In brief: DiCaprio in frame to play Bond creator

Leonardo DiCaprio (right) is being tipped to play James Bond creator Ian Fleming (left) in a new film, Fleming; writer Damien Stevenson says: "It's the real James Bond. In England, Ian Fleming's exploits are well known. Talking to people out here [America], no one had any idea that M was based on a real person, Miss Moneypenny was based on a real person"… Former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl's plan to marry his long-time partner Maike Richter, 35 years his junior, is thought to be a 'deathbed marriage'; Kohl, 78, has been seriously ill for some months having ignored a series of ailments ranging from prostate problems to diabetes to continue his gruelling schedule of international diplomacy... A new production of Harold Pinter's first major play The Birthday Party has opened at the Lyric Hammersmith, exactly 50 years after it premiered at the same theatre to disastrous reviews; only one critic, Harold Hobson, liked the play in 1958, writing: "Mr Pinter and The Birthday Party will be heard of again - make a note of their names"... The death of American pop artist Robert Rauschenberg on Monday, aged 82, will reignite the controversy about his influence on Tracey Emin, who is believed to have borrowed heavily from the artist's 1955 work Bed – made from his pillows and quilt - for her own 1999 installation My Bed, without ever acknowledging the fact. The art critic Robert Hughes once said Emin's work was "stale", understood to be a reference to her pillaging Rauschenberg’s original idea...