Names and faces

LITTLE ROCK — John Travolta said privacy laws should shield celebrities from the kind of exposure suffered by Kate Middleton. Gossip magazines have published topless pictures of Prince William’s wife taken during a private holiday. Travolta, who has faced unwelcome scrutiny of his own private life, told the BBC that it is the “worst time to be famous.” “There is a right to privacy whether you’re famous or not famous, and I feel that anyone being invaded at that level is unfortunateand there should be a law, no one would like that,” he said in an interview broadcast Friday. Travolta plays a corrupt cop in Oliver Stone’s drug-war film Savages, which opened in Britain on Friday. It’s his first film since 2010. Recently he has been in the headlines for his private life, including a discredited lawsuit contending he had groped two masseurs. Travolta, who has been one of Hollywood’s best-known faces since he starred in Saturday Night Fever in 1977, said he almost retired from acting after the death of his 16-year-old son Jett in 2009. He said that after his son’s death from a seizure, he’d “thought of retiring at one point because it felt like too much.” But he told the BBC that “after three years getting a lot of support from my church and a lot of support from people, fans, family I decided that it was OK to go back to work.” Travolta is a prominent member of the Church of Scientology.

The former home of J.K. Rowling in Edinburgh, Scotland, is on sale for at least $3.7 million after the author of the Harry Potter books moved to another address in the Scottish capital. The Victorian two-story, eight-bedroom town house in the Merchiston area of the city stands in its own grounds with a walled garden and went on the market Thursday, according to Rettie & Co., the company handling the sale. It also hasa library, study and drawing room, the sale brochure shows. Rowling, 47, started writing the Harry Potter series in cafes in Edinburgh, staying in the city after the books turned her into a millionaire. The first one was published in June 1997. She bought the top half of the Merchiston house in 1999 before purchasing the ground floor from her neighbor and returning it to a two-story town house. The author and her family moved into their new home in Edinburgh last year, the Herald newspaper reported.