--- In [email protected], "Alex Stanley" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > --- In [email protected], Sal Sunshine <salsunshine@> > wrote: > > > > Kind of brings to mind Julia Roberts, who looks sort of like a > > young Katharine Hepburn, except, of course, for the fact that KA > > could actually *act.* > > I've never understood the Julia Roberts phenomenon. IMO, she's > an ordinary looking woman with acting skills that are mediocre, > at best. It boggles my mind that the industry deems her worthy > of tens of millions of dollars per film. I don't get it.
Ok, just a pro-Julia word or two. She has a certain ability as an actress that I didn't fully understand until I remembered a quote by Tamasaburo Bando, the world's most famous Kabuki onagata. In the all-male Kabuki theater, onagatas are the men who play the women's roles. They are trained from the age of five or six to do this. Many are not gay, but are known for their ability to "portray women better than women." I once saw Tamasaburo Bando perform in L.A., from the second row. He did three excerpts from famous Kabuki plays that night. In them he played a young girl, a middle-aged woman, and an old woman. It was amazing, because not only did the characters change *totally*, to the point that you had difficulty remembering that it was the same actor playing each role, but at no point during the evening was there any question in your mind that the person you were watching onstage was a woman. Anyway, on this tour he was interviewed and specfically asked about this ability of his to play women better than women. He said, "Inside every woman there are places so deep, and so private, that they would never be able to show them. But I can." THAT is the thing that Julia Roberts does in some of her roles. Her forte is those moments of *vulerability*, in which she reveals those deep, private places that very few other actresses are capable of revealing or willing to reveal. It's exactly *why* directors cast her in roles that have one or more of those moments in the script. This doesn't mean that you have to like her, of course, but that's why I like her. I have encountered very few other actresses who are willing and able to reveal such depths. Isabelle Adjani springs to mind, of course, but very few others.
