The arts' most wanted

Yo Yo Ma is known for his unusual collaborations

BBC News Online examines what is in store for the arts world in 2001.

One of next year's big movies is likely to be Ang Lee's martial arts romance Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

The critics are not only saying it is Oscar material, but are falling in love with the soundtrack.

An unusual collaboration between composer Tan Dun, classical cellist Yo Yo Ma and traditional singer Co Co Lee, it could just be the soundtrack of the year.

But another soundtrack - for the film Chocolat - by British composer Rachel Portman could also be in the running.

Portman is becoming a composer of some stature.

Tacita Dean was a Turner Prize finalist in 1998

She composed the much acclaimed music for The Cider House Rules and won Oscars for best original music for Evita and Emma.

2001 should be the year she finally gets the recognition for being one of the UK's most successful exports to Hollywood.

If you have not heard of the artist Tacita Dean yet, chances are you will have before February is out.

A survey of her work at Tate Britain will be her first significant exhibition in the UK, though she was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 1998.

Dean trained as a painter but now works in mixed media and particularly film.

Watch out too for actor David Oyelowo, who hit the headlines this year by being the first black actor to play a British Shakespearean king.

Oyelowo will take part in what is being described as "theatre's contribution to the monarchy debate", The Histories.

Can Oyelowo's Henry cast a light on the monarchy?

This is a staging by the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) of Shakespeare's eight history plays.

The mammoth task, never before attempted, involves actors like Samuel West and Oyelowo, songs from Billy Bragg and directors like Michael Attenborogh and Steven Pimlott.

Oyewolo will also appear in a Channel 4 comedy, Dog Eat Dog.

The Mummy star Brendan Fraser is to join the lengthening list of Hollywood actors taking to the UK stage.

He will star in Tennessee Williams's Cat On A Hot Tin Roof.

Shakespeare's history plays

Henry IV - parts I and II

Henry V

Richard II

Richard III

Henry V - parts I, II and III

Ally McBeal star Calista Flockhart is on the cards for an as yet unnamed play.

And British actress Anna Friel will open in Wedekind's Lulu at the Almeida in March.

The much visited and even more lauded Tate Modern in London launches its first temporary exhibition in February.

It will look at peaks of cultural creativity in nine great cities.

The show will take in Paris in 1910, when the work of artists Picasso and Braque was developing alongside musicians Debussy and Stravinsky.

It will also look at New York in the 70s where disco met radical politics and pop art, collapsing the boundaries between art, film, fashion and architecture.

British museums will be commemorating the anniversary of Queen Victoria's death.

Major exhibitions will commemorate Queen Victoria's death in 1901

The Victoria and Albert Museum in London will look at the spirit and imagination of the Victorian age, and Tate Britain has a major exhibition on the Victorian nude later in the year.

The Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art is holding artist Rachel Whiteread's first major solo exhibition in the UK.

Turner prize winner Whiteread is famous for her casts of domestic objects and particularly for her 1993 cast of the inside of a Victorian house in London.

In Australia there was a time when convict ancestry was a shameful thing, but no longer.

Peter Carey, the Booker prize-winning author of Oscar and Lucinda, a new novel that fictionalises the story of the notorious and much-loved bushranger Ned Kelly.

The book, The True History of Ned Kelly, arrives garlanded with praise.

Young author Hector McDonald is being touted as the new Alex Garland, author of bestseller The Beach.

Rachel Whiteread won the Turner Prize in 1993

His book, The Mind Game, is the story of an Oxford student persuaded by his professor to become a guineapig in a groundbreaking test of emotional reasoning.

The plot involves the student taking a holiday in Kenya with his girlfriend - but all is not what it seems.

Christine Keeler, who as a 19-year-old was at the centre of a political storn when she had affairs with cabinet minister John Profumo and a Russian official, is to publish her tell-all biography.

Now aged 58, her book, The Truth At Last, is to be published by Macmillan - the family publishing company of the prime minister she all but destroyed.

But US writer Candace Bushnell is likely to take the last word in sexual shenanigans in 2001.

Bushnell, the woman behind Channel 4 series Sex In The City, has written a novel chronicling the Manhattan mating game.

Since Bushnell, who models her stories on her own life, is described in the US media as being "annoyingly beautiful", she will probably be ubiquitous during her publicity tour of the UK.