Acting is not good enough
IN Hitchcock’s 1946 film Notorious Cary Grant plays an American agent who recruits the daughter of a convicted German war criminal (Ingrid Bergman) as a spy. They are flying into Rio and Bergman leans across him to look out of the plane’s window. It’s as though he sees her for the first time and is stricken by love. A look passes across his face in an instant.
For all his urbane smoothness Cary Grant was a great screen actor. The scenes between them after this (fully clothed of course) are so hot you feel you ought to look the other way.
But in today’s climate Cary Grant might have found himself bullied into turning down this deeply heterosexual role. He married umpteen times but his happiest relationship was with actor Randolph Scott, with whom he lived for a dozen years.
He wasn’t the only actor cast against type and it is doubtful that the movie industry would ever have got off the ground if gay actors (of both sexes) had been denied the chance to play straight characters Which brings us to Jack Whitehall – he’s straight – who has been monstered on social media for accepting a role as a gay character in a Disney film. Using this logic then Captain Poldark must be played by a Cornishman (so farewell Irish Aidan Turner), Tom Hanks should really have been gay and suffering from Aids in that film Philadelphia. And Superman should only be played by someone who can
A substance said to be the world’s oldest cheese has been found in an Egyptian tomb dating back 3,000 years. This could be true but hang on… there’s a piece of Parmesan in the back of my fridge which I suspect is even older.
both fly and is allergic to kryptonite.
The story goes that when Dustin Hoffman and Laurence Olivier worked on the 1976 film Marathon Man, Hoffman’s character had supposedly stayed up for three days. Hoffman admitted to Olivier that he had attempted to stay awake for 72 hours to bring truth to his performance. “My dear boy,” replied Olivier, “why don’t you just try acting?”
But mere “acting” won’t do any more. If you’re playing someone who is part of a minority then you must belong to that minority.
Recently the singer who was to play Puerto Rican Maria in a Proms performance of West Side Story stood down because she was criticised for not being an authentic Latina. But was the man cast as her lover Tony authentically Polish?
Tastes and sensibilities do change. Quite rightly we are not comfortable with white actors being blacked up but there’s nothing consistent about the new rules either.
For why is it that while Jack Whitehouse is crucified for playing a gay character, an actress such as Maxine Peake is lauded for playing Hamlet? I’m sure she was sensational but last time any of us looked, Hamlet was a man.