Haddock can escape and rescue their friend Calculus. A recurring comic trope in the series is Haddock's aversion to Castafiore, who can never remember his name (addressing him variously as Hammock, Paddock, Padlock, Hemlock, Hassock, Havoc, Maggot, Bartok, and Bootblack, among other names). Gossip journalists once reported a romance and engagement between Castafiore and Haddock in The Castafiore Emerald, complete with photographs of Castafiore showing a disgruntled Haddock the flowers in his own garden. This quite chagrined the captain, but not the diva, who was quite used to such inventions from the tabloids. Castafiore was once falsely imprisoned by the South American dictator General Tapioca and Colonel Sponsz in order to lure Calculus, Haddock and Tintin to San Theodoros where they prepare a deadly trap for them and Tapioca's rival, Alcazar. Their ruse backfired, not least because Castafiore expressed her contempt for her show trial and her life sentence with her trademark ear-splitting rendition of the Jewel Song. The court had to be cleared. In prison, Castafiore made her jailers suffer even more by throwing her pasta over their heads because they had not cooked it al dente. Character background and influences Opera was one of Hergé's pet peeves. "Opera bores me, to my great shame. What's more, it makes me laugh," he once admitted. And so, perhaps not surprisingly, he created an archetypical singer who makes the reader laugh. Though la Castafiore is obviously Italian, her pet aria is from a French opera (Faust was composed by Charles Gounod) rather than the Verdi, Puccini, Bellini, or Donizetti one might have expected from a star of La Scala. Faust, and this aria in particular, was among the most famous of all operas in Hergé's time. Furthermore, the choice of this aria is intentionally comic: Hergé depicts the aging, glamorous and utterly self-absorbed opera diva as Marguerite, the picture of innocence, taking delight in her own image in the mirror, with the oft-repeated quote: Ah, I laugh to see myself so beautiful in this mirror!. Bianca Castafiore is portrayed by Kim Stengel in the 2011 film The Adventures of Tintin: Secret of the Unicorn, which merges plots from several books. Renée Fleming provided the singing voice. Although Sra. Castafiore invariably sings her signature aria in Hergé's books, in the film, the character presents a different aria, "Je veux vivre..." from Gounod's Romeo et Juliette. Oddly, the lead-in (played by an invisible