Chastity pledge

Looks like there’ll be no hanky panky for Tom Cruise, reports MSNBC.com. Cruise’s new lady love has said that she wants to remain a virgin until she gets married.

A 2003 profile of Katie Holmes in the Sunday Mirror of London discusses how “she went to cheerleading practice, got straight-A grades, and made a pledge that she would remain a virgin until marriage.”

The romance is a dream of more than two decades fulfilled for 26-year-old Holmes; according to various reports, a year ago, Holmes revealed that the 42-year-old Cruise was her “first celebrity crush” and that she started pining away for him in 1983 when she was 4 years old and saw him in “Risky Business.”

International appeal

Istanbul, Turkey — Shakira has arrived in Turkey to film a popular German entertainment show.

She is scheduled to appear live May 15 in “Wetten, dass … ? (Wanna Bet?)” from the ancient Roman amphitheater of Aspendos near the Mediterranean resort of Antalya.

The Colombian superstar will sing “La Tortura” from her new album, “Fijacion Oral 1,” scheduled for release in June, the show’s Web site said.

The show is also expected to include hotel heiress Paris Hilton.

Courtroom vibes

Los Angeles — A man accused of punching Dr. Dre at the Vibe Awards last year must stand trial on an assault charge, a judge has ruled.

Judge James Dabney on Friday found sufficient evidence to try 26-year-old Jimmy James Johnson.

The man allegedly punched the veteran producer and rap star after asking for his autograph during a taping of the show on Nov. 15. The attack set off a chair-throwing brawl that spread through the crowd.

Johnson was allegedly stabbed by rapper Young Buck after Dre was struck. Buck, whose given name is David Darnell Brown, has pleaded not guilty and is free on bail awaiting trial.

Dre., 40, whose given name is Andre Young, was about to receive a lifetime achievement award when he was punched.

Rock on a roll

New York — Chris Rock is ready to get juiced.

“I’m pretty scrawny,” Rock says in the new issue of Rolling Stone magazine. “If I was playing (football), I’d definitely be on steroids. You know, most people in the world, if you told them they could take a pill and be better at their job, they’d take the pill.”

Rock co-stars with Adam Sandler in the upcoming “The Longest Yard,” a remake of the 1974 movie about prison inmates who challenge the prison guards to a football game. It hits theaters May 27.

It is Rock’s first film since he hosted the Oscars in February. The 39-year-old actor-comedian continues to say he would do the show again if they asked him and the time was right.

“Doing the show got a bit of the chip off my shoulder,” he says. “When you’re a comedian that curses, you’re always a second-class citizen to the guys who don’t curse. They say, ‘You’re big, but so-and-so’s a family comedian.’ It’s almost like porn — nobody admits to liking it, but it’s a billion-dollar industry.”

From undead to eternal word

New York — Vampires are usually her passion, but Anne Rice is getting biblical in her next book, due out in November from publisher Random House. “Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt” will tell the story of Jesus’ early years in his own words.

Excerpts of a lengthy letter that will accompany advance review copies of the book this summer are published in the new issue of Entertainment Weekly.

“I’m not a priest,” Rice writes in the letter. “I can’t be one. I’ll never be able to go to the altar of the Lord and say the words of consecration at Mass, ‘This is my body. This is my blood.’ No, I can’t work that magnificent Eucharistic miracle. But in humility, I have attempted something transformative which we writers dare to call a miracle in the imperfect human idiom we possess. It’s to bring Him here in the form a story, and that story is Christ The Lord.”

Mr. Clooney’s neighborhood

George Clooney has written an apologetic letter to 300 residents of the Italian village he now calls home, reports Ananova.com.

Neighbors in Laglio — dubbed Clooneyville since the Hollywood heartthrob moved there — have grown increasingly fed up with the disruption his presence has brought. And they feared they would lose the town’s only public beach after Clooney snapped it up to add to his bulging property and land portfolio.

But the star has been quick to assure residents that the beach will remain for everyone’s use — and has vowed to clean it up and accept honorary Italian citizenship to prove his love for the town.

In an open letter, he wrote: “I think of Laglio as the most beautiful town in the world. The people, my neighbors, are the kindest and warmest. I have never and would never try to take the beach away … but the story got out there and seems to have stuck.

“Allow me to prove that I am worthy of an honorary citizenship. Let me fix up the beach.”

Clooney moved to the village on Lake Como three years ago.

Mission: Truly impossible

Scarlett Johansson and “The Matrix” star Carrie-Anne Moss have quit the second “Mission: Impossible” sequel because of ongoing delays, reports IMDB.com.

The two actresses were slated to team up with Tom Cruise in “M:I 3” but director J.J. Abrams says he has had to let them go because of scheduling problems around the film’s script.

Abrams, who has yet to announce his replacements for the project, is committed to starting the shoot in July.