• August 09, 1999
• Vol. 52
• No. 5

Insider

By Tom Cunneff

In The Haunting, sultry Catherine Zeta-Jones plays an insomniac, but in real life she sleeps like a log, she told me at the film's L.A. premiere. "You have to beat me across the head to wake me up," says the Welsh actress, who recently returned from a three-week European vacation (with her new beau, actor Michael Douglas). "It was long overdue," says Zeta-Jones, adding that she has no plans to rush into another role, even though the offers are piling up. Her next project, in fact, is to paint the L.A. home she purchased earlier this year. Says Zeta-Jones: "I haven't been there since I bought it."

On Emmy Awards night it might be better to be a presenter than a nominee—especially if you don't win. The treasure chest that presenters receive at the Sept. 12 show is worth more than $4,000 and includes such luxuries as a two-night stay at the swank L'Ermitage Beverly Hills hotel; a stress-and-tress treatment at the Frédéric Fekkai beauty spa; a week of consultation with a celebrity nutritionist; and a Christopher Radko commemorative glass ornament. The nominees, meanwhile, get bubkes. (Their gift is the nomination itself, I'm told.)

Is Madonna turning her 2-year-old daughter Lourdes into her own Mini-Me? Little Lourdes and her babysitter recently popped into the chic Pom D'api children's shoe boutique in Beverly Hills to buy a pair of the expensive, French-made shoes that are turning up on the offspring of such Hollywood bigwigs as Steven Spielberg and Kate Capshaw. Lourdes, whose mom calls her Lola, took off the Versace sandals she was wearing and put her tootsies into a fashionable pair of white leather platform sandals with half-inch wedge soles, which the sitter purchased for $80.

A few weeks ago I reported that pop singer Britney Spears shot her first movie role, a cameo in Jack of All Trades. Well, she's about to shoot her first TV role. In an episode airing in late September, the teen sensation will play herself on ABC's Sabrina, the Teenage Witch. She's returning the favor after the show's star, Melissa Joan Hart, appeared in the singer's video for "(You Drive Me) Crazy."

Brothers Ralph and Joseph Fiennes teamed up recently but not for a movie. They gathered in Manhattan with their sister Sophie, a producer, to give a reading from the novel Blood Ties, which was written by their mother, Jennifer Lash, who died in 1993 of breast cancer. Ralph helped get her work published posthumously after mentioning it to English Patient author Michael Ondaatje on the set of the Oscar-winning 1996 film based on his novel.

While discussing the orgy scene in Eyes Wide Shut, which was altered to get the film an R rating, a studio insider told me that digitally creating a few actors gave the drama's editors greater control. "They didn't want to take the chance that they were covering any more than they needed to," says my source, who worries about the future of thespians. "If I were an actor, I'd be sweating it. Digitized people don't need a big trailer."

• Contributors:
• Hugh McCarten.

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