The Hunger Games star Jennifer Lawrence revealed to NY Daily News yesterday she was discovered by a talent scout while on holiday in Manhattan at 14.
The Kentucky-born actress said she was walking in Union Square with her mother when the scout approached her.
"It wasn't creepy, he just wanted to take a picture," the 21-year-old told the Daily News. "Then all these agencies started calling and we just kind of went out of boredom."
Lawrence's breakthrough role was in 2010's Winter's Bone, which earned her an Oscar nomination.
She is the lead star of the much-anticipated film adaptation of The Hunger Games, opening on Thursday in UAE cinemas.
Horse racing drama Luck is cancelled
HBO has abruptly cancelled its racetrack drama series Luck after three horses were injured and put down during 10 months of filming.
The drama about the underbelly of racing starred Dustin Hoffman in his first TV series, as a crime boss scheming to bring casino gambling to a track.
Luck fell far short of an HBO hit such as The Sopranos, drawing as few as 500,000 viewers for a weekly debut showing.
In addition, it was hit by bad publicity that only the most successful project could justify enduring.
Among the organisations condemning the equine deaths was People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, which called oversight of the animals' welfare inadequate and alleged that old, unfit horses were being overworked.
Luck ends its single-season run on Sunday in the US.
Charlize Theron adopts son
The actress Charlize Theron has adopted a baby boy and will raise the child as a single parent, her spokeswoman announced last week.
"Charlize has adopted a child. She is the proud mom of a healthy baby boy named Jackson," read the statement. No further details were released.
The boy is Theron's first child. The 36-year-old split with her long-term boyfriend Stuart Townsend in 2010.
Winfrey axes Rosie O'Donnell show
Oprah Winfrey's OWN network is dropping the curtain on The Rosie Show after just five months. The show premiered in October to around 500,000 viewers but lost about half that audience within days of its debut.
In a statement released by OWN, Winfrey called O'Donnell "an incredible partner" who worked to put on the best show "every single day".
O'Donnell was quoted as saying she loved working with Winfrey and "wished the show was able to attract more viewers".
The final episode will be broadcast on March 30.
Norah Jones plays new album at festival
Ten years after she shook the 2002 South By Southwest music festival with Come Away With Me, Norah Jones returned to Austin, Texas, on Saturday to play her entire new album Little Broken Hearts.
"It's a little scary sharing these songs with new people, but we're all friends, right?" she asked a crowd of a few hundred.
Jones thought Austin – in her home state of Texas – was the perfect place to share her 12-song album, to be released on May 1.
"Is it weird hearing music you've never heard before?" she asked.
Dressed in a black-and-white striped dress and beige cowboy boots, Jones joked: "New album, new band, new dress."
Film prises lid off Myanmar
A documentary by a 71-year-old American professor chronicles daily life in what has long been one of the world's most-repressed places, examining its grinding poverty and tragic decades of military rule.
Robert Lieberman's They Call it Myanmar: Lifting the Curtain is a result of a trip to train local filmmakers; all the while the Cornell University physics professor shot his own documentary on the sly. Part documentary, part travelogue, the film absorbs the country's charms and cruelties and spills them out with disarming curiosity. The film is showing at selected cinemas in the US.