There’s something to be said for an actor, male or female, who isn’t classically attractive, but can sell being attractive when needed. Someone like a Meryl Streep or Bette Davis strikes me that way.
I have never tried working as an actor, but I did once read an actor taking about how people would drop out of acting one they got older, because all of the parts were for younger folk, and he said that this was ridiculous because, as an actor, the most dependable line of steady work with meaty parts is as “the old man” or “the old woman”. (Granted, this is probably largely thanks to the aforementioned actors all quitting the profession as they aged.)
But that makes me note that there’s a difference between “being famous” in Hollywood and “having regular employment” in Hollywood. If you’re a good character actor, who plays the part that you look like well, and you have a strong work ethic, I would bet that you can find regular work more easily than someone who is beautiful and talented. You might never get a multi-million dollar contract for your work, but you might very well end up with a filmography three times the length of your average top listed actor.
Mix in a degree of professionalism too, i.e. being reliably able to show up on time, knowing your lines.
How important is knowing your lines, anyway, for a screen actor? I know it’s essential for a stage actor, who has to get through a two-hour performance all in one go, but when you’re making something composed of scenes of a few minutes each, it’d be a lot easier to cram for one scene’s worth of lines at a time.
I’d hazard a guess that being able to memorize something quickly is significant, especially since rewrites are common and constant. Show up on a particular day knowing all the dialog scheduled for that day (which may well be pretty minimal), but be mentally nimble enough to toss all that and learn new lines on the spot, without complaining.
Without beauty an actress has a significantly reduced chance of her acting ability ever being seen. She can find bit parts, even meatier stuff as the beauty’s homely friend or playing old, but it will require a lot more luck than already required for a beauty to get parts. However, some surgery and makeup can do wonders.
It’s a lot harder than you’d think. You not only have to be constantly memorising scenes a line at a time, but they’re filmed out of order so sometimes there’s no flow to the narrative clear in your head. Then you have to forget those lines and go onto the next.
What does make it easier, if you’re lucky enough to film this way, is to “read in” your lines while the other actors are shooting their angles, then when it comes to your own close up you’ve recited them so often they come to mind easily. But more often than not they start with the wide shots so it doesn’t usually work out as well as it might.
Experienced actors, of course, get used to it pretty quickly, and it becomes second nature for them soon enough.
Nevermind actresses. Has anybody watched cable news lately? Apparently only beautiful women are capable of discussing politics. Even the female guests, experts, and journalists are hot.
Whenever they actually interview a plain-looking woman, I accept whatever she says as received wisdom, regardless of the subject.
I have appeared on TV a few times. You don’t just show up. They have a whole makeup department which spends a significant amount of time and no little effort in making you look good.
I have dark hair and light skin. If its afternoon or evening, they make me shave again, not even a hint of shadow… I have messy hair, they fix it professionally or mess it up artfully. They’ll sometimes have a selection of clothes to make me look, however, they want me to. Plus layers of makeup. And this is a for a local station in an appearance that might last 5 minutes, 10 tops.
You have to be beautiful to give weather reports too…
To a degree it’s both, but (sadly) I’d guess it’s 80/20 beauty/ability. It’s a shame.
Both, and having a good agent. Personally, I don’t consider any of today’s stars beautiful, and I have seen better-looking women in shopping malls, than in movie theaters. Stars of the past, were beautiful, for example, Vivien Leigh, Ava Gardner, Lana Turner, etc.
This.
And the number of roles that call for an attractive woman is surprisingly small. As my old Theater Arts teacher said, most roles call for middle-aged or older, and there’s not much call for for hordes of young and beautiful.
Said teacher told us of friends of his who said they’d give acting a chance for 10 years and then move on to something else if nothing came of it. He said he thought that was ludicrous, because their chances for roles only increased as thy got older. Those were male friends of his, but the principle’s the same.
Most actresses are much plainer than you realize. They look great on film because, of course, they have a team of professionals MAKING them look great.
There is nothing particularly exceptional about the beauty of MOST actresses, really; what is so special about Meryl Streep, Glenn Close, or Julia Roberts? Were it not for their sheer fame if you passed them on the street you would not be blown away by their beauty. Amy Adams is pretty but not stunningly so. Katharine Hepburn wasn’t a great beauty, nor was Bette Davis, or is Susan Sarandon, who played Bette Davis in a TV series.
Lest you think I’m grabbing old actresses here, at the risk of sounding mean, let’s take Chloe Grace Moretz of “Kick Ass” fame. What’s so special about her? Nothing, really; she looks super all dressed up for an awards show, but so do 98% of 20-year-old women. I’ve dated women prettier than Moretz. I went to school with scores more, hundreds maybe. You know lots of women prettier than her. Everyone does. She’s a lovely young woman, not the slightest thing wrong with her, but nothing exceptional.
Now, line up 100 college aged women who equal Chloe Grace Moretz in looks and put them in screen tests along with Moretz. The likely outcome is that all will be painfully terrible compared to her, ranging from “that’s not dreadful, I guess, but she is obviously an amateur” to “oh my God I am so embarrassed for that poor woman.” If you’re lucky maybe 1 out of 100 will look and sound like a professional. The college’s acting school is not picking winenrs based on looks, they’re looking for talent.
IMDB a list someone made of “the top 100 actresses all time.” (this is easily done, and there’s more than one list.) Which of these women are, absent makeup and hairstylists to the stars, REMARKABLY pretty? Clearly, some of them are - Marion Cotillard, Halle Berry, Ingrid Bergman - but most of them could pass for schoolteachers or bank tellers and I have co-workers who are at least as pretty as they. Sissy Spacek, Frances McDormand, Kathy Bates and Tilda Swinton, raving beauties? I don’t think so, but their mantles look pretty damn good with those Oscars on them, I’ll tell you that, especially in the context of their nice big houses built with the dollars of millions of movie-going customers…
It’s not 80% looks and 20% ability. It’s 95% ability and 5% looks. Looks are easy; people are born that way and a makeup artist and a wardrobe expert go a long way (and of course a person who acts for a living will go to considerable effort to maintain their beauty as best as can be done, likely to an extent most people won’t. Emma Stone is not going to let $5 million paydays slip away because she doesn’t want to shell out for a personal trainer and good skin care.) Acting is hard, much harder than it looks, and most beautiful women (and men) cannot act nearly well enough to be on screen.
I agree with this general principle, there are a lot of people with the right makeup who look fantastic. But those that don’t are still going to have a hard time. Makeup can’t drastically change proportions and assymetry. There is surgery that can take care of a lot of that, which is why so many actors and actresses do get surgery. Women have to be thin to get a chance also, they can diet, they can get lipo, but all of those things only go so far. There’s a line under which an actress is going to have a very hard time getting parts no matter how talented they are. And that’s not because nobody cares about talent, there are just a limited number of parts and plenty of actresses with both looks and talent that will get them. Given 10 women with great looks and average talent and 10 women with subpar looks and and the same or even more talent you will find many more of the women in the first group getting decent partys than the number of women in the second group. Movies and television are a visual medium, more so than theater which doesn’t rely on close-ups. The same ‘good looks privilege’ that exists in the rest of the world is magnified for film and screen actresses.
To keep things in perspective, there are many roles for women where talent isn’t that important anyway and the better looking women have the best shot at most of them. They are essentially models. In general there are fewer small parts for women than men where talent does matter, men get the best character roles playing stereotypical roles while the most common stereotypical role for women is a gorgeous face and voluptuous figure, further narrowing the opportunities for women with talent.
In the end it’s not that beauty outranks talent by so much for roles for women where talent matters, it’s just a lack of those roles that makes for a lot of competition, and beauty whether natural or artificial provides an edge.
Really? On the male side, how about actors like Ron Perlman?
Which is hardly surprising, after all, since passing for schoolteachers and bank tellers is precisely their job.
How about it?
Hollywood is very male-centric, and there are many more roles for average-looking guys (even funny looking (funnier than most) ones). There have been several threads about movies with either no women in them or a few women just for eye candy. There are entire genres of movies that are mostly male-centric - war films, westerns, spy films, etc. But, that said, most leading me are good looking. It’s been discussed ad infinitum how Humphrey Bogart would never be cast as a leading man these days.
Beauty is actually a distraction. Look at the trouble they went to, to un-beautify Charflize Theron for “Monster”. Why not just use an ugly actress in the first place?
Glenne Headly could convince me in Dirty Rotten Scoundrels that I needed to have sex with her. Joan Cusack did the same thing in Addams Family Values, and Janeane Garofalo in The Truth About Cats and Dogs. Jessica Biel never convinced me that she could kill a vampire. I’m gonna go with talent.