Warnie and Liz Hurley bag $1m for 'access-all-areas interview'

Sydney, Apr 21 (ANI): Shane Warne and his fiancee Elizabeth Hurley have reportedly pocketed nearly 1 million dollars from their access-all-areas and heavily styled interviews with Britain's Hello! magazine and Australia's own Woman's Day.

According to Sydney Morning Herald, Hello! stumped up the bulk of the money, the sort of figures not seen in magazine publishing since the heady 1990s.

The Woman's Day magazine also coughed up heavily to buy the exclusive interview and photo spread with the former Australian cricketer and Hurley.

The celebrity couple had apparently been shopping the exclusive rights to their love story for some time, but it was Woman's Day that finally bit the bullet and paid a rumoured 250,000 dollars for the Australian rights, complete with heavily styled shots of the pair cavorting in Sri Lanka in matching brilliant white beach outfits.

But since the deal was also with Hello! magazine in Britain, which published midweek, Woman's Day executives issued legal letters warning other media not to publish anything to do with the story and dispatched it to all Australia's big media houses.

With such a huge investment, the editor of Woman's Day, Fiona Connolly, brought forward publication by three days to Friday, hoping to generate extra sales over the weekend.

The deal is said to be the biggest in Australian magazines since Bec and Lleyton Hewitt's 2005 wedding cash bonanza. (ANI)