But what about Mimi Rogers? I have heard she’s a delight to work with. Really, large yabbos knocking her out of work?
Edit: Er, where does she fit in the ‘four types’ list.
[Sean Connery] Not a fan of the ladies, are you Trebek? [/SC]
MMMmmmmmm, Buffalo 66-era Christina Ricci.
What the hell do Ryan Gosling’s titties have to do with anything?
Personally, I’m a big fan of Rufus Sewell- I think he’s a great actor with a real presence on film; perhaps the lazy eye prevents him from getting the work that he should.
[sub]and plus he got them small titties what means he a good actor.[/sub]
Every actor, no matter how good, has some whiffs. Lou Gossett Jr. won an Oscar for An Officer and a Gentleman; name one other good movie he ever made. (If you say Iron Eagle I will shoot you.) I’m not denying Fiorentino may have been difficult, but so are a lot of stars. I think her career just petered out naturally as she aged, which happens all the time to females actors. You think it’s crap, but how many actresses can you name who worked steadily after age 45 at the same rate they did before? I don’t think it’s any big secret that men have longer careers than women do, fair or not.
If I say Enemy Mine, can I escape with a severe beating?
After watching Black Snake Moan, I must respectfully disagree.
No, you may not! 
Did you catch him in There Will Be Blood? I thought that guy’s face looked familiar, but woulda never placed him as the dashing hero of Persuasion.
I’ve often thought that Bryan Brown is the luckiest actor on Earth. 
Yup! That was a nice surprise. He really gets around! I believe he’s currently in Mrs Pettigrew Lives For a Day. (I think that’s the right title.)
Diggstown.
I don’t think that’s right at all. How many men work just as steadily as they did before as they approach 50?
There are fewer parts for everyone as they get older and the occasional older man who works alongside a progressively younger woman is pretty rare. How often does that actually happen? Especially now that many of the standard “older men/younger women” actors like Sean Connery and Michael Douglas work much less than they did before.
I agree completely. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that men and women have basically the same shelf life as actors; it’s just that the women’s window of opportunity skews younger.
For every Sean Connery or Michael Douglas who gets to work older, you’re going to have a Kirsten Dunst or Natalie Portman (both still young despite hitting it big 14 years ago) who gets to start much younger. How many male stars take off at age 13?
I’d say that men get an extra 5-10 years at the end of their career that the women don’t. Say, late 40s to mid 50s. But on the flipside, I’d say the women get an extra 5-10 years at the beginning of their career. Not many men become sustainable movie stars until their mid-20s, whereas it’s practically normal for women to hit it big as they’re turning legal.
Scarlett Johansson, Keira Knightley, Ellen Page, Evan Rachel Wood, Camilla Belle, Anne Hathaway; the list goes on and on. Look at Heroes, where Hayden Penettiere broke out at 16, while her in-show love interests remain anonymous throwaway actors. That’s because young guys get about as much respect as older women.
But there’s a flip side to this. No matter what gender they are, actors in their late teens and early twenties are still fairly raw in terms of their craft. It’s ultimately to a male actor’s advantage to spend those years in relative obscurity since he can make and learn from his mistakes and become more experienced out of the glare of public attention. By the time an actor hits his 40’s, he’s more likely to be at or near his peak talent-wise at the same time his career is peaking. In contrast, the actresses in their late teens and early twenties who hit it big have whatever deficiencies they have in terms of inexperience out there for all of the general movie-going and TV-watching public to see. Unfortunately, by the time many actresses have improved and become more experienced, the number of parts available to them has drastically decreased.
Of course, it should be emphasized that, percentage-wise, this only applies to the most successful of the successful in the acting profession.
Did you miss the list in Ellis Dee’s post? Any of those actresses can write their own ticket and all of them are highly respected. The number of young actors on such a list would be considerably smaller (if not completely non-existant).
Ciaran Hinds was also very good (in fact, he was the best part of the movie) as a steely Russian leader in The Sum of All Fears.
Rufus Sewell was also excellent in Dark City and A Knight’s Tale.
Either of them, with a meaty breakout role, could be huge in Hollywood.
In the cases of Scarlett Johansson, Keira Knightley, Evan Rachel Wood, Anne Hathaway, and Hayden Penettiere, there’s a lot of disagreement out there regardng that point. I think the consensus is better with Ellen Page and Camilla Belle but that’s only because they’re still pretty new. In any case, I think all of these actresses are still in the “promising” stage of their careers. They still have room to grow and are thus more prone to making the same mistakes most actors their same age do. The only difference is the mistakes are out there for more of the public to see.
Yeah, but all this is irrelevant. My point was that women and men have the same basic shelf-life as actors; the women just start earlier. You’re jumping through an awful lot of hoops to try and keep the martyr status of actresses going in the face of this counter to “but it’s so unfair that women are put out to pasture earlier than men!”
Men finish later, women start earlier, men are most famous later in their career, women are most famous at the beginning of theirs. Sounds like a perfectly fair deal to me. Don’t girls mature faster anyway? To try and claim some kind of handicap because the more-famous younger women can’t possibly be great because they’re young is disingenuous at best.
Also, what disagreement do you mean? That actresses like Scarlett Johansson and Keira Knightley are big stars? I can’t imagine there is any disagreement on that, so you must be talking about your unrelated point about acting ability. Note that I never brought acting ability up, so you can’t quote me and then say there’s disagreement when you’re talking about a point I never made.
As for acting ability, I’m afraid that is a non-starter, since there isn’t a single actor in Hollywood we’d all agree is a good actor. That’s the reason I carefully couched my terms as “big stars” and “sustainable careers”.
Finally, Scarlett and Keira are both five years past the “promising” stage of their careers.
In answer to the OP, I think that Tim Roth should be huge. He’s an incredible actor with great range and depth of knowledge regarding whatever role he takes on, big or small. And he’s been amazing in every part I’ve ever seen him in, to the point that I look forward to any new stuff he’s got coming down the pipeline.