My God! She looks just like my daughter (now 17) in that clip! I swear, they could be near-identical twin sisters. :eek:
You’re conflating two skills here, in which it is perfectly possible to have wildly differing amounts of both trained competence and natural talent. You were trying to recognize a face you’re not familiar with in still photos taken many years apart. Quite doable, but some people are better at it than others. It’s similar to recognizing shared traits among the members of a family.
Your wife recognized someone from a low-def rendering of characteristic movements. Specific motions are often enough to ID someone, even if you can’t see their facial features very well. I have a friend whose eyesight is so appalling that when she was a little kid she thought trees really did look like the puffy things in coloring books; prior to glasses, she learned to recognize people at quite some distance by the way the colorful person-botch walked and stood.
There’s a neurological condition called prosopagnosia, in which the hard-wired ‘face recognition’ features of your brain fail to group features together into a coherent face and file it with the right kind of memories; depending on the degree, prosopagnostics might fail to recognize even family members. It’s especially miserable with actors, who change makeup, hair color, and (if they’re any good) body language for different roles. Oliver Sacks, the fellow behind Awakenings and The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat, has written about it from time to time – he’s fairly badly prosopagnostic, and also so absent-minded he’s been known to walk straight past his own apartment building on his way home, more than once.
Personally, there are a lot of people that I find more distinctive for their movements than anything else. I’ve been poking into very old films lately. Charlie Chaplin is almost unrecognizable out of makeup in still photographs, but I couldn’t possibly miss him on film, even if he’s been stuffed into a giant chicken suit.
The movie was released when she was 13, so she’s probably more like 11 there.
I didn’t mean it to just sound pervy, I meant it as in if you didn’t know any better she could pass for 16 or 17 in that clip. She was a classic beauty at a disconcertingly young age!
I’m 49 years old and all I think of when I see Natalie Portmann (at any age) is: how many crayons does she need to color with? 8, 16, 32, or the whole 64?
What does that even mean?
Is that some overly complicated and unfunny way of saying she looks like a child?
I’m guessing yes.
She has a degree from Harvard, is multi-lingual, has co-authored some decent papers, and even has Erdos number, fwiw. She also taught a course at Columbia as a guest lecturer.
But she *looks *young.
“Schwing” isn’t quite the right word, but she is definitely an elegant beauty, and has a lot of charm. When she smiles in that clip, her whole face lights up, and that’s engaging. She really captured the role in the film, too.
Besides being short and skinny and small chested?
I never really analyzed it. I didn’t realize she’s short. She just looks - I don’t know - doe-eyed, maybe? Big look of innocence or something.
Definitely not the boobs. Her figure is, of course, a standard upon which beauty might be measured.
She’s 5’3" (1.6 m). She’s 31 years old, so she’s still reasonably young.
Scanning imdb, here she is in Feb of this year.
And here she is at the Golden Globes this year.
So the question I guess is to Enuma Elish.
Very interesting comments, Arabella Flynn. And might help explain why I used to conflate Bruce Willis and Mickey Rourke: do they have similar demeanors?
Perhaps I’ll be called sexist but, despite the Willis-Rourke example, I usually identify males more easily than females. I often have trouble recognizing Nicole Kidman whose looks seem to vary greatly between films.
In the picture that produced the “schwing” she looks about 12 to me. A twelve year old dolled up a bit, but 12. She does not look 12 to me any more, but she is one of those people who didn’t change a lot in appearance while growing up.
I couldn’t say about Willis and Rourke; I can picture the first, but I don’t think I’ve seen enough of the second to compare. I can go look it up if you like. My blog is full of flotsam, but a lot of said flotsam has to do with psych profiling, a large part of which involves using “analyzing body language” as an excuse to go scour YouTube for endless footage of interesting people. 
I could give you a lot more examples of actors and actresses I have totally failed to recognize in something, because they’re so ridiculously good at changing the way they move from role to role.
It may be that you recognize men more readily than women because you happen to focus on things it’s easier to alter with makeup and costuming. It’s easier for women to change their apparent demeanor without having to change how they stand or move just because they have more options for clothes, hair, and makeup. Good actresses do both. For example, I would never have known it was Charlize Theron as Aileen Wuornos in “Monster” had I not seen her name on the credits – it’s a bit difficult to reconcile with, say, “Aeon Flux”.
The actors I find easiest to recognize are the ones that borrow heavily from their own native mannerisms as appropriate when they play various roles. Robert Downey Jr, David Tennant, Winona Ryder, Sigourney Weaver, and Angelina Jolie are some current names that spring to mind. Natalie Portman has had the same slightly wonky smile since she was a child, which makes her obvious. Nicole Kidman, from what I’ve seen, doesn’t really have a lot of distinctive gestures or even move much when she talks; I can see where she’d be difficult to pick out with different hair/wardrobe/accents.
Eh. I’m more impressed that I asked co-viewers of Underworld Awakening if they thought this actress looked like this one back when she was in this…and it turned out that she looked like her to me because that’s her mom 
Well, she did study and perform ballet and was a leading role in The Black Swan.
Saw that recently. Didn’t like it. It falls squarely into a genre I like to call “A human head!” stories.
[spoiler]I first began categorizing A human head! stories in the late 1980s, when watching a TV series called Freddy’s Nightmares, a horror anthology series based (loosely) on the Nightmare on Elm Street series. In a typical episode, a teenager would be walking along, minding his own business, when suddenly a van full of chainsaws would crash into him, it’s buzzing slicing cargo flying about madly, dicing flesh and bone in a heady red mist of atomized blood as he screams in terror… and then the kid would wake up. “Wow, what a crazy dream!” Get dressed, go downstairs, find his mom in the kitchen. “Good morning, Mom. What’s for breakfast?” "Good morning, son. Just the usual eggs, bacon, toast… and a human head!" The mother would pull a severed human head from the fridge, its eyes flaming red, tongue flapping, gore dripping from severed neck, the teenager screams in terror… and then he wakes up again in his bed. Rinse, repeat, five or six more times and the last “nightmare” is only “real” because the episode is over.
The main character in Black Swan has a whole series of gory experiences, all being shaken off as dreams or hallucinations until the end. It got to the stage where there was no point getting emotionally invested in (or even particularly shocked by) what was happening, because five minutes later, it could be demonstrated to not actually have happened.[/spoiler]