October 21, 2012

What has happened to the beautiful people?

Did some disease just strike Hollywood? Seriously, they look ill or corrupt or desolate. Scroll down. And go here and scroll. Are they all somehow dying? Is this the return of "heroin chic"? Did the picture-of-health go out of style? What's happening?

Why does Hollywood suddenly look so awful?
  
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42 comments:

Jason (the commenter) said...

All those people are for the most part B-listers, if that.

Automatic_Wing said...

It's a Tim Burton film, everyone is supposed to look that way.

robinintn said...

They're English.

RazorSharpSundries said...

Christopher Lee looks very dignified. He doesn't look scary anymore. My sister forced me to watch those old Hammer movies when I was a kid. I hated Christopher Lee, he scared the hell out of me.

wyo sis said...

We're all getting older?

SomeoneHasToSayIt said...

Google "Stars without makeup". These folks were never good looking.

On a random walk up State Street, one will encounter many many more 'beautiful' than typical Hollywood types.

Sorun said...

There are so many celebrities now that the average celebrity looks more like the average person.

edutcher said...

Went with 3.

A lot of these people really have no character and it shows. The reason behind the Gloria Swanson line in "Sunset Boulevard", "In my day, we had faces!".

PS Helena Bonham Carter has always had the waif look.

If you want to see her looking like a real woman, watch "The King's Speech". Her most endearing performance, btw.

KCFleming said...

Our Weimar moment.

This is what running on fumes looks like.

madAsHell said...

They all have HDC syndrome.

High Definition Cameras

Michael K said...

I never liked Bonham Carter after she took Kenneth Branagh away from Emma Thompson. She looks frumpy and her boob job shows too clearly. Breasts aren't shaped that way.

Hagar said...

Not just the people; that's also some awful clothes!

J Bones said...

It's not really Hollywood, those are all British actors.

Jason (the commenter) said...

Reading The Daily Mail and complaining about ugly celebrities is like reading Think Progress and complaining about ugly Republicans.

The people who want to look at beauty hang out on tumblr.

Skyler said...

You need a category that these aren't the beautiful people. They're the has-beens.

Wince said...

The Beautiful People

And I don't want you and I don't need you
Don't bother to resist, or I'll beat cha
It's not your fault that you're always wrong
The weak ones are there to justify the strong

The beautiful people, the beautiful people
It's all relative to the size of your steeple
You can't see the forest for the trees
You can't smell your own shit on your knees

There's no time to discriminate,
Hate every motherfucker
That's in your way

Hey you, what do you see?
Something beautiful, something free?
Hey you, why you trying to be mean?
You live with apes man, it's hard to be clean

The worms will live in every host
It's hard to pick which one they eat most

The horrible people, the horrible people
It's as anatomic as the size of your steeple
Capitalism has made it this way,
Old-fashioned fascism will take it away

Hey you, what do you see?
Something beautiful, something free?
Hey you, why you trying to be mean?
You live with apes man, it's hard to be clean

There's no time to discriminate,
Hate every motherfucker
That's in your way

Hate! [x8]

The beautiful people
The beautiful people (aahh)

Hey you, what do you see?
Something beautiful, something free?
Hey you, why you trying to be mean?
You live with apes man, it's hard to be clean

Hey you, what do you see?
Something beautiful, something free?
Hey you, why you trying to be mean?
You live with apes man, it's hard to be clean

Paddy O said...

They're all old.

Jason (the commenter) said...

Skyler: You need a category that these aren't the beautiful people. They're the has-beens.

But Althouse can't admit that. Her point is that all of Hollywood is now ugly and it's somehow related to Obama or the decline of the Liberal elite. If she wanted intellectual honesty she wouldn't have cherry picked a source like The Daily Mail.

(That The Daily Mail is her source of pulp-culture speaks volumes.)

Sydney said...

Helena Bonham Carter is a beautiful woman, but for some reason she only appears in public uglied up since she married Tim Burton. She was her beautiful self in The King's Speech, though.

NorthOfTheOneOhOne said...

It's that desperate battle against Time and Age. And they're all losing, badly!

Ralph L said...

She asked for a dress with a view and a ton of facepaint.

Strelnikov said...

I'm not sure H B-C is a good one to start this with. Outside of her turn as Marla Singer in Fight Club she's never looked that good.

Anonymous said...

"It's that desperate battle against Time and Age. And they're all losing, badly!"

They're going for the Pelosi Look.

Strelnikov said...

"They're English."

At leas they didn't give us close ups of their teeth.

Sam L. said...

I'm just not seeing it. they don't look skinny to me. The guys...need shaves.

Christy said...

Isn't the British press notoriously hostile to celebrities? Even I, a casual photo taker, noticed that the lights and angles for those shots were awful.

I'm remembering a talk show with Kate Winslet when she was frustrated with a magazine layout she had done. The magazine had photoshopped in someone elses legs. Winslet stood, showed her own lovely legs and asked what was wrong with them. Her point was that we rarely see stars as they really are. We don't IRL have a makeup artist and a hair stylist doing touch ups every 15 minutes.

McTriumph said...

Never forget that movies are fantasy, like those glamour shots your normal looking neighbor's wife gave her husband for valentine's day. Makeup, great camera work and someone else with good wardrobe taste can make anyone look like a movie star.

Helen Bonham Carter, who didn't fall in love with her in "Room With A View"?


Of the hand full of female stars I've seen up close only Brooks Shield was strikingly beautiful without makeup. Donna Douglas was strikingly beautiful for an older woman with makeup.

Anonymous said...

An observation: In the good old days, i.e. the so-called Golden Age, Hollywood actors, especially the females, retired right around they turned 40. Today's "stars" male or female try to stay alive with capped teeth that give them a lisp, fish-lips which fool no one and Botoxed foreheads, and cat faces, which are depressing to see, awful to watch. And those boobs! Why do they think they look good carrying two balloons looking like some weird deformity?

What I hate most to see are those ugly veiny naked legs. Cover them up with a pair of nylons for goodness sake.

Fr Martin Fox said...

It amazes me how many of these folks don't know how to dress; and how many of them will make appearances looking like utter slobs.

Musicians and comedians do performances--for which people pay a princely sum--wearing the same clothes they'd use to wash their car. Same attire when they come on TV shows to promote themselves. It's contempt. For us, their audience.

(It just occurred to me: these folks also don't like being recognized when out and about, and I understand that. But then when you dress for Jay Leno exactly the same way you dress for Home Depot, that's what will happen. One more reason to dress to the nines on Jay Leno.)

So many of our "celebrities" lack any class. Probably that was true 70 or 80 years ago, but the publicists had sense enough to hide it.

Fr Martin Fox said...

I just thought of the hilarious "Sinatra Group" spoof Joe Piscopo did on the old SNL, when he said to Billy Idol, take that sneer off your face; the audience wants to like you!

Darrell said...

That's what swallowing the Marx does to you. Not pretty.

William said...

Maybe it's an English thing. Helena Bonham Carter is very upper class. She can dress any damn way she pleases. There's a part of me that admires her for turning up dressed like a bagwoman at red carpet events......Around NYC, one sometimes see movie stars. They dress down. I guess the idea is that maybe people won't recognize and bother them. Maybe it works. You don't notice the ones you don't notice.

Icepick said...

The great thing about Helena Bonham Carter's look is that her hair is always a disaster. It always looks like she just got out of bed after a long night of fucking someone's brains out, and having hers fucked out in turn.

Joe said...

In the relatively recent past, movie star image was highly managed. This was especially true during the "studio era" but extended long past then. The advent of cable television and then the internet shattered that; it opened up thousands of outlets for paparazzi AND created an massively increased demand for their product.

On top of all that, has been actors who in years past would have just vanished into the woodwork, now have a way to extend their careers and/or reinvent themselves.

(Incidentally, in one of your links, it appears the photographers were using extremely bad lighting. The photographer appeared to be using the built-in flash and overexposed the images. In short, the photographer didn't know what he/she was doing.)

Leland said...

Meh, can't do the poll. The problem is the photography and poor lighting. The shadows cast make them look unattractive. Well except for Behn Zietlin, who looks like the Joker did her lipstick.

Balfegor said...

re: elkh1:

An observation: In the good old days, i.e. the so-called Golden Age, Hollywood actors, especially the females, retired right around they turned 40.

I think it's more that sometime in their 30s, female actresses transitioned from playing youthful romantic interests into playing the older woman, and then wife, mothers, matrons, and so on. I still remember how in Cold Mountain, Nicole Kidman's aging face was wildly inconsistent with the role she was supposed to be playing. Checking Wikipedia now, she must have been about 35, when she was trying to play a girl of 20 or so. It was strikingly odd, like seeing a woman of 35 wearing Hello Kitty.

Ann Althouse said...

When Helena Bonham Carter was in "Howard's End" and "A Room With a View," I thought she was the most beautiful actress of the era and one of the most beautiful actresses ever. In these pictures, she looks terrible. The makeup is particularly bad.

Balfegor said...

Re: Althouse:

Howards End was 20 years ago. A Room with a View is even older. True, Carter's style has changed since then (I suppose hanging around Tim Burton will do that to anyone), so she might be able to recapture a bit of that old look if she styled herself very carefully. But she's a lot older today.

john said...

WTF with the comment deleting?

ALP said...

My theory: lack of sleep. Making it in the entertainment industry means long, long, long working days and little sleep. Plus the stress of little food to keep that starving, hardbody look.

Lack of sleep and food.

ricpic said...

The reverse of this is a person who's so unbelievably beautiful that even playing a down and outer she's still beautiful. Just watched Barfly. Faye Dunaway, playing a tramp in slept in clothes, can't unglamorize herself. And what gams!

Anonymous said...

Hey, these are Brits! No fair.

A. They're drunk
B. They never looked quite as plastic perfect as Hollywood