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$4M Getaway . . . Next Oprah!

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TIMES STAFF WRITER

OPRAH WINFREY, whose ABC talk show has been nationally syndicated since 1986, has purchased a house for $1.4 million and 80 acres for $3 million, all in Telluride, Colo.

Winfrey, whose revenues from her show and TV-film studio were estimated to total about $39 million last year, will produce and host ABC’s “Afterschool Specials” this season.

Besides appearing daily on her own show, she was on the Arts & Entertainment Network earlier this year in the documentary series “The Class of the 20th Century,” which ended Thursday. She’s also known for her acting, primarily as Sofia in the 1985 film “The Color Purple.”

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Winfrey lives in Chicago, where she produces her Emmy-winning show through her Harpo Productions (“Oprah” spelled backwards) in the 88,000-square-foot movie studio and TV complex, which she also owns along with a 160-acre farm in nearby Indiana.

She bought in Telluride, “because she likes to ski and snowmobile,” a source said. When she rented the log-and-stone home, over New Year’s at $1,500 a night, “she fell in love with it,” he added.

She paid cash for the newly built home and the land, where she plans to build another house within the next two years. “Then the existing home will be used for guests,” the source said.

The existing home has three master bedrooms, each with a Jacuzzi tub, and a massive fireplace in 5,000 square feet. It also has a guest house with a kitchen and a living room.

Built by Owen Development of Monrovia, the home is next to a chairlift on a ski run at Telluride Mountain Village, where such celebrities as Keith and Robert Carradine and Susan St. James also own vacation get-aways.

PETER BOGDANOVICH’S Bel-Air home, where he lived from 1974--after making his hit film “The Last Picture Show”--until he moved recently, is on the market at $3.5 million.

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Built in 1928, the Spanish Mission-style hacienda was one of the first houses in Bel-Air. It has four bedrooms and six baths in 7,115 square feet. It also has a circular courtyard, swimming pool, cabana with a fireplace, lawns and gardens.

Bogdanovich directed and produced the comedy film “Noises Off,” which opened Friday and stars Michael Caine, Carol Burnett, John Ritter and Christopher Reeve.

He was living in the house when he met and directed Dorothy Stratten in “They All Laughed.” Stratten was Playboy’s “Playmate of the Year” in 1980, when she was shot to death by her estranged husband in an apparent murder-suicide.

Bogdanovich, who has been linked romantically to Stratten, wrote the book “The Killing of the Unicorn: Dorothy Stratten 1960-1980,” and in 1989, the director, then 49, married Stratten’s younger sister, Louise, who was 20.

They relocated to Brentwood a few weeks ago, sources say, and the house was listed with Terry de Sousa of Coldwell Banker, Beverly Hills.

The property is in foreclosure, other sources say. Public records indicate that the house has been owned by a bank since 1990, the same year that International Creative Management filed a lawsuit accusing Bogdanovich of failing to repay the talent agent company more than $100,000.

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Bogdanovich filed Chapter 7 bankruptcy in 1985, the same year Louise Stratten dropped a lawsuit against Playboy’s Hugh Hefner and her former stepfather, Burl Eldridge. That lawsuit contended that the two falsely told reporters that Bogdanovich had seduced her when she was 13 and paid for her to have plastic surgery to make her look more like her late sister.

ROBIN COUSINS, Great Britain’s 1980 Olympic Gold Medalist in Men’s Figure Skating, is in the throes of renovating the Beachwood Canyon home he purchased two years ago.

Cousins choreographed and served as a technical adviser and commentator in the Interscope/MGM/Pathe feature film “The Cutting Edge,” a figure-skating comedy/romance directed by Paul Michael Glaser that is due to be released this week.

Cousins is putting about $450,000 into the Hollywood home, which was built in the 1950s, burned in a fire and rebuilt in the 1970s.

He’s expanding the two-bedroom, 2,500-square-foot home to 4,000 square feet, adding a third level and a wall of French doors, to take advantage of the canyon views.

Actor SIDNEY TOLER, who played detective Charlie Chan in 22 movies during the 1930s and ‘40s, owned a hilltop in the Mount Olympus area of Hollywood, where he had planned to build a palace but died before he had a chance to begin grading.

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After three years of construction, a couple who bought the 22-acre site and subdivided it finally completed a 12,000-square-foot mansion on the three-acre summit, and they have put that home on the market at $7.9 million.

The main house has solid bronze, double 10-foot-high front doors and an indoor swimming pool designed to eliminate the need for chemicals by using two ozone machines that allow oxygen to flow freely.

The five-bedroom main house has two bedroom suites and a den on the third floor that can be converted into a large ballroom with an outside deck. There is also a two-story guest house and three waterfalls on the property, which has been listed with Jeff Hyland of Alvarez, Hyland & Young, Beverly Hills.

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