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Imitation, Eccentricity, and Impersonation in Movie Acting

From the eighteenth until the early twentieth century, the Aristotelian concept of mimesis governed most aesthetic theory, and stage acting was often described as an “imitative art.” Denis Diderot’s “Paradoxe sur le comédien” (1758), for example, argued that the best theater actors played not from personal emotions or “sensibility,” but from “imitation” (Cole and Chinoy, 162). According to Diderot, actors who depended too much upon their emotions were prone to lose control, couldn’t summon the same feelings repeatedly, and were likely to alternate between sublime and flat performances in the same play; properly imitative actors, on the other hand, were rational observers of both human nature and social conventions who developed imaginary models of dramatic characters and, by imitating those models, reproduced the same nuances of behavior and colors of emotion every evening.

For centuries actors on the stage were taught to imitate a vocabulary of gestures and poses, and certain variations on the theory of acting as imitation persisted into modern times, as in the essays on aesthetics in the 1880 and 1911 editions of The Encyclopedia Britannica, which try to distinguish between the mimetic arts and the “symbolic” or abstract arts; in both editions, acting is described as an “imitative art” dependent upon and subordinate to the higher art of poetry. At a still later date, Brecht went so far as to argue that not only fictional characters but also everyday personalities and emotions are developed through a process of imitation: “The human being copies gesture, miming, tones of voice. And weeping arises from sorrow, but sorrow also arises from weeping” (152). For the past seventy or eighty years, however, the dominant forms of actor training in the United States have minimized or even denied the importance of imitation and the related arts of mimicry, mime, and impersonation. “The actor does not need to imitate a human being,” Lee Strasberg famously declared. “The actor is himself a human being and can create out of himself” (Cole and Chinoy, 623). More recently, the website of a San Francisco acting school specializing in the Sanford Meisner technique (named for a legendary New York teacher of stage and screen performers) announced that its students would be taught to “live truthfully under imaginary circumstances” and to “express oneself while ‘playing’ imaginary circumstances” (www.themeisnertechniquestudio.com).

The change of emphasis from imitation to expression is due in part to motion pictures. Filmed performances are identical at every showing, making Diderot’s paradox appear irrelevant, and movie close-ups of actors reveal the subtlest emotions, giving weight to the idiosyncrasies of personal expression. But the shift toward personally expressive acting precedes the movies. The first manifestations of the change appeared in the second half of the nineteenth century, with new forms of stage lighting, Henrik Ibsen’s psychological dramas, William Archer’s call for actors to “live the part,” and Konstantin Stanislavsky’s introspective naturalism. By the late 1930s, when variants of Stanislavsky’s ideas were fully absorbed into U.S. theater and Hollywood achieved hegemony over the world’s talking pictures, dramatic acting was nearly always evaluated in terms of naturalness, sincerity, and emotional truth of expression. A kind of artistic revolution had occurred, which, in some of its manifestations, was akin to the victory of romanticism over classicism at the beginning of the nineteenth century. As M. H. Abrams explains in a famous study of that earlier revolution, the metaphor of art as a mirror reflecting the world was replaced by the metaphor of art as a lamp projecting individual emotions into the world. “Imitation” became associated with such words as “copy,” “substitute,” “fake,” and even “counterfeit.” (Notice also that in some contexts the related term “impersonation” now signifies an illegal act.) The new forms of psychological realism, on the other hand, were associated with such words as “genuine,” “truthful,” “organic,” “authentic,” and “real.” Thus V. I. Pudovkin’s early book on film acting championed Stanislavsky’s idea that “an actor striving toward truth should be able to avoid the element of portraying his feelings to the audience” (334), and in the theater the Actors Studio advocated the development of “private moments” and “organic naturalness.”

The romantic revolution was concurrent with the democratic and scientific revolutions, which also changed attitudes toward “innovation,” a term that had been reviled in the writings of Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, and even Shakespeare, but which in the nineteenth century became a signifier of artistic achievement. As René Girard points out, however, where art is concerned, innovation depends upon an imitative or mimetic relationship between new work and prior models: “The main prerequisite for real innovation [in art] is a minimal respect for the past and a mastery of its achievements, that is, mimesis” (244). The postmodern spread of pastiche and quotation might be said to involve a return to just this sort of mastery, but postmodernism relies upon a quality of irony or knowingness quite different from the classical arts.

The irony of the situation is that classicism and romanticism have always been two sides of the same coin. As Raymond Williams convincingly argues in Culture and Society (1958), the eighteenth-century doctrine of imitation was never intended as slavish adherence to a set of rules or to previous works of art; at its best, it was a set of precepts that were supposed to help artists achieve what Aristotle called “universals.” But romanticism also claimed to be dealing with universals; the imitative tradition and the cult of personal expression were therefore equally idealistic and equally committed to a representation of what they regarded as essential reality. Where the history of acting is concerned, the major difference between these two schools is that the former claims to be Plato’s “second nature,” achieved by mimesis, and the latter claims to be original nature, achieved by playing “oneself.”

Both approaches to performance are capable of producing good acting, and in practice most modern actors are pragmatic rather than doctrinaire, willing to use whatever technique works in particular circumstances. In fact, a great many films require a mixture of naturalistic and imitative techniques. Consider Barbara Loden’s raw, disturbing, utterly natural-looking performance in the title role of Wanda (1971), a film Loden also wrote and directed: she probably makes use of Method-style “sensory memory” to help create states of fatigue and hunger (as in the scene in which she sops up spaghetti sauce with bread and chews with gusto while also smoking a cigarette), but her performance also involves mimicry of a regional, working-class accent.

Although the technique of imitation and the technique of personal feeling are often opposed to one another by theorists, they aren’t mutually exclusive; it’s quite possible for pantomime artists or actors who use conventional gestures to “live the part” and emotionally project “themselves” into their roles. A remarkable testimony to this phenomenon has been given to us by Martin LaSalle, the leading “model” in Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket (1959). LaSalle wasn’t a professional actor when the picture was made and he found himself serving as a kind of puppet, executing whatever movements and poses Bresson asked of him. His performance is minimalist, seldom changing its expressive quality; at one point he sheds tears, but most of the time his off-screen narration, spoken quite calmly, serves to inform us of the intense emotions his character feels but doesn’t obviously show on his face or in his voice. And yet LaSalle creates a memorably soulful effect, reminiscent in some ways of the young Montgomery Clift. In 1990, when documentary filmmaker Babette Mangolte tracked down LaSalle in Mexico, where he has worked for many years as a film and theater actor, he described how the experience of Pickpocket had marked his entire life. He recalled that Bresson told his “models” to repeat actions over and over, never explaining why; at one point he shot forty takes of LaSalle doing nothing more than walking up a stairway. The technique nevertheless had emotional consequences for the actor. LaSalle believed that Bresson was trying to provoke “an inner tension that would be seen in the hands and eyes,” as if he wanted to “weaken the ego of the ‘model,’” thereby inducing “doubt,” “anxiety,” and “anguish tinged with pleasure.” Although the performance was achieved through a sort of pantomime or rote repetition of prescribed gestures and looks, it was by no means unfeeling. “I felt the tension of the pickpocket,” LaSalle told Mangolte. “I think, even if we are only models, as [Bresson] says, we still take part in and internalize the activity. I felt as if I were living the situation, not externally but in a sensory way.” The astonishing result was that after Pickpocket LaSalle moved to New York and studied for four years at The Actors Studio with Lee Strasberg, who became the second great influence on his career.

As important as deeply felt emotion may be to a performer, there’s something disingenuous about the modern pedagogical tendency to devalue imitation, for we can find many instances in which movie actors, even naturalistic ones, are required to perform imitative tasks: depending on the situation, they can be called upon to mimic accents and physical signifiers of age, social class, gender, and sexuality; to deliberately emphasize conventional poses and gestures; to “act” for other characters in visibly artificial ways; to imitate models of “themselves” by repeating personal eccentricities from role to role; and to impersonate historical figures or other actors.

We need only think of film comedy, which often involves the foregrounding of stereotypical behavior and the mechanics of performance. Alec Guinness, a distinguished stage actor whose work in dramatic films depended upon minimalism and British reserve, was one of the most natural-looking performers in screen history, yet he performed in a manifestly imitative way when he played comedy rather than drama. As George Smiley, the leading character in the British television adaptation of John le Carré’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1989), Guinness is so quiet, so natural, so lacking in energetic movement and obvious emotion, that he makes the actors around him look like Dickensian caricatures; he reveals a repressed emotional intensity only when he makes slight adjustments of his eyeglasses and bowler hat. Contrast his performance in Alexander Mackendrick’s dark comedy The Ladykillers (1955): as the leader of a group of crooks who rent a room from a harmless little old lady, he wears comic buck teeth and sinister eye makeup, and his interactions with the landlady overflow with fake sincerity and oily sweetness. As Pudovkin might say, he portrays feelings so that the audience, if not the naïve old lady, can see his absurdly unconvincing act.

The burlesque comic Ed Wynn once distinguished between joke-telling clowns and comic actors. The first type, Wynn explained, says and does funny things, and the second type says and does things funnily. The distinction doesn’t quite hold, because comic actors sometimes also say or do funny things; even so, light-comic genres often depend upon performers who can execute ordinary movements and expressions in amusing ways, as if “quoting” conventions. Ernst Lubitsch’s Paramount musicals of the early 1930s are clear examples, requiring the actors to behave in a chic but visibly imitative style. In The Love Parade (1930), which employs a good deal of silent pantomime, Maurice Chevalier is cast as a Parisian playboy and military attaché to the unmarried and sexually yearning Queen of Sylvania, played by Jeanette MacDonald. When the two characters meet, their comically stiff formality soon dissolves into flirtation and then into a duet entitled “Anything to Please the Queen.” Throughout, their every intonation and expression is so heightened and intensified that there’s barely any difference between talking and singing. In the slightly later One Hour with You (1932), everyone poses, speaks, sings, and exchanges glances in this imitative fashion, heightened by moments of rhymed dialogue and direct address to the audience. Chevalier and MacDonald play a happily married couple whose relationship is threatened when the wife’s sexually promiscuous best friend (Genevieve Tobin) secretly decides to seduce the husband. In the first scene involving the three, Lubitsch creates a gallery of conventionally expressive close-ups and obvious displays of body language. MacDonald stands with her arm around Tobin and smiles in delight as she shows off Chevalier. “Look at him!” she says proudly, “Isn’t he darling?” In close-up, Chevalier looks down at the floor and gives an exaggeratedly modest, shy smile. Cut to Tobin, who slyly smiles and remarks, “I think he’s cute.” Cut to Chevalier, who becomes uncomfortable, squirming and frowning. MacDonald whispers something in Tobin’s ear while Tobin stares at Chevalier, clearly impressed. “Oh!” she says, eyes widening in surprise. Another close-up shows Chevalier, still frowning but looking more puzzled and concerned. MacDonald whispers again. “He can?” Tobin asks, looking Chevalier up and down in frank wonder and admiration. “Yes, he can!” says MacDonald proudly. In his next close-up, Chevalier is baffled and openmouthed. “Let’s see him do it!” Tobin cries in delight. MacDonald crosses to Chevalier and sweetly pleads, “Darling, look like an owl!”

Lubitsch’s nonmusical comedy Trouble in Paradise (1932) might seem different because it’s filled with Samson Raphaelson’s witty dialogue, but it, too, involves imitation. In an opening scene, Herbert Marshall stands in the moonlight on the balcony of a hotel in Venice, looking down at the Grand Canal as an obsequious waiter hovers behind his shoulder, addresses him as “Baron,” and offers to serve him:

WAITER:		Yes, Baron, what shall we start with, Baron?
BARON:		Hmm? Oh, yes. That’s not so easy. Beginnings are always difficult.
WAITER:		Yes, Baron.
BARON:		If Casanova suddenly turned out to be Romeo, having supper with Juliet, who might become Cleopatra, how would you start?
WAITER:		I would start with cocktails.
BARON:		Excellent. It must be the most marvelous supper. We may not eat it, but it must be marvelous.
WAITER:		Yes, Baron.
BARON:		And waiter?
WAITER:		Yes, Baron?
BARON:		You see that moon?
WAITER:		Yes, Baron.
BARON:		I want to see that moon in the champagne.
WAITER:		Yes, Baron. (Writes.) Moon in champagne.
BARON:		I want to see, umm.
WAITER:		Yes, Baron?
BARON:		And as for you, waiter . . .
WAITER:		Yes, Baron?
BARON:		I don’t want to see you at all.
WAITER:		No, Baron.

Amusing as the words are, the charm of the scene has as much to do with Marshall’s performance, which epitomizes the popular 1930s idea of ultracosmopolitan masculinity. His well-cut tuxedo, his slicked-back hair, and his elegant pose, with one hand holding a cigarette and the other in a jacket pocket, all create an air of sophistication befitting an advertisement in a luxury magazine. Marshall also speaks amusingly, in a plummy English accent, almost singing his lines in a tone of worldly, romantic melancholy. In keeping with the dialogue, he’s too good to be real. Indeed, we soon learn that he’s not a baron but a jewel thief, perfectly suited to a film in which almost all the characters are pretending or wearing social masks.

Another form of imitation can be seen when actors play characters that try to hide their true feelings from one another or that put on a comic or ironic act—something that inevitably occurs in films that have theater or playacting as a subject. Such films often make it difficult to distinguish truth from pretense. In All about Eve (1950), for example, Bette Davis plays an aging theatrical star threatened by the offstage machinations of an apparently naïve and worshipful young understudy, played by Anne Baxter. Baxter’s performance is cleverly balanced between innocence and gimlet-eyed guile, so that we glimpse just a hint of her deception even when it fools others. Discovered as a waif standing in the rain outside a theater, she’s invited into Davis’s dressing room, where the star’s director-husband and a famous playwright have gathered after the show. Humble and shy, she passionately praises Davis and flatters everyone else in the room, converting them into a hushed audience curious to hear the story of her life. Just as her story begins, Thelma Ritter, in the role of Davis’s dresser and maid, suddenly enters and briefly disturbs the expectant mood. After a pause, Baxter proceeds: she’s a poor farmer’s daughter from Wisconsin who has always loved theater but took a job as a secretary in a brewery to help support her family; there she met and married her husband, Eddie, who also loved theater. But World War II intervened, and Eddie was killed in the South Pacific. Since then, she’s been finding work wherever she can and attending Davis’s performances at every opportunity. She tells all this with an absence of self-pity and an idealistic, worshipful attitude toward the stage, where “the unreal seemed more real to me.” There are several clues that she’s giving a performance: she’s a bit too pretty and nicely made up, her voice is a bit too cultivated and melodic, and her story contains a few too many sentimental clichés. Even so, she causes Bette Davis, whose face is covered with cold cream, to pluck a tissue from a box and wipe a tear from her eye. Thelma Ritter, a woman who has seen many actors come and go, is also impressed. “What a story!” she sighs. “Everything but the bloodhounds snapping at her rear end!”

If All about Eve concerns an actor who feigns emotion, Being Julia (2004), adapted from Somerset Maugham’s novel Theatre, concerns an actor whose excess of real emotion threatens to undermine her performances. Annette Bening plays a middle-aged British stage star of the 1930s, a larger-than-life character endowed with innate theatricality and acute emotional sensitivity. The realistic performance requires Bening to imitate certain conventional models; she must adopt a British accent, and her every gesture and expression, both onstage and off, must suggest the fragile histrionics of an aging diva. When we first see her, she makes a grand entrance into her husband-impresario’s office, complaining with intense bravura that she’s exhausted and in need of a rest. That evening she goes to an elegant restaurant and makes another grand entrance, smiling and nodding to acknowledge her admiring public; but when her homosexual dinner companion tells her that to avoid gossip they shouldn’t keep seeing one another, she breaks into copious tears.

The ensuing plot concerns her affair with an American fan, barely older than her adolescent son, who seduces her and then turns her into a miserable, sexually dependent slave. When the affair begins, she’s lifted out of a mild depression and becomes giddy and girlish; but when her lover withdraws and treats her coldly, she becomes a haggard, weeping neurotic, alternately angry and groveling. What helps her conquer the roller coaster of emotion is her memory of a long-dead director and mentor (Michael Gambon), who magically appears as a sort of ghost in moments of crisis, criticizing her everyday performance and dispensing advice. Gambon is a projection of her own critical self-consciousness, an internal monitor or coach, created through her professional ability to mentally observe her performances as they happen, both onstage and in real life. In Denis Diderot’s words, Julia has within herself, like all the best actors, “an unmoved and disinterested onlooker” (Cole and Chinoy, 162). At her most anguished point, when she’s weeping hysterically, Gambon appears and mocks her ability to “turn on the waterworks.” He advises her to become a more imitative actor, exactly the sort of player Diderot might have admired: “You’ve got to learn to seem to do it—that’s the art of acting! Hold the mirror up to nature, ducky. Otherwise you become a nervous wreck.” In the film’s concluding moments, this advice enables her to emerge victorious not only in her private life but also on the stage, where her lover’s new girlfriend has been cast alongside her.

The stage acting in Being Julia, shown in close-ups, is manifestly artificial and full of tricks: we see heavy makeup on the actors’ faces, we hear the actors’ loud voices projected toward the theater auditorium, and we glimpse Bening struggling with a misplaced prop during a tearful scene. In the offstage sequences, however, the acting looks realistic and the emotions are sometimes expressed in nakedly exposed style. In the scene in which Bening has her tearful breakdown, she wears no apparent makeup and her pale skin becomes red and blotchy as she weeps. We can never know (without asking her) how this scene was achieved—she may have been feigning emotion, she may have been playing “herself” in imaginary circumstances, and she may have been doing both. No matter how she accomplished her task, her performance looks spontaneous, as if she were being Julia rather than imitating her.

At the same time, the audience recognizes Julia as Annette Bening, whose body and expressive attributes can be seen in other films. Her apparent authenticity of feeling, which earned her an Academy Award nomination for Being Julia, is essential to the cinema of sentiment or high emotion and is valued in 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 when performed by a star, has a paradoxical effect; the more perfect it is, 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 gestures, together with appropriate costumes such as the luxurious scarf and floor-length topcoat we see him wearing in the Kansas scenes. He stands as Capote did, with back slightly arched and belly thrust forward, and is especially good at duplicating the Capote voice and accent, which he masters to such a degree that he uses it effectively even in the softly spoken, intimate moments. (His costar Catherine Keener, who plays Harper Lee, the author of To Kill a Mockingbird, has far less need to impersonate because Lee was notoriously shy and reclusive, and thus lacked a celebrity image.) Beyond all this mimicry, however, Hoffman’s portrayal is noteworthy for its naturalness and psychological nuance, which are worthy of the best Stanislavskian acting. In fact, his impersonation is wedded to a subtle psychological idea about the character. Largely through silent reaction shots, he enables us to see Capote’s mingled voyeuristic curiosity and fear over the murders; his growing attraction to one of the killers; and his cunning manipulation of the Kansas community, the two condemned men, and the publishers of his book. As Robert Sklar has pointed out in his review of Capote, the contradictions and complexities of the character are also shaped and shaded by Hoffman’s appropriation of typical Capote mannerisms: “In an early scene, Hoffman/Capote points his chin in the air, a movement signaling at once vanity and vulnerability. The actor conveys Capote’s conviction that his inner demons can be controlled by regarding the ‘self’ as a constant performance. It’s a life strategy that the film Capote puts to the test, and finds ruinously wanting” (57).

Capote and Infamous are examples of a subgenre that Thomas Doherty terms the “textual biopic,” in which “a foregrounded artwork becomes background to a portrait of the artist during the process of creation” (4). The textual biopic isn’t new (see Charlton Heston as Michelangelo painting the Sistine Chapel in The Agony and the Ecstasy [1965]), but recent years have produced a cycle of such films, all dealing with celebrities of the modern media. A signal characteristic of the pictures in the cycle is that the audience’s knowledge of and in most cases admiration for the “background” artwork functions as ironic counterpoint to a more or less antiheroic depiction of the artist’s psychological and professional conflicts. Cases in point are two films about Alfred Hitchcock that appeared in 2013: HBO’s The Girl, directed by Julian Jarrold, which concerns the making of The Birds and Marnie; and Fox Searchlight’s Hitchcock, directed by Sacha Gervasi, which tells the story of the making of Psycho. Doherty observes that the filmmakers “traffic not only in reenactments [i.e., imitations] of scenes from their host films,” but also “play an audiovisual mind game” involving intertextual references. The danger of this strategy is that Hitchcock fans might reject the reenactments as weak imitations; but even when the films succeed at the level of imitation, Doherty remarks, they “can only be pilot fish swimming in the wake of their great white sharks, a lesser order of Hitchcockian entertainment” (4).

The Girl and Hitchcock have a somewhat distracting effect because knowledgeable viewers are constantly in the position of judging how well the actors imitate their models. The Girl, derived from Donald Spoto’s gossipy book Spellbound by Beauty: Alfred Hitchcock and His Leading Ladies (2009), centers on Hitchcock and Tippi Hedren, played by Toby Jones and Sienna Miller. Although Miller is an emotionally subtle and talented actor, for that very reason she lacks Hedren’s brittle, almost affectless quality, which Hitchcock used so well to convey repression in both The Birds and Marnie. Jones does an excellent job of mimicking the Master of Suspense’s accent, but he plays the character as nothing more than a sour, sadistic user and abuser of women, lacking even a trace of the on-screen charm and humor that made Hitchcock a popular personality. The situation is different in Hitchcock, based in part on Stephen Rebello’s The Making of Psycho, which gives us a likable Hitchcock. Unfortunately, Anthony Hopkins, who plays the famous director, sounds too much like Anthony Hopkins and is smothered by an all-too-visible rubber face. Ageless beauty Helen Mirren doesn’t remotely resemble Alma Reville (a woman unknown to the general public). Scarlett Johansson is appropriately bosomy as Janet Leigh but too voluptuously soft and rounded, lacking the somewhat birdlike figure and the mixed attitude of toughness and vulnerability we see in Leigh’s Marion Crane. James D’Arcy, who plays Anthony Perkins, is the most effective mimic in the cast but has the thankless job of walking in the footsteps of one of the iconic performances in screen history.

To my mind, a more effective example of impersonation in a textual biopic is Simon Curtis’s My Week with Marilyn (2011), which concerns the making of Laurence Olivier’s The Prince and the Showgirl (1957), starring Olivier and Marilyn Monroe. Marilyn has been impersonated on stage, film, and TV more than any other movie star, and nearly as much as any historical personage. A partial list of women who have played her (omitting celebrities such as Lindsay Lohan and Madonna, who have posed as her in magazine photos or music videos) includes Melody Anderson, Susan Griffiths, Catherine Hicks, Ashley Judd, Blake Lively, Barbara Loden, Sophie Monk, Poppy Montgomery, Barbara Niven, Misty Rowe, Mira Sorvino, Charlotte Sullivan, and Sunny Thompson. To this list we can add the more recent performances of Megan Hilty, Katharine McPhee, and Uma Thurman, who’ve played actresses competing for the role of Marilyn in a fictitious Broadway musical on NBC-TV’s Smash. But Michelle Williams, who stars in My Week with Marilyn (aided by a bit of padding and what I suspect is a rear view of a nude body double), is especially good.

Neither Williams nor Kenneth Branagh, who plays Olivier, looks quite like their model, and their problems are exacerbated by the fact that they not only impersonate film stars but also perform very precise reenactments of scenes from The Prince and the Showgirl. Williams overcomes potential reservations by virtue of her luminous beauty and exemplary rendition of Marilyn’s patented little-girl voice. Her performance of one of Marilyn’s singing and dancing numbers, which uses the same costuming and camera angle as the original movie, looks almost as if a double exposure of her and Marilyn would perfectly match. At the more subtle and realistic level, Williams gives complexity to the character, suggesting Marilyn’s insecurity and guile, curiosity and intelligence, and mixture of fear and pleasure over the power of her stardom. The film also gives her a chance to reveal that Marilyn’s show-business image was the product of imitation: at one point, faced with a group of admirers, she asks her companion, “Shall I be her?” and breaks into an openmouthed display of voluptuousness. For his part, Branagh gives an amusing impersonation of the actor who has often been regarded as his predecessor. He’s especially good at capturing Olivier’s theatrical and narcissistic eccentricities: the tendency to raise his hand to his brow like a gentleman lifting a teacup; the rising, singsong inflection of his voice; the melancholic postures and sudden gusts of witchy, almost girlish business. He even accurately reproduces the comic “Carpathian” accent Olivier used in The Prince and the Showgirl.

One phenomenon peculiar to celebrity impersonation in the biopic is that, because of the realist nature of the genre, it always takes a few scenes for the audience to accept the mimicry and settle into a willing suspension of disbelief. This is especially true when an established movie star performs the impersonation. Near the beginning of Steven Soderbergh’s Behind the Candelabra (2013), for example, Michael Douglas performs a reenactment of Liberace’s Las Vegas nightclub act, and throughout the scene I feel a kind of amused wonder, thinking to myself, “It’s Michael Douglas!” The thought never goes away but it gradually becomes less intrusive, in part because the film moves from a huge public spectacle to increasingly intimate scenes, and in part because, as the story develops, Douglas gives a good deal of complexity to the character.

When a relatively unknown actor performs an impersonation, the effect of the split between actor and role is slightly different because the audience doesn’t know the actor’s normal “self.” An impressive instance is Christian McKay as Orson Welles in Richard Linklater’s textual biopic Me and Orson Welles (2009). This film imagines a single week in New York in 1937, when, through a combination of boyish self-confidence and amazing good luck, an entirely fictional teenage acting hopeful played by Zac Efron finds himself swept up into the whirlwind staging of Welles’s modern-dress Julius Caesar. The reenactment of events surrounding the rehearsal and staging of the play is flawed, giving virtually no sense of the politics of the Mercury Theater and too little evidence of why Caesar made such a powerful impression on those who saw it. And, when we witness snippets of the show on opening night, they lack the disturbing patterns of light and darkness and aura of violence that stunned the original audience. Instead, everything is subordinated to a comic portrayal of behind-the-scenes sexual shenanigans and to demonstrations of Welles’s supposed will to power.

Like most movies about Welles, Me and Orson Welles seems to take more relish in depicting his character flaws (at least one of which, womanizing, he no doubt possessed) than in his artistic accomplishments. In this case we’re shown a quarrel between technician Samuel Leve, who wants credit on the show’s playbill, and Welles, who thunderously declares that Julius Caesar is “my vision.” (Where this quarrel is concerned, I recommend that readers consult producer John Houseman’s Run-Through: A Memoir, pages 296–98, where we’re told that Leve’s job, under the direction of Jean Rosenthal, was simply to convert Welles’s design sketches into blueprints.) The film nevertheless gives a fine sense of how a romantic, idealistic theater company on the verge of great things can become an ambitious young man’s family of choice, albeit a family with as many rivalries and disillusionments as any other. As its title indicates, it depicts not just Welles but nearly everyone in the Mercury Theater as amusingly self-preoccupied; even Efron, the star of Walt Disney’s High School Musical franchise and the heartthrob of millions of teenage girls, cleverly reveals the calculation lurking behind innocence. Chief among the virtues of the film, however, is McKay. Welles has been played by many actors, including Paul Shenar, Eric Purcell, Jean Guérin, Vincent D’Onofrio (aided by the voice of Maurice LaMarche), Liev Schreiber, and Angus Macfadyen—but none have come this close to his looks, voice, and slightest movements. In contrast, the actors around McKay do little to imitate the real-life figures they represent: James Tupper looks a bit like Joseph Cotten, but Eddie Marsan, Leo Bill, and Ben Chaplin have no resemblance at all to John Houseman, Norman Lloyd, and George Coulouris. Almost the entire responsibility of creating a persuasive historical representation falls on McKay, who, before appearing in the film, had performed successfully in a one-man stage show about Welles and apparently come to know his model intimately. He captures the booming voice, the vaguely mid-Atlantic accent, the twinkle in the eye, the forbidding glance, and the heavy yet somehow buoyant walk. He’s slightly too old (Welles was twenty-two at the time of Caesar) and never displays Welles’s infectious laugh, but he merges with the character more completely than a star could have done and is just as convincing when he tries to seduce a young woman as when he proclaims ideas about theater. To hear him read aloud a passage from Booth Tarkington’s The Magnificent Ambersons is to feel as if one were in the presence of Welles. Even so, the actor McKay is always present to us alongside the impersonation, taking obvious pleasure in the magic trick he performs, enabling us to see that Welles was not simply a flamboyant personality but an actor and director of seriousness and importance who could bring audiences to their feet.

Whenever we encounter an overt, creative impersonation such as the ones performed by Michelle Williams, Kenneth Branagh, Michael Douglas, and Christian McKay in the films I’ve mentioned, we can easily appreciate the singular skill of the performers. But imitation in all its manifestations has always been an important, even crucial, feature of the art of movie acting. The various forms of imitation discussed here—the copying of conventional gestures and accents, the rote repetition of predetermined gestures and movements, the development of model character types, the repeated performance of personal eccentricities, and the impersonation of historical characters—may not be the most valued aspect of what actors do, but they are sources of pleasure for the audience. They contribute to the system of genres and styles (as in the distinction between comedy and drama or between conventional movie realism and a director like Bresson), and more generally to the rhetoric of characterization and the formation of personality on the screen. In a more subtle and general sense, they complicate our ideas of personal autonomy and individuality; they make us at least potentially aware of the imitative aspects of our lives in the real world, as both personalities and social beings.