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Accidentally a star

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She is best known for the catchy pop tune ‘Accidentally Kelly Street’, but Jackie Brygel discovers singer Angie Hart is more than a one-hit wonder.

As the lead singer of hit ’90s pop band Frente!, Angie Hart toured the globe and hit the headlines for everything from posing near-nude for a magazine cover to making an appearance on Home and Away.

More than a decade later, Angie reveals her life couldn’t be more different from the frenetic days with the indie group and it’s wildly successful single ‘Accidentally Kelly Street’.

Now the Melbourne-based solo artist has just released her latest album, Eat My Shadow, and is preparing for an Australian tour. The 37-year-old is also loving being a newlywed.

“My husband is not a musician,” Angie says. “His name’s Blair Pearce and he’s a management consultant. He’s got a good business head — which is great for when I bring contracts home. I’ve got someone to read them for free! He’s also learnt so much so quickly about the music industry.”

Angie reveals her new hubby, whom she met at a party in Melbourne and hopes to start a family with in the near future, couldn’t be more supportive.

“That’s the wonderful thing about being a little bit older,” she says. “The day that we decided to get together, we pretty much laid it all out on the table. We knew we were going to be together forever, so there were no games.”

Angie admits that these days she looks back on her time with Frente! with a sense of bewilderment.

“I don’t really know how it happened. It was one of those wonderful times when indie pop got a look-in for a second,” she says.

“I wouldn’t be doing music today if it wasn’t for that. It really made my career.”

That said, Angie confesses she’s more than happy to have swapped a non-stop life on the road for a more homely existence.

“I’ve got a bit of tour phobia these days,” Angie says, chuckling.

“I have just started travelling overseas again now and I am getting a little bit more of a taste for it again. But I like having family around,” she says.

“I lived in Los Angeles for about nine years, but I’ve always been a Melbourne girl. I did enjoy my time in the US, but I’m very Australian. I felt a bit out of step all the time over there.”

And Angie couldn’t be happier with her latest recording effort, Eat My Shadow, which features collaborations with Mark Seymour and Ben Lee.

“I had the courage to strip it back and let the songs speak for themselves,” she reflects.

Angie Hart’s new album, Eat My Shadow is out now.

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Medical warning over increase in the ‘wind-down’ wine

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In case you weren’t confused enough about the benefits and consequences of drinking wine, a professor in Britain says that women risk developing liver disease or becoming alcohol-dependant because they are unaware of the impact of regular drinking.

Professor Ian Gilmore, president of the Royal College of Physicians in London told Britain’s Telegraph.co.uk that the pressure of being a mother or having a career was leading women to drink more and consequently they are “storing up a health time bomb”.

“Women in their role as mother or carer use alcohol to cope with exhaustion, anxiety, isolation and with stressful life events,” Professor Gilmore said.

He believes the link between alcohol consumption, the emancipation of women and their bigger role in the workplace has led to women feeling under more pressure, and having a drink to calm themselves.

“Women feel pressure to compete with their male counterparts, especially in those industries which are dominated by men and are highly paid, such as financial institutions in the city.”

Professor Gilmore continued, “Alcohol is a sedative and a relaxant but, used on a regular basis, can really put people at high risk. Women are storing up a health time bomb by drinking this regularly.”

The 2009 Australian Guidelines to Reduce Health Risks from Drinking Alcohol advises, “There is no level of drinking alcohol that can be guaranteed to be completely ‘safe’ or ‘no risk’.”

The guidelines recommend that healthy men and women drink no more than two standard drinks on any day to reduce the lifetime risk of harm from alcohol-related disease or injury.

Your say: do you have a drink at the end of the day? How regularly do you drink? Do you think women drink at a dangerous level? Do these findings worry you? Share your opinions below.

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Wash to wear: designer-style laundering

When it comes to getting the most out of an outfit, designer Alex Perry knows exactly how it’s done. The leading fashion designer is all about keeping everything — from the essential wardrobe must-haves through to the precious one-off pieces — in perfect condition.

Alex has teamed up with Elextrolux to offer his top 10 tips on caring for an important investment — your clothes.

1. Don’t take the wonder out of bras

Always wash white lingerie in a detergent for colours which doesn’t contain bleach. Most white synthetic lingerie is dyed white, so when you wash it with bleach, the white colour is bleached.

2. Red lipstick and red wine, no longer the devil

When you get a lipstick stain, pre-treat it by prewashing it by hand with dishwashing liquid (preferably one containing bleach) and then wash the garment as recommended. Cover red wine stains with table salt to absorb the wine. Or try removing the stains with a small amount of white wine.

3. Colour me happy

It may sound simple, but separating light colours, dark colours and whites will ensure the colours of your clothes last.

4. Don’t sweat it

To remove perspiration and deodorant stains or marks, rub with soap first then wash as recommended.

5. Powder or liquid

It doesn’t matter which one you use, as long as you use a detergent with bleach for whites or without bleach for colours and one without enzymes for wool and silk. The important thing to remember is not to overdose your machine with either if you want good results.

6. Weighing in on load size

Getting a washing machine that has a weight sensor is always a good idea. It will help you determine the right amount of clothes and it’s a good idea to mix bigger and smaller garments for better circulation in the drum.

7. Don’t get you knickers in a knot

Wash bags are inexpensive insurance! The little nylon net bag protects underwire bras, lace panties and nylon pantyhose as they tumble in the washer. But don’t overfill the bag; remember to keep it half-full so garments have room to move.

8. Know your fabric

Different fabrics should be washed and dried in different ways. It’s a good idea to sort your clothes by fabric into two main groups: manmade fibres and natural fibres. Some dryers, like the Electrolux Energy Star dryer, have a range of programs that offer gentle drying of silk, wool and other delicate mix fabrics.

9. Fatal attraction

If possible, don’t dry synthetic fabrics with other fabrics, as they tend to attract lint, resulting in the dreaded pilling. And remember to always follow the temperature on the care label or you risk ruining your clothes — fast!

10. A delicate issue

Delicate fabrics benefit from less frequent cleaning — a ‘refresh’ cycle, as featured on the Electrolux Iron Aid Dryer, is a great way to freshen up your dresses in between wears.

For more fashion and fabric care advice, visit www.thinkingofyou.com.au/fashion.

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Sarah: the Murdoch to watch

Thrilled to be expecting her third child, Sarah Murdoch talks to Lee Tulloch about motherhood and what it’s like to have married into a high-profile business dynasty. Untainted by power or fame, Sarah has remained her own person, working tirelessly for a raft of charities – and on a documentary series she finds moving and inspiring.

“Please don’t let this be another story about Mrs Murdoch.” The most accessible member of the Murdoch clan rolls her eyes and smiles to let me know she’s not quite serious. “Marriage, motherhood – it’s always that. I’d much rather be private about my life.”

In pictures: Sarah Murdoch

Sarah Murdoch is smiling because she knows there’s a contradiction in what she asks. The former supermodel, Bonds underwear ambassador, Australia’s Next Top Model host and tireless fundraiser for a slew of causes, from breast cancer to children’s health, pops up everywhere these days: running on a treadmill in Sydney’s Martin Place in the Foxtel Lap to raise money for the Murdoch Childrens Research Institute, delivering a speech on a new breast cancer initiative at the National Press Club, sporting a big pink satin bow and a bigger grin on the red carpet at an Estée Lauder fundraiser, launching politician Tony Abbott’s book, Battlelines, before a savvy political crowd, and, from November 3, fronting a television series, Pride of Australia, that looks at the lives of 28 unsung Australian heroes, on Foxtel’s Arena.

Try as she might to keep her public and private worlds separate, the two keep dovetailing. She might be reluctant to talk about her family, but sometimes there’s no getting around it. For the past three months, she has been wearing caftans and baggy shirts to hide what is now obvious to everyone — she is expecting her third child.

Sarah, 37, and husband Lachlan, 38, are overjoyed that sons Kalan, five and Aidan, three, will have a new playmate, but Sarah is not looking forward to the scrutiny her growing baby bump is about to get. For the most part, she is feeling the vulnerability that most women feel early in their pregnancies.

“I wish I were further down the track before talking about it,” she admits. “There are ups and downs with every pregnancy and you don’t want to go through these with everybody.”

Yet there was little chance it would go unnoticed. The cat was well and truly out of the bag a couple of weeks ago when she appeared at a Breast Cancer Foundation event in a purple satin dress, displaying a very defined curve in front.

The evolution of Sarah Murdoch

Nor can she go to ground and ride out the next few months away from public view. In the first months of the pregnancy, she had to forge on with the narration of Pride of Australia, while suffering awful bouts of morning sickness. “I was quite nauseous through the whole thing,” she recalls.

Now that she’s feeling better, she has her causes and Pride of Australia to promote, as well as preparation for the new season of Australia’s Next Top Model, which will start filming in March. The newest Murdoch is due in April, so timing will be “tricky”, she says. Trickier still is a bad case of “pregnancy brain”, which, she says, gets worse with every baby. “I just walked into a wall!” she says, with a laugh.

Read more from this interview in the November issue of The Australian Women’s Weekly out now with Sarah Murdoch on the cover.

Sarah Murdoch appeared on this month’s cover of The Australian Women’s Weekly with no retouching or airbrushing. Would you like to see more of this in future editions of the magazine? And is she the ultimate role model? Tell us below!

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Schapelle’s descent into madness

Schapelle Corby looking forward to 'cleansing swim'

Schapelle Corby

As convicted drug trafficker Schapelle Corby enters her sixth year in a Bali jail, her biographer, Kathryn Bonella, charts her slide into depression, despair and mental illness.

Schapelle Corby may inhabit a filthy, rat-infested concrete cell in the hellhole that is Bali’s Kerobokan Prison, but she lives in a world of fantasy. She hears voices in her head. Statues tell her secrets. Non-existent birds twitter and stop to send a secret code and imaginary ducks tell her to follow them.

Several weeks ago, one of these ducks led Schapelle, 32, onto the roof of her cell block. It was high and dangerous. She had climbed into the ceiling from inside her cell, then lifted tiles from the roof and climbed out. In her imagination, the duck was telling her to follow it to the beach. She was coaxed down safely, but she’s since done it again. The second time, the duck was telling her to come up on the roof to get some fresh air.

In her more lucid moments, Schapelle doesn’t want to deal with the hell of prison life anymore. She has slashed her wrists twice and told Australian psychiatrist Dr Jonathan Phillips, who recently examined her, that if she bleeds to death, she doesn’t care who is left to clean it up. It’s a stark turnaround from three years ago, when she told me, while I was writing her biography, that she was totally against suicide because she felt it was selfish to leave behind a mess and trauma for family.

But in the past 18 months, Schapelle, a former Gold Coast beauty-therapy student jailed on October 8, 2004, for smuggling 4.2kg of marijuana into Bali, has changed indescribably.

I caught up with her recently while working on my latest book, Hotel Kerobokan: The Shocking Inside Story of Bali’s Most Notorious Jail, published by Pan Macmillan Australia on November 1, and found her dishevelled, childlike and teary, with sores and scratches on her face and knees. The black hole that she has been slowly sliding into since she started her 20-year sentence has now finally consumed her. Much of the time she is disconnected from reality, which is simply too painful for her to bear.

For the first three-and-a-half years inside Kerobokan Prison, she somehow held it together, despite being kept in a place most people would not think fit for a dog: she once found a bloody sanitary pad draped over her toothbrush, rats run around in her cell, junkies have injected themselves next to her, women have almost died from miscarriages in her cell, she has witnessed brutal bashings and a prisoner hanging by a noose. She lives in a small concrete cell with up to 15 other women. The squat toilet often blocks and spews out raw sewage. The door is locked at 4.30pm and not opened until 7am.

Incredibly, when she came out to visits, she was usually upbeat, immaculately dressed and groomed. Yet, despite how normal she seemed, staying positive took enormous willpower and effort. Schapelle did it for herself, but mostly she did it for her family and particularly her dad, Michael, who was prone to his own bouts of depression due to having bone cancer.

However, Schapelle was coping by repressing her pain and shutting down.

Eighteen months ago, Schapelle told me she wanted to die. The chilling words came after I’d asked her if she was okay. “No I’m not. I want to die.”

“No you don’t, Schapelle,” was my reflex reply. She turned and looked directly at me with her piercing blue eyes. “Don’t ask me if you don’t want to hear it … I do want to die.”

Read the rest of this compelling story in the November issue of The Australian Women’s Weekly out now with Sarah Murdoch on the cover.

Your say: What do you think of Schapelle? Do you think she should be brought home?

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Our all natural covergirl

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The Weekly’s November cover girl, Sarah Murdoch, told us she did not want her photographs digitally retouched. So we didn’t.

Real. Is a word Sarah returns to often. It’s the “real” stories in Pride of Australia that engage her. It’s the realness of the sausage sizzle and the camping trip and the lining up to buy tickets to Up [the children’s movie] with everyone else.

In pictures: Sarah Murdoch

It’s also, admirably, the desire to put a real face forward in the media. Literally. She wants The Weekly to leave her photographs as natural as possible, wrinkles and all.

“I think when I’m retouched in photographs it’s worse, because when people see me in real life, they go, ‘Oh, God! Isn’t she old!’ ” She’s joking, of course, but all the same, “It makes me mad that we can’t embrace the beauty of ageing, because we’re all going to do it. I’m wondering about these people who are in their 30s – even 20s sometimes – doing all this Botox and work on their faces. What are they going to look like by the time they’re 60 or 70? Where do you stop? It’s a slippery slope. I’m not brave enough to go there.”

Your say: If it was available to you at the time of your wedding, would you have your cherished main photo retouched to enhance your beauty?

Click here to VOTE

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Fifi’s flirty photo shoot

Usually Fifi Box is racing around Australia reporting the weather, but yesterday she swapped her gumboots for a glamorous Tim O’Connor dress.

The single 32-year-old was part of a shoot to launch Baileys with a Hint of Coffee at Sydney’s Argyle Hotel in The Rocks and apparently had a lot of flirty fun with the cute baristas.

Like most single girls, Fifi didn’t let the opportunity to get cosy with the baristas pass her by. “Baileys with a Hint of Coffee is made all the more delicious with great company,” she said playfully as she posed with the two baristas.

Always up for a good laugh and trying new things, Fifi had no problem climbing a tall espresso cup tower as part of the shoot, but she ensured she had the handsome baristas on hand to help her. “Will you catch me if I fall?” she asked with a grin.

The fun flirting at the shoot almost led to one of the baristas asking Fifi out, but his nerves got the better of him.

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Anna Wintour up close

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Anna Wintour

She’s the feared and revered editrix of the US edition of Vogue. With her trademark bob and perma-sunglasses, she has the power to inspire fashion royalty on the one hand, and crush designers with the other.

Click here to see the evolution of Anna Wintour in pictures

For more than 20 years, Wintour has been at the helm of American Vogue, all the while never being seen in the same outfit twice! The September 2007 edition of Vogue was heralded as its biggest ever, and director RJ Cutler’s The September Issue is based on the production of this issue.

The documentary takes us behind the scenes and into Wintour’s lair: the New York offices of Vogue. The film shows some candid moments between Wintour and creative director Grace Coddington — some of whose beautiful images end up on the cutting-room floor — creating interesting viewing.

If you’ve read the book or seen the film, The Devil Wears Prada, you might recognise some similarities between Wintour and Miranda Priestly, the feared editor in The Devil. This is mostly because author Lauren Weisberger, the author of the novel, was once an assistant of Wintour’s.

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Pasta perfection

All year round

Question: How do you cook pasta al dente?

Al dente (al den tay) is Italian meaning “to the tooth”, and offers a slight resistance with bitten into – it should not be soft or overdone.

Bring water to a rolling boil in a large saucepan then add salt (salt increases the water temperature slightly at boiling point). Gradually add the pasta so the water does not go off the boil. Add long pasta by holding the strands and feeding them in gradually as they soften. Keep the water boiling fast to keep the pasta moving.

Test by biting a piece of pasta. It is done when it is al dente – cooked through but still firm to the bite (2 to 3 minutes for fresh pasta, 5 to 12 minutes, depending on freshness and thickness, for dried).

Drain pasta, but do not rinse. Place pasta into a heated serving bowl, add the sauce then toss and serve at once. Serve the cheese separately, if using.

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Kerry Katona’s cheap new gig

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Former Atomic Kitten Kerry Katona is apparently on a new career path. She’s reportedly been reduced to making personal appearances at pubs in the UK for just £50 ($90) a gig.

The ex-wife of Brian McFadden decided to take on the new venture after losing her £250,000 ($445,200) contract with supermarket Iceland after being filmed allegedly taking cocaine, the News of the World reported.

The singer’s husband, Mark Croft, is apparently behind the new moneymaking idea, with the aim of lifting Kerry’s profile and getting her back into the spotlight.

“She is happy to go along with it. She’s keen to do whatever it takes to earn some extra money,” the News of the World quoted an unnamed friend as saying.

“The idea is to draw in customers and she enjoys it, as she gets to earn money while getting drunk.”

Kerry’s spokesman has denied the claims that the gigs are taking place.

In the past, Kerry has been part of a number of reality TV shows including Kerry Katona: Crazy in Love in 2007, and, more recently, Kerry Katona: What’s the Problem?, which was aired in May to June in the UK this year.

In August last year, the singer was declared bankrupt in London’s High Court over an £82,000 ($146,000) tax debt. A Manchester court has since lifted the bankruptcy, the UK’s The People reported.

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