With our favourite party girl Amy Winehouse missing from the Grammys there was only one thing for it - to join local girls Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan for some serious LA action.

But while we expected things to be wild, we didn't predict being flies on the wall for the mother of all cat-fights between the pair.

We watched open-mouthed as Lindsay pointed at Paris and snarled: "What the hell is that bitch doing here? I didn't know she was on the list."

To which Paris spat back: "F*** off you bitch."
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We were caught in the crossfire of their extraordinary bust-up at Timbaland's exclusive pre-Grammys bash at Avalon.

From the cosy confines of our VIP table - where we necked cocktails with Pink, Kelis and Britney Spears's cousin Ali - we watched the hilarious confrontation unfold.

And the reason for them locking horns in public? A bloke, natch...

A source close to the pair explained to us: "Both of them want to work with Timbaland to revive their faltering music careers.

"Both saw the party as an ideal way of getting him on side - but they didn't count on the other being there." Lindsay arrived at the party first. She made a beeline for the hit producer - who has worked with Justin Timberlake and Madonna - and waved at him wildly over the barriers.

Then Paris strolled in surrounded by a massive entourage and took up a seat directly opposite Li-Lo - and far closer to Timba.

Clocking her rival, Lindsay began fluffing up her hair extensions and launched into verbal attack. After her outburst she flounced past Paris, giving the hotel heirhead a death stare.

And taking a huge swig of Red Bull, she made her move - clambering over a sofa towards her prey. Not to be outdone, nimble Paris hurdled a barrier and flung herself at him first.

None of which impressed the great man himself, who gave both a blank stare before walking off. Well done girls!

There's bound to have been bags of bust-ups at last night's Grammys. We'll be there, bringing you all the backstage dirt and party politics tomorrow...
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Mel Gibson has been slapped with a major fraud and breach of contract lawsuit, filed today in Los Angeles Superior Court.

Benedict Fitzgerald, who wrote the screenplay for 1979’s “Wise Blood,” claims that he was hired to write a script for "The Passion of the Christ" for Gibson.

Fitzgerald claims that in spring 2001, he was contacted by Eveleen Bandy, about “writing a dramatization of ‘The Passion of Our Lord’ (which became ‘The Passion’) for Gibson.”

He claims that in their original negotiations, Gibson said he was going to pay for the film himself, and "because he was so rich," he wouldn't take a cut of any profits, but that they would be divided among the other people who worked on the movie, “excluding Gibson.”

Fitzgerald also claims Gibson "considered [the movie] a personal gift to his faith."

Fitzgerald claims he wrote the script for the film, devoting several years of his life and doing several re-writes. Because of the amount of work he put in, “he experienced substantial cash flow problems,” the lawsuit claims as his “dedication trumped fiscal self-interest.”

The screenwriter claims he struggled to receive a production bonus of $75,000 which had been promised to him. He goes on to claim he eventually only received the money “because he permitted writing credit to be shared with Gibson.”

But it doesn't end there. Fitzgerald, after lengthily describing his own Catholicism and fervent belief in the project (which he claims is how he got hired in the first place), says Gibson "preyed monetarily" on him, "taking advantage of his unbridled enthusiasm for the project and with full cognizance of [Fitzgerald’s] fundamental personal and spiritual beliefs. In making a mockery of his own purported belief system, Gibson callously and greedily exploited [Fitzgerald],” the suit read.

“He shamelessly minted and cobbled gobbles of money from ‘The Pasion.’ And just as Gibson extracted shared screenplay credit from [Fitzgerald], he also extracted sums of money due [Fitzgerald],” the suit continued.

Fitzgerald is suing for fraud breach of contract, breach of the covenant of good faith, unfair business practices and unjust enrichment. He is asking for at least $5,000,000.

George R. Hedges, an attorney for Gibson's production company, Icon, told People, the lawsuit "is utterly baseless and the charges are utterly baseless."

He said the screenwriter "was handsomely compensated – a very significant amount of money for any writer on any project."
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Pregnant Jamie Lynn Spears made a rare appearance in her hometown of Kentwood, Louisiana.

Hiding her bump in a baggy hooded-sweatshirt, the Zoey 101 star, took her black and white puppy to the veterinarian Friday.

(The 16-year-old wore a similar oversized sweatshirt when she was last photographed leaving a GED class with her mom Lynne January 4.)

On Saturday and Sunday, Spears went out with her beau, Casey Aldridge, the father of her baby.

Hand-in-hand, they went to a convenience store Saturday. Spears sported a white Heineken beer T-shirt that showed the faintest hint of her growing stomach.

The next day, Spears and Aldridge ran errands, stopping to kiss every now and then.

Her dad is currently in Beverly Hills looking after older sis Britney.
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The pop-rock singer confirmed rumors she's heading into the world of fragrances and designer duds, in an interview with reporters earlier today.

"I'm going to be doing a fragrance and I'm also going to be doing a clothing line," Lavigne said. "The clothing line I wanted to do for about three years. A lot of times what people do is they do a licensing deal and I didn't want to do that, I wanted to own a company and really be able to be a designer, be creative. I finally found someone to partner up with and I'm very excited about it because I love clothes, I love anything visual and I'm excited to be able to focus on something else creatively."

Lavigne is embarking on "The Best Damn Tour," a jaunt in support of her 2007 album, "The Best Damn Thing," beginning March 5. The trek will take her across the world, but when she gets back, she plans to throw herself into her new, second career.

"I love music and by the time I get off tour, I think it'll be me doing music straight for seven years, so I look forward to something new and to put my energy into and to take a little break even though I'll still be writing," she said.

As for the Canadian's globetrotting, Lavigne will be breaking out a few things to tickle the fancy of concertgoers, including back-up dancers.

"There is dancing on maybe like four songs and it's not very like, dancing," she said, weary of those who might try and peg the tour pop-esque. "It's very me, kind of kicking and punching and stomping . songs like 'Girlfriend' and 'I Can Do Better.' Then it's me playing guitar, me on the piano, me with my band the entire show and then [the dancers] come back. So it's not actually a lot."

Another moment to look out for, Lavigne's cover of Joan Jett's "Bad Reputation" during a costume change. The piped-in sounds will accompany a montage of Lavigne throughout the years.

"This was Jamie King, my set director, his idea, which was kind of cool," the singer explained. "When I go do a change, he came up with the idea, of having 'Bad Reputation' play in a video montage and I was like, 'It was really cool that he thought of that, because that was a song that I was actually thinking about covering, because I had to come up with a good cover song.'

"He just wanted to put some fun images up on the screen, different images of me from throughout my career, from when I was 17, with my fist in the air screaming, or my little kick shots and just fun shots," she added.
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Avril Lavigne arriving at Hyde night club with dude

Kate Hudson says she wants to have more kids even if she has to be a single mother.

The Oscar-nominee split from ex-husband Chris Robinson, the father of her four-year-old son Ryder, in October.

Hudson insists she's not looking for love again yet, but enjoys motherhood so much, she's already thinking about having more babies.

Hudson says, "It is still the greatest thing in the world. I can't wait to have more. It's the best thing ever."
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She was Jack Nicholson's lover, Helmut Newton's muse, and David Bailey's enchantress. Over a 40-year career, Anjelica Huston also became a fashion icon. Here, the actor tells Tim Blanks why she owes her air of dangerous glamour to an unhappy Hollywood childhood. Extracted from 'Another Magazine'

Just up the coast, Malibu has been ablaze for days, but it's not smoke that is making the air in Santa Monica turbid with haze. A perma-fog has rolled in as a side-effect of a weather phenomenon known as the marine layer. Anjelica Huston couldn't have asked for a better backdrop. Black of garb and hair, as strong-featured as a warrior queen, she emerges out of the mist like a Gothic vision.

Though I'm exaggerating for effect (she claims she's prone to the same thing herself), Huston nevertheless has the mien of a genuine icon. Such a label is scarcely more than destiny made manifest for her. Her genes, life and work as a model, actress and director have conspired to create a bewitching persona, dipped in darkness. "No, not darkness – mystery," insists David Bailey, who fell under her spell in the early 1970s when Huston was modelling, and is now preparing a book of his photos of her. They include, appropriately, some of the most memorable fashion images of the era.

She defined that time, as she would go on to define others, but Huston calls herself a child of the 1960s. "I still hang my beads, burn my incense – I'm retarded that way. I put scarves on the lamps in every hotel room I go into. I clutter my life with things. I have memories all over that I don't even necessarily want to remember," she says.

Huston and her husband, sculptor Robert Graham, famously live in a fortress-like structure in western Los Angeles' Venice Beach. They've just put up a building next to the house for his studio and her offices. "When he walks into my space, his face just registers horror and confusion at the amount of crap, things that assistants framed 20 years ago, stuff I don't even like – I put it all back up on the wall relentlessly," she admits. While she was moving, she found a box of possessions she'd inherited from a dear friend. "It was his entire life in something the size of a milk crate. Anyone who's expecting that from me has a different story coming. I've got house-loads." Inevitable, with all the lives she's lived.

Her father was the director John Huston, her mother the prima ballerina Enrica Soma, both products of notoriously demanding professions who wouldn't tolerate cowardice, reticence or whining in Anjelica or her brother, Tony. "I did a lot of things to please my father and make my mother happy that, on reconsideration, I don't know I should have done," she says. "Hunting side-saddle – that's something I'd never do again. It was so dangerous. But he kind of liked that."

Huston remembers her father being away so much that he was "a visitor in his own house. When we were little, we were his little adoring ones but then the time came when he returned and found slightly bumptious teenagers who weren't the enthusiastic jolly children he'd left behind. Then he'd be critical and I never took criticism well. He came down hard on both my brother and me when my mother and he split up. He was drinking a lot at the time so he had a hard edge."

When she was 12 or 13, there was a terrible fight over Anjelica's unwillingness to go to art school in Paris and her father slapped her – "that was the end of a decent relationship for a long time. I didn't want to be around him at that point."

After her parents split, Huston remained in London with her mother, and the schism with her father was amplified when Soma died in a car crash in 1969, and she fled to New York. "Before I knew it, I'd taken up with a 42-year-old man, who was not only a good deal older than I was, but also had tremendous mental problems, beyond anything I'd had experience of." That man was the photographer Bob Richardson and, instead of the safe harbour she was seeking, Huston found herself, at 18, the carer. "I didn't know the ashtrays were talking to him at the time, but he was tremendously schizophrenic and there would be days when he would wake up and the world was worthless and everything in it, and I would think it was my fault, the way that one does when one is being blamed for everything."

Richardson had been back from Paris for a year, opened a studio in New York and was in the process of leaving his wife when he met Huston. (She doesn't believe she caused the split. At least, Bob never said anything like that to her.) He'd also come under the care of a doctor named Max Jacobson, the Dr Feelgood whose shots of methamphetamine and vitamins kept Manhattan's beau monde humming. "I remember the first time we met, it was my first sitting with Bob, for Harper's Bazaar. He picked me up in one of those little Mini cars with his big poodle in the back and we raced off to Jones Beach, where he sort of hypnotised me. He had me crying and reaching for the sun. It was very powerful. I followed his directions very precisely; he was intrigued because I was malleable, and he liked working with me."

Getting his models to cry was something of a Richardson signature. It was a way to drag those cool, perfect beauties off their pedestals and make them fragile, emotional flesh and blood. "He created stories around these women and of course the stories were always him," says Huston. "The photographs were always about him." Anyone curious about those stories should look at the recent definitive monograph of Richardson's collected work, overseen by his son Terry. There is Donna Mitchell, weeping on the rocks in Greece (the image that sparked a revolution in fashion photography). And, of course, there's a lot of Huston, belying her years, breathtakingly beautiful but also haunted and stretched to the limit. She still finds them painful to look at.

But what a photographer! And, in Huston, Richardson found an ideal vehicle. "The pictures that I thought were particularly brilliant were the ones where he was sent off on his own without an art director or editor looking over his shoulder, and he had that freedom," she says. "Often they were really radical, the more radical the better. We did an Irish series for French Vogue in the 1970s that had me lying in the road with blood pouring out of my mouth and a rifle in my hand. We did Visconti's The Damned for Italian Vogue, out there in the train station in Rome with all these older Italian women looking like they wanted to stone us and screaming 'Puta!' at me. It was very dangerous for the time, but it was fun, like doing little plays."

The relationship lasted four years, and inevitably, while there were dark, desperate and helpless days, there were plenty of good times too. Huston was reminded of this when she ran into make-up artist Serge Lutens six years ago, just before Richardson died. "I remarked on what a desperately sad time it was, what a sad man Bob was. 'I never thought it was such a sad time,' said Lutens. 'We did beautiful work.'"

Yet the Richardson experience may have eased Huston's work with the other great monstres sacrés of the era – Guy Bourdin, for instance, also notorious for making models weep. "A dangerous little cutie," Huston calls him. "I shot with him only once. He asked the make-up artist to do glamour make-up on the girls, and I saw this pale-blue eyeshadow on my eyelids, and I looked at the other girls and they were so much prettier than I was that I had a complete breakdown. So these two girls walked me round the square and when we got back in, Bourdin asked me what the matter was, and I said, 'Oh, my nose is enormous and my eyes are ' like raisins, I'm hideous,' and he said, 'If you have small eyes, they should be smaller; if you have a big nose, it should be bigger.' He completely defused the timebomb that I was. And that was it. He laughed at me, then we laughed together."

From an early age, Huston knew she had something, "Not necessarily a talent like a musician or an artist, where you actually present something, but a talent for the transmission of expression – and that was really what I found through acting. I always liked the open-endedness of it, the fact you're creating something that's so intangible – I don't even know if you are creating, it's more like being a transmitter."

Modelling was always about acting for Huston. She loathed the way she looked, so her air of haughty self-possession was a performance in itself. "If I'd known I looked half as well at the time, I'd have been much happier about myself," she acknowledges now. "But I liked working for a camera, the atmosphere of creation, interpreting what a photographer or designer had in mind." That application translated to her film work, where fashion played a big part in her best-known roles, both Oscar-nominated: as Mafia princess Maerose Prizzi in Prizzi's Honor and the monstrous Lilly Dillon in The Grifters (she won for the former). Lilly with her ash-blonde hair and Azzedine Alaia dress could have stepped straight out of a Helmut Newton photograph. And no one would have had a better idea of that than Anjelica Huston.

She met Newton during French Vogue's golden age, on the same day that she'd been working with Bourdin. "I'd gone home after the shoot and I was sitting in [fashion photographer] Tony Kent's apartment at 3am having some vegetable stew and I got a phone call from Vogue asking me to come back to the Place du Palais-Bourbon to be photographed by Helmut Newton for the opening page. I'd heard these stories about how cruel he was to girls and how he shouted at them, but he was so sweet. He was doing those pictures with the red Polaroid eyes. We got on really well and I worked with him quite a lot during that period when he was doing things spilling from glasses. You always got crème de menthe or milk or something all over you."

Then came Bailey. He remembers her as a giggling girl of nine when they first met at John Huston's house off Eaton Square. What she remembers is a call her mother got from Vogue, asking if Anjelica, now a much less giggly 15, could be shot by their superstar photographer. "I walked into a dressing room as [the supermodel] Celia Hammond was leaving – the most beautiful girl you'd ever seen in your life, with hair the colour of lemons, skin like peaches and cream, huge blue eyes. I was stunned. The editor came in and said, 'You know how to do your own make-up? You can do your own individual lashes?' I said, 'Oh yeah.' Three hours later, I'm still wrestling with these Twiggy lashes. They kept checking on me, to see if I was all right. I emerged from ' the dressing-room in some gypsy outfit I didn't have the courage to say I hated. I get on set, I'm me and I don't know what to do. Bailey said something like, 'Do something, missy' and I said, very coldly, 'Don't call me missy, I don't like it.' It was a horrible little session. I think he got one bad picture."

But Bailey clearly liked the backchat. Huston feels it's because he liked anyone who stood up to him. "He used to prod you till you came back. I think he liked girls with a little wit – that was always his thing. He loves to have a giggle, he doesn't like to be taken so seriously, which it took me a while to understand, because he had such a big reputation."

Years later, Bailey was the photographer, Huston the model (with Grace Coddington as stylist and Manolo Blahnik the male mannequin) on one of fashion's great road trips, winding willy-nilly down the Riviera, then across to Corsica in a raging storm with a plane-load of nuns. "We got off the plane and the guy from the tourist board was there to pick us up. He opened the boot of his car and it was full of rifles. From that moment on, we were mystified by the place. Our first night, three Black Mariahs came pouring out of town, there were riot police in the main square. It turned out three towns had been left out of the general vote and they'd come down to the main street of Ajaccio to shoot it out – and this was commonplace. Manolo and I had adjacent balconies, and every morning we'd shout shrilly to each other 'Vive la Corse! Vive la Corse' ['Long live Corsica.']"

Bailey and Huston were briefly lovers. "Actually, at one point he said, 'If I were to ask you to marry me, you'd be a fool to say no,' and I said, 'Don't be ridiculous,' and it never came up again. He was one of those people you could go on being a friend with, it was not about being hurt." It does, however, seem that their closeness was sufficiently enduring to arouse Jack Nicholson's suspicions. "Jack did call wanting to know if I was in love with her," Bailey remembers.

Jack and Anjelica: from 1973 onwards, they were America's favourite showbiz soulmates, the apogee of cool coupledom. But cool was tough. "Jack was a huge movie star and got a lot of attention and sometimes it was hard to be around it, because it would come uncensored and very directly whether I was with him or not," Huston recalls. "Girls threw themselves at him. And he was all boy. He wasn't going to turn down anything interesting, particularly if I was away. And I was away a lot. I was working a lot, he was working a lot."

It was small comfort that she was the one her wayward lover came home to – "particularly if he was coming home with the scent of another woman on his hands. Mostly you take those things as they come and there are moments when you're really close and other times when you find a letter in a drawer and it drives you crazy or someone comes up and slips a number into his pocket. I know one thing for sure: if you go looking for it, you'll find it." '

"Relationships are so mutable," she muses. "There are moments when you think it's more important than anything to stay together, but you drift in different directions. Ultimately, it's terribly hard for me to break up with people, but Jack and I had essentially broken up a long time before we did break up. We weren't living together, we were seeing other people, we weren't discussing it with each other. A lot of the confrontational quality of our relationship – that confrontation that goes with knowing someone belongs to you – did not exist anymore. But the actual act of breaking up with Jack was huge; it was like breaking up with a parent. It was as hard as any death that I've survived."

It was ultimately her decision, though Nicholson fathering a child with another woman in 1989 didn't leave her much room for manoeuvre. "For years, I felt Jack would wake up some day and count the measure of his loss when it comes to me, but I don't think so. He's as happy as a clam up there in his lair watching basketball on television, or enjoying whatever it is he's enjoying."

Huston once remarked that, in a relationship, you have to give without any expectation of success. Does she feel this is a woman's lot in love? "No, I think in a way it's a man's lot too. There is really no justice in love. You can't go into something emotional with a bargain in mind. You have to love unequivocally. You have to be direct in your emotions otherwise you can't expect anyone to deal directly with you."

Doesn't that open one up to a world of pain? "I think one's being constantly hurt. I honestly wish I didn't take things so hard, personally and professionally. If I can't make something work, I get tremendously frustrated and tremendously down on myself, but I only know that way of pushing myself. I don't know how not to be that other person who doesn't put themselves out to be hurt."

Huston married Robert Graham in 1992. She uses words such as "volatile" and "turbulent" to describe their relationship, which begs the obvious question, were you looking for your father in your boyfriends? Huston gives the slightly less obvious answer. "I probably still am. Most of my boyfriends are strong, they stand up for themselves. I don't feel they would crumble and die if I was to disappear. Even though you want to feel, to a certain extent, that they can't live without you, the truth is most people can. If you think they're going to sob on your grave, re-think – they're wondering how far that petrol's going to get them towards the next party."

Where she stands vis-à-vis her adored mother is more complicated. "I don't think I'd have got in nearly as much trouble had my mother lived," she says. "I think I was lost – adrift, shall we say? – from several years before her death till my mid-30s. If she'd lived, I wouldn't have made the mistakes I made. I wouldn't have spent that long with Bob – my mother wouldn't have let me. And I wouldn't have needed to, because I wouldn't have been seeking that particular watershed."

It was always too hard for her, for one reason or another, to have her own kids, yet her most memorable roles have been refractions of motherhood. "I'm afraid that's what there is in life for women after a certain age," she offers mildly. But just look at those mothers. The matriarchal figures she has chosen to play have been either wicked (The Grifters, The Witches), weird (Morticia Addams, two-thirds of her Wes Anderson moms), absentee (the other third), or, in her latest film, Choke (a Chuck Palahniuk adaptation), a scary monster who kidnaps a child and turns him into a freak.

She likes being Anderson's totemic mother figure. "But I'm always a lonely part in his movies. It's really frustrating because I want to be one of the girls or one of the boys. Still, there's a fantastic line in The Darjeeling Limited when the mother is asked why she didn't come to the father's funeral, and she answers, 'I didn't want to.' Her whole character is expressed in that fantastically liberating line. That's the way I want to feel: that I didn't do something because I didn't want to, rather than making up an excuse. I'm still working on that... I'm still hiding from the teacher.

"I don't think people have ever cast me for anything too traditional or midwestern or housewifey," Huston adds with masterful understatement. "But I find that lately – maybe it's because I'm getting older – they're asking me to play smart people, which I'm not so crazy about because it means you have to talk fast." I suggest that smart people don't talk, they listen. "If only I could convince the scriptwriters of that!" she whoops. "I love no dialogue – or as little as possible. That's my ideal."

Lunch is over and the notion is floated that age can be a liberating force for women. "It's lovely to be able to befriend women and not feel that they're stalking you for your boyfriend," Huston concedes with a wry smile.

On hearing that my London neighbour, the singer Chrissie Hynde, was jealous on hearing of our meeting, she responds with a delighted "I love that. Bonnie Raitt came up the other night and said she liked my work, and that made my day," she adds. "I'd have loved to have been a singer, to be able to stand up in front of people and really belt a song, like Aretha Franklin or Maria Callas."

Then, as this child of the 1960s – and every decade since – merges with the mist that refuses to lift, she makes a last wish: "I wouldn't mind if Bob Dylan thought my work was pretty great. That wouldn't kill me."
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A lawyer for John Ritter's family told a jury Monday that he would show doctors caused the actor's death by an improper diagnosis and substandard treatment.

"What you'll hear, ladies and gentleman, is that ... they did everything wrong," attorney Moses Lebovits said in his opening statement at the trial in Los Angeles County Superior Court.

Ritter died of a tear in the aorta, known as an aortic dissection, on Sept. 11, 2003, at Providence St. Joseph Medical Center in Burbank.

Ritter's relatives say he was instead mistakenly treated for a heart attack, and they are suing two doctors for $67 million. The lawsuit follows settlements with the hospital and eight other medical personnel for about $14 million.

At the time of his death, Ritter was 54 and the star of the ABC series "8 Simple Rules ... For Dating My Teenage Daughter." The award-winning star of the sitcom "Three's Company" had a varied career, with credits ranging from TV's "The Waltons" to the 1996 movie "Sling Blade."

Amy Yasbeck, Ritter's widow, wept during parts of Lebovits' opening statement.

Lebovits claimed that a radiologist, Dr. Matthew Lotysch, failed to give Ritter warning of his purportedly enlarged aorta two years before he died, and that Dr. Joseph Lee, the cardiologist called to Ritter's side the night of his death, failed to order the proper tests to diagnose his condition.

Central to the case is the claim that Lee failed to have a chest X-ray done before treating Ritter for what appeared to be a heart attack.

"Because they didn't get the chest X-ray, they gave him the wrong treatment," said Lebovits.

Had Ritter been treated properly, Lebovits said, the actor would have undergone surgery that night and recovered in six to eight weeks, and his life expectancy would not have been affected.

In a defense opening statement, attorney Stephen Fraser, who represents Lotysch, told jurors that neither of the doctors being sued was responsible for Ritter's death.

Nothing could have been done to prevent Ritter's demise because body scans showed his aorta was of normal size and showed no sign that it would dissect, Fraser said.

"Dr. Lee did not save John Ritter's life, but he did not kill him," Fraser said. "There was nothing that could have been done to save Mr. Ritter's life."

The defense attorney said Lee did what was required for someone having a heart attack -- which was what appeared to be happening to Ritter when Lee joined the case.

Lee's attorney, John McCurdy, said Ritter had symptoms of a heart attack and did die of a heart attack caused by a dissecting aorta. By the time Lee arrived, there had been a "code AMI," he said, meaning Ritter was having an acute myocardial infarction -- an acute heart attack.

"In that situation, you don't wait around for an X-ray," McCurdy said.

Another Ritter family attorney presented a rosy picture of the actor's prospects to earn millions for the rest of his life, had he survived. Michael Plonsker said ABC and Touchstone Studios executives will testify that Ritter's show probably would have run for seven seasons and made millions.

"If John was still alive, the show would still be on the air," Plonsker said.

The show had its premiere in 2002 and ended in 2005.

Defense attorney Alex Watson told jurors that TV schedules are unpredictable, that Ritter's show had already seen ratings decrease when it was placed opposite Fox's "American Idol" and that it would be speculation to say how long it would have lasted and how much money Ritter would have earned.

The huge amount of money being sought was out of proportion with reality, he said.

Actor Henry Winkler had been expected to testify Monday but left as defense opening statements went late into the afternoon. He was to return Wednesday, when the trial resumes.
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