An Invention without a Future. James Naremore
actors come and go, is also impressed. “What a story!” she sighs. “Everything but the bloodhounds snapping at her rear end!”
If All about Eve concerns an actor who feigns emotion, Being Julia (2004), adapted from Somerset Maugham’s novel Theatre, concerns an actor whose excess of real emotion threatens to undermine her performances. Annette Bening plays a middle-aged British stage star of the 1930s, a larger-than-life character endowed with innate theatricality and acute emotional sensitivity. The realistic performance requires Bening to imitate certain conventional models; she must adopt a British accent, and her every gesture and expression, both onstage and off, must suggest the fragile histrionics of an aging diva. When we first see her, she makes a grand entrance into her husband-impresario’s office, complaining with intense bravura that she’s exhausted and in need of a rest. That evening she goes to an elegant restaurant and makes another grand entrance, smiling and nodding to acknowledge her admiring public; but when her homosexual dinner companion tells her that to avoid gossip they shouldn’t keep seeing one another, she breaks into copious tears.
The ensuing plot concerns her affair with an American fan, barely older than her adolescent son, who seduces her and then turns her into a miserable, sexually dependent slave. When the affair begins, she’s lifted out of a mild depression and becomes giddy and girlish; but when her lover withdraws and treats her coldly, she becomes a haggard, weeping neurotic, alternately angry and groveling. What helps her conquer the roller coaster of emotion is her memory of a long-dead director and mentor (Michael Gambon), who magically appears as a sort of ghost in moments of crisis, criticizing her everyday performance and dispensing advice. Gambon is a projection of her own critical self-consciousness, an internal monitor or coach, created through her professional ability to mentally observe her performances as they happen, both onstage and in real life. In Denis Diderot’s words, Julia has within herself, like all the best actors, “an unmoved and disinterested onlooker” (Cole and Chinoy, 162). At her most anguished point, when she’s weeping hysterically, Gambon appears and mocks her ability to “turn on the waterworks.” He advises her to become a more imitative actor, exactly the sort of player Diderot might have admired: “You’ve got to learn to seem to do it—that’s the art of acting! Hold the mirror up to nature, ducky. Otherwise you become a nervous wreck.” In the film’s concluding moments, this advice enables her to emerge victorious not only in her private life but also on the stage, where her lover’s new girlfriend has been cast alongside her.
The stage acting in Being Julia, shown in close-ups, is manifestly artificial and full of tricks: we see heavy makeup on the actors’ faces, we hear the actors’ loud voices projected toward the theater auditorium, and we glimpse Bening struggling with a misplaced prop during a tearful scene. In the offstage sequences, however, the acting looks realistic and the emotions are sometimes expressed in nakedly exposed style. In the scene in which Bening has her tearful breakdown, she wears no apparent makeup and her pale skin becomes red and blotchy as she weeps. We can never know (without asking her) how this scene was achieved—she may have been feigning emotion, she may have been playing “herself” in imaginary circumstances, and she may have been doing both. No matter how she accomplished her task, her performance looks spontaneous, as if she were being Julia rather than imitating her.
At the same time, the audience recognizes Julia as Annette Bening, whose body and expressive attributes can be seen in other films. Her apparent authenticity of feeling, which earned her an Academy Award nomination for Being Julia, is essential to the cinema of sentiment or high emotion and is valued in all of today’s popular genres; but the doubling or tandem effect of recognizing Bening alongside the character has a longer history, essential to the development of the star system and to the pleasures of theater itself. It achieved great prominence in the eighteenth century, at the time of Diderot, when leading actors such as David Garrick not only imitated Hamlet but also brought individual style or personality to the role. Thus, as time went on, it became possible to speak of “David Garrick’s Hamlet,” “John Barrymore’s Hamlet,” “John Gielgud’s Hamlet,” “Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet,” and even “Mel Gibson’s Hamlet.”
In motion pictures this phenomenon was intensified, with the result that stars often gained ascendency over roles, repeatedly playing the same character types and bringing the same personal attributes and mannerisms to every appearance. Consider again Maurice Chevalier, who at Paramount in the 1930s was cast as a military officer, a medical doctor, and a tailor, but who always played essentially the same character. Chevalier had been a hugely popular cabaret singer and star of the Folies Bergère in Paris during the 1920s, and Hollywood wanted him to display many of the performing traits associated with his success; at the same time, Lubitsch and Mamoulian modified those traits, making him less uninhibited and bawdy, more suitable to a general American audience. In his Paramount musicals of the pre-Code era, he’s always the boulevardier in a straw hat, the stereotypical representative of what American audiences at the time thought of as “gay Paree”—sophisticated, exuberant, grinning, amusingly adept at sexual innuendo, eager to charm and seduce beautiful women. Hence in The Love Parade and One Hour with You, the films I’ve described above, he not only imitates certain conventional gestures and expressions for the sake of comedy, but he also reproduces the broad smile, the jaunty posture, the suggestive leer, the rolling eyes, and the distinctive French accent that were associated with “Maurice Chevalier.” His public personality was in a sense unique, but it was nonetheless a carefully crafted “model” in Diderot’s sense of the term, a model so idiosyncratic that Chevalier became a popular subject for generations of comic impersonators to imitate onstage and in film.
Chevalier’s performances were stylized and extroverted, indebted to the musical revues of Paris, and for that reason he could be viewed as what the early futurists and the Soviet avant-garde called an “eccentric” actor; in fact, Sergei Eisenstein’s doctrine of “eccentrism,” which is most clearly evident in the grotesque caricatures of Strike (1924), was developed in part by analogy with music-hall performers. Relatively few of the leading players in classic Hollywood had this extreme kind of eccentricity, although comics like the Marx Brothers and W. C. Fields and unusual personalities like Wallace Beery, Marie Dressler, and Mickey Rooney certainly qualify. Many character actors of the period were also eccentrics; indeed the very term “character actor,” which in Shakespeare’s day referred to a performer who played a single vivid type, was often used by the film industry to describe supporting players with cartoonish personalities: we need only think of the lively crowd of eccentrics in Preston Sturges’s comedies, including William Demarest, Eugene Pallette, Franklin Pangborn, Akim Tamiroff, and Raymond Walburn. Comedic females such as Marjorie Main and Thelma Ritter belong in the same category, as do many of the noncomic supporting players, such as Sydney Greenstreet, Elisha Cook Jr., and Peter Lorre in John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon (1941).
Leading players, on the other hand, tended to have symmetrical faces and usually behaved in almost invisible fashion; their close-ups conveyed what Richard Dyer has called their “interiority,” and the smallest movements of their bodies helped create a sense of their personalities. But the classic-era stars were no less carefully constructed performers than the character actors; their identities were created not only by their roles but also by their physical characteristics and idiosyncrasies or peculiarities of expression. In her intriguing essay on Humphrey Bogart, Louise Brooks makes precisely this point. “All actors know that truly natural acting is rejected by the audience,” Brooks writes. “Though people are better equipped to judge acting than any other art, the hypocrisy of ‘sincerity’ prevents them from admitting that they, too, are always acting some role of their own invention. To be a successful actor, then, it is necessary to add eccentricities and mystery to naturalness, so that the audience can admire and puzzle over something different than itself” (64–65).
Bogart was certainly a natural-looking performer who seemed to have a reflective, mysteriously experienced inner life, an actor who appeared to be thinking in a way quite different from Garbo’s blank-faced close-up at the end of Queen Christina (1933). But Bogart’s “naturalness” was expressed through distinctive physical attributes and carefully crafted displays of personal eccentricities. To express thoughtfulness, for example, he often tugged at his earlobe, and to create an air of relaxed confidence or bravado he repeatedly hooked his