Actresses

Actress Lindsay Lohan violated her probation Thursday by leaving a Newport Beach rehabilitation facility where she was to begin 90 days of treatment in a reckless driving case, prosecutors said. Mark Heller, Lohan's attorney, told Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge James Dabney on Thursday morning that his client had already begun her therapy at the Morningside Recovery facility after opting not to go to a Long Island recovery center. Heller told the judge the facility met all the conditions of Lohan's plea agreement in a case in which she was also convicted of lying to police.

After skipping out on entering a Newport Beach rehabilitation facility and facing the prospect of arrest for violating her probation, Lindsay Lohan has checked into the Betty Ford Center to begin a 90-day court-mandated stay in her reckless driving conviction. Lohan also rehired her former attorney Shawn Holley, who represented her for several years, and the lawyer arranged for the "Mean Girls" star to enter the Rancho Mirage facility. The moves capped a chaotic 24 hours in which Lohan showed up Thursday at Morningside Recovery in Newport Beach, only to promptly leave.

Sally Kellerman does a mean Marlon Brando. "Sally, don't you recognize me or are you playing it cool?" she mumbles in her best brooding tough guy, mimicking one conversation with the actor when, as a struggling actress, she made ends meet by working as a waitress in a Hollywood eatery in the late '50s. ("I waited on more stars than I worked with in my entire career," she adds.) But that's not where her connection to Brando started. Kellerman, who came to fame as the rigid Korean War nurse Margaret "Hot Lips" Houlihan in Robert Altman's 1970 comedy classic "MASH," writes in her new autobiography "Read My Lips: Stories of a Hollywood Life" about how she had a crush on Brando as a shy, overweight teenager at Hollywood High.

NEW YORK - Enthroned on her couch in Beverly Hills, Hollywood superagent Sue Mengers did not go gentle into that good night but, instead, gossiped and tattled against the dying of the light. Well, she's back holding court in her modest (by neighborhood standards, anyway) palace, which has been relocated to Broadway's Booth Theatre. Here Bette Midler, draped in a turquoise caftan like a sedentary 1980s queen too tired even for browsing on Rodeo Drive, delivers Mengers' ribald wit and agentry wisdom in John Logan's "I'll Eat You Last: A Chat With Sue Mengers.

Broadway for Cicely Tyson is clearly like riding a bike. Her last rendezvous in the rialto was in "The Corn Is Green" in 1983, but you'd never know that 30 years had passed by her exquisitely understated performance in the revival of Horton Foote's "The Trip to Bountiful," which opened Tuesday at the Stephen Sondheim Theatre. There's not the slightest hesitancy or straining for effect in her portrayal of Carrie Watts, the elderly mother cooped up in a two-room Houston apartment with her son and daughter-in-law (played less assuredly by Cuba Gooding Jr. and Vanessa Williams)

NEW YORK - Sucking on a cigarette and swigging from a bottle of spirits, the Virgin Mary isn't looking all that virginal in Colm Tóibín's defiantly strange, inescapably controversial and at moments intensely gripping dramatic experiment "The Testament of Mary. " If she seems distinctly Irish that is because the play, which had its Broadway opening Monday at the Walter Kerr Theatre, is being performed by the powerhouse Irish actress Fiona Shaw, known to many as Harry Potter's aunt but awarded an honorary Commander of the Order of the British Empire for her stage genius.

Long before the age of computer-generated special effects, Marcel Vercoutere helped create a scene widely considered among the most terrifying in movie-going history. In "The Exorcist," the 1973 horror film that became a pop-culture phenomenon, the head of a helpless young girl twists completely around as a young priest battles the demon that inhabits her body. With its wild, animated eyes, the life-size robot used as a stand-in for actress Linda Blair was built by Vercoutere, the film's special effects director, with help from its chief makeup artist, Dick Smith.

In a multimillion-dollar twist on celebrity musical chairs, singer-actress Jessica Simpson has purchased Sharon and Ozzy Osbourne's estate in Hidden Hills for $11.5 million, public records show. The Cape Cod-inspired mansion, built in 2001, sits on a 2.5-acre promontory off a cul-de-sac in the gated community. It features a paneled study with fireplace, a home theater and studio area, six en suite bedrooms and a guest apartment with kitchenette. The family room of the 11,000-square-foot home has sliding barn doors and a reclaimed brick fireplace.

After the coffee. Before the weekend! How did I never think of that before? The Skinny: I've been catching up with TNT's "Southland. " Man this show is good and I really will miss it if this is its last season. Go watch it on VOD. Friday's headlines include the box office preview, IMDb winning its legal battle against an actress mad about her real age being posted and reviews of "42" and "To the Wonder. " Daily Dose: "The Bible" was a huge hit for the History Channel earlier this year (see below)

BALTIMORE - The good staffers of Vice President Selina Meyer's office had been trying to put out a fire all afternoon when their slightly discombobulated leader, played by Julia Louis-Dreyfus, turned up on the set of HBO's "Veep. " Before she stepped into character, however, Louis-Dreyfus had a question. "Did you talk to the actors about the script changes?" she said to the show's creator and all-around head coach, Armando Iannucci, as he sat behind a monitor watching takes. He nodded.