The Last Stand

CURTAIN CALL Gwyneth Paltrow, whose stage experience consists of several shows at the Williamstown Theater Festival in Massachusetts, will make her London stage debut in May in ''Proof,'' David Auburn's Tony- and Pulitzer-winning play. Directing the show will be her ''Shakespeare in Love'' director, John Madden. Jennifer Jason Leigh currently stars in the Broadway production, in the role that won a Tony last year for Mary-Louise Parker.

LEGAL BRIEFS ''Sex Machine'' singer James Brown is being sued for sexual harassment. A trial began Tuesday in Los Angeles, with one of the Godfather of Soul's former employees saying she lost her job because she turned down his advances. Plaintiff Lisa Agbalaya, 36, ran Brown's West Coast office for several years until Brown shut down the office in February, 2000, days after she faxed her harassment complaint to California authorities. Brown's lawyers said the office was closed for unrelated financial reasons. On their advice, Brown didn't comment to reporters, but they overheard him in the courtroom saying, ''Are you as disgusted with this as I am? This thing is crazy.''...

In a rare lawsuit against the Federal Communications Commission, singer Sarah Jones is complaining that the FCC violated her First Amendment rights by ruling that her song ''Your Revolution'' is indecent and fining an Oregon noncommercial radio station $7,000 for playing it. The song aired once, during an October, 1999 early evening broadcast on Portland's KBOO-FM, and a listener complaint led to an FCC review that determined that Jones' rap tune contained ''unmistakable patently offensive sexual references.'' In fact, the song contains no profanity, only paraphrasings of sexually suggestive lines familiar from rap songs by male performers, which Jones says her song twists in order to make a point about how male rappers degrade women. Not that the FCC has been much friendlier about explicit raps by men. Last year, the agency levied a similar fine against a Wisconsin station that played the unedited version of Eminem's ''The Real Slim Shady'' and another fine against a Colorado station that played the supposedly clean edit of the song. However, the FCC overturned the latter ruling a couple weeks ago, having decided that the edited version wasn't indecent after all.

BABY TALK Eddie Murphy truly has a Klump-sized brood. On Tuesday, at a Los Angeles hospital, wife Nicole gave birth to the couple's fifth child, a girl they named Bella Zahra (seven pounds, six ounces). The couple, together since the late 1980s and married since 1993, have three other girls (Bria, 12; Shayne, seven; and Zola, two) and a boy (Myles, 10). Murphy, 40, also has a son, Christian, from a previous relationship....

''Saturday Night Live'''s Ana Gasteyer and her husband Charlie are expecting their first child, due in late June. She'll be the first ''SNL'' performer to work while pregnant.

PASSING NOTES Photographer Inge Morath, who was married for the last four decades to playwright Arthur Miller, died of undisclosed causes at 77 yesterday at a Manhattan hospital. She married the ''Death of a Salesman'' author in 1962, a year after he and his second wife, Marilyn Monroe, were divorced. In a career that began in the late 1940s, she published more than two dozen books of her photos and writings.