The picture has been garnering awards-season heat ever since it screened at the Venice, Telluride and Toronto film festivals in the la femme dresses outlet. But Stone managed to carve out a little time during her whirlwind visit to look at properties because, in mid-March, she’ll be back: starting work on director Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Favourite. That film, which also stars Olivia Colman and Rachel Weisz, is an incendiary study of rivalry at the court of Queen Anne. Colman will play the monarch; Weisz is Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough; and Stone the lowly courtier Abigail Hill, who becomes a favourite of Anne’s — much to the irritation of the scheming duchess, who served as a lady of the bedchamber. ‘I found the house myself — and it’s just what I was looking for!’ she told me. ‘It has plenty of room and a lovely garden.’ Dick's now hot on the heels of Cinders, oh yes he is! Dick Whittington will be the London Palladium’s next la femme dresses. It will follow on from box-office success Cinderella: the first Palladium pantomime in three decades, whose ticket sales are fast approaching the £6 million mark. Seats for Dick Whittington go on sale today, so by the time it opens next December, the streets around the famous variety house will, with luck, be paved with gold. The only downside is that she won’t be able to bring her golden retriever over from Los Angeles to enjoy that garden. Stone has had costume fittings with Oscar-winning designer Sandy Powell, who will dress the ensemble for The Favourite. When Emma Stone went house-hunting in London last week there was one deal breaker. It had to have a garden. ‘What I didn’t want was a soulless apartment,’ she told me. The actress was actually in la femme homecoming dresses La La Land with BAFTA and Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences members. In the acclaimed film musical, she plays an aspiring actress who meets a jazz composer (Ryan Gosling) on a Los Angeles freeway during a traffic jam. The opening sequence, shot on an exit ramp with scores of candy-coloured cars and hundreds of singing and dancing extras, rivals anything film musical greats like Stanley Donen and Arthur Freed (Singin’ In The Rain) ever did. I wondered whether she had been having voice lessons to perfect the cut glass accent she’ll need. ‘This is a Yorgos Lanthimos film,’ she teased. ‘It won’t be a conventional British period costume drama. It will be full of surprises!’ Anyone who saw Lanthimos’s previous movies, Dogtooth and The Lobster (in which Weisz also starred) will know that he’s anything but conventional. Nick Thomas, who runs Qdos entertainment (producers of the Crimbo shows) said 110,000 tickets for the five-week run of Cinderella had been sold so far cheap la femme cocktail dresses. ‘The glitterball rolls on,’ he said. Dick Whittington will be a brand new production. Director and producer Michael Harrison will join writer Alan McHugh next year to work on the storyline. ‘We’ll all go out for a curry and discuss. It’s very much a collective enterprise, like “From an idea stolen by . . .”,’ he joked. Cinderella stars Paul O’Grady, Julian Clary and Amanda Holden, but no decisions have been made about who’s returning for Dick. By Wednesday afternoon, ticket sales for Cinderella were £5.8 million. The run ends on January 15. Tracie Bennett, who will play Carlotta Campion: the former showgirl and one-time movie star who has been to hell and back, in Dominic Cooke’s National Theatre production of the Stephen Sondheim and James Goldman musical Follies. Olivier award-winning Bennett will join leads Imelda Staunton and Janie Dee, who play Sally Plummer and Phyllis Stone, former follies dancers who meet at a reunion. Their husbands will be played by Peter Forbes and Philip Quast. Bennett will get to sing Sondheim’s showstopper number I’m Still Here: a song originated by Yvonne De Carlo on Broadway and by Dolores Gray (followed by Eartha Kitt) in the 1987 London production produced by Cameron Mackintosh. Cooke’s production, choreographed by Bill Deamer, will run at the NT in the autumn. Cooke told me he’s going to be working from Goldman’s original book and not the revised version he penned in 1987.