Expecting
Talk show host Ricki Lake, 32, and her husband, Rob Sussman, 34, an artist, are expecting their second child in June. Son Milo is 3....
Broadway bright light Audra McDonald, 30, the youngest performer in stage history to win three Tonys, including one for Carousel, is expecting her first child in February. Daddy is her longtime love, Peter Donovan, a bass player whom she married last year.
Update
On Dec. 27 the Montana supreme court unanimously upheld a lower court ruling that entitled Patricia Shannon, 66, the mistress of late CBS correspondent Charles Kuralt, to the 110-acre property near Twin Bridges that he promised her in a letter shortly before he died in 1997. Kuralt's two daughters had sought legal recourse to keep the fishing retreat—worth $600,000—from going to Shannon, Kuralt's lover of nearly 30 years.
Births
Actress Laura Wright, 30, who plays ex-stripper Cassie Layne Winslow on the CBS soap Guiding Light, and husband John Wright, 31, an architect, welcomed son John Michael (7 lbs. 1 oz.) on Dec. 21 in Bucks County, Pa. Big sis Lauren Elizabeth is 2 ½....
Deejay Norman "Fatboy Slim" Cook, 37, and his wife, Zoë Ball, a TV and radio personality, welcomed their first child, son Woody (8 lbs. 5 oz.), on Dec. 15 in London.
Deaths
Alan Cranston, a Democrat and nuclear arms control activist who represented California in the U.S. Senate for 24 years before retiring in 1993, his career tainted by the savings and loan industry scandal, died of a heart attack on Dec. 31 at his home in Los Altos Hills, Calif. He was 86 and had battled prostate cancer in the early '90s....
Screenwriter Julius Epstein, who teamed up with his twin brother, Philip (and Howard Koch), to coauthor the Academy Award-winning script for 1943's Casablanca, died on Dec. 30 in L.A. He was 91....
Character actor Leo Gordon, 78, whose steely-blue eyes helped get him cast as the bad-die in films and TV shows such as 1994's Maverick and NBC's Bonanza over a 50-year career, died on Dec. 26 in L.A....
Ad man Thomas G. Yohe, one of the co-creators of ABC's Schoolhouse Rock, the series of educational animated shorts that ran on Saturday mornings from 1973 to '85, died on Dec. 21 of cancer in Norwalk, Conn. He was 63....
Bass singer Nick Massi, who as an original member of the pop group the Four Seasons can be heard on '60s radio classics like "Big Girls Don't Cry" and "Walk Like a Man," died of cancer on Christmas Eve in Newark. He was 73.
Law and Order
On Dec. 29 highway patrol officers busted Charmed star and Beverly Hills, 90210 alumna Shannen Doherty, 29, on suspicion of drunken driving near L.A. She was released without bail but faces arraignment on Jan. 26.
In Court
On Dec. 22, a week after filing for divorce from Barbara Feltus Becker, 34, his wife of seven years, Boris Becker, 33, the Teutonic tennis ace and three—time Wimbledon champion, asked Germany's highest court to order her to bring their sons—6-year-old Noah and 1-year-old Elias—back to that country from Miami, where the estranged couple have a home. U.S. courts do not recognize German law, so legal experts say Becker will have to persuade an American judge to enforce any such order.
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