COMMENTARY : Beauty a Burden for Actresses?

Is beauty a handicap for a serious actress? If you’re an actor, you can be gelatinous and plug-ugly, you can have a Barrymore profile, you can look deeply average. Whatever your mug, few will use it to undercut your dramatic abilities.

But it’s different with actresses. Reading some of the reviews in recent weeks of Michelle Pfeiffer’s performance in “Frankie & Johnny,” you’d have to conclude that only drab, out-of-shape women should be playing love-starved working-class waitresses. It’s a curious sort of reverse discrimination, as if the only proper role for beautiful movie actresses to play was . . . beautiful movie actresses.

Can someone who looks that good convincingly play in the “ordinary” range? Can she really be a great actress?

The great glamour queens of Hollywood, from Rita Hayworth to Ava Gardner to Marilyn Monroe, have generally been beauties first and actresses second. It is only when the bloom faded that they were given an opportunity to “act”--often playing broken-down beauties.

If the careers of these women had developed far away from the Hollywood dream factories, it’s possible they might have demonstrated richer dramatic gifts, but it’s also true that they provided what many finer actresses did not--an image you could swoon over. Katharine Hepburn and Bette Davis might have sparked the intellectual reveries of bright, young, independent women, but could they fill out a mass audience’s ga-ga fantasies?

The glamour queens of Hollywood existed at a time, unlike the current movie era, when women could play unadulterated fantasy figures without seeming absurd or retrograde. Nowadays, if an actress tries to duplicate the goddessness of an earlier era, it only survives as camp. When Madonna vamps as Marilyn Monroe, she may be trying for tribute but the effect is parody.

Julia Roberts is probably the closest contemporary equivalent to the Golden Age beauties; the retro-goddess aspect is still fundamental to her star power. She’s demonstrated a gift for infectious comedy but she’s been foisted upon us as a ding-a-ling hooker (“Pretty Woman”), a suffering princess (“Sleeping With the Enemy”) and an everyman’s fantasy Florence Nightingale (“Dying Young”). Roberts may be a better actress than many of the screen’s legendary beauties, but, given her recent spate of sacrificial-angel roles, who can tell anymore?

Beauty is a tremendous asset to an actress because it means that we want to look at her. Beauty is not essential to being a great performer, of course, but, with a talented actress, it can increase her range of roles--and not just because it’s easier to go from beautiful to plain than the other way around. Her radiance becomes a kind of idealization. We willingly accept that she is more entrancing onscreen than her real-life counterparts would be.

It’s a suspension of belief we gladly make because we intuitively perceive her beauty as being all-of-a-piece with the make-believe essence of film. Unlike the theater, film offers up its performers as objects of contemplation; their larger-than-life immensity can be overpoweringly sensual, and this makes it easy for them to enter our dreamscape. A performer’s beauty is more than ornamentation--it’s a latchkey to the magic of movies.

One of the charges that can fairly be leveled at Hollywood is that it has always had a rather narrow view of beauty. The pert prettiness of standard-issue “all-American” good looks has long been the industry norm; “exotic” looks--i.e., the kind you wouldn’t expect to see on a Barbie doll--are generally only tolerated from one-of-a-kind powerhouses such as Anjelica Huston, or actresses with accents, such as, most recently, Lena Olin. The beauty of racial or ethnic variety has largely been ignored, with the result that some of the most gifted--and gorgeous--actresses around, such as Joan Chen and Maria Conchita Alonso, have had diminished careers.

In the case of Michelle Pfeiffer, however, her looks connect up with the all-American glamour that Hollywood has long enshrined, and this may have worked against her.

Pfeiffer began her career playing cuties in films such as “Grease 2,” and she was good at it. A faint residue of surfer chick still clings to her features. Certain directors, such as Robert Towne in “Tequila Sunrise,” have tried to turn Pfeiffer into a glossy movie creature.

But what is remarkable about her career so far is how well she has resisted the impulse to play glamorpusses. She could easily coast on a career concocted of Hollywood taffeta and glitz; she could be enshrined--and mummified. Instead, she’s ranged from the poignancy of her performance in “Dangerous Liaisons” to the been-around sensuality of “The Fabulous Baker Boys” to the Chekhovian frailty in “The Russia House.”

Playing the waitress in “Frankie & Johnny,” she gives the dinky film a gravity and pain it can’t fully accommodate. Her toned-down beauty isn’t an aberration. It’s essential to her character: an emblem of Frankie’s unemerged possibilities.

Pfeiffer’s ability to, in a sense, rise above her radiance is a testament not simply to her choice of roles but to her craft. She makes her beauty work in terms of the characters she plays . When that beauty is cruelly cast aside, as in “Dangerous Liaisons,” the effect can be overwhelmingly tragic, as if in her rejection was the rejection of all purity. You may come away from a Pfeiffer performance thinking of her beauty, but that’s not all you’re thinking about. That’s what separates her from any number of actresses whose beauty is finally tiresome because there’s nothing behind it.

Yes, beauty can be an asset in the movies, but when a superb actress is at the height of her powers, her performance overrides any paltry considerations of her looks. Didn’t Barbra Streisand commandeer the screen in an era of Barbies? Has there ever been a more ravishing actress than the mop-haired, blade-nosed Anna Magnani at her volcanic best? The truth is, if Michelle Pfeiffer were half as exquisite as she is, she’d still be a major actress. The real beauty in film is talent.