Taking Names

Uma stalker found guilty

A lovesick former mental patient was convicted yesterday of stalking and harassing actress Uma Thurman for more than two years, Associated Press reports.

Jack Jordan, a 37-year-old out-of-work lifeguard and pool cleaner, faces up to a year in jail. He was convicted of stalking and one count of aggravated harassment and acquitted of two more harassment counts. The judge ordered a psychiatric exam before his next court date on June 2.

Mr. Jordan, who lives with his parents in Gaithersburg, said he first developed a crush on Miss Thurman in high school after seeing her in the 1988 Terry Gilliam movie “The Adventures of Baron Munchausen.”

Olivia Newton-John in town

Aussie-British singer Olivia Newton-John, 59, has traveled from the Great Wall of China to the Amazonian rain forests in recent days. The latter was a virtual trip in the halls of the National Geographic Society, where she will be tonight for a private benefit concert for the Amazon Center for Environmental Education and Research (ACEER) Foundation.

In China, she participated in a three-week walk on the wall to raise $500,000 for a cancer wellness center in Melbourne, Australia. “In order to be healthy in mind, body and spirit, you need a healthy planet,” she says, explaining the connection between the two projects. (Doubtless, it helps that “my partner John owns the Amazon Herb Company that deals in medicinal plants from that region,” where she visited in person last June, she says.)

ACEER, which among its other education projects trains South American teachers the value of conservation, is the first nonprofit to be supported directly by the National Geographic Society. Miss Newton-John, a breast cancer survivor, is named in the current issue of People magazine as one of the “Age-defying Beauties” of our time along with Jane Seymour, Maria Shriver, Natalie Cole and others.

Dina Lohan named top mom

Here’s one for the books: Dina Lohan is being honored as a great mother, the New York Post notes.

Her famous daughter, Lindsay Lohan, is literally a poster girl for bad behavior. Her mug shot appears in liquor-industry ads as an example of a “hard-core drunk driver” who needs a Breathalyzer to stay off the road. Lindsay also went to rehab three times last year and was jailed for drunken driving and cocaine possession. Yet Dina Lohan was named a Top Mom last night by a Long Island-based charity, the Mingling Moms Organization.

Mingling Moms President Erica Logiudice called Dina “such a dedicated mom. … Through all the ups and downs of Lindsay, she has been by her side.”

Some of Dina’s fellow honoree moms are Rae Stern, mother of shock jock Howard Stern; Lillian Robinson (Eddie Murphy); Ann Iris Guttenberg (Steve Guttenberg); and Betty Seinfeld (Jerry Seinfeld).

Death in the ’City’?

Contrary to persistent Internet buzz, the upcoming “Sex and the City” movie won’t kill off one of its key characters, director Michael Patrick King tells Associated Press.

The long-awaited and much-hyped film, based on the storied HBO series of the same name, opens May 30.

Mr. King is putting some of our worst fears to rest — namely, that Mr. Big, Carrie Bradshaw’s (Sarah Jessica Parker) longtime on-and-off love, played by Chris Noth, will somehow kick the bucket.

“Kill Mr. Big? I would have been chased around the planet by women with torches,” the director says.

The death rumor has led to some naughty speculation. One of the naughtiest: New York Magazine suggested that Charlotte, the Park Avenue socialite played by Kristin Davis, could be killed in a freak tennis accident.

So does anybody die? Mr. King offers this answer: “It’s a summer movie. Why would I want to kill anyone?”

Compiled by Ann Geracimos and Robyn-Denise Yourse from staff, Web and wire reports.