Do we care if actors look like the real-life person they’re playing? Sometimes. Few would fail to raise an eyebrow if a hairy, waif-like sprite played Winston Churchill in his war-leader years. On the other hand, only the most pernickety of maniacs will demand that anyone taking on Queen Anne look exactly like Sir Godfrey Kneller’s painting of that monarch in the National Portrait Gallery in London. Was the question even raised when Olivia Colman played the role in The Favourite?
Controversy surrounding the recent trailer for Bradley Cooper’s film Maestro nudges this question once more to the surface. Featuring Cooper as Leonard Bernstein and Carey Mulligan as Felicia Montealegre, the conductor’s wife, the promo works the adagietto from Mahler’s Fifth Symphony in with touching academy-ratio images showing the couple through the decades. Alas, the “oohs” had barely subsided when the commentariat turned to Cooper’s prosthetic nose.
There was, in the wake of Oppenheimer, already some understandable anxiety about non-Jewish actors playing Jewish figures on screen. But the decision to enlarge Cooper’s nose sparked considerably greater levels of unease. The actor Tracy-Ann Oberman, herself Jewish, described the prosthetics as “the equivalent of Black-Face or Yellow-Face”.
We will leave the particulars of that debate for another day. Here’s the thing. Why did Cooper or his advisers think such a risk worth taking? True, Bernstein had the second-most-famous face of any conductor from the last century. He wasn’t quite so recognisable here as André “Mr Andrew Preview” Previn (his own fault for performing insufficient sketches with Morecambe and Wise), but Bernstein was a genuine celebrity in the United States.
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That noted, his fans would surely have accepted a few superficial tweaks to Cooper’s appearance. Sling him in the right sort of suit and those who knew what Bernstein looked like would surely think the actor close enough. There was no need to tamper with the hooter. It’s not like putting a moustache on Charlie Chaplin or taking an arm off Lord Nelson.
Actors playing Cyrano de Bergerac have ventured out with smaller masses above their upper lip
Actors sometimes think such tweaks help inner as well as outer transformation. The current nose looks to be more controversial than the one Nicole Kidman wore in The Hours 20 years ago, but it actually casts less of a (literal) shadow. Actors playing Cyrano de Bergerac have ventured out with smaller masses above their upper lip. And it didn’t do much to make Kidman look more like the snoot of Bloomsbury. The Australian still seemed too tucked and shiny to pass muster as the sorrowful, drooped Virginia Woolf. Again, why bother?
Ann Roth, costume designer on The Hours, told the Los Angeles Times that the fake organ gave a “jolt, a kick-start” to Kidman’s performance. Maybe she was right. The now-disgraced Harvey Weinstein sent an emissary to London to talk his star out of the prosthetic, but the producer Scott Rudin resisted, and Kidman went on to win the Oscar. “By a nose,” Denzel Washington quipped at the podium.
“King actors” such as Laurence Oliver and Orson Welles, graduates of the stage, relied on facial or bodily modifications – noses in particular – as a way of leaving their everyday personalities behind. “I can never act as myself,” Olivier said. “I have to have a pillow up my jumper, a false nose or a moustache or wig.” The actors who came after them liked to pretend they were breaking down divisions between audience and performer. They wore everyday clothes and mumbled their words. Welles and Olivier felt a need to press home that divide with consciously theatrical costuming.
Something different is going on with the noses in Maestro and The Hours. They may help the actors make that imaginative leap, but they are also there to connect with memories of an actual personality. When not playing grade-A listed icons such as Elvis or Marilyn, such alterations are hardly worth the effort.
Consider two films made more than 40 years apart. When the supporting cast of All the President’s Men – Jack Warden, Martin Balsam, Jason Robards – turned up to play senior staff at the Washington Post they did little to alter their appearances. They were themselves. After all, how many people knew what Ben Bradlee or Howard Simons looked like? When Tom Hanks, David Cross and others appeared in Steven Spielberg’s The Post, sometimes playing the same characters, they were layered in wigs, make-up and prosthetics. A class of dull pedantry seems to have taken over in the production office. The world is expected to care about things it really doesn’t care about.
Paradoxically, it was Olivier, that great fan of the artificial schnozz, who put it best when upbraiding a star of All the President’s Men. “My dear boy,” he told Dustin Hoffman on the set of Marathon Man, “why don’t you try acting?”
