Coronation Street legend Anne Kirkbride to be honoured with Outstanding Achievement accolade at the British Soap Awards

Anne Kirkbride is set to receive the Outstanding Achievement gong at the British Soap Awards for her role as Deirdre Barlow.

The Coronation Street legend, who passed away in January after a short battle with cancer, will have another moment to shine during the ceremony, which is due to be held at the Palace Theatre in Manchester on Saturday.

It is sure to be an emotionally-charged moment as Bill Roache, who plays the late soap star's screen partner Ken Barlow, will present the accolade to Anne's real-life husband, David Beckett.

The gesture marks only the second time in the 16-year history of the event that an award has been given posthumously.

It is, however, the first time that a posthumous gong will be given to an on-screen performer.

A Corrie source told Mail Online: 'We're delighted such a well-loved and respected actress is being honoured with this Outstanding Achievement award.

'Anne created such an iconic soap character who was part of our lives for over four decades.'

The late actress could end up securing two gongs during the course of evening, which is due to air on Thursday 21 May.

Anne has been nominated for Spectacular Scene of the Year for her exit performance, which saw her throw a trifle around the Barlow household.

The cast and crew of Coronation Street, along with its millions of viewers, were left devastated at the start of the year when Anne passed away in January.

And in an upcoming episode of the ITV drama, fans will soon see how Deirdre's close family and friends learn that she has passed away from a suspected aneurysm, according to latest reports.

The Sun’s TV Biz claim that Deirdre's loved ones find out the tragic news after they throw a surprise party to welcome her back to Weatherfield.

Viewers will reportedly see local resident, Bev Unwin reveal that the much-loved character died ‘peacefully’ in her garden before making a return to the cobbles.

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Paloma Faith and Stanley Tucci for Peter & Wendy

She will be joined in the modern day re-imagining of JM Barrie's classic Peter Pan tale by Stanley Tucci, who will play Captain Hook.

Scottish actress Laura Fraser – who was in the final season of Breaking Bad - will play Mrs Darling, while newcomers Zac Sutcliffe and Hazel Doupe have been cast in the lead roles.

ITV's Director of Drama, Steve November, said: "I'm delighted to be bringing JM Barrie's classic story of Peter Pan to ITV.

"This wonderful interpretation by Adrian Hodges is faithful to Barrie's original, but adds a new and unexpected dimension that makes it feel as though we are hearing the story for the first time.

"We're thrilled to have such a great cast on board to star in this exciting new drama."

Jamie Oliver, Hugh Jackman rap on Food Revolution Day song

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Jamie Oliver has put down his frying pan and picked up a microphone — all in the name of his new food education project.

To mark Food Revolution Day, the British chef appears in a Band Aid style music video rapping alongside actor Hugh Jackman, Paul McCartney and several other international stars including Ed Sheeran, who wrote the song.

“My name is Jamie Oliver and I’m here to say, I want to talk about Food Revolution Day,” Oliver raps.

“Half the world is starving, with too little to eat, and the other half die, from being obese.

“If you haven’t got a clue, about the mess that we’re in, the answer is in the words that we sing.”

Oliver’s Food Revolution Day wants to get compulsory food education put into schools to fight childhood obesity and diet-related health problems in young people.

A Change.org petition has been created to drive support for the project, gaining over one million signatures so far, and shared by famous faces including Matthew McConaughey to Usain Bolt.

On the petition Oliver writes, “We’re currently facing a global obesity epidemic, with 42 million children under the age of five either overweight or obese across the world. The bottom line is the next generation will live shorter lives than their parents if nothing is done to rectify these alarming stats.”

“If you can help me get millions of people to sign this petition, we can create a movement powerful enough to force all G20 governments to take action.”

The campaign has also got social media users writing on their hands and taking ‘sign it selfies’.

Jackman raps in the video: “Come on everybody, do the right thing, sign the petition”.

Umimachi Diary offers time to reflect after Mad Max fury at Cannes

Hirokazu Kore-eda's "Umimachi Diary" (Our Little Sister), a slow, poetic look at time passing, is the perfect antidote to the adrenaline shot that "Mad Max: Fury Road" gave the Cannes Festival just before the competition effectively started on Thursday.

While George Miller's opus, which was screened out of competition, is the ultimate action film, "Umimachi Diary" tells the story of three sisters and their half-sister in Japan and echoes the work of the late Yasujiro Ozu.

"One needs to step back to look at how time goes by. In this way my work is similar to Ozu's," Kore-eda told a news conference ahead of the film's premiere on La Croisette.

"It's a story on character and time that passes."

Three sisters living in the old city of Kamakura travel to the funeral of their estranged father and invite their younger half-sister to live with them.

"It's a beautiful film, classically Japanese in terms of lifestyle. It depicts the beauty of the seasons. I'm eager to see how it will be welcomed in the West," said lead actress Ayase Haruka.

Kore-eda's previous film, "Like Father, Like Son", got a warm reception at Cannes two years ago as it won the Jury Prize.

He will be in fierce competition this year with a director he looks up to, Taiwan's Hou Hsiao Hsien, who presents "The Assassin" at Cannes.

"He's a strong paternal figure, I am pleased to be competing here with him," said Kore-eda.

Also in competition on Thursday was Italian director Matteo Garrone’s “Il Racconto dei Racconti” (Tale of Tales), an action fantasy based on the 17th century fairytales of the Neapolitan writer Basile.

Garrone said that he’d chosen the tales because they were a bit off kilter from other fairytales, including as they do a story about a king who falls in love with a flea and another king who kills a sea monster in order to feed its heart to his wife so she can become pregnant.

The film, a big budget production for Italy, with actress Salma Hayek as the barren queen, is long at two hours but weaves together some fascinating characters and plots.

"It was an ambitious project, granted, one had to be a bit bold and daring to do. But I launched into this adventure with a whole group of actors and actresses who are quite extraordinary and you saw the result," said Garrone.

Hayek said eating the sea monster heart – which she said Garrone had insisted be realistic enough to fool a doctor watching the film – had been excruciating.

"Disgusting! No, we have to talk about this; our director here wanted the heart to be inside, identical to the real heart. It's not just from the outside that was perfect, he needed inside all the exact parts; God forbid I took a bite and a doctor would recognize there's an artery missing!"

High Society, Old Vic, review: 'What a swell party - eventually'

Well, Did You Evah? A show that looked destined for a dutiful three stars come interval time turns itself round so entirely in the second half that Kevin Spacey’s final piece of programming for the Old Vic may prove one of the hits of the summer.

The 1998 stage musical of High Society, with a book by Arthur Kopit, is based directly on Philip Barry’s original 1939 stage play The Philadelphia Story, but uses most of the Cole Porter songs of the 1956 musical film version – plus a scattering of other Porter numbers. The plot presents itself as arch and gossamer thin, demanding that we care about a spoilt socialite, Tracy Lord (Kate Fleetwood), on the eve of her wedding to a dullard who holds no apparent attraction to her - she certainly doesn’t need the money – while she’s thrown over her first husband CK Dexter Haven (Rupert Young), seemingly out of petulance.

• The best West End musicals on now

So artificial do proceedings seem in the first hour that I wished the theatre had jettisoned its current in-the-round layout, which demands a certain realism, and removed the action safely behind the proscenium arch. The shadow of the film lies heavy too: director Maria Friedman (best known as a superb singer of West End musicals) has set the action in 1958, a bit too close to the film’s date for comfort, and no one in the enthusiastic cast has charisma to come close to Bing Crosby or Frank Sinatra. Worse, the exquisite delicacy of that perfect romantic song True Love is turned into something of pure schmaltz.

But then the party starts. Jazz musician Joe Stilgoe (son of Richard), inhabiting the Louis-Armstrong-esque entertainer role of the film, had given us a glimpse of his talents in the opening five minutes but, in the second half, he and band leader Theo Jamieson deliver such a breathtaking piano duet that it feels lias if the champagne hasn’t just gone to the heads of the wedding guests (shimmying wildly in their New Look silks) but the audience’s too. I won’t give away the coup of Tom Pye’s clever stage design, but suffice it to say we also get some exemplary tap dancing on top of a grand piano.

• The best plays on now in London

After that, it is also as if Fleetwood, far better at being a comedian than “the fair Miss Frigidaire”, has downed a couple herself, and developed a dollop of endearing, hedonistic personality in the process. The men around her liven up too and, with top marks as well going to choreographer Nathan M Wright and the exemplary band, the show finds its heart and proves charming. It transpires, unsurprisingly, that Friedman knows a thing or two about delivering barn-storming song-and-dance after all.

Pitch Perfect 2: The Barden Bellas are back with an encore-worthy sequel

Competitive a cappella groups score points for snazzy reinventions of the recognizable, but sequels rarely try for such innovation. And soPitch Perfect 2, the sparky enough follow-up to the surprise musical comedy from 2012, doesn’t stray from the original. What we have is an update that is tighter, slicker and fine-tuned in more ways than one – no doubt music to the ears of the fans of a flowering franchise.

Crass zingers fly, songs have more verve and, a-ca-casionally, familiar characters show growth. And by growth, we’re not talking about Fat Amy’s expansion.

Then again, we are. Although Anna Kendrick’s Beca is again the lead here (as the chief arranger for Barden Bellas, an all-girl college a cappella group), Rebel Wilson’s sassy Fat Amy fills up more screen time. In fact, she shows way too much in the sequel’s opening moments, descending from the rafters during a Kennedy Center performance. The wardrobe malfunction leaves no wonder to the Aussie’s “down under,” and the Obamas in the private box – stock first couple footage is used – are left wincing from the vaginal mishap.

The Bellas, who snagged a national championship in Pitch Perfect as freshmen, are now seniors and three-time defenders. As a result of Amy’s unfortunate exposure, however, the troupe is thrown off a victor’s tour, with no chance for a fourth straight title.

As soundtrack choices are mindful of the storyline, the downturn of the Bellas is accompanied by Mika’s bouncy Lollipop hit from 2007, about trying too hard and ultimately being let down. But the girls are not flat for long. Stripped of their national tiara, they decide to shoot for a world title instead.

And there’s your narrative, skimpier than a Beyoncé gown and so standard: redemption, twee-glee style. (Or Rocky style: The lead singer of German antagonists Das Sound Machine is a female Ivan Drago, albeit one whose intimidating sexuality unnerves Beca to humorous ends.)

The way back to respectability is a road of fun. We have plenty of one-joke characters, and there’s Elizabeth Banks and John Michael Higgins back as the pithy broadcasters. Higgins – who knows his way around Christopher Guest-mode comedy and whose Owner of a Lonely Heartdinner-table performance in The Break-up gets a big “yes” as the greatest a cappella moment in cinematic history – is particularly hilarious as the riotously racist and merrily misogynistic commentator. He sees the successful all-gal glee clubbers as an “inspiration to all girls across the country who are too ugly to be cheerleaders.”

Banks, who also makes her feature directorial debut here, is strictly second banana. She’s also unadventurous behind the camera. A trip to Copenhagen for an outdoor festival – A Cachella, perhaps? – is dealt with dismissively.

But make way for the clumsy underclassman Emily, played by Hailee Steinfeld (all grown up from True Grit). She ushers in a new sensibility – original songs instead of covers – and finds a willing collaborator in Beca, an aspiring music producer looking for a voice of her own. Likewise, the rest of the harmony-happy graduating class considers its next steps, too.

As for the film, it doesn’t try too hard to distinguish itself from its predecessor, hitting the notes it needs to hit while pushing a girl-power – we hear Beyoncé’s Run the World (Girls) – agenda. Although it works well as an encore, the likelihood is that this thing isn’t over until the Fat Amy zings again.

Mel Gibson gives thumbs-up to new Mad Max

Mel Gibson has given Mad Max: Fury Road the thumbs up and even shared a joke with his former director at the film's US premiere, George Miller has revealed.

Speaking at the Cannes film festival on Thursday, Miller – who has revived his popular film series after 30 long years – said Gibson was in good spirits at last week's Los Angeles screening, despite being absent from the latest instalment in the franchise that made him a global star in the 1980s.

"I sat with him next to me, and Tom [Hardy, Gibson's replacement] right behind us," he told Fairfax Media at Cannes. "We hadn't seen each other for a long time.

"Mel is someone, in a sense, who cannot lie. He started chuckling through the movie and I thought, 'Ah, that's the chuckle I remember'. Then he started digging me in the ribs. Then he started asking me about the actors, because he's about to direct a film [Hacksaw Ridge] in Australia."

It had been expected that Gibson would have a noteworthy cameo in Mad Max: Fury Road. Indeed, after appearing in last year's The Expendables 3, which star Sylvester Stallone claimed he'd wanted Gibson to direct, there was talk of a quiet return to form and favour for the actor-director, whose box-office-topping status came crashing down after an anti-semitic outburst following his 2006 arrest on a drink-driving charge. Allegations of domestic violence, and a recording in which he managed to be both racist and threatening to his then-partner Oksana Grigorieva, followed in 2010.

Miller admitted that watching the new film with his troubled former star was difficult.

"It was kind of an emotional moment for me. He gave me great respect at the end, as a director. He's a wonderful actor – and a really great director.

"As you probably know, I was heartbroken to see what was happening with Mel. Because I've always known him as a really, really good man."