The CW has renewed Gossip Girl and Nikita as well as freshman drama Hart of Dixie and ended the run of buzzy freshman dramas Ringer and The Secret Circle.

Gossip Girl’s sixth-season pickup doesn’t come as a surprise as there had been conversations about bringing back the Blake Lively-Leighton Meester hourlong for a final round because the actors’ contracts expire next year. In January, executive producer Stephanie Savage told reporters that the Gossip Girl writers were leaving the story open at the end of season five. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter later that month, she suggested that next season felt like “an organic ending point.” Savage will remain showrunner, while Sara Goodman has been promoted to executive producer.

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Leighton Meester has joined forces with Vera Wang to support bone marrow centre DKMS.

The Gossip Girl star – who is the face of the fashion house- is teaming up with the founder of DKMS Katharina Harf and Vera Wang to raise awareness on the need for bone marrow donors.

Vera Wang has designed a T-shirt with the words “Share the Love” for the campaign. The shirt comes as a gift with a $78 purchase from Vera Wang’s fragrance collection Lovestruck. The offer begins March 28 at Macy’s.

Leighton will feature in the campaign to promote the effort with Kerri Mullen, a 19-year-old leukaemia survivor who was saved by a bone marrow donation from a DKMS donor. DKMS is touted as the world’s largest marrow donor centre.

“‘Share the love’ is an altruistic idea of love – it’s about giving the gift of life to a stranger,” Leighton said, according to WWD.

Leighton is the face of Lovestruck and has previously told of her shock at being approached by Vera to be an ambassador for the product.

“I was at one of her shows and she mouthed to me across the runway, ‘I want to talk to you’ I was like, ‘OMG, what does Vera Wang want to talk to me about?’ I thought I’d done something wrong!” she said.

“The next day, I got a call asking if I wanted to represent her new fragrance.”

The beauty has said she is thrilled to be representing the scent.

“I love her clothes and obviously when I first smelt Lovestruck I loved it too! It’s got an edginess that really appealed to me,” she gushed.

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Blair Waldorf recently got married on “Gossip Girl,” but actress Leighton Meester, who portrays the New York socialite on TV, doesn’t know if she wants to walk down the aisle.

“I never had a boyfriend until I was 18,” Meester told the April issue of Marie Claire. “It’s nice, I guess – when you like them. But it isn’t the most important thing. I’m not sure I ever want to get married. The only time a relationship is good is when you really love them. I don’t want to hang out with some guy I just like.”

That’s not the only way Meester, 25, differs from her “Gossip Girl” character, who grew up in a lavish lifestyle in Manhattan.

“I couldn’t relate to kid stuff — ‘Jimmy doesn’t like me!’ Who cares? I was worried we didn’t have gas money or food,” Meester revealed. “Those were my concerns.”

Meester said her family history is “probably the craziest” she’s ever heard.

Both Meester’s mother and father served time for drug-related offenses. She was born in a hospital (not in a jail as has been reported, she says) before being transferred to a halfway house for three months. Meester then moved in with her grandmother until her mother, Constance, was released from jail.

“I look back now and I see it in a nice light,” Meester told the upcoming issue of Marie Claire, which hits newsstands March 20. “It wasn’t uncomplicated. But I played outside. I went to the beach. There were happy, fun times.”

Meester continues to star on the CW’s “Gossip Girl,” and this summer, she hits the big screen in “That’s My Boy” with Adam Sandler, Andy Samberg and Susan Sarandon.

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Leighton Meester, best known for her indelible portrayal of rich-girl snobbery and capriciousness as Blair Waldorf on Gossip Girl, is getting her bowl on at Frames, a low-key alley abutting the Port Authority, Manhattan’s main bus terminal and one of the last vestiges of Times Square’s gritty past. She enjoys bowling — this is her second outing in a week. Which is not to say Meester is skilled at bowling. Because she is not.

“I never played sports,” she explains, before releasing her ball with an indifferent thump. “I wasn’t any good at them.” She watches the ball drop into the gutter with limp finality. Unfazed, she throws again, hurling it down the lane, knocking over a handful of pins. A second gutter shot follows. “I guess I need a bigger target,” she says flatly.

Meester is no stranger to such things. One of those rare children born with both full-blown ambition and the determination to avoid even the slightest derailment, Meester has been aiming at big game since grade school. Part of this is a rejoinder to circumstance. Meester’s mother, Constance, gave birth to her while serving federal prison time for drug trafficking. Meester was not, she has oft clarified, born in jail. She was delivered in a hospital, then transferred to a halfway house for three months, after which she was sent to live with her grandmother until Constance’s release. Her father, Doug, also served time for drug-related offenses. He and Constance would later divorce. The difficult facts of her childhood provided Meester with matchless perspective. Also, an ineffaceable blueprint of what not to do.

“My family has a crazy history,” she acknowledges. “Probably the craziest I’ve heard of.”

But it was not, she is quick to point out, Dickensian in its misery. “I look back now and I see it in a nice light,” Meester says of her youth in Marco Island, Florida. “It wasn’t uncomplicated. But I played outside. I went to the beach. There were happy, fun times.”

Meester, like many hard-knock kids, has little use for self-pity. “You can take what is handed to you and use it as an excuse to mess up. But I’ve always handled what was given to me by life. I consider myself lucky. I was never lied to. And I was loved.”

When Meester was 10, she attended a modeling convention in Atlanta during her Christmas break. An agent snapped her up on sight and took her to New York City. “I ended up staying. I never went back to Florida,” she explains. “That was that.”

She lived with her mother in dodgy rentals in the West Village, then in Inwood, at the northernmost tip of Manhattan. Meester booked commercials for Bloomingdale’s, Stern’s, the Limited Too. She flourished under pressure.

“I worked a lot, even though I was just a kid. It seemed normal to me,” she shrugs.

Building on her success, Meester left New York at 14 for Los Angeles for pilot season. She and her mother lived in an apartment at the corner of Hollywood and La Brea, steps from the Walk of Fame, surviving on modest checks from Meester’s grandfather and fees from Meester’s modeling gigs. When she could, she took acting classes. She preferred the ones with adults.

“I couldn’t relate to kid stuff. ‘Jimmy doesn’t like me!’ Who cares? I was worried we didn’t have gas money or food. Those were my concerns.”

Meester stayed laser-focused, eschewing boyfriends for work and study. She took a pass on prom. “It was a lot of money for a ticket. And I just didn’t care that much,” she says. Her eyes were fixed, as ever, on the prize.

“When you see how you react when you suffer,” she explains, “that’s when you know what you are made of.”

For several years, she was a prolific bit player, landing gigs on Law & Order, House, 24, and Entourage. The game changer came in 2006, when she landed Gossip Girl, an audacious, soapy drama adapted from the series of young-adult novels about the salacious lives of spoiled New York City prep schoolers. The show, a breakout hit, is now in its fifth season.

Meester is broadening her scope to film. This summer, she will appear in the Adam Sandler comedy That’s My Boy, in which she plays a neurotic bride who “starts out sweet, then gets crazier and crazier.” It is a familiar refrain. From her spoiled Machiavellian princess in Gossip Girl to the upstart underminer in Country Strong to the sapphic stalker in The Roommate, Meester specializes in elevating unsavory women above the “crazy bitch” stereotype. She doesn’t play the girl you love to hate. She does something far trickier: She makes you love the hateable girl. A quicksilver hybrid of Sharon Stone and Drew Barrymore, Meester has created something entirely new: the beyotch with a heart of gold.

For the full feature, pick up the April issue of Marie Claire when it hits newsstands on March 20.

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When Leighton Meester asks, “Want to sit in the back with me?” you immediately dismiss motion-sickness worries and clamber up into the black SUV. Meester’s easy, friendly demeanour makes you feel like you’re hanging out like you always do, although you only just met for a ride-along interview en route to the airport.
This Toronto trip is a quick stop in a go-go-go schedule for the actress, part of a media tour she and her friend, hairstylist Charles Baker Strahan, are doing together for Herbal Essences, for which she is the spokesperson.

“I used to use it before, but Charles re-introduced the brand to me, and I fell in love with it,” she says.

Also part of her busy life is her fourth season of Gossip Girl, where she plays manipulative society-princess Blair Waldorf, and three movies she wrapped in recent months.

In Country Strong, starring Gwyneth Paltrow and Tim McGraw and scheduled for widespread release in January, Meester, 24, plays a young, Texas beauty-queen singer alongside Paltrow’s self-destructive country music star.

Despite having music in common — the actress fits singing and songwriting into her schedule as much as she can — Meester highlights this role as one of the most different from herself.

“She’s secretive about a lot of her past, about her insecurities and shortcomings, and is very much a little girl in a woman’s body,” she says.

“She looks up to Gwyneth’s character so much, and is totally heartbroken when she’s not what she expected her to be.”

In February’s The Roommate, Meester is a Single White Female-ish roommate to Minka Kelly.

“That’s about as far away from myself as you can get, and the most uncomfortable role I’ve ever played,” she says. “Every day I had to do something completely the opposite of a choice I would make in real life.”

Most of Meester’s characters are a bit bent in some way, whether spoiled and scheming, uncomfortably needy or outright psychotic. The secret to playing them is not to judge, she says.

“You have to embrace and love them, and reach some part of them in yourself, whether it’s completely blurry, vague and distant, or something you can relate to.”

Teamed with Hugh Laurie, Katherine Keener, Alyson Janney and Oliver Platt in The Oranges, also due in 2011, Meester finds herself in another questionable-choices character.

“I’m the daughter in one family who falls in love with the father (Laurie) in the other family.”

The actress says she doesn’t have a list of I-Want roles.

“I’ve been really lucky that the characters I want to play are also in scripts that are wonderful and beautifully executed, and I have time to do it.”

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Though primarily known as Blair Waldorf on the CW’s Gossip Girl, Meester is hoping to become recognized as a singer – having been a part of Cobra Starship’s hit song “Good Girls Go Bad.” And she already has one big musical mentor.

“Recently I’ve spent a lot of time with Cyndi Lauper, and she’s a legend,” says Meester. “She gave me the advice: Never sell your publishing, so I’ll take that.”

The thrill of the stage has Meester – who’s worked with Lil Wayne, Robin Thicke and Adam Lambert – hooked.

“I get more excited than nervous, and I feel like that’s the best kind of energy to have,” the TV actress, 23, told PEOPLE Saturday before a 15-minute gig at Venetian’s Tao Las Vegas. The performance, she says, is “cute, sexy … I’m just having the time of my life, and I hope it continues.” (See her video with Thicke here.)

Meester began her electro-pop set with the Cobra Starship song “Good Girls Go Bad,” then followed with “Somebody to Love,” “Playing Games” and “Your Love’s a Drug.”

After the performance, she headed to a sky box table in the moat overlooking the entire club, to celebrate her last night before heading back to the Gossip Girl set. Earlier in the evening, Meester, the band, dancers and crew dined at LAVO for an Italian feast.

And since performing live doesn’t frighten her, what does give Meester pause? Her brother’s driving.

“He’s 16, so I get worried,” she said.

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Thanks to Britt we have HQ scans from September’s issue of Harper’s Bazaar with Leighton on the cover.

[007] Harper’s Bazaar (September)

Last night, Cobra Starship invaded the screening room at the Tribeca Grand hotel for the video premiere of “Good Girls Go Bad,” their new single that features Gossip Girl star Leighton Meester.I spoke to the actress (and two-time NYLON cover girl!) for about sixty seconds before she was whisked away by photographers. And here’s what we said:

You have a great look in the Good Girls Go Bad video. Did you pick your own clothes? “I did! I loved the clothes in that video… I wore a beautiful Bally dress, and I ended up keeping a few pieces from set – I kept this great dress from Kim Ovitz with a belted waist that I love. She makes amazing stuff. And do you know my friends were in the video?”

No way. “There’s a lyric in the song about five best friends, so it was me and Vicky [Cobra Starship’s keytarist], plus three of my girlfriends. They all got styled for the shoot, too… hey, you look really familiar… I met you at a Longchamp party…”

Like two years ago. “I have a really good memory. You’re a writer and you told me I had to meet Olivia Palermo, because you thought she was the real life Blair Waldorf.”

And now she’s on The City! “I haven’t seen that show, but I did ask Cecily [von Ziegesar, the Gossip Girl author] if Blair was based on Olivia, and she said she wrote the books way before Olivia was in New York City, and she basically made Blair up. But people do say I look like Olivia Palermo. And also, that I look like Minka Kelly from Friday Night Lights.”

Oh, that show is amazing. “It’s an incredible TV show, isn’t it? And I just did a movie with Minka, that’s a little bit like Fatal Attraction. It’s called The Roommate… I guess you could say I play her stalker, so it was odd also looking like her. But I was blonde in the movie, so it wasn’t so obvious.”

Back to your shoes; I’m obsessed with them. “I bought them at Barneys, they’re Roger Vivier.”

They’re so classic, but also very sparkly. “Exactly!”

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