Kudos to the great Whoopi Goldberg who covered herself with glory playing an addiction recovery sponsor in Benjamin Bratt’s A&E drama “The Cleaner.” She was described therein as being “like a Nubian queen living in a funky old beach bungalow.” Bratt adds: “Talk about an iconic persona. I think over the years people have forgotten what an amazing actor she is!”

And remember, not too many months ago, Whoopi told me that she adores making movies and yearns for great roles in the future. This is a woman who won the Academy Award for “Ghost.” And she is also the woman who righted the boat of “The View” and has put that show on a more even keel.

Gossip redux: Scientists at the University of Michigan are now saying that “social bonding” creates happier, healthier levels of progesterone. So gossip is good for women. (It’s good for men, too, but naturally they’d go the selective route intimating that only females gossip.)

The university’s research journal says they are “the first to show gossiping and chatting” are good for you. The “first?!”Hmmm, I wrote an entire chapter about how gossip is good for people and this ran as the foreword to my memoir “Natural Blonde” published in 2000.

In it I said gossip and talking among ourselves helps us to sort out what we know, what we believe and what we feel morally. Gossip is also one of the last of the egalitarian inexpensive ways to have fun. It doesn’t cost anything and anyone can do it. And also, it makes us feel slightly powerful because gossip and the exchange of news is more exciting, more interesting than just uttering platitudes and talking about the weather. So, I concluded that gossip is the tawdry jewel in the crown of free speech.

Maybe some of you have read the P. D. James novel “A Taste for Death,” wherein her hero, the detective Adam Dalgliesh, says: “Gossip was like any other commodity in the marketplace. You received it only if you had something of value to give. And he liked the sense of power which gossip gave him. Perhaps it reduced the vast amorphous city to manageable proportions for him...”

Reading the international press: “Mary Poppins” has beaten “Harry Potter” to the title of best family film of all time in a survey done by the biscuit company Oreo. Other runners up were “The Wizard of Oz,” “Bambi,” “E. T.,” “Star Wars” and “Grease.” (But Harry had his inning; he won for the best scene in a movie, meaning his discovery of the secret platform at King’s Cross Station.)

The Vatican is now making money from King Henry VIII’s adultery with Anne Boleyn. The priceless document that led to his divorce from Catherine of Aragon and his break with Rome has been reproduced in detail by the Vatican and is on sale 500 years after the original was shut away in the archives. The copies cost about $71,000 apiece. They will sell mainly to museums and libraries.

And they said: Shia LaBeouf: “I support my parents. It’s like having two 50-year-old children. My mom is the pillar of my life and ... a very beautiful woman. I’d like to find a woman who treats me as good as my mother.”

Antonia Fraser, who is writing a book since the loss of her beloved husband Harold Pinter: “In essence, it is a love story. The beginning and the end, the first light and twilight, are dealt with more fully than the high noon in between, which is described more impressionistically. It is ‘my life with Harold Pinter,’ not my complete life, and certainly not his.”

Michelle Pfeiffer on playing an older woman in “Cheri”: “The whole thing to looking great in films is your lighting. ... Any of us know to make friends with the lighting director; that’s the guy who’s your best friend in making a movie.”