People and Celebs

As tall and radiant as you'd imagine her, Uma Thurman enters the conference room at the offices of the California Film Institute in San Rafael, Calif., and makes a beeline for the snack spread.

Welcome back to the daily grind, Garth Brooks. Since you "unretired" from music, you're probably stressed about how things are going to work out.

Rest easy, Garth. You'll be fine. After all, you may have friends in low places, but they're so in love with you they'd pack the Opry just to watch you play "The Thunder Rolls" on a ukulele.

Michael Sheen has played Tony Blair and David Frost, but his latest incarnation of a British historical figure suggests a path the actor's life could have taken.

With a wife and 5-month-old in Los Angeles and a career in overdrive, Patton Oswalt was sitting in the lobby of a hotel sipping hot tea and ruing the fact that he was in San Francisco for less than 24 hours, and it was strictly business -- he was doing a standup comedy show.

Capt. Chesley Sullenberger is expected any moment at a Danville, Calif., Starbucks, and I wait there, half-expecting the American hero to zoom down from the heavens, like Superman.

TORONTO - After director Scott Hicks made "Hearts in Atlantis," which needed an 11-year-old boy to star opposite Anthony Hopkins, he vowed never again.

Thirty-five years into his role as host of "Prairie Home Companion" Garrison Keillor is a national emblem of Minnesota humor. He is also an extreme self-doubter.

"It's really dissatisfaction with my own work that keeps me going," he said in a recent interview, "and this profound sense of failure that I feel after almost every show I do."

It sounds like a cliche, but it's true -- at 45, Juliette Binoche is becoming rejuvenated by her hometown of Paris. The City of Light is once again her city of life.

A look at Ed Asner's resume turns up guest roles in a host of legendary television shows: "The Naked City," "Alfred Hitchcock Presents," "Route 66," "The Untouchables," "The Outer Limits," "Burke's Law," "Mission: Impossible," "The Wild Wild West," "Rich Man, Poor Man," "Roots."

Mary Travers, whose bell-clear alto defined songs of the folk era, stayed a true believer well into an age when true belief was enough to reduce many to the status of quaint oddity, like some lost soldier found on a South Pacific island, fighting on long past the truce.