THE venerable playwright Sir Tom Stoppard, one of the cleverest and wittiest of British dramatists, has been quietly dropped from a major Hollywood film project.

Stoppard, whose film credits include the Oscar-winning Shakespeare in Love, and Enigma and The Russia House, was commissioned to write the first draft for the keenly awaited film of Philip Pullman’s trilogy, His Dark Materials.

The script ended early in the second book, and Stoppard included a treatment for the second and third films. Ominously, as it turns out, there was no director on board at the time.

Stoppard, whose stage credits include Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, Hapgood, Indian Ink and Arcadia, received an unexpected telephone call in May from the Cannes Film Festival. He was told that Chris Weitz, the director of the lightweight About A Boy, starring Hugh Grant, and American Pie, was to direct the Dark Materials films.

“They told me that they did not want me to do any more work on the script than I had already done,” said Stoppard, one of the first knights of the British stage and film world.

“They said they might come back to me for the second and third script. I think that is a polite way of saying cheerio.”

Paxman, club man

JEREMY PAXMAN, who was blackballed by the Garrick Club, the haunt of actors, lawyers and journalists, six years ago, is trying again. Proposed by Robert Harris, the author of Fatherland, he will have his application heard next month. His abrasive interviewing style cost him the place last time. Word is he will make it this time.

Perpetual prince

THE former Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith and his wife Betsy were in the audience for the Japanese-directed Hamlet at the Barbican, London.

What can IDS have felt when he heard Fortinbras’s words about the Danish prince: “He was likely, had he been put on, to have proved most royally.” Like Hamlet, IDS never got to wear the crown — let alone even fight an election as Leader of the Opposition. Betsy, rather touchingly, had her head on IDS’s shoulder for most of the performance.

Language problem

YOU can make video calls, access e-mails and watch television programmes. But do Vodafone’s new 3G telephones have screening facilities to bar nuisance calls? When Jonathan Ross took to the stage to introduce the stars at the Vodafone launch party, he peppered his conversation with a certain four-letter word. Jamelia, the chart-topping singer, and Eva Herzigova, the supermodel, were both baffled. Herzigova said: “I did not understand him.” And she is fluent in five languages and learning another.

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