Jennifer Lawrence, one of the world’s highest-paid actresses, has recently received mixed reviews for her latest three films: Passengers, mother! and Red Sparrow. Lawrence is a real star, in so that she is a good actor but that is not her essential ingredient, writes Stephen Galloway writes in The Hollywood Reporter. People can identify with her, both within the roles she plays and when she is offscreen. Jack Nicholson did this in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Through his role, the audience felt like they’d “inhabited the soul of a borderline personality, the kind of man we might have no patience for in real life.” And when Bette Davis embodied a woman who shoots her lover in The Letter, we supported her, not the law. There have been very few great stars in the history of film — George Clooney, Tom Hanks, Julia Roberts, Denzel Washington, to name a few. But, Galloway writes, studios have increasingly turned to brands, rather than brand names or individual actors. They favor product over personality now and have given up on the notion that film can be about real people. In doing so, they’ve turned their back on their ability to use films to teach us how to care. Without developing character pieces, they won’t develop more stars, and everyone in Hollywood should be worried about that. Lawrence can bounce back, like John Travolta did with Pulp Fiction in 1994, but if stars like her do vanish, then so do we “one little nick of our humanity at a time.”
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