Being a nerdish type in high-school, I’ve hung around in all the nerdy circles through HS and college (again, my college being a nerd-ville) and I can’t even COUNT the number of comp-sci or mathy-type girls who needed contacts, a haircut, and one flattering piece of clothing to make them look 1000% more attractive. It wasn’t that they weren’t attractive, it was that they had the most unflattering clothing, haircuts, and accessories, and didn’t know/care enough about fashion or style to make themselves look better.
In fact, one of these girls is one of my best friends. I bought her a book on makeup and a book on fashion for christmas.
Hasn’t anyone ever seen the “what not to wear” show? Those people routinely go through amazing transformations, without any plastic surgery, not from bad to beautiful, as in hollywood, but from below-average or average to definitely above-average.
So, IMHO, deciding to take an interest in your appearance, dressing well and getting a flattering haircut, can turn an average girl to quite a looker. I think that’s more what these shows are going for, not necessarily the transformation from physically-ugly to physically-beautiful.
I don’t think it matters what the actress really looks like as long as the story is good and she can act. If an actress is good enough, she can portray ugly. Nia Vardalos was pretty convincingly ugly in My Big Fat Greek Wedding and Charlize Theron goes to show that a person can ACT just as ugly as her abilities will let her no matter what looks she was born with. She’s All That was probably a shitty movie with a dumb script. I always had the impression that it was more about the guy’s transformation from utter asshole to apologetic asshole.
I think Ugly Betty is dressed up as ugly and doesn’t just look like some hot girl in glasses, but at the same time it’s hard for her to look truly ugly when she’s always smiling and appealing in her personality. It can be hard to find someone convincingly ugly when they have a nice personality and big smile. In real life I think she’s pretty but I do think her prettiness is obscured well enough in her costume for the show to respectably be called “Ugly Betty.”
That’s something I love about Grey’s. It’s lovely.
I think America Ferrera was a great choice for the role, and handpicked by Salma Hayek from what I’ve read and seen. She’s certainly not ugly, but she’s not really Hollywood either. She just looks like a normal woman, and that’s a good thing compared to all the other actresses her age.
Or, hey, what if everyone - absolutely everyone - was actually exactly as they appeared? So, you know, the beautiful girls were invariably lovely people; the ugly ones were bitches?
It’d be interesting then to see if the guys who habitually go for beautiful-but-psycho girls were actually attracted to the beauty … or the psycho? :eek:
It’d make an interesting short-story premise, though I don’t know if you could get a movie out of it.
A counter example to that is Toni Collett in Muriel’s Wedding. She looked very much the part of “ugly girl” in that. Overweight and bad teeth. All her own.
Granted in wasn’t a Hollywood film (Aussie).
While having lost some weight she also looked pretty awful in About a Boy.
I came in to make the same point. She was called “the fat girl” by her boss, and her friend at the office even mentioned how hard it would be to find anything that would fit her in the samples closet (the character was a size 6), but no one ever called her ugly.
Read Victorian literature. They believed in that stereotype; that virtue would bring beauty, and sin ugliness. One of the best examples of this was the stunted, ugly Hyde in the Jeckyl and Hyde story. Another good example is the Portrait of Dorian Grey. While a -tad- over-preachy, it’s all about the sins of Dorian making the picture uglier and uglier.
I was talking about her role in The Princess Diaries (a textbook example of the “nobody knows I’m pretty because I have frizzy hair and glasses” phenomenon).
But how many people do you honestly know in real life that are that unattractive? That are ugly? I see hundreds of people a day, and I’d say that few of them are downright ugly, and many would be much better looking if they had the time and money to focus on thier looks (like most successful actors do). You only need to look for pictures of famous people without makeup to divorce yourself from the notion that all of them are uncommonly good looking right now. Do you think George Clooney or Angelina Jolie would look the way they do if they had a 9-5 job, kids, and limited resources and time? It’s just a matter of proirities, the familiarity we have with famous people, and the distortion created by fame. I’m sure you can go back and find high school pictures of many famous people that show how average looking they are. For example:
That and Circle of Friends bugged me, in that they hired a relatively thin woman and had her gain weight for the part. Surely there are heavier actresses out there; both women were relative unknowns so it’s not like the producers were going for a “name” in the role. The exception may have been America Ferrara in Real Women Have Curves, and she’s gone on to slim down as well.
I know quite a few people who are plain and certainly unfashionable. But I agree with you that a lot has to do with grooming and beauty rituals Hollywood folks do.
IIRC the “dog” in Dogfight was Lili Taylor- definitely no dog.
And Sissy Spacek is not hot by any means, but she has some scenes in the bizarre Lee Marvin flick Prime Cut (pre-Carrie) where she is pretty hot looking.
Katherine Heigl is hot as hell, but the rest are pretty much plain Janes. The show creator has said in interviews that she deliberately reversed the stereotype, with average women getting the spotlight and studly hunks being relegated to supporting roles.
What I find interesting is that many women who would be quick to decry average-guy-hot-chick casting seem to have no problem with Grey’s Anatomy average-chick-hot-guy casting. Stinks of hypocrisy to me.
Well, it’s only in ONE show, maybe that’s why no one has a problem with it. It’s the exception to the rule. I’m certain that the rest of the movies and shows will still have hot women with fat, average guys.
Sandra Oh is a plain Jane? Ellen Pompeo? Kate Walsh? Sara Ramirez? What? These women are all thin, gorgeous, and in no way average. I can’t believe anyone is saying this with a straight face.
