Names in the news

Melissa Etheridge, who recently announced she has breast cancer, is recovering at her… Melissa Etheridge, who recently announced she has breast cancer, is recovering at her California home from two surgeries over the weekend. On her Web site, Etheridge, 43, said that tumor and lymph nodes were removed, and that she will next undergo chemotherapy.

“I still have both of my breasts, and whether I will keep them is a bridge I have to cross later,” she said on the site.

Though she has canceled a number of tour dates, Etheridge still plans to shoot a pilot for ABC in which she plays a gay music teacher.

MORE FALLOUT IN HARASSMENT CASE

The woman who has accused Fox News host Bill O’Reilly of sexual harassment says she has been locked out of her office by her bosses, who are considering ways of firing her.

Andrea Mackris has not been back to her New York Fox office since Wednesday, when she filed the suit, which claims O’Reilly regaled her with unwanted tales of his sexual exploits. She tells the New York Daily News that she wants her life and her career back: “I love being a journalist. I never expected my life to take this acute left turn.”

Meanwhile, a Fox rep tells the Daily News that the network has asked a judge to clear the way for Mackris’ termination.

Mackris’ suit came hours after O’Reilly sued her and her lawyer for extortion, charging that they are trying to get $60 mil in hush money from him. He says they threatened to file a harassment suit if he did not agree to a financial settlement.

FIDDY’S NEW ROLE

50 Cent went from a hard life on the streets, during which he reportedly was shot and stabbed nine times, to hip-hop superstardom. Now, according to the Hollywood Reporter, he has been tapped to star in the thriller “Locked and Loaded” by acclaimed Irish director Jim Sheridan.

But can Fiddy make the stretch? He’s being asked to play an orphaned kid who starts out in a life of crime, but turns his back on the streets to launch a successful music career.

Did we say 50 Cent is something of a protege of Eminem, who, um, turned his back on the streets to achieve superstardom, even singing a song about it all in a movie called “8 Mile,” which tracks the life of a poor guy being raised by a single mother who turns his back on the streets to …

JERRY LEWIS GETS HIS DUE

Our cultural war against France is over. That’s the one in which they got to send over abstruse philosophers such as Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault to gum up undergraduates’ brains, while we sent Jerry Lewis to lull them into a soporific state of submission. We gobbled up their philosophy, and they declared Lewis the greatest American theoretician since Buster Keaton and John Dewey.

That was forever ruined over the weekend with an announcement by the Los Angeles Film Critics Association that it is giving a lifetime achievement award to Lewis, “whose `idiot’ character,” the Hollywood Reporter says, “made him something of a cultural hero in France, to the general incomprehension of American critics.”

Lewis, whose “frantic misfit … offends the world with his infantile behavior,” nonetheless took filmmaking seriously, the Reporter explains. The comedian will be awarded his prize Jan. 13 at a sumptuous banquet in Lalaland.

(Wire services contributed to this column.)

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