The role of comic strip heroine Modesty Blaise, reportedly turned down by Uma Thurman because it involved nudity, has gone to the virtually unknown actress Natasha Henstridge (left). Ms Henstridge is best known for playing an alien sex fiend in the science fiction film Species.

When the Bolshoi Ballet first hit America in the late 1950s, tickets were like gold dust. So how come, last year in Las Vegas, they were playing to 6,770 empty seats a night?

ROCK

MAXIMOVA & VASILIEV AT THE BOLSHOI by Roberta Lazzarini, Dancebooks pounds 20

23 December

Mary Wright reads a first novel that's in love with rock journalism; The Lonely Planet Boy by Barney Hoskyns Serpent's Tail, pounds 8.99

Contact Theatre, Manchester

Alexander Godunov was a dancer of handsome stature and blond good looks. He possessed a virtuoso technique and enjoyed a career of glamorous highlights in ballet and film; but his triumphs were short-lived.

For Yuri Grigorovich and the Bolshoi, time stood still. No new productions, same old ballerina - that's his wife, Natalia Bessmertnova, he's putting through her paces. Then enter stage left, his successor Vladimir Vasiliev. LOUISE LEVENE reports on a Yeltsin coup. Photographs by LAURIE LEWIS

ON TUESDAY they cut the power at the Powerhaus. The Islington club closed down, and there to administer the Last Rites were The Damned. Appropriate, really: they played their first farewell gig in 1978 and seem to have been doing them almost soli dly ever since. To make the mood even cheerier, drummer Rat Scabies dedicated the show to Peter Cook. The crowd wore black. But then, they always do.

MOSCOW - Russia has been - more or less - a free country for some time now, but little islands of dictatorship persist. One is at the Bolshoi ballet where, critics say, the artistic director and choreographer, Yuri Grigorovich, still rules with a Stalin-like grip. Even here, it seems, the winds of democracy may be about to start blowing.

Tchaikovsky Romances: Olga Borodina (Philips, CD). A seductive recital from the fast-rising Kirov mezzo. MW

IN 1925, the Japanese Ministry of Culture raised the crane to the position of a national monument in an attempt to prevent the extinction of one of the country's most sacred birds. By then, what were thought to be the last 12 cranes left in Japan were surviving in the swampy area around Kushiro on the island of Hokkaido, where they had fled to escape being shot and cooked for dinner. (Eating crane was a privilege once reserved for the Emperor on New Year's Day, but gradually it became a widespread delicacy.) Today, some of the descendants of those 12 cranes live on a reservation in the same area, looked after by its director, Ryoji Takahashi, who for the past 37 years has studied their behaviour and mating habits, and in the process has become almost an honorary crane himself.

Yuri Grigorovich interviews on autopilot. One more question and you expect him to confine himself to name, rank and serial number. Weary of press criticism and pathologically contemptuous of journalists, he is never the ideal subject. After six weeks of largely hostile reviews, a frosty reception seemed inevitable. I was led into his den in a warm basement bunker below the Albert Hall where he sat flanked by his smiling interpreter and his impresario Derek Block. This was their chance to point out that the Bolshoi's season has been a financial and popular success.