Ephraim Hardcastle
CHILDREN of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle would become US citizens via her and British royalty via him. However, US lawmakers are still considering a constitutional amendment stripping citizenship from anyone who accepts a foreign royal title. So far this measure has received 12 of the 38 legislative votes required. The last vote was taken in 1814!
GREEK playboy Taki, 81, reveals that on the day biographer Claire Tomalin’s war correspondent husband Nick was killed during the 1973 Yom Kippur war he was in an adjacent car with Princess Margaret’s former beau Group Captain Peter Townsend. ‘He saved our lives,’ he writes in The Spectator. ‘He told us to turn off the car engine and get out. We had never heard of heat-seeking missiles. Nor had Nick Tomalin. He did not turn off his engine and…you know the rest.’
CURVY actress Kate Winslet, 41, who says she hasn’t weighed herself since 2005 was reportedly nicknamed ‘Kate Weighs-a-Lot’ by Titanic director James Cameron, when cast in her breakthrough 1997 role. As for her co-star, Leonardo DiCaprio, Winslet (pictured) jokes: ‘We do look very different. You know, he’s fatter now and I’m thinner.’
PLAYBOY boss Hugh Hefner, who has died aged 91, is to be buried alongside Marilyn Monroe at LA’s Westwood Village Memorial Park. ‘I would have told her how much she meant to me and still does,’ he remarked. He put her on Playboy’s inaugural cover, selling all 80,000 and laying the basis for his £174million fortune.
TONY Booth’s daughter Lauren, 50, tweets on his death aged 85: ‘His love for Shakespeare and equal rights, his inspiration to us all,’ adding: ‘The man who taught me to read and above all: to fight for what I believe in.’ But of her conversion to Islam in 2010, he remarked: ‘I don’t know if we’ll ever speak again - I suspect not.’
NOW flogging a 50th anniversary ‘box set’ of the Rolling Stones’ 1967 album, Their Satanic Majesties Request – an illregarded attempt to cash in on the ‘psychedelic’ mood of the time – Sir Mick Jagger said of it: ‘Too much time on our hands, too many drugs, no producer to tell us, “Enough already, thank you, can we just get on with this song?”’ At £64 a pop you’d have to be stoned to buy it.
TERRY Waite, 78, managed to secure an interview for his book Solitude with moors murderess Myra Hindley – despite her hostility to publicity. She dreaded visits from Lord Longford complaining his appearances prevented her parole. She never did get out, dying aged 60 in 2002.
FRISKY novelist Kathy Lette, 58, who split from QC hubby Geoffrey Robertson after 25 years, is adapting to single life. Holidaying in Venice she twitters: ‘Off with the girls to nab a gondolier. We may not speak Italian, but we’re fluent in body language.’ Will she content herself with ‘just one Cornetto’?