Actress, musician and model Clémence Poésy is now to star opposite Michael Caine. Gerard Gilbert meets the rising vedette

I once received a very nice card from an actor who said that my trashing of his performance had made him laugh out loud.

Perhaps it is the boyish face and youthful dexterity of the 39-year-old Irish comedian, but when people talk about Ed Byrne they tend to do so in terms of a school report card. "He showed a lot of promise", suggests a friend just after I had decided in my head that, had he been graded by my old school, he would have been awarded an A for effort and a B minus for attainment.

The actor Sir Patrick Stewart has declared his wish to be allowed an assisted death, and has become a patron of Dignity in Dying, the group campaigning for a change in the law on assisted suicide.

A new touring production of A Midsummer Night's Dream set in a film studio quotes Popeye's "Spinach Song", a snippet of Bellini's "Casta Diva" and The Clovers' "Love Potion No 9".

Broadway is being crippled by an attendance crisis that is forcing many productions to close early, according to the actor Sir Patrick Stewart.

The acting career of Corey Allen was boosted by early roles such as that of the ill-fated high-school gang-leader Buzz Gunderson, who challenges the new boy Jim Stark – played by James Dean – to a "chickie run" in the 1955 film Rebel Without a Cause.

The actor Sir Patrick Stewart said he was "astonished" to find himself in the company of his childhood heroes Sir Laurence Olivier, Sir John Gielgud and Sir Alec Guinness in becoming a theatrical knight as he attended Buckingham Palace yesterday.

It all could have been so different. Nick Clegg mouthing off about the "old politics"; David Cameron insisting that it was "time for change" and Gordon Brown urging the electorate to "beam him up" to Number 10. Or perhaps not.