When good actors choose badly
When an actor makes a poor choice, it can have terrible repercussions
A ghost from the past showed up on the interview circuits recently. Alicia Silverstone, the hottest young star in Hollywood a quarter of a century ago, was attempting to remind the world she still exists.
It was happening at a time when the studios were putting a brake to major releases because of COVID-19. So the movie she was peddling, a marital comedy called Bad Therapy, was never a big-screen proposition. It started streaming immediately, received generally awful reviews and received a single star on Rotten Tomatoes.
Silverstone is 43 now. She has continued to act over the years, and insists she never really enjoyed the fame that enveloped her in 1995 with the release of Clueless, director Amy Heckerling ’s cheeky replanting of Jane Austen’s Emma from early 19th-century England to contemporary Beverly Hills. But no amount of determination and talent (and she possesses plenty of those) can alter the fact that in Hollywood, she is now a has-been.
Silverstone provides an unsettling example of how bad professional decisions can send a promising career into a tailspin. She’s not alone: Many Tinseltown figures have seen their careers — and in some cases their stardom — destroyed by awful acting choices. And on occasion, the fall from grace can be cruel.
She was only 18 when Columbia Pictures, bowled over by her success in Clueless, rashly gave her a multimillion-dollar production deal that gave her more power than she was able to handle. Thus, in whatever she did, she would bear the burden of unreasonable expectations. The resulting movie, a limp romantic comedy called Excess Baggage, would eventually arrive two years later, incapable of rescuing a career that was already in free fall because of what had hit screens shortly before. The appalling Batman & Robin would cause career damage to a lot of people, including director Joel Schumacher and stars George Clooney and Chris O’donnell. But its most vulnerable victim was Silverstone, whose casting as Batgirl was supposed to elevate her stardom to new heights. The tabloids, always ready to gnaw away at success, were merciless when they decided to focus on her body weight. So Batgirl became Fatgirl in their assault — and Silverstone’s international celebrity began evaporating while she was still in adolescence. Still, when it comes to experiencing Hollywood’s slippery slope, she has lots of company, including some of the biggest names in Tinsel Town. And what all have in common are terrible career decisions.
Thanks to Wayne’s World, Shrek and Austin Powers, Mike Myers managed to reach superstar status. Their popularity allowed him to survive such stinkers as So I Married an Axe Murderer and a reputation for becoming increasingly difficult to work with. But 2008’s The Love Guru, a numbingly awful ego trip, was a disaster both critically and financially, and his career never recovered.
Bruce Dern, a fine actor, says the biggest mistake he ever made was to sign for The Cowboys in 1972 and to be forever remembered and reviled as the loathsome slimeball who shot John Wayne dead in that film. He told Postmedia in an interview years later that it was the worst career choice he ever made because he had messed with the John Wayne mythology and Wayne’s image of invincibility. Worse, it became a constant battle to reshape his image, and despite later films such as Coming Home and The Great Gatsby, he never succeeded.
Thirty years ago, Geena Davis was a huge star thanks to movies such as A League of Their Own, Thelma & Louise and The Accidental Tourist, for which she won an Oscar. And then she married action director Renny Harlin, who persuaded her to go the pirate route and star in an abomination called Cutthroat Island, a $98-million disaster that earned one 10th of that amount back at the box office. Davis’s big-screen career was dead soon afterward, although she’s had some later success on television.
Halle Berry’s Oscar-winning performance in Monster’s Ball gave her enormous power in Hollywood — so much so that the industry later would yield to her demand for an additional half million in salary for baring her breasts in Swordfish. But then she insisted on playing Catwoman on screen — delivering a performance so bad that one critic suggested that in all good conscience she should return her Academy Award. That one film was enough to remove Berry from the industry’s front ranks and her career has never fully recovered.
Faye Dunaway’s eyeball-rolling, over-the-top performance as Joan Crawford in Mommie Dearest has become a camp favourite, and it has continued to blight her career and credibility ever since. Best to try to erase that film from memory and continue to honour the distinguished actress who gave us Bonnie and Clyde, Network and Chinatown.
There was a time when he was basking in the success of 1990’s Dances With Wolves that Kevin Costner seemed unassailable and indestructible both as an acting and directing power broker. The first cracks in that image came with his floundering attempt to play Robin Hood on screen, followed by an overwrought Wyatt Earp. Then came the ordeal of Waterworld, a benighted project he should never have accepted and then tried frantically to salvage. But there was no forgiveness for The Postman, a preposterous vanity project in which he seemed intent on crashing his reputation as both actor and director into a bottomless pit. He’s still around, performing respectably, but he’s long been off the A List.