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Looks familiar?

Cate Blanchett and Katharine Hepburn
  • Posted at 4:59pm
  • 18 April 2008
  • by AndrewCollins-RT

At times, Martin Scorsese’s Howard Hughes biopic The Aviator feels like a big-budget episode of Stella Street, in which John Sessions and Phil Cornwell created an English suburb populated by the very famous.

In Scorsese’s movie, we have Cate Blanchett’s note-perfect, Oscar-winning turn as Katharine Hepburn, for which she had freckles painstakingly painted onto her face, arms and chest, wore a red wig, studied Hepburn’s films and did daily voice exercises. Then there’s Kate Beckinsale, who’s nowhere near as convincing as Ava Gardner, Jude Law as Errol Flynn (he wishes) and pop singer Gwen Stefani as Jean Harlow.

Whether Leonardo DiCaprio is an accurate facsimile of Howard Hughes is harder to gauge, as the producer/director spent most of his life behind the camera. In truth, being asked to re-create a familiar figure on-screen can be a poisoned chalice.

Geoffrey Rush played the title role in The Life and Death of Peter Sellers and not only gave life to the troubled star but also re-created many of his most famous film parts – a risky business with such iconic characters as Inspector Clouseau and Dr Strangelove among Sellers’s repertoire.

There’s always the safety net of changing names, as Clint Eastwood did with his portrayal of director John Huston in White Hunter, Black Heart, in which he was renamed “John Wilson”. If you say so.

Impersonate the Beatles, as with the film Backbeat, and the whole world will scrutinise the likenesses. A film like the excellent Control, that tells the tragic story of Joy Division singer Ian Curtis, has an easier time of it. As an avid fan of the band, I’m au fait with the available concert footage of Curtis (I’ve even met the other members of the band) and can confirm that Sam Riley’s performance is spot-on.

But for most people the accuracy of impersonation is immaterial. They can just lose themselves in the drama.

It’s a good spectator sport, measuring the actor against the star they’re playing – TV viewers have seen this with the recent Curse of Comedy season on BBC4 – but also mildly distracting. Perhaps if I’d never watched an Ava Gardner film, I’d have no problem with Beckinsale’s rendition. But that’s too high a price to pay.

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