Dame Edna Descends To Middle Earth

There's to be two further episodes of the iconic 'Middle Earth' drama with The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey due to be released in December 2012, while The Hobbit: There and Back Again is slated for release 12 months later.
The news came as it emerged that the Goblin King has been cast as Aussie cross-dressing comedian Barry Humphries
The Australian actor and satirist, best known for his larger-than-life housewife character Dame Edna and the drunken Australian 'cultural attaché' Sir Les Patterson, will play Gorkin, the king of the goblins, in Peter Jackson’s two-part adaptation of the J.R.R. Tolkien fantasy novel.
Other new cast members include the Welsh actor Luke Evans, who has been cast as Bard the Bowman, the English actor Benedict Cumberbatch - currently on television screens in Sherlock - as Smaug the dragon, and the Canadian Evangeline Lilly, best known for her role in television series Lost.
Lilly will play a woodland elf named Tauriel, a character not in the original story.
Another recent signing to the cast was the actor and comedian Stephen Fry, who will play The Master of Laketown.
The $500 million (£307m) production, a two-part prequel to blockbuster The Lord of the Rings trilogy, began filming in New Zealand in March.
Martin Freeman - who plays Watson alongside Cumberbatch in Sherlock - will star as the short, hairy-footed hero Bilbo Baggins, who is swept into an epic quest to reclaim the lost Dwarf Kingdom of Erebor from the fearsome dragon Smaug.
He will star alongside Elijah Wood, Ian McKellen, Cate Blanchett, Andy Serkis and Christopher Lee - all of whom will reprise their Lord of the Rings roles.
The Hobbit is set in Middle Earth 60 years before the Lord of the Rings trilogy, which was also adapted for cinema by Jackson. The Rings trilogy was a blockbuster success when the films were released annually from 2001 to 2003, grossing nearly $3bn worldwide at the box office and winning Jackson best picture and best director Oscars for the finale.
(BMcC/KMcA)