Elizabeth Movie

Set decorator Peter Howitt, whose previous films include "Braveheart" and "Mission: Impossible," is up for his seventh Oscar nomination. Art director John Myhre, whose credits include "What's Eating Gilbert Grape" and "Immortal Beloved," is nominated for the first time. "Elizabeth," shot on location in Newcastle, England, was their first collaboration. Howitt was interviewed by phone from London. Myhre was interviewed in Los Angeles.

A two-hour CBS television movie about Elizabeth Smart's nine-month kidnapping ordeal is expected to air in November, her father says. The story will be told from the viewpoint of her parents, Ed and Lois Smart, who have also signed a book deal about the kidnapping. Filming is expected to begin in two weeks in Canada. The Smarts have contracted with Doubleday Books to tell their story in "Bringing Elizabeth Home: A Journey of Faith and Hope." Her uncles are working on a separate book.

When Hollywood hosts the Academy Awards on Sunday, few countries will feel as much pride of homeland as Australia, which has produced seven of this year's Oscar nominees. They include Cate Blanchett for best actress in "Elizabeth," Geoffrey Rush for best supporting actor in "Shakespeare in Love," Rachel Griffiths for best supporting actress in "Hilary and Jackie," Peter Weir for best director of "The Truman Show" and David Hirschfelder for best original score for "Elizabeth."

Set decorator Peter Howitt, whose previous films include "Braveheart" and "Mission: Impossible," is up for his seventh Oscar nomination. Art director John Myhre, whose credits include "What's Eating Gilbert Grape" and "Immortal Beloved," is nominated for the first time. "Elizabeth," shot on location in Newcastle, England, was their first collaboration. Howitt was interviewed by phone from London. Myhre was interviewed in Los Angeles.

A two-hour CBS television movie about Elizabeth Smart's nine-month kidnapping ordeal is expected to air in November, her father says. The story will be told from the viewpoint of her parents, Ed and Lois Smart, who have also signed a book deal about the kidnapping. Filming is expected to begin in two weeks in Canada. The Smarts have contracted with Doubleday Books to tell their story in "Bringing Elizabeth Home: A Journey of Faith and Hope." Her uncles are working on a separate book.

Marilyn Monroe enjoyed celebrating her 36th birthday on the set of her film "Something's Got to Give." But a week later--June 8, 1962--Monroe was fired from the romantic comedy by 20th Century Fox, and the project was shelved. Two months later, she was dead from an apparent drug overdose. Over the decades, there have been glimpses of Monroe's scenes from the film--which eventually was made in 1963 as "Move Over, Darling," with Doris Day--primarily of her famous nude swimming sequence.

Vina Delmar, who as a young woman wrote a series of novels that scandalized the country, making them not only best-sellers but giving her entree to Hollywood, has died in a Pasadena convalescent hospital. The author of "Bad Girl," a 1928 Literary Guild selection about premarital sex and pregnancy that later became a play and film, was 86 at her death Jan. 19.

Greta, one of three vivid and endearing women in Cathleen Schine's new novel, finds herself at ground zero of a midlife crisis in the opening pages of "She Is Me." She is a 53-year-old landscape designer whose home in Rustic Canyon is the focus of all that restless nervous energy, and she currently favors an abundance of roses, heather and lavender in her own garden: "Santa-Monica-on-Thames" is how Schine describes it.

Decked out in a lace slip and little else, Kathleen Turner's beckoning form looms over the Eugene O'Neill Theatre on West 49th Street, easily seducing passers-by from the two other marquees in view. Without a glance at the title--"Cat on a Hot Tin Roof," that drama club perennial--you might think Turner's competition was "Lovers in Heat" at the World Porn Spectacular down the block, not Somerset Maugham's "The Circle," another Broadway revival playing under demure signage across the street.

When Hollywood hosts the Academy Awards on Sunday, few countries will feel as much pride of homeland as Australia, which has produced seven of this year's Oscar nominees. They include Cate Blanchett for best actress in "Elizabeth," Geoffrey Rush for best supporting actor in "Shakespeare in Love," Rachel Griffiths for best supporting actress in "Hilary and Jackie," Peter Weir for best director of "The Truman Show" and David Hirschfelder for best original score for "Elizabeth."

If, as has been said before, Pete Wilson looks the way California feels--tired, cranky and peevish--then his wife, Gayle, is looking the way California wants to feel: chipper, smiling, glad to be here. That's also a shorthand assessment for the political job-sharing component of the Wilsons' partnership.