People: Oprah’s club is a two-way street
Oprah Winfrey got Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Cormac McCarthy to do the one thing he hates most: talk about his work.
In a rare TV interview, McCarthy, 73, said on Tuesday’s show that his book “The Road” – this year’s Pulitzer winner for fiction, and Winfrey’s March pick for her book club – was inspired by a trip he took with his young son to El Paso, Texas, four years ago.
He started to imagine what the city might look like 50 or 100 years in the future, McCarthy explained: “I just had this image of these fires up on the hill … and I thought a lot about my little boy.”
A few years later, he said, during a trip to Ireland, “There was a book, and it was about that man and that little boy.”
Winfrey also announced that “Middlesex,” a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Jeffrey Eugenides, is her new selection.
Published in 2002, the book is an epic about a Greek-American who is a hermaphrodite – someone born with both male and female sexual organs.
“I promise it will grab you from the first sentence,” Winfrey said.
Making it crystal clear
Rosie O’Donnell will dish about her “interesting year” in a book, “Celebrity Detox.”
She says her long-delayed memoir on fame will offer a candid look at her life, including her brief, battling stint on “The View.”
Fame “is, in fact, a drug,” O’Donnell says, adding she’s seen folks so transformed by celebrity that they looked like meth addicts.
Acting? Just a brief interruption
Angelina Jolie may have won an Oscar, but she wants to be remembered as a humanitarian.
“I have no animosity toward Hollywood or the demands of the red carpet, all that silliness,” Jolie, a best actress winner for 1999’s “Girl, Interrupted,” tells Esquire magazine. “That’s my job, and I’m happy to have it.
“But when I die, do I want to be remembered as an actress? No.”
Jolie, a UN goodwill ambassador, is an activist for issues ranging from global poverty to wildlife conservation.
A rather crude display
Actress Daryl Hannah met Tuesday with Ecuador’s president to discuss a lawsuit there against Chevron, a day after she trudged through the jungle to visit a polluted site.
The oil company is accused of failing to clean up billions of gallons of toxic wastewater.
During her visit, Hannah, star of 1984’s “Splash,” rolled up a sleeve of her shirt and dipped it into an oil pit, holding it above her head as the thick liquid dripped down her arm.
Consider it curbed, and cooled
Finally, this just in: “Seinfeld” co-creator and “Curb Your Enthusiasm” creator/star Larry David has split with his activist wife of 14 years, Laurie.
Laurie David produced “An Inconvenient Truth,” the global-warming movie that won the Oscar for best documentary.
The birthday bunch
Singer-songwriter Gary “U.S.” Bonds is 68. Actor Robert Englund (Freddie Krueger) is 58. Playwright-actor Harvey Fierstein is 53. Actress-comedian Sandra Bernhard is 52. Comedian Colin Quinn is 48. Actor Paul Giamatti is 40. Singer Uncle Kracker is 33.