all of today’s popular genres; but the doubling or tandem effect of recognizing Bening alongside the character has a longer history, essential to the development of the star system and to the pleasures of theater itself. It achieved great prominence in the eighteenth century, at the time of Diderot, when leading actors such as David Garrick not only imitated Hamlet but also brought individual style or personality to the role. Thus, as time went on, it became possible to speak of “David Garrick’s Hamlet,” “John Barrymore’s Hamlet,” “John Gielgud’s Hamlet,” “Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet,” and even “Mel Gibson’s Hamlet.”
In motion pictures this phenomenon was intensified, with the result that stars often gained ascendency over roles, repeatedly playing the same character types and bringing the same personal attributes and mannerisms to every appearance. Consider again Maurice Chevalier, who at Paramount in the 1930s was cast as a military officer, a medical doctor, and a tailor, but who always played essentially the same character. Chevalier had been a hugely popular cabaret singer and star of the Folies Bergère in Paris during the 1920s, and Hollywood wanted him to display many of the performing traits associated with his success; at the same time, Lubitsch and Mamoulian modified those traits, making him less uninhibited and bawdy, more suitable to a general American audience. In his Paramount musicals of the pre-Code era, he’s always the boulevardier in a straw hat, the stereotypical representative of what American audiences at the time thought of as “gay Paree”—sophisticated, exuberant, grinning, amusingly adept at sexual innuendo, eager to charm and seduce beautiful women. Hence in The Love Parade and One Hour with You, the films I’ve described above, he not only imitates certain conventional gestures and expressions for the sake of comedy, but he also reproduces the broad smile, the jaunty posture, the suggestive leer, the rolling eyes, and the distinctive French accent that were associated with “Maurice Chevalier.” His public personality was in a sense unique, but it was nonetheless a carefully crafted “model” in Diderot’s sense of the term, a model so idiosyncratic that Chevalier became a popular subject for generations of comic impersonators to imitate onstage and in film.
Chevalier’s performances were stylized and extroverted, indebted to the musical revues of Paris, and for that reason he could be viewed as what the early futurists and the Soviet avant-garde called an “eccentric” actor; in fact, Sergei Eisenstein’s doctrine of “eccentrism,” which is most clearly evident in the grotesque caricatures of Strike (1924), was developed in part by analogy with music-hall performers. Relatively few of the leading players in classic Hollywood had this extreme kind of eccentricity, although comics like the Marx Brothers and W. C. Fields and unusual personalities like Wallace Beery, Marie Dressler, and Mickey Rooney certainly qualify. Many character actors of the period were also eccentrics; indeed the very term “character actor,” which in Shakespeare’s day referred to a performer who played a single vivid type, was often used by the film industry to describe supporting players with cartoonish personalities: we need only think of the lively crowd of eccentrics in Preston Sturges’s comedies, including William Demarest, Eugene Pallette, Franklin Pangborn, Akim Tamiroff, and Raymond Walburn. Comedic females such as Marjorie Main and Thelma Ritter belong in the same category, as do many of the noncomic supporting players, such as Sydney Greenstreet, Elisha Cook Jr., and Peter Lorre in John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon (1941).
Leading players, on the other hand, tended to have symmetrical faces and usually behaved in almost invisible fashion; their close-ups conveyed what Richard Dyer has called their “interiority,” and the smallest movements of their bodies helped create a sense of their personalities. But the classic-era stars were no less carefully constructed performers than the character actors; their identities were created not only by their roles but also by their physical characteristics and idiosyncrasies or peculiarities of expression. In her intriguing essay on Humphrey Bogart, Louise Brooks makes precisely this point. “All actors know that truly natural acting is rejected by the audience,” Brooks writes. “Though people are better equipped to judge acting than any other art, the hypocrisy of ‘sincerity’ prevents them from admitting that they, too, are always acting some role of their own invention. To be a successful actor, then, it is necessary to add eccentricities and mystery to naturalness, so that the audience can admire and puzzle over something different than itself” (64–65).
Bogart was certainly a natural-looking performer who seemed to have a reflective, mysteriously experienced inner life, an actor who appeared to be thinking in a way quite different from Garbo’s blank-faced close-up at the end of Queen Christina (1933). But Bogart’s “naturalness” was expressed through distinctive physical attributes and carefully crafted displays of personal eccentricities. To express thoughtfulness, for example, he often tugged at his earlobe, and to create an air of relaxed confidence or bravado he repeatedly hooked his thumbs into the waist of his pants. At one level Bogart was simply reacting as he naturally would, but the gestures were practiced and perfected until they became part of an expressive rhetoric, a repertory of performance signs. At the height of his fame he played many roles, among them a private eye, a gangster, a neurotic sea captain, a disturbingly violent Hollywood screenwriter, and an aging Cockney sailor; but his eccentricity persisted through variations of character. You can see the business with the thumbs in such different pictures as The Big Sleep (1946) and The Barefoot Contessa (1954). You can see it in a wartime short subject, “Hollywood Victory Caravan” (1945), where Bogart appears as “himself” and where, as Gary Giddins has observed, he stands with “thumbs under belt as though he were doing a Bogart impression” (43). You can also see it in a well-known news photo of 1947, when Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Paul Henreid, Richard Conte, John Huston, and other Hollywood notables went to the U.S. capitol to protest the HUAC hearings on supposed communists in the movie industry: Bogart stands front and center of the group, his jacket spread and thumbs under his belt. He’s imitating or copying a model of Humphrey Bogart.
Like Chevalier, Bogart was a star that comic entertainers liked to impersonate. Others have included Marlon Brando, Bette Davis, James Cagney, Kirk Douglas, Clark Gable, Cary Grant, Katharine Hepburn, Burt Lancaster, Marilyn Monroe, Edgar G. Robinson, James Stewart, and John Wayne. (One of the most popular subjects of comic impersonation as I write this essay is probably Christopher Walken, an eccentric if ever there was one.) Usually the stars are subject to impersonation because of a peculiar voice or accent, an oddity of facial expression, or a distinctive walk. Some have had all three. John Wayne had a deep voice with a drawling California accent, a habit of raising his eyebrows and wrinkling his forehead to express surprise or consternation, and an oddly rolling, almost mincing gait. Marilyn Monroe had a breathy voice, a parted mouth with a quivering upper lip (a quiver that, as Richard Dyer has observed, was designed not only to express yielding sexuality but also to hide an upper gum line), and an undulating, provocative walk that emphasized her hips and breasts. Some of the legendary stars, especially the stoic males like Dana Andrews or the flawless females like Ava Gardner, were difficult to mimic except perhaps in caricatured drawings. But even the less eccentric actors had performing quirks or tricks, such as Andrews’s tendency to cock his elbow out to his side when he drinks from a glass. There are so many famous names one could mention in this context that eccentricity would seem the norm rather than the exception. Sometimes the eccentricity is sui generis, and sometimes it has an influence on the culture. Marlon Brando and Marilyn Monroe’s mannerisms have been imitated by many other actors in more or less subtle ways; and James Cagney spawned a generation of teenaged performers, beginning with the Dead End Kids, who copied the early Cagney’s ghetto-style toughness and swagger.
In the history of cinema there have been occasions when famous actors have not simply imitated but impersonated other famous actors. One of the best-known examples is Tony Curtis’s impersonation of Cary Grant in Some Like It Hot (1959). (Curtis’s equally amusing impersonation of a woman in that same film is based partly on Eve Arden.) A more recent instance is Cate Blanchett’s remarkable impersonation of Bob Dylan in Todd Haynes’s I’m Not There (2007), a film in which Dylan is also played by Christian Bale, Marcus Carl Franklin, Richard Gere, and Heath Ledger. Blanchett is the only actor in the group who tries to look and behave like Dylan, and her performance is a tour de force, achieving uncanny likeness to the androgynous pop star in the most drugged phase of his career. But impersonation in fiction film, especially
