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Though here I sat thinking "Could an overweight girl feel so confident?".
Well, Nicki Bronski (iirc that's the actress's name? Although I may be misremembering) does seem pretty darned perky and confident, bless her. I was so sorry that the Writers' Strike (which I supported, mind you) meant that the Golden Globes got cancelled, because that meant she didn't get to have her fifteen minutes of gorgeous frock and peer recognition, poor kid.
Anyway, yes - it's the nature of Hollywood (and much US telly) that characters tend to be physically idealised. "Perfect hair", teeth, t*ts, arses, skin etc etc. It's a rare imperfect actor or actress that gets to play anything other than bit parts - and of course fat actors are more acceptable than fat actresses, because that's the nature of Western society and its attitude towards women. Sucks.
I'm quite fond of Jack Black, but
Shallow Hal just made me wince from the trailers far too much to bother catching it. And
Big Momma's House seems to depend almost entirely for its comedy on the sheer hilarity of how revolting fat women are. Yeah. Thanks for that.
Of course, John Waters gave Ricki Lake lots of great roles back in the 80s, and I'm actually perfectly fond of the musical version of Hairspray too. And we've got
Dream Girls - that had a large-ish actress in one of the main roles, being utterly awesome. We tend to have actors and actresses of various shapes and sizes on UK telly (and I remember Pam Ferris piling on weight for her character in
The Darling Buds of May, who was very much one of the good guys), and on TV even in the States you've had Roseanne, that fella on LOST, a couple of the characters on Popular...but, yeah, okay, positive portrayals of heftier people (and I mean, even a wee bit hefty, never mind big fat buggers like myself) are still pretty few and far between. I mean, do you remember all the kerfuffle about Renee Zellwegger putting on weight to play Bridget Jones, and all the BS about how "fat" she was? @@
To be fair, though, we could equally have this rant about US portrayals of Brits. A British accent on a bloke (whether the actor in question was a Brit or a Yank) was shorthand for 'Macchiavelian villain - probably gay' throughout most of the 80s and 90s, and is only a little less so nowadays. British women were almost invariably depicted as posh, frustrated ice-maidens just dying for a good shag from a red-blooded American man.
This is just how mainstream bums-on-seats cinema works, you know? Stereotypes abound, and the women have to be shaggable.
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But in recent years, a movement has been trying to bring opera more in line with other mainstream forms of entertainment. With that comes the preference for svelt singers.
Oh dear. I confess, I do find it HORRIBLY distracting when the singer doesn't look the part - I mean, I'm more of a theatre-goer than an opera-goer, and so when I do go to opera I'm generally engaging more with the narrative than with the music (because it's not my area of expertise, and beyond thinking 'Oooh, that's a good one! Ack! Need hanky!' I really can't make any sensible comments). And this means that if the character is supposed to be a gorgeous young princess and she's being played by a huge woman of advancing middle years I find it TERRIBLY distracting. I would far rather pay to see the singers just stand there and sing, or to have the singers just stand there and sing while some mute dancers act it all out...but being asked to believe that this bloke in his 40s is actually the hot young apprentice or whatever...well, I find it very difficult to get engaged with the performance. It throws me right out of the whole suspension-of-disbelief thing.
I realise that's rather shallow of me, and I do feel very bad for the hefty opera singers facing employment problems.