On May 31, 34 years after he dropped out of college, Steven Spielberg received his B.A. from California State University, Long Beach. He tells us he got all A's, with Schindler's List fulfilling the credit requirement for a humanities course and Amistad satisfying a black-history class. Jaws didn't earn credit for a marine biology class, however, so he wrote a paper about the California coast. And how did the movie mogul cap off his graduation? By taking his wife, Kate Capshaw, parents Leah Adler and Arnold Spielberg, and a few friends who had attended the morning ceremony to an IHOP for a pancake feast. During college he ate there four or five days a week. For graduation gifts, he says, he got a lot of "How To" books on getting a job and avoiding post-graduate panic attacks.
As Padmé Amidala in Star Wars: Episode II—Attack of the Clones, Natalie Portman gallops through the galaxies. Now the actress, who just finished her junior year at Harvard, is doing some traveling in real life. She'll soon be leaving for a 10-day guided tour of Scandinavia and Russia with her parents, she tells us. But Portman, who's multilingual (she speaks Hebrew and French), isn't learning any Swedish or Russian for the trip. She's too busy immersing herself in Civil War books. Immediately after her vacation Portman heads to Romania to begin rehearsals with Jude Law for the movie adaptation of Cold Mountain, the bestselling novel about a forest-wandering Confederate soldier. Why Romania? "It looks the most like North Carolina during the Civil War period," says Portman.
To thank The King of Queens cast for completing 100 episodes recently, the studio that produces the show commissioned caricature artist Al Hirschfeld to do one of his famous pen-and-ink drawings of the show's stars, Kevin James, Leah Remini and Jerry Stiller. But Remini tells me she and James had no idea how special the gift was—or how valuable. (An original Hirschfeld starts at $8,600.) All they could think about were the $40,000 Porsche Boxster sports cars the four stars of Will & Grace received after their successful first season. "Kevin and I are uneducated idiots," Remini says now. "We were like, 'What the hell is this?'" Though she has since come to appreciate its value, I suspect she would have preferred a Porsche.
- Contributors:
- Hugh McCarten,
- Marisa Laudadio.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
