Ed Burns expresses his love of the common man

New York Actor Ed Burns says growing up around New York police officers led him to make films that celebrate working-class heroes.

Burns’ father, uncle, and four cousins were officers, and three childhood friends joined the force. The director and star of “Sidewalks of New York,” and star of the new “Life or Something Like It,” said his father took him on tours of the rough neighborhoods where he worked.

“Another time, he put me in a jail cell saying ‘You want to be a tough guy and do drugs? This is where you’ll end up.’ Believe me, experiencing this stuff as a kid changes the way you look at the world,” Burns told Parade magazine in Sunday’s editions.

Burns, 34, majored in English at college and worked as a production assistant on the TV show Entertainment Tonight.

He scraped together $25,000 to make “The Brothers McMullen,” a film about three Irish Catholic brothers. It won the Sundance Film Festival’s Grand Jury prize, and Burns never looked back.

“When you go from making $18,000 a year, getting people coffee, to winning an award like that, I knew from that day on, it would never be the same,” he said.

Rosy role for Bernadette

New York Tony award winner Bernadette Peters will be back on Broadway in 2003 as Mamma Rose in the musical Gypsy.

At 13, Peters joined the show’s national touring company as Baby June’s understudy. But she only got to perform on stage as one of the “Hollywood Blondes,” June’s assistants.

Peters, 54, who won Tony awards for “Annie Get Your Gun” and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Song and Dance,” has been unstoppable since then. She won a Golden Globe for the film “Pennies from Heaven” and Emmy nominations for her appearances on “The Muppet Show” and “Ally McBeal.”

Yeltsin in fine form

Mineralnye Vody, Russia Looking fit and jovial during his vacation in southern Russia, retired former President Boris Yeltsin said Sunday that he has no ailments but wants to recapture his youth.

The 71-year-old Yeltsin, who underwent quintuple heart bypass surgery as president and was debilitated by illness for long periods of his second term, has been vacationing with his wife, Naina, near Mineralnye Vody, a region dotted with mountain springs and spas.

Asked by state-run RTR television Sunday whether he was there to seek medical treatment, Yeltsin said, “I have nothing to cure. I’m fine, but it’s for prevention and getting younger. I need to start thinking about getting younger.”

He then announced the birth of his sixth grandchild, Masha, born to his younger daughter, Tatyana Dyachenko, and former Yeltsin chief of staff Valentin Yumashev.