Film Actors as an important part of a movie. An actor or actress is a person who acts in a dramatic production and who works in film, television, theatre, or radio in that capacity. The ancient Greek word for an actor, ὑποκριτής (hypokrites), means literally "one who interprets"; in this sense, an actor is one who interprets a dramatic character.
 |
| Photo Courtesy : http://movies.about.com |
The word actor refers to a person who acts regardless of gender, while actress refers specifically to a female who acts, therefore a female can be both. The Oxford English Dictionary states that originally "'actor' was used for both sexes".
The English word actress does not derive from the Latin actrix, probably not even by way of French actrice; according to the Oxford English Dictionary, actress was "probably formed independently" in English. As actress is a specifically feminine word, some feminists assert that the word is sexist. Gender-neutral usage of actor has re-emerged in modern English, especially when referring to male and female performers collectively, but actress remains the common term used in major acting awards given to female recipients and is still common in general usage.
The gender-neutral term player was common in film in the early days of the Production Code, but is now generally deemed archaic. However, it remains in use in the theatre, often incorporated into the name of a theatre group or company (such as the East West Players).
The first recorded case of an actor performing took place in 534 BC (though the changes in calendar over the years make it hard to determine exactly) when the Greek performer Thespis stepped on to the stage at the Theatre Dionysus and became the first known person to speak words as a character in a play or story. Prior to Thespis' act, stories were only known to be told in song and dance and in third person narrative. In honour of Thespis,a 6th century B.C poet, actors are commonly called Thespians. Theatrical legend to this day maintains that Thespis exists as a mischievous spirit, and disasters in the theatre are sometimes blamed on his ghostly intervention.
Actors were traditionally not people of high status, and in the Early Middle Ages travelling acting troupes were often viewed with distrust. In many parts of Europe, actors could not even receive a Christian burial, and traditional beliefs of the region and time period held that this left any actor forever condemned and many actors were believed to be homosexual. However, this negative perception was largely reversed in the 19th and 20th centuries as acting has become an honored and popular profession and art. Part of the cause is the easier popular access to dramatic film entertainment and the resulting rise of the movie star—as regards both their social status and the salaries they command. The combination of public presence and wealth has profoundly rehabilitated their image.In the past, only men could become actors in some societies. In the ancient Greece and Rome and the medieval world, it was considered disgraceful for a woman to go on the stage, and this belief continued right up until the 17th century, when in Venice it was broken.
In the time of William Shakespeare, women's roles were generally played by men or boys. The British prohibition(Victor Andersen) was ended in the reign of Charles II who enjoyed watching female actors (actresses) on stage. Historically, acting was considered a man's profession; so, in Shakespeare's time, for instance, men and boys played all roles, including the female parts. However when an eighteen year Puritan prohibition of drama was lifted after the English Restoration of 1660, women began to appear on stage. The first occurrence of the term actress in the OED being by Dryden in 1700. In modern times, women sometimes play the roles of prepubescent boys. The stage role of Peter Pan, for example, is traditionally played by a woman, as are the principal boy and dame in British pantomime.
This is uncommon in film, however, except in animated films and television programmes, where boys are sometimes voiced by women. For example, in The Simpsons the voice of Bart Simpson is provided by Nancy Cartwright. Opera has several "pants roles" traditionally sung by women, usually mezzo-sopranos. Examples are Hansel in Hänsel und Gretel, and Cherubino in The Marriage of Figaro. Having an actor dress as the opposite sex for comic effect is also a long standing tradition in comic theatre and film. Most of Shakespeare's comedies include instances of overt cross-dressing, such as Francis Flute in A Midsummer Night's Dream.
The movie A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum stars Jack Gilford dressing as a young bride. Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon famously posed as women to escape gangsters in the Billy Wilder film Some Like It Hot. Cross-dressing for comic effect was a frequently used device in most of the thirty Carry On films. Dustin Hoffman and Robin Williams have each appeared in a hit comedy film (Tootsie & Mrs. Doubtfire, respectively) in which they played most scenes dressed as a woman.
Several roles in modern plays and musicals are played by a member of the opposite sex (rather than a character cross-dressing), such as the character Edna Turnblad in Hairspray — played by Divine in the original film, Harvey Fierstein in the Broadway musical, and John Travolta in the 2007 movie musical. Occasionally the issue is further complicated through a woman acting as a man pretending to be a woman, like Julie Andrews in Victor/Victoria or Gwyneth Paltrow in Shakespeare in Love.
Here are the List of nominees for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor (by actor) and List of nominees for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress (by actress) .
Do you want to see more actors and actress?, click here for actress and here for actors.
Academy Award
The Academy Awards, popularly known as the Oscars, are presented annually by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS)to recognize excellence of professionals in the film industry, including directors, actors, and writers. The formal ceremony at which the awards are presented is one of the most prominent film award ceremonies in the world. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences itself was conceived by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio boss Louis B. Mayer. The 1st Academy Awards ceremony was held on Thursday, May 16, 1929, at the Hotel Roosevelt in Hollywood to honor outstanding film achievements of 1927 and 1928. It was hosted by actor Douglas Fairbanks and director William C. DeMille. The 81st Academy Awards honoring the best in film for 2008 will be held on Sunday, February 22, 2009 at the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood with actor Hugh Jackman hosting the ceremony for the first time.
Actor News : The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button (tbc)
- Release Date Feb 6th 2009
- Certificate tbc
- Genre
- Action/adventure,
- Drama
- Starring
- Brad Pitt,
- Cate Blanchett,
- Tilda Swinton,
- Elle Fanning,
- Jason Flemyng
- Director
- David Fincher
- Screenwriter
- Eric Roth,
- Robin Swicord
Certain filmmakers are too good to win Oscars. Too good because their vision is unblinkered, unblinking. Kubrick, for one. Peckinpah, Hitchcock, Welles, Altman, Lynch… Well, you get the idea. David Fincher is of course one of these filmmakers, but his dismissal by the Academy is so complete he actually belongs to another subset, one consigned to a rejection more robust, more resolute.
All of the above were at least nominated for statuettes, three of them gifted honorary awards. Fincher has zero nods from six films - films that include a trio of masterpieces in Se7en, Fight Club and Zodiac. Still, he’s at least in good company, his banished kindred including Aldrich, De Palma, Leone, Lang...
But all that’s about to change. Fincher is about to be embraced. Not because The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button is his best film, or because it’s the American classic we were all hoping for (expecting, dammit) but are the violence, desolation, obsession, rage and anarchic,
seething humour that so artfully disfigures his previous work; in comes warmth, romance, (fleeting) fulfilment, sentiment and magical realism. A gorgeous-looking fable spun from F Scott Fitzgerald’s 1921 short story, Button flirts with whimsy, skirts schmaltz, at times teetering on the edge of a misty(-eyed) abyss but pulled back by Fincher’s cerebral disposition and meticulous technique. Scrupulous, exacting, he’s our generation’s Kubrick - and Button is his AI, a two-parts beguiling, one-part queasy mix of heart and mind.
It’s also an epic of rare scope and scale (see, the Academy really will love it), if not the substance you might expect from a 167-minute opus that spans 90-odd years in its foregrounding of one man’s peculiar growth against that of a nation. Naturally, the man in question is Benjamin Button, born a frail, crumple-faced OAP and aging backwards until his buckled body becomes vital and virile - he is, after all, played by Brad Pitt - and then on into childhood, nappies, a shoebox grave.
Button’s journey takes in his raucous upbringing in a New Orleans rest home, a visit to a brothel to vigorously lose his cherry, first love with Tilda Swinton’s married sophisticate, a seesawing sea voyage, WW2 (replete with a blistering sea battle), a reunion with the father (Jason Flemyng) who abandoned him as a wheezing, arthritic baby and more, much more. The big event in Benjamin’s life, though, is his long-awaited - and then terribly curtailed - romance with Cate Blanchett’s dancer, Daisy.
It’s here that Fincher’s overreaching saga shakes off its flaws to glide with all the elegance and beauty of a silhouetted Daisy in a moonlit gazebo - one of many poised, gleaming images that steal the breath. All life, all love is of course ephemeral, but Benjamin and Daisy’s especially so, and Fincher communicates the rapidity of their sweet years together with a bewitching montage that perhaps even surpasses the time-lapse construction of the Transamerica Pyramid in Zodiac. Button brims with such magic moments, such grand sequences, yet for all the aesthetic riches on display it rarely connects. Partly it’s because Benjamin is so passive throughout, an observer who’s likeable enough (and played with admirable restraint by Pitt) but hard to root for.
But mostly it’s Fincher’s decision to shoot on digital: cold, burnished, rinsed in sepia, the foreground action frequently pasted onto pristinely rendered backdrops.
Here is a world one step removed from our own and threaded with a measured, storybook narration - befitting a fable, sure, but this is a fable that’s neither warm nor funny enough to cup the heart like a Big Fish or a Pan’s Labyrinth.
Button is instead melancholy, a teensy bit maudlin and, Fincher being Fincher, more than a little fucked up, the crisscrossing paths of our lovers lending a whiff of paedophilia to the early scenes, a waft of Oedipal Complex to the denouement. Yet for all these niggles, Fincher’s seventh feature is bold and brilliant enough to show up the tame ambitions of 90 per cent of US filmmakers working today.
Who else would make a film where the envelope-shredding effects are so buried in the storytelling and the enterprise and the commitment that they barely warrant a mention? Lost, quite literally, in the mix…
Sources : en.wikipedia.org
www.totalfilm.com
0 Komentar