Category: 5. Entertainment

Mammograms can find cancer early before symptoms appear. Regular screening decreases the risk of dying from breast cancer. But a recent survey question by the Annenberg Public Policy Center shows that some Americans appear to be confused about when women with an average risk of breast cancer should begin a regimen of regular mammograms.

Women with an average risk of breast cancer should begin to have mammograms every other year beginning at age 40, according to the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, which issued an updated recommendation on April 30, 2024, in the Journal of the American Medical Association, formalizing an earlier draft proposal. The recommendation applies to women from ages 40 to 74.

Founded in 1984, the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force is “an independent, volunteer panel of national experts in prevention and evidence-based medicine.” It offers guidance to federal health agencies and, through the Affordable Care Act, essentially determines which preventive services should be covered by insurers. 

Guidance from major medical organizations on what age to begin regular mammograms has changed over the years – from 40 to 50 and then back to 40 again. While a start date of age 40 is widely recommended, some medical organizations have put forth other recommendations. The American Cancer Society, for instance, advises that women with average risk have the option to start screening every year from age 40 to 44, then should have mammograms annually from 45 to 54 years old, and then continue with mammograms every other year.

The Annenberg Public Policy Center (APPC)’s health survey, conducted with a sample of over 1,600 U.S. adults in April, finds that nearly half of those surveyed (49%) know that age 40 is when women at an average risk of breast cancer should begin to have mammograms every other year. But 10% say they should begin at age 20; 21% say age 30; 8% age 50; and 11% are not sure.

Confusion can arise when medical guidance about detection or treatment changes, as it has in recent years with mammograms. Our data suggest that the recommendation that such screening ordinarily start at 40 years old is not yet widely enough known.”

Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania

In our April 2024 survey, conducted before the task force lowered its recommendation from age 50 to age 40, the overall finding was the same: 49% thought the correct age was 40. That was not the recommended age at that time, though it is today with the updated medical advice.

More uncertainty among younger women

Among the women surveyed, nearly three-quarters (72%) who are ages 40-49 years old know that regular mammograms should begin at age 40. About 6 in 10 women age 30-39 years old (63%) and 50-74 years old (59%) know this as well (the percentage difference between them is not statistically significant). Younger women are the least well-informed about when to begin mammograms – among women 18-29 years old, just over a third (37%) know the correct age.

In addition, more younger women say they are not sure what the correct age is. The survey finds that 16% of women 18-29 years old and 11% of women 30-39 years old are not sure at what age to begin having mammograms. There is no statistically significant difference between those two age groups – but both differ significantly from the very small percentage of women 40-49 years (1%) who are not sure of the age to being having mammograms.

Among 18- to 29-year-old women, the most commonly selected incorrect age for when to begin regular mammography is 30 years old (selected by 27%) – a decade earlier than recommended. Among women 30-39 years old, those who are approaching the recommended start age for mammograms of 40 years old, the most commonly selected incorrect age is 50 years old (selected by 12%) – a decade later than current recommendations.

APPC’s Annenberg Science and Public Health knowledge survey

The survey data come from the 24th wave of a nationally representative panel of 1,653 U.S. adults conducted for the Annenberg Public Policy Center by SSRS, an independent market research company. Most have been empaneled since April 2021. To account for attrition, replenishment samples have been added over time using a random probability sampling design. The most recent replenishment, in September 2024, added 360 respondents to the sample. This wave of the Annenberg Science and Public Health (ASAPH) survey was fielded April 15-28, 2025. The margin of sampling error (MOE) is ± 3.4 percentage points at the 95% confidence level. All figures are rounded to the nearest whole number and may not add to 100%. Combined subcategories may not add to totals in the topline and text due to rounding.

The actor Lea Thompson has had a distinguished screen career but hesitated to share it with her daughters when they were growing up. “I did not show them most of my stuff because I end up kissing people all the time and it was traumatic to my children,” she recalls. “Even when they were little the headline was, ‘Mom is kissing someone that’s not Dad and it’s making me cry!’”

Thompson’s most celebrated role would be especially hard to explain. As Lorraine Baines in Back to the Future, she falls in lust with her own son, Marty McFly, a teenage time traveller from 1985 who plunges into 1955 at the wheel of a DeLorean car.

Back to the Future, released 40 years ago on Thursday, is both entirely of its time and entirely timeless. It was a box office summer smash, set a benchmark for time travel movies and was quoted by everyone from President Ronald Reagan to Avengers: Endgame. It is arguably a perfect film, without a duff note or a scene out of place, a fantastic parable as endlessly watchable as It’s a Wonderful Life or Groundhog Day.

It also, inevitably, reflects the preoccupations of its day. An early sequence features Libyan terrorists from the era of Muammar Gaddafi, a caricature wisely dropped from a stage musical adaptation. In one scene the young George McFly turns peeping tom as he spies on Lorraine getting undressed. To some, the film’s ending equates personal fulfilment with Reagan-fuelled materialism. It caught lightning in a bottle in a way that is unrepeatable.

“If you made Back to the Future in 2025 and they went back 30 years, it would be 1995 and nothing would look that different,” Thompson, 64, says by phone from a shoot in Vancouver, Canada. “The phones would be different but it wouldn’t be like the strange difference between the 80s and the 50s and how different the world was.”

Bob Gale, co-writer of the screenplay, agrees everything fell into the right place at the right time, including the central partnership between young Marty (Michael J Fox) and white-haired scientist Doc Brown (Christopher Lloyd). The 74-year-old says from Los Angeles: “Oh man, the film wouldn’t even be made today. We’d go into the studio and they’d say, what’s the deal with this relationship between Marty and Doc? They’d start interpreting paedophilia or something. There would be a lot of things they have problems with.”

Gale had met the film’s director, Robert Zemeckis, at the USC School of Cinema in 1972 and together they sold several TV scripts to Universal Studios, caught the eye of Steven Spielberg and John Milius and collaborated on three films. The pair had always wanted to make a time travel movie but couldn’t find the right hook. Then Gale had an epiphany.

“We put a time travel story on the back burner until I found my dad’s high school yearbook and boom, that was when the lightning bolt hit me and I said, ha, this would be cool: kid goes back in time and ends up in high school with his dad!”

Gale and Zemeckis pitched the script more than 40 times over four years but studios found it too risky or risque. But Spielberg saw its potential and came in as executive producer. After Zemeckis scored a hit with Romancing the Stone in 1984, Universal gave the green light.

The character of Doc Brown was inspired by Gale’s childhood neighbour, a photographer who showed him the “magic” of developing pictures in a darkroom, and the educational TV show Mr Wizard which demonstrated scientific principles. Then Lloyd came in and added an interpretation based on part Albert Einstein, part Leopold Stokowski.

Thompson was cast as Lorraine after a successful audition. She felt that her background as a ballet and modern dancer gave her a strong awareness of the movement and physicality required to play both versions of Lorraine: one young and airy, the other middle-aged and beaten down by life.

“I was perfectly poised for that character,” she says. “I understood both the dark and the light of Lorraine McFly and understood the hilarity of being super sexually attracted to your son. I thought that was frickin’ hilarious. I understood the subversive comedy of it.”

Thompson has previously worked with Eric Stoltz, who was cast in the lead role of Marty at the behest of Sidney Sheinberg, a Universal executive who had nurtured Spielberg and put Jaws into production. But over weeks of filming, starting in November 1984, it became apparent that Stoltz’s serious tone was not working.

Gale recalls: “He wasn’t giving us the kind of humour that we thought the character should have. He actually thought the movie turned out to be a tragedy because he ends up in a 1985 where a lot of his life is different. People can argue about that: did the memories of his new past ripple into his brain, did he remember both his lives? That’s an interesting conversation to have and it gets more interesting the more beer you drink.”

Eventually it fell to Zemeckis to inform Stoltz that his services were no longer required. Gale continues: “He said he thought that possibly Eric was relieved: it was not like a devastating blow to him. This is just hindsight and speculation but maybe Eric’s agents thought that it would be a good career move for him to do a movie like this that had Spielberg involved. Who knows?”

Stoltz’s abrupt departure came as a shock to the rest of the cast. Thompson says: “It was horrible. He was my friend and obviously a wonderful actor. Everybody wants to think that making a movie is fun and that we’re laughing for the 14 hours we’re standing in the middle of a street somewhere.

“But it’s also scary because you need to feel like you’ve made a little family for that brief amount of time. So the minute someone gets fired, you’re like, oh wait, this is a big business, this is serious, this is millions of dollars being spent.”

Stoltz was replaced by the young Canadian actor Michael J Fox, whom Zemeckis and Gale had wanted in the first place, and several scenes had to be reshot. Fox was simultaneously working on the sitcom Family Ties so was often sleep-deprived. But his boundless charm, frazzled energy and comic timing – including ad libs – were the missing piece of the jigsaw.

Thompson comments: “He is gifted but he also worked extremely hard at his shtick like the great comedians of the 20s, 30s and 40s: the falling over, the double take, the spit take, the physical comedy, the working on a bit for hours and hours like the greats, like Laurel and Hardy and Charlie Chaplin. Michael understood that.

“Being a dancer, I was fascinated and kind of weirdly repelled because it didn’t seem like the acting that we were all trying to emulate: the De Niro kind of super reality-based acting that we were in awe of in the 80s, coming out of the great films of the 70s. I feel like Eric Stoltz, who is a brilliant actor, was trying to do more of that. Michael was the face of this new acting, especially comedy acting, which was in a way a throwback and a different energy.”

It was this lightness of touch that enabled Fox and Thompson to carry off moments that might otherwise have seemed weird, disturbing and oedipal. When 1950s Lorraine – who has no idea that Marty is her future son – eventually kisses him inside a car, she reports that it is like “kissing my brother” and the romantic tension dissolves, much to the audience’s relief.

Thompson says: “It was a difficult part and it was a very dangerous thread to put through a needle. I have to fall out of love with him just by kissing him and I remember Bob Zemeckis obsessing about that moment. It was also a hard shot to get because it was a vintage car and they couldn’t take it apart. Bob was also worried about the moment when I had to fall back in love with George [Marty’s father] after he punches Biff.

“For those moments to be so important is part of the beauty of the movie. These are ‘small’ people; these are not ‘great’ people; they’re not doing ‘great’ things. These are people who live in a little tiny house in Hill Valley and to make the moments of falling out of love and falling in love so beautiful with that incredible score is fascinating.”

Back to the Future was the biggest hit of the year, grossing more than $200m in the US and entering the cultural mainstream. When Doc asks Marty who is president in 1985, Marty replies Ronald Reagan and Brown says in disbelief: “Ronald Reagan? The actor? Then who’s vice-president? Jerry Lewis?” Reagan, a voracious film viewer, was so amused by the joke that he made the projectionist stop and rewind it. He went on to namecheck the film and quote its line, “Where we’re going, we don’t need roads,” in his 1986 State of the Union address.

Thompson, whose daughters are the actors Madelyn Deutch and Zoey Deutch, was amazed by Back to the Future’s success. “But when I look at the movie, I do understand the happy accident of why it’s become the movie it’s become to generation after generation. The themes are powerful. The execution was amazing. The casting was great. The idea was brilliant. It was a perfect script. Those things don’t come together usually.”

And if she had her own time machine, where would she go? “If I could be a man, I might go back to Shakespeare but as a woman you don’t want to go anywhere in time. Time has been hard on women. So for me, whenever I’m asked this question, it’s not a lighthearted answer. I can only give you a political answer.”

The film ends with Doc whisking Marty and girlfriend Jennifer into the DeLorean and taking off into the sky. But Gale points out that the message “to be continued” was added only for the home video release, as a way to announce a sequel, rather than being in the original theatrical run.

Back to the Future Part II, part of which takes place in 2015, brought back most of the main characters including the villain Biff Tannen, who becomes a successful businessman who opens a 27-storey casino and uses his money to gain political influence. Many viewers have drawn a comparison with Donald Trump.

Gale explains: “Biff in the first movie is not based on Donald Trump; Biff is just an archetype bully. When Biff owns a casino, there was a Trump influence in that, absolutely. Trump had to put his name on all of his hotels and his casinos and that’s what Biff does too.

“But when people say, oh, Biff was based on Donald Trump, well, no, that wasn’t the inspiration for the character. Everybody has a bully in their life and that’s who Biff was. There’s nothing that resembles Donald Trump in Biff in Part I.”

Back to the Future Part III, in which Marty and Doc and thrown back to the old west, was released in 1990. A year later Fox was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease at the age of 29. He went public with his diagnosis in 1998 and became a prominent advocate for research and awareness. He also continued acting, with roles in shows such as The Good Wife and Curb Your Enthusiasm, and in October will publish a Back to the Future memoir entitled Future Boy.

Thompson, whose brothers both have Parkinson’s, sees Fox twice a year. “He’s endlessly inspiring. He’s very smart and he’s done the spiritual work, the psychological work on himself to not be bitter about something awful happening to him but also be honest: this sucks.”

Time’s arrow moves in one direction but Back to the Future found a way to stage a comeback. One night after seeing the Mel Brooks musical The Producers in New York, Zemeckis’s wife Leslie suggested that Back to the Future would make a good musical. Gale duly wrote the book and was a producer of the show, which premiered in Manchester in 2020 and has since played in London, New York and around the world.

Gale says: “It was total euphoria. The first time I saw the dress rehearsal with the DeLorean, before we had an audience, I went out of my mind how great it was, and then to see the audience going completely out of their minds with everything was just such a joyous validation.

“I’m so blessed to have a job where I get to make people happy. That’s a great thing to be able to do and get paid for that. I don’t ever take any of this for granted. I’m having a great time and the idea that Back to the Future is still with us after all these years, as popular as it ever was, is a blessing. I think about it all the time that if we had not put Michael J Fox in the movie, you and I probably wouldn’t even be having this conversation right now.”

Why, indeed, are we still talking about Back to the Future four decades later? “Every person in the world wonders, how did I get here, how did my parents meet? The idea that your parents were once children is staggering when you realise it when you’re about seven or eight years old.

“Your parents are these godlike creatures, and they’re always saying, well, when I was your age, and you’re going, what are they talking about, how could they have ever been my age? Then at some point it all comes together. If you have a younger sibling and you’re watching them grow up, you realise, oh, my God, my parents were once screw-ups like me!”

And if Gale had a time machine, where would he go? “I don’t think I would go to the future because I’d be too scared,” he says. “We all see what happens when you know too much about the future. My mom, before she was married, was a professional musician, a violinist, and she had a nightclub act in St Louis called Maxine and Her Men. I’d like to travel back in time to 1947 and see my mother performing in a nightclub. That’s what I would do.”

This Morning stars Cat Deeley and Ben Shephard hot footed it from their ITV show over to the All England Lawn Tennis & Croquet Club for day four of Wimbledon on Thursday.

Cat dressed for the Centre Court sunshine in a pretty floral print dress, posing with her dapper co-star after speeding through the London traffic on motorbike to make it to the tournament on time after wrapping their show.

Whilst Cat enjoyed a day out with her co-star, Abbey Clancy and Peter Crouch made it a family affair by treating their eldest daughter Sophia to a day at SW19.

Meanwhile TV adventurer and Wimbledon regular Bear Grylls took his seat in the Royal Box with his wife Shara on Centre Court. 

Centre Court spectators will be watching Jack Draper compete against 2017 Wimbledon finalist Marin Cilic and Dan Evans takes on Novak Djokovic.

Draper, the current world Number four, takes on 2017 Wimbledon finalist Cilic as he looks to progress past the second round for the first time.

World number one Jannik Sinner is also back in the spotlight, up against Aleksandar Vukic, whilst Iga Swiatek plays Caty McNally in the other Centre Court match.

An excited Cat could barely look at the Centre Court action, at one point covering her face with her hands

The ITV star grimaced and gasped her way through the day four matches which included Jack Draper vs Marin Cilic

Abbey Clancy and Peter Crouch treated their eldest daughter Sophia, 14, to a day of tennis 

Abbey and Peter shared a kiss, with daughter Sophia caught in the middle, as they took a break from watching the on court action 

TV adventurer Bear Grylls took his seat in the Royal Box with his wife Shara for day four on Centre Court 

Meanwhile after enjoying the hospitality suites, Jack Whitehall joined Union J star Josh Cuthbert and and his model wife Chloe Lloyd, who were also in the stands.

Chloe looked gorgeous in a white dress, flaunting her long legs in the ultra mini which she teamed in polka dot heels and a micro Chanel bag. 

Singer and environmentalist Feargal Sharkey and Dragon’s Den star Deborah Meaden shared a laugh in the celeb-packed Royal Box, with actress Celia Imrie seen catching up with William Hague a row ahead. 

Judy Murray has opened up on the secrets of the Royal Box at Wimbledon as celebrity guests continue to flood into Wimbledon.

While there are 18 Championship grass courts at SW19, all eyes are often on the historic Centre Court, which plays host to the best stars the sport has to offer as they compete for glory.

Centre Court boasts nearly 15,000 seats, meaning lucky punters can be seen cheering on their favourites, and are joined by guests in the Royal Box at around lunchtime each day.

So far this week, the likes of David Beckham, Cate Blanchett and Olivia Rodrigo have all been present.

On Tuesday Murray, renown for her coaching work in the sport and her support for tennis-playing sons Andy and Jamie, made an appearance. 

Cat put on a very animated display in her VIP seat after a busy morning in front of the cameras 

The TV star looked gorgeous in her pretty floral dress for her sporting afternoon 

A nervous-looking Cat sat alongside Ben Shephard’s son Jack, 18

Cat dressed for the Centre Court sunshine in a pretty floral print dress teamed with lace-up sandals 

Cat and Ben had a busy morning, racing across London after wrapping This Morning to get to the tournament in time 

Cat Deeley and Ben Shephard attended as a guest of Emirates

Abbey, Sophia and Peter couldn’t stop their giggles as they enjoyed their family day out 

Sophia topped up her lip gloss as she sat alongside her parents in the VIP seats 

Peter laughed after Abbey Clancy catches him cleaning his sunglasses on her dress

The pair appeared to be having a lot of fun together 

Abbey looked effortlessly chic as she arrived for the tennis in a butter yellow pinstripe skirt and cropped blazer

The couple got animated as they watched in from the stands during one of the day’s big matches 

Abbey and Peter were joined by their 13-year-old daughter Sophia Ruby Crouch

Bear was seen shaking hands with a member of the armed forces as he mingled in the Royal Box before taking his seat 

England footballer Anthony Gordon and Jack Whitehall sat together on Centre Court 

Union J star Josh Cuthbert and and his model wife Chloe Lloyd, who were also in the stands, with Chloe wowing in a white mini dress as they sipped on Pimm’s

Dragon’s Den star Deborah Meaden was sat in the Royal Box, a row behind William Hague 

Singer and environmentalist Feargal Sharkey also had Royal Court seats with his wife Elizabeth

Feargal Sharkey and Deborah Meaden shared a laugh, with actress Celia Imrie was seen catching up with William Hague 

Celebrated actress Celia looked pretty in pink for her day in the Royal Box 

Prince Michael of Kent arrived in the Royal Box prior to the Gentlemen’s Singles second round match between Daniel Evans of Great Britain and Novak Djokovic

Before her trip, she opened up on what it is like in the Royal Box on The Chris Evans Breakfast Show with The National Lottery on Virgin Radio UK.

‘Royal Boxing should be a verb, shouldn’t it?’ she said.’ It should be a summer verb.’

She added: ‘Well, you arrive usually around 11.30, so you go upstairs, they have a champagne reception, then you go in for lunch and you could be sitting beside absolutely anybody at lunch. There’s no seating plan, it’s just as you go into the room.

‘It’s in the clubhouse of the All England Club, and the first year that I went I took my mum, of course, and we sat with Jack Nicklaus. 

BAFTA award winning actress Naomi Ackie looked chic in polka dots for her arrival 

Singer and song writer Calum Scott, who rose to fame on ITV’s Britain’s Got Talent in 2015, was also at Wimbledon as a guest of Emirates

Newcastle and England footballer Anthony Gordon was looking dapper in a cream blazer as he took in the view at Centre Court whilst EastEnders star Ben Hardy put on a smart display 

Downton Abbey star Jim Carter posed with his actress daughter Bessie Carter, who stars in Bridgerton, in the Emirates suite 

Jack Whitehall stopped by the AELTC’s Parkside Suite in No.1 Court before watching some play

Also in attendance for day four were David and Samantha Cameron 

Samantha looked chic in a teal summer dress complete with a tiered skirt and drawstring waist 

‘I sat with a few years ago a lady who was the first female Spitfire pilot. I mean it’s just you could be with absolutely anybody and the stories are fascinating.

‘It’s really tough when the sun comes round because there’s no escape. 

‘It’s actually I think worse for the guys because they have to wear a jacket and tie and they’re not allowed to take the jacket off unless the royalty in the box takes their jacket off first. That’s the protocol.’

David Beckham’s long-awaited knighthood glory might take a shocking turn amid tensions with his son Brooklyn.

Radar Online reported that the Beckham family’s ongoing family feud might ruin the retired English footballer’s knighthood.

For the unversed, Brooklyn and his wife, Nicola Peltz, are not still close to the rest of the family after snubbing the Beckham family patriarch’s 50th birthday.

Sources told the outlet that Victoria is shaking with rage over her onetime golden child for causing unnecessary stress when his father is about to be bestowed with the title of Sir by King Charles.

“David has waited for this moment for so many years; it’s literally his crowning achievement. He wants his family to celebrate with him. Sadly, there’s no question of Brooklyn being involved. The whole family is disgusted with him,” the insiders revealed.

Victoria, who will also be called Lady Beckham, “can’t fathom why he hasn’t been in touch on his hands and knees with a groveling apology,” they claimed.

“The whole family is devastated by the way things are right now. And the fact it’s all playing out in public, with Brooklyn and Peltz being open about feeling hard done by and playing professional victims, makes it 10 times worse,” the sources stated.

For those unversed, David Beckham, who shared four children, Brooklyn, Romeo, Cruz, and Harper, with wife Victoria, was considered for a knighthood for the first time in 2011 after he played a pivotal role in bringing the 2012 Olympics to London.

It is pertinent to mention that it was delayed because he was linked to the tax-avoidance scheme but he was later cleared of the charges, which opened the way for him to receive the honour.

The team of Netflix’s hit show Squid Game has just gotten up close and honest about the reason they cut out so many scenes about the VIP’s.

The whole thing has been broken down by the editor of the series.

He spoke to Entertainment Weekly about everything and explained how a lot never made it.

The editor in question is named Nam Na-young and he started off by saying, “actually, there were more scenes with the VIPs.”

But “as I was editing, I did cut them a lot because when we’re in the VIP room, the tension kind of releases.”

The main reason for this creative shift was that the show’s creators wanted to focus on “the contestants’ emotions and reactions of the games” as that was what even he admits to having prioritizing.

Another major hurdle this time around was the safety of the characters, because in games like the jump rope, even a five foot height was creating fears.

For those still unversed with the series its one of the biggest global hits to date, running on its third and final season which released on June 27th, 2025.

The story focuses heavily on Gi-hun this time around as well, following his return to the deadly game that leaves only one man left standing at the end, with a promise of a lot of cash, upon survival.

IT IS THE moment rock fans thought would never happen. On July 4th Oasis, the greatest British band of their generation, will go on stage for the first time in 16 years. Such a thing seemed impossible given the group’s spectacular combustion in 2009, after a fight between Liam Gallagher, the lead singer, and his brother, Noel, the main songwriter. In the intervening years the siblings fired shots at each other in the press and on social media. (Noel famously described Liam as “the angriest man you’ll ever meet. He’s like a man with a fork in a world of soup.”) But now, they claim, “The guns have fallen silent.”

IT IS THE moment rock fans thought would never happen. On July 4th Oasis, the greatest British band of their generation, will go on stage for the first time in 16 years. Such a thing seemed impossible given the group’s spectacular combustion in 2009, after a fight between Liam Gallagher, the lead singer, and his brother, Noel, the main songwriter. In the intervening years the siblings fired shots at each other in the press and on social media. (Noel famously described Liam as “the angriest man you’ll ever meet. He’s like a man with a fork in a world of soup.”) But now, they claim, “The guns have fallen silent.”

When Julia Roberts gets in Richard Gere’s Lotus Esprit as it stutters along Hollywood Boulevard in the 1990 film Pretty Woman, Germans heard Daniela Hoffmann, not Roberts, exclaim: “Man, this baby must corner like it’s on rails!” In Spain, Mercè Montalà voiced the line, while French audiences heard it from Céline Monsarrat. In the years that followed, Hollywood’s sweetheart would sound different in cinemas around the world but to native audiences she would sound the same.

The voice actors would gain some notoriety in their home countries, but today, their jobs are being threatened by artificial intelligence. The use of AI was a major point of dispute during the Hollywood actors’ strike in 2023, when both writers and actors expressed concern that it could undermine their roles, and fought for federal legislation to protect their work. Not long after, more than 20 voice acting guilds, associations and unions formed the United Voice Artists coalition to campaign under the slogan “Don’t steal our voices”. In Germany, home to “the Oscars of dubbing”, artists warned that their jobs were at risk with the rise of films dubbed with AI trained using their voices, without their consent.

“It’s war for us,” says Patrick Kuban, a voice actor and organiser with the dubbing union Voix Off, who along with the French Union of Performing Artists started the campaign #TouchePasMaVF (“don’t touch my French version”). They want to see dubbing added to France’s l’exception culturelle, a government policy that defines cultural goods as part of national identity and needing special protection from the state.

Dubbing isn’t just a case of translating a film into native languages, explains Kuban, it’s adapted “to the French humour, to include references, culture and emotion”. As a result, AI could put an estimated 12,500 jobs at risk in France: including writers, translators, sound engineers, as well as the voice actors themselves, according to a study by the Audiens Group in 2023.

“Humans are able to bring to [these roles]: experience, trauma and emotion, context and background and relationships,” adds Tim Friedlander, a US-based voice actor, studio owner, musician, and president of the National Association of Voice Actors. “All of the things that we as humans connect with. You can have a voice that sounds angry, but if it doesn’t feel angry, you’re going to have a disconnect in there.”

Since the introduction of sound cinema in the late 1920s and 1930s, dubbing has grown to be an industry worth more than $4.04bn (£2.96bn) globally. It was first adopted in Europe by authoritarian leaders, who wanted to remove negative references to their governments and promote their languages. Mussolini banned foreign languages in movies entirely, a policy that catalysed a preference for dubbed rather than subtitled films in the country. Today, 61% of German viewers and 54% of French ones also opt for dubbed movies, while Disney dubs their productions into more than 46 languages. But with the development of AI, who profits from dubbing could soon change.

Earlier this year, the UK-based startup ElevenLabs announced plans to clone the voice of Alain Dorval – the “voix de Stallone”, who from the 1970s onwards gave voice to Sylvester Stallone in some 30 films – in a new thriller, Armor, on Amazon. At the time, contracts did not state how an actor’s voice could be re-used: including to train AI software and create synthetic voices that ultimately could replace voice actors entirely. “It’s a kind of monster,” says Kuban. “If we don’t have protection, all kinds of jobs will be lost: after the movie industry, it will be the media industry, the music industry, all the cultural industries, and a society without culture will not be very good.”

When ChatGPT and ElevenLabs hit the market at the start of 2022, making AI a public-facing technology, “it was a theoretical threat, but not an immediate threat”, says Friedlander. But as the market has grown, including the release of the Israeli startup Deepdub, an AI-powered platform that offers dubbing and voiceover services for films, the problems with synthetic voice technologies have become impossible to ignore.

“If you steal my voice, you are stealing my identity,” says Daniele Giuliani, who voiced Jon Snow in the Game of Thrones, and works as a dubbing director. He is the president of the Italian dubbers’ association, ANAD, which recently fought for AI clauses in national contracts to protect voice actors from the indiscriminate and unauthorised use of their voices, and to prohibit the use of those voices in machine learning and deep data mining – a proposal that’s being used as a model in Spain. “This is very serious. I don’t want my voice to be used to say whatever someone wants.”

AI’s tentacles have had a global reach too. In India, where 72% of viewers prefer watching content in a different language, Sanket Mhatre, who voices Ryan Reynolds in the 2011 superhero film Green Lantern is concerned: “We’ve been signing contracts for donkey’s years now and most of these contracts have really big language about your voice being used in all perpetuity anywhere in the world,” says Mhatre. “Now with AI, signing something like this is essentially just signing away your career.”

Mhatre dubs more than 70-100 Hollywood movies into Hindi each year, as well as Chinese, Spanish, French films; web series, animated shows, anime, documentaries and audiobooks. “Every single day, I retell stories from some part of the world for the people of my country in their language, in their voice. It’s special,” he says. “It’s such an inclusive exercise. In India, if you’re not somebody who speaks English, it’s very easy to be knocked down and feel inferior. But when you are able to dub this cinema into Hindi, people now understand that cinema and can discuss it.”

He’s noticed a decline in the number of jobs dubbing corporate copy, training videos, and other quick turnaround information-led items, but he thinks his job is safe at the moment as it’s impossible for AI to adapt to cultural nuances or act with human emotion. “If the actor’s face is not visible on screen, or if you’re just seeing their back, in India, we might attempt to add an expression or a line to clarify the scene or provide more context.” When there are references to time travel movies in a sci-fi film, he explains, a dubber might list Bollywood titles instead.

But as AI learns more from voice actors and other humans, Mhatre is aware that it is a whole lot quicker and cheaper for companies to adopt this technology rather than hire dubbing actors, translators, and sound engineers.

“We need to stand against the robots,” says Kuban. “We need to use them for peaceful things, for maybe climate change or things like that, but we need to have actors on the screen.”

A remarkable documentary is providing insight into the propaganda found within Russian schools. Mr. Nobody Against Putin, directed by David Borenstein, premiered at the 2025 Sundance film festival in January, where it won the world cinema documentary special jury award.

The film was recorded over two years by Pavel “Pasha” Talankin, an events coordinator and videographer at a high school in Karabash, a heavily polluted town in central southern Russia. The documentary records the intensification of Kremlin-directed ultra-nationalist and pro-war propaganda within the Russian schooling system, which has intensified since the escalation of the war against Ukraine in February 2022.

Talankin makes clear his view that this approach to “education” represents a moral wrong, and he is very much on point with the writings of the key ethicists on the subject. American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, for example, wrote that “education is both a tool of propaganda in the hands of dominant groups, and a means of emancipation for subject classes”.

Niebhur was writing about the education system in the US during the 1920s, when there was a widespread understanding that propaganda was used in these two ways. Talankin’s concern is that Russia has moved to a position of imbalance, where the “dominant groups” have too much influence and are using their power to corrupt the minds of children through disingenuous narratives about national servitude, sacrifice and conformity, coupled with the unsubtle threat that those who are not patriots are “parasites”.

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In their highly respected book Propaganda & Persuasion (1986), propaganda experts Garth Jowett and Victoria O’Donnell state that “to analyse propaganda, one needs to be able to identify it”. This is a difficult task because propaganda thrives through symbols, the subliminal and in fictional works precisely because the audience is not conscious of it.

However, the creation of an environment that uses propaganda is also depends on who is given the oxygen of publicity and who is marginalised. These are the conditions under which ideological indoctrination occurs and power is achieved or maintained.

As such, a critical analyst of propaganda must assess the linguistic strategy, the information strategy, the eminence strategy (how to ensure that the target audience are watching, reading or listening to the desired content) and the staging strategy of the communicator. This can be remembered through the helpful L.I.E.S. mnemonic.

Talankin’s footage shows how Russian schools now promote distorted versions of European history. The well-trodden narrative that Ukraine has been taken over by neo-Nazis is referred to several times in lessons. Russian flags appear with greater frequency around the school as time goes on, and assembly time becomes an exercise in pledging allegiance to the fatherland.

Teachers are expected to read from scripts prepared for them by the ministry of education. Pupils then respond with choreographed answers – some even glancing down at notes under their desks. The children are told about how dreadful life in France and the UK is because of their reliance on Russian fossil fuels.

Interestingly, the Kremlin has asked that all of this be videoed and uploaded to a central database to ensure compliance with national regulations on what is taught in schools. Indeed, Talankin complains at one point that much of his time is now spent uploading the videos rather than actually teaching the students and helping them to be creative – as his job previously was.

Shared humanity

Talankin takes us on a tour of his city. He shows a pro-war rally that is broadly supported by the townsfolk. Or at least those in opposition dare not say anything or engage in an equivalent demonstration. He takes us to the civic library, theoretically a site of independent learning but which has been hijacked by these propaganda efforts.

Perhaps the most important moments of the documentary though are the snippets of critique and the sense of “knowing” that Talankin is keen to show. The young girl who jokingly tells her teacher to “blink twice if you’re lying”, and to which all her class then laugh. His interactions with other teachers who confide in him that they know that the propaganda is bullshit, but, worried for their status and prosperity, go along with it.

The propaganda is pretty poor though. It is clunky and obvious, and, while it might generate some short-term influence, it smacks of both arrogance and desperation on the part of the Kremlin. Indeed, it shows that there is no desire on the part of central government for Russian people to thrive intellectually.

This scenario is reminiscent of the end of the Soviet era, when communist propaganda continued to prevail, but few still believed it. Nevertheless, without a clear alternative to follow, or obvious alternative leader to guide them, most people continued to abide.

The most harrowing part of the documentary comes towards the end when Talankin provides an audio recording of the funeral of a local lad who has been killed in Ukraine. He did not dare film the funeral as this is a cultural faux pas, but the screams and wails of the mother as her son is laid to rest are piercing. The scene seems intended to bring our shared humanity to bare.

Talankin is a nice guy with intelligence and ethical fortitude. The kids are funny, charming and talented. The mother is doing what we would all do if we had lost a child to a violent death. As such, Mr. Nobody Against Putin might better be called Mr. Everybody Against Putin, as should be of grave concern to everyone that Russia’s education system is resorting to such techniques.

After decades of debate over how to honour the women who used to work in the city’s shirt factories, Derry has produced a sculpture of three giant spools of thread cast in bronze.

Ranging in height from 2 to 3.5 metres (6.5-11.5ft), the monuments loom over Harbour Square to recall an era when thousands of girls and women worked in dozens of factories that made the Northern Irish city a world leader in shirt production.

However, some former workers are aghast and say the decision to use abstract symbols rather than female figures occludes their role from history. “This gesture fell way short of what we hoped for – we feel airbrushed out of it,” Clare Moore told the BBC this week.

Before the official unveiling last month, several former workers staged a protest and held a banner saying “these factory girls say no”. There had been no proper consultation and the bronze spools did not accurately resemble the ones they used in the factories, they said.

Derry city and Strabane district council had hoped the £187,000 design would draw a line under a troubled 20-year stop-start quest to represent the city’s industrial heritage with public art. The council called the artwork a “fitting tribute” and said it had fully engaged with the former workers.

Chris Wilson, the artist behind the sculpture, said at least two years of consultations included a day-long workshop that showed a model of the artwork to dozens of former workers, who at that meeting raised no objections.

“They all seemed onboard with the idea,” Wilson told the Guardian. “I’ve never worked on a project that had such an extensive and transparent process.”

The sculptures are not figurative but “almost anthropomorphic” in suggesting a group of people, with textures and shadows to evoke memory, he said. “The factories are all gone but what came across to me, in talks with the ladies, was their memories and recollections and friendships.”

One of the bronze spools emits what appears to be a loose thread around the base but is in fact quotes from some former workers, Wilson said. “I’ve been told that public art is like sport. Everybody has opinion and is entitled to have an opinion.”