THE HOUSTON CHRONICLE
In Waiting to Exhale, the upcoming film based on Terry McMillan's bestseller, Whitney Houston plays one of four women struggling with relationships. "People fail you," says Houston, 32, who plays a sexy, single TV executive. "You depend on them and they disappoint you." Though Houston won't talk directly about her husband, Bobby Brown, she admits it's hard for her to trust people. "That's why the friends I have are all I want. I don't want any more new friends." Plus, her daughter Bobbi, 2, keeps her busy. "I get up and take her to school like regular people. We go out to restaurants. People stare and expect me to do back flips or something, but I'm just a true hands-on mother, because that's what my mother [singer Cissy Houston] was to me."

DOC SOUP
Adam Arkin isn't a doctor, but he plays one on Chicago Hope. So does he find himself fielding medical questions in real life? "No, I don't get people coming up to say, 'Hey, do you think I should have a radial keratotomy?' " he says. But Arkin, who grew up in the shadow of his father, actor Alan Arkin, now gets mistaken for ER's George Clooney. "Obviously people are not paying close enough attention, because they confuse us," says Arkin, 39. "George told me that people are always coming up to him and saying, 'You're great, but I love your dad.' When I arrived at the Emmys, I had this press photographer literally yelling at me, 'George, hey George! Look over here, George!' Finally I looked at the guy and said, 'My name is not George, okay?' And the guy says, 'Oh, excuse me, Mister Clooney!' "

I OWE IT ALL TO ETON
English actor Charles Shaughnessy, who plays theatrical producer Maxwell Sheffield on The Nanny, now holds the title of reigning Celebrity Jeopardy! champion. "My parents had despaired of my extremely expensive English education, since I put it aside to do daytime soaps and now a sitcom in America," says Shaughnessy, 39, who graduated from Eton and received a law degree from Cambridge. "But it finally paid off. In the first game, English literature was one of the categories. And I got the final Jeopardy! answer, 'What is a malapropism?' " Shaughnessy scored the most points in the weeklong, all-celeb contest (defeating such knowledgeable types as David Duchovny, Lynn Redgrave and ER's Noah Wyle), won $30,000 for charity and even got a phone call from his boyhood nanny. "Nanny Marlene, who now lives in Virginia, saw me and called out of the blue to say, 'I always knew you were smart, Master Charles.' "

WHAT'S A ZUNIGA?
Daphne Zuniga hasn't improved her filmography since signing on to play Melrose Place's Jo Reynolds in 1992. "When I took Melrose," she recalls, "I wondered, 'Will Martin Scorsese want to meet me if I'm on this show?' " The answer, so far, is no, but playing a defense lawyer in the recent NBC miniseries Degree of Guilt helped Zuniga, 32, enhance her name recognition. "My first agent," she says, "wanted to change my last name to Woods or Hill or Forrest, saying, 'I can't spell it and I can't pronounce it.' I could not imagine being anything other than a Zuniga. Then the agent asked, 'Well, what's your middle name?' I said, 'Sorry, it's not Susan. It's Eurydice.' "