Prince William stepped out solo in South London, just hours after a major update from his and Princess Kate’s The Royal Foundation.
On Tuesday, September 9, the Prince of Wales visited Spiral Skills, a youth organisation in Lambeth that has received funding from his Homewards initiative.
“Homewards UK is providing funding to the brilliant Spiral Skills in Brixton, whose team use lived experience and consistency to provide support, employment, training and opportunities for young people locally,” read a social media statement by Kensington Palace.
Launched in 2023 across six locations in the U.K., Homewards is the future king’s ambitious project to make homelessness “rare, brief and unrepeated.” Spiral Skills, founded in 2015, helps young people aged 14–25 with career coaching, workshops, and employment opportunities to break cycles of unemployment and exclusion.
Thanks to Homewards’ support, the group has moved into a new prevention hub, expanding its impact in the community.
William also joined a workshop with Young Creators UK, a creative agency run by underrepresented youth, and reunited with Homewards advocate Fara Williams MBE, who previously appeared in his Homewards documentary.
It comes as the Prince and Princess of Wales announced the new Chief Executive Officer for the Royal Foundation.
“We are looking forward to welcoming Sarah to The Royal Foundation and to working with her on some of the issues which are closest to our hearts,” the couple said in a statement.
The Venice Film Festival hadn’t even finished yet before the stars jetted across the Atlantic for the Toronto International Film Festival 2025. So far, the glitzy event has already seen the likes of Angelina Jolie, Anya Taylor-Joy, Paul Mescal and British Vogue’s September cover star Michaela Coel grace the red carpet, with buzzy new releases including Hamnet, Couture, Sacrifice and The Christophers all premiering in the Canadian city.
The fashion on the red carpet hasn’t disappointed either, with Taylor-Joy, Josh O’Connor and Lakeith Stanfield all wearing Jonathan Anderson’s new creations for Dior, while Kirsten Dunst and Maue Apatow have been dressed in Alessandro Michele’s romantic designs for Valentino.
Below, see all the best looks from the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival red carpet.
Olivia Cooke, the British actress who stars as Alicent Hightower in HBO‘s Game of Thrones spin-off series House of the Dragon, has lamented women being shamed for setting boundaries in sex scenes.
In an interview with The i Paper, Cooke said actresses “often get labelled ‘difficult’ or ‘a bitch’ for speaking up” when they are uncomfortable with intimate performances.
Cooke, who is promoting Robin Wright’s upcoming Amazon Prime Video series The Girlfriend, said the industry had changed for the better now that intimacy coordinators have become commonplace on set.
“It’s amazing to me that people had to just fudge their way through those scenes before those people existed,” the Ready Player One star said.
Cooke said good intimacy coordinators become a “voice” for women who are hesitant about filming requests, particularly when actresses are “just starting out and don’t have the vocabulary to say what they’re not comfortable with.”
She added that “showing intimacy, passion is an integral part of reflecting the human experience” and that the scenes can be filmed without actors feeling like “a chunk of yourself has been taken.”
The Girlfriend premieres on September 10. It follows Laura (Wright), a woman who seemingly has it all: a glittering career, a loving husband, and a precious son, Daniel. Her life begins to unravel when Daniel brings home Cherry (Cooke), a girlfriend who changes everything.
As a girl growing up in Detroit, the jazz singer Sheila Jordan, who has died aged 96, heard a Charlie Parker record on a jukebox and knew then that his jazz pathway was one that she wanted to follow.
“Four notes! I heard Bird [Parker] and he’s been my hero ever since,” she said. Indeed she later married Duke Jordan, then a pianist with Parker, immersing herself in African American bebop culture and remaining true to her first inspiration throughout a long if uneven vocal career.
Not quite Piaf-size but certainly diminutive, Jordan overcame many obstacles: a small if expressive voice, racial bigotry, a troubled marriage, her own alcohol and cocaine abuse, and the need to provide for her daughter Tracey, born in 1955, once Duke, a heroin addict, had walked out. “He left but I kept my daughter,” she said.
There was also the realisation that her unorthodox vocal style was an acquired taste. Nevertheless, she found wide-ranging acceptance in Europe. She was made a National Endowment for the Arts jazz master in 2012 at the age of 84, and her discography burgeoned in the latter half of her career, as did her teaching assignments in the US and overseas.
According to the New York Times, she was born Sheila Jeanette Dawson in Detroit, the daughter of Margaret (nee Hull) and Donald Dawson, then both 21 years old and working for General Motors. However, in an interview with Sally Placksin, author of the book Jazzwomen, Jordan stated that her mother was only 16 at the time of her birth and married Jordan’s father the same night.
What is not in dispute is her father’s almost immediate disappearance from her life, and her mother gradually losing herself to alcohol. The three-year-old Sheila was sent to live with her maternal grandparents, Walter and Irene Hull, in Summerhill, Pennsylvania, a dirt-poor hamlet in coal-mining country. They too were alcoholics: “It was a struggle just living; we ate whatever my grandfather, who was part-Native American, caught when he went hunting – deer, squirrel, porcupine,” she told the writer Leonard Feather.
Jordan rehearsing with Harvie S in Manhattan in the 1980s. Photograph: Ira Berger/Alamy
Given these straitened circumstances, the child’s only consolation was to sing, which she did assiduously, on the radio, in church or at school. Reclaimed by her mother, she moved back to Detroit in 1942, and fell in with jazz-minded friends. Hearing Parker’s Now’s the Time in 1945 sealed her fate: with two other Bird “fanatics”, she formed a vocal trio, Skeeter, Mitch and Jean, with Skeeter Spight and Leroi Mitchell, which specialised in putting words to Parker’s recorded solos. Parker came through Detroit to perform, but Sheila and her friends were too young to enter the club so he left a rear door open to allow them to hear the music. The first time she sat in with him and sang, he told her she had “million-dollar ears”, paying tribute to the accuracy of her pitch.
Constantly hassled by Detroit’s police in this racially tense city and frequently hauled into the cells for consorting with black friends, Sheila left the trio and in 1950 made for New York, working as a secretary by day and picking up singing gigs as “Jeannie Dawson” by night; Charles Mingus suggested she study music with the innovative pianist and thinker Lennie Tristano.
Sheila married Duke Jordan in 1952, but they performed together only occasionally. The British bassist Peter Ind, then working in New York, recalled “their rented loft at West 18th Street, where they often had all-night jam sessions”. All too soon, though, Duke was gone (the couple divorced in 1962) and she continued balancing typing jobs with club gigs, until in 1958, her regular spots at Page Three in Greenwich Village began to attract critical attention, not least from the influential composer-pianist George Russell, who included her on his album The Outer View, recorded in 1962.
Jordan in the 1960s. Photograph: Tom Copi/Getty Images
Russell then recommended her to Blue Note Records and her debut album, Portrait of Sheila, the first on the label by a singer, recorded with just guitar, bass and drums, appeared a year later, earning rave reviews, and winning her the 1963 DownBeat Critics Poll and their Talent Deserving Wider Recognition category a further nine times.
After appearing with Russell’s sextet at the Newport jazz festival in 1964, she made brief trips to Europe, also touring with the radical trombonist Roswell Rudd and working regularly with the pianist Steve Kuhn, and increasingly often with the bassists Harvie S or Cameron Brown.
The advertising agency job she had held since 1966 came to an end in 1987: laid off with a year’s severance pay, she “figured it was time to sing full-time”. This she did, working constantly, often in Europe, and building an extensive portfolio of recordings – the latest, Portrait, was released this year.
Jordan lived to improvise, taking chances, often interpolating instant spoken narratives into her performances, or scatting, before moving on to a ballad, the emotion laden with what she called “the pain of life”. Frequently in the UK, she appeared at Ronnie Scott’s with the pianist Brian Kellock in 2006, having played earlier at the club in 2001 with the pianist Nick Weldon, among many other local appearances.
A biography, Jazz Child – A Portrait of Sheila Jordan, by Ellen Johnson, was published in 2014.
Consistently creative and game to the end, she was tended in her final illness by Tracey, a music publicist, who survives her, as does a half-sister, Jaquelynn.
This collection of short films from Gaza film-makers gives a mosaic of images, ideas and microvignettes of what life is like for civilians under nonstop attack, sometimes improvising semi-fictionalised scenes within the scenes of devastation. It is a humanitarian artistic project in which the words “Hamas” and “Israel” are not mentioned; instead we hear the voices of young and old, male and female, people for whom the violence and the grief have become part of the fabric of everyday life. Perhaps the simple fact of life going on there, with stoicism and often with humour, is a remarkable thing in itself.
In Nidal Damo’s Everything Is Fine, a budding standup comedian wanders around, wondering how to ply his trade when all the venues are rubble; a class of schoolkids learn how to create stop-motion animation about their lives in Khamis Masharawi’s Soft Skin. Ahmed Hassouna’s Sorry Cinema is a film in which he says he once lived and breathed movies, and longed for the day when a film of his would be accepted at a big film festival. Now he says he just wants to survive day to day and apologises to cinema for neglecting it – but the irony is that the images of uproar and destruction that he is capturing are spectacularly cinematic.
For me, one of the most startling pieces was Taxi Wanissa by Etimad Washah, about a man called Ahmad with his donkey, called Wanissa. There is a climactic scene in which Washah has captured some (genuine) bombing; the scene cuts to black and then Washah herself addresses the camera and says that she intended Ahmad to die in the bombing and the donkey to return home unharmed. But in the middle of the shoot, she says, she heard that her brother had been killed and now wishes to stop. She no longer has the heart for this film, or perhaps it is rather that this sudden intrusion became the ending – the authentic ending. A heartbreaking collection.
I like my bacon sandwich with brown sauce, but that means keeping a bottle for a long time. What else can I do with it? Will, via email In the early 1980s, Tom Harris, co-owner and chef at the Marksman in east London, made a beer mat from penny coins for his dad (and in the quest to secure a Blue Peter badge): “The instructions said to put the dirty coins in brown sauce overnight,” he recalls. “The next morning, they were all shiny and looked brand new, so there’s another use for it right there!”
Brown sauce is “an absolute marvel”, agrees Sabrina Ghayour, author of the recently published Persiana Easy, and not just for its cleaning prowess: “If you break it down, the sauce is packed with some pretty interesting ingredients, including my beloved tamarind.” It’s worth exploring your bottle options beyond HP, too, not least because there was much controversy back in 2011 when the brand gave its recipe, which had remained unchanged for more than a century, a tweak. “They reduced the salt [from 2.1g per 100g to 1.3g] and it completely upset the balance,” Harris says, “and that’s a great sadness.” That’s why Ghayour’s go-to these days is Tiptree: “It has a slightly less vinegary punch and a more rounded sweetness,” which comes with the added bonus of making it “even more versatile”.
If you were to ask Harris’ dad, one such use would be a piece of fried fish in a buttered roll with lots of brown sauce: “That’s a lovely, lovely thing.” Otherwise, use it in place of tonkatsu sauce “with anything crumbed or fried, such as a pork chop”, he adds.
The “tangy, savoury nature” of the stuff also works a dream with a hash, says Anna Tobias, chef-owner of Cafe Deco in London, which bottles its own brown sauce. “I often do a hash after a Sunday roast, when you have a bit of leftover meat, cabbage and potatoes,” she says. “Fry them up, top with a fried egg, put some brown sauce on the side and that’s delicious.” Or pair it with roast pork: “Instead of apple sauce, why not try brown?” Tobias says. “It has the same sweet-sour tang and will cut through.”
Brown sauce is, after all, a porky condiment, although it was traditionally partnered with sausages rather than bacon. “When I was the tea boy at Dad’s warehouse, I’d do the 11am sandwich run and it was always sausages with brown sauce and bacon with red,” Harris says. “That was the dividing line.”
Ghayour says our reader Will, however, could also harness the acidity in his excess sauce to “give wonderful life to soups, stews, sauces, gravies, marinades [think sticky barbecue-style] and beyond”. Meanwhile, as the weather cools, Tobias would be tempted to segue to homemade baked beans: “I know not many people bother making their own beans, but adding a bit of brown sauce to the tomatoes and cooking that with the beans would be very good.”
That all said, sometimes you don’t need to look beyond the obvious: “Brown sauce is really good for breakfast, and maybe that’s its purpose in life,” Tobias says very sensibly. A good dollop on the side of a full English, or on a bacon sandwich, is always going to be more than OK.
Brolin told a story about Powell getting ready for a scene they were doing together. “Glen is sitting there over and over, slamming his fist down on his thigh, and I’m like, ‘Goddamn, let up on yourself, dude.’ But: into it! Works himself into a state. And that can be embarrassing.” At a glance, something like The Running Man, Brolin said, could seem superficial—nothing to get worked up over. “You’re like, ‘Hey, man, it’s The Running Man, relax.’ You know? ‘It’s Big Top Pee-wee, it’s okay.’ And it’s not that. And he refuses to do that. And I don’t care if you’re cold plunging every morning, I don’t care what it is. I just want to see you doing it. I just want to see you proving to yourself that you’re there for real.”
Tank top by Skims. Shorts by Bode. Hand wraps by Islero.
One morning in Glasgow, Powell and his driver picked me up from my hotel. On our way to breakfast, we passed more locations for the J.J. Abrams film Powell was currently shooting. Powell said he had recently been negotiating with his home state to make it more possible for productions to shoot there. “There’s a few things in the deal points that I’m trying to get amended a bit, but Texas just passed a massive film incentive,” he said.
I asked Powell if he had elected himself to this role as Hollywood ambassador to the state, or whether he’d been asked to help. “I went to the Capitol when, probably when I was 17, 16, to talk about the incentives.” But, he said, “It is only now that I feel like I’m sort of one of the maybe four or five people that represent Texas in Hollywood that they’ve sort of been like, ‘Hey, we need you. It’s you. McConaughey, Woody, Owen.’ There’s not that many of ’em.”
The car pulled up to a restaurant on the east side of Glasgow’s downtown. When we walked in, the restaurant staff audibly giggled at the sight of Powell. We sat down and looked at the menu. “Would you mind, would it be annoying if I did sort of a customized version?” Powell asked the waiter.
One of the many ways that Powell symbolizes the peculiar dilemmas of modern manhood is the intense and deliberate way he takes care of himself and his body. He is a bona fide bro from Austin—increasingly, America’s home of a familiar strain of male optimization—who cold plunges, infrared saunas, and, on a nearly daily basis, submerges his face into a bowl of ice cubes.
In TheRunning Man, Powell does many of his own stunts. “I knew that based on the Stephen King book, Ben Richards was a tank,” Powell said about his character in the film. So Powell, with the guidance of Cruise, who taught him how to outline and prepare for the major stunts in a film, worked to become a tank. “I was like, Okay, I got to be a bit of a weapon. And so that’s why I trained the way I trained on this. I put on a lot of muscle. A lot of it was functional. A lot of it was so I could absorb hits. But a lot of it was also authentically for an audience.” It was Cruise who taught Powell to think about the job of acting as an inherently physical one. “I went from going, ‘Oh, I’m an actor on a movie,’ to ‘I’m a high-performance athlete,’ ” Powell told me. “And I’m just very lucky that I have someone like Tom who I could literally go, ‘Hey, what do I do to survive something?’ ”
The actor Michael Caine has again come out of retirement for one last job – in this case, Vin Diesel sequel The Last Witch Hunter 2. Caine will be reprising his role as a priest who assists the immortal warrior played by Diesel to stop the plague ravaging the planet.
Caine, 92, first retired in 2009, after shooting gang crime drama Harry Brown and then again, 24 films later, in 2021, after starring as novelist in Best Sellers. He returned for little-seen Croatian historical drama Medieval in 2022 and, the following year, starred in The Great Escaper as a D-Day veteran who travels to Normandy solo from his care home for the 70th anniversary.
Caine gave mixed messages about his retirement while promoting that film, telling BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “I’ve figured, I’ve had a picture where I’ve played the lead and it’s got incredible reviews. The only parts I’m likely to get now are old men, 90-year-old men, maybe 85. And I thought, ‘Well, I might as well leave with all this – I’ve got wonderful reviews. What have I got to do to beat this?’”
Speaking to the Guardian to promote that film, however, Caine indicated some appetite to continue working, saying that the following January, he would be shooting a new movie in which he played Charles Darwin. “And that’ll be it. I won’t do another one after.”
Caine with Elijah Wood in the first film. Photograph: Summit Entertainment/Everett/Shutterstock
Questioned whether he was certain, Caine said: “No! But the point is, can you do it? Can you remember all the lines? I’ve got used to not working and staying in bed till 11am and staying out late at night. I love it.”
The Darwin project appears not to have materialised, although Disney do have a Charles Darwin film in development.
The Last Witch Hunter attracted mixed reviews on release a decade ago, but was a substantial hit internationally and has since proved a staple of streamers, with Netflix reporting that it was one of their most-watched titles last year.
While Caine has been off our screens for two years, he has remained in the public eye through his sideline in thriller writing, as well as publishing a new memoir, and his sometimes gnomic tweets.
Later this year will see the first film for eight years of fellow Oscar-winner Daniel Day-Lewis, another habitual retiree, who co-writes and stars in Anemone, the directorial debut of his son, Ronan.
Discover the whoppsy-whiffling new stage adaptation of Roald Dahl’s The BFG…
Don’t miss this unforgettable adventure at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, from 25 Nov 2025 to 31 Jan 2026.
Learn more about this brilliant stage play here!
Competition time!
One lucky reader will WIN four tickets to see the whoppsy-whiffling new stage production of The BFG at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-Upon-Avon, PLUS a delicious pre-theatre meal at the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Rooftop Restaurant. Wow!
To enter, we want you to imagine you had your own BFG – and draw what they’d look like! Would your giant have big ears and arms as thick as tree trunks? Would they be acrobatic or fantastically farty? You decide!
Then upload your marvellous friend via the form below.
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The fifth edition of the Filippo Nicosia International Award took place on 30 August at the Villa Medici Giulini in Briosco, Italy, following two days of intensive masterclasses.
The prize was ultimately won by Israeli quartet Ensemble Finale, which received €5,000, a debut recording with Da Vinci Publishing, a portrait by Archi Magazine, sets of Larsen strings, and a GEWA violin case. The quartet also receives performance engagements at venues including the Amici del Teatro Carlo Felice e del Conservatorio Niccolò Paganini, the Famiglia Artistica Reggiana, and the Gioventù Musicale d’Italia.
Duo Gullino-Troncarelli won the award for Best Italian Ensemble, receiving two concert engagements in China, as well as the Casa Musicale Del Rio Prize, gaining free use of Reggio Emilia’s Steinway Hall for concerts, rehearsals, and recordings.
Musica Nova á Quattro was awarded the prize for the most deserving violinist, receiving a violin made by Liuteria Grisales, while both the Ineo Quartet and Trio David receive concert engagements during the 2026–2027 season.
Founded in 2020, Ensemble Finale consists of violinists Victoria Gelman and Omer Herz, violist Leikie Glick, and cellist Gali Knaani. The quartet has attended the Stauffer Academy in Cremona and has performed at festivals including the Muzi International Chamber Music Festival, the Tamir Chamber Music Series, and the Felicia Blumental Festival.
The masterclass teachers and jurors for this year’s award were violinists Boris Garlitsky and Cristiano Gualco, violist Dimitri Hoffmann, cellist Peter Jarůšek, and pianist Jacques Ammon. Each group received a lesson with every teacher.
As part of the prize, Ensemble Finale will perform at the 2025 Cremona Musica exhibition on 28 September.
