For someone who’s no stranger to People’s 50 Most Beautiful list, it’s hard to feel sorry for actress Penelope Cruz.
But listen to her sob story about her early days in Hollywood and you might muster a little sympathy.
“Many times I would pick up the phone and realize there was no one to call, because I didn’t have any friends,” she reveals in the August issue of W magazine about the time she worked on 1998’s “The Hi-Lo Country,” her first English-speaking film.
While she scraped for acting gigs, she kept company with two stray cats she kept in her Sunset Marquis hotel room in L.A.
“I cannot even look at those rooms now,” Cruz tells W. “I have a weird physical reaction. Everything comes back from those years.”
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Get this star on ‘Scrubs,’ stat!
Sounds like Courteney Cox is real a team player on the set of “Scrubs,” the comedy in which she’ll guest star next season.
“She’s what we call a gamer,” executive producer Bill Lawrence told a Television Critics Association panel on Wednesday, according to people.com. “She’s up for anything. I don’t think you get that all the time with big-name actresses.”
Cox is slated to play the new chief of medicine at Sacred Heart Hospital, and she’s made an impact with the show’s big wigs. Lawrence said: “We’d have her back in a heartbeat.”
In other “Scrubs” news, Zach Braff said Wednesday that he would be leaving the show at the end of the new season, according to The Associated Press.
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Mamma mia, he’s cute
Pierce Brosnan may no longer don the tux as James Bond, but he still drives the ladies wild.
The “Mamma Mia!” star got rave reviews from the flick’s director, Phyllida Lloyd, who said Brosnan has a “total smooch factor” about him.
“He’s incredibly smoochy,” producer Judy Craymer tells people.com. “There isn’t a 15-year-old or an 85-year-old who doesn’t love Pierce.”
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Shock jock shocked
Jimmy Kimmel and Sarah Silverman are broken up — and Howard Stern is broken up about it.
The DJ said on his Sirius radio show that he was supposed to vacation with the comedians this week, but they canceled.
“Jimmy e-mailed me and said they were going through some tough times,” Stern said, according to people.com. “I was so upset I had to go take a walk.”
Kimmel is upset, too, according to Stern. Kimmel told the shock jock that although the split was mutual, he felt like he lost his best friend.
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4,336
The number of movie theaters “The Dark Knight” hits this weekend, making it the highest theater count of any movie ever, according to boxofficemojo.com.
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View to a good cry
Everything seems to turn into a melodrama on “The View,” even when the hosts kind of agree with each other.
Take Thursday’s show, which tackled Jesse Jackson’s use of the n-word along with disparaging remarks about presidential hopeful Barack Obama.
All agreed that it’s a bad word, but tensions thickened between Whoopi Goldberg and Elisabeth Hasselbeck — surprise — in discussions about when, if ever, the word should be used.
For the record, Hasselbeck thinks it “perpetuates stereotypes and hate” and should never be used, not even by African-Americans.
“We use it the way we want to use it,” Goldberg responds, according to video posted on usmagazine.com.
Hasselbeck later says, “My thing is, we don’t live in different worlds, we live in the same world.”
But Goldberg cuts in, “We do live in different worlds. I’m sorry, Elisabeth. This is the way it is.”
Hasselbeck fights back tears as she tries to defend her position. “This is upsetting to me,” she says.
“How are we supposed to move forward if we keep using terms that bring back that pain?”
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The Personals page was compiled by the staff of RedEye, and news services contributed. For updates all day, visit redeyechicago.com.
