STAR IMAGES
Below are some capsule profiles of different stars in terms of their star images. Some are successful, some less so. All quotes are slightly adapted from the books, Leading Men and Leading Ladies. The entries here may suggest different ways to define a star image. After the quote, I've included the name of the star and one of their films."With her doe-eyed charm and petite figure, she was a startlingly novel kind of beauty fo the early fifties. Instead of buxom, blonde and giggling, she was slener, boyish and modest, with a naivete which did not rule out sophistication."
Audrey Hepburn (Sabrina)
"His specialty was that of the long-suffering and well-meaning husband whose wife treated him appallingly. Hitchcock inverted his persona to reveal its unattractive side."
Herbert Marshall (The Little Foxes)
"He is usually remembered as hard-fighting and sexy in a rugged in an authoritarian way, offering tough gallantry to all women on principle."
John Wayne (The Quiet Man)
"Like Garbo, she possessed the ability to suggest great depth of emotion without histrionics. . . . She knew the seret of hinting at inner terror without resorting to outward babble."
Ingrid Bergman (Bells of St. Mary's)
"Her expressive face asks people to share in everything she's thinking and feeling."
Julia Roberts (Pretty Woman)
"She has carved out for herself a recognizable territory as a woman struggling with the problems of independence, which has confirmed her position as a resolutely contemporary actress."
Meryl Streep (Sophie's Choice)
"She chooses, more and more, films about women who have indeed lived life to the full but who combine a great deality of sexuality with their self-determination and intelligence."
Susan Sarandon (Dead Man Walking)
"Her own talent was for steamier more bulldozing kinds of passion. She learned how to exploit that style to maximum effect."
Elizabeth Taylor (A Place in the Sun)
"She came over as a that of a dream girl from another planet: breathy, cartoon-like, strreamlined, pneumatic. She sensed the desire for unreality, and made it flesh."
Marilyn Monroe (Monkey Business)
"As a leading man, he is the sexy ingenu still discovering new delights: even now in his early fifties, he retains the air of puzzled eroticism that made him a sex-symbol overnight. . . . [His] character can be plotted from his mouth, which still curves up with an expression of gratified suprise, rather than down with the disillusionment of middle-age. . . . What stops [his] character from comic pathos is the seam of stubborn self-righteousness that lurks beneath his timid charm."
Dustin Hoffman (The Graduate)
"[His] swarthy but sensitive features have a slightly baleful cast redeemed by the soulfulness of his eyes. His characters mirror this intriguing mixture of gentleness and violence. . . . He has an affinity for 'outsider' roles, conveying complex, stormy emotions with restraint; the impression is that [he] has been there himself and doesn't want to talk about it too much. As such, there are elements in the persona that can be traced back to Bogart's defensive introspection in Casablanca, and to some of Eastwood's cool, austere, secretive heroes."
Al Pacino (Dog Day Afternoon)
"She could project a dazzling array of moods. She was alternately flirtatious and kittenish, then monstrously overbearing and vengeful, switching in the blink of an eye." Vivien Leigh (Gone with the Wind)
"Diffident without being timid, and tough but not insensitive, the taciturn actor symbolized a new kind of hero, courageous in spirit as well as body. He had come to personify the values of middle America and helped to define the Western hero ethic."
Gary Cooper (High Noon)
"She excels at sophisticated banter, alternately as flirtatious as a kitten and stuffily severe."
Katherine Hepburn (Bringing Up Baby)
"She showed a capacity for saint-like suffering that was truly awesome."
Irene Dunne (Love Affair)
"As an object of passion in a nightmarish fantasy of seduction, she has become a potent icon. It was as a scream queen ravaged by demented scientists and moon monsters that she really found fame."
Fay Wray (King Kong)
"She is at once fickle and severe, projecting such contradictions with tragic appeal. She had brought cinema to maturity by yoking the silents' sense of gesture and drama to the realism of the talkies, but remained an enigmatic and unreachable phenomenon."
Greta Garbo (Queen Christina)
"A quiet, self-reliant pussycat, tough with men but tender with chosen women, [he] has a lazy, low-profile sexiness and a tantalizingly disciplined tension. Occasionally it becomes orgiastic viciousness. Although his persona is neither straightforwardly paternalistic nor law-abiding, he nonetheless became one of America's ideal macho males in the seventies, and he is now usually regarded as the natural successor to Wayne's position as the foremost action film hero. . . . He first develped the figure of the cynical, idealistic wanderer, dishing out revenge in a meaningless universe."
Clint Eastwood (The Unforgiven)
"[His] superstar persona is that of a charismatic, but ultimately helpless, male moved by forces beyond his control; it is that combination of rebellion and impotence, as well as his traditional good looks, which makes him so attractive."
Warren Beatty (Bonnie and Clyde)
"He tended to be cast as a nice, safe, well-educated black."
Sidney Poitier (In the Heat of the Night)
"One can barely think of her without a glycerine tear sliding down the cheek, for she established an unequal reputation as a sob sister."Jane Wyman (All That Heaven Allows)
"He played flawed but fundamentally good characters; men of strength and integrity who represented American normality."
Spencer Tracy (Bad Day at Black Rock)
"His leading men were stoical, cool and insolent loners. His heroes were often made unconventional by sensitivity and self-doubt. Later he abandoned his macho image for that of a more traditional romantic leading man."
Steve McQueen (The Thomas Crown Affair)
"Bulky, crude and unwashed, he represents a primitive and uncompromising eroticism. But he's more than a big slob: his power and his threat lie in his frightening seriousness and the sense of unreleased passion one can only just glimpse."
Marlon Brando (The Godfather)
"His image became the essence of cultivated urbane sophistication, that of the smooth and desirable American male with the right manners and the right physique, a man who would always step confidently over the trip-wires of fate on the way to painlessly achieved moral growth."
Cary Grant (Bringing Up Baby)
"It was probably his qualities of passionate seriousness that made him a long-lasting screen character."
Charles Boyer (Love Affair)
"Although he later showed a roguish touch in comedy, he seemed to prefer portraying introverted loners, obsessives or even mystics."
Peter O'Toole (Lawrence of Arabia)
"A loveable, built-to-last hunk with strong box-ofice appeal and a braod chest that he bared to advantage, he was versatile enough to shine in some of Hollywood's most powerful weepies, then later, in the sixties, in fun-and-sex comedies. He developed a less conventional and somewhat camp persona as an amiably sexy lover who was man enough to accept a successful women."
Rock Hudson (Pillow Talk)
"He played restless, anguished heroes of burgeoning youth culture, embodying rebellion against middle-class values and hypocritical suburban parents. Sulkily beautiful, he slunk around in jeans which were too tight, sneering and pouting and refusing to look adults in the eye, unloving and unlovable to them because they either ingored him or substituted material goods for the understanding and loving acceptance he craved. His potency, though, was less in his youth than in the sadness and world-weariness he brought to his roles. The key to his characterw is his rage and disenchantment against a world that has lost its nobility."
James Dean (Rebel without a Cause)
"He brought intelligence and psychological perception to his characters. A tortured introvert who was reputedly as unhappy in private as he was on screen, he always looked slightly ill-at-east and restless, as though he was caught unprepared. His motives were frequently at cross-purposes and his characters were nearly always ambivalent in their emotions, conveying pain and fear as well as love and desire. When he was romantic it was often in a troubled way. He was one of the first actors to suggest a conflict between the success motive and a moral sense; he was often a victim of his own impulses."
Montgomery Clift (A Place in the Sun)
"[He] has come to represent, in both his films and his private life, the 'good' outsider; detached, ironic and idealistic despite his iconoclastic streak.. . . [H]is amused half smile and famous blue eyes still convey a youthful irreverence as well as a very appealing trace of self-detraction. . . . His first screen roles were very much in the Brando mould: neurotic, mirthless, mumbling and boishy. . . . Within a few years, though, a new and more distinctive character was emerging--a male whose macho demeanor and tongue-in-cheek bravado concealed sexual fears and social inadequacy. [H]e displayed a mixture of strength, devilment and vulnerability with which many men could identify. These 'loner' films gave way to the individualist heroes of the early to mid-seventies. . . . He showed "honesty in playing characters vulnerable to the disillusioning and depleting forces of time."
Paul Newman (The Sting)
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