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Check out our clip from Chuck in the video player above.
Tom Hanks is ready to reprise his role as Robert Langdon when and if the time comes. / Hanks: Junko Kimura, Getty Images
Birthday buzz
February 14: Hugh Downs, 89
February 15: Matt Groening, 56; Jane Seymour, 59
February 16: Ice-T, 52; LeVar Burton, 53
February 17: Paris Hilton 29 Jerry O’Connell 36
February 18: John Travolta, 56; Yoko Ono, 77
February 19: Benicio Del Toro, 43; Smokey Robinson, 70
February 20: Cindy Crawford, 44; Sidney Poitier, 83
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Who's hot in Hollywood
He plays “Captain Awesome” on NBC’s Chuck, but as a kid, Ryan McPartlin says, he wasn’t quite that awesome. “Basically, I didn’t get the girl that much, so I really had to develop a lot of personality,” says the actor, 34. The key to his success on Chuck, he says, is eschewing a movie-star life for the L.A. suburbs with his wife, Danielle, and sons Wyatt, 3, and Dylan, 7 months. “I can’t have all the Hollywood clichés. I just have to be in a good environment with good people.” … Joe Hill, Stephen King’s author son, adores music as much as he loves books. And when working on his novel Horns, in stores Tuesday, he listened to Kiss. “They’re about as guilty a pleasure as you can get,” says Hill, 37, adding that his famous father took him to his first Kiss concert in the late 1970s. “I stayed awake long enough to see Gene Simmons spit blood, and then I fell asleep next to my dad. ”
Is James Arness still alive? If so, where does he live, and what was his last Gunsmoke show?
Billy Pendley, Central City, Ky.
Yep, he’s still alive and kicking. Arness, who starred as Marshal Matt Dillon on TV’s Gunsmoke from 1955 to 1975, lives in Los Angeles with his wife, Janet, with whom he has three sons and three grandchildren. A native of Minneapolis, Arness, 86, also appeared in five made-for-TV Gunsmoke movies in the 1980s and ’90s, the last of which aired in 1994. Today, the actor and his wife stay busy raising money for the United Cerebral Palsy organization.
Dan Brown's book The Lost Symbol would make a good movie. Does Tom Hanks have any plans to reprise his role as Robert Langdon in a film version?
Joe Finch, Dumfries, Va.
Hanks is game, but nothing’s set in stone for him to revisit his role as the globe-trotting symbologist from The Da Vinci Code and Angels & Demons. These days, Hanks is working more behind the scenes: He has partnered with Steven Spielberg to produce HBO’s epic miniseries The Pacific. It begins March 14.
Is the incredible movie Nine related to the earlier film 8½, and what do the titles mean?
Denise Lohness, Topeka
The title of 8½, the 1963 semiautobiographical Oscar-winning film directed (and co-written) by Federico Fellini, refers to the number of movies Fellini directed (seven solo features, plus three episodes of anthology films he counted as one-half each). Maury Yeston, who wrote the music and lyrics for the 1982 Tony-winning musical Nine, which inspired the 2009 movie, has said he titled it Nine because if you add music to 8½, “it’s like a half-number more.”
Judi Dench is Lilli in the musical Nine. Check out this clip from the 2009 movie also featuring Daniel Day Lewis.
I was stunned by the beautiful Paula Patton in the movie Precious. What else has she done?
Roland Zimany, Des Moines
The 34-year-old Los Angeles native has been acting in movies only since 2005, but in that short time she has performed with Will Smith in Hitch and Denzel Washington in Déjà Vu. Patton’s first child, a boy with husband (and pop/R&B singer) Robin Thicke, is due in May.
Contributing: Gayle Jo Carter, Brian Truitt
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