Show Biz: Hellraiser Nicholson's sex and violence suit

Jack Nicholson is back in trouble.

A woman who claims that Nicholson paid her and a partner $US1000 ($2142) each to dress up and perform sex, says the actor beat her and threw her out of the house when she demanded the money.

The actor originally paid her a $US32,500 ($64,000) settlement in 1997 but now Catherine Sheehan's lawsuit seeks to have that settlement rescinded.

According to the lawsuit, Nicholson allegedly invited Sheehan and a friend to his home on October 12, 1996, offering them $US1000 each to wear "little black dresses" and engage in sex acts with him.

Afterwards, when Sheehan asked for their money, "Nicholson became loud and abusive," according to the lawsuit, "demanding to know what the plaintiff was talking about, stating that he had never paid anyone for sex as he could get anyone he wanted as a sexual partner."

Sheehan claims that when she tried to leave, Nicholson grabbed her by the hair, pounded her head on the floor and eventually threw her out of the house, the lawsuit said.

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The striking Wes Bentley, fresh from rejecting the role of the Vampire Lestat in the upcoming Queen of the Damned, will next play troubled acting legend Montgomery Clift, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

Bentley, who burst onto the scene as a moody teen in American Beauty, has signed on to star in Monty, which director Billy Hopkins (I Love You, I Love You Not) plans to start shooting next spring.

Clift, along with James Dean and Marlon Brando, represented a new breed of sensitive, introspective acting that helped to revolutionise Hollywood in the 1950s.

His films include A Place in the Sun, From Here to Eternity and Suddenly, Last Summer. He was nominated for four Academy Awards.

Monty follows the rise and fall of Clift's movie career, which ended with his death in 1966 and his struggles with drug addiction and homosexuality.

Since American Beauty, Bentley's wrapped two other films: Soul Survivors and Kingdom Come.

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Donny Osmond says his problem with social phobia has been especially difficult. He's a celebrity, after all.

"Social phobia is the fear of what people are saying about you," Osmond says in TV Guide "You think people are looking at you, talking about you, criticising you, when in fact they actually were. So that couldn't be disregarded. People were criticising me or critiquing me every day in the press."

He said a psychologist diagnosed him with social phobia in 1995, but getting help was difficult.

"The last thing I wanted to do was seek psychiatric help, because it would end up in the tabloids: Donny Osmond Goes Crazy, " he told the magazine.

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Michael J. Fox has started his own foundation to help speed a cure for Parkinson's disease.

The name - the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson's Research - unnerves him.

"The fact that it's eponymous just freaks me out," he said in this week's Newsweek.

"But I understand, from a branding point of view, that it's effective. I get e-mail from people all the time saying, 'I finally told a co-worker that I had Parkinson's, the Michael Fox disease.' That's pretty heavy."

Fox recently taped his last episode of Spin City. He is leaving the show to focus on family, his health and his foundation work.

"I think at some point I may write a book," he said.

"I'm as jaded about celebrity memoirs as everybody else is, so that's not what I want to do. Someone was asking me the other day what would I write? And I said, 'How to lose your brain without losing your mind?'"

- NZPA