The Los Angeles City Fire Department got a call from the home of Murphy's husband Simon Monjack about 8 a.m., fire officials told TMZ.

She was taken to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, where she was pronounced dead on arrival. (Source: NY Daily News)

The LAPD took Sparks into custody at 8AM PT this morning on a felony warrant charging him with molestation.

The alleged incidents began occurring in 1994 and continued for several years. According to the criminal complaint Shane allegedly committed the crimes of lewd acts upon a child -- all felonies. There is only one alleged victim.

The criminal complaint -- filed by the L.A. County District Attorney's office -- charged Sparks with 8 incidents of alleged molestation with an underage girl. There was a clerical error in the D.A.'s charging documents -- there are actually only 8 counts -- not 9.

The lewd acts include oral copulation and other acts "with the intent of arousing, appealing to, and gratifying the lust, passions, and sexual desires of the defendant, who was at least 10 years older than [the victim]."

Sparks -- who was also a choreographer on "So You Think You Can Dance" -- is being held on $590,000 bail.

Sparks is the second person from "So You Think You Can Dance" who's been in trouble with the law -- earlier this year his co-star Alex Da Silva was charged with rape.

No immediate comment from Shane's camp. (Source: TMZ)

The Oprah Winfrey Show, a groundbreaking broadcast that began as a local Chicago talk show and grew over two decades into the foundation of a media empire worth billions, will end its run in 2011 after 25 seasons on the air, Winfrey's production company said Thursday night.

Winfrey plans to announce the final date for her show during a live broadcast on Friday, Harpo Productions Inc. said, bringing an end to what has been television's top-rated talk show for more than two decades, airing in 145 countries worldwide and watched by an estimated 42 million viewers a week in the U.S. alone.

A Harpo spokeswoman declined to comment Thursday on Winfrey's future plans except to say that The Oprah Winfrey Show will not be transferred to cable television.

Winfrey is widely expected to start up a new talk show on OWN: The Oprah Winfrey Network, a much-delayed joint venture with Discovery Communications Inc. that is expected to debut in 2011. OWN is to replace the Discovery Health Channel and will debut in some 74 million homes. An OWN spokeswoman declined to comment Thursday.

CBS Television Distribution, which distributes The Oprah Winfrey Show to more than 200 markets blanketing the United States, held out hope that it could continue doing business with Winfrey, perhaps producing a new show out of its studios in Los Angeles.

"We have the greatest respect for Oprah and wish her nothing but the best in her future endeavors," the unit of CBS Corp. said in a statement. "We know that anything she turns her hand to will be a great success. We look forward to working with her for the next several years, and hopefully afterward as well."

Winfrey's 24th season opened earlier this year with a bang, as she drew more than 20,000 fans to the city's Magnificent Mile on Michigan Avenue for a Chicago block party with the Black Eyed Peas.

She followed up with a series of blockbuster interviews — Mike Tyson and Evander Holyfield, exclusives with singer Whitney Houston and ESPN's Erin Andrews, and just this week, former Alaska governor, GOP vice presidential candidate and best-selling author Sarah Palin. She found time between shows to lobby the International Olympic Committee in Denmark for Chicago's failed bid to host the 2016 Olympics.

The loss of The Oprah Winfrey Show would be a blow to CBS Corp. because it earns a percentage of hefty licensing fees from TV stations that use it.

On a conference call with analysts two weeks ago, CBS Chief Executive Leslie Moonves said the contract with the show ran through most of 2011 and "if there's a negative impact, it wouldn't hit us until '12."

CBS continues to sell several top shows into syndication, however, including Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy. But many TV stations are struggling with falling advertising revenue and were unlikely to pay the same fees as in the past for Winfrey's show, which has seen ratings slip 7 percent from a year ago and saw its average viewership slip below 7 million last season.

Winfrey started her broadcasting career as a teenager in Nashville, Tenn., reading the news at WVOL. Two years later, Winfrey started co-anchoring news broadcasts on WTVF-TV in Nashville. In 1976 she moved to Baltimore to anchor newscasts at WJZ-TV before becoming host of the local talk show People Are Talking.

In 1984, she relocated to Chicago to host WLS-TV's morning talk show A.M. Chicago — the show became The Oprah Winfrey Show one year later. She set up Harpo the following year and her talk show went into syndication, rising to become one of the most successful in the history of broadcasting.

Powered by the show's staggering success, Winfrey built a wide-ranging media empire. Harpo Studios produces shows hosted by Dr. Phil McGraw and celebrity chef Rachael Ray, her "book club" selections produce instant best-sellers, and O, The Oprah Magazine was the nation's seventh most popular magazine in the first half of 2009.

"I came from nothing," Winfrey wrote in the 1998 book Journey to Beloved. "No power. No money. Not even my thoughts were my own. I had no free will. No voice. Now, I have the freedom, power, and will to speak to millions every day — having come from nowhere."

Earlier this year, Forbes scored Winfrey's net worth at $2.7 billion, even as the magazine knocked her from atop its list of the world's most powerful celebrities. The honor went to Angelina Jolie, but Winfrey was still No. 2 on the annual Celebrity 100 list — and the top earner at $275 million. (Source: NPR)

"Hudson will play Winnie Mandela in a film that begins production May 30 in the South African locations of Johannesburg, Capt Town, and the Transkei and Robben Island where the future president spent 18 of his 27 years in prison.

“Winnie” will be directed by Darrell J. Roodt, the veteran South African filmmaker whose 2006 film “Yesterday” was Africa’s Best Foreign Film nominee, and who also directed “Cry, The Beloved Country,” and “Sarafina!”

Andre Pieterse, Roodt and Paul L. Johnson wrote a script based on the Anne Marie du Preez Bezdrob biography “Winnie Mandela:A Life.”

Picture is being made with South African and Canadian money, with Pieterse producing with Michael Mosca of Canada’s Equinoxe Films.

While Nelson Mandela—who’ll be played by Morgan Freeman in the Clint Eastwood-directed “Invictus”-- is a universally sympathetic figure for his struggle against apartheid, his former wife is a far more complicated figure. She has been depicted as the mother and wife who was a steadfast supporter of her activist husband and who was jailed herself for campaigning for his release and fighting against apartheid. Her image was subsequently tarnished by association with a bodyguard who murdered a 14-year old alleged informer, and she was later convicted of fraud.

The filmmakers will tell the whole story, good and bad.

“I was compelled and moved when I read the script,” Hudson said. “Winnie Mandela is a complex and extraordinary woman and I’m honored to be the actress asked to portray her. This is a powerful part of history that should be told.”

Hudson, who is expected to sing the film’s theme song, followed her screen debut with “The Secret Life of Bees” and “Sex in the City.” After releasing a Grammy-winning self-titled debut album earlier this year, Hudson is in the studio recording a follow-up, and then will begin preparing for the role. She also stars in “I’ll Be Home for Christmas,” an ABC holiday special to be broadcast December 14" (Source: Variety)

“I don’t even remember much about my time at Yves Saint Laurent, though I do think some of my best collections were [there]—other than that black-and-white initial one. That one wasn’t very successful and wasn’t very good. But being at Yves Saint Laurent was such a negative experience for me even though the business boomed while I was there. Yves and his partner, Pierre Bergé, were so difficult and so evil and made my life such misery. I’d lived in France off and on and had always loved it. I went to college in France. It wasn’t until I started working in France that I began to dislike it. They would call the fiscal police, and they would show up at our offices. You are not able to work an employee more than 35 hours a week. They’re like Nazis, those police. They’d come marching in, and you had to let them in and they’d interview my secretary. And they can fine you and shut you down.

Pierre was the one calling them. I’ve never talked about this on the record before, but it was an awful time for me. Pierre and Yves were just evil. So Yves Saint Laurent doesn’t exist for me.”

Ford didn’t buy anything from the YSL estate sale in February 2009. “God, of course not. I have letters from Yves Saint Laurent that are so mean you cannot even believe such vitriol is possible. I don’t think he was high when he wrote them either. I just think he was jealous, and Yves and I were friends before I took over the company. But then we began to move the company forward and were very successful…he just became so insanely jealous…that phase in my life just doesn’t exist anymore.”

“I was going through a very similar thing to what George [the main character is his directorial debut] is going through in the book—a very serious midlife crisis,” Ford says. “I think back during that part of my life I wasn’t in touch with my spiritual side. I had neglected that and had become absorbed really in materialism. I had a wealth…of every kind of material success. Fame, a great boyfriend, plenty of houses, tons of money. I could indulge in anything I wanted—which included a lot of cigarettes and vodka, which I have now stopped. But then I hit a point when I turned 40—even though I was still at Gucci until I was around 43—when I had a very severe midlife crisis. I have always struggled throughout my life with depression. I’ve never made any of this public because…well…”

Ford pauses and gathers himself. “I’m not one to wear any of this on my sleeve. When someone would come into my office in the morning and ask me how I was I’d always go, ‘I’m great! Great!’ But I wasn’t great. My own emotional suffering led me to realize I had neglected this spiritual side of my life. I had always depended on this inner voice to lead me along in life and I had shut it out. I had silenced it. I was raised a Presbyterian and went to a private Catholic school in Santa Fe, but I guess I’d describe myself now as perhaps closer to a Taoist. And this is why the book spoke to me so much—this renewed need for spirituality in my life. I had originally read the book in my 20s when you and Ian [Falconer] and I were visiting David Hockney and he introduced us to Christopher Isherwood.”

“I think I developed a taste for vodka and cigarettes because my first kiss with a guy was with Ian, and he tasted like vodka and cigarettes back then,” Ford says, both bemused and touched by the memory as he displays again a bit of his endearing brashness. “I never knew I liked men sexually until Ian came into my life. And he wasn’t just my first male kiss. The first blow job I ever gave anyone was the one I gave to Ian in the back of a cab on the way home from a night at Studio 54 as we made our way down to where he lived on Eighth Street and Fifth Avenue. Of course, it was a Checker cab,” he jokes with his innate ability to be both snooty and vulgar at the same time (those now defunct taxis had large backseats—enough room for dalliances en route). Indeed, one of the many personal touches that Ford has incorporated in his version of A Single Man is giving George a last name: Falconer.

“One might think on the surface that I’m the boss, but really Richard is driving and running the relationship,” he says. “That’s because I want more than anything in the world for Richard to be happy. I sometimes think he doesn’t still believe that. But it’s true. Sometimes I think he forgets how much I still love him and how much his happiness means to me.”

“His soul,” Ford says without hesitation. “Something clearly spoke to me. It wasn’t his beautiful blue eyes and his silvery hair and his slender handsomeness. It was something that reached out to me through his false self—his true self connecting with my true self—and it was instant. On our first date he took me to a Southwestern restaurant in New York because he knew I was from New Mexico, and we were poor and could eat for about five bucks each. At the time one of Richard’s best friends was dying of AIDS and one of my best friends was dying of AIDS too, so we talked a lot about that, as I’m sure a lot of guys did on first dates back then. We were both just so emotionally exhausted. So there was no sex on that first date. I think it took about three dates before we had sex. He knew I had a fondness for sugary breakfast cereals, so he had put a box of Froot Loops under the bed, hoping I would come home with him that night of our third date. I did. And the next morning he pulled out that box of Froot Loops from under the bed. It was so cute. We moved in together a month after we met.”

“Yes, when it becomes a federal law. Right now it doesn’t do any good in the states. A few weeks ago Richard had to go into the hospital for something, and I had to carry around all these legal documents saying I could make medical decisions for him. It was insane. The fact that we are not married in the federal sense means that if I were to die, he’d have to pay all these taxes on my estate and receive but a fraction of it and he’d have to alter his life —whereas if we were married, he wouldn’t have to face that burden. That’s disgusting. It’s wrong. But that said, I think I am in favor of terming what I’m talking about as a civil partnership. We all get so caught up with this word marriage. For me, the word marriage is something that a religion should decide. Just give me all the same rights. A civil partnership is what I’d like for everyone—heterosexual as well as homosexual. Call it what you like—it’s the rights that are important. Getting hung up with the semantics derails the cause we’re all fighting for.”

“I think Richard was right,” he says now. “I’m not so sure I would have wanted to create a child and inflict the world we live in on him or her.” What if his parents had felt the same way? “I’m not so sure I wouldn’t have been happier never existing,” he says quietly. “I’m not so sure at all. Of course, if I had never existed, I wouldn’t know.” Those frown lines he is still able to summon crease his brow at such a thought. But then he wanly smiles. “I’m not so sure I’m glad I was born,” he whispers. “I’m not so sure.”

But he is careful to add, “I’m happier than I’ve ever been in my life. After I left Gucci I was in that deep depression. And now I can truthfully say that I’m happy. But that said, life is hard and can be so isolating. That is the theme of A Single Man that struck me so, and I exaggerated that theme in the film—the isolation one can feel in one’s life. But the most important thing that George says—and the thing that has proved the most valuable to me in my life, as I get older—is that ability to connect. That is the one thing I live for, to connect.”

“When I die no one will look at any of my fashion collections and get any true sense of me. But they can watch this movie and know what I was about.”