PEOPLE

By Belinda Luscombe

FAR, FAR FROM FARGO

"I have a low sap threshold," says FRANCES MCDORMAND, who was worried that Paradise Road, a wrenching tale of a women's prisoner of war camp, might cross it. But McDormand's character is so nonsappy she's almost surly. "It was really gratifying to me that after 15 years of work they thought, 'If she can do a Minnesotan police chief, she can do a German Jew,'" says McDormand of the difference between this role and her Oscar-nominated performance in Fargo. Right now life is nothing like a prison camp. "I'm picking out shoes and dresses for all these award things," she says. "Still, it's better than having them thumb their noses at you."

IS THIS MAN IN-SULTAN MISS USA?

He has the world's biggest bank balance, several luxury hotels and two wives. But is the SULTAN OF BRUNEI also, well, a party guy? Former Miss USA SHANNON MARKETIC has filed suit against the Sultan, his brother Prince Jefri Bolkiah and a Los Angeles talent agency after she took a trip with a friend to the tiny province that borders Malaysia to make what she thought were promotional appearances for a fee of $21,200 a week. Instead, she says, she found she was expected to go to all-night parties and make herself available for sex. She had to hand over her passport when she arrived, and it took her 32 days to get it back so she could leave the country. Responding to reports in the Malaysian press, the Brunei palace issued a denial of her claims, saying the Sultan had never met Marketic.

ANCHORS AWAY!

You'd think barbs would sting less when they come from the velvet tonsils of a network news anchor. Apparently not, at least not when they're delivered about a fellow evening star. After CBS newsman DAN RATHER used the word "news-lite" several times to describe his competitors' newscasts in an otherwise genial interview in the Philadelphia Inquirer, TOM BROKAW's hackles were raised. Asked for comment, Brokaw remarked that he didn't "want to pick an argument with Dan," but he did recall the time that Connie Chung anchored an entire broadcast from the ice skating rink where Tonya Harding practiced. "Whenever there is the first hint of a counterclockwise symbol on a weather map that a hurricane might hit land," Brokaw added, "Mr. Hard News is down there wrapped around a lamppost."

SEEN & HEARD

Hedy Lamarr is always ahead of her time. In 1933 she pranced naked onscreen in Ecstasy. Now Lamarr, 82, is being recognized for a different breakthrough. The Electronic Frontier Foundation is honoring her for a 1942 patent that anticipated frequency-hopping technology used in satellites and cellular phones.

Brigitte Bardot, no stranger to on-screen nudity, owes her family a lot. Literally. In her 1996 biography Initiales B.B., she lambastes ex-husband Jacques Charrier as a "gigolo" and says that while pregnant, she regarded son Nicolas as "a tumor." Last week a French court granted the maligned duo $43,000 but refused to order the pages excised.