Names and faces

LITTLE ROCK — Gerard Depardieu, the French actor who is fleeing high taxes in France, arrived Saturday in Russia by private airplane to claim his new Russian passport, possibly from President Vladimir Putin himself. A spokesman for Putin told Reuters that the two men would meet in the Black Sea resort of Sochi, an encounter that might include the handing over of the passport. At whatever point he receives the papers, Depardieu will become a Russian citizen, liable only for a flat 13 percent income tax rate, compared with the 75 percent on income over $1.3 million that he would be likely to pay under France’s new Socialist government. A French court temporarily suspended the top tax rate, but the government is expected to reinstate it. To escape the new French tax bill, Depardieu first registered as a resident of Belgium. The resulting furor apparently captured Putin’s attention, and he offered Russian citizenship to Depardieu. The actor responded by writing an open letter to Russian state television, saying, “I really love your president, V. Putin, and it is mutual.”

Al Pacino said Friday that he decided not to meet famed record producer and convicted killer Phil Spector before portraying him in an HBO movie - only to find he already had. A friend showed Pacino a 20-year-old photo in which the actor was standing next to Spector. Pacino said he has no memory of the moment. The movie, Phil Spector, debuts in March. It focuses on the client-attorney relationship between Spector and Linda Kenney Baden, who represented him in his first trial after he was charged with the murder of actress Lana Clarkson. That ended in a mistrial, but Spector was convicted in a second trial and is now serving 19 years to life in prison. Pacino wore a dizzying array of wigs in his portrayal of the eccentric Spector, whose “Wall of Sound” style was an integral part of pop music in the early 1960s. The actor said he decided not to meet Spector in prison because he’d be a different man than the one Pacino is portraying, who had not yet been convicted of a crime. He watched video clips of Spector to help him with his portrayal. “I didn’t know anything about him, except that he was responsible for a lot of great music and this strange case,” Pacino said.