Rocker Paul McCartney played a surprise gig at London's Covent Garden on Friday, drawing a crowd of hundreds as he and his band performed half a dozen songs from the back of a truck.

The 71-year-old former Beatle played a colorful piano and strummed the guitar in the plaza in the center of the capital in a stunt to promote "New", his first album of solo material in six years.

"The Lion King" has more reason to roar — it's on pace to end the week as the first Broadway show to earn $1 billion.

According to The Broadway League, the show ended last week with a 16-year gross of $999,267,836, and it regularly pulls in between $1 million and $2 million a week over eight performances at the Minskoff Theatre.

French movie star Alain Delon said Friday he was quitting as honorary president of the Miss France beauty contest committee after it berated him for backing the far-right National Front party.

"Your committee thought it was good to react publicly," the 77-year-old actor said in a scathing letter.

A French osteopath whose list of famous clients included Pablo Picasso and Rudolf Nureyev was on Friday sentenced to 10 years in jail for raping and sexually assaulting female patients.

Nineteen women had come forward to accuse Pierre Pallardy, 72, of unwanted sexual advances. A court in Paris found him guilty of five instances of rape and seven cases of sexual assault.

Andrea Bocelli will receive a graduate degree in Italy next week.

The 55-year-old tenor says he'll receive a master's degree in vocal performance from The Conservatory of Music, Giacomo Puccini in La Spezia, Italy, on Tuesday.

NBC-Universal employees have been told the recasting of Christian Grey in the company's film version of the erotic best-seller "Fifty Shades of Grey" will be finalized in the next few weeks.

A company-wide "town hall" on Wednesday covered a variety of subjects but "Fifty Shades" was the inevitable hot topic in the wake of last weekend's announcement that Charlie Hunnam was dropping out as Christian Grey, according to an NBC-Universal employee who attended the meeting.

An attorney for Stephen Baldwin says the actor will turn over $100,000 on Friday toward his delinquent New York tax bill.

That leaves him just $200,000 in arrears.

Catherine Deneuve, who turns 70 next week, is one of a generation of mature actresses for whom interesting character roles are no longer a rarity.

Judy Dench, 78, Helen Mirren, 68, Meryl Streep, 64, and "Amour" star Emmanuelle Riva, 86, have in recent years blazed a trail largely barred to their predecessors.

Sales of vinyl records in Britain are at their highest level for more than a decade, doubling in the past year thanks in part to the new Daft Punk album, an industry body said Thursday.

Almost 550,000 LPs have been sold so far in 2013, the highest number in any full year since 2003, according to the BPI, which represents the British record industry.

A book deal, tabloid attention and now a new television show — it's a busy time in the public eye for 25-year-old Ronan Farrow.

MSNBC announced Wednesday that it had hired Mia Farrow's son, a human rights activist and former Rhodes scholar, to host a weekday program on the left-leaning cable television network starting sometime next year.