity: The all-singing, all-dancing stage show about a grumpy, list-obsessed record store owner closed after 14 performances in New York in 2006.

Grumpy Old Men: The musical of the 1993 film starring Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau hits Broadway this winter, starring F Murray Abraham and George Hearn. A new character, Punky, sexes up the story.

Somen ‘Steve’ Banerjee went from working at a petrol station to managing a multimillion dollar business based on muscular male strippers

British director Tony Scott is set to shoot the turbulent life and times of Chippendales founder Somen “Steve” Banerjee, a millionaire entrepreneur who fell spectacularly from grace. Variety reports that the as-yet-untitled biopic is based on a script by Lisa Schrager and will be bankrolled by a private equity fund based in India.

Banerjee was the Bengali immigrant to the US who devised and managed the Chippendales, a troupe of muscular male strippers. His life took him from a job at a California petrol station to running a multimillion dollar business during the 1980s. But Banerjee’s mounting paranoia and criminal tactics would eventually trip him up. He attempted to burn down two rival nightclubs and was later arrested for hiring a hit-man to assassinate his former business partner along with two onetime Chippendale dancers. Banerjee hanged himself in his prison cell in October 1994, just hours before he was due to be sentenced.

Scott’s last film was the action blockbuster The Taking of Pelham 123. He is currently directing Denzel Washington in Unstoppable, a drama about a runaway freight train. A start date for the Banerjee biopic has yet to be announced.

Jacques Audiard’s prison drama hailed as ‘a masterpiece’ as it takes the festival’s inaugural best film prize

Jacques Audiard’s prison saga Un Prophète (A Prophet) was last night named as the inaugural winner of the London film festival’s award for best feature film. The picture was first unveiled at the Cannes film festival back in May, where it took the jury prize but was beaten to the crowning Palme d’Or award by Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon.

Un Prophète tells the tale of an illiterate Arab convict who endures a harsh rite of passage when he is recruited by the Corsican mob. Announcing the award, jury chair Anjelica Huston hailed the film as “a masterpiece”. She added: “Un Prophète has the ambition, purity of vision and clarity of purpose to make it an instant classic. With seamless and imaginative storytelling, superb performances and universal themes, Jacques Audiard has made the perfect film.”

Last night’s awards ceremony, held at London’s Inner Temple, also spelled good news for screenwriter Jack Thorne, who was named best British newcomer for his work on the forthcoming coming-of-age drama The Scouting Book for Boys. Defamation, a study of antisemitism, won the prize for best documentary, while the Jaffa-set crime thriller Ajami – directed by Scandar Copti, a Palestinian, and Yaron Shani, an Israeli – was named as best first feature. Elsewhere, there were BFI fellowships for British actor John Hurt and the Malian film-maker Souleyman Cissé.

The 53rd London film festival wraps up tonight with the world premiere of Nowhere Boy, artist Sam Taylor-Wood’s big-screen salute to the young John Lennon.

The Funny People star has signed to play both siblings in a ‘romantic comedy’

Humpty Dumpty is already on his way to the big screen, in the form of a 3D horror movie planned for release next year. Now it looks like Jack and Jill are set to follow him into multiplexes, with Adam Sandler signing up to play both characters – now twin siblings – in a new romantic comedy.

Variety reports that Jack and Jill will be penned by Steve Koren, an erstwhile Saturday Night Live performer who worked with Sandler during the comic’s own time on the US TV institution.

It’s not known whether the film will have any connection to the traditional nursery rhyme, whose roots arguably lie in 18th-century French history: “Jack” can be read as code for King Louis XVI, who was guillotined (lost his crown), and was followed by his queen, Marie Antoinette, “who came tumbling after”.

Sandler will next be seen in cinemas in Dennis Dugan’s high-school reunion comedy Grown Ups, alongside Salma Hayek and Steve Buscemi, which opens in the US next June. Jack and Jill is planned for release in early 2011.

Director says he has cracked the structure of Yann Martel’s allegorical novel about a boy adrift at sea with a tiger

It has been stuck in development hell for much of the past decade, but the big-screen version of Yann Martel’s 2002 Man Booker prize-winning novel Life of Pi finally looks set to go into production after the Oscar-winning film-maker Ang Lee confirmed it will be his next film.

Martel’s acclaimed novel chronicles the travails of a shipwrecked teenage boy stuck on a life raft with only a female orangutan, injured zebra, hungry hyena and brooding Bengal tiger for company. In recent years the likes of M Night Shyamalan, Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Alfonso Cuarón have all been attached at one time or another to the project, but none has managed to get a movie into production.

Lee told the Digital Spy website his version was still at the scripting stage and he had not yet begun to think about casting.

“I’m delivering the first draft,” he said. “I think I’ve cracked the structure of the movie and I’ll figure out how to do it later.

“How exactly I’m going to do it, I don’t know … A little boy adrift at sea with a tiger. It’s a hard one to crack!”

Lee said the film would most likely be out in two years’ time. The Taiwan-born director’s next movie in UK cinemas will be Taking Woodstock, his comedy-drama about the 1969 music festival, which premiered in May to lukewarm reviews at Cannes. It screens at the London film festival today and opens nationwide on 13 November.

• Communist leader has not spoken to press in three years
• Oscar winner visited Island of Youth yesterday

The actor Sean Penn has flown to Cuba to chase what would be the biggest scoop of his career as a part-time journalist: an interview with Fidel Castro.

The Oscar winner, who last year bagged interviews with Raúl Castro and Hugo Chávez, is reportedly on assignment for Vanity Fair in his quest to meet Cuba’s former president.

In a sign of Havana’s approval the communist party newspaper Granma covered Penn’s visit yesterday to the Island of Youth, where he visited a gallery and met artists.

According to the online magazine tmz.com Penn hopes to ask Fidel about Cuba’s evolving relationship with the Obama administration.

The interview – which has not been confirmed – would be a coup for the Hollywood star’s brand of activist journalism. No western journalist has seen let alone interviewed the 83-year-old leader since an intestinal illness forced him from public view three years ago. Fidel stepped aside from the presidency but remains influential in Cuba – and an iconic, enigmatic figure abroad.

Penn, an outspoken liberal and anti-war activist, took a break from filming to visit Iraq as a journalist in 2004. He followed up with a visit to Iran the following year and then befriended Chávez.

Venezuela’s socialist president, who seldom gives interviews, gave ample access to Penn and arranged an interview with Raúl Castro, Cuba’s even more interview-shy president. The stories were published in The Nation and the Huffington Post.

Critics say the actor is too soft in the interviews and should leave journalism to professionals. “Why does someone like Penn think he can do this job, which isn’t his job?” asked The New Yorker.

Chávez and the Castros also opened their doors to Oliver Stone, another Hollywood leftist. He made sympathetic documentaries about his subjects, a contrast with most US media hostility to the Latin American presidents.

Lindsey Lohan, Paris Hilton, Orlando Bloom among the celebrities victimised by break-ins

In a town already known for meteoric rises in status and fortune, a group of Los Angeles teenagers are said to have found a fast way to enjoy the glitz and glamour of the stars – by burgling their houses.

Los Angeles police say four teenage girls and a boy pored over fashion magazines, websites and gossip television shows and selected jewellery and clothing they wanted, then determined where the targeted stars lived, cased their houses, and struck, in some cases more than once at the same house.

The crude burglaries, which police say netted millions of dollars, were captured on surveillance cameras, and detectives have linked the teens to break-ins at the Hollywood homes of Lindsey Lohan, Paris Hilton, Orlando Bloom, reality television star Audrina Patridge, and others, US news media reported. In some instances the victims remained unaware their homes had been burgled.

“This is a no-brains caper. There’s not a lot of self-awareness,” Los Angeles detective Brett Goodkin told the Los Angeles Times. “They saw it, they wanted it, they took it and continued taking it.”

The suspects, who include a girl who was hoping to star in a reality television show of her own, have earned instant notoriety in a culture in which the bar for media stardom seems to drop weekly.

In a twist seemingly written by a jobbing Hollywood screenwriter, the suspects now find themselves featured alongside the celebrities they are accused of burgling on TMZ.com, a celebrity news website that has followed the case since the thefts were first reported.

Police say the group’s ringleader was 19-year-old Rachel Lee, arrested on Friday in Las Vegas. TMZ reported that authorities seized from Lee’s father’s home in Las Vegas a hat linked to Lohan and partially nude photos linked to Hilton. Lee, Diana Tamayo, 19, Courtney Ames, 18, Nicholas Prugo, 18, and Alexis Neiers, 18, are accused of a burglary spree that began in October 2008 and ran until September. Prugo was the first arrested, after turning up alongside others in surveillance footage. He was accused of stealing $170,000 in designer jewellery and clothing from the homes of Lohan and Patridge.

The girls were classmates at Indian Hills High School, a school for troubled teens. The suspects were allegedly aided by 27-year-old bartender Roy Lopez, accused of fencing the stolen goods.

Goodkin said the suspects focused on one star at a time, tracking their movements using ubiquitous celebrity photograph and media sites on the internet and learning when they were scheduled to be out of town. Police seized from Prugo a laptop containing images of one of the suspects flashing a stack of cash, and showing a history of internet searches for close-up photographs of the victims’ jewellery, TMZ reported.

A lawyer for some of the victims has said Los Angeles paparazzi photographers are at fault for prying into stars’ private lives, revealing details about their houses and encouraging the theft.

Other crimes against US celebrities

Nicole Richie: The reality TV star and daughter of Lionel Richie was hurt this month when a paparazzo photographer crashed into her car in Beverly Hills.

John Travolta: A Bahamian paramedic and attorney are accused of trying to extort money from the Pulp Fiction star in return for silence about the circumstances surrounding his son’s death.

David Letterman: A CBS news producer is charged with seeking $2m from the television host to keep mum about an affair he had with an employee.

The Heath Ledger factor and Terry Gilliam’s cult appeal have combined to lure hefty Italian audiences into The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus

Even with the presence of the late Heath Ledger in his final performance, Terry Gilliam’s The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus always looked like it might struggle to recoup its $45m budget. Gilliam’s films, after all, have something of a habit of haemorrhaging cash, and the movie struggled to find a distribution deal in the US. But the former Python can rest assured that his film is, at the very least, wildly popular in Italy.

Variety reports that Parnassus took a whopping $2.7m in its first weekend there, enough to put it at No 2 on the box-office chart. Distributors had clearly underestimated the appeal of a bit of fantastical Gilliam whimsy, for the film only screened in 227 cinemas. It will expand to more than 300 from this weekend to cope with demand, but the meagre number of screens available for viewers wanting to see the film meant that it scored the country’s third-highest per-screen average of the year, an impressive $11,870 for each cinema.

Gilliam’s film, the tale of a travelling theatre company which offers audience members the chance to enter a fantastical world beyond its dusty curtain, is also faring decently in the UK, where it entered the chart at No 3 with a bow of £905,000 two weekends ago. The prospects therefore look a little better for the film’s US debut on Christmas Day, though so far it is only being tested on limited release there.

Roberto Proia, head of Italian distributor Moviemax, said Ledger’s huge fanbase had undoubtedly helped Parnassus to achieve success in Italy. “We also found out that teenagers massively love Gilliam, and we did not expect this,” he said. “He really has rock-star status.”

Gilliam’s most successful box-office take is his $57m haul for 1995′s science fiction thriller 12 Monkeys. His last film, 2006′s fantasy drama Tideland, however, took just $566,000 across the world.