Did Hollywood become saturated with starlets a decade ago?

Cafe Society
1

Reading the thread about Kate vs. Diana popped a new question into my mind, one that I mentioned in that thread but will repeat here:

is it just me, or in the 2000s did we become overrun with late teens, early-twenties starlets who kind of all look the same? I am watching a tv miniseries from 1995 and the people in it look much more, like, well . . . real people. Or, compare the first season of ER, which contains actors who might actually look like people working in a hospital, to the last season, which was basically beautiful bombshells left and right.

Note that I think this has primarily been a change with regard to female actresses; I haven’t noticed a similar trend among men. What I have noticed among women is that it basically seems like on almost every tv show and movie featuring a youngish (teens to late twenties) character, the character is played by a very attractive, thin, young blond or brunette actress. They all seem to fit the same “mold” when it comes to appearance, although that mold is hard for me to define. Long hair, cute face, sharp features, high, well-defined cheekbones, small nose, large eyes. I would basically describe them as “sorority pretty,” although I’m realize that is a very vague definition.

For example, here is a picture of some big mid 80s actors: http://www.people.com/people/archive/article/0,,20127981,00.html

I would not consider any of those girls to be conventionally pretty. They all seem to have very quirky faces. Compare them with the girls here: Mean Girls - Wikipedia

(granted Mean Girls is supposed to be about “pretty girls” I think [haven’t seen it] but I just wanted to point out the “type” of girl I’m talking about)

Or compare Claire Danes in My-So-Called-Life with Claire Danes a few years later. It seems like she got very “prettied up,” if that makes sense.

So am I just interpreting all this through a lens of my own bias? Do the “mean girls” type girls have just as much variation in feature as the “brat pack” girls? Has the aesthetic of “hot” just changed? Were the brat pack girls considered super-hot in the 80s?

Also, I sort of think the 70s, 80s and 90s might have been a bit of an aberration in this regard, because when I watch movies from the 50s and 60s I think those women are also very attractive by 2000s standards.

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All of the actresses in that picture from Mean Girls have quirky faces. Lindsay Lohan is the most average looking of all of them. Amanda Seyfried has big bug eyes, Lacey Chabert has kind of a Bette Middler thing going on with her lower jaw, Rachel McAdams has kind of an elfish look; all are good-looking but very individual.

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Not sure about early-twenties starlets, if they were playing their age, but there definitely has been a rise in teen-playing-teen starlets.

My personal memory only goes back to the '80s, but it seems that in those days, there could be only one female teen star. There were other teen actresses, but lone stardom went from Brooke Shields to Molly Ringwald to Winona Ryder to Alicia Silverstone. And then I think Disney and Nickelodeon started skewing younger and producing more shows and movies, which gave rise to Melissa Joan Hart, Hilary Duff, Amanda Bynes, and later Miley Cyrus, and now the iCarly chick and some others…And at the same time, there also seemed to be more respect given to serious actresses who happened to be young, so they didn’t get the also-ran stigma that Ringwald’s contemporaries did.

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It’s weird. They look different, but it does seem harder to rememember what they look like. It’s more like they are trying to look the same even though they don’t.

And, of course, Lindsay (she’s removing the Lohan) does have a distinctively recognizable face.

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I agree with needscoffee, you picked the absolute worst movie to prove your point as all four of the main actresses (along with a fifth not pictured, Lizzy Caplan) are pretty distinct looking.

Beyond that, I’m not sure I agree with your argument at all. When I started thinking about it, I came up with around two dozen actresses who I consider quite distinct: Keira Knightley, Mill Jovovich, Emma Stone, Emma Watson, Emma Roberts, Scarlett Johannsen, Emily Blunt, Jenna Fischer, Zooey Deschanel, etc, etc, etc.

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So, the real question is this: is Hollywood saturated with starlets named Emma? :slight_smile: