In brief: Tom Cruise fails to attend son’s film premiere

Tom Cruise is in trouble with Hollywood insiders for failing to attend the premiere of his 13-year-old son Connor's big screen debut, Seven Pounds. Connor (pictured right with Cruise, his stepmother Katie Holmes and David Beckham), one of two children adopted by Cruise and Nicole Kidman during their 10-year marriage, plays a younger version of Will Smith in the film. Cruise was unable to attend, blaming commitments to promote his own movie Valkyrie............ Having once met a magazine reporter naked from the waist up (cuddling a cat to preserve her modesty), Carla Bruni, wife of the French president Nicholas Sarkozy, has come over all coy: she has won a court victory against the fashion label Pardon selling shoulder bags featuring a picture of her naked, taken when she was a model in 1993, which was used without her consent. The court awarded her €40,000 in damages............ Oscar winning actor Richard Dreyfuss, who plays Vice President Dick Cheney in the Oliver Stone movie W, is suing his father and uncle over a personal loan he claims they never repaid. Dreyfuss has filed a lawsuit seeking $4m, accusing them of "fraud" and "malice" for refusing to turn over their accounting records............ In one of the bloodier battles of the culinary year, Jamie Oliver and Nigella Lawson went head to head competing for Christmas book sales. So far, Oliver's Ministry of Food has trounced Lawson's Nigella Christmas, outselling her in Waterstone’s by more than 200,000 copies......... The actor Sam Bottoms, who made his screen debut as the mute teenager Billy in The Last Picture Show, in which his brother Timothy Bottoms played one of the leads, has died at 53 from brain cancer. He famously played the role of the California surfer-turned-GI Lance Johnson in the Vietnam epic, Apocalypse Now........