Comedienne Jo Brand (39) - known for her anti-male jokes - secretly married her boyfriend just before Christmas. The star of Channel 4's Through The Cakehole wed psychiatric nurse Bernie Bourke, according to the Sun.
Helen Mirren (51), star of Prime Suspect, also married - just seven hours before the year ended. Mirren wed Taylor Hackford on his 53rd birthday in Scotland.
French pop singers Mireille Mathieu and Sylvie Vartan, along with World Cup ski champion Luc Alphand, were among those yesterday awarded the Legion d'Honneur. The award, created by Napoleon Bo- naparte in 1802, is handed out by President Jacques Chirac.
Italian soldiers were spared from attack in Beirut in 1983 because of a Syrian general's crush on actress Gina Lollobrigida, a newspaper reported yesterday. Syrian Defence Minister Mustafa Tlass told the daily Al- Bayane that he had been an admirer of Lollobrigida since his youth.
"During Israel's invasion of Lebanon . . . I gathered the Lebanese resistance leaders together and told them: do whatever you want with the US, British and other forces, but I do not want a single Italian soldier to be hurt," Tlass said. "[Druze warlord] Walid Jumblatt asked me why the Italians in particular. I replied: `Because I do not want a single tear falling from the eyes of Gina Lollobrigida'."
Bathroom giant Armitage Shanks is to create a museum dedicated to lavatories.
Among the exhibits will be an Armitage china bed pan recovered from a ship which sank in the River Clyde in the last century.