Well how does she act in that video of hers? Does she talk? Come on, folks, this is the SDMB. Don’t make me go out and do research on my own.
I would have thought the whole roster of WWF would have qualified. I never was a fan but used to watch a lot of it with my kids, who were, and came to appreciate the “totality” of its commitment to entertainment. Everyone from Vince down was playing a part in a soap - pretending to be some wrestler with a bogus name who was fueding with another guy with a fake name who had stolen his “girlfriend” or pretending to be the estranged son of the owner of the whole thing to set up another wrestler with an assumed name etc etc. They were all pretending to be private people, pretending to be public people.
Oh and I loved the way theat having adopted a fake name they then added a nickname to it.
So Steve Williams didn’t just become Steve Austin he became Stonecold Steve Austin. Ed Leslie wasn’t satisfied with Brutus Beefcake as a nom de ring, he had to be Brutus The Barber Beefcake. Jake The Snake Roberts from Aurelian Smith, Jr and Randy Macho Man Savage from Randy Poffo were favourites.
Bob Dylan. There’ve been so many versions layered on versions it gets hard to tell where real Bob ends and myth Bob begins. Even the aw-shucks, ordinary guy Bob is proabably an act…
mm
To save you the trouble… She is dumb and vapid looking in the video as well… sure night vision makes everyone look kind of sketchy… but Paris looks bored ALL the TIME. Giving a bj- bored… Riding reverse cowgirl- bored… answering her cell phone-bored.
I refuse to believe its an adopted persona for her. Its in the eyes, you can’t hide the fact that it seems to take an extra second or two longer than the average person for things to register. She’s flat out vacuous and ignorant.
He did a “Fresh Air” interview with Terry Gross that was phenomenal. (I can’t find it in the archives.) He was also great in “Bowling for Columbine”; he was definitely very aware of what had happened and his role in it.
I have a lot of respect for Marilyn Manson.
Robin
Oh, I forgot one of the most bizarre examples: Herbert Khaury never appeared in public as anything but Tiny TIm.
And from all I’ve read and heard, Tiny Tim was just the OPPOSITE of most of the manufactured characters we’ve been posting about here.
That is, we’re mostly talking about people who PLAYED bizarre or weird characters in movies or on TV, but who were pretty normal in real life. Or people who seemed flamboyant and outrageous in public, but were very quiet and reserved in real life.
But by all accounts, Herbert Khaury was even weirder off camera than on. His public persona was not a put-on. If anything, it was a toned-down version of his true self.
Houston radio talk show host Ken Hoffman once said (I’m paraphrasing, but not distorting what he said), “Over the years, I’ve interviewed all kinds of celebrities. Many of them, especially the comedians, had a character or set of mannerisms they adopted when they were on the air, but which they turned off as soon as we cut to a commercial. Tiny Tim was different. As soon as we cut to a commericial, he’d start talking about all kinds of strange things… about the disposable diapers he wore, about how wonderful Hefty bags were. He could go on for hours about Hefty bags if you let him.”
I saw him live in Tahoe. I laughed so hard my sides hurt. Seriously. That is not common for me. Although I laugh, I am not usually a boisterous laugher and am somewhat reserved. I quite enjoyed his show. He comes regularly here to York and I have tried to get people to go with me, but no one will…
I’ve heard from multiple sources, most recently last week from morning radio DJ guys who had him on as a guest (possibly multiple times), that he’s quite normal and soft-spoken during the commercials.
I’d say it’s not smart for someone who will never had any need for money to craft a public persona of stupid whoreness just for a few bucks. It’s like a woman with a solid middle-class income and no money woes giving handjobs for money in truck stops. She’s likely doing it because she likes it.
In Paris Hilton’s case, my guess is she’s kind of a dumb whore, but she might play it up for the attention. But by no stretch of the imagination is it “smart” for her to act the way she does for money, unless she anticipates being cut of from the Hilton funds for some reason.
How about Paulie Shore? I’m pretty sure nobody is that irritating in real life.
Heh, nice.
An elaborative hijack:
I also remember seeing them onstage when I was a kid and went with my parents to the Grand Ole Opry. My father was a Roy Acuff groupie and through a skillful oratory and a Masonic hand signal got permission to go backstage after the show. I saw Minnie Pearl coming out of her dressing room but instead of Minnie she was now “Mrs. Sarah Ophelia Colley Cannon”, still charming and nice (she waved and smiled but didn’t speak) and if the pricetag had been on her pantsuit it would have been an exponential of the $1.98 from the hat. (Minnie Pearl/Sarah Cannon’s house was next door to the Governor’s Mansion in Nashville but distinguished to tourists as “it’s the nice one”; I saw a virtual tour when it went up for sale a few years ago and remember that it was a huge house but only about 4 rooms (master bedroom, maid’s room [she had the same live-in-maid fro about 60 years and when the maid got too old Minnie kept her anyway and just got maids to wait on them both], office and the rest was just an enormous space divided by angles and curtains.)
Grandpa Jones came out and did speak to my father for a while (they had a friend in common- my father’s cousin had once been in Grandpa’s act) and it was so strange seeing this old man from the stage in blue jeans, what I could tell was an expensive camel hair sports coat, dress shirt and expensive Henry Higgins style hat. He also wore contacts in person. Very nice and so was his wife (who was his age and had been with him forever). We later saw them pulling out in a red sports car (with her driving).
I also remember Archie Campbell leaving, looking much more like a high power attorney than a country comic, and some stoned seeming diva (I honestly don’t remember which one but she was big at the time) and the rest of the Opry essentially snubbed her. Unfortunately for my father/fortunately for my mother, Roy Acuff never came out, but it was so strange seeing people go from overalls to middle aged businessmen and matrons.
There was one exception though: Junior Samples left, the way he dressed and acted and spoke were all exactly the same as on stage. He stopped and asked my father something like “'scuse me sir, you ain’t seen a dark headed boy bout his age” [indicating me] “runnin’ round look fer me has you?”. My father answered, truthfully, no, and this being probably my first celebrity theophany I walked on air for the next several days because “AN HONEST TO GOD TV STAR USED ME AS A POINT OF REFERENCE!”
I have an “anniversary of Laugh-In” show on videotape, and in one of the short scenes where, I think, everyone is heading to the set, you hear him talking to somebody, and actually, he sounds like a truck driver. Deep, gruff voice, belly laughter. Then he gets in front of the camera and becomes that werido. If not for having seen it and heard it myself, I’d think he was like that all the time, but it is in fact his schtick.
There was a fairly extensive article on her and her childhood and background in Vanity Fair about a year or two ago. It was an interesting piece. She is no brainiac and there is no “dumb like a fox” aspect about her. She is quite genuinely a bit stupid. When the nicest thing a notoriously celeb friendly mag can say about you is that you are “an epic slut” what you see is most assuredly what you get.
“Elvira” was my first thought, too. I met Cassandra Peterson once. She’s a classy, smart, poised redhead, quite unlike the ditsy, delightfully slutty, black-tressed Elvira character. Pretty much the only thing Elvira and Cassandra have in common is the memorable boobage, and even that has considerable assist from Elvira’s push-up antigravity brassiere.
I can think of a nicer thing to say: she’s not Nicole Ritchey (who should be scuttled and used for parts if there are any without smack that can be salvaged).
Revtim writes:
> In Paris Hilton’s case, my guess is she’s kind of a dumb whore, but she might
> play it up for the attention. But by no stretch of the imagination is it “smart” for
> her to act the way she does for money, unless she anticipates being cut of from
> the Hilton funds for some reason.
According to her wikipedia entry:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Hilton
Paris Hilton is worth about $50 million from her inheritance. It’s estimated that she has made more than $20 million from her celebrity sorts of income (her The Simple Life salary and such) so far. And that underestimates how much her celebrity status gets her. She also no doubt gets into a lot of events, including free travel, clothes, and jewelry, just because various event planners, clothes designers, and jewelry makers want her to be seen at various places wearing their products. And she gets to meet people by being a celebrity that she might not if she were merely the great-grandchild of someone who made a fortune. If she eventually marries one of those Greek shipping heirs that she has been dating, her worth will go up by a factor of ten. Even if she doesn’t, she might well make more money from her celebrity status by the time she turns 30 than she got from her inheritance.
I suppose Ali G is another example, although lots of people are aware that Ali G is a character, his…victims…usually don’t.
“Couldn’t it be argued that slavery is a bit racialist?”
Perhaps Vanilla Ice is another example, since he at first claimed to have attended an all-black school and had been a gangster, when he was really just another middle class suburban white kid.
Jim Carrey has said that he is much more like the shy character he played in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind when he’s not “on.”
Going back a few years, though this has more to do with confusing a performer with his public persona, instead of the performer behaving this way in public…Buster Keaton came across as a milquetoast in a number of his films, when he actually had a very deep, gruff speaking voice and was no milquetoast. Harold Lloyd was nothing like his “glasses” character in real life and said he went unrecognized without them.