(This is probably the most trivial topic for a thread I’ve ever come up with.)
Determining the height actors, actresses, athletes, and other public figures from how they look on TV or in the movies can be a tricky game. Camera angles, shoe heels, how someone carries himself or herself, the type of roles a person plays, and (especially in the case of basketball players) the relative height of the other people around someone can give a deceptive picture of someone’s height. For example, while recently browsing the IMDB, I came across the entry for Julie Christie and discovered she was only 5’2" (which surprised me since I always thought she was around 5’7"). Another time, I found I completely misjudged the height of Katie Holmes by assuming she was about 5’3" when in fact she’s 5’9". So what famous person have you found was shorter or taller than he or she seemed?
I keep getting conflicting reports on Arnold Schwarzenegger’s height. All the official stuff seems to say he’s 6’2. However, my dad (who is about 5’10") claims that he stood next to Arnold in an elevator and was taller than him. Everything I’ve read indicates that he wears huge lifts.
The first time I saw The Hudsucker Proxy there is a scene where Tim Robbins is talking to Paul Newman, and there’s a single shot where it pulls wide, showing how tall Tim Robbins is, an how short Paul Newman is, making the balance of power look completely off-kilter.
I’d always thought of them both as being averagely tall, as most male actors are. It surprised me to see I was wrong in my assumption.
Tom Cruise’s height (5’7") never registered until one of my friends mentioned it. Now I can’t see him in a movie without thinking about how they must have carefully framed shots to make him look more imposing, and carefully chosen his co-stars so he doesn’t look diminuitive.
On a similar note, when I first visited the Rock 'n Roll Hall of Fame, I was struck by how small all the life-size mannequins were. Many of my idols (which of course in my mind were larger-than-life) seemed disappointingly average.
I saw a recent interview with Barbara Feldon (swoon), and she said that although she enjoyed making Get Smart, one thing she really hated was that she was told to slouch a little whenever she was in the same shot as Don Adams, so he would appear taller than he is.
And yes, Tom Cruise is a short little berk. I saw him in the street with Nicole Kidman. They looked odd together.
He was barely 5’8" and Ingrid Bergman was at least 5’10", so Casablanca was all about shoe lifts and camera angles and maybe the occasional step-stool.
Fascinating topic! For a few weeks about 30 years ago I did some volunteer work at the public library in Nashville reading magazine articles aloud onto tapes that blind people could call up on some special radios that were available to them.
Among the articles I read, one called “The Height Report” was on this very topic. It went into all sorts of psycho-babble about why we associate Height with Right and why the good guy is always imagined (until seen to be otherwise) to be tall and the bad guy short (or at most average height). Along the same lines as white hats and black hats.
Seen through this prism it stressed how we are somewhat startled when we find some public figure that we perceive as upright and noble turns out to be short of stature, and why those we see as evil or at least up to no good turn out to be tall.
They even had a couple of lists of those who are taller than we perceive and those who are shorter than we perceive.
Along these same lines, I know I’ve seen at least one website where you can compare you own height to that of public figures. Sort of a guessing game type thing. The results are usually a bit of a surprise.
I’ll try to locate the link if some of you don’t beat me to it.
But Walloon has already raised an important issue: the source for the cited heights. I’ve read (I don’t recall the source ) that Hollywood usually jacks up the reported height of shortish actors and trims an inch or two off tallish actresses, in their press releases. A case in point was James Dean, whose height was variously reported as 5’ 10" (give or take a few inches) but whose biographies had him as considerably shorter.
It’s become a cliche to hear, “I met such-and-such celebrity, and wow, he was really shorter than I expected.”
Among the few people I’ve heard the opposite about are:
Bill Clinton. No, he’s not a giant, but he seems to be around 6’2," and many people who’ve met him expected him to be smaller.
Michael Crichton. He’s famous, but doesn’t appear on TV often. When people meet him, they find he’s tall enough to be an NBA center (okay, make that power forward).
Okay. Don’t ask me how I ever found this site or why I would have run across it in the first place. Unless it’s not unique and is just a copy of stuff from some other site. I give that decent odds.
I was going to mention this. Freddie Mercury’s outfits (there were two, I seem to recall) were downright tiny on the mannequins. I think I was taller at fourteen. The Queen Online website says he was 5’9" but I have my doubts.
Seems my view of Hollywood is skewed upward about three inches. I figured all the shorter women were about 5’4" and judged their costars accordingly. Apparently, most of them are 5’0" to 5’1" so the women and men I thought towered over them are only 5’7".
I’m most surprised about Jerry Lewis, William Shatner, Jack Nicholson, and Simon Cowell - I thought they were all six-footers. I’m surprised that David Spade is as tall as 5’9" and that Sean Hayes isn’t a little guy.
) that Hollywood usually jacks up the reported height of shortish actors and trims an inch or two off tallish actresses, in their press releases. A case in point was James Dean, whose height was variously reported as 5’ 10" (give or take a few inches) but whose biographies had him as considerably shorter.