It's the alma mater for scores of Hollywood people, including Angelina Jolie, Nicolas Cage and Lenny Kravitz. It's the place where Monica Lewinsky felt her first stirrings of attraction to older men when she entered into an adulterous relation with her drama teacher.

Now the school that inspired the teen series Beverly Hills, 90210 is in a controversy as juicy as anything the television show's creator Aaron Spelling could dream up. Beverly Hills High School is embroiled in a toxic-cancer-cluster scare that has prompted the real-life Erin Brockovich to launch a class-action lawsuit.

Alleging a link between toxic fumes leaking from the oil wells beneath the school's football field and the hundreds of former students who have developed cancer, Ms. Brockovich and her colleagues filed 25 personal-injury claims against the famously wealthy city and its school district on Monday.

Ms. Brockovich is the blond-bombshell environmental crusader who inspired the eponymously titled blockbuster film. Based on a true story about the former Miss Pacific pageant winner and file clerk who stumbled across medical records that sparked a landmark water-pollution investigation, the film earned Julia Roberts an Academy Award.

The 1996 case resulted in the largest toxic-tort settlement in U.S. history, with the Pacific Gas and Electric Company being forced to pay $333-million (U.S.) in damages to 600 residents of Hinkley, Calif., who had been exposed to industrial solvents that had leaked into the groundwater.

Now, Ms. Brockovich's boss, lawyer Ed Masry, says the damage claims in the Beverly Hills High case could climb even higher than those for Hinkley.

At a press conference on Monday, the "toxic-torts" team alleged that fumes leaking from the buried wells have caused 280 cases of Hodgkin's disease, non-Hodgkin's lymphoma and thyroid cancer since the 1970s.

"These statistics are 20 times higher than the national average for these specific cancers," said Ms. Brockovich, adding that nearly 300 claims could eventually be filed on behalf of afflicted students who attended the school between 1975 and 1997.

Mr. Masry said he expects to name the city, the school board and three oil companies as defendants in dozens of individual lawsuits this November.

"I feel betrayed and angry," says Lori Moss, a 1992 graduate and plaintiff, who was diagnosed in 1996 with Hodgkin's lymphoma, a cancer of the immune system. The cancer is in remission, but Ms. Moss, now 28, has recently been diagnosed with thyroid cancer.

It was Ms. Moss who first brought the case to the firm's attention when she attended a book signing, and waited for three hours to meet Ms. Brockovich and tell the author about her experience.

The campus oil rig is no secret in Beverly Hills, which was rich with oil early in the 20th century. The operation next to the football field began pumping out oil long before the school opened in 1928.

There are eighteen active wells, which produce 450 barrels of oil and 120,000 cubic metres of natural gas a day and earn the school system up to $700,000 (U.S.) in royalties each year.

The oil derrick, a 45-metre-tall tower that looms over the school at the northwest corner of Spalding Drive and Olympic Boulevard, has long been considered an eyesore in the tony, palm-tree-dappled neighbourhood. Three years ago, it was covered up with brightly painted flower decals, painted by students and children in hospital, and nicknamed The Tower of Hope. Some have now renamed it the Tower of Fear.

In typical Hollywood fashion, the scandal was first reported during sweeps month on Feb. 10. A local TV station was tipped off by the law firm, which hired environmental specialists to conduct air tests over a five-month period in and around the school's athletic fields. The tests revealed high levels of benzene, toluene and h-hexene, by-products of the oil industry.

The segment spread panic across one of the most affluent enclaves in the United States. Irate parents demanded that the wells be shut down.

The Beverly Hills Unified School District and the South Coast Air Quality Management District, which tracks air pollution for most of Southern California, have disputed the findings.

Proving a link between cancer and the oils wells in court won't be easy, says Wendy Cozen, a cancer epidemiologist at the University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine.

"None of these cancers is well linked to petroleum or petroleum products," she told USA Today. "There's oil wells all over L.A., and no cancer pattern is associated with neighbourhoods with oil wells."

In the meantime, some parents are questioning the motives of Ms. Brockovich, now a popular motivational speaker and host of a new Lifetime television show called Final Justice. In February, Ms. Brockovich told Variety columnist Army Archerd that the film rights for this latest case were "up for grabs." She has since said the comments were made in jest.