Bringing up baby: The Hollywood adoption craze !!!!!!!!!!!!

[Daanyeer]

Source: news.independent.co.uk
March 16, 2007 Author: Guy Adams

As Brad and Angelina become proud parents of a Vietnamese orphan, it seems there is only one way to build a celebrity family these days.

Breakfast-time in the Pitt-Jolie household must be like a raucous committee meeting at the United Nations.

Yesterday, the couple visited an orphanage on the outskirts of Ho Chi Minh city in order to collect Pax Thien, a three-year-old Vietnamese boy who becomes the fourth child in their happy brood. He joins son Maddox, adopted from Cambodia in 2002, daughter Zahara (Ethiopia, 2005), and another girl, Shiloh, who arrived in May last year, after Jolie fell pregnant by her boyfriend Brad Pitt.

Jolie was inspired to adopt overseas after visiting Cambodian slums during the filming of Lara Croft:Tomb Raider in 2000.

Although Pitt will be Pax Thien's de facto father, Jolie must file adoption papers as a single parent, since they have yet to marry.

Calista Flockhart & Harrison Ford

Flockhart saw baby Liam come into the world on New Year's Eve 2000, and has subsequently posed with him in many a Hello! shoot. The child's natural mother, who had four previous children, met the Ally McBeal star on several occasions prior to giving her son up, and allowed the star to attend the birth in a New York hospital.

Back in those days, Flockhart was a single parent; however she later began a relationship with Harrison Ford, with whom she now plays happy families.

Although the wafer-thin star is yet to produce her own offspring, she has frequently denied alleagtions that she avoided pregnancy for cosmetic reasons.

Madonna & Guy Ritchie

It all went pear-shaped in October, when the Queen of Pop swept into Malawi to "rescue" 13-month-old David Banda, who was living in an orphanage after his mother died from Aids.

First, the boy's father, Yohane, a peasant farmer, claimed not to have understood what he had agreed to do when he agreed to the adoption. Next, it was claimed Madonna and husband Guy Ritchie's celebrity status had allowed them to sidestep local adoption laws.

Finally, human rights groups were critical, claiming super-rich showbusiness personalities should not be allowed to "cherry-pick" children from the Third World.

Only when Madge faced the Newsnight cameras did the "Madonna and child" hoo-hah die down. Today, baby David lives in London with brother, Rocco, and sister Lourdes, Madonna's daughter from a previous relationship.

Soon-Yi Previn & Woody Allen

Woody Allen's track record on adoption is colourful, to say the least. In 1992, he began a sexual relationship with Soon-Yi Previn, 22, the Korean daughter of his ex-girlfriend Mia Farrow. The couple met in the 1980s when Previn was a teenager and fortysomething Allen was in loco parentis. Previn was one of six children (three adoptive, three biological) from previous relationships that Farrow brought to the director's New York home. Allen and Previn married in 1997 and have adopted two daughters, Bechet and Manzie.

Farrow remains one of Hollywood's most enthusiastic proponents of adoption. She has since added a further five children to her brood, bringing her career total to 14 - of which 10 were adopt ed.

Tom Cruise & Nicole Kidman

He was the pin-up from Top Gun; she was his flame-haired co-star in Days of Thunder. Tom and Nicole married in 1990, but never produced any offspring of their own (she was pregnant when they split, but miscarried). However, they did adopt two children: Isabella and Connor.

Both came from impoverished backgrounds on America's East Coast, and had been put up for adoption by parents who couldn't afford to raise them. Isabella arrived in 1993; Connor came two years later.

Although their divorce in 2001 was keenly contested, the couple have amicably shared the kids ever since: Isabella and Connor attended both Cruise's recent wedding to Katie Holmes, and Kidman's to Keith Urban.

Julie Andrews & Blake Edwards

In 1974, actress Julie and her second husband, Blake Edwards, adopted two orphaned Vietnamese girls, Amy and Joanna.

That raised eyebrows, since few prominent stars had previously brought-up children of non-European extraction.

Andrews later said it had been prompted by her experience working on a project to help child victims of the Vietnam war. "It goes back several years to the time when Blake and I were members of the Committee of Responsibility," she said.

"At that time, hundreds of youngsters were brought over to America, treated, and returned to Vietnam, and we had an opportunity to see some of those children."

Meg Ryan

Meg Ryan doesn't need a fella to fake an orgasm, and she certainly doesn't need to sleep with one to get her hands on a baby.

In 2006, the star of When Harry Met Sally and Sleepless in Seattle returned from China with an adopted baby girl, Charlotte, whose name was later changed to Daisy True.

"She is just about a year old and I thought she was Charlotte and she is just not, she is a Daisy, so now her name is Daisy True," said Ryan. "She has the most honest, open, beautiful face you will ever see."

Although Ryan claims to have considered adoption in the USA, she was inspired to venture overseas during a visit to India in 1996.

She also has a teenage son, Jack, from her tempestuous previous marriage to the actor Dennis Quaid.

Lionel and Brenda Ritchie

If you've ever wondered why trashy reality TV star Nicole Ritchie looks nothing like her famous father, here's why. In 1984, Lionel and his then wife Brenda informally adopted the three year-old daughter of one of their backstage assistants, who'd previously had a brief fling with one of his session drummers.

Although they raised her as their own, the adoption was only formalised in 1990, when Nicole was nine. Lionel and Brenda divorced in acrimonious circumstances a year later.

Today, Nicole is a successful LA socialite and minor TV star. She oscillates between being best mates and worst enemies with Paris Hilton. Ritchie, for his part, has fathered two further children by his now-dissolved subsequent marriage to Diane Alexander.

George Lucas

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away... George Lucas decided it was time to start a family.

He adopted Amanda in 1981, with wife Marcia only to become a single father two years later, when she left him.

Lucas decided to put his career on hold in order to add Katie and Jett to his brood in the late 1980s. "I really stopped making movies so I could raise my kids, and that took 15 years," he says. Lucas is often introduced at Star Wars conventions by one or more of his brood, who have also made cameos appearances in his films.

Diane Keaton

Keaton, now 61, never married or had children, but adopted two in her fifties: a daughter, Dexter, in 1996 and a son, Duke, in 2001. The decision sparked widespread debate over the maximum age for adoptive parents. Keaton said: "I was not ready before. One of my former lovers said to me: 'You are a very late developer.' I think the same applied to motherhood.

"[My children] have given me the most humbling, shocking, amazing and defining relationship of my life. I always spent too much time worrying whether a man loves me but I've found raising a child the most demanding and humanising of all loves."

Steven Spielberg & Kate Capshaw

In keeping with Hollywood tradition, the Spielberg household boasts no less than seven bairns, from a variety of relationships.

Two are adopted, two come from Spielberg and Caplin's first marriages, and a further three are the product of the couple's union, often described as one of the most enduring in showbusiness.

Their adopted son, Theo, is an African-American born in 1988. Daughter Mikaela George was discovered through the public adoption agencies in 1996, and born shortly after that year's Oscars. At that time, Capshaw issued a statement saying: "We are so thrilled to welcome Mikaela into our lives, the sixth and final addition to our family."

Fully nine months later, she was eating her words, though: Steven and Kate's seventh child, Destry, was born to the couple in December that year.

Michelle Pfeiffer & David E Kelly

In 1993, Pfeiffer used a New York agency to find Claudia Rose, the daughter of a nurse who already had four children and couldn't afford a fifth. Although reports claimed she had "bought" the 6lb nipper, before flying her to LA in a private jet, Pfeiffer insisted no money changed hands and reacted angrily to reports describing Claudia as a "designer baby". Shortly after adopting Claudia, she met, fell in love with and married Kelly, a writer and film director. They then had a son, John, in 1994.