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Friday, Mar 16, 2001 5:57 PM UTC

Princess Di — movie star?

Costner says Diana was considering "Bodyguard" sequel; Hugh Grant's a jerk; and Scary Spice ditches the breast implants she said she never had.

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Topics: Celebrity, Spice Girls, Whitney Houston,

Royal shocker from Kevin Costner: If Princess Diana hadn’t died when she did, she may well have pulled a Whitney Houston.

According to the BBC, Costner has told interviewer Michael Parkinson that, at the time of her death in 1997, he and the Princess of Wales were deep in talks about her starring opposite him in a sequel to “The Bodyguard.”

“I had talked with Princess Di a couple of times. I explained to her that I was going to try to make this movie for her and she was genuinely interested,” Costner told Parkinson in an interview airing in the U.K. on Saturday.

While Costner says Diana “never committed to saying that she would do the film,” he promised to show her the script when it was done. “She was genuinely excited to see it,” he said, but fate would have otherwise. “The day the script was delivered to me, we lost Diana.”

So, alas, we’ll never know if the Princess of Wales would have been as fine an actress as Whitney.

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Channeling the king of Queen

“Freddie would go, ‘Oh wonderful.’”

— Queen guitarist Brian May on what the band’s late lead singer Freddie Mercury would say about the band’s induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame next week.

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Hugh better not call him nice

Hugh Grant wants the world to know that, whatever his ex Liz Hurley might say about him in all those gushy interviews, he’s not a nice guy.

He is, in fact, a miserable, self-centered cad, just like the role he’s playing in the upcoming big-screen adaptation of “Bridget Jones’s Diary,” Bridget’s icky co-worker/love interest, Daniel Cleaver. The jerky role, he says in the upcoming issue of Biography, is a “blessed relief” after all those stammering, flinchy-smiling nice-guy roles that are his signature.

“I’m nearer to Daniel Cleaver than I am to nice Charles [from "Four Weddings and a Funeral"] or nice William [from "Notting Hill"],” Grant insists.

Don’t tell me he thinks we’ve all forgotten the Divine Brown thing …

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The truth about falsies

“It was sooo great. I’d go out at night with those fake boobs and people treated me differently. At first I thought it was weird, but then I got into it. Man, it’s amazing what breasts do!”

— Bridget Fonda on the faux mammaries she wore in Quentin Tarantino’s “Jackie Brown,” in Biography.

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Or is this the truth about falsies?

It seems there are good faux mammaries and bad faux mammaries, and Scary Spice apparently got the bad kind.

The Spice Girl known as Mel B. has secretly had her breast implants removed, according to the U.K. Mirror, in order to prevent them from leaking and wreaking havoc on her health. What’s more, the paper reports, the silicone falsies (which the singer has long denied having had implanted) were getting kinda hard and lumpy.

“Mel was worried that the hardening could cause the implants to leak,” a “source” told the tab. “They’d gone lumpy and were beginning to look a bit shapeless. The operation was a straightforward procedure and Mel is fine. She’s relieved it’s over.”

In related Mel B. boob news, Ananova reports that the newly natural Spice has decided against promoting a new inflatable bra that has just gone on sale in the U.K. The Ultrabra Airotic, to which the Spice Girl has apparently given an unofficial thumbs-up, is being marketed by Gossard as an easy way to pump yourself up two cup sizes in a “safe alternative to cosmetic surgery.”

(Frequent fliers take note: Testing has shown that the bra, which uses a detachable pump, won’t blow up in planes.)

A spokeswoman also touts the lingerie’s ability to go from flat to fluffy according to your mood. “Lots of women don’t want to have huge breasts through the day but do want to have them in the evening,” she told reporters. “They may be meeting a client for lunch in the day and want to look demure and then go clubbing in the evening. The pumps fit in your handbag if you want to deflate during the day.”

But be warned: If your co-workers catch you mid-deflation, you’re apt to feel like a real boob.

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Miss something? Read yesterday’s Nothing Personal.

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