Actors and the Versatility Obsession

Yet another comment-become-post!

In many ways ‘versatility’ is a bias that seems supremely applicable to the actor compared to any other art form or even the director within cinema. We don’t ask whether directors make different kinds of films all the time but we are more often than not impressed by actors who do radically different parts. Similarly in other art forms a painter or a composer or a writer is judged by how he or she can work through a form or a thought over the length of a career (or life). No one has ever lost points for not attempting what they don’t wish to or cannot. A different bias pervades these other art forms which is that of the ‘supreme’ work, the epic one that puts forth or reorders a ‘world’. Again, even within cinema films that offer great all-encompassing visions are often privileged. But this is not the same as wanting the artist to do all kinds of genres and forms and themes and so on. Of course there are always exceptions who prove the rule. Brando always played Brando, the same for Nicholson, even as they did different parts critics and audiences always wished to see their signatures. It is also true that someone like De Niro went through a whole series of films with Scorsese where a certain persona and/or character was used as a model to then provide variations on in each new film. Better still Pacino in the 70s did a variety of roles that nevertheless involves similar variations on a mood and tone. But the former was often put under the Scorsese label or that of a great director-actor partnership. It was undoubtedly this but this was the excuse used to avoid the more obvious conclusion that De Niro was restricting himself to a certain space. Which of course did not make his job easier by any means.

Images from Once Upon a Time in Mumbai Again (updated)