Winning transformations in films

For all the attention it’s been getting, you’d think Nicole Kidman’s nose was the star of “The Hours,” the much-acclaimed film about three women whose lives are affected by the works of author Virginia Woolf.

To portray Woolf, Kidman sports a fake proboscis that transforms one of Hollywood’s most stunning beauties into, well, a frumpy intellectual. As the cover of a recent issue of Entertainment Weekly promised: “You Won’t Believe Your Eyes.” That’s true enough; the woman gazing out dourly from posters for “The Hours” bears little resemblance to the star of “Moulin Rouge!” and “Eyes Wide Shut.”

But Kidman is hardly the first person to tinker with appearance to satisfy the cinematic muse; heck, John Huston’s “The List of Adrian Messenger” was really all about famous actors (Frank Sinatra, Burt Lancaster, Robert Mitchum, et al.) wearing disguises. And anyone who’s ever seen “The Wizard of Oz”: Here’s betting you wouldn’t have recognized Bert Lahr (the Cowardly Lion), Jack Haley (the Tin Woodsman) or Ray Bolger (the Scarecrow) if you’d run into them walking down the street.

So while it’s a fact that Kidman’s transformation is remarkable, she’s following a path hundreds of actors have trod before. Here’s are examples of other famous faces (and other body parts) altered for the big screen:

* Lon Chaney in “The Phantom of the Opera” (1925). Chaney was so famous for changing his appearance to suit a role that fans were said to have no idea what he really looked like. In a career that included roles ranging from an armless knife-thrower to Quasimodo, he was never more memorable than in “Phantom.” With his eyes bugged out, his nostrils pinched and stretched and his hair all but obliterated, Chaney’s visage was the stuff of nightmares. He was so startling that lobby cards for the film were careful to blot out his face, to ensure that movie audiences jumped for real when Mary Philbin unmasked him. The strategy worked, and a horror icon for the ages was born.

* Boris Karloff in “Frankenstein” (1931). The opening credits for James Whale’s horror classic list the monster as played by “??????.” And the mystery only deepens when Henry Frankenstein’s soulless creation first appears on screen, his head the shape of a gallon pickle jar, bolts protruding from both sides of his neck, his eyes so far receded that they seemed closer to the back of his skull than the front. It made Karloff’s career.

* Jose Ferrer in “Cyrano de Bergerac” (1950) and Steve Martin in “Roxanne” (1987). Kidman is certainly not the first actor to don a fake nose in the name of art -- not in a world where “Cyrano de Bergerac,” about a man with an oversize schnoz who writes love letters for his word-challenged friend, has been a dramatic staple for more than a century. Ferrer won an Oscar for his starring role, while Martin’s film was a modern update.

* Grace Kelly in “The Country Girl” (1954) and Elizabeth Taylor in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” (1966). For years, the surest way for an actress to win critical acclaim -- and awards -- was to play a role sans makeup. In 1954, two years before leaving Hollywood to become a real-life princess, Kelly glammed herself down to play the determined, obsessive wife in “The Country Girl” and won an Oscar. For Mike Nichols’ “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,” Taylor turned both frumpy and shrill; she, likewise, won the golden statuette.

* Laurence Olivier in “Richard III” (1955). Olivier was handsome, dashing, athletic and one of the greatest actors ever. But only one of those traits -- the last -- was apparent in perhaps his greatest film performance, as Shakespeare’s insidiously malevolent English monarch. The actor spent three hours each day putting on his prosthetics, including a fake nose, fake hand, hunched back and black wig, but the results were worth it. Oscar-nominated, he lost to Yul Brynner in “The King and I.”

* Orson Welles in “Touch of Evil” (1958). There’s that fake nose again. Welles slapped on an outsized nose to go along with his outsized frame for this tale of moral corruption in a Mexican border town. Rarely have the results of moral decay played out so vividly.

* Bette Davis in “What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?” (1962). Davis was never exactly a beauty queen in the movies, but this was extraordinary: As aging silent-screen child star “Baby Jane” Hudson, she wore enough pancake makeup to cover the Taj Mahal. In doing so, she invented a look that not even Chaney could have envisioned on his best day. Little surprise she was Oscar-nominated.

* Robert De Niro in “Raging Bull” (1980) and Tom Hanks in “Cast Away” (2000). As Jake LaMotta, the savage prizefighter who becomes a pitiable stand-up comic, De Niro set the bar high for actors. To play the older LaMotta, De Niro added 62 pounds of flab to his lean frame. That earned him an Oscar. Two decades later, Hanks went through a similarly extreme transformation to play a plane-crash survivor washed up on a deserted island. After filming the first part of the movie, he took a year off, lost 50 pounds, then shot the scenes on the island. The difference was remarkable -- although not, in the academy’s opinion, Oscar-worthy.

* Daniel Day-Lewis in “My Left Foot” (1989). No actor loses himself in a role like Day-Lewis. To play Irish poet Christy Brown, whose cerebral palsy affected everything but the muscles in his left foot, Day-Lewis contorted his body in ways that went beyond making him unrecognizable. The transformation seemed downright magical. He too won an Oscar.

* Eddie Murphy in “The Nutty Professor” (1996). Murphy’s obese college professor Sherman Klump drinks a potion that causes him to lose both his rotundity and his charm. Murphy, thanks to the genius of makeup wizard Rick Baker, plays seven characters, most of them members of the outlandish Klump clan. The film revived Murphy’s flagging career.

* John Leguizamo in “Spawn” (1997). Leguizamo is 5 feet, 10 inches tall and thin, which may come as a surprise to those who know him only through his performance as the squat, rotund and flamboyantly evil Clown. His performance is as creepily over-the-top as they come.

* Julia Roberts in “Erin Brockovich” (2000). Had she known what a pair of fake breasts could do, here’s betting she might have tried it years earlier. Certainly, there’s far more to her performance than her greatly enhanced cleavage. But it helped get her noticed.