CELEBRITY WATCH
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May 11, 2000
Web posted at: 5:26 p.m. EST (2126 GMT)

From staff and wire reports

Today's buzz stories:

• Halle Berry fined in hit-and-run
• Darva Conger takes it off
• Marc Anthony gets quickie Vegas wedding
• Florence frets over 'Hannibal'

Halle Berry fined in hit-and-run

Berry

BEVERLY HILLS, California -- Halle Berry has been placed on three years probation, fined $13,500 and will perform 200 hours of community service for leaving an automobile accident that left another motorist injured.

"Your honor, I would like the court to know that I have taken this matter very seriously from the very beginning," the 33-year-old actress said Wednesday in Los Angeles County Superior Court after pleading no contest to charges of leaving the February 23 accident. "I am pleased that this can be resolved."

The "Bulworth" co-star was driving a rented Chevrolet Blazer that ran a West Hollywood red light and collided with a car driven by Hetal Raythatha -- who broke her wrist in the collision -- and then sped away. Berry, who suffered a gash on her head, reported the mishap to police at the hospital.

But Berry's plea doesn't mean she's completely out of trouble. Raythatha is suing her for unspecified damages.

Darva Conger takes it off

NEW YORK -- Readers of Playboy magazine soon should be able to see something that TV groom Rick Rockwell apparently never did: Darva Conger, nude.

The men's magazine has confirmed that the 34-year-old who married Rockwell on Fox TV's "Who Wants to Marry a Multimillionaire" will pose inside its glossy pages later this year. The photos, said Christie Hefner, CEO of Playboy Enterprises, are "beautiful."

Conger is the beauty Rockwell, a real estate investor and sometime standup comic, chose to wed on live TV at the conclusion of the February 15 broadcast. It was a ratings hit.

The marriage was not as successful. The honeymoon was a flop, and the two returned home knowing each other no better than when they left. Conger got the union annulled, while Rockwell sputtered that his feelings were hurt, too.

Then she lost her job as an emergency room nurse, so Conger returned to TV -- this time, to vent. "I don't want anyone else's money," she told ABC recently. "I just want my life back."

And then, Playboy came calling. The publication date for Conger's pictorial has not been announced, said magazine officials attending a shareholders' meeting here.

Marc Anthony gets quickie Vegas wedding

Anthony

LAS VEGAS -- Call him a romantic fool -- an energetic one, anyway. Puerto Rican pop star Marc Anthony left the Blockbuster Entertainment Awards in Los Angeles Tuesday night, hopped a private jet to Las Vegas and was married. He wed former Miss Universe Dayanara Torres in a midnight ceremony.

"You could call it spur of the moment," said Lilly Rosario, a receptionist for Marc Anthony Productions in New York. "We were working here -- la, la, la -- and get a call: 'Marc wants to get married.'"

Well, it wasn't quite that sudden, said Anthony's publicist. The 31-year-old singer had been planning the wedding for seven months, she said, and made plans for 12 friends and family members to attend the ceremony.

The marriage is the first for both. Anthony and his bride, 25, crowned Miss Universe in 1993, will live in Puerto Rico.

Florence frets over 'Hannibal'

Anthony Hopkins has agreed to reprise his "Silence of the Lambs" role in the sequel, "Hannibal"

FLORENCE, Italy -- Hannibal, eat somewhere else. That's the message some local politicians are sending to producers of "Hannibal," the sequel to "Silence of the Lambs."

They're worried that some scenes in the movie, to be shot here, won't cast Florence in a positive light. In the words of one politician, the film could make the city "the setting for morbid thrills and vulgar horror."

Sounds like an apt description of Hannibal "the Cannibal" Lecter, the character Anthony Hopkins made famous in the 1991 thriller. In the sequel, Lecter, again played by Hopkins, is supposed to commit a particularly gruesome murder in the ornate Salon of the Lilies in the Palazzo Vecchio.

Some folks would rather he take his bloodletting somewhere else, but filmmakers are undaunted. "Everything's on schedule, everything's fine," said the movie's publicist. "Everybody still loves us, as far as I know."