Film: Rushes

THE FLIRTATION between Hollywood and the English stage appears to be blooming into a heady romance. Having performed, to undiluted critical acclaim, in The Iceman Cometh at the Almeida, Kevin Spacey is to be directed by Sam Mendes, in a Dreamworks black comedy.

According to Variety, the artistic director of the Donmar Warehouse will begin shooting the low-budget movie in December. Spacey will play a forty- something married man who resolves his mid-life crisis by reinventing himself as a muscle-bound hunk.

To complete the Hollywood-West End connection, The Blue Room, Mendes's latest production, stars - in case you have missed all the Sunday supplements for the last six months - Nicole Kidman.

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"BEWARE: PSYCHIATRISTS at work." That is the message that over a quarter of a million figures in showbiz all over the world received last week. According to the Los Angeles Times, the missive from a Scientology-associated group lays the blame for a number of high-profile deaths - including, amongst others, Billie Holliday, Ernest Hemingway, Kurt Cobain, Marilyn Monroe and John Lennon - at the door of psychiatry and psychological practices.

Specifically, the letter, which came from the self-styled Citizens Commission on Human Rights International and whose signatories (according to the article in the LA Times) included actresses Anne Archer and Juliette Lewis, revealed its authors' aims to be "exposing and eradicating criminal acts and human rights abuses [perpetrated] by psychiatry all over the world".

Among the most recent victims of malevolent shrink wrong-doing, says the letter, were the blockbuster producer Don Simpson, the comedian Chris Farley, and INXS singer Michael Hutchence.