People

By Julie Rawe

Q&A PAUL NEWMAN

Oscar winner Paul Newman, 81, doesn't just talk about Cars. He drives in and co-owns a racing team

In Cars, which opens June 9, you voice the character of Doc Hudson, a mysterious 1951 Hudson Hornet and former racing champ who doesn't seem to be that popular. What's his problem? He's a solitary kind of car. Maybe his carburetor isn't working like it used to.

You haven't done a big-screen film since Road to Perdition in 2002. Do you think you might call it quits on cinema altogether? I may have one more film left in me. I'm looking.

What was the first car you ever owned? What kind of car are you driving these days? First car was a 1937 Packard. Paid 60 bucks for it in 1947. Today I drive a Prius, a hybrid SUV and a Volvo wagon with some "stuff" in it.

How does your wife feel about your racing habit? She wishes I was more of a monk.

Not to be a killjoy, but with gas prices soaring and global warming such a worry, why encourage a gas guzzler of a pastime? The Super Bowl in its entirety probably guzzles as much gas as the Daytona 500.

Are you a backseat driver? Do you ever let your wife drive? When we start out together and I'm driving, she always says, "Now, we're not in a hurry, are we?" When we start out together and she's driving, I always say, "Now we're not in a hurry." They're for different reasons. --By Jeff Chu

MAYBE ORANGE SUITS HER?

She was an ex-cop on Lost, but MICHELLE RODRIGUEZ seems to really appreciate incarceration. In April she opted to go to jail rather than do 240 hours of community service after she got nailed for drunken driving in Hawaii. She was sentenced to five days in an Oahu prison but spent less than three behind bars. She began a two-month jail stint last week in Los Angeles (the Hawaiian incident violated her probation from a 2004 hit and run) but was released less than five hours later. She still has to do 30 days of community service, though. Maybe, since it has worked out so well twice, she should ask for more jail time instead?

IF AT FIRST YOU DON'T SUCCEED ...

Nervous kids and obscure words are not the stuff of big-time TV, but this year's Scripps National Spelling Bee was an improbable nail-biter. One of the 13 finalists got reinstated after judges made a spelling error, a Canadian came in second--who knew foreign kids could compete?--and KATHARINE CLOSE, 13, prevailed in her fifth year. The eighth-grader from Spring Lake, N.J., won with ursprache. It means protolanguage. Now try to use it in conversation.

FIRST LOOK

RUSSELL CROWE TRIES A SOFTER SIDE

What do you do after you have made one of the most violent--and successful--movies of recent years? Romantic comedy, of course. Ridley Scott and RUSSELL CROWE, the director and star of Gladiator, have teamed up again on A Good Year, which is based on a Peter Mayle novel of the same title. Crowe, looking positively puppyish, plays Max Skinner, a London investment banker who inherits his uncle's vineyard in Provence. The character is "a bit of a cad" who "believes that to be successful, you have to be ruthless," says Scott. Max gets his comeuppance (quelle shock) and the French babe. The movie, which was filmed about four minutes from Scott's vineyard in Provence, has a scene involving the actor getting apoplectic over a cell phone, but it was "written before Russell's little incident," says Scott. Why did the director of Alien want to do romantic comedy? "The trick is to keep changing your target in life. It keeps you insecure," he says. "A little bit of insecurity is good for everyone."

With reporting by Jeff Chu