Age and Actresses

There are lots of signs that you're getting a little bit older. Your sprained ankle takes two months to heal, instead of two weeks like when you sprained it when you were 19. Staying out 'til midnight seems like a big deal.

For guys at least, another sign is when you can put together a pretty good-sized list of Actresses Who Should Have Had Better Careers. It's the premises of the list that show your age. First, you have to have noticed these actresses some time ago. Ten years at least is necessary, I think. Second, you have to have actually been paying attention to movies and TV over a more or less continuous period of some amount of time. This is different than just noticing somebody in a movie once. This means noticing the newspaper or at least commercials and noticing that someone you've seen before is in something new and being willing to give it a shot. Say you need to do this over a 5-year period or so. Third, these actresses need to be somewhat passed the point where you would have expected them to get to be really big stars. We're not talking Julia Roberts right after Mystic Pizza here. As has been discussed at length in lots of other places, this point comes unfortunately early for actresses in Hollywood. It is a bitter truth, but that is the way things apparently work. The actresses on your list have to be more or less passed the point where they're going to get really big.

Every guy has a list like this, I think. I remember that my dad really liked Angie Dickinson, said that she never had the career she should have. I remember lots of reruns of Policewoman (which had these really groovy '70s credits where Ms. Dickinson's image froze and then like shadow effects spread out behind the image -- it was pretty awesome). Now Ms. Dickinson apparently hung out with Frank Sinatra and the rest of the Rat Pack and maybe JFK in the '60s. Her working on Policewoman in the '70s thus would have been a sign that she was passed the point that she was going to be a big star. This just isn't my dad. One of my best friends from law school thought that Jenny Garth on 90210 was all right. Now Ms. Garth hasn't had herself a great big career. I'll bet my friend thinks that she should have been a much bigger star.

So I guess that I've gotten somewhat older 'cause I can put together a pretty decent list. They're all good-looking -- that's part of the point, I guess -- so I'm not going to comment much on that:

Janine Turner -- She was really good as the smart-mouthed pilot on Northern Exposure and she could pull off really short hair, which is unusual. Now Northern Exposure was one of maybe the five or so best TV shows of the '90s (X-Files, Homicide: Life on the Street, Seinfeld, Simpsons being others, in my opinion). She starred in one stupid, stupid mountain-climbing movie with Sylvester Stallone (Cliffhanger? I just remember John Lithgow being good and psychotic as the villian) and then she pretty much disappeared. She had a baby and dropped out of Hollywood at some point and now appears in eye-wetting commercials. When The Muse showed me a Web site that had pretty much incovertible photographic evidence that Ms. Turner had had some facial work done, I was pretty horrified.

Dana Delany -- How she never got really big, I will never know. She was really good on a really good late '80s show China Beach (with Marg Helgenberger of CSI fame), but she never seemed to get any decent movie parts or even TV leads. She was in Exit to Eden, a bad movie starring Rosie O'Donnell and Dan Aykroyd in which they played cops of some kind investigating some sort of scam on like a pleasure island that Ms. Delany ran as the dominatrix. I watched about an hour of this a couple of months ago and, as always, Ms. Delany was good, but, God was this movie bad.

Elizabeth Shue -- Liked her when I saw Karate Kid, then she seemed to do nothing for a while, I knew she did Adventures in Babysitting, but I haven't ever managed the willpower to see that. Then she disappeared for more years while her brother Andrew got big as the marble-mouthed guy on Melrose Place. Then she reappeared and got nominated for an Oscar in Leaving Las Vegas. Somehow I never managed to work up the willpower to see that one either. The idea of watching Nicholas Cage drink himself to death seemed pretty depressing. So I think that the only thing that I have ever actually seen her in other than Karate Kid was about an hour of this Kevin Bacon vehicle Hollow Man. Pretty bad, but she was good. When will she get the starmaker she deserves?

Paula Marshall -- I have always liked her, despite the fact that she has never been a single successful TV show despite many attempts. (I believe that she basically acknowledges that she is the Queen of Failed TV Shows.) She did a show with Jason Bateman that was kind of funny (Chicago Sons, I think). She did a show (Cupid) with Jeremy Piven, who is now hot because of Entourage ("Let's hug it out, b---h!") and The Muse's current favorite. I noticed that she's on a new show this year, but it's gotten terrible reviews. Such an undeserved fate.

Elizabeth Perkins -- She was great in Big. That was a pretty tough role, being able to convincingly play someone who was into someone who behaved like a 13-year-old without making it be yucky. She hasn't been in much, or at least much that I have seen, since because she was taking care of her kids. I was almost interested in seeing in Moonlight & Valentino because of her, even though the guy in the movie was Jon Bon Jovi. (Didn't actually see it though and saved some self-respect.) She was in Dogs & Cats, playing the soccer mom wife of Jeff Goldblum and the mother of the kid whose secret-talking dog is the hero of the movie who defeats the meglomanical cat voiced by Sean Hayes from Will & Grace. (Don't ask.) I spent the whole movie thinking, "Oh my god is this a travesty." Now she apparently is on a pretty good Showtime show called Weeds in which she gets to chew a whole lot of scenery. It almost makes me want to spend the $10 a month to get Showtime. But that's what DVD's are made for.

Early Helen Hunt -- Now, I know what you're saying, how can she not have had the career that she deserved? She has an Oscar and 14 Emmys, for God's sake! Aw, yes, but this is the later Helen Hunt, who wears bizarre burlap-sack-like dresses with charcoal eyeliner to the Oscars and is way too thin. I'm talking about the Helen Hunt before Mad About You and during the first couple years of that show. She was basically my First Actress Who Should Have Had A Better Career. She did a lot of nondescript TV movies and a very good indie movie with Eric Stoltz and Wesley Snipes called The Waterdance. And she did the first couple of years of Mad About You. That show came on in my first year of law school, I think. I remember, after my law school graduation, when four or five of my (male) friends and I were sitting in some really boring bar prep class and someone suggested that we come up with our lists of our favorite actresses. Four of the five guys had Helen Hunt on their lists. The one woman in our group took it as a sign that we weren't total morons. It was an eye-opening moment. I thought it was my own weird thing, but, no, Ms. Hunt had a powerful effect.

But then Mad About You hung around about five years too long and curdled like unrefrigerated milk. Paul Reiser kept writing dumb storylines. Jamie (Ms. Hunt) and Paul had "problems." They decided to have a baby and behaved like no one had ever had a baby before. The final straw for me was the show where they were trying to get the baby to sleep through the night, so they were letting herself cry herself to sleep. As I recall, the whole show consisted of the two of them sitting outside of the baby's room while she cried, agonizing about whether to go in and pick her up. Awwww! It was awwwful!

After that, Ms. Hunt lost a bunch of weight she didn't need to lose, started winning Emmys that she didn't deserve (after Candace Bergen had won the Emmys that Ms. Hunt did deserve) and doing movies where she slept with Jack Nicholson, who was, say, 40 years older than her and playing the love interest of Woody Allen, who was, say, 50 years older than her.

So Early Helen Hunt is on my list, Later Helen Hunt not so much. Maybe she'll get her mojo back at some point. We can always hope.