Stars lend glamour to ‘Oscars of science' Breakthrough Prizes
Gwyneth Paltrow, Alicia Keys and Lizzo were among the stars giving science some pizzazz at this year's Breakthrough Prizes in Los Angeles on Saturday.
Nicknamed the 'Oscars of Science', the six awards of $3 million (£2.3 million) each are given for advances in life sciences, physics and mathematics.
Some of the biggest names in tech, film and music walked the red carpet in Barker Hangar in Santa Monica, California, lending their glamour to the event.
Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos all flashed a smile, despite a torrid week in which their companies lost billions in the market turmoil caused by Donald Trump's tariff announcements.
Media mogul Rupert Murdoch, 94, was pictured with his wife Elena Zhukova, 67, whom he married last summer. His third wife, Wendi Murdoch, 56, was also in attendance.
Other attendees included Zoe Saldana, the Oscar-winning actress, Paris Hilton, the socialite, Gal Gadot, the star of Disney's ill-fated Snow White remake, and Lily Collins, the Emily in Paris actress.
Musicians Lizzo, Katy Perry, Alicia Keys and Christina Aguilera also came.
The scientists who developed Ozempic, the pioneering weight-loss drug, were awarded a Breakthrough Prize.
Another went to David Liu, an American molecular biologist, for developing two precise gene editing tools to help people with severe genetic diseases.
A further life science prize was given for groundbreaking research on multiple sclerosis.
More than 13,500 researchers from Cern, Europe's particle physics laboratory, took home a joint award for testing the modern theory of particle physics.
The Breakthrough Prizes were founded in 2012 and are sponsored by Yuri Milner, a Russian–Israeli billionaire, and tech entrepreneurs including Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Meta.
This year's prizes were given at a fraught moment for US science, as Donald Trump's government stripped funding for institutions like the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
'The NIH is a treasure, not just for this country but for the world,' said Mr Liu, after winning his award.
'Trying to dismantle the heart of what supports science in this country is like burning your seed corn.'
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Best Mary Poppins Behind The Scenes Facts
First, Walt Disney started going after the rights to adapt P.L. Travers' Mary Poppins in 1938, four years after the first book was published. However, Travers repeatedly refused to give over the rights. Over the next several years, Disney continued to send offer after offer to Travers in an attempt to adapt the book. In 1959 — 21 years after starting the pursuit — Travers finally agreed to have Mary Poppins adapted by Disney, but she would have "final say" on the script. According to the documentary, Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious: The Making of Mary Poppins, Disney personally flew to London in 1959 and met with Travers to once again try to convince her to let him adapt Mary Poppins. Speaking of the meeting, Travers reportedly said that talking to Disney was "like talking to a friendly, charming uncle who took from his pocket a gold pocketwatch and dangled it enticingly before your eyes." After working on adapting the book for two years, P.L. Travers came to Disney Studios and apparently "didn't like anything" that was written. In recordings and sketches from a 1961 meeting, Travers said, "The book should be read very carefully for accuracy." Some of the things she had a problem with were that Mary should "never be impolite to anybody," and she didn't like that the parents would start out harsh and not pay attention to their children so they could eventually have a "change of heart." In the documentary, Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious: The Making of Mary Poppins, composer Richard Sherman said the "key to the story" was the parents being so preoccupied with their own lives that there was a "need" for Mary Poppins to come, so it was essential that they start a little cold, especially the Travers signed off on the project and was billed as a consultant on the film. Mary Martin, Bette Davis, and Angela Lansbury were all considered for the role of Mary Poppins before Julie Andrews. When Disney did a sequel to the film in 2018, titled Mary Poppins Returns, Lansbury actually appeared as a woman selling balloons in the park. At the time, Martin was best known for her work on stage in South Pacific, Peter Pan, and The Sound of Music. Meanwhile, Davis was fresh off her renowned work in Now, Voyager and All About Eve, and Lansbury had just starred in The Picture of Dorian Gray. Julie Andrews caught the attention of the Sherman brothers and Walt Disney after they saw her in Camelot. After Andrews and Richard Burton performed "What Do The Simple Folk Do?" on The Ed Sullivan Show, Disney flew to NYC to see Camelot on Broadway. In an interview at the Mary Poppins premiere, Disney said, "I went backstage and I tried to convince her that I was capable of making a picture with live actors as well as cartoons. I didn't know what she thought of me." In an interview from 1973, Andrews recalled that Disney "started acting out the whole of the script of Mary Poppins" while visiting her backstage at Camelot. Then, Disney invited Andrews and her then-husband, Tony Walton, to Los Angeles to see the storyboards for the film. Walton, who was a costume and set designer, ultimately ended up working on Mary Poppins, too. Initially, it was unclear if Julie Andrews would be able to star in Mary Poppins because she was the logical choice to star in My Fair Lady, after she played Eliza Doolittle on the West End and Broadway. However, Jack Warner ultimately cast Audrey Hepburn, citing that they needed "a name" to carry the film. Ultimately, Andrews and Hepburn were pitted against each other all awards season, with Andrews winning both the Golden Globe and Oscar for Mary Poppins, and she even thanked Warner in her Golden Globes acceptance speech. In her speech, Andrews said, "Finally, my thanks to a man who made a wonderful movie and who made all of this possible in the first Jack Warner."Looking back on her career with the Hollywood Reporter in 2015, Andrews said the one thing she wished she had was a recorded version of her My Fair Lady to show her grandchildren. She also said that while she understood the decision, getting passed over for the film only reinforced the idea she had in her head that she wasn't "pretty enough" for movies. Dick Van Dyke "begged" Walt Disney to let him play Mr. Dawes Sr., according to Julie Andrews in her memoir Home Work. Van Dyke wanted the role of Dawes Sr. so badly that he reportedly offered to play it for free. Andrew wrote in her memoir, "[Disney] took Dick up on that offer, and also persuaded him to make a $4,000 donation to the California Institute of the Arts, which Walt had recently cofounded." Disney made Van Dyke screentest for the role, too, as a little joke. According to Andrews, "Word flew around the Studios that he had been hilarious, totally persuasive and completely unrecognizable." Dick Van Dyke calls his accent for Bert the "worst Cockney accent [he's] ever done." While filming Mary Poppins, he asked J. Pat O'Malley, an Irish actor who voiced some of the animated characters in the film, to help him with his accent. Van Dyke joked in 2012 that he "made up a story" that it wasn't a Cockney accent, but rather an accent from "a little obscure county in the north of England." He also said that to this day, British people will come up to him and tell him what a horrible accent he does as Bert in Mary Poppins. Artist Peter Ellenshaw hand-painted 100 matte paintings for the backdrops that are seen in Mary Poppins. For the cityscape of London at dusk, Ellenshaw purposefully put little holes in the painting so that lights could shine through the back to make it look like the lights in the city. He said, "The lights would all come on gradually all over the city, or appear to." He previously worked with Disney on Treasure Island and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. The first scene they filmed for Mary Poppins was the "Jolly Holiday" sequence, which means it was also the first thing Julie Andrews ever shot for a film in her career. In her memoir, Andrews recalled, "My first filmed scene simply required that I strike a pose, hands on my umbrella, while Bert said, 'You look very pretty today, Mary Poppins!' I then had to walk past him and say, 'Do you really think so?' I was extremely nervous and fretted over how to say that one simple line. I had no idea what my voice would sound like or how to appear natural on film." Bert and Mary walking arm-in-arm during "Jolly Holiday" was also one of the first pieces of choreography Andrews and Dick Van Dyke learned during rehearsals. Andrews said in her memoir, "I performed Mary Poppins's demure, ladylike version of the step — but Dick flung his long legs up so high that I burst out laughing. To this day, he can still execute that step." Over the course of the development of Mary Poppins, the Sherman brothers wrote around 32 songs, with only 14 making the final version of the movie. When they started working on the songs, there wasn't a script yet, so instead they worked off of P.L. Travers' book and used chapters to figure out what a song could be. Walt Disney's favorite song was "Feed The Birds." In one of the stories in the book, Mary Poppins spins a compass, and the Sherman brothers actually wrote songs for each of the places the compass lands on, like "North Pole Polka," "The Land of Sand," and melody for "The Land of Sand" was later used in The Jungle Book for "Trust In Me." Since Mary Poppins flies a lot, most of her costumes had to be duplicated in a larger size to accommodate the harness Julie Andrews had to wear. In her memoir, Andrews revealed, "This was a thick elastic body stocking, which started at my knees and ended above my waist. The flying wires passed through holes in the costume and were attached to steel panels on either hip." She continued, writing, "I literally did a lot of 'hanging around' between takes, and when I was suspended, the steel panels pressed on my hip bones, which became very bruised. Sheepskin was added, which helped, although it was barely enough, since I couldn't look too bulky." Since the penguins, fox, and more animated characters weren't actually on stage with the actors, cardboard cutouts were used in between takes so the actors would know where they should look and have the proper sightline before the cutouts were taken away to film the scene. The merry go round horses were the only things on set most of the time. In her memoir, Home Work, Julie Andrews recalled, "For the tea party under the willows with the penguin waiters, a cardboard penguin was placed on the table in front of me. Once I'd established the sightline, the penguin was taken away, and when cameras rolled, I had to pretend it was still there." In order to add in the penguins that Bert dances with during "Jolly Holiday," it was just Dick Van Dyke alone on the stage, and the animators then had to figure out how to add in the penguins after the footage was shot. Frank Thomas was the lead animator on the penguins. He previously worked on countless Disney animated movies like Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Bambi, Cinderella, and more. "When I get over on the stage, I'd say, 'Where am I going to put my penguins?'," Thomas recalled in the documentary, Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious: The Making of Mary Poppins. He continued, saying, "Because I would get the film of Dick actually doing the dance, here's hit feet flying all around and stepping on my penguins. How are you going to know ahead of time where he's going to be and where Dick Van Dyke's going to be? So I was losing more penguins every day. I had them duck, and I had them jump, and I had them get out of the way anyway they could." The entire "Jolly Holiday" and "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious" scenes were created using the sodium vapor process. Instead of having the actors on a blue or green screen, which is common today, the actors were filmed against a white screen that was lit with yellow-hued sodium vapor lights. This process made it easier to isolate Julie Andrews, Dick Van Dyke, and the other actors from the background so the animators could animate both behind and next to them. Since they didn't film the scene against a blue backdrop, it also didn't put a limit on the colors that could be used in costumes, like Bert's blue bowtie and socks. Since "Step In Time" was such a demanding musical number, it was one of the few that required an extensive rehearsals. Dick Van Dyke revealed that it was a six week rehearsal process because it was "so complicated." He added, "It was amazing, the six weeks of rehearsal kind of got me into shape, and once we started shooting, I was ready." Van Dyke wasn't a trained dancer prior to Mary Poppins. Van Dyke told Conan O'Brien in 2012 that he asked Gower Champion, who was the chroegpraher for Bye By Birdie, which he starred in on Broadway and in the film, to help him learn to dance. He's loved dancing ever since. Mary's magic carpet bag was created by combining footage of Julie Andrews on a soundstage getting fed items up through the bag by a crew member hiding below the table, and footage of Karen Dotrice and Matthew Garber reacting to a clear table as Jane and Michael. Dotrice recalled, "We didn't know she was going to pull all of this stuff out of it! We were told to react to what she was taking out of the carpet bag. All of the things she pulled out of that carpet bag were a complete shock." She added, "Our reactions were completely genuine ... It was very exciting." In order to film the moment when Mary, Bert, Jane, and Michael climb the staircase made out of smoke, the crew created what was called "the black sponge stairs." On set, it was a seemingly ordinary staircase, but the stair treads were made of a sponge-like material so the actors' feet would slightly sink in, as if they were walking on the smoke. In a documentary, Karen Dotrice recalled filming the moment, saying, "I don't know how many takes it took to walk up that smoke staircase because we're following Julie holding broomsticks, walking up this smoke screen staircase, but it was like sinking." For the tea party with Uncle Albert, played by Ed Wynn, the sets were recreated a few different ways to help film the moment when everyone is floating and spinning in the air while laughing. The set was tilted 90 degrees in various directions, so the roof would be in a different spot, even with the ceiling being upside down at one point. Depending on the camera angle, the actors were either suspended on wires or sitting on a seesaw on top of a ladder, if it was a close-up. In the documentary, Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious: The Making of Mary Poppins, Tony Walton recalled, "Walt [Disney] himself came up with the technical approach to achieve the fact that they are laughing, [and] they are all floating about in the air." "Practically Perfect" was a song that was initially going to introduce Mary Poppins; however, it was cut from the film. Instead, the melody was repurposed into "Sister Suffragette," which Mrs. Banks sings. When Glynis Johns was brought in to play Mrs. Banks, she actually requested she have her own musical number, which is how "Sister Suffragette" was born. In a documentary about Mary Poppins, Johns revealed, "I said to Walt [Disney], it might give me incentive, if I could have my own little number." Richard Sherman said that after that, Disney leaned over to her and said they just finished a number for Mrs. Banks, and she'll love it. At the time, Richard and Robert hadn't even written the musical number yet. "The Chimpanzoo" was a song that was originally going to follow "I Love to Laugh" and was going to be sung by Julie Andrews while Mary, Bert, and the children were floating in the air at Uncle Albert's. The whole scene was developed but the number was scrapped the day recording on the song was going to take place. Richard Sherman revealed that Walt Disney felt the sequence wasn't necessary, and instead, after "I Love to Laugh," they all joke while drinking tea and then float down to the floor. And finally, costume designer Tony Walton hid little Easter eggs and details into the lining of Mary Poppins' outfits. In an interview with Vanity Fair in 2022, Julie Andrews revealed, "He said, 'You know, you're very prim and proper on the outside, but I think Mary Poppins has a kind of secret life, maybe, and I'm gonna give her, when you open your coat or when you turn and dance, you'll see marvelously-colored petticoats and wonderful linings of your clothes.'" Andrews said Walton's approach to the costumes helped her discover who Mary really was. She told Vanity Fair, "He said, 'Because I think that's what gives her pleasure. Very formal on the outside and a little bit wicked on the inside, so to speak.' And it completely gave me a clue as to her character. Big, big help for me." Is there another Mary Poppins behind-the-scenes fact that you love that isn't mentioned above? Tell us about it in the comments below!
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Helen Hunt on why she's rejecting Hollywood beauty standards
Helen Hunt on why she's rejecting Hollywood beauty standards Helen Hunt may be Hollywood royalty, but she's no beauty queen. The Oscar-winning actress, 61, opened up about the inner turmoil she's experienced in the entertainment industry due to Hollywood's intense beauty standards in a June cover story for Flow Space. Hunt, best known for her roles in the sitcom "Mad About You" and acclaimed dramas "As Good as It Gets" and "Twister," rose to fame in the 1990s when celebrity tabloids routinely scrutinized stars' physical appearance. "It felt impossible not to internalize the way you're supposed to look," Hunt reflected. "And (there was) a certain amount of misery and shame around not looking exactly that way." While Hunt rarely discusses the image pressures of being in Hollywood, she said she eventually reached a turning point. "I realized, 'This could quietly ruin your whole life.' I made a decision: I'm not playing. Not going to (let it) take up a lot of space in my mind," she said. Hunt added that the self-help book "The Only Diet There Is" by Sondra Ray was helpful in shifting her perspective on food and body image. "What I took from it is eat what you want and love every bite, period," she said. Justine Bateman embraces getting older: How to feel beautiful and accept aging The Emmy and Golden Globe-winning actress isn't the only female veteran to get candid on rejecting beauty standards. "Baywatch" alum Pamela Anderson and actress Justine Bateman have spoken out about embracing aging and stepping out in makeup-free looks. In a 2023 interview with "60 Minutes Australia," Bateman, who'd become the subject of online commentary over her "old" looks, defended her aged appearance and said cosmetic procedures "would erase" the authority she's gained over the years. "I like feeling that I am a different person now than I was when I was 20," Bateman said at the time. "I like looking in the mirror and seeing that evidence. ... I think my face represents who I am. I like it.'
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Kate Hudson Puts a Velvety Spin on the Little Black Dress for the Newport Beach TV Fest
Kate Hudson attended the Newport Beach TV Festival on Thursday in Newport Beach, Calif., for a special occasion at the inaugural event. The Oscar-nominated 'Almost Famous' actress was honored with the TV Performance of the Year Award (Actress). For the event, Hudson opted for her spin on a classic wardrobe staple. The 'Running Point' star wore a black velvet maxidress with sharp shoulders and long sleeves. The dress was designed with a fitted silhouette and included a sleek style sensibility and a high-neckline. More from WWD Miley Cyrus Puts Her Own Twist on a '80s Rockstar Hairstyle at the Chanel and Tribeca Film Festival Luncheon in NYC The Best Beauty Moments at The Fragrance Foundation Awards 2025: Laverne Cox, Vera Wang, Carolyn Murphy and More Outcast Clothing Brand Brings French Sensibility to the Grove in Los Angeles for a Limited-time 'Le Club Outcast' Pop-up Store Hudson added pops of white to contrast her black velvet dress, adding a pair of pearl earrings and carrying a white clutch with seashell inspiration as her main accessories. As for her glam, Hudson opted for old school glamour. The actress' blond tresses were styled with a side part and coiffed with long, flowing beach waves. Her makeup included standout elements as bold brows, lined eyes and another pop of color thanks to her bold red lip. The actress regularly collaborates with Los Angeles-based stylist Marc Eram. Hudson's Newport Beach TV Festival look follows a recent trend of celebrities putting their own respective spin on the little black dress. For her Wednesday appearance on 'The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon,' Miley Cyrus went back into Mugler's archives to style her LBD with inspiration from the fashion label's fall 1998 ready-to-wear collection. At the 'I Don't Understand You' screening on Monday, Amanda Seyfried got playful with fringe elements on her little black dress, courtesy of Rabanne. Taraji P. Henson also styled her LBD, courtesy of Christian Siriano, for her 'Tonight Show' look on Tuesday. The little black dress, popularized by such cultural moments as Audrey Hepburn in 'Breakfast at Tiffany's,' is considered a wardrobe essential for its versatility. Over the course of the last week, celebrities have show just how adaptable the look is, with unique textural moments, appliqués and more. View Gallery Launch Gallery: Kate Hudson and Mindy Kaling Channel Gold Glamour at Netflix's 'Running Point' Premiere Red Carpet Arrivals, Photos Best of WWD Mia Threapleton's Red Carpet Style Through the Years [PHOTOS] Princess Charlene of Monaco's Grand Prix Style Through the Years: Louis Vuitton, Akris and More, Photos Princess Charlene's Monaco Grand Prix Style Evolution at Full Speed: Shades of Blue in Louis Vuitton, Playful Patterning in Akris and More
