Showbiz: When JR turned into a hippie

Larry Hagman, best known for playing JR Ewing on Dallas, has admitted doing something the Texas tycoon would never have considered - taking LSD.

Recalling his first acid trip, the actor said: "This cave door opened up right in front of me - I mean it was really real - and there were octopuses guarding the gates and a lion with feathers and it could fly. It was very, very scary.

"And I looked up to my left and my grandmother, who'd been dead for, like, 25 years, kind of levitated in the sky above me and said, 'Don't worry about it - go with the flow."'

The 70-year-old actor recently had another vision: he saw Linda Gray, who played his wife Sue Ellen on Dallas, perform her nude scene in the London production of The Graduate, in which she plays Mrs Robinson.

"It's done with proper lighting and everything but you can see just about everything. She's 61 now and she looks absolutely sensational," he said.

* Michael Jackson's first album of original music in six years is the top-selling record in the US. Invincible sold 366,272 units in its first week of release.

That was nothing on the scale of Jackson's 1982 Thriller - the biggest-selling album ever with more than 40 million units worldwide - but better than expected by those who said the 43-year-old would struggle to make a comeback.

* Tammy Blanchard missed Monday's Emmy ceremony when film work kept her in Canada, but the 25-year-old - who won best supporting actress in a mini-series or movie for Life with Judy Garland: Me and My Shadows - said she preferred celebrating in her hotel room.

"I had freedom to express myself as crazy as I wanted. I was jumping around and laughing and being hysterical."

Had she been on stage, her speech would have been about "dreams come true".