Face to face
Hollywood, Madison Avenue have double standard when it comes to celebrity visages
By: Alison Gillmor
The first face was Daniel Craig's in the movie Cowboys & Aliens. In the opening scene, Craig wakes up in the middle of the sagebrush, dry, dirty and burnt by the sun. His skin is so lined and creased that it could hold a winter's rain, as they like to say out west. His ruddiness makes his blue eyes pop. He looks terrible but in a really hot way.
Of course, Craig, who is also the butchest James Bond since Sean Connery, has always had that brutto-bello, ugly-pretty thing going on. And he and his beat-up, 43-year-old face just get more and more compelling.
The other face was Julia Roberts' in a Lancôme layout. This silky-smooth advertisement snagged headlines when it was banned in Britain for excessive and misleading airbrushing. It seems that the Pretty Woman was not quite pretty enough for the makeup company, so Roberts' face -- which, like Craig's, is 43 years old -- was Photoshopped into smoothed-over, tidied-up perfection.
Unfortunately, Roberts' face looks not just poreless but weirdly textureless, almost featureless.
Stars are their faces, in some sense, and Roberts's face has always been intriguing -- beautiful but not conventionally so, with that nose a little longer than expected and that wide, mobile mouth. But Roberts' Photoshop face feels devoid of expression, of experience, of individuality, of those things that presumably made her a star in the first place.
One could point out that Craig's face is in a western, a genre that prizes ruggedness, while Roberts's face is in an advertisement for an age-defying beauty product. But it's more than that. Female actors are increasingly becoming models and cover girls, and the plasticized ideals of airbrushed beauty -- all gleamy and golden-beige and boneless -- are starting to creep over into their films. Meanwhile, Craig's fabulously scuffed-up brand of movie handsome seems to extend even to his magazine work. He is currently featured on the cover of Esquire, and he doesn't look airbrushed into oblivion. He looks like a well-dressed prize fighter.
Craig has a lot to look forward to. In Cowboys & Aliens, his co-star is the 69-year-old Harrison Ford, whose cragginess at this point is matched only by his crankiness. Ford gets more and more like your crazy, wrinkled, wedding-wrecking great-uncle every time he hits the big screen, and good for him.
Roberts, on the other hand, is somehow expected to draw on her 23 years of on-camera experience while simultaneously looking like her 20-year-old niece Emma. At 43, one of the biggest female stars of her generation seems fated to retreat into Photoshop world, a place without lines and shadows, a place beyond time and personal history, a place where strong emotions are frowned on -- well, not even frowned on, because frowning causes unsightly forehead creases.
This gender division might not affect all midlife men and women in Hollywood. (Yes, yes, I know, there's the marvellous Helen Mirren, the woman who manages to break all the rules. And on the male side, even gorgeous George Clooney occasionally gets the gilded touch of the airbrush.)
But there's no getting away from it. Craig's face is becoming more specific as he ages; Roberts' is becoming more generalized. Craig is becoming more himself as he gets older. Roberts, it seems, is no longer allowed to live in her own skin.
Source:
http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/opinio ... 59118.html
. It's hard for me to just call Rachel, Rachel. I always want to say, "Lucky Rachel." If he's HHH, she's LLR.
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