Byline: PAUL SCOTT
FOR Hollywood's right-on set, the gala premiere this week of a documentary about the plight of Sudanese tribesmen was the highlight of the socially-conscious calendar.
As Nicole Kidman and fellow actor Edward Norton mingled with the A-list crowd, a fragile and hunched figure frantically pushed her way through the melee until she alighted upon the African 'stars' of the film, standing alone in a tight huddle.
Then, after waiting for the paparazzi to line up in front of her, Angelina Jolie bestowed a beatific smile on this somewhat bemused contingent as the flashguns popped around them.
For the divine Miss Jolie it was just too good a photo opportunity to pass up - not least because it provided her with the ammunition for another salvo in a bitter (but oh so entertaining) feud over who can truly claim the title of Tinseltown's self-appointed angel of mercy.
Her opponent for the crown is none other than the Queen of Pop herself, Madonna. Such is the level of vitriol between the two stars that the pillow-lipped Miss Jolie broke cover this week to accuse her rival of 'illegally' adopting her one-year-old Malawian son, David Banda.
Miss Jolie's attack came after the singer went on the offensive herself, branding Miss Jolie and her boyfriend, Brad Pitt, as 'idiots' after they declared their ambition to build their own 'rainbow coalition' of international adoptees.
Little wonder Hollywood is lapping up this delicious catfight between two of the world's biggest female stars, especially as, if rumours are to be believed, it is lent added spice by something of a Sapphic frisson.
The Mail has learnt that a lipstick lesbian is writing a no-holds-barred book in which she will describe in graphic detail how she was a lover of the stunning actress and the singer at the same time.
Jenny Shimizu, a 39-year-old model, will allege that Madonna flew her around the world for secret liaisons before she married the film director Guy Ritchie. Their affair, she says, coincided with an equally passionate fling with the leggy Miss Jolie.
All steamy stuff, and the discovery that they are alleged to have been competitors for the affections of the crop-haired Miss Shimizu will, doubtless, do nothing to improve relations between the two stars.
They fell out after 31-year-old Jolie, who has herself adopted two children from the Third World, counselled Madonna over her plans to adopt a baby of her own.
The singer's friends say she was inundated with a flurry of hectoring emails from the campaigning Miss Jolie after Pitt, who is friends with Ritchie, persuaded the couple over dinner that they should consider giving a home to a child.
BUT when Miss Jolie heard that the Ritchies were planning to take on an African child, she is said to have insisted that they secretly visit orphanages in Ethiopia where Miss Jolie found her daughter, Zahara, almost two. (She also has a five-year-old Cambodian son, Maddox, as well as her natural baby daughter by Pitt, Shiloh.) It was not advice Madonna was inclined to take.
Instead, amid a frenzy of publicity, she travelled to Malawi in October to carry out the controversial adoption of baby David.
The snub did not go down well with Miss Jolie.
Within days, she was bemoaning to friends the trend of celebrities 'jumping on the adoption bandwagon' to buy themselves positive publicity, although she pointedly refused to name Madonna.
Then, this week, the Oscar-winning actress waded in, telling a French magazine: 'Madonna knew the situation in Malawi, where he (David) was born.
It is a country where there is no legal framework for adoption. Personally, I prefer to stay on the right side of the law. I would never take a child away from a place where adoption is illegal.' Unsurprisingly, Madonna is said to be ' apoplectic' over the remarks, particularly as she has yet to be granted full custody of David and is facing a renewed onslaught from human rights groups in Malawi who say she and Ritchie used their celebrity and a [pounds sterling]1.7 million donation to the orphanage where David lived to bypass the law governing adoptions by foreigners.
At the same time, she has been hit by revelations this week that she is paying the tuition fees for a Malawian government official whose colleagues helped the singer with the adoption. Madonna reportedly agreed to fund civil servant Willard Manjolo's degree at Swansea University in June last year, four months before she was given the allclear to bring the boy home to Britain.
The revelations come as David's father, Yohane Banda, complained this week that he can't contact the 48-year-old singer to find out about his son.
'I don't have her phone and mailing addresses,' he told a Malawian newspaper. 'All I want is to find out how my son is, but I don't know how I can do it.' Hardly the best time, then, for Miss Jolie's highly public comments, which came barely a month after she criticised David's adoption in another magazine interview.
That caused Madonna to respond with a stinging swipe of her own, in which she openly ridiculed Miss Jolie and Pitt over their scheme to build an orphanage in India. She said: 'I'm not interested in going there like an idiot and going, "OK, I'm going to build ten orphanages and I'll see you guys later".
'I've joined the UN and become an ambassador, visited various countries and just showed up and smiled and looked concerned. But that's not getting to the root of the problem and neither is building orphan care centres.' That wounding riposte is reported to have left Miss Jolie - herself an ambassador for the UN High Commission for Refugees - seething, with a friend saying: 'Angelina is shocked. She can't believe it. She was asking: "Where did that come from?" It just seemed like a very personal attack.
'Angelina thinks the worst part of it all is that Madonna could have used the opportunity to say something that could actually be of benefit to someone.' Nor have some inside Madonna's camp stopped there. Publicly, her fiercely protective publicist Liz Rosenberg played down the rift this week, but added pointedly: 'True, it might have been easier had Madonna adopted a child from another country, but Madonna doesn't shy away from things because they are difficult.' Privately, however, others in her camp laid into Miss Jolie, with one saying sneeringly: 'Angelina seems to think she has got a monopoly on being the good Samaritan, but quite frankly criticising Madonna for adopting David is a case of the pot and the kettle.' Indeed, Miss Jolie might not be on the safest of ground, given that the U.S.based agency she employed to organise her adoption of her son Maddox in 2002 was later found to be the front for a baby-trafficking and money-laundering outfit.
TWO years later, Lauryn Galindo, the boss of Seattle International Adoptions, was sentenced to 18 months in a U.S. jail for visa fraud.
While American parents such as Miss Jolie paid an average of [pounds sterling]7,000 to the company to arrange the adoptions of Cambodian 'orphans', many of the children were bought from their dirt-poor parents for as little as a bag of rice.
When the scandal was exposed, the U.S. government and several other countries shut down adoptions from Cambodia, although it should be said Miss Jolie knew nothing of the illegal trade and there is no evidence Maddox was not an orphan.
Nor has it tempered the actress's desire to add to her multinational menagerie, dubbed the United Colours of Brangelina (the nickname for the couple, merging 'Brad' and 'Angelina').
Indeed, this week Miss Jolie was saying publicly that she wants at least 13 adopted children while she bizarrely described Shiloh, her seven-month-old natural daughter, as 'a blob'.
'I feel so much more for Mad and Zee because they're survivors,' said Miss Jolie. 'They came through so much. Shiloh seemed so privileged from the moment she was born.' Hardly typical maternal sentiments. But then friends close to the star couple, who fell for each other on the set of the film Mr And Mrs Smith two years ago while 43-year-old Pitt was still married to actress Jennifer Aniston, paint a somewhat colourful picture of life with the decidedly odd Miss Jolie.
They say that she recently walked out of the minimalist Malibu mansion she shares with Pitt and left him minding the children while she checked into the suite of a Beverly Hills hotel - to learn French. They also told the Mail she complained that she had been trying to concentrate on her studies, but was being disturbed by her children. She was, apparently, away for some days.
Meanwhile, she is said to insist that she and Pitt regularly fly their single-engine Cirrus SR22 plane to a ramshackle airfield in the middle of the Californian desert, where they pick up motorcycles and spend several days sleeping rough to 'reconnect' with nature.
NOT that the couple aren't also prone to the usual Hollywood excesses. Three months ago they spent [pounds sterling]200,000 on works by trendy British 'guerilla artist' Banksy at a show in Los Angeles.
One, a bust of a man with a bleeding bullet hole in the forehead, set them back [pounds sterling]40,000 and they also shelled out [pounds sterling]120,000 on a painting called Picnic, which depicts a white family of four lunching under an umbrella while 15 starving Africans look on.
The irony of their own conspicuous consumption was, it seems, lost on the couple.
But in true humanitarian style, the pair spurned festive celebrations to spend Christmas Day with refugees (and an invited camera crew) in Costa Rica.
Meanwhile, it seems it is Pitt who takes on the bulk of childcare chez Brangelina, with the actress letting slip in the same interview this week: 'Each morning I'm woken by Brad, who gets agitated by changing the nappies of Zahara and Shiloh at the same time.' Hardly surprising, then, that the formerly high-living Pitt chose to spend a New Year holiday drinking beer with a bunch of male friends on a yacht in the Virgin Islands.
Nor is it surprising that rumours about the state of their relationship continue, particularly as twice-married Miss Jolie insists she has no intention of making it legal.
At the same time the actress is looking increasingly skinny, with newspapers running pictures this week of bulging veins in her bony arms and hands, which experts blame on her punishing exercise regime. It is not, it's fair to say, a good look, but ironically it is shared by her rival Madonna whose dedication to working out has had the same unsightly effect.
Which brings us back to that feud and Madonna's insistence that - not content with one adopted child to add to her own children, Lourdes, ten, and Rocco, six - she now plans to return to Malawi to adopt a baby girl.
Would it be too cynical to suggest that, not to be outdone, we can expect a reciprocal (and highly public) act of compassion from the determined Miss Jolie some time in the near future?
MOTHER OF ALL CATFIGHTS; They share a passion for adopting foreign babies-as well as, rumour had it, the same lesbian lover. So why are Angelina and Madonna caught up in Hollywood's fiercest slanging match?
Byline: PAUL SCOTT
FOR Hollywood's right-on set, the gala premiere this week of a documentary about the plight of Sudanese tribesmen was the highlight of the socially-conscious calendar.
As Nicole Kidman and fellow actor Edward Norton mingled with the A-list crowd, a fragile and hunched figure frantically pushed her way through the melee until she alighted upon the African 'stars' of the film, standing alone in a tight huddle.
Then, after waiting for the paparazzi to line up in front of her, Angelina Jolie bestowed a beatific smile on this somewhat bemused contingent as the flashguns popped around them.
For the divine Miss Jolie it was just too good a photo opportunity to pass up - not least because it provided her with the ammunition for another salvo in a bitter (but oh so entertaining) feud over who can truly claim the title of Tinseltown's self-appointed angel of mercy.
Her opponent for the crown is none other than the Queen of Pop herself, Madonna. Such is the level of vitriol between the two stars that the pillow-lipped Miss Jolie broke cover this week to accuse her rival of 'illegally' adopting her one-year-old Malawian son, David Banda.
Miss Jolie's attack came after the singer went on the offensive herself, branding Miss Jolie and her boyfriend, Brad Pitt, as 'idiots' after they declared their ambition to build their own 'rainbow coalition' of international adoptees.
Little wonder Hollywood is lapping up this delicious catfight between two of the world's biggest female stars, especially as, if rumours are to be believed, it is lent added spice by something of a Sapphic frisson.
The Mail has learnt that a lipstick lesbian is writing a no-holds-barred book in which she will describe in graphic detail how she was a lover of the stunning actress and the singer at the same time.
Jenny Shimizu, a 39-year-old model, will allege that Madonna flew her around the world for secret liaisons before she married the film director Guy Ritchie. Their affair, she says, coincided with an equally passionate fling with the leggy Miss Jolie.
All steamy stuff, and the discovery that they are alleged to have been competitors for the affections of the crop-haired Miss Shimizu will, doubtless, do nothing to improve relations between the two stars.
They fell out after 31-year-old Jolie, who has herself adopted two children from the Third World, counselled Madonna over her plans to adopt a baby of her own.
The singer's friends say she was inundated with a flurry of hectoring emails from the campaigning Miss Jolie after Pitt, who is friends with Ritchie, persuaded the couple over dinner that they should consider giving a home to a child.
BUT when Miss Jolie heard that the Ritchies were planning to take on an African child, she is said to have insisted that they secretly visit orphanages in Ethiopia where Miss Jolie found her daughter, Zahara, almost two. (She also has a five-year-old Cambodian son, Maddox, as well as her natural baby daughter by Pitt, Shiloh.) It was not advice Madonna was inclined to take.
Instead, amid a frenzy of publicity, she travelled to Malawi in October to carry out the controversial adoption of baby David.
The snub did not go down well with Miss Jolie.
Within days, she was bemoaning to friends the trend of celebrities 'jumping on the adoption bandwagon' to buy themselves positive publicity, although she pointedly refused to name Madonna.
Then, this week, the Oscar-winning actress waded in, telling a French magazine: 'Madonna knew the situation in Malawi, where he (David) was born.
It is a country where there is no legal framework for adoption. Personally, I prefer to stay on the right side of the law. I would never take a child away from a place where adoption is illegal.' Unsurprisingly, Madonna is said to be ' apoplectic' over the remarks, particularly as she has yet to be granted full custody of David and is facing a renewed onslaught from human rights groups in Malawi who say she and Ritchie used their celebrity and a [pounds sterling]1.7 million donation to the orphanage where David lived to bypass the law governing adoptions by foreigners.
At the same time, she has been hit by revelations this week that she is paying the tuition fees for a Malawian government official whose colleagues helped the singer with the adoption. Madonna reportedly agreed to fund civil servant Willard Manjolo's degree at Swansea University in June last year, four months before she was given the allclear to bring the boy home to Britain.
The revelations come as David's father, Yohane Banda, complained this week that he can't contact the 48-year-old singer to find out about his son.
'I don't have her phone and mailing addresses,' he told a Malawian newspaper. 'All I want is to find out how my son is, but I don't know how I can do it.' Hardly the best time, then, for Miss Jolie's highly public comments, which came barely a month after she criticised David's adoption in another magazine interview.
That caused Madonna to respond with a stinging swipe of her own, in which she openly ridiculed Miss Jolie and Pitt over their scheme to build an orphanage in India. She said: 'I'm not interested in going there like an idiot and going, "OK, I'm going to build ten orphanages and I'll see you guys later".
'I've joined the UN and become an ambassador, visited various countries and just showed up and smiled and looked concerned. But that's not getting to the root of the problem and neither is building orphan care centres.' That wounding riposte is reported to have left Miss Jolie - herself an ambassador for the UN High Commission for Refugees - seething, with a friend saying: 'Angelina is shocked. She can't believe it. She was asking: "Where did that come from?" It just seemed like a very personal attack.
'Angelina thinks the worst part of it all is that Madonna could have used the opportunity to say something that could actually be of benefit to someone.' Nor have some inside Madonna's camp stopped there. Publicly, her fiercely protective publicist Liz Rosenberg played down the rift this week, but added pointedly: 'True, it might have been easier had Madonna adopted a child from another country, but Madonna doesn't shy away from things because they are difficult.' Privately, however, others in her camp laid into Miss Jolie, with one saying sneeringly: 'Angelina seems to think she has got a monopoly on being the good Samaritan, but quite frankly criticising Madonna for adopting David is a case of the pot and the kettle.' Indeed, Miss Jolie might not be on the safest of ground, given that the U.S.based agency she employed to organise her adoption of her son Maddox in 2002 was later found to be the front for a baby-trafficking and money-laundering outfit.
TWO years later, Lauryn Galindo, the boss of Seattle International Adoptions, was sentenced to 18 months in a U.S. jail for visa fraud.
While American parents such as Miss Jolie paid an average of [pounds sterling]7,000 to the company to arrange the adoptions of Cambodian 'orphans', many of the children were bought from their dirt-poor parents for as little as a bag of rice.
When the scandal was exposed, the U.S. government and several other countries shut down adoptions from Cambodia, although it should be said Miss Jolie knew nothing of the illegal trade and there is no evidence Maddox was not an orphan.
Nor has it tempered the actress's desire to add to her multinational menagerie, dubbed the United Colours of Brangelina (the nickname for the couple, merging 'Brad' and 'Angelina').
Indeed, this week Miss Jolie was saying publicly that she wants at least 13 adopted children while she bizarrely described Shiloh, her seven-month-old natural daughter, as 'a blob'.
'I feel so much more for Mad and Zee because they're survivors,' said Miss Jolie. 'They came through so much. Shiloh seemed so privileged from the moment she was born.' Hardly typical maternal sentiments. But then friends close to the star couple, who fell for each other on the set of the film Mr And Mrs Smith two years ago while 43-year-old Pitt was still married to actress Jennifer Aniston, paint a somewhat colourful picture of life with the decidedly odd Miss Jolie.
They say that she recently walked out of the minimalist Malibu mansion she shares with Pitt and left him minding the children while she checked into the suite of a Beverly Hills hotel - to learn French. They also told the Mail she complained that she had been trying to concentrate on her studies, but was being disturbed by her children. She was, apparently, away for some days.
Meanwhile, she is said to insist that she and Pitt regularly fly their single-engine Cirrus SR22 plane to a ramshackle airfield in the middle of the Californian desert, where they pick up motorcycles and spend several days sleeping rough to 'reconnect' with nature.
NOT that the couple aren't also prone to the usual Hollywood excesses. Three months ago they spent [pounds sterling]200,000 on works by trendy British 'guerilla artist' Banksy at a show in Los Angeles.
One, a bust of a man with a bleeding bullet hole in the forehead, set them back [pounds sterling]40,000 and they also shelled out [pounds sterling]120,000 on a painting called Picnic, which depicts a white family of four lunching under an umbrella while 15 starving Africans look on.
The irony of their own conspicuous consumption was, it seems, lost on the couple.
But in true humanitarian style, the pair spurned festive celebrations to spend Christmas Day with refugees (and an invited camera crew) in Costa Rica.
Meanwhile, it seems it is Pitt who takes on the bulk of childcare chez Brangelina, with the actress letting slip in the same interview this week: 'Each morning I'm woken by Brad, who gets agitated by changing the nappies of Zahara and Shiloh at the same time.' Hardly surprising, then, that the formerly high-living Pitt chose to spend a New Year holiday drinking beer with a bunch of male friends on a yacht in the Virgin Islands.
Nor is it surprising that rumours about the state of their relationship continue, particularly as twice-married Miss Jolie insists she has no intention of making it legal.
At the same time the actress is looking increasingly skinny, with newspapers running pictures this week of bulging veins in her bony arms and hands, which experts blame on her punishing exercise regime. It is not, it's fair to say, a good look, but ironically it is shared by her rival Madonna whose dedication to working out has had the same unsightly effect.
Which brings us back to that feud and Madonna's insistence that - not content with one adopted child to add to her own children, Lourdes, ten, and Rocco, six - she now plans to return to Malawi to adopt a baby girl.
Would it be too cynical to suggest that, not to be outdone, we can expect a reciprocal (and highly public) act of compassion from the determined Miss Jolie some time in the near future?
