Rik Mayall as Lord Flashheart in “Blackadder” count? 
Jennifer Coolidge – “Stifler’s Mom” of the American Pie series – is a handsome woman of a certain age, but she is not now and was not in 1999 by any means an ultiMILF like, say, Susan Sarandon or Michelle Pfeiffer or Cher (three names that pop into my mind in this connection because I happened to spot a DVD of The Witches of Eastwick on sale at a drugstore counter yesterday, and I’ll be in my bunk).
The ‘stud guy’ in “Queer As Folk” (american version). Only saw it a couple of times, so I don’t know his character name. But every time I saw it, all the other guys were constantly gushing about how unbelievably smoking hot he was, and the blonde twink was always drooling over him. I was flummoxed. If I passed him on the street I wouldn’t have bothered to look once, let alone twice.
Ditto.
Okay - I’m gonna get flamed for this but here goes: **Kathleen Turner ** in Body Heat. Yes her voice and bad girl charms are sexy, and yes it is hot to see naked people get all…well, hot, I guess - but the whole movie hinges on Hurt’s character being completely mesmerized by Kathleen Turner. Sorry - I think she is attractive, but not “throw the garbage can through the window to get to her” attractive.
Now if Angelina Jolie, to cite one example, was on the other side of the glass, I’d throw *Kathleen Turner * through the window to get to her… 
It was the same in the British version of Queer as Folk and a much-discussed point by people who watched it. Aiden Gillen isn’t bad by any stretch of the imagination, but he’s no hunk.
The one that always stands out for me is Alan Shore in Boston Legal, he’s not attractive physically or as a person. The icing on the cake was when he went on that beach holiday to get away from it all when he suffered from word salad and was in the pool area wearing a wool sweater! And yet he still managed to chat up an attractive woman. 
Oh, and Jonathan Frakes as Riker in ST:TNG. I mean yeah he was good for one series but quickly stepped on an oil patch and skidded into girdle territory very very quickly after that. Yet he seemed to be the resident stud on the ship: again,
Oh oh, and Baltar in BSG. He’s supposed to be this accomplished womaniser but the guy really isn’t all that.
Ellen Barkin’s IMDB bio describes her as “unconventionally pretty,” and she is indeed. But somebody more conventionally pretty should have been cast in some of her movies where she played the Object of Desire – e.g., Switch and The Big Easy.
Renee Zellweger is really no prettier than – in fact, pretty in much the same way as – Joey Lauren Adams (with whom I have sometimes confused her); yet for some reason she seems to land more of the pretty-girl roles. (I’d go with Renee, but I’d be thinking of Joey.)
I’ll not argue your point, and if Angelina had been around at the time, she would definitely have been offered the role before Kathleen. But if you’re surveying the casting from today’s vantage point, after seeing Kathleen’s sex appeal wane after all the less-than-hot things she’s done in the years afterward, you’re missing that in the day she was smokin’.
The same sort of thing must be said for Elizabeth Taylor. In the days of A Place in the Sun, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and even Butterfield 8 (though less so there), there was not a hotter actress on the planet. But to see Liz through the haze of all her later roles, it dims her striking beauty.
I suppose Bette Davis used to be hot, but it was before my life began and I don’t have the eye to see her earlier work because of how the years treated her.
One of these days, Angelina will start looking raunchy, too.
The only hottie I can even think of who looked great as she aged was Ava Gardner. But I’m almost sure somebody will remind me of others.
Not that I’m into that sort of thing, but if you haven’t already seen it you can get an eyeful of young hot Shatner in the original Twilight Zone - not the famous airplane episode, but the one where he and his new wife start taking a fortune-telling machine a little too seriously.
Agreed. I always thought she was slightly fugly, myself. She’s just off enough to be not just “plain” but “kind of weird looking” in a way that makes it harder for me to see her as attractive than a typically plain woman. I think it’s largely the fact that she has a lower lip where her upper lip should be, but even the shape of her face is kinda weird.
One I’ve never gotten: Hugh Grant. He is always cast as some sort of hot guy, but he looks like he’s borderline Down Syndrome* and is just doofy looking in general.
Agreed–plus she was a total bitch. I like that movie other than the fact that I just could NOT understand why both of them were so into her.
Brian. And I initially shared your view, but then I kept watching the show and now I’m totally convinced he is the sexiest thing ever. It’s not what he looks like, it’s how he is. Like how he moves, talks, carries himself, etc… So your opinion might have changed somewhat if you’d seen more episodes.
Yum to Vincent. Very yum. Ron Perlman, not so much. So, yeah.
*please, PC police, don’t get all rabid on me. My own sister has Down Syndrome. I’m not being insensitive. I’m just being honest: he has that look to his face.
I’ve only seen a few episodes, but it seems to me that they’ve acknowledged that Spader/Shore isn’t all that too look at. One woman in the office wanted him to know that she wasn’t turning him down because he was too old for her, but because he was too fat. And in the first season there was a conventionally handsome lawyer in the office who complained that women fell for Shore despite the fact that he (other lawyer) had a much firmer ass.
There was a recent thread on “actors you were shocked to learn used to be hot,” and it was startling to see Elizabeth Taylor and some other renowned beauties there.
A classic example is the Brigid O’Shaughnessy role in The Maltese Falcon.
This woman is supposed to be hot enough to lure Sam Spade’s partner to his death and later to create a conflict in Spade on whether he should turn her over to the cops for murder.
Instead, Mary Astor comes off as an unappealing ditz with a finishing school accent.
I wondered if it was just me. Bogart was certainly capable of generating on-screen heat (viz. Bergman, Bacall), but there didn’t seem to be any chemistry at all between him and Astor.
Clemence Poesy as Fleur Delacour in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.
It could be argued that finding someone hot enough to be Fleur, whose main characteristic was that she was hotter than hot, would be as difficult as casting Helen of Troy (and speaking of…), but they definitely could’ve done better. Most of the other Beaubaton girls were hotter. And even if somehow they were stuck with here they could’ve used makeup, haircolor, lighting and whatever other movie magic they’ve got to make her look better.
As it was she was a distraction every time she came onscreen.
Here’s a non-person-specific observation/comment.
I’ve seen the standard of beauty and hotness and sexiness and other variations on the theme pass through several sea changes over the decades. There’s virtually nothing that stays the same, and one generation looks at another generation’s tastes (backward and forward) as being odd or even funky.
If you can accept that basic premise, it comes down to the casting couch. The gal gets the role the casting director (or the producer or the director or the leading man) puts her in because of one of these reasons:
- she really is hot
- she’s not all that hot but she plays the couch really well
- the public thinks she’s hot
- the tabloids make her out to be hot
- she’s available at a better price than the really hot one(s)
- nobody else was available that time
- she’s got enough clout to get the role in spite of all the objections others could make
The appeal is her demanding personality, not her looks: Cusack and Diaz are pathetic losers in the movie. Keener isn’t. It doesn’t make her physically attractive, but I don’t think that was the point.
Rosanna Arquette in Silverado. She even has a speech about how difficult it is because she is so pretty. Just didn’t work in a Hollywood movie. In real life, maybe. I’ve seen pictures of actual settlers and she would stand out in comparision. But in a Hollwood movie I would not consider her beautiful. She does have sex appeal but not conventional beauty.
I was going to say Zach Braff playing JD on Scrubs, but I’m not sure. Certiainly he has a history of sleeping with women who are wwwwaaayyyyy out of his league–Eliot is probably the least hot of his sexual partners – but I don’t think we’re meant to think the other characters think he’s a hottie.
90% of the doctors I know have wives that would be way out of their league except for that whole doctor thing.
I just thought of another one that puzzles me.
The character isn’t really presented as all that hot, but yet you do have several guys going after her as if she were in heat.
I just don’t see anything attractive in Ellen Pompeo on Grey’s Anatomy. Katherine Heigl, yes. Sandra Oh, no.