Scales-tipping actors must stay heavy to keep working
While half of America skips lunch, or pledges to, and bemoans the thousand extra ounces flesh is heir to, one glamorously employed elite has a perfect excuse for staying plump. Fat actors and actresses—those who won their fame with an expansive physical image—often feel they must stay heavy to keep working.
Acting is usually a kind of seduction of the audience, and the conventionally unseductive, unless they are established stars, pay a price. They may be denied sympathetic or leading roles. They may be consigned to comedy, on the presumption that audiences think fat is funny. They may, like James Coco, grow “tired of getting scripts that were all fat jokes.” They may, like Charlotte Rae, find it “depressing” to be offered lots of characters specifically described as fat. And offstage they worry as much about health, vigor and appearance as the well rounded in other walks of life. But in a notoriously unstable business, fat actors and actresses have a trademark that steadily gets them jobs.
Sometimes that trademark is chosen deliberately. Shelley Winters, now synonymous with matronly excitability, was an underemployed leading lady of about 35 when Director George Stevens gave her an idea. Says she: “He told me that if I gained 30 Ibs. I could successfully make the transition to leading character actress and I would work all my life.” She did, and has since won two Oscars (The Diary of Anne Frank, 1959, and A Patch of Blue, 1965) while acting at varying weights —but “the fat pictures are the ones that are big and successful.”
Sometimes weight is imposed by a role. When the late Vivian Vance played Ethel Mertz in I Love Lucy, according to Bart Andrews’ The Story of I Love Lucy, she was obliged by contract to stay 20 Ibs. overweight so that she would look older and frumpier than Star Lucille Ball.
Robert De Niro gained 50 Ibs. to play the older Jake La Motta in Raging Bull, then quickly dropped most of it for his next role, in True Confessions.
Most often an actor’s amplitude just happens, then turns out to be a help. It is especially useful to a gifted but lesser known journeyman such as Pat Mines, who after 29 years in show business is at last in a Broadway hit, playing the wily courtier Count Orsini-Rosenberg in Amadeus. Says he: “I’m sure there is a ‘fat list,’ perhaps even written down, that producers consult. You like to think you’re hired strictly for your abilities, but I know my size has gotten me jobs.” Among actors who might be on any producer’s list: Orson Welles, an epic creator who is known to the television generation as the butt of Johnny Carson’s fat jokes; William Conrad, TV’s Nero Wolfe; Raymond Burr, old Ironside; and Burt Young, the Gibraltar of Rocky. Perhaps the most stereotyped of all is Victor Buono. Fat from childhood, Buono reached 400 Ibs. before a recent diet took him down to 350. He played Bette Davis’ father in Hush, Hush’. . . Sweet Charlotte when he was 25 and Davis was 55. Now 43, Buono longs for varied roles but tells himself, “In a business of visual types, you are a mountain.”
Women seem to find weight more of a hindrance, perhaps because Hollywood and the theater offer fewer roles for women. Shirley Stoler, best known as the prison commandant in the film Seven Beauties, played the mother in Edward Albee’s Broadway version of Lolita this spring.
Both roles required her to be fleshy and sensual, and gave her a showcase—but such roles are rare. Kathleen Freeman, a vice president of the Screen Actors Guild who has played in more than 100 movies and won two TV Emmy nominations by portraying a battle-ax, says her shape registers with casting directors “right away.” Being stereotyped as fat, even if employed, “infuriated” her, so she dieted from 200 down to 150 Ibs.—for about the third time in her life, she says.
Frantic dieting is common in Hollywood. Says Acting Coach Anna Strasberg: “When an actor’s agent tells his [overweight] client he should start thinking in terms of character roles, the actor goes crazy.” Freeman, though, built her career in character parts. So did Coco and Dom De Luise, both of whom have also gone on diets. None expects much change professionally. Yet each wants to improve his appearance. And each seems convinced he will be among the 10% to 20% of dieters nationwide who stay thin. Among those who have drifted back up is Edward Asner. He dieted when he shifted the TV character of Newsman Lou Grant from the Mary Tyler Moore Show to his own hour-long show, thinking the audience would take a lean editor more seriously. One champion drifter is Hines, now 265 Ibs., who has lost “at least a thousand pounds” and is now reconciled to playing fat parts. “Once an actor’s image is established,” he says, “it doesn’t change. I’ve been all the way down to 220 lbs., and I was up for the same roles I am now.”
Except for Burr and Conrad, fat actors and actresses rarely play heroes. They play extravagant figures of fun or menace, sometimes on the verge of losing control.
They are often asked to stereotype the worst things they may believe about themselves and then” weight. But to those moments in the dark, when an audience is demanding physical perfection, fat actors offer a comforting alternative—a tale of beauty and obese. —William A. Henry III.
Reported by Joseph Pilcher/Los Angeles and Janice C. Simpson/New York
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