HE is a Good Ol' Boy from rural Texas. She is a study in cosmopolitan sophistication. He has exploded on to the scene like a summer brush fire. She smouldered for almost three years before bursting into flame. He plays an idealistic Southern lawyer. She plays a gossipy 19th century Englishwoman.
But Matthew McConaughey and Gwyneth Paltrow have a lot in common. Through some conjunction of fate, hype and coincidence, they have turned white hot at precisely the same moment. They are Hollywood's newest and shiniest stars, the "It" boy and girl of 1996, the Next Big Thing.
In the last few months McConaughey has graced more magazine covers than many actors do in a lifetime. Vanity Fair put him on the cover twice in four months and called him "Hollywood's new sensation". Rolling Stone pronounced him "not just hot but sparkling and spitting like metal in the microwave". Entertainment Weekly cooed over his "opaque and expressive" screen presence and "quasi John Wayne walk".
The attention showered on Paltrow was scarcely less rhapsodic. Time called her "the most elegant actress of her generation". Harper's Bazaar eulogised "Hollywood's newest and most promising star". Vogue editor Anna Wintour put her on the cover a rare distinction for a non model and wrote that the 23 year old was "well known as the actress every designer wants to dress".
Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the adulatory frenzy surrounding both actors, both Americans, was that it had reached fever pitch long before most of us had ever seen either one of them deliver a line of dialogue. To be sure, we had heard of Paltrow. We knew her as the waifish blonde appendage of Brad Pitt, the officially designated "sexiest man alive". A few film buffs had chirruped excitedly about her scene stealing performance in Flesh And Bone and her impressive turn in Mrs Parker And The Vicious Circle. Diligent readers of movie credits perhaps noted that it was her head that was sent to Brad Pitt in a box in Seven. But in truth she was one of a handful of young actresses whose name most often elicited the reaction: "Oh yeah . . . what was she in again?"
Not even this much could be said for McConaughey. Before landing the lead role in John Grisham's A Time To Kill. The 26 year old from Uvalde, Texas, had appeared in five films and none, with the possible exception of the cult hit Dazed And Confused is likely to have stuck in your memory. The Return Of The Chainsaw Massacre, in which he played the lead, was not even released in US cinemas. He didn't have to spend long learning his lines for the 1994 film - Angels In The Outfield - there weren't any. But why these two faces and why now? What arc the ingredients of this elusive stardust and the conditions under which they can be kneaded, coaxed and cajoled into Hollywood gold? Can we discern in the vertiginous ascent of McConaughey and Paltrow the outline of a formula, a recipe for the production, or perhaps cultivation, of that rarest and most precious of species, the movie star?
At first glance the most obvious thing that the two have in common is stunning looks. Paltrow's is a glassy, unconventional beauty: her slightly protruding top lip gives her porcelain face a permanently pouty look. Her neck is so long and slim that you fear she might get whiplash from nodding. McConaughey is more classically handsome, a square jawed chip off the old leading man block. He has an infectious grin and an athlete's body: his father was a professional American football player. And apparently he has a very, very impressive bottom. "Not since Sharon Stone caught America's attention in Basic Instinct have the media seemed so eager to bestow stardom on an actor's nether regions," Entertainment Weekly declared.
But looks are not enough, insists Pat Kingsley, McConaughey's heavyweight publicist (he has four agents) in Los Angeles. "This city is full of very handsome young men. He got here because people were knocked out by his performance, his acting ability.
It is undoubtedly true that both actors give arresting performances in their latest films. Playing the eponymous Emma in Douglas McGrath's addition to the heaving Austen oeuvre - already dubbed the period remake of Clueless by Hollywood wags - she is intoxicatingly good, bathing the rest of the cast in her luminous glow. Not only does she deliver a flawless upper class English accent (not something we have come to expect from Hollywood's finest) but she even gives a virtuoso singing performance and reveals herself to be no slouch with a bow and arrow.
McConaughey's notices for A Time To Kill have been almost as breathless. He plays Jake Brigance, a young lawyer who passionately defends a black man charged with killing the two rednecks who raped his daughter. Much has been made of the fact that every leading man in Hollywood (yes, even Brad) was considered, and rejected, for the role, and that the film's supporting cast - Samuel L. Jackson, Sandra Bullock Kevin Spacey - is unusually starry. But most critics agreed the newcomer held the film.
IT IS a truism that there is more to stardom than being a great actor. Otherwise Sean Penn and Jennifer Jason Leigh would be twinkling from the Hollywood heavens. McConaughey and Paltrow seem to have something else and it sets them apart from their merely talented peers. In Paltrow's case, interviewers invariably swoon over her singular combination of child like innocence and poise. Few interviews are complete without some description of her impossibly graceful movement across a room. "In my experience with her, and watching her, she doesn't seem like anybody else, at least not anybody else who's already an icon," says McGrath. "There's nobody around and working today who she reminds you of. She seems unique."
McConaughey, too, invites comparisons with the leading men of another era rather than today's $15 million a picture names. He has been likened so often to the young Newman that the comparison has ceased to seem ludicrous. Appropriately enough, Newman is his idol. When the coming man finally got to meet the septuagenarian star, Newman's advice seemed calculated to feed the McConaughey frenzy: "Be about your word. A handshake deal is a handshake deal. Be honest even if you catch hell." Newman's counsel, scripted or not, seemed to capture the rugged decency that forms the core of both men's appeal.
McConaughey, who somewhat disconcertingly wears a ring made with gold removed from his mother's teeth (she is still alive), quickly showed he could play the wholesome hunk as well as any Grisham character. "We have two rules in the family," he told Rolling Stone. "Don't lie and don't say `I can't'."
Joel Schumacher, the director of A Time To Kill, summarises McConaughey's appeal like this: "Matthew is without question, a different kind of leading man. After a long period in which most of the male movie actors decided they'd be Seattle grunge, stocking cap, goateed, chain smoking, hotel room smashing posers, his intelligence and integrity come through. Still, there's also a bit of the bad boy in Matthew. At first glance, you think he's every mother's dream. At second glance, you'd lock your daughter up."
The buzz was first audible in November when the tabloid TV show 48 Hours aired an item about McConaughey and the New York Times reported that "top directors are vying to meet him" and "scripts and proposals are surging into his agent's office". By Christmas, the man almost nobody had heard of had been pronounced one of the sexiest men alive by another tabloid TV show and "Hollywood's coming man" by one influential New York columnist. But things didn't get really crazy until April, when Schumacher flew to New York to show his film to a select group of big shot journalists. That month McConaughey got his first Vanity Fair cover and by June the Los Angeles Times was reporting on the media frenzy surrounding the new star, a sure sign the young actor had reached what you might call "escape velocity".
WITH a TV scriptwriter (Bruce Paltrow) for a father and an award winning stage actress (Blythe Danner) for a mother Paltrow was, by contrast, a veritable Hollywood thoroughbred whose newfound celebrity seemed like an accident waiting to happen. Michael Douglas, a close family friend, helped get her into the University of California at Santa Barbara (she didn't stay long) and Uncle Steven (Spielberg) gave her a part in Hook. She won raves for her performance as a con artist in Steve Klove's Flesh And Bone but escaped wider public notice until she became one half of one of Hollywood's most dashing couples a few months later. McGrath says her much publicised union with Pitt did not hurt when the time came to step up a division: "People who didn't know her work and thought of her as a decorative appendage to him got a double surprise, when they saw her performance.
Cary Grant once compared becoming a movie star to getting on a streetcar. Some actors, he said, "stood, holding tightly to leather straps to avoid being pushed aside". In the centre of the car, an elite few sat comfortably. "They were the big stars. At the front, new actors and actresses pushed and shoved to get aboard." McConaughey and Paltrow may not have seats in the Hollywood streetcar but they are most definitely aboard. At least until the Next Big Thing comes along.