HURLEY SHOWS OFF NEW BOYFRIEND
Actress Liz Hurley showed off her new boyfriend, ending the rumours about her love-life since her split from long-term partner actor Hugh Grant in May. The Sun newspaper had pictures of Hurley kissing film director Steve Bing at Elton John’s concert in New York.

Hurley has been linked with several other men recently and there were rumours that she might resume her romance with Grant, star of Four Weddings And A Funeral, after the couple went on holiday to the Mediterranean in August.
It is the second time in a week that Hurley has been front page news in the British press after U.S. actors picketed the premiere of her new film Bedazzled, and branded her a scab for making a perfume commercial despite a Hollywood strike against advertisers.

EX-BOND MOVED BY AFRICAN SLUM POVERTY
James Bond star Sir Roger Moore has launched a polio campaign in an urban slum in Ghana, admitting that while filming in exotic locations in his Hollywood heyday, he was blind to the poverty that sometimes surrounded him. “The most tiring thing was changing my shirt 45 times a day and wearing six different suits, all (of) the same cut, because they got sweaty,” he told Reuters in the slum in Ghana’s capital Accra, “Now I see what was around me, but was not affecting me.”

Moore, a goodwill ambassador for the U.N. Children’s Fund (UNICEF), starred as the suave, sophisticated and unflappable secret agent James Bond in films in the 1970s and 1980s. He said that the sight of pregnant women cracking stones in a makeshift quarry in the northern town of Tamale had brought home the depth of African poverty to him. “A mother, eight months pregnant, sits on a rock cracking stones all day for perhaps $4 a week, and the children are having to work — no education and no play,” he said, “Mothers with babies on their backs carried pans full of stones on their heads, and sometimes a stone would fall and hit the baby.”

Several West African nations have organized campaigns this week to immunize children under five against polio, which is cheap to prevent but cripples for life if not caught. Of the 17 countries that still have polio, 11 are in Africa.

BANDERAS IN ECKS
Antonio Banderas is in final negotiations to star in the action movie Ecks Vs. Sever. The film will mark the English-language debut of Thai helmer Kaos, whose actioner FHA became one of the highest-grossing films in Thai history and won a gaggle of Siamese kudos.

In a script penned by Alan McElroy, Banderas will play Ecks, a covert operative who is locked in mortal combat against his nemesis, Sever. The two agents engage in a vicious and clandestine cat-and-mouse game before realising they must unite to defeat a common enemy. The film is being produced by Franchise Pictures, the company behind Battlefield Earth, and will be distributed domestically by Warner Bros.

Banderas recently inked a deal to star as David Siqueiros in Julie Taymor’s Miramax biopic Frida Kahlo, and will also topline Dimension Films’ Spy Kids with Alan Cumming.

FRANCE, IRAN PICK Oscar NOMS
France has picked The Taste Of Others and Iran has selected A Time For Drunken Horses as their official selections for Oscar foreign-language film entries.

The Taste Of Others, slated to unspool in L.A. and N.Y. in February, is the story of two lovers: a married businessman (Christiane Millet) and an actress (Anne Alvaro).

Distributed by Offline Releasing and Artistic License, the pic, penned by Agnes Jaoui and Jean-Pierre Bacri, was helmed by Jaoui.

Iran’s ...Drunken Horses has been lauded at a bevy of film festivals, from Edinburgh to Toronto, since garnering the Camera d’Or this year in Cannes. The film, from fresh director Bahman Ghobadi, concerns five orphaned siblings who struggle to fend for themselves.

The film, which opened in 16 cities on October 27, as part of the Shooting Gallery Film Series, marks the widest initial release for an Iranian pic in the U.S.

STAR WARS ACTOR TO STAR IN BILLY FURY BIOPIC
Star Wars actor Ewan McGregor is to feature in a new movie about British pop pioneer Billy Fury, the Daily Express reported. McGregor is to make a film biography of the Liverpool tugboat deckhan,d who became a pop icon in the early 1960s with hits such as Halfway to Paradise and Jealousy.

After a succession of hits, Fury disappeared from the limelight because of illness. He died of a heart attack aged 43 as he tried to resurrect his career.
Also starring in the film will be McGregor’s uncle Dennis Lawson, who had a small part in the first Star Wars film. “We should be shooting it next summer, and Dennis and I will be acting together,” McGregor said.

TOMB RAIDER TO BE SHOT AT ANGKOR WAT
Scenes for the action film Tomb Raider, featuring Oscar winner Angelina Jolie, will be shot at Cambodia’s famous Angkor Wat temples. “The government has agreed to allow British Paramount Pictures to shoot Tomb Raider in the Angkor complex,” Som Sokun, director of cinema for the Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts, told Reuters. Based on the popular video game of the same name, filming of Tomb Raider will begin in the last week of November, he said.

The film’s main character, Lara Croft, has two guns slung around her hips, but the Cambodian authorities have said shooting of guns will not be allowed in the 9th-12th century temple complex. “The ministry will not let them shoot guns in the Angkor complex because it is an ancient temple and could get damaged,” Som Sokun said. He said Hollywood star Matt Dillon had applied for permission to film a movie in Cambodia called Beneath the Banyan Tree. “We do not know whe he plans to start filming,” Som Sokun said. Dillon has visited Cambodia several times since the early 1990s, and was in Phnom Penh earlier this month.

The last major production filmed in Cambodia was 1964’s Lord Jim. A French film crew shot scenes for an upcoming movie earlier this year in Phnom Penh, Som Sokun said.

Jolie, daughter of Hollywood actor Jon Voigt, won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for the 1999 film Girl, Interrupted.