People
NEW YORK — Forest Whitaker will make his Broadway debut this spring as a drunken, small time hustler in a revival of Eugene O’Neill’s “Hughie.”
The Academy Award and Golden Globe winner will play Erie, who tells his tale to a sympathetic soul in a rundown hotel lobby. He misses Hughie, the fleabag hotel’s desk clerk who has just died. Michael Grandage will direct.
Whitaker’s movie roles include Lee Daniels’ “The Butler,” “Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai” and his Oscar-winning turn as Idi Amin in 2006’s “The Last King of Scotland.”
Other actors who have played Erie on Broadway include Jason Robards in 1964, Ben Gazzara in 1975 and Al Pacino in 1996. The play is set in 1928 and runs about an hour.
Dates and theater will be announced later.
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LOS ANGELES — A judge overturned Terrence Howard’s divorce settlement with his second wife Monday, finding the actor was coerced into signing the settlement by her threats to leak private details.
Superior Court Judge Thomas Trent Lewis’ ruling means Howard and his ex-wife, Michelle Ghent, will now have to renegotiate the financial terms of their divorce. The ruling also ends, for now, any claims Ghent has to Howard’s earnings from the hit TV show “Empire.”
“The evidence of extortion or duress was unrebutted,” Lewis said.
Howard contended he signed a 2012 settlement to end his marriage to Ghent out of fear she would leak private details about him, including phone sex recordings with other women and a video of him dancing naked in a bathroom.
The agreement entitled Ghent to a share of Howard’s earnings, which would include a portion of his salary from the hit Fox series “Empire,” which opens its second season in the fall.
“I could not be any more pleased by today’s ruling,” Howard wrote in a statement.
Ghent’s lawyers have said she denied extorting the actor in a deposition and argued he didn’t prove threats she made in 2011 forced him to sign the agreement a year later. She was not allowed to testify at a recent hearing because her attorneys did not file a sworn declaration from her before the proceedings began.
