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Sir Tom Jones and the star's faux pas over whether gays are 'normal': SEBASTIAN SHAKESPEARE on the Cardiff singer's views on homosexuality

By Sebastian Shakespeare for the Daily Mail

Published: 21:46 EST, 21 October 2015 | Updated: 22:58 EST, 21 October 2015

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Accused of being sexist after claiming recently that his long-suffering wife Linda had ‘lost her spark’, Sir Tom Jones has now dug himself into another hole — this time over homosexuality.

The Delilah singer, 75, admits he used to be prejudiced against gays and suggests they are not ‘normal’.

He says he struggled to accept his first-ever music producer, the late Joe Meek, because of his sexuality.

‘I was ready for most aspects of the music industry but, when I met [him], that threw me off a bit, because he was a homosexual,’ says Jones. ‘I thought: “Wait a minute, is the London scene — the people who run British showbusiness — are there a lot of homosexuals involved here? Because, if so, I’m going back to Cardiff.”

Alarmed: Young Tom, left, said that at first he struggled to accept his first producer, the late Joe Meek, right, because of his sexuality

‘When I signed with Decca, and Peter Sullivan became my manager . . . I said: “You’re not one of these queer fellows, are you?” And he said: “What are you on about?” I became paranoid, you see. I wondered, was that required to make a hit record?’

Jones goes on to express his relief at discovering that most men in the music business were ‘normal’.

Tying himself in knots, in an interview with The Big Issue, he adds: ‘Well, I shouldn’t put it like that. Homosexuals are normal, it’s not that they’re not normal. It’s just that they are what they are.’

His comments are unlikely to go down well with Boy George, the gay singer who has replaced him as a coach on BBC1’s The Voice.

While Sir Tom is renowned as a ladies’ man, his sexuality has sometimes been a matter of bizarre conjecture, with an online poll finding that 30 per cent of respondents thought he was gay, and 30 per cent thought he was bisexual.

But it seems Meek may have scarred him for life. Sir Tom’s former bass player, Vernon Hopkins, revealed six years ago that the singer was actually once groped by Meek.

‘I remember loading the equipment in the van outside Joe’s and Tom running down the stairs shouting: “He just touched my b*******! That b****** grabbed my b****!” ’

33-year-old actress Sienna Miller at the Manhattan premiere of Burnt on Tuesday

Sienna's revealing slip on lost film role

Mixed fortunes for Sienna Miller, who has been busy promoting new film Burnt, in which she stars as a sous chef who falls for her boss, played by Bradley Cooper.

The 33-year-old actress, who was photographed at the Manhattan premiere on Tuesday, is still coming to terms with having been dropped from Johnny Depp’s latest movie.

Miller filmed scenes as one of Depp’s lovers in the gangster flick Black Mass — about Boston crime boss Whitey Bulger — but they ended up on the cutting room floor.

‘Thanks to the wonderfully hyperbolic media coverage, it’s been totally blown out of proportion,’ Miller tells the Daily Beast website about the screen snub. ‘I shot four days and it was a cameo.’

Sienna must have succumbed to hyperbole herself when she talked about the same role last year. ‘I shot for two weeks,’ she boasted to Boston.com, adding: ‘I read as much as I could about Whitey . . . [and] spoke to some people here who knew him and knew her.’

The fiancee of Jonathan Rhys Meyers, American actress Mara Lane, has been an invaluable source of support for the troubled Irish actor — best known for playing Henry VIII in The Tudors — in his battle to stay sober.

Now, however, it is Rhys Meyers’s turn to provide succour, after Lane suffered burns to her face when a beauty treatment went wrong.

The actress reveals that, while visiting a beautician in LA, instead of the facial she requested, she was given a ‘peel’ — where a chemical solution is applied, causing skin to peel off and regenerate.

‘I was out of commission because of it, with permanent burn marks,’ says Lane, who still bears scars more than a week later.

‘Tried to be all gorgeous and get a facial and then this . . . Seemed like a good idea at the time.

‘Trying to play it off with an inch of make-up that I had to paint on, but inside I’m slightly dying.’

Jonathan Rhys Meyers's fiancee Mara Lane suffered burns to her face (right) when a beauty treatment went wrong. Instagram

Once a staple of London’s social scene, reality star Noelle Reno, whose former fiance Scot Young fell to his death from a fourth-floor flat last year, is calling time on her party days.

‘I don’t go out nearly as much. I actually try to avoid parties,’ Noelle, 31, confessed at a Hello! party, to which she took skin doctor Ariel Haus as her date.

She added: ‘I’ve spent so much of my life going out that even two parties a week is a lot now. If it’s a choice between a party or a quiet dinner with friends, then it’s easy: dinner every time.’

Why Tennessee Williams thanked God for Pierce

Movie star Pierce Brosnan has much to show for his illustrious career, but last week, the 62-year-old discovered it’s personal possessions that matter the most.

Brosnan found a lost telegram sent to him by late American playwright Tennessee Williams, who chose Pierce for his play The Red Devil Battery Sign in 1977. ‘Thank God for you dear boy,’ Williams wrote

The former James Bond actor found a lost telegram sent to him by late American playwright Tennessee Williams, who chose Pierce for a London production of his play The Red Devil Battery Sign in 1977. ‘Thank God for you dear boy,’ Williams, a committed bachelor, wrote to the aspiring actor, 24.

Sharing a photo of it online, Pierce said: ‘Thought I’d lost this piece of memorabilia, and there it was amidst the storage of life the other day. I was not long out of drama school and I got to work with this great man of the theatre . . . Mr Tennessee Williams.’ Pierce was so proud of his trophy he forgot to mention that Williams misspelt his name: ‘Brosman’.

He’s happily married to his second wife, the actress Rachel Weisz, but Daniel Craig admits he’s a jealous guy, who gets shaken and stirred and even prone to violence when another man so much as looks at the significant woman in his life.

Daniel, 47, confesses that he once launched an attack on a man who got over-friendly with an unnamed girlfriend. ‘I play a tough guy, but that’s not me,’ he says. ‘I’ve always been good at avoiding fights. The only thing to ever get me in trouble would be someone looking at my girl the wrong way.

‘That always got me going. I still get jealous, but not how I used to. I was in a bar in France once and this guy pinched my girl’s a***. I flew across the room and kind of lifted this guy up.

‘These days, I’m much more happy to have a quiet word with someone.’

Theatre actors are luckier than screen ones, according to Anne-Marie Duff, who made her name in TV’s Shameless before her current role in BBC1’s crime drama From Darkness. ‘It’s because there is not this obsession with you and your looks that there is on the screen,’ she says.

So maybe it is fortunate that Duff, 44, opens at the National Theatre next week as the haggard and grimy-faced Lizzie Holroyd in D. H. Lawrence’s Husbands And Sons. The new play will also give her a chance to get over poor reviews for From Darkness.

Yesterday was Back To The Future Day, the date when Michael J. Fox’s character Marty McFly arrives in the future in the Eighties movie trilogy.

America’s publicity-friendly ambassador Matthew Barzun, 44, commemorated the occasion on social media by sporting two ties, mirroring Marty’s future dress sense. Unfortunately, I can’t travel to the past to check, but weren’t diplomats all grown-ups in the Eighties?

America’s publicity-friendly ambassador Matthew Barzun, 44, commemorated Back To The Future Day on social media by sporting two ties

At 81, Sophia Loren is still well-preserved — but she worries about the increasing reliance of today’s starlets on plastic surgery.

The Oscar winner says: ‘These young girls really need to be more selective of what they are doing to their bodies and their faces. I mean, you do not know for sure if you are going to a good doctor . . . you can end up looking worse than what you thought you originally were.’

He’s just turned 92, but sprightly Nicholas Parsons dismisses any talk of retiring — unless he gets the sack or fans get sick of him.

Parsons, chair of Radio 4’s Just A Minute, says: ‘People say: “At your age, surely you’ve thought about retiring?” My answer is simple . . . I’m in a profession that retires you.’ No doubt BBC executive Alan Yentob, who has a £6 million pension pot, would agree.

Dame Vivienne Westwood, aka the Queen Of Punk, has proved her rebellious spirit is as strong as ever.

As the 74-year-old designer travelled by train from London to Cambridge, she defied the sacrosanct rule of public transport by propping her dirty shoes on the seat opposite while reading a paper. Off with her head — or, at least, her platform boots.

Olympic sailing hero Sir Ben Ainslie is relocating from his hometown — Lymington, in Hampshire — to the Isle of Wight.

Ainslie, 38, always said he would never make the move accross the Solent, but tells me that Lady A, the gorgeous former Sky Sports presenter Georgie Thompson, was insistent. ‘A happy wife is a happy life,’ he sighs.