writersclub.iafrica.com | kathy_hofmeyr | maguffin Quite a character

Dustin Hoffman recently said he never thought he would make it in Hollywood because he was too ugly to be a movie star. Unfortunately, he has a point. Becoming a movie star is almost exclusively contingent on a performer’s physical appearance, not upon his or her acting ability. How else would you explain Keanu Reeves?

There is, of course, the occasional exception — Tom Hanks, for example, is not a pretty man. He could twist a railway track with a single glance, quite frankly, but for some reason he remains popular and is cast in starring roles.

But who wants to be a movie star, anyway? Certainly not Humphrey Bogart, another exception to the rule. Bogey could never be called a handsome man. Not only was he short and jowly, but to borrow a line from Chico Marx: “He’s got a nose like a bloodhound… and the rest of his face don’t look too good, either.”

Despite his mournful demeanour, Bogart became a leading man, but he repudiated the title of “star”. Bogey saw a distinct divide between movie stars and actors. To him, stars burned bright and beautiful, but were little more than pretty balls of gas — and he wasn’t speaking astronomically. Bogart loved the craft and admired most of all those few he felt deserved the accolade “actor”, accomplished performers like Spencer Tracy or Charles Laughton.

The character actor in old Hollywood nonetheless could be a valuable asset. Peter Lorre, for example, the short, bug-eyed player of no fixed European accent (1930s Austro-Hungary’s answer to Steve Buscemi) played in some 87 films, including ‘Casablanca’ and ‘The Maltese Falcon’. He brought humour, mystique and three-dimensionality to many projects, yet never got his name above the title.

KATHY HOFMEYR

would like to be remembered as a best-selling author, a little-known blues singer and perhaps someone’s favourite aunt. She lives in Jo’burg with her dogs, two pure-bred mongrels named Harpo and Buffy.

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In the late 1960s began what film historians refer to as the Hollywood Renaissance which, amongst other changes, saw the rise of the character actor — or at least the rise of his name from beneath the film title to above it.

Previously, only film stars tended to be cast in central roles — “lead” meant “good-looking” (or, sometimes, “Charlie Chaplin”) — but Renaissance directors moved away from the extravagant studio style of epics, musicals and romances into smaller, location-based “slice of life” pictures.

This also meant a shift in focus from white, Anglo-Saxon type-casting — the type, back then, of “classic” good looks — to less conventionally attractive “ethnic” types. It was here that actors like Hoffman (in Mike Nichols’s ‘The Graduate’), Robert De Niro (in Scorsese’s ‘Taxi Driver’) and Al Pacino (in Coppola’s ‘The Godfather’) got their breaks — actors generally agreed to be among the greatest of all time, who almost certainly would never have risen above “character” roles at another point in history. There but for the grace of Goldwyn, or something.

But we’ve gradually seen a return to the classic Hollywood tradition of attractive but moderately- to nauseatingly untalented stars in mainstream leading roles, and perhaps the finest performers on our screens are again being classed as character actors. Many of them (David Morse, Oliver Platt and Tony Shalhoub, to name but three) are turning to television, where one’s chances of finding more substantial roles are better.

The Coen brothers are among those directors who cherish their character actors, writing roles for them that often surpass the leads. William H Macy in ‘Fargo’, Tim Blake Nelson in ‘O, Brother, Where Art Thou?’, John “Nobody fucks with the Jesus” Turturro in ‘The Big Lebowski’, John Goodman in ‘Barton Fink’ and ‘Raising Arizona’, Bill Cobbs in ‘The Hudsucker Proxy’ — the list goes on. Tarantino does it, too, providing killer roles (pun entirely deliberate) for everyone from Steve Buscemi to Eddie Bunker to Michael Keaton. And as for Baz Luhrmann, well, who could forget Harold Perrineau as Mercutio in ‘Romeo + Juliet’?

Some of the best films of the past few years have featured character actors in their lead roles — ‘Garden State’ being perhaps the most obvious.

These actors don’t just stick to acting, either. Gary Oldman wrote and directed ‘Nil by Mouth’ to great acclaim. Steve Buscemi made ‘Animal Factory’, as well as several episodes each of ‘The Sopranos’, ‘Oz’ and one of ‘Homicide: Life on the Street’.

Gary Sinise directed ‘Of Mice and Men’, casting John Malkovich as Lenny and turning out perhaps the finest film adaptation of a John Steinbeck novel since Elia Kazan filmed ‘East of Eden’ with James Dean in 1955.

Stanley Tucci brings out quirky self-penned comedies like ‘The Big Night’ and ‘The Impostors’ and William H Macy has a drama called ‘Keep Coming Back’ due out next year. De Niro and Pacino also each have taken a crack at directing, with ‘A Bronx Tale’ and ‘Looking for Richard’ respectively.

Perhaps it’s just me, but real actors seem to have minds of their own. It’s movie stars who come out and say the dumbest things, perhaps because they’re caught off-guard in the blaze of the spotlight, perhaps because they really are as dumb as bricks to begin with.

"I make Jessica Simpson look like a rock scientist," Tara Reid once gushed, while Arnold Schwarzenegger opined: "I think that gay marriage is something that should be between a man and a woman."

Laura Dern doesn’t come off too well either, speaking of her work on ‘Jurassic Park’: “You can hardly tell where the computer models finish and the real dinosaurs begin.”

And Hanks reveals that, while he doesn’t have the looks of a movie star, he certainly has the brain power: “There was nothing to react to except wind and trees [in Cast Away]. It was like making a silent movie.”

But while the stars mouth off on whatever issue happens to fill their tiny, tiny minds in the moment they are confronted with a microphone, marry and divorce one another with the frequency of Marie Antoinette trying on gloves, or turn their eating disorders into front-page news, the real actors go quietly about their business, developing extraordinary careers as directors and writers. Or just, at the very least, people Bogart would have been proud to call “actors”.