Studies in Film Stardom

22/09/2026

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If the star is exceptional, that needn’t mean they are Gods. They must be seen as different from the average person, but also capable of representing qualities that the viewer can comprehend as close to their own. This is the paradox of the star: they are different, yet the same. They may be better looking, more charismatic or charming than the person paying to watch them on screen, but they also have to be capable of representing problems that aren’t too removed from the viewer’s own.

Obviously, stars represent individuating traits that make them very distinct, even if they also must possess a quality that makes them alike enough to be called a star at all. Dustin Hoffman and Clint Eastwood have almost nothing in common, even if they have both played characters who can do what a man has gotta do. But while this is characteristic of Eastwood’s persona, it is an anomalous dimension to Hoffman’s. When Eastwood comes to town in urban or western environments, from Coogan’s Bluff to High Plains Drifter, the locals fret; when Hoffman does so in Straw Dogs, the response is closer to ridicule. Yet Hoffman will defend his wife and his honour no less than Eastwood might, even if it is based on casting against type, as we are a little surprised at the ferocity Hoffman can offer. Paul Newman and Steve McQueen may be capable of playing hard men far more readily than Hoffman, but this isn’t central to their persona, just as Bronson moves even further along the aggressive spectrum than Eastwood, who may have been a bigger star than Bronson because he could modulate a little more within the macho image.

This indicates that though actors may be synonymous with a certain type (the hard man, the weakling, the dizzy blonde, the go-getter, the manipulator, the self-sacrificer and so on), if they fall too readily into the type, they risk both stereotyping themselves and alienating the viewer. One doesn’t identify with their predicament; we find their exaggeration of a given quality a source of humour.  If Bronson had been in Straw Dogs, the film’s plot would have been over in twenty-five minutes, and he would probably have moved on to other villages to escalate the killing spree. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s work increasingly absorbed comedy into the mayhem, well aware that his characters had almost nothing in common with the audience, but that this became the humorous point, evident too in some of Sylvester Stallone’s films. While one could empathise with the mundane realities of Rocky Balboa and Rambo in the first films, the sequels created what we could call constructive alienation. It wasn’t identification the films insisted upon, but a brutalised escalation that left viewers in a numbers game: how many baddies will Stallone take out? Stallone, while narrowing his range, extended his brand, and this might risk a contradiction: that stars could become stereotypes without losing their superstardom. That is perhaps true, but they couldn’t quite hold onto their humanity. When Stallone decided to return to it in a film like Cop Land, he was cast against type. Had he followed the trajectory of the first Rocky, he wouldn’t have been. In Rocky and Cop Land he was humanly identifiable; in many others he was a cartoon that could only be taken seriously within the diegesis: by characters aware of his brutality. Viewers were more aware of the exaggeration, and chuckled along lightly.

One way of looking at this is to imagine a star reproduced in computer- generated form. Whose persona would be easier to turn into a CGI, AI movie – Dustin Hoffman or Arnold Schwarzenneger? Lance Elliot noted, “AI is getting so good at devising human-like video actors that it is nearly impossible to discern whether the movie screen contains real actors or fake actors. Thus, anxious debates are taking place about requiring a kind of special tax on machine-produced “actors” so that the costs of employing AI will be equal to the cost of using living, breathing human actors.” (Forbes) That may be so, but who would doubt that Schwarzenegger would be easier to replicate than Hoffman, that Predator would be an AI reboot long before The Graduate or Midnight Cowboy?

Yet rather than fretting too much over what the future might bring, we can use it as no more than a conceit to contain what the star has been over most of cinema’s history. A star is a human being who embed themselves within certain characters, and that makes stardom neither quite the person they are nor necessarily the character they play. They offer a liminal figure that becomes their persona. When George Clooney plays a character, they are usually Clooneyesque, a place somewhere between the man he is and the person he depicts. While the recent Jay Kelly might seem more autobiographical than most, as he plays an actor long in demand and hugely successful, whether in Out of Sight, Up in the Air, Ocean’s Eleven or a Nespresso advert, Clooney would still seem to be playing a variation of himself.

Put another actor in any of these roles, and the character would likely change, or at the very least our perception of it. This is usually less true for character actors but, like all actors, they are embodied beings with key characteristics that are hard to change: the grain of the voice, the height, the eyes, the smile. Most of them can be changed, as we see when well-known actors play characters like John Merrick in The Elephant Man, Eric Stoltz in Mask, De Niro in Raging Bull and Charlize Theron in Monster. Yet these actors are still cast in the role, suggesting that rather than using an unknown who would be indistinguishable from the character they play, because they bring no extra notion of themselves to the part, the actor very much does. When a critic says an actor is unrecognisable in the role, that isn’t quite true. Like the art of mimicry, the point lies in the gap between one person and another. This can be reduced merely to the virtuoso: that an actor can do accents, adopt a walk, lose or put on weight, master facial and bodily gestures. Yet if it is about more than admiration, it rests partly on the inhabiting of another self, and the viewer’s empathic comprehension of that double embodiment. The actor devotes themselves, sometimes over many months, to create the existence of a character other than themselves, and the viewer for a couple of hours shares in that experience.

One might insist that this would be true of any actor playing a role, and a non-professional might just as easily play the part. But often the non-professional plays a role like their own life, all the better so that they don’t have to create a character, but exist more or less as themselves, with the film shaped around them. Bicycle Thieves, Kes, and Accattone have great performances, but when the actors tried to replicate them in other roles, they didn’t have the same force. A star, on the other hand, might often seem less authentic than the non-professional, and thus better able to show within this relative inauthenticity a far greater range. This range will still usually be quite narrow, but this is partly because a star is a brand and must remain distinguishable from the brands around them. The McQueen brand might have crossed over with the Newman one, the Eastwood with the Bronson, Jane Fonda’s with Ellen Burstyn’s. (Eastwood was offered the role in Death Wish first; Fonda turned down the part of Chris in The Exorcist.) But they were distinguishable, even when they were competitive: “Newman was the A-list actor when it came to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, but McQueen wasn't ready to acknowledge that fact when it came down to negotiations. He wanted top billing and the same number of lines.” (Slash)

But looking at four clips from various actors’ work, we will try to bring out this distinguishable quality, and see in it the reason why thespian obsolescence would be a great loss, changing the nature of what cinema has been over its relatively short history. Audrey Hepburn may seem an icon equal to Marilyn Monroe now, but she was less of a profit-making figure in the 1950s than Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, Doris Day, and Elizabeth Kerr. According to Ultimate Movie Rankings, she comes in at 120. (Deborah Kerr at number 11 comes in ahead of Monroe, Taylor and Day).  Yet Hepburn conveyed an image perhaps stronger than any woman in 1950s cinema, which lay partly in the singularity of her persona and the cut of her clothing. In Vogue, Cecil Beaton reckoned Hepburn was the “public embodiment of our new feminine ideal", and that “Nobody ever looked like her before World War II .” She was neither a siren, nor a vamp, nor a femme fatale, and could play innocence easily, even when guilt might be assumed. Take the plot of Sabrina. Hepburn is the eponymous character who, at the beginning of the film, looks yearningly at William Holden’s rich playboy, David Larrabee. Her father is the family chauffeur, and Sabrina isn’t so much ignored as unnoticed. But when she returns from a lengthy trip to Paris and returns, waiting at the train station, Larrabee roars past in his car, reverses back, picks her up and wonders who she is. She is now a sophisticated woman, with a little dog and clothes designed by famous costume designer Edith Head, with a Givenchy inflection. David now pursues Sabrina, though he is to marry someone else, which is important for the family business, as this will result in a major merger. With David having second thoughts about the wedding, his brother Linus (Humphrey Bogart) manipulates the situation so that he can keep Sabrina and David apart, all the while falling in love with Sabrina himself. In turn, David realises what is going on, accepts that he should marry the woman he promised, keep the company afloat, and that Linus should be with Sabrina. As Sabrina moves from one rich brother to the next, nothing in the film indicates she is a gold digger, and thus far away from the siren, the vamp or the femme fatale.

In different ways, Doris Day and Marilyn Monroe could appear innocent too. Doris Day was innocent of sexuality itself, while Monroe could seem naive about the effect she would have on men, without at all being unaware of her sexual appeal: an ambivalence that might be central to her success. (The vamp etc. knew exactly their allure, and calibrated it into plot execution.) Yet we could still imagine that Monroe would want to marry into wealth, well aware that ‘Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend’, and that she could easily play a lead role in a film called How to Marry a Millionaire, even if the machinations of the plot suggest that love trumps greed or financial security.

Interestingly, Bogart wanted his own wife Lauren Bacall for the Sabrina role, and when “asked how he liked working with Hepburn, Bogart replied: ‘It's OK, if you don't mind to make 20 takes.’” (ClassicMovieHub) Whatever Hepburn’s perceived inexperience, the more established Bacall would have been miscast. Bacall always seemed wise to the world in films like To Have and Have Not, The Big Sleep, and Dark Passage, while Hepburn, never a comic actor, nevertheless shared with the comedian the ability to be blind to circumstances. In Sabrina, the connivances and contrivances are beyond her, and thus beneath her. She manipulates nothing and is simply seeking love. A cynic might propose that moving from loving one rich brother to another doesn’t suggest romantic inclinations, but financial pragmatism, even cynicism. Yet this isn’t how Hepburn plays it, even if near the end of the film economics comes into the work. She is now over David, but in love with Linus. However, she will marry neither, as she prepares to go to Paris once again, after turning down Linus’s attempt to give her cash after the whole messy affair. She is in the car with her father, and they discuss how the way the world works. “There is the front seat and the back seat, and a window in between.” Her father adds, “It wouldn’t have worked out, really, darling. The papers and everybody else would have said how fine and democratic for a Larrabee to marry a chauffeur’s daughter. But would they have praised the chauffeur’s daughter? Democracy can be a wickedly unfair thing, Sabrina. Nobody poor was ever called democratic for marrying somebody rich.” Central to the father’s claim is that nobody would take seriously the notion that a poor woman would be marrying into wealth for love. But if anybody can prove democracy has it wrong, it will be Sabrina. Director Billy Wilder films the scene in one take, from a frontal angle as the father offers wisdom, while practising his profession: driving. It gives to his words a gravity they might not quite have had if he were walking or seated in a room. The impression is generally right but specifically wrong, as Sabrina will indeed be with Linus.

What we have made clear is that in star power,  the actor possesses qualities that must be embodied and embedded in the narrative, but are nevertheless clearly attributes of the person themselves. When we watch Hepburn, what are we watching and listening to beyond the story the film is telling? We watch how she moves through space, how the clothing fits her light frame, and listen to the texture of a voice that is soothing yet precise. If we wish to claim that the 1950s and the 1960s were the greatest decades for screen stardom, it might rest partly on the way stars would move through the frame in medium shot, the richness of the colour during this period, and also the relative social mobility that needn’t leave stars too impossibly out of reach. Tackling the last of these first, many stars of the era came from modest backgrounds (though not Hepburn): Michael Caine, Sean Connery, Alain Delon, and Steve McQueen were all from impoverished or broken childhoods. So too were Marilyn Monroe, Sophia Loren and Claudia Cardinale. Others were from comfortable families, but far from the nepo-baby culture that many now decry. Acting was an upwardly mobile profession, consistent with the post-war prosperity boom and redistribution principles that allowed many from poorer backgrounds to become, if not wealthy, at least relatively prosperous. Vittorio Trevitt noted “the average Briton witnessed a substantial growth in their real earnings, which went up by an estimated 50% from 1951 to 1964, and would continue to climb until the end of the 1960s.” (History is Now) Marc Levinson says, “The quarter-century before then, starting around 1948, saw the most remarkable period of economic growth in human history. In the Golden Age between the end of the Second World War and 1973, people in what was then known as the ‘industrialised world’ – Western Europe, North America, and Japan – saw their living standards improve year after year.” (Aeon)

Most classical movie stars, most of the time, were filmed in black and white, including Ingrid Bergman in Gaslight and Casablanca, Gary Cooper in Meet John Doe and The Fountainhead, Marlene Dietrich in Blonde Venus, and The Scarlet Empress. Greta Garbo never made a film in colour. There were exceptions: Clark Gable and Vivian Leigh in Gone with the Wind, and Errol Flynn in The Adventures of Robin Hood (and Olivia de Havilland in both). But actors couldn’t expect to be filmed in colour until well into the 1950s. If someone had red hair or blue eyes, black hair and green eyes, earlier films couldn’t quite bring out these qualities. To describe someone as strawberry blonde, as Robert Reford so often was, only makes sense in a cinema of colour. Elizabeth Taylor and Paul Newman may have worked often in black and white, but it took colour to bring out these two actors’ famous eyes, and added enormously to the appeal of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

But whether in colour or black and white, part of cinema’s appeal is watching people move with gracefulness through screen space. This is surely a central feature of the musical, but it is there in many other films during the 1950s and 1960s when screen space was opened up partly by widescreen, partly by the sort of longer takes critics such as Andre Bazin promoted, which he emphasised over editing. David Bordwell sees that more recent cinema is often quite different. Speaking of the Bourne films and others, he says, “directors nowadays tell us that they are in search of energy, a moment-by-moment spiking of audience interest. You can get it through fast cutting, arcing camera movements, sudden frame-entrances, the nervousness of the handheld shot, or all of the above.” (Minding Movies)

Barefoot in the Park may be a minor film, but from the perspective of stardom, the use of colour, the burgeoning wealth in the US at the time, and its consideration of screen space, it can prove useful. Redford plays a lawyer on his way up, but not there yet, and Jane Fonda, his wife, accepting they need to rough it a bit before the serious money comes in. They take a Greenwich Village apartment that Corie (Fonda) may think has character, but that Paul finds distasteful. When he first occupies it, we see the contrast between the bare, run-down space and Paul’s attire: an elegant black coat, black shoes, and a grey scarf. He is also wearing a watch that might not be cheap. However, more importantly in this adaptation of Neil Simon’s play, director Gene Saks respects the type of mise en scene that is unavoidable in theatre, but can serve a subtly different purpose in cinema. On the stage, the actor is always roughly the same distance from the audience. Sure, the actor will move around the stage, creating a slightly greater or lesser proximity, and, at a stretch, an audience member could leave their seat and get closer or further away. But this proximity is generally fixed, while in cinema our perceptual distance from the actor is constantly changing. What many films of the period insisted upon, however, in contrast to the contemporary films Bordwell discusses, is being able to watch actors move through screen space, and to take in planes of perception. In one shot, Paul takes a phone call in the foreground on the right-hand side of the frame; Corie is in the background on the left-hand side. He is discussing a court case; she has other ideas on her mind as she looks lasciviously at her new husband.

We needn’t pretend the film is a masterclass in long take cinema; not even remotely. Nevertheless, it does give two actors, who went on to become the biggest stars of the 1970s (as Fonda showed she was so much more than a nepo baby), an opportunity to illustrate their appeal, without reducing that appeal simply to the close-up. Whether it is Fonda jumping out of bed in a terribly cold room, later running down New York streets, or Redford drunk, walking barefoot in the park of the title, we aren’t only watching actors’ faces, but their general body language as well. Unlike a model, who must work within a narrow register of expressions and movements, the actor gets to express far more of their personality, if we accept personality as a reflection of broad expressions and movements. Models get to pose, but while actors might often do so as well, the actor also gets to express anger, grief, happiness, and desire. The range of their feelings is translated into the range of their facial and bodily expressions. In a film like Barefoot in the Park, these emotions might be performatively expressed and far from the interior Method acting of Marlon Brando (with whom both Fonda and Redford acted alongside the previous year in The Chase). But they do offer a large range of gestures next to a model. Yet Bordwell notices that many contemporary films no longer offer that range, less because the actors are incapable of expressing it, than because directors carve up the mise en scene so that we can no longer see it. We can watch Barefoot in the Park and see the actors perform their roles in full-bodied performances: in acting that shows the body from tip to toe.

Viggo Mortensen was never a huge star, and his popularity rests probably more on appearing in Lord of the Rings than a more general, long-lasting celebrity. To become a superstar, an actor needs to transcend a role or become iconically linked with it, and extend their persona over several characters that have large-box-office appeal, or play a series of characters that reflect that persona. Clint Eastwood created two, in The Man with No Name and Dirty Harry, but augmented them with numerous parts as cops and cowboys elsewhere. Ditto, to a less distinguished degree, Sylvester Stallone, with Rocky and Rambo, and then numerous roles that seemed like variations on these two characters. Tom Cruise may have been Maverick and Nathan Hunt, but his stardom rests less on these two characters (finally less iconic than Eastwood’s or Stallone’s) than on a general body of work that makes Maverick and Nathan consistent with them: the go-getter on a mission.  Cruise became a huge star in his twenties, and was only 21 in Risky Business and 24 in Top Gun. Mortensen was over thirty when he landed leading roles in The Reflecting Skin and The Indian Runner, and neither were star-making, even if the latter carried a danger rare in American leading roles. Covered in tattoos at a time when they represented danger rather than paraded cool, he is the errant brother only a mother could love, and a sibling would resent. A man constantly in trouble and with a vicious streak, this is supporting-role territory. Yet it helped make Mortensen a well-known name, though not quite a leading man, as he took secondary parts in Crimson Tide, Portrait of a Lady and A Perfect Murder. Lord of the Rings made him a star, but it was as though Mortensen was always going to be a reluctant one, far more so than Redford, who was again and again in obituaries referred to as a star despite himself, with Brooks Barnes noting, “Mr Redford created the image of a reluctant star.” (New York Times) Mortensen was more the cautious character actor who wished for leading roles but always sought to retain an element of hiding within the character over insisting on star status. He could have capitalised on playing Aragorn in Lord of the Rings when offered a role in The Hobbit. “Before they started shooting, back in 2008, one of the producers did ask if I would be interested. I said, 'You do know, don't you, that Aragorn isn't in The Hobbit? That there is a 60-year gap between the books?'" (Guardian)

To understand Mortensen’s modest stardom, then, perhaps Eastern Promises and especially A History of Violence encapsulate the heroic elements of The Lord of the Rings, with the destructive qualities of The Indian Runner. Both are roles containing hidden identities, with Mortensen in Eastern Promises ostensibly involved in a Russian gang but actually an undercover operative. In A History of Violence, he plays family man, Tom Stall, who takes out a couple of thugs that come into his diner. Feted as a local hero, we discover later that he turned his life around when he met and married a lawyer, played by Maria Bello. Before that, he was the violent Joey from Philadelphia. Many an actor could convincingly play the good dad, and many others the cruel hard man, but Mortensen plays both, and is equally convincing.

Hollywood doesn’t often do marriage very well, and far more films are about the move towards wedded bliss than its domestic realisation. It is also why there is very little marital sex in cinema, with A History of Violence alongside Don’t Look Now as conspicuous exceptions. Think of all the actors who don’t do domesticity, including some we have already named: Eastwood and Cruise, as well as Warren Beatty and Jack Nicholson. Rocky Balboa may have a long-term marriage with Adrian, but she is usually there as an emotional punching bag, even saying in Rocky V, “all those beatings you took in the ring I took them with you.” Think of how many films hinge on a family member’s kidnapping, from Commando to Taken, from Ransom to Prisoners, as if people are more likely to have someone in their family seized, than possess a regular home life. A History of Violence might finally be an action film, as Mortensen needs to go back to Philadelphia from his home in Indiana. But it is also an examination of family life, and the notion that a woman needs to know the nature of the man she has married. It is, if you like a remarriage drama, a variation on what the philosopher Stanley Cavell called comedies of remarriage, with couples in classic Hollywood realising that they needed a second bite of the cherry to see they couldn’t really part, with His Girl Friday exemplary.

It is also why the film is a two-hander, with Bello’s role far from the long-suffering Adrian. Edie only half-knows the man she has married: the one she is with hasn’t made her suffer at all. But this is Tom, not Joey from Philadelphia. As Stall, he is the kind family man with a local business, an imaginative lover, and a much-liked figure in the community. As Joey, he is a violent thug and liar who has married his wife under false pretences. Stall wants to convince Edie that this is the man he is, but she has now to incorporate the man that he was, and still on occasion be when the moment demands it. Whether taking out the men who come into the diner, or a henchman in the family’s garden, Edie now knows her husband is someone capable of extreme violence. Can she stay married to such a man?

If the comedies of remarriage tap into relationships that require reinvigoration or a rethink, in A History of Violence, that rethink is fundamental: can she fall in love all over again with a man she knows now can lie and kill, and would this be dereliction of duty given the kids, or an awareness of nuance that people are complex beings? We might even wonder if part of what has made their marriage so good, and the sex still active, is that they know they contain selves within themselves. This is illustrated early on when Edie puts on some cheerleader gear and plays the role before they make love. When they have sex again, it is after she slaps him, and he grabs her by the throat. “Get off me… Joey”, she says, before they have aggressive sex on the stairs.

Yet central to the film’s success is the casting: attractive actors no longer young, but very far from being old, who wouldn’t quite be described as stars, yet who have the power of charisma without the narcissism of celebrity. Mortensen and Bello are plausible as a domestic couple, as Fonda and Redford are not in Barefoot in the Park. The latter are performing a couple, and while this partly lies in the film’s origins as a play, we watch as if viewing actors in the process of becoming famous. In A History of Violence, we don’t doubt the film wouldn’t have worked with unknowns, but would it have worked so well with George Clooney and Julia Roberts, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie?  While usually one talks about stars vs character actors, sometimes a film demands a character star, and both Mortensen and Bello are great examples of this intermediary category.

Sometimes the star achieves the status of icon, which is often closely associated with the capacity to personify. Monroe represented female sexuality, just as John Wayne encapsulated rugged masculinity. Alain Delon may never have become as internationally famous as these two Americans, but this rests chiefly on Hollywood itself personifying the movie industry. Delon was French and, though he worked occasionally in American films, Once a Thief, Red Sun, and Scorpio, they did nothing for his status. His iconography may be synonymous with beauty, but that didn’t mean he could be deracinated and his iconic French aspect still hold. Yet within the European context, and between Plein Soleil and La Piscine, and including The Leopard, The Eclipse, Le Samurai, Delon, like Bridget Bardot, and to a lesser but important degree Marcello Mastroianni, and Claudia Cardinale, made 1960s Europe at least as glamorous as Hollywood, perhaps more so. By the time of La Piscine in 1969, Delon was so established he could play both a version of himself and the icon he had become. Or perhaps a perversion of himself, since during the filming, Delon’s friend and stand-in, Stefan Markovic, was found murdered, and while Delon was never directly linked to the affair, he was friends with the man who was held in custody for a year over the killing. By the time La Piscine came out, the scandal would have been constantly in the press, and there we have, in the initial stages, a bronzed and fit Delon around the pool, with his top off, and later in the film looking haunted and drawn as he tries to cover up a murder within the story. In an echo of the earlier Plein soleil, he murders a man with whom he can’t quite compete, and the role is played once again by Maurice Ronet. If art looked like it was imitating life, it was also art imitating art, and though La Piscine is a very average film directed by Jacques Deray (and that would surely have been a better one if by that master of bourgeois psychological intrigue, Claude Chabrol), it is fascinating as a study in both actor and character. Delon might have wished to avoid the parallels with his life when it came to the Markovic Affair, even if he actively invoked others in the casting of the film. He insisted Romy Schneider star opposite him as the woman who was once seeing Ronet and whom she might respect and admire more than her present partner. Yet while it is Delon playing her present partner in the film, he was her ex-lover in life, and many watching La Piscine at the time would have known about the stars’ earlier affair, a relationship that was still deemed worthy of coverage in 2024, just after Delon’s death. British Vogue chronicles it well, and the terrible tragedies later in Schneider’s life short life; she died at 43. Yet while Delon would have known that he was invoking their own love affair in casting Schneider, it was the murderous aspect of the film, and not the love element, that became central to the press around it.

This might seem like gossip, and in some ways it is, but unlike cameramen or editors, the personal lives of actors have often been a feature of the production. While a director might wish to hire an editor or cameraman they won’t be employing them because of their public profile, but because of their professional craft. Stardom is the combination of that profile with craft, and while we might wonder whether we should know about the details of a star’s personal life, that we do is partly what separates them from the very thing that might one day replace them. In the Vogue piece, we hear about Delon’s childhood in foster homes, his early work in a butcher’s shop. The article tells us how Delon finished with Schneider and married the pregnant Nathalie Barthelemy. We hear of Schneider’s husband’s suicide and the terrible death of her son. This is gossip indeed, but it is also the tissue of life, and will it be replaced by the antiseptically algorithmic, with the personal substituted by impersonal production, one where a star’s childhood wasn’t in a school, but on an assembly line, and in data capture. We might then need a new word for stardom, as they will be neither Gods, nor humans.

 

© Tony McKibbin

Tony McKibbin

Studies in Film Stardom

If the star is exceptional, that needn’t mean they are Gods. They must be seen as different from the average person, but also capable of representing qualities that the viewer can comprehend as close to their own. This is the paradox of the star: they are different, yet the same. They may be better looking, more charismatic or charming than the person paying to watch them on screen, but they also have to be capable of representing problems that aren’t too removed from the viewer’s own.

Obviously, stars represent individuating traits that make them very distinct, even if they also must possess a quality that makes them alike enough to be called a star at all. Dustin Hoffman and Clint Eastwood have almost nothing in common, even if they have both played characters who can do what a man has gotta do. But while this is characteristic of Eastwood’s persona, it is an anomalous dimension to Hoffman’s. When Eastwood comes to town in urban or western environments, from Coogan’s Bluff to High Plains Drifter, the locals fret; when Hoffman does so in Straw Dogs, the response is closer to ridicule. Yet Hoffman will defend his wife and his honour no less than Eastwood might, even if it is based on casting against type, as we are a little surprised at the ferocity Hoffman can offer. Paul Newman and Steve McQueen may be capable of playing hard men far more readily than Hoffman, but this isn’t central to their persona, just as Bronson moves even further along the aggressive spectrum than Eastwood, who may have been a bigger star than Bronson because he could modulate a little more within the macho image.

This indicates that though actors may be synonymous with a certain type (the hard man, the weakling, the dizzy blonde, the go-getter, the manipulator, the self-sacrificer and so on), if they fall too readily into the type, they risk both stereotyping themselves and alienating the viewer. One doesn’t identify with their predicament; we find their exaggeration of a given quality a source of humour.  If Bronson had been in Straw Dogs, the film’s plot would have been over in twenty-five minutes, and he would probably have moved on to other villages to escalate the killing spree. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s work increasingly absorbed comedy into the mayhem, well aware that his characters had almost nothing in common with the audience, but that this became the humorous point, evident too in some of Sylvester Stallone’s films. While one could empathise with the mundane realities of Rocky Balboa and Rambo in the first films, the sequels created what we could call constructive alienation. It wasn’t identification the films insisted upon, but a brutalised escalation that left viewers in a numbers game: how many baddies will Stallone take out? Stallone, while narrowing his range, extended his brand, and this might risk a contradiction: that stars could become stereotypes without losing their superstardom. That is perhaps true, but they couldn’t quite hold onto their humanity. When Stallone decided to return to it in a film like Cop Land, he was cast against type. Had he followed the trajectory of the first Rocky, he wouldn’t have been. In Rocky and Cop Land he was humanly identifiable; in many others he was a cartoon that could only be taken seriously within the diegesis: by characters aware of his brutality. Viewers were more aware of the exaggeration, and chuckled along lightly.

One way of looking at this is to imagine a star reproduced in computer- generated form. Whose persona would be easier to turn into a CGI, AI movie – Dustin Hoffman or Arnold Schwarzenneger? Lance Elliot noted, “AI is getting so good at devising human-like video actors that it is nearly impossible to discern whether the movie screen contains real actors or fake actors. Thus, anxious debates are taking place about requiring a kind of special tax on machine-produced “actors” so that the costs of employing AI will be equal to the cost of using living, breathing human actors.” (Forbes) That may be so, but who would doubt that Schwarzenegger would be easier to replicate than Hoffman, that Predator would be an AI reboot long before The Graduate or Midnight Cowboy?

Yet rather than fretting too much over what the future might bring, we can use it as no more than a conceit to contain what the star has been over most of cinema’s history. A star is a human being who embed themselves within certain characters, and that makes stardom neither quite the person they are nor necessarily the character they play. They offer a liminal figure that becomes their persona. When George Clooney plays a character, they are usually Clooneyesque, a place somewhere between the man he is and the person he depicts. While the recent Jay Kelly might seem more autobiographical than most, as he plays an actor long in demand and hugely successful, whether in Out of Sight, Up in the Air, Ocean’s Eleven or a Nespresso advert, Clooney would still seem to be playing a variation of himself.

Put another actor in any of these roles, and the character would likely change, or at the very least our perception of it. This is usually less true for character actors but, like all actors, they are embodied beings with key characteristics that are hard to change: the grain of the voice, the height, the eyes, the smile. Most of them can be changed, as we see when well-known actors play characters like John Merrick in The Elephant Man, Eric Stoltz in Mask, De Niro in Raging Bull and Charlize Theron in Monster. Yet these actors are still cast in the role, suggesting that rather than using an unknown who would be indistinguishable from the character they play, because they bring no extra notion of themselves to the part, the actor very much does. When a critic says an actor is unrecognisable in the role, that isn’t quite true. Like the art of mimicry, the point lies in the gap between one person and another. This can be reduced merely to the virtuoso: that an actor can do accents, adopt a walk, lose or put on weight, master facial and bodily gestures. Yet if it is about more than admiration, it rests partly on the inhabiting of another self, and the viewer’s empathic comprehension of that double embodiment. The actor devotes themselves, sometimes over many months, to create the existence of a character other than themselves, and the viewer for a couple of hours shares in that experience.

One might insist that this would be true of any actor playing a role, and a non-professional might just as easily play the part. But often the non-professional plays a role like their own life, all the better so that they don’t have to create a character, but exist more or less as themselves, with the film shaped around them. Bicycle Thieves, Kes, and Accattone have great performances, but when the actors tried to replicate them in other roles, they didn’t have the same force. A star, on the other hand, might often seem less authentic than the non-professional, and thus better able to show within this relative inauthenticity a far greater range. This range will still usually be quite narrow, but this is partly because a star is a brand and must remain distinguishable from the brands around them. The McQueen brand might have crossed over with the Newman one, the Eastwood with the Bronson, Jane Fonda’s with Ellen Burstyn’s. (Eastwood was offered the role in Death Wish first; Fonda turned down the part of Chris in The Exorcist.) But they were distinguishable, even when they were competitive: “Newman was the A-list actor when it came to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, but McQueen wasn't ready to acknowledge that fact when it came down to negotiations. He wanted top billing and the same number of lines.” (Slash)

But looking at four clips from various actors’ work, we will try to bring out this distinguishable quality, and see in it the reason why thespian obsolescence would be a great loss, changing the nature of what cinema has been over its relatively short history. Audrey Hepburn may seem an icon equal to Marilyn Monroe now, but she was less of a profit-making figure in the 1950s than Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, Doris Day, and Elizabeth Kerr. According to Ultimate Movie Rankings, she comes in at 120. (Deborah Kerr at number 11 comes in ahead of Monroe, Taylor and Day).  Yet Hepburn conveyed an image perhaps stronger than any woman in 1950s cinema, which lay partly in the singularity of her persona and the cut of her clothing. In Vogue, Cecil Beaton reckoned Hepburn was the “public embodiment of our new feminine ideal", and that “Nobody ever looked like her before World War II .” She was neither a siren, nor a vamp, nor a femme fatale, and could play innocence easily, even when guilt might be assumed. Take the plot of Sabrina. Hepburn is the eponymous character who, at the beginning of the film, looks yearningly at William Holden’s rich playboy, David Larrabee. Her father is the family chauffeur, and Sabrina isn’t so much ignored as unnoticed. But when she returns from a lengthy trip to Paris and returns, waiting at the train station, Larrabee roars past in his car, reverses back, picks her up and wonders who she is. She is now a sophisticated woman, with a little dog and clothes designed by famous costume designer Edith Head, with a Givenchy inflection. David now pursues Sabrina, though he is to marry someone else, which is important for the family business, as this will result in a major merger. With David having second thoughts about the wedding, his brother Linus (Humphrey Bogart) manipulates the situation so that he can keep Sabrina and David apart, all the while falling in love with Sabrina himself. In turn, David realises what is going on, accepts that he should marry the woman he promised, keep the company afloat, and that Linus should be with Sabrina. As Sabrina moves from one rich brother to the next, nothing in the film indicates she is a gold digger, and thus far away from the siren, the vamp or the femme fatale.

In different ways, Doris Day and Marilyn Monroe could appear innocent too. Doris Day was innocent of sexuality itself, while Monroe could seem naive about the effect she would have on men, without at all being unaware of her sexual appeal: an ambivalence that might be central to her success. (The vamp etc. knew exactly their allure, and calibrated it into plot execution.) Yet we could still imagine that Monroe would want to marry into wealth, well aware that ‘Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend’, and that she could easily play a lead role in a film called How to Marry a Millionaire, even if the machinations of the plot suggest that love trumps greed or financial security.

Interestingly, Bogart wanted his own wife Lauren Bacall for the Sabrina role, and when “asked how he liked working with Hepburn, Bogart replied: ‘It's OK, if you don't mind to make 20 takes.’” (ClassicMovieHub) Whatever Hepburn’s perceived inexperience, the more established Bacall would have been miscast. Bacall always seemed wise to the world in films like To Have and Have Not, The Big Sleep, and Dark Passage, while Hepburn, never a comic actor, nevertheless shared with the comedian the ability to be blind to circumstances. In Sabrina, the connivances and contrivances are beyond her, and thus beneath her. She manipulates nothing and is simply seeking love. A cynic might propose that moving from loving one rich brother to another doesn’t suggest romantic inclinations, but financial pragmatism, even cynicism. Yet this isn’t how Hepburn plays it, even if near the end of the film economics comes into the work. She is now over David, but in love with Linus. However, she will marry neither, as she prepares to go to Paris once again, after turning down Linus’s attempt to give her cash after the whole messy affair. She is in the car with her father, and they discuss how the way the world works. “There is the front seat and the back seat, and a window in between.” Her father adds, “It wouldn’t have worked out, really, darling. The papers and everybody else would have said how fine and democratic for a Larrabee to marry a chauffeur’s daughter. But would they have praised the chauffeur’s daughter? Democracy can be a wickedly unfair thing, Sabrina. Nobody poor was ever called democratic for marrying somebody rich.” Central to the father’s claim is that nobody would take seriously the notion that a poor woman would be marrying into wealth for love. But if anybody can prove democracy has it wrong, it will be Sabrina. Director Billy Wilder films the scene in one take, from a frontal angle as the father offers wisdom, while practising his profession: driving. It gives to his words a gravity they might not quite have had if he were walking or seated in a room. The impression is generally right but specifically wrong, as Sabrina will indeed be with Linus.

What we have made clear is that in star power,  the actor possesses qualities that must be embodied and embedded in the narrative, but are nevertheless clearly attributes of the person themselves. When we watch Hepburn, what are we watching and listening to beyond the story the film is telling? We watch how she moves through space, how the clothing fits her light frame, and listen to the texture of a voice that is soothing yet precise. If we wish to claim that the 1950s and the 1960s were the greatest decades for screen stardom, it might rest partly on the way stars would move through the frame in medium shot, the richness of the colour during this period, and also the relative social mobility that needn’t leave stars too impossibly out of reach. Tackling the last of these first, many stars of the era came from modest backgrounds (though not Hepburn): Michael Caine, Sean Connery, Alain Delon, and Steve McQueen were all from impoverished or broken childhoods. So too were Marilyn Monroe, Sophia Loren and Claudia Cardinale. Others were from comfortable families, but far from the nepo-baby culture that many now decry. Acting was an upwardly mobile profession, consistent with the post-war prosperity boom and redistribution principles that allowed many from poorer backgrounds to become, if not wealthy, at least relatively prosperous. Vittorio Trevitt noted “the average Briton witnessed a substantial growth in their real earnings, which went up by an estimated 50% from 1951 to 1964, and would continue to climb until the end of the 1960s.” (History is Now) Marc Levinson says, “The quarter-century before then, starting around 1948, saw the most remarkable period of economic growth in human history. In the Golden Age between the end of the Second World War and 1973, people in what was then known as the ‘industrialised world’ – Western Europe, North America, and Japan – saw their living standards improve year after year.” (Aeon)

Most classical movie stars, most of the time, were filmed in black and white, including Ingrid Bergman in Gaslight and Casablanca, Gary Cooper in Meet John Doe and The Fountainhead, Marlene Dietrich in Blonde Venus, and The Scarlet Empress. Greta Garbo never made a film in colour. There were exceptions: Clark Gable and Vivian Leigh in Gone with the Wind, and Errol Flynn in The Adventures of Robin Hood (and Olivia de Havilland in both). But actors couldn’t expect to be filmed in colour until well into the 1950s. If someone had red hair or blue eyes, black hair and green eyes, earlier films couldn’t quite bring out these qualities. To describe someone as strawberry blonde, as Robert Reford so often was, only makes sense in a cinema of colour. Elizabeth Taylor and Paul Newman may have worked often in black and white, but it took colour to bring out these two actors’ famous eyes, and added enormously to the appeal of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

But whether in colour or black and white, part of cinema’s appeal is watching people move with gracefulness through screen space. This is surely a central feature of the musical, but it is there in many other films during the 1950s and 1960s when screen space was opened up partly by widescreen, partly by the sort of longer takes critics such as Andre Bazin promoted, which he emphasised over editing. David Bordwell sees that more recent cinema is often quite different. Speaking of the Bourne films and others, he says, “directors nowadays tell us that they are in search of energy, a moment-by-moment spiking of audience interest. You can get it through fast cutting, arcing camera movements, sudden frame-entrances, the nervousness of the handheld shot, or all of the above.” (Minding Movies)

Barefoot in the Park may be a minor film, but from the perspective of stardom, the use of colour, the burgeoning wealth in the US at the time, and its consideration of screen space, it can prove useful. Redford plays a lawyer on his way up, but not there yet, and Jane Fonda, his wife, accepting they need to rough it a bit before the serious money comes in. They take a Greenwich Village apartment that Corie (Fonda) may think has character, but that Paul finds distasteful. When he first occupies it, we see the contrast between the bare, run-down space and Paul’s attire: an elegant black coat, black shoes, and a grey scarf. He is also wearing a watch that might not be cheap. However, more importantly in this adaptation of Neil Simon’s play, director Gene Saks respects the type of mise en scene that is unavoidable in theatre, but can serve a subtly different purpose in cinema. On the stage, the actor is always roughly the same distance from the audience. Sure, the actor will move around the stage, creating a slightly greater or lesser proximity, and, at a stretch, an audience member could leave their seat and get closer or further away. But this proximity is generally fixed, while in cinema our perceptual distance from the actor is constantly changing. What many films of the period insisted upon, however, in contrast to the contemporary films Bordwell discusses, is being able to watch actors move through screen space, and to take in planes of perception. In one shot, Paul takes a phone call in the foreground on the right-hand side of the frame; Corie is in the background on the left-hand side. He is discussing a court case; she has other ideas on her mind as she looks lasciviously at her new husband.

We needn’t pretend the film is a masterclass in long take cinema; not even remotely. Nevertheless, it does give two actors, who went on to become the biggest stars of the 1970s (as Fonda showed she was so much more than a nepo baby), an opportunity to illustrate their appeal, without reducing that appeal simply to the close-up. Whether it is Fonda jumping out of bed in a terribly cold room, later running down New York streets, or Redford drunk, walking barefoot in the park of the title, we aren’t only watching actors’ faces, but their general body language as well. Unlike a model, who must work within a narrow register of expressions and movements, the actor gets to express far more of their personality, if we accept personality as a reflection of broad expressions and movements. Models get to pose, but while actors might often do so as well, the actor also gets to express anger, grief, happiness, and desire. The range of their feelings is translated into the range of their facial and bodily expressions. In a film like Barefoot in the Park, these emotions might be performatively expressed and far from the interior Method acting of Marlon Brando (with whom both Fonda and Redford acted alongside the previous year in The Chase). But they do offer a large range of gestures next to a model. Yet Bordwell notices that many contemporary films no longer offer that range, less because the actors are incapable of expressing it, than because directors carve up the mise en scene so that we can no longer see it. We can watch Barefoot in the Park and see the actors perform their roles in full-bodied performances: in acting that shows the body from tip to toe.

Viggo Mortensen was never a huge star, and his popularity rests probably more on appearing in Lord of the Rings than a more general, long-lasting celebrity. To become a superstar, an actor needs to transcend a role or become iconically linked with it, and extend their persona over several characters that have large-box-office appeal, or play a series of characters that reflect that persona. Clint Eastwood created two, in The Man with No Name and Dirty Harry, but augmented them with numerous parts as cops and cowboys elsewhere. Ditto, to a less distinguished degree, Sylvester Stallone, with Rocky and Rambo, and then numerous roles that seemed like variations on these two characters. Tom Cruise may have been Maverick and Nathan Hunt, but his stardom rests less on these two characters (finally less iconic than Eastwood’s or Stallone’s) than on a general body of work that makes Maverick and Nathan consistent with them: the go-getter on a mission.  Cruise became a huge star in his twenties, and was only 21 in Risky Business and 24 in Top Gun. Mortensen was over thirty when he landed leading roles in The Reflecting Skin and The Indian Runner, and neither were star-making, even if the latter carried a danger rare in American leading roles. Covered in tattoos at a time when they represented danger rather than paraded cool, he is the errant brother only a mother could love, and a sibling would resent. A man constantly in trouble and with a vicious streak, this is supporting-role territory. Yet it helped make Mortensen a well-known name, though not quite a leading man, as he took secondary parts in Crimson Tide, Portrait of a Lady and A Perfect Murder. Lord of the Rings made him a star, but it was as though Mortensen was always going to be a reluctant one, far more so than Redford, who was again and again in obituaries referred to as a star despite himself, with Brooks Barnes noting, “Mr Redford created the image of a reluctant star.” (New York Times) Mortensen was more the cautious character actor who wished for leading roles but always sought to retain an element of hiding within the character over insisting on star status. He could have capitalised on playing Aragorn in Lord of the Rings when offered a role in The Hobbit. “Before they started shooting, back in 2008, one of the producers did ask if I would be interested. I said, 'You do know, don't you, that Aragorn isn't in The Hobbit? That there is a 60-year gap between the books?'" (Guardian)

To understand Mortensen’s modest stardom, then, perhaps Eastern Promises and especially A History of Violence encapsulate the heroic elements of The Lord of the Rings, with the destructive qualities of The Indian Runner. Both are roles containing hidden identities, with Mortensen in Eastern Promises ostensibly involved in a Russian gang but actually an undercover operative. In A History of Violence, he plays family man, Tom Stall, who takes out a couple of thugs that come into his diner. Feted as a local hero, we discover later that he turned his life around when he met and married a lawyer, played by Maria Bello. Before that, he was the violent Joey from Philadelphia. Many an actor could convincingly play the good dad, and many others the cruel hard man, but Mortensen plays both, and is equally convincing.

Hollywood doesn’t often do marriage very well, and far more films are about the move towards wedded bliss than its domestic realisation. It is also why there is very little marital sex in cinema, with A History of Violence alongside Don’t Look Now as conspicuous exceptions. Think of all the actors who don’t do domesticity, including some we have already named: Eastwood and Cruise, as well as Warren Beatty and Jack Nicholson. Rocky Balboa may have a long-term marriage with Adrian, but she is usually there as an emotional punching bag, even saying in Rocky V, “all those beatings you took in the ring I took them with you.” Think of how many films hinge on a family member’s kidnapping, from Commando to Taken, from Ransom to Prisoners, as if people are more likely to have someone in their family seized, than possess a regular home life. A History of Violence might finally be an action film, as Mortensen needs to go back to Philadelphia from his home in Indiana. But it is also an examination of family life, and the notion that a woman needs to know the nature of the man she has married. It is, if you like a remarriage drama, a variation on what the philosopher Stanley Cavell called comedies of remarriage, with couples in classic Hollywood realising that they needed a second bite of the cherry to see they couldn’t really part, with His Girl Friday exemplary.

It is also why the film is a two-hander, with Bello’s role far from the long-suffering Adrian. Edie only half-knows the man she has married: the one she is with hasn’t made her suffer at all. But this is Tom, not Joey from Philadelphia. As Stall, he is the kind family man with a local business, an imaginative lover, and a much-liked figure in the community. As Joey, he is a violent thug and liar who has married his wife under false pretences. Stall wants to convince Edie that this is the man he is, but she has now to incorporate the man that he was, and still on occasion be when the moment demands it. Whether taking out the men who come into the diner, or a henchman in the family’s garden, Edie now knows her husband is someone capable of extreme violence. Can she stay married to such a man?

If the comedies of remarriage tap into relationships that require reinvigoration or a rethink, in A History of Violence, that rethink is fundamental: can she fall in love all over again with a man she knows now can lie and kill, and would this be dereliction of duty given the kids, or an awareness of nuance that people are complex beings? We might even wonder if part of what has made their marriage so good, and the sex still active, is that they know they contain selves within themselves. This is illustrated early on when Edie puts on some cheerleader gear and plays the role before they make love. When they have sex again, it is after she slaps him, and he grabs her by the throat. “Get off me… Joey”, she says, before they have aggressive sex on the stairs.

Yet central to the film’s success is the casting: attractive actors no longer young, but very far from being old, who wouldn’t quite be described as stars, yet who have the power of charisma without the narcissism of celebrity. Mortensen and Bello are plausible as a domestic couple, as Fonda and Redford are not in Barefoot in the Park. The latter are performing a couple, and while this partly lies in the film’s origins as a play, we watch as if viewing actors in the process of becoming famous. In A History of Violence, we don’t doubt the film wouldn’t have worked with unknowns, but would it have worked so well with George Clooney and Julia Roberts, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie?  While usually one talks about stars vs character actors, sometimes a film demands a character star, and both Mortensen and Bello are great examples of this intermediary category.

Sometimes the star achieves the status of icon, which is often closely associated with the capacity to personify. Monroe represented female sexuality, just as John Wayne encapsulated rugged masculinity. Alain Delon may never have become as internationally famous as these two Americans, but this rests chiefly on Hollywood itself personifying the movie industry. Delon was French and, though he worked occasionally in American films, Once a Thief, Red Sun, and Scorpio, they did nothing for his status. His iconography may be synonymous with beauty, but that didn’t mean he could be deracinated and his iconic French aspect still hold. Yet within the European context, and between Plein Soleil and La Piscine, and including The Leopard, The Eclipse, Le Samurai, Delon, like Bridget Bardot, and to a lesser but important degree Marcello Mastroianni, and Claudia Cardinale, made 1960s Europe at least as glamorous as Hollywood, perhaps more so. By the time of La Piscine in 1969, Delon was so established he could play both a version of himself and the icon he had become. Or perhaps a perversion of himself, since during the filming, Delon’s friend and stand-in, Stefan Markovic, was found murdered, and while Delon was never directly linked to the affair, he was friends with the man who was held in custody for a year over the killing. By the time La Piscine came out, the scandal would have been constantly in the press, and there we have, in the initial stages, a bronzed and fit Delon around the pool, with his top off, and later in the film looking haunted and drawn as he tries to cover up a murder within the story. In an echo of the earlier Plein soleil, he murders a man with whom he can’t quite compete, and the role is played once again by Maurice Ronet. If art looked like it was imitating life, it was also art imitating art, and though La Piscine is a very average film directed by Jacques Deray (and that would surely have been a better one if by that master of bourgeois psychological intrigue, Claude Chabrol), it is fascinating as a study in both actor and character. Delon might have wished to avoid the parallels with his life when it came to the Markovic Affair, even if he actively invoked others in the casting of the film. He insisted Romy Schneider star opposite him as the woman who was once seeing Ronet and whom she might respect and admire more than her present partner. Yet while it is Delon playing her present partner in the film, he was her ex-lover in life, and many watching La Piscine at the time would have known about the stars’ earlier affair, a relationship that was still deemed worthy of coverage in 2024, just after Delon’s death. British Vogue chronicles it well, and the terrible tragedies later in Schneider’s life short life; she died at 43. Yet while Delon would have known that he was invoking their own love affair in casting Schneider, it was the murderous aspect of the film, and not the love element, that became central to the press around it.

This might seem like gossip, and in some ways it is, but unlike cameramen or editors, the personal lives of actors have often been a feature of the production. While a director might wish to hire an editor or cameraman they won’t be employing them because of their public profile, but because of their professional craft. Stardom is the combination of that profile with craft, and while we might wonder whether we should know about the details of a star’s personal life, that we do is partly what separates them from the very thing that might one day replace them. In the Vogue piece, we hear about Delon’s childhood in foster homes, his early work in a butcher’s shop. The article tells us how Delon finished with Schneider and married the pregnant Nathalie Barthelemy. We hear of Schneider’s husband’s suicide and the terrible death of her son. This is gossip indeed, but it is also the tissue of life, and will it be replaced by the antiseptically algorithmic, with the personal substituted by impersonal production, one where a star’s childhood wasn’t in a school, but on an assembly line, and in data capture. We might then need a new word for stardom, as they will be neither Gods, nor humans.

 


© Tony McKibbin