Actor Michael Jeter dies

Los Angeles — Michael Jeter, the character actor who won a supporting actor Emmy as a shrimpy assistant football coach on CBS’s “Evening Shade” and was known on “Sesame Street” as The Other Mr. Noodle, has died, his publicist said Monday. He was 50.

Jeter’s body was found in his Hollywood Hills home Sunday, publicist Dick Guttman said.

Guttman said Jeter, who was HIV-positive but had been in good health, apparently died of natural causes.

Jeter had film roles as a kindhearted mental patient in 1998’s “Patch Adams,” a mouse-loving prisoner in 1999’s “The Green Mile” and a dinosaur-hunting mercenary in 2001’s “Jurassic Park III.”

Jeter started as a stage actor and won a 1990 supporting actor Tony Award as provincial German Jewish bookkeeper Otto Kringelein in the musical “Grand Hotel.”

On “Evening Shade,” which ran from 1990 to 1994, Jeter played the blustery assistant football coach Herman Stiles opposite the lead character played by Burt Reynolds. Jeter won his Emmy in 1992.

‘American Idol’ contestant booted

Los Angeles — “American Idol” finalist Corey Clark has been dropped from the Fox series because of an arrest last fall at his family’s Topeka, Kan., home.

Clark, 22, withheld information about the arrest which, had it been known, “might have affected his participation in the show,” Fox said in a statement Monday.

Records show that Clark was charged with one misdemeanor count each of battery, criminal restraint and obstructing justice. He is set to go to trial April 15.

Topeka police Lt. John Sidwell said Monday that Clark was arrested Oct. 12 after he allegedly fought with his 15-year-old sister, dragged her to a vehicle, refused to let her go, then struggled with police officers.

Ready for a different role

New York — After years as a bachelor, Hugh Grant said he wanted to take some time off from making movies to concentrate on his romantic life.

“I’m ready, baby,” he tells Vanity Fair for its May issue. “I need to get married and have children. Put it this way: If I went to a party tonight and bumped into a fantastic girl — whereas three years ago it might have led to a short-term relationship, now I definitely keep my thoughts open to the idea of settling down and breeding. Definitely.”

Grant, 42, spent 13 years with model Elizabeth Hurley, but the two never married.

Cher to Jacko: Beat it

Radnor, Pa. — Cher is no longer a Michael Jackson fan.

“… I don’t like him anymore. And it’s because of his children. I cannot imagine putting my children through what he put his children through,” Cher says.

Though she once considered Jackson a “great artist,” she said she has been turned off by all the negative reports about him. She said she also was disappointed by his behavior last year at American Bandstand’s 50th anniversary show, in which she also appeared.

“He had this child rolled up in a blanket, and I was thinking, ‘What kind of life is this?”‘ the 56-year-old singer said.

“Then I saw the recent documentary on him, and I thought, ‘This guy is nuts. He shouldn’t have these children,”‘ Cher said.