Planet Pop

Police want Heather Mills McCartney to stop bugging them. PHOTOS: AP

US comedian Chris Rock's new film detailing the frustrations and temptations of married life strangely reflects persistent rumors his real-life marriage is in trouble.

But even after such scrutiny in life and fiction, one of America's most popular comedians says he is no marital expert.

"I know nothing about marriage," Rock said in a recent interview for his cinematic look at modern matrimony, I Think I Love My Wife, which opened Friday in the US.

Rock, 42, dismissed media reports from late last year that he was filing for divorce as "all rumors, I am happy." His 10-year marriage succeeds due to being tactful, he said.

"I know it helps if you are wrong all the time and when you are right, just say you are wrong," he joked. "It helps to smooth things over. That is pretty much it. Just be wrong."

In his new romantic comedy, a lighthearted remake of the 1972 acclaimed French film Chloe in the Afternoon, Rock plays a successful investment banker devoted to his wife and two kids — who is sexually tempted by an attractive female friend.

Sinbad is alive and well, Wikipedia reports to the contrary.

It is his second directing effort and displays the same humor that helped him rise through the comedy circuit ranks in the 1980s to a film and television career using comedy that pokes fun at both romance and class.

"It is just the weird world I live in," he said, commenting on a scene in the film which sends up the lack of black Americans in his character's firm and corporate America. "The reality is, I went to one of these brokerage houses and there were two black guys out of 800 people, like six out of 5,000, wow!"

His comedy sought to poke fun at his own life rather than deliberately crossing racial barriers, he said.

"Look at James Brown, what's blacker than James Brown? There was no real effort to cross over into a wider audience," he said. "If you do anything good, everybody will buy it."

Condolences flowed for US comedian Sinbad after the online encyclopedia Wikipedia announced his death on Thursday, but it turned out the grieving was premature and the comic was alive and well.

The hoax entry said the 50-year-old entertainer, who appeared in several television series and starred in films including Houseguest, and Jingle All the Way, had died of a heart attack on the morning of March 14.

The news was quickly picked up by an Internet user who forwarded the e-mail link and prompted widespread mourning.

But Wikipedia spokeswoman Sandra Ordonez said the Sinbad entry had been vandalized and although the error was quickly caught and changed, some Internet users had sent e-mails with a link to the old version.

"This caused people to inadvertently change the entry throughout the day to the vandalized version," said Ordonez.

"We are currently looking into who made this edit, and have protected the page. We regret any confusion or distress this may have caused Sinbad and his fans everywhere."

And in the UK, police have warned Heather Mills McCartney, the estranged wife of former Beatle Paul McCartney, about using the emergency phone number 999 too often.

The 39-year-old, in the middle of a bitter divorce battle that has thrust her into the media spotlight, has complained of harassment by paparazzi since the split was announced 10 months ago.

Chief Superintendent Kevin Moore, of Brighton and Hove Police on the southern English coast where Mills spends much of her time, said there was a risk that officers may take her calls less seriously if she contacted them too often.

"We are having to spend a disproportionate amount of time on one particular person," he said. "We are duty-bound to respond, but clearly people who make lots of calls to the police run the risk of being treated as the little boy who cried wolf," he added. "Officers who have attended previously to find there have been no grounds might not take any claims seriously, and that's the danger we face."

A police spokesperson would not say how many emergency calls Mills made.