The Associated Press/file
Matthew Broderick and his wife, Sarah Jessica Parker, arrive at the 52nd Annual Primetime Emmy Awards at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles on Sept. 10, 2000. Broderick and Parker are expecting their first child.

Broderick, Parker expecting first baby

Olympian news services

Originally published Saturday, April 6, 2002

NEW YORK -- It's offspring time for Matthew Broderick and Sarah Jessica Parker: They're expecting their first child.

Syndicated columnist Liz Smith reported Friday that Parker, 37, is pregnant, and is due to give birth in the fall. Parker's publicist wasn't immediately available for comment.

The 40-year-old Broderick, who recently co-starred on Broadway in "The Producers," and Parker, co-star of HBO's "Sex and the City," have been married since May 1997.

SYDNEY, Australia -- Russell Crowe is set to star in an Australian court as the real-life victim of an alleged extortion plot.

Video footage allegedly showing Crowe in a street brawl will be key evidence in the trial of three men charged with trying to blackmail the Oscar-winning "Gladiator" star.

The New Zealand-born Australian also may be called to give evidence in the trial that is scheduled to start Monday and last two weeks, a spokesman for the New South Wales state public prosecutor's office said Friday.

The case centers on a nightclub surveillance video that reportedly shows Crowe and several others fighting outside a Coffs Harbor night club in November 1999. Crowe owns a ranch outside the beach-side resort, 280 miles north of Sydney.

Philip Anthony Cropper, 36, and Malcolm Brian Mercer, 37, are accused of threatening to have the video published on national television unless Crowe paid them $106,000. Prosecutors have not said how the men got the video.

Cropper, Mercer and another defendant, Mark James Potts, 42, also are charged with perverting the course of justice by withholding the video from police. Blackmail carries a maximum 10-year sentence in New South Wales and perverting the course of justice a maximum of 14 years.

SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina -- Some 2,000 people gathered Friday on Sarajevo's main downtown square to cheer Danis Tanovic, the writer-director who won Bosnia's first Academy Award.

"I'm happy and calm because I came back home. I simply came back home to my parents, my friends and my people," Tanovic said, taking his Oscar out of his backpack and holding it up for the crowd to see.

Tanovic, whose film "No Man's Land" won this year's Oscar for best foreign-language film, arrived in his hometown to accept on Saturday the city's annual "April 6" award -- given to citizens who make distinguished contributions to society. The "April 6" award is in honor of the city's liberation from Nazi Germany on that day in 1945.

"No Man's Land," a satire of the 1992-95 Bosnian war that devastated the country, has won 42 film awards, including a Golden Palm at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival.

NEW YORK -- Football great and former actor Jim Brown, who chose jail over community service for vandalizing his wife's car, says he'll never get violent again.

"I will never again raise my hand to anyone regardless of what they do to me," Brown told Bob Costas for Thursday night's "On the Record" on HBO. "It's such a weak gesture. I regret any physical acts against anyone."

The 66-year-old was convicted of misdemeanor vandalism. Jurors acquitted him of the more serious charge of making a terrorist threat during an argument with his wife in 1999.

Costas interviewed Brown, who was the subject of a recent Spike Lee documentary, through a glass screen at a California jail.

The Olympian Copyright 2002

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