Something in Common : Dracula & Rupert Murdoch

Russell Crowe may be in the frame to play Count Dracula in the 37th film about the legendary Transylvania but he is also tipped to play Rupert Murdoch in a planned film based on the memoirs of journalist Sir Harold Evans.

Harold Evans

Evans was the editor of the Sunday Times from 1967 to 1981 when Rupert Murdoch purchased Times Newspapers after a secret meeting with then PM Margaret Thacher, a fact just revealed in the Leveson Inquiry. He was appointed editor of The Times by Murdoch after extracting an agreement that Rupert would have no editorial input. That feel apart within a year and  Evans resigned, writing his auto-biography Good Times Bad Times in 1984.
He now lives in New York with his wife Tina Brown the former Vanity Fair editor and their 2 children.

Playing Evans will be the thinking woman's heart throb Colin Firth. This will be the second time an Aussie actor has played the Citizen Kane of the Antipodes. In the excellent TV  series Selling Hitler based on the phony Hitler Diaries and broadcast in 1991, Dame Edna Everage's manager Barry Humphries was cast as Murdoch. Rupert agreed to the purchase of the diaries after they were endorsed by the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper who later expressed reservations before publication. Despite being informed that the diaries were fakes, Murdoch famously said "publish them anyway, after all we're in show business".

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Dame Edna stars in The Hobbit

Maybe not Dame Edna Everage but her manager (and many say  the two have never been seen in the same room at the same time) Barry Humphries is to join the cast of The Hobbit.

The Peter Jackson $500M movie starts filming next March in New Zealand and Humphries will play the Goblin King.

It's not Barry's first acting role. He appeared as Rupert Murdoch in the 1980's TV series 'Selling Hitler' about the scandal involving the Sunday Times newspaper and the fake Hitler diaries, the Kath & Kim movie and Barry McKenzie Holds His Own based on the Private Eye magazine comic script.

Humphries contributed some immortal lines to the 2 McKenzie films such as when McKenzie is collared at a London party by a pompous  Hooray Henry who asks him : "tell me Mr McKenzie, is it true Australia is full of homosexuals?" to which McKenzie replies:
"No that's just the publicity we put out to attract the Pommy migrants"

Tomorrow at mid-day Dame Edna Everage will give a twenty minute talk at the Black & White charity committee's Woman of Achievement lunch. The Shuttle bring carry a full report.

In the meantime-here is a slice of Aussie culture from a Barry McKenzie fillum with the wonderful John le Mesurier.
And if you think that's an exaggeration  : In 2007 newly elected PM Kevin Rudd dumped former PM John Howard's 'migrant test' that required prospective migrants to know amongst other things who Don Bradman and Mervyn Richardson were!.( Richardson invented a lawn mower).