People in the News

WASHINGTON - Nicole Kidman says she didn't have to go far to research her role as a psychiatrist for the upcoming movie, "The Visiting."

• Photos

"I have a father who is a psychologist, so my life has been research," the Oscar-winning actress told AP Radio in a recent interview.

Unlike her ex-husband Tom Cruise, who went on a rant against psychiatry in a "Today" show interview earlier this year, Kidman said she thinks psychiatry is a worthwhile profession that can help people.

"Yeah, of course. I think all sorts of things do in terms of Buddhism, in terms of therapy. I think people choose things that they need that are going to help them. And obviously, I've seen my father do some magnificent work," she said.

In "The Visiting," Kidman is separated from her child, a role that is even more painful, she said, considering the parents who were separated from their children during Hurricane Katrina.

"That's why this reverberated so strongly, because of seeing those images over and over and over again."

Kidman won a best-actress Oscar for her role in 2002's "The Hours."

---

NEW YORK - Yankees star Derek Jeter received a threatening letter that reportedly warned he'd be "shot or set on fire" if he didn't stop dating white women.

The FBI is investigating "racially threatening letters to Jeter and others across the country," special agent Scott Wilson said Monday by phone from Cleveland. He declined to comment further.

Jeter downplayed what he called the "stupid letter," saying he didn't perceive it as a specific threat.

The Daily News reported that the hate mail to the Yankees' 31-year-old captain called him a "traitor to his race" for dating white women. It warned him "to stop or he'll be shot or set on fire," the newspaper said in Monday editions, quoting an unidentified law enforcement source.

Similar threatening letters have been sent to other public figures in recent months, including U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, Miami Dolphins defensive lineman Jason Taylor and the parents of tennis star James Blake. The threats have been traced to the Cleveland area.

Jeter said he heard about the letter two or three months ago and didn't feel threatened by it.

"It wasn't like, 'I'm going to do this to you. I'm going to do that to you.' It was just a stupid letter. I've gotten stupid letters before. That's basically it. Now, for some reason, it's on the front page and it's some big, huge story," he said.

Jeter, picked by People magazine as one of the world's most eligible bachelors, has been linked with models, singers, actresses and athletes of various racial and ethnic backgrounds in New York's gossip columns. His mother is white, his father is black.

In an interview broadcast Sunday on CBS' "60 Minutes," Jeter said that he and his sister were taunted for being biracial while growing up in Michigan. But he said he has never heard any racial epithets from the fans at Yankee Stadium in his 11 seasons playing there.

The New York Police Department's hate crimes unit recently completed a four-month investigation into the Jeter letter, which police said was mailed to Yankee Stadium earlier this season. The probe's findings haven't been made public.

---

PARIS - Directors Martin Scorsese and Wong Kar-Wai joined hundreds of film buffs at the inauguration of a new home for La Cinematheque Francaise film center.

The center moved Monday into a stylish building designed by Frank Gehry in eastern Paris, ending a two-decade hunt for a new location.

"The Cinematheque has been waiting for this moment for a long time," said producer-director Claude Berri, the cinematheque president. "Now it's done."

The center was created in 1936 to promote art-house films and defend French cinema. It has had many locations over the years, most recently near the Eiffel Tower.

French Culture Minister Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres called the cinematheque a place "where films won't be consumed like products, but preserved, watched, studied, compared and loved, as works."

The center gets most of its funding from the French government, and the minister said France would continue to support national funding to protect national cinematic production.

He defended France's longtime policy of "cultural exception" - a policy of state support for homegrown art, film and music to counter the influence of American pop culture.

"It's not insulting American cinema to note that 85 percent of cinema seats sold around the world are done so for the films that it produces," he told visitors that included Wong and Scorsese.

The center opens to the public Wednesday. Visitors will have access to four screening rooms, libraries and exhibition halls in the more than 150,000 square feet of floor space in the building, which previously housed an American cultural center and has been vacant since 1996.