Observations on celebrity

The faces of fame

In his 1957 essay "The Face of Garbo", Roland Barthes celebrated the eponymous Swedish actress for "belonging to that moment in cinema when capturing the human face still plunged audiences into the deepest ecstasy". The medium of cinema is today too shopworn and cynical for us to worship actors' faces the way we did then. But we will never cease to appreciate beauty, and there are few contemporary actresses as beautiful as Nicole Kidman.

She may be our generation's Garbo - a preternaturally poised performer with flawless features, elusive and unyielding. Her latest film, Australia, a Gone With the Wind-style epic, certainly feels antique. During Newsnight Review's critique of the film, Germaine Greer complained that the narrative was interrupted by the "landscape of Nicole Kidman's paralysed face", while Johann Hari compared Kidman's screen presence to "watching a mannequin" and said that her performance had been "ruined" by her inability to move her face.

The press has been equally unkind. The New York film critic David Edelstein took offence at Kidman's "big immovable forehead", comparing her to the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz. Salon's Stephanie Zacharek observed: "The colleague next to me asked me what I thought it [her forehead] was made of. I said melamine - whatever it is, you could break an egg against it with no trouble."

The contemporary sensibility dictates that if someone is placed on a pedestal, that pedestal must at some point be kicked out from under them, preferably in front of a live studio audience. In her review of The Stepford Wives (2004), in which Kidman also starred, Zacharek suggested that Kidman's "beauty is so coolly porcelain that she teeters on the edge of off-putting". Perhaps, with Australia, Kidman has fallen off the edge.

It is true that her affectless face makes it difficult to conceive of Australia as anything other than artifice - camp, even. If acting is in essence the expression of emotion, then Kidman's face is an insult to acting. This may be why, according to the Hollywood Reporter's annual review of Hollywood's most successful women, Kidman's asking price has fallen considerably. Or perhaps the real reason is that she is now aged 41.

According to the film industry's perverse logic, a woman of 40 is too old. As a character in the film The First Wives Club remarks: "There are three ages of women in Hollywood: babe, district attorney and Driving Miss Daisy." Apart from occasional sleeper hits such as Mamma Mia!, Sex and the City, The Devil Wears Prada and My Big Fat Greek Wedding, female-driven films rarely succeed at the box office. In October 2007, a Warner Brothers executive, Jeff Robinov, reportedly said: "We are no longer doing movies with women in the lead."

For Barthes, Garbo was an archetype, more an idea or ideal than an actual human being, and Kidman is equally abstruse. In a society that demands authenticity from its actors, Kidman seems too ethereal, remote. Where other stars are hot or even cool, Kidman is cold; in a New York Times Magazine interview in November, the actor Mickey Rourke described her as an "ice cube".

Rourke himself is attempting a comeback, playing the title character in the independently financed drama The Wrestler. In the early 1980s, when he first emerged in films, Rourke was handsome and self-assured. He is no longer either. After alienating the studios with his egotistical behaviour, Rourke (who is 56) returned to his first love, professional boxing. The actor has since had five nose jobs; in one operation, the cartilage from his ear was used to rebuild his nose. His face is different in other ways, too: shapeless, scarred, disfigured and deformed. In one scene in The Wrestler, his character describes himself as "an old broken-down piece of meat". And yet the film does not debase Rourke; rather, it liberates him. He has no beauty with which to be burdened and no esteem to lose. His performance is propelled by a sense of urgency - that this might be his last lead role, that he has the chance to set things right.

Rourke's features are a stark contrast to Kidman's. And yet his face - a map of resilience, resignation, rage and regret - is peculiarly human. Where Kidman is an empty vessel in Australia, Rourke says a great deal in The Wrestler, often without saying a word.

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