BREAKING… Refresh for latest: Actor James Gandolfini died suddenly after a suspected heart attack while on holiday in Rome to attend the Taormina Film Festival in Sicily. He was 51. Gandolfini will be forever known for his portrayal of mob boss Tony Soprano on the seminal HBO series The Sopranos, which eventually won him 3 Emmy Awards and a $1,000,000-an-episode paycheck. Overweight, balding, rough around the edges with a thick New Jersey accent, Gandolfini was the opposite of a marquee leading man, destined to be a character actor. Yet he proved through his masterful acting that he could make Tony Soprano sexy and smart, towering and powerful. Chris Albrecht who greenlighted the crime family saga at HBO in 1999 and approved Gandolfini in the role, just emailed Deadline: “Absolutely stunned. I got the word from Lorraine Bracco and just got off with Brad Grey who had just heard from David Chase. We had all become a family. This is a tremendous loss.” (Grey was the executive producer and Chase the creator of The Sopranos.) And Gandolfini’s managers confirmed the actor’s death. “It is with immense sorrow that we report our client James Gandolfini passed away today while on holiday in Rome, Italy,’ said Mark Armstrong and Nancy Sanders. ”Our hearts are shattered and we will miss him deeply. He and his family were part of our family for many years and we are all ... Read More »

Sopranos star James Gandolfini died suddenly today after a suspected heart attack while on holiday in Rome to attend the Taormina Film Festival in Sicily. He was 51. Read more here. Click on a photo to launch the slideshow.  Read More »

Anthony D’Alessandro is Managing Editor of AwardsLine. After stealing comedic thunder from the goddesses in her 2000 debut as the foul-mouthed Jewish princess Jenny Brier in Sex And The City, Kat Dennings made an impression on the show’s creator, Michael Patrick King. So when King offered Dennings a shot at playing a free-spirited New York waitress in the CBS series 2 Broke Girls, which he co-created with Whitney Cummings, choosing between film or TV was a little easier for the actress. Kind of a Laverne & Shirley for the millennial set, the series finds Dennings is right at home as Max Black, delivering one-liners in the style of Bea Arthur, Megan Mullally or even Fran Drescher. In fact, since her early teens—and without any acting lessons—Dennings has vamped and deadpanned, a natural talent that’s given her the opportunity to work with director Judd Apatow on The 40-Year-Old Virgin and play a supporting comic-relief role in Marvel’s Thor franchise. Related: EMMYS: Comedy Series Overview AwardsLine: You’ve distinguished yourself as a comedic performer with your deadpan cadence. Did you nurture this over time? Dennings: That’s really interesting—I’ve never thought much about that. I guess it’s just how I am. But I know for a fact my older brother Geoffrey is also very much like ... Read More »

Vodaphone Ups Ante In Fight For Germany’s Kabel Deutschland It looks like a battle is brewing for Germany’s largest cable group, Kabel Deutschland. Vodafone has raised its preliminary offer to about €7.5B ($10.1B), Bloomberg sources said. That’s €85 a share compared to the €80-€82 offer that was initially rejected by Kabel. But it’s equal to a preliminary offer made by John Malone’s Liberty Global. Financial Times, meanwhile, reports that Liberty is structuring its bid to offer assets as opposed to cash. Sources told the paper that Liberty, which recently acquired the UK’s Virgin Media for $23.3B, has proposed injecting its existing German cable assets and keeping Kabel’s public listing. This would help circumvent regulatory concerns about combining Germany’s two biggest cable companies. Liberty owns the No. 2 cable outfit, Unitymedia. However, an all-cash offer could have better chances of being approved, a source told Bloomberg. Spain Box Office Has Worst Weekend Ever, Down 25% Year-Over-Year Spanish box office has suffered acutely in the first half of the year. Last weekend was the worst in the nation’s history with only 347,000 tickets sold for €3.7M. That’s 25% off the same weekend last year, according to reports. According to El Pais, Pedro Perez, head of the Spanish producers union FAPAE, said the industry is in “a panic.” Value-added ... Read More »

A female's mating decisions are largely based on traits that reflect fitness or those that help males perform well under the local ecological conditions, a new study has found. Males' bright colors, flashy ornaments, and elaborate songs are examples of fitness-related traits that females appear to have evolved to prefer, according to the study from the National Institute for Mathematical and ...

Lord Macdonald of River Glaven suggested that officials at the Care Quality Commission (CQC) might have committed misconduct in a public office, and said questions should be asked as to whether they could face criminal charges. His comments come after a damning report found the CQC might have deliberately suppressed an internal review which criticised its inspections of University Hospitals of ...

The chemical that makes naked mole rats cancer-proof has been identified by two researchers at the University of Rochester. The findings could eventually lead to new cancer treatments in people, said study authors Andrei Seluanov and Vera Gorbunova. Naked mole rats are small, hairless, subterranean rodents that have never been known to get cancer, despite having a 30-year lifespan. The research ...

Alameda Hospital is exploring an affiliation with the Alameda Health System, which operates Highland, Fairmont and the John George Psychiatric hospitals.The boards of both organizations have signed a letter of intent to pursue a relationship and will have about 90 days to seek public comments and work out the details.Alameda Hospital could benefit financially because the health system would help ...

A female's mating decisions are largely based on traits that reflect fitness or those that help males perform well under the local ecological conditions, a new study has found. Males' bright colors, flashy ornaments, and elaborate songs are examples of fitness-related traits that females appear to have evolved to prefer, according to the study from the National Institute for Mathematical and ...

It is a fate common to great actors whose most enduring success comes on television that the highest praise they receive is actually a trap concealed inside a compliment. Referring to someone’s ';iconic role'; or ';indelible performance'; can be a way of saying that a performer could really do only one thing, and his legacy is that he did it perfectly.With the sudden ...

James Gandolfini was riveting as a sadistic mob hit man in this underrated Quentin Tarantino-penned film (Tony Scott directed). Gandolfini's character Virgil has a brutal motel room fight with Patricia Arquette and delivers a chilling monologue on being an assassin: ''Now, the first time you kill somebody, that's the hardest.... Now...I do it just to watch their f---in' ...

(Reuters) - Fewer drivers will take to the road during the Independence Day holiday in part due to a sluggish economy, but also because people will take less time off, travel group AAA said on ...

A female Chinese astronaut Thursday said from space that she and her crewmates haven't seen any UFOs during the trip. Female astronaut Wang Yaping, one of the three crew members of Shenzhou-10 spacecraft, greeted about 330 primary and middle school students at a Beijing high school through a live video feed system, about 340 km above the Earth, reported Xinhua. "Through the front windows, we ...

A project using facial recognition technology has won two students first prize in a science competition. Yousif Al Hammadi and Nasser Al Rayhi, who are studying computer engineering at Khalifa University, won first place in applied sciences for their project "People Identification Using 3D Facial Images" in the Think Science competition. The competition was organised by the Emirates ...

Crew members of Shenzhou-10 (back L-R) Wang Yaping, Nie Haisheng and Zhang Xiaoguang attend a press conference in Jiuquan, northwest China’s Gansu province on June 10, 2013. China is to send its second woman astronaut into orbit on its longest mission yet, space officials said on June 10, as the country works towards building a space station. AFP PHOTO BEIJING – A Chinese astronaut ...

China has held its first classroom lecture from its orbiting space station as part of efforts to popularize the successful manned space flight program among young people. Female astronaut Wang Yaping took questions live from among 330 elementary and middle school students at a Beijing high school during the 51-minute class from aboard the Tiangong 1 prototype space station on Thursday morning. ...

1993 Tony Scott movie "True Romance." (Warning: Link NSFW.) Gandolfini reunited with Scott for "Crimson Tide" in 1995; that year also found him starring in "Get Shorty" as Bear, a gruff and physical bodyguard with a heart of gold. Other supporting parts in "A Civil Action," "8MM," "She's So Lovely," "The Juror" and ...

Former NDP premier Mike Harcourt recalls Garde Gardom -- a political opponent -- as a man who wouldn't let party differences get in the way of a friendship or personal respect. "He was a very happy warrior," said Harcourt of the former lieutenant-governor and attorney-general, who died Tuesday at age 88. "He was ebullient, positive and very outgoing. "We were friends ...

VICTORIA -- No one who met Garde Gardom was likely to forget the vigorous presence, the town crier's voice, and the ever-present laugh, his head thrown back, him savouring every moment, the original hale-fellow-well-met of the B.C. political scene.Gardom was elected in 1966, defeating Social Credit stalwart Robert Bonner. In the subsequent decade, he was one of a trio of Liberal MLAs who led ...

As big and intimidating as Alonzo Bodden is, he could be an ex-football star, a bodyguard or a hitman, but instead he uses his talents as a ...