Successful Actresses..

Hi, It’s me again, with another rumination. Bollywood is going to be quite a popular topic of mine, but in this blog entry. I’d like to compare and contrast Hollywood, and Bollywood, specifically the actresses. After that, I might go onto the differences between the models and the actresses in the respective countries.

Now. I believe in Hollywood, there are two relative cadres or groups of actresses. Actresses that look good on screen, so here we’re talking about the Megan Foxes, Scarlett Johanssones, Jessica Albas and so forth. Then you have the actresses who are watched not so much for the beauty but for the strength of their acting performance. I’d say Helena Bonham Carter, Dame Judi Dench and Marion Cotillard, this is all subjective of course. However, the truly successful actresses, the ones that become household names are the actresses who manage to straddle these two categories and excel in them. And here, you would talking about Angelina Jolie, Sandra Bullock, Julia Roberts. The point being that, it not enough to have good looks, but you have to be able to build on these good looks, and be able to act well enough as well. This can be evidenced in Jolie’s recent movies Wanted and Changeling. One grossed 750 million, and the other brought her an Academy Award nomination.

Conversely, though in Bollywood, there are three categories in which an actresses has to perform in, since Bollywood also has song-dance routines included into its movies. Therefore there are you might say six groups of actresses, in Bollywood. The two mentioned above, and then the four other groups, which include looking good, and dancing well (the item girls, and some lesser actresses), just dancing well (background dancers or less popular item girls) as well as two other groups, which I would like to deal with separately. The other groups would be of course, looking good and acting well, and the highly coveted group of being able to do all three perfectly. The reason I want to deal with the former separately, is because very few actresses in Bollywood, can actually dance, to give the example of Bipasha Basu, but look good can act tolerably. Most popular actresses fit into this category, and it seems for this reason, this one other discipline, where one can pull out in Hollywood from the last ten years, actress who excel such as Jolie, Roberts, Bullock. One has to go back to the eighties and early nineties for the first such Bollywood actress. The one and only Madhuri Dixit, and then if you go even further back, Rekha. Sadly, since Madhuri there have only been pretenders to the throne. The one person coming closest being Kajol, however I do believe that her dancing let her down.

It just seems odd, that an industry, in which I place far greater value than in Bollywood, requires relatively less talent to succeed in. Bit strange…

Anyway, as a closing remark, I would like to highlight something I thought was quite weird. There is always been this undercurrent that Actresses shouldn’t marry, because once they do, their status as a sex symbol diminishes, and lose its lustre because of the fact that they have a husband, and kids, and the whole domestic image. Now, I was thinking that surely this should apply even more to models, since all they really have is their bodies, nothing else. But, I see is Heidi Klum being married have three babies and pregnant with the fourth, Adriana Lima, Karolina Kurkova, Gisele Bundchen all pregnant, and all four of them prominent models. Is being a model more secure than being an actress?

And how come, in the West, a model is proper career on its own, perhaps back in the East, being a model is just a stepping stone to a career in cinema? Strange, don’t you think?