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Devotion to an ActorDateline: 5th November, 2000 Some interesting facts:
We are currently running our Greatest Living British Actors/Actresses poll, and so far there have been 4,618 votes cast for the Actresses, and 122,844 for the Actors. Hold on a minute! Over 100,000? Is this real? Of course it isn't. There has been ballot-rigging on a massive scale, which makes the poll totally invalid. It began with supporters of Ken Branagh and Alan Rickman - I am told that one Branagh fan reported on a bulletin board that (s)he had voted over 500 times - and it's now spread to the fans of Ralph Fiennes. The Sean Bean and Michael Crawford fans have treated the whole thing with more respect and have simply cast one vote each, or so it would seem from looking at the results to date. I will be announcing what I intend to do about this particular poll elsewhere, but the fervour with which people are voting for their favourites does make you think. What is it about actors that attracts such devotion? The point is, of course, that people do need heroes. Not necessarily in the traditional sense - the knight in shining armour syndrome - but people whom we can admire, look up to, people whose lives are brighter than our own, who brighten our lives. So many of us are stuck in dull everday existences: jobs which are unsatisfying, even boring; lives which lack excitement; relationships which are less than satisfactory. We look for something outside the humdrum, the mundane, and we often find it in the movies or on television. It is, I think, significant that the actors who received the most nominations in our polls were not the theatricals, the stage actors, but those who are known through film or TV appearances. (We also have to factor in, of course, the fact that the Internet is an international medium, so a huge proportion of those who look at the site only know British actors through TV and film, so names like Simon Russell Beale or Ian Holm are next to unknown to them. But even if this were not the case, I still believe that there is something about what appears on the screen which is much more compelling to the majority of people than anything which happens on a stage.) Film and TV present us with an alternative reality in a way which is impossible for the stage. When we go to a theatre and become involved in a play, we have to willingly suspend our disbelief. We cannot escape the fact that what is being acted out in front of our eyes is just that, something which is being acted out, whereas, because of its far greater realism, it is much easier to believe that what we see on the screen is actual reality. When we watch an actor playing the part of a knight in shining armour on screen, part of us wants to believe that what we are seeing is real, and, because we want to believe it, in some corner of our minds even the most sophisticated of us accept it as reality for the time that we are under its spell. When the credits roll we return to the mundane world, but a little of the magical "reality" of the screen remains lodged in our subconscious. The actors whom we see in these alternative realities remind us of the magical escape into another more exciting, happy, passionate, interesting world: they become symbols of our escape from the everyday. Thinking of Ken Branagh reminds us of the heroism and greatness of King Henry, of the passionate world of Love's Labour's Lost, of the terrifying (but so much more interesting than our own) world of Baron Frankenstein. Thus we associate screen actors with escape from dullness, and we choose our screen heroes in accordance with what it is that most appeals to us: the swashbuckling of an Errol Flynn, the dangerousness of a Leslie Grantham, the passion of an Alan Rickman (for Truly, Madly, Deeply is, perhaps, the archetypal love story for many women - I have to say here that all my female friends call it a "woman's film"!). Watching a stage play, we are less prone to being sucked into the world of the play. We are always one step removed, and, as far as the actors are concerned, more aware of their technique than we ever are in film or TV. Thus, while we may become great fans of this actor or that actress, we are not so deeply involved; the two realities do not become so blurred. So perhaps we should not be so surprised at the ballot-rigging: those who are doing it are, in effect, voting for part of their own psyche. Articles Indices:
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