[from Contact Music]

Lord of the Rings star Viggo Mortensen is begging fans to help him recover poems and short stories he wrote while shooting Hidalgo in the Sahara Desert - after they were stolen from his car.

The actor feels sure that whoever took the 12 short stories and 75 poems knew what they were looking for, because money and a computer were left on his backseat but his prose was gone.

He says, "It just made me feel like, 'You're not paying attention to the things that matter to you.'"

Published April 2, 2004