Madonna denies affair, divorce rumours, spiritual outreach

Madonna on Sunday took the rare step of issuing a formal denial of reports linking her to US baseball star Alex Rodriguez and speculation she was to divorce British director Guy Ritchie.

In an exclusive statement released to celebrity magazine People, Madonna poured scorn on suggestions she was in a romantic relationship with New York Yankees star Rodriguez.

The 49-year-old pop icon also scotched speculation that she was seeking a divorce from "Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels" director Ritchie after seven years of marriage.

"My husband and I are not planning on getting a divorce," Madonna was quoted as saying in the People statement.

The singer insisted she only knew Rodriguez because they shared the same manager, Guy Oseary.

"I brought my kids to a Yankee game. I am not romantically involved in any way with Alex Rodriguez," Madonna said.

Rodriguez's wife Cynthia, who recently gave birth to the couple's second child, was reported to have left the slugger last week, citing Madonna as the cause of her marital breakdown, and alleging Madonna wooed Rodriguez to Kabbalah, a form of Jewish mysticism.

"I have nothing to do with the state of his marriage or what spiritual path he may choose to study," added Madonna, who said she issued the statement to distinguish "fact from fiction."

"I have learned over the years not to take accusations and the many false reports about me very seriously," she said.

"I also appreciate how fiction and fact seem to be perceived as one and the same by people who read both newspapers and the Internet."

Madonna, who was previously married to US actor Sean Penn, is widely regarded as the world's highest-earning female singer with Forbes.com putting her top of its "Cash Queens of Music" earlier this year with earnings of 72 million dollars between June 2006 and June 2007.

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Madonna: 'Not Planning on Getting a Divorce'

Madonna has released an exclusive statement to PEOPLE, denying that she is divorcing Guy Ritchie or having an affair with Yankee star Alex Rodriguez.

In it, she says: "My husband and I are not planning on getting a divorce. I know Alex Rodriguez through Guy Oseary, who manages both of us. I brought my kids to a Yankee game. I am not romantically involved in any way with Alex Rodriguez. I have nothing to do with the state of his marriage or what spiritual path he may choose to study.”

Alex Rodriguez’s wife Cynthia blamed the rumored affair for the demise of her marriage to the slugger, sources say.

Amid growing buzz of divorce, the singer’s rep had earlier issued a denial that the singer and her husband of over seven years, Guy Ritchie, were splitting.

The singer, who is no stranger to rumors, also says: “I have learned over the years not to take accusations and the many false reports about me very seriously. I also appreciate how fiction and fact seem to be perceived as one and the same by people who read both newspapers and the internet."

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Madonna's Tyson team

Madonna is joining forces with Mike Tyson for a charity campaign.

The pop superstar and the former boxing champion will fly to Malawi, Africa, together to promote awareness of children with HIV and AIDS after meeting at the Cannes Film Festival in France, where they are each promoting their documentary films.

A source told Britain's Daily Mirror newspaper: "Madonna thinks Mike is amazing and asked if she could have a private screening of his documentary 'Tyson' while she was in the Riviera.

"Mike agreed immediately and offered to do a favour in return. He has promised to fly with her to Malawi this summer to promote awareness of children with AIDS there."

Madonna, 49, produced and narrated the film 'I Am Because We Are', which highlights the plight of Malawi's one million orphans who suffer from the deadly disease.

Tyson's biographical feature 'Tyson' documents his colourful past including his drug-taking, the infamous moment when he bit off part of opponent Evander Holyfield's ear during a bout and his incarceration for the rape of a beauty queen, an allegation he has always denied.
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Madonna and Justin Timberlake 'Tie One On' After Concert

What could keep die-hard workout queen Madonna from the gym? A shot of tequila, and maybe a lemon drop.

The singer, who sounded groggy and admitted to having a hangover on Ryan Seacrest's KIIS-FM radio show Thursday morning, said that she and Justin Timberlake hit the town after performing a free concert in Manhattan on Wednesday.

"We had to celebrate," Madonna, 49, said. "[We] decided we both work too hard and have to have fun."

Adding that she defied her usual mantra of "work hard, and work so hard here's no time to play," the singer told Seacrest: "I had a shot of tequila ... I may have had a lemon drop, too … We 'tied one on' as they say.



adonna and Timberlake, who sings on her single ”4 Minutes," may have looked like BFFs Wednesday, but there was a time when the friends would "tip-toe around" each other in the studio. The pop stars barely knew each other when they began to work on her new album, and Madge reveals she was nervous about it.

"When you write music, the first thing that enters your brain is, 'I don’t want to say it, and I don't want to share it, 'cause they might think it’s stupid. And that happens to everybody," she told Seacrest.

But these days, Madonna has nothing but accolades for Timberlake. "He's ambitious but not in an offensive way," she said. "He's incredibly responsible and he’s good at what he does and I think he has a long future in front of him. He understands the insanity of being a pop star."

No stranger to controversy, Madonna, also chimed in on the Miley Cyrus Vanity Fair photo scandal, telling Seacrest, "Leave her alone. She’s gonna be 16 soon and then 17 and then 18, and then she might show her knees and then what's gonna happen?"

Source: people.com

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Madonna And Justin Timberlake Play Free New York Show

Madonna played a free concert at the Roseland Ballroom in NYC Wednesday night to celebrate the release of her album, 'Hard Candy." Justin Timberlake joined her onstage to perform Madonna's new song, '4 Minutes,' the first single on the album. They pair danced and Madge pinned him up against a wall.






See a clip or other pictures at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/05/01/madonna-and-justin-timber_n_99626.html

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Vanity Fair May 2008: Madonnarama!

As she nears 50, Madonna’s narrative is shifting. Yes, there’s another new super-pop album, Hard Candy, with Justin Timberlake and Pharrell Williams. But there’s also Filth and Wisdom, the feature film she’s co-written, produced, and directed, and I Am Because We Are, her documentary on Malawi, the aids-ravaged country where she controversially adopted her third child. Whisked to L.A. for an intense prep session, followed by an almost two-hour interview, the author explores the evolution of the Madonna myth as she harnesses her image-making genius to a cause, a philosophy, and the search for her true self.

The world is a series of rooms, which are arranged like concentric circles, or rooms within rooms, joined by courtyards and antechambers, and in the room at the center of all those rooms Madonna sits alone, in a white dress, dreaming of Africa.

To reach her, you must wait for a sign. When it comes, if you are pure of heart, you begin to move toward Madonna, and move fast. One moment you are in Connecticut, wondering if it will snow, the next moment you are swept up by a force greater than yourself. You’re in a car on the highway, flashing past sleepy towns, moving closer and closer to the center, which you approach deftly and humbly, in the manner of a pilgrim. Like a pilgrim, you set off before first light. Like a pilgrim, you remove your shoes—to pass through security at the airport. Like a pilgrim, you read and reread sacred texts: profiles and reviews, the first published in the early 1980s, the most recent published just a second ago, which constitute a kind of record, the good news, the Gospel of Madonna.

Taken together, these chronicle the career of Madonna, each different, but each telling the same story, which is so established and archetypal it verges on folklore: the girl from suburban Detroit, which can stand for anywhere other than here; the early years in Eden, memories of which Madonna describes as “grainy and beautiful,” when her mother was young and alive; then tragedy, the wound that never heals, the death of her mother from breast cancer when Madonna was six; empty days plagued by tormented dreams. “You’re aware of a sense of loss, and feel a sense of abandonment,” she told me. “Children always think they did something wrong when their parents disappear.” Then her father’s second marriage, the stepmother, the drudgery, because she was the oldest girl in a house filled with eight children and so was pressed into adult service, cleaning and wiping and changing, when she was still a child herself; secrets and desires, her life before the mirror, which has followed her everywhere; high school, where she was beautiful, but punky and strange. “I didn’t fit into the popular group,” she said. “I wasn’t a hippie or a stoner, so I ended up being the weirdo. I was interested in classical ballet and music, and the kids were quite mean if you were different. I was one of those people that people were mean to. When that happened, instead of being a doormat, I decided to emphasize my differences. I didn’t shave my legs. I had hair growing under my arms. I refused to wear makeup, or fit the ideal of what a conventionally pretty girl would look like. So of course I was tortured even more, and that further validated my superiority, and helped me to survive and say, ‘I’m getting out of here, and everyone is a heathen in this school—you don’t even know who Mahler is!’ ” She found refuge in dance class and went on to the University of Michigan to study dance, but for just a year, because then she was gone to New York.

Because this is mythology, a short struggle was followed by a quick ascent to stardom. When was it? Nineteen eighty-two? Nineteen eighty-four? The birth of the music video? “Borderline”? And just like that, every girl in every school is Madonna Ciccone, with her slutty magnificence and lacy driving gloves and bare midriff and spangles.

Here is my favorite quote—it’s an editor at Billboard talking to Jay Cocks in 1985 for Time: “Cyndi Lauper will be around a long time. Madonna will be out of the business in six months.”

I felt the presence of Madonna as soon as I landed at LAX. It was as if she had been there a moment ago, and, in fact, while waiting for my luggage, I scanned a copy of the New York Post and came upon a picture taken the day before which showed Madonna, having come through customs, holding her two-and-a-half-year-old son, David, whom she had adopted in Malawi in 2006, the cameras an inch from her face. “The paparazzi are out of control,” she would later say. “I haven’t been to Los Angeles in quite a while, and I don’t watch television here or in England, and I was told there’s now a television show where the paparazzi are the stars of the show—is that true? That they film each other doing paparazzi jobs? Which gives them more fuel. I usually found that type kept their distance—they definitely do in England, because it’s illegal to photograph children. But that’s not how it is here. They get this close, and don’t care how much they scare your children. Being famous has changed a lot, because now there’s so many outlets, between magazines, TV shows, and the Internet, for people to stalk and follow you. We created the monster.”
The Full Madonna Madonna

The many modes of Madonna have been on full display in the pages of Vanity Fair, beginning in 1986. See them all in our revealing slide show.

I was rushed to Century City from the airport, to the towering new office building of CAA, the talent agency that represents Madonna, and seated in an empty screening room, which was spooky in the same way an empty church is spooky. The lights went down, and for 90 minutes I watched a documentary Madonna has written and produced, I Am Because We Are, which is African folk wisdom that means something like “It takes a village.” It too is about community—about identity and how it’s rooted in place. The movie sings of Malawi, a landlocked little nation in sub-Saharan Africa, ravaged by aids, filled with orphans—a world without adults that has become, in her middle years, the great cause of Madonna’s life. With this movie, it seems, she hopes not only to raise awareness but also to explain her own obsession with the motherless children of Africa.

It opens with Madonna walking in a crowd of Africans. Then her voice, which is the voice of the upper Midwest painted in Oxford glaze: “People always ask me why I chose Malawi. And I tell them, I didn’t. It chose me. I got a phone call from a woman named Victoria Keelan. She was born and raised in Malawi. She told me that there were over one million children orphaned by aids. She said there weren’t enough orphanages. And that the children were everywhere. Living on the streets. Sleeping under bridges. Hiding in abandoned buildings. Being abducted, kidnapped, raped. She said it was a state of emergency. She sounded exhausted and on the verge of tears. I asked her how I could help. She said, You’re a person with resources. People pay attention to what you say and do. I felt embarrassed. I told her I didn’t know where Malawi was. She told me to look it up on a map, and then she hung up on me. I decided to investigate, and I ended up finding out much more than I bargained for, about Malawi, about myself, about humanity.”

See Vanity Fair May edition table of contents http://www.vanityfair.com/magazine/toc/2008/toc200805

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Madonna to Addopt Indian Baby

The "4 Minutes" singer – who is in the final stages of formally adopting two-year-old Malawian son David Banda – is keen to open her home to a disadvantaged Indian tot after she fell in love with the country following her visit this year.

During the trip – on which Madonna was accompanied by husband Guy Ritchie, David and her two other children Lourdes, 11, and seven-year-old Rocco - the family spoke to Bollywood choreographer Sandip Soparrkar, who has adopted an Indian baby.

Sandip said: "We spoke about how there are so many children in India who need homes."

Madonna – who has given up her attempt to adopt a little girl from Africa after growing frustrated with the process – and Guy initially clashed over the idea but they have now decided it will be good for the family.

A source told Britain's The Sun newspaper: "Madonna was very taken with Sandip. He told her there were orphans who would melt her heart. Guy was against the idea, but when she wants something, she gets it."

"After the stress of adopting David, Guy thought Madonna was mad to want to go through it all again. But they talked and talked and decided adopting a baby from India would be easier."

The couple started the process of adopting David in October 2006.

Last week, Madonna was deemed a suitable mother by Malawian officials and it was recommended that David should stay with the couple at their family home in London.

The adoption is due to be formalized in the near future.

Source: BANG Showbiz

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Madonna's News Music Video

Check out the latest single from Madonna - ''4 Minutes!''

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MADONNA PLANS INTIMATE PERFORMANCE

Madonna is planning to perform at a series of intimate venues this year

Madonna is planning to perform at a series of intimate venues this year.

The multi-millionaire singer - famed for her spectacular stadium concerts - says it is her dream to sing to smaller audiences, but is worried she wouldn't make any money.

She said: "I have always wanted to do intimate performances. My dream is to go around doing shows in opera houses but who makes money in opera houses?"

"When I create my shows they are usually quite intricate. They don't expand and collapse to varying stage sizes. I have always wanted to do grand shows but in really intimate venues, which never seems to be possible."


Madonna, 49, insists the main appeal of playing slimmed-down shows for her would be getting up close and personal with her audience.

The mother-of-three said: "I just love theater and the magic of theater. You can hear people breathing and you can see their sweat, you can see the work. And yet you can still be pulled into the magic of everything and be tricked by the illusion of one spotlight and also the danger of it being live."

"Each audience that you have changes your performance. I love that more than anything."

Source: BANG Showbiz

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MADONNA DOESN'T FEAR YOUNGER RIVALS

The "Material Girl" singer - who turns 50 in August - doesn't feel threatened by pop stars who are half her age because she enjoys competition.

She said: "Getting older is an advantage in terms that you've got a lot more experience and you tend to not make the same mistakes. And you feel a bit wiser and less impulsive."

"It's great to feel experienced. But I also work with people who are half my age, so I feel like I have to work even harder to keep up with everybody."

"But the fact of the matter is I can kick all of their a***s! I guess I'm OK for now. It does keep the flame under my foot, though."

The mother-of-three - who released her debut album, "Madonna," in 1982 - also revealed she barely recognizes herself in old publicity shots.

She added to Dazed and Confused magazine: "Sometimes, I see a picture of me and I really remember that moment - and it brings back memories, very specific memories."

"And other photographs that I see, I just think - who's that? I don't know that girl!"

"I don't regret any of it, but I do sometimes think, 'Oh God, what was I thinking? Why did I wear that, why did I do that?' All kinds of things."

Source: BANG Showbiz

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