Faces of the week

Our regular look at some of the faces which have made the news this week. Above are Liza Minnelli (main picture), with Mel Brooks, Paula Radcliffe, Dame Barbara Cartland and Howard Keel.

Liza Minnelli

As the daughter of one of Hollywood's biggest stars, Liza Minnelli was born under a media spotlight. In the following 58 years, she's never been out of the headlines for long.

The legal eagles are certainly circling around Liza's head at present.

Not only she is she embroiled in a series of bruising lawsuits with her estranged husband, David Gest, but a former bodyguard is now suing Minnelli for damages, accusing her of forcing him to have sex with her in order to keep his job.

Doubtless, Minnelli will take it in her stride. "My life has been lived in front of the press," she says. "I was born and someone took a picture and it's been that way ever since."

Judy Garland's first visitor to see her new baby daughter was Frank Sinatra. She grew up with the likes of Noel Coward, Nat King Cole, Humphrey Bogart and Fred Astaire, while "the pretty lady", as she called Marilyn Monroe, would come to her room and chat with her.

Electrifying performer: Liza at work

Not that Liza was impressed: "They were just boring friends of my parents", she said.

One celebrity parent might have made life difficult; but Dad was famous, too. Vincente Minnelli was the director of famous musicals including Meet Me in St Louis, Gigi and An American in Paris.

But by the time Liza was five, her mother and Minnelli, the second of Garland's five husbands, were divorced.

Liza had already appeared in one of her mother's films, In the Good Old Summertime, and at nine, danced with Garland on Broadway.

Before she reached her teens, with her mother's addictions and depression becoming ever more alarming, she had become Judy's nurse and dresser, constantly alert to any threat of a suicide attempt.

She even hired and fired staff and, at 14, started driving her brother and sister to school because the chauffeur was always drunk and her mother liked him too much to sack him.

I've always been married or going with someone. Liza on her tangled love-life.

As a 19-year-old performer, Minnelli seemed to be emerging from Garland's shadow. She won a Tony Award for her role in the musical Flora, even though the show itself flopped.

And, in 1972, Minnelli won the Best Actress Oscar for Cabaret, in which she displayed the full range of her considerable talents.

But, by now, after her mother's death from an overdose of sleeping pills, Liza was hooked on tranquillisers and thereafter, it seemed, attention was focussed on her own, apparently inherited, problems.

She divorced her first husband, Peter Allen; a second marriage was soon on the rocks, and another foundered after she suffered a third miscarriage. There were other romances, too, with Baryshnikov, Sellers, Aznavour and Scorsese.

"I've always been married or going with someone," she said. "I always felt I didn't exist unless I was defined through a man's eyes."

But Liza Minnelli's fourth marriage, to David Gest, was subject to widespread ridicule.

Her marriage to David Gest collapsed into bitter recriminations

A Channel 4 documentary about Minnelli and Gest's 2002 Manhattan wedding turned out to be a horror-fest, with guests - and viewers - recoiling as Gest, seemingly intent on proving his credentials, subjected Minnelli to "the Kiss".

In the words of one observer, it was more "a work of dental suction, a deep steam wash of Minnelli's molar cavities and lower gums."

Along with the heartache of lost romance and childlessness, Liza Minnelli has battled with addictions and obesity.

She has had both hips replaced and has survived double pneumonia and another life-threatening illness, encephalitis.

Yet she has never indulged in self-pity. "I've always hung my ass out on the line, just waved it in the breeze, waiting for someone to take me apart," she says. "Regret is a huge exercise in futility."

Minnelli's survival is a tribute to her toughness. As she once said: "Reality is something to be overcome."

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Mel Brooks Three years after its Broadway premiere, The Producers' arrival on the London stage has enjoyed the same rapturous reception by audiences and critics. The arch-priest of political incorrectness, Mel Brooks, is still in love with his creation: "If you have to trip a little old lady to get a ticket, do it," he says. But not if you object to a smirking, high-camp Hitler or glamorous, high-kicking stormtroopers. Says Brooks: "You either get it or you don't." Full story

Paula Radcliffe Paula Radcliffe delivered one in the eye for the sneerers and the smirkers by winning the New York marathon. It followed her despair at the Athens Olympics, when she failed to finish the marathon and the 10,000 metres. "Athens was a disaster," said 30-year-old Radcliffe. "I'd never had a failure of that magnitude before." Her Big Apple victory gave her a prize of $100,000, but the money was of little significance: it was a race of redemption. Full story

Dame Barbara Cartland Devotees of Barbara Cartland's romantic novels learned that, four years after her death, another 158 unpublished works are to appear on the internet. They'll be published each month for the next 13 years. Towards the end of her 99 years, Dame Barbara was writing 10 novels a year. There'll apparently be no surprises in the new novels: most of them will be about the poor girl who meets a handsome Lord. And, as usual, readers will be left at the bedroom door.

Howard Keel Howard Keel, who died at the age of 85, described himself as "a dramatic actor who sings". He played straight roles in several films, but it was Keel's larger-than-life performances in film musicals such as Kiss Me Kate, Show Boat and Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, that made him a star. Handsome, 6ft 3in tall, Keel's career enjoyed a later revival when he joined the hugely-successful television series, Dallas, as an adversary of JR Ewing. Full story

Compiled by BBC News Profiles Unit's Chris Jones.