John Simpson, on actors

October 9, 2007 3:18 PM

John Simpson, on actors.
posted by veedubya (23 comments total)

Uh, so Hollywood stars are human beings? Wonderful conclusion. This Simpson guy, he's on target.
posted by xmutex at 3:22 PM on October 9, 2007

Summary: Star fucker is depressed about stars being flawed people.
posted by tkchrist at 3:30 PM on October 9, 2007

Man, what is John Simpson doing writing for the Daily Mail?!
posted by afx237vi at 3:46 PM on October 9, 2007

About a third of the way down the page, if you look closely you can just make out a picture of George Clooney (inadequate and sweaty).
posted by hal9k at 3:55 PM on October 9, 2007

Who the hell is John Simpson? A little background would be great. It's like if I made a one link post to some article by Rick Mercer. Come on.
posted by eurasian at 4:01 PM on October 9, 2007

I prefer reading about stars being assholes rather than being dorky.
posted by Citizen Premier at 4:17 PM on October 9, 2007

Man, what is John Simpson doing writing for the Daily Mail?!

Well hey, if it's good enough for Ronnie Wood...

John Simpson. What, we gotta cut and chew your meat for ya too? :)
posted by miss lynnster at 4:28 PM on October 9, 2007

I could tell it was George Clooney based on seeing the upper 10% of the photo alone. Stop celebrity culture, I want to get off!
posted by tepidmonkey at 4:57 PM on October 9, 2007

For eurasian and anyone else seeking context for this FPP.

John Simpson is the BBC's world affairs editor, a veteran journalist who has covered most of the most significant world conflicts of the last 20 years. His report on the friendly fire incident mentioned by Tim Robbins.
posted by electricinca at 5:59 PM on October 9, 2007

Uh, so Hollywood stars are human beings? Wonderful conclusion. This Simpson guy, he's on target.

Well, he was writing for the Daily Mail readership.
posted by chrismear at 6:22 PM on October 9, 2007

Not sure what the Burton anecdote was doing in there but it was the best part of the article so I'm not complaining.

"Tell the director to go and f*** himself. I'm reminiscing here about the divine Elizabeth, and mustn't be disturbed."
posted by effwerd at 6:32 PM on October 9, 2007

Sir Ian McKellan, on acting.
posted by EarBucket at 7:31 PM on October 9, 2007

Sir Richard Burton: "An actor is something less than a man, while an actress is something more than a woman."

Here is the introduction to the complete 1963 BBC recording of Dylan Thomas' Under Milk Wood — A Play for Voices, with Burton as the First Voice:

Only you can hear the houses sleeping in the streets in the slow deep salt and silent black, bandaged night. Only you can see, in the blinded bedrooms, the coms and petticoats over the chairs, the jugs and basins, the glasses of teeth, Thou Shalt Not on the wall, and the yellowing dickybird-watching pictures of the dead. Only you can hear and see, behind the eyes of the sleepers, the movements and countries and mazes and colours and dismays and rainbows and tunes and wishes and flight and fall and despairs and big seas of their dreams.

From where you are, you can hear their dreams.

Listen to Part One (with links to subsequent parts at the bottom), and imagine any male celebrity of today reading the same.
posted by cenoxo at 7:32 PM on October 9, 2007 [2 favorites]

...But perhaps all this was too British for Tim Robbins.

Americans, no matter what their political views, aren't attracted by talk of the long term.

Christ, what an asshole.
posted by zardoz at 7:57 PM on October 9, 2007

The distance between the self-assurance of the figure on screen and the real-life human being without the costumes can be immense.

Next he'll be telling me that movie actors aren't making up the words as they go along but are reading from "scripts." And that despite having these "scripts" they sometimes make mistakes and have to do multiple "takes" of the SAME SCENE!
posted by drjimmy11 at 9:52 PM on October 9, 2007

Is he related to Bart?
posted by dirigibleman at 10:02 PM on October 9, 2007

earbucket, that's very funny.
posted by small_ruminant at 10:22 PM on October 9, 2007

Is this where I vote for cenoxo to make an FPP of that comment?
posted by Alvy Ampersand at 11:28 PM on October 9, 2007

Burton is probably the only person that could still get away with his comment about actors and actresses (I sincerely doubt that he'd lump both sexes into today's PC "actors" category), so I'll leave it at that.

However, expanding a bit more upon his profession, he also said:

Actors are poor, abject, disagreeable, preverse, ill-minded, slightly malicious creatures. And of that august company of idiots, I'm afraid I'm a member.
...
I'm strictly in Hollywood for the fame and money.

WRT to the latter, how different might Burton's career and life been had he been selected — as Ian Fleming's first choice [see item 3]* — to play James Bond in the original film version of Thunderball (with Alfred Hitchcock directing).

*From the Robert Sellers book, The Battle for Bond.
posted by cenoxo at 12:54 AM on October 10, 2007

The piece is a bit rambling. But I think the point is not that Hollywood actors are human or flawed, but that off set they, or some contemporary ones, are below the normal human average at communicating and creating an impression. Which is part of their trade.

Who the hell is John Simpson?

Who the hell is Tim Robbins? I genuinely have no idea, but we can't have everything footnoted.
posted by Phanx at 3:24 AM on October 10, 2007

I'm increasingly perplexed by the amount of links to the Daily Mail of late on Metafilter. For those Mefites that don't quite grasp what a putrid organisation it is I'd like to suggest a look at this wonderful article. I'm unsure which is my favourite part, but segueing from talking about homosexuality straight into paedophilia as though one implied the other (last two paragraphs) probably shades it. Though paragraph three runs it close for illustrating their knee-jerk anti-PC agenda.
posted by Gratishades at 4:52 AM on October 10, 2007

Oh, I think Simpson's managed a silk purse here - out of a bit of a mish mash of film star anecdotes. (Though I agree with Gratishades that the Daily Mail is putrid, generally speaking...).

I still want to kick Simpson in his lazily ungallant shins, however, for writing of Elizabeth Taylor, as an aside during the Burton interview:

It's hard to remember, in the blowsy, embarrassing reality of today, how beautiful she once was. I nodded, and felt emboldened. "So you don't feel bitter towards her?"

(If one wants to make that obvious point about the actress, there's a far better snippy famous comment about Elizabeth Taylor from someone else - something about how it was once every women's tragedy that they didn't look like her, now it's every women's tragedy that they do...)
posted by Jody Tresidder at 6:03 AM on October 10, 2007

Celebrities are really not actors - being a celebrity negates their ability to act.
posted by niccolo at 8:09 AM on October 10, 2007