the more conscious we are of the performer who accomplishes it. Successful impersonation in real life is a form of identity theft, but in theater or film our pleasure as an audience derives from our awareness that it’s Curtis pretending to be Grant or Blanchett pretending to be Dylan, never a complete illusion.
The example of Blanchett serves to remind us that the film genre most likely to involve overt imitation or impersonation of one actor by another is the biopic, especially the biographical film that tells the life story of a celebrity in the modern media. Film biographies of remote historical figures or real-life personalities from outside the media seldom if ever require true impersonation; we have no recordings or films of Napoleon or Lincoln, and the many actors who have played them on the screen needed only conform in general ways to certain painted portraits or still photographs. The audience seems inclined to accept fictional representations of historical characters and some types of modern celebrities as long as the performance is consistent and reasonably plausible: Willem Dafoe has played Jesus Christ, Max Shreck, and T. S. Eliot without radically changing his physiognomy, and Sean Penn is quite convincing as gay activist Harvey Milk in Milk (2008), even though he doesn’t physically resemble Milk. When a conventionally realistic biopic concerns a popular star of film or television, however, the situation is a bit more complex. The actor needs to give a fairly accurate and convincing impersonation of a known model while also serving the larger ends of the story. No matter how accurate the impersonation might be, the audience will inevitably be aware that an actor is imitating a famous personage; but if it becomes too much a display of virtuosity, it can upset the balance of illusion and artifice.
Larry Parks’s portrayal of Al Jolson in a quintessential Hollywood biopic, The Jolson Story (1946), deals with these problems by almost avoiding impersonation during the dramatic episodes of the film. Parks behaves with an ebullience appropriate to an old-time showman, occasionally speaking with a brash New York accent, but he makes little attempt to mimic the famous entertainer’s distinctive looks or vocal tone; far more handsome than the real Jolson, who was alive and a star on the radio when the film was made, he simply adds his attractiveness, youthful vigor, and charm to the generally flattering, glamourizing aims of the project. When he breaks into song, however, he creates a different effect. We hear the actual Jolson’s voice on the soundtrack—a voice that gives the film an aura of authenticity and convinces us of Jolson’s talent—and Parks convincingly re-creates the singer’s eccentric trademark mannerisms, most of which were derived from years of performing in provincial vaudeville and blackface minstrel shows. All the signature Jolson moves are on display: the rhythmic rocking from side to side, the strut across the stage, the broad grin, the widely rolling eyes, the clasped hands, the dropping to the floor on one knee with arms open wide, and so forth. These gestures and expressions had become so much associated with Jolson that he was relatively easy to impersonate; but they were also dated, as were songs like “Mammy,” so that he was in danger of becoming a cliché or quaint caricature. (At one moment, the film seems to acknowledge this possibility: Evelyn Keyes, who plays Jolson’s wife, does an enthusiastic but joking impersonation of Jolson singing “California, Here I Come.” Only a few moments before, we’ve seen Larry Parks as Jolson singing that same number.) Parks’s charisma and energy nevertheless manage to overcome these dangers, enlivening the film and even enhancing Jolson’s image as a singer. Parks never jokes with the all-too-predictable Jolson persona and in the end becomes exactly what Hollywood wants him to be: an idealized version of Jolson as played by the star Larry Parks. (As Leo Braudy has observed in The World in a Frame, the sequel to this film, Jolson Signs Again [1949], creates a double impersonation and adds to the “Byzantine” relation between actor and character [238]. Parks plays the older Jolson, who makes a comeback when he records songs for the actor Larry Parks to lip-synch in The Jolson Story. In a scene in a screening room, we see Parks shaking hands with Parks while the real Jolson, seated in the background, makes an unacknowledged cameo appearance.)
Beyond the Sea (2004), a somewhat Felliniesque biopic about the short life of singer-actor Bobby Darin, is an interesting contrast with The Jolson Story. Kevin Spacey, who not only stars in the film but also produced, directed, and coauthored the screenplay, is an unusually gifted mimic and a sincere admirer of Darin. He sings all the musical numbers in the film himself, and he is such a skillful impersonator that when the film was released he went on tour performing a live re-creation of Darin’s nightclub act. Ironically, however, the closer he comes to reproducing Darin’s voice and mannerisms, the more he reveals a disparity between himself and the man he is imitating. A chameleon performer, Bobby Darin was the equal of Sinatra as a singer of ballads and swing arrangements and just as good at rock and roll, country, and social protest songs. His nightclub and television appearances were filled with sexy energy and exciting dance moves, and his few films demonstrate that he had fine acting abilities in both light comedy and Method-style psychological realism. Spacey, however, is a less dynamic and charismatic personality, and to make matters worse, he’s slightly too old for the part. The whole purpose of the film is to celebrate Darin’s talent, which was doomed from the start because of a childhood illness; unfortunately, though, it feels more like a vanity project in celebration of Spacey’s talent for mimicry.
Biopics in general are crucially dependent upon a dialectical interaction between mimicry and realistic acting, an interaction that can become threatened when a major star undertakes an impersonation. In White Hunter Black Heart (1990), one of Clint Eastwood’s most underrated films, Eastwood plays a character based on John Huston and in the process accurately imitates Huston’s slow, courtly manner of speaking. Good as the imitation is, it has a slightly disconcerting or comic effect, if only because it’s performed by an iconic star in the classic mold; any basic change in such an actor’s voice and persona seems bizarre, almost as if he had donned a strange wig or a false nose. Probably for this reason, some of the most effective impersonations in recent films have been accomplished by actors who are not stars in the classic sense. Meryl Streep, for example, has performed a variety of characters and accents, so that when she impersonates the celebrity chef Julia Child in Julie and Julia (2009) there is no great dissonance caused by a difference between star persona and role.
Like Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman possesses a particular kind of stardom that is based on his work as an actor, not on his sex appeal or public personality. One of the high points of his career is his impersonation of Truman Capote in Capote (2005), which won several awards and was widely praised by people who had known Capote intimately. We can see the actor behind the mask of Capote, but the actor doesn’t have a consistent behavioral image that generates conflict with the mask. The impersonation, moreover, is never slavish, so nuanced and emotionally convincing that the display of imitative skill never causes a rift in the suspension of disbelief. Hoffman’s achievement is all the more impressive because Capote was an ostentatiously eccentric figure, the kind of personality that might seem comically grotesque. An effective self-publicist who relished celebrity and society gossip, he was far better known than most writers in America; people who never read his books saw him often on television, especially as a guest on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show, but it was difficult to say whether the mass audience viewed him more as a witty TV conversationalist or as a freak. Short and chubby, with a round face resembling a dissipated child, he spoke in a high-pitched, nasal, quite effeminate voice that was marked by a whining Southern drawl, and he gestured with broad, limp-wristed movements. In the period when he became famous, few if any media personalities were so obviously and theatrically gay.
Very soon after Capote was released, the actor Toby Jones played Capote in Infamous (2006), which, like the Hoffman film, deals with the events surrounding the writing of Capote’s In Cold Blood, a so-called “nonfiction novel” about the murder of a Kansas farm family and the capture and execution of the two killers. Even though Jones seems to have the advantage of a greater natural resemblance to the diminutive Capote, his performance is much less interesting than Hoffman’s. In contrast to Jones, Hoffman’s neck and chin are relatively strong and his physique sturdy; he’s also a bit too tall for the role, although the film compensates for this problem by the way it frames and photographs him in relation to the other actors. At the technical level of impersonation, he adopts Capote’s hairstyle and effeminate
