Remember that rumour that Hilary Duff was going to star in 90210? What a ridiculous rumour that was.

Because, please. This is Hilary Duff we’re talking about. Multi-millionaire singer and actress Hilary Duff. She’d never lower herself enough to appear on an embarrassingly self-conscious youth-orientated CW TV show like 90210. That’s absurd.

But luckily, Hilary Duff would lower herself enough to appear on an embarrassingly self-conscious youth-orientated CW TV show like Gossip Girl. So she has. It’s great news for anyone who watches Gossip Girl and actively identifies themselves as a Hilary Duff fan. So that one creepy man must be thrilled.

Have you heard the news? Gossip Girl is where it’s at lately. No, really, it is. It is. Chace Crawford was named as Summer’s Hottest Bachelor by People magazine recently, and he’s in Gossip Girl. And Kelly Rutherford got pregnant last year, and she’s in Gossip Girl. And, um, Michael Jackson died last week and, er, people gossiped about him and he had quite a girlish figure, and OH ALRIGHT, Gossip Girl isn’t where it’s at in the slightest. Gossip Girl’s a slightly rubbishy TV show that we’ll never properly invest in because life is obviously too short.

But all that’s about to change, because very soon Gossip Girl is going to become a slightly rubbishy TV show that we’ll never properly invest in because life is obviously too short that Hilary Duff will briefly appear in. It’s incredible news!

Oh, come on. Hilary Duff. You know who she is. She’s Disney’s discarded Miley Cyrus prototype. You remember. Fights with elderly screen legends a lot. Hilary Duff. Oh, you remember.

No? Well, look, she’s going to be on Gossip Girl soon and that’s that. EW reports:

The actress-designer-pop chanteuse will play Olivia Burke, a movie star who enrolls at NYU in search of a traditional college experience. She ends up rooming with Vanessa (Jessica Szohr) so it’s safe to say she’ll be majoring in Drama! Duff will debut in this season’s fourth episode, slated to air Oct. 5.

We’re genuinely thrilled about Hilary Duff joining the cast of Gossip Girl – it’s literally the holy grail of people we don’t really care about deciding to star in TV shows that we’ve never even watched a single episode of. Well, not literally the holy grail – technically that’d involve Radio One DJ Jo Whiley agreeing to do a multi-episode arc on the FX TV show Sons Of Anarchy – but it’s close enough.

And Hilary Duff shouldn’t worry that recently turned down a spot on 90210 because she’d rather have her own show, only to discover that her own show wasn’t good enough to be picked up by NBC, thereby forcing her to return to 90210’s network with her tail between her legs to accept a spot on a TV show that couldn’t be any more similar to 90210 if it employed Tori Spelling out of a sense of pity. There’s nothing embarrassing about that at all. Ahem.

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Hilary Duff and Faye Dunaway know that only too well. Between them, Hilary Duff and Faye Dunaway have had plenty of bad ideas – covering everything from Mommie Dearest to Aaron Carter – but now all their combined bad ideas seem to have looped past the point of infinity and returned as one brilliant idea.

And that idea is the public spat that Hilary Duff and Faye Dunaway have now found themselves involved in. It’s so inexplicably perfect that we want to cry.

So let’s start by listing all the bad ideas that led up to this point. The first bad idea came when someone decided that they’d remake Bonnie And Clyde starring Hilary Duff.

Now, this is obviously a bad idea because the original Bonnie And Clyde was a masterpiece of cinema that didn’t just usher in a new era of American moviemaking, but also inspired one of the world’s best ever songs.

Meanwhile, a Bonnie And Clyde movie starring Hilary Duff is legally obliged to feature either a song called I Love All My Special Friends or a new ending that involves Bonnie Parker, having learnt her lesson, riding a unicorn over a rainbow to the sound of Mmmbop by Hanson. Either way, it’s going to be awful.

The second bad idea was letting Faye Dunaway know that someone was remaking her film. You see, Faye Dunaway isn’t the effortlessly glamorous young star of Bonnie And Clyde any more – she’s a cranky old witch whose last major interview ended up with her hurling the journalist out in a blind rage.

Tell Faye Dunaway that Hilary Duff will be taking her part in a new Bonnie and Clyde film and you’re essentially reminding her of her own mortality. And that can only end in bitterness – and, if you’re lucky, a catty quote like this:

“Couldn’t they at least cast a real actress?”

Which brings us to our third bad idea – telling Hilary Duff that Faye Dunaway doesn’t think that she’s a real actress. Which is actually what happened yesterday, and E! Online was there to catch the bizarrely out of character reaction:

“I think that my fans that are going to go see the movie don’t even know who she is. I think it was a little unnecessary, but I might be mad if I looked like that now, too.”

And there we have it. Three genuinely hopeless ideas that have merged together and created the best idea of all – a rap-style beef between an embittered 68-year-old woman and a young girl who might still be a virgin. But just because we were never expecting Hilary Duff and Faye Dunaway to get involved in a public catfight, it doesn’t mean that we’re not going to enjoy every second of it.

But who’ll win? It’s not an argument that can be settled in a traditional way – like a ‘who can remember the most about the Cuban missile crisis’ competition or a side-by-side comparison to see whose genitals look least like a butcher’s offcut bucket – so there’s only one thing for it. A bikini wrestling match between Hilary Duff and Faye Dunaway in a paddling pool filled with jelly.

God, we’ve got to stop visiting those specialist websites.

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Hilary Duff is now 21 years old – old enough to get hammered on booze, old enough to drive a tractor and, if only she wasn’t a female, old enough to vote. She’s also old enough to have sex, although she’s jiggered if she’s going to tell you if she actually does or not.

You see, Hilary Duff hasn’t admitted that she’s still a virgin. And she hasn’t admitted that she’s not. But she has claimed that she didn’t say she was. The dirty moo.

If we were Hilary Duff, we’d be playing catch-up like nobody’s business at the moment. Her old peers have long since deserted her – Lindsay Lohan to get arrested and go to rehab and end up trudging around as a sort of bored-looking domesticated would-be lesbian, and the Olsen Twins to have it off with one-balled sportsmen and own buildings where famous actors can go to die naked – and she’s been left behind a little bit.

While other turn-of-the-century childstars delight in going out without any knickers on, Hilary Duff still seems like the sort of girl who wouldn’t go out unless she was wearing 14 pairs of knickers, at least three of which must be made of impenetrable lead chainmail, and a large pair of Victorian-era bloomers.

And there’s nothing wrong with preserving your purity like that, so long as you’re still pitching yourself at a market that appreciates that kind of sentiment, like Twilight-watching tweens or staunchly religious puritans. But Hilary Duff has decided that she needs to aim squarely at the mass market with her new Best Of album, so she’s decided to sex herself up a bit.

How? Will Hilary Duff get naked in a pop video like Britney Spears? Will she release a sexually explicit book like Madonna? Will she have full sex with a man on a video like Kim Karadshian? No, not quite.

But what Hilary Duff will do is deny that she claimed she was a virgin two years ago. We know – steady yourselves, boys. According to the San Francisco Chronicle:

In a 2006 interview with Elle magazine, the former Disney star touted her squeaky-clean image, insisting she hadn’t yet had sex. But she now denies every making the claim, telling Maxim magazine: “You know what? I was quoted saying I was a virgin, but I absolutely did not say that. That’s nobody’s business but my own. Somehow it turned into a bad thing!”

Hilary Duff is right, of course – it is nobody’s business but her own. And, you know, the legions of permanently-aroused teenage Maxim readers who are all bound to wank themselves into a blistery tizzy at even the vaguest insinuation that Hilary Duff might not be a virgin. But that’s it. Just Hilary Duff and the wanking boys. And now you as well, since you just read it here, we suppose. But that’s it. It’s nobody else’s business. Probably.

So maybe we’ll never know if Hilary Duff has had sex or not. And that mystery is going to keep us absolutely rapt for at least the next ten seconds until we forget that Hilary Duff even exists again. Rapt.

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Yup, that Hilary Duff’s a hot piece of property at the moment, or at least she would be if we could work out what the point of her was. You know what Hilary Duff would be great in? A creatively-bankrupt revisiting of a TV series that everyone stopped liking about 18 months into its 10-year run almost 20 years ago.

What’s that? There’s a part going spare in the new Beverly Hills 90210 spin-off? Well that’s certainly very fortunate for both Hilary Duff and Beverly Hills 90210. Not so much for us, though – we think Beverly Hills 90210 is going to be shit and that Hilary Duff’s a wanker.

It’s probably easiest to think of Hilary Duff as a kind of proto Miley Cyrus, albeit one who didn’t tit around topless like an underage whore so much. Hilary Duff had the hit TV show, the CDs and the creepy murder-fetish stalker.

Trouble is, though, Hilary Duff is now 20, and in dog years that’s 93. Fortunately Hilary Duff isn’t a dog, so this isn’t relevant. But, unfortunately, one dog year is roughly equal to one washed-up tween hag year, and Hilary Duff is one of those. What’s a girl to do?

Well, Hilary Duff could continue churning out Lizzie McGuire shows and movies until she’s visibly middle-aged and not the least bit convincing (known in the trade as ‘pulling a Sabrina The Teenage Witch), but she won’t do that.

Otherwise Hilary Duff could rely on her newly-official sexiness to open up a few doors, but that tactic’s hampered by the fact that the only people who find Hilary Duff sexy are Austrian men who lock their children in the cellar and have sex with them.

So it’s just as well that the new Beverly Hills 90210 spin-off might have Hilary in its sights. Fox reports:

According to E! sources, Duff’s potential character is called Annie Mills. Annie is a Beverly Hills High student who is into theater acting, just like Shannen Doherty’s character, Brenda, was on the original show. She yearns to fit in with the alternative crowd and leans a lot on her adopted brother, Dixon. Both Duff’s publicist and The CW, which is expected to debut the “Beverly Hills” spin-off this fall, had no comment, according to the New York Daily News.

Why, that sounds delightful. But maybe Hilary Duff really is the thing that the new Beverly Hills 90210 needs – after all, hasn’t she always seemed destined to star in a show that looks dated within six weeks of filming and is only remembered by anyone so that non-Americans have a postcode to use when they want to access US-only stuff on the internet? Plus we shouldn’t forget that a big star like Hilary Duff will bring a huge audience to the show.

An audience of paedophiles, admittedly, but who’s counting?

Read more:

Report: Hilary Duff Offered Starring Role in ‘90210′ Remake – Fox