When Actors Go Too Far…

By Steve Saragossi

It takes a very special actor to sink a film, and an undeniable level of talent to give a performance so chronically wrong-headed and over-the-top that it sucks in all the other elements of the film surrounding it and makes them redundant. So, it’s no surprise that the following film-sinking performances are given by theatre greats, Oscar winners, critically acclaimed performers and much loved cult heroes. This is just not them at their very best…

MARLON BRANDO (THE ISLAND OF DR MOREAU)

“No matter how hard the circumstances, you can win, and you can triumph over it.” So said director John Frankenheimer, though it’s a credo that could hardly be applied to his woeful adaptation of H.G Wells’ sci-fi/parable The Island Of Dr. Moreau (1996). The film is fatally torpedoed from many directions, not least of which is the hilariously pompous performance by Marlon Brando. In his last few films, Brando seemed to think that the upper class English accent that he first affected in Mutiny On The Bounty (1962) would serve instead of an actual performance. His Dr. Moreau is a bastard crossbreed of Robert Donat in Goodbye Mr. Chips, Alistair Sim in The Happiest Days Of Your Life, and Dame Edith Evans in The Importance Of Being Earnest. The performance is so willfully over the top that you can’t dismiss it as just a money job, but neither can you quite believe a director as talented as Frankenheimer would have allowed Brando to so wholeheartedly sabotage the film. Brando’s death scene, in which he attempts, whilst sitting at a piano in a kaftan, to introduce to a bunch of man-animals the relative merits of Schoenberg and Gershwin, before they rip him apart and eat him, is as eye-poppingly bad as it sounds. It’s as damning a coda to a great actor’s career as it’s possible to imagine. Of course, killing a film stone dead was a whimsical hobby for Brando, and mention should also be made of The Missouri Breaks (1976), Night Of The Following Day (1969), Candy (1968) and The Appaloosa (1966). “The only thing an actor owes his public is not to bore them,” the great man once said, and Brando certainly lived up to this adage: even when he was bad, he was perversely fascinating.

FAYE DUNAWAY (MOMMIE DEAREST)

In truth, Faye Dunaway was never a great actress. Steve McQueen didn’t want her on The Thomas Crown Affair, and her film career has been adequate but hardly stellar, with Bonnie And Clyde (1967), Chinatown (1974) and Network (1976) her only true transcendent moments. So it was curious that she was even offered the difficult role of screen icon Joan Crawford in the warts ‘n’ all biopic Mommie Dearest (1981). Perhaps it was a tip-of-the-hat to Ms. Crawford herself, who once proclaimed: “Of all the actresses, only Faye Dunaway has the talent, class and courage that it takes to make a real star.” The more dispassionate observer might posit that it was Dunaway’s Crawford-like cheekbones that won her the role. Whatever the reason, the stage was set for one of the most laughably camp performances this side of a John Waters movie. “It was meant to be a window into a tortured soul,” Dunaway said after the film’s release. “But it was made into camp.” Crawford’s eyebrows and shoulder pads give more sympathetic performances than she does. Imagine the most overwrought, emotive acting in silent films, multiply it by ten, and you’re nowhere near close to the finely cured ham that is Faye Dunaway (who won a much deserved Razzie Award) in this picture. The scene where she berates her daughter for not liking her is quite possibly the worst, most hilariously overwrought scene in post-war cinema history. Dunaway’s star-as-freak show, eyes-bulging, spit-flying-from-the-corner-of-her-mouth, arms-dangling-from-her-shoulders-like-a-robot, fingernails-drawn-like-knives performance would ultimately be the catalyst that detonated her career as a viable leading lady. In 2008, when Dunaway was interviewed for a recent movie, the very first thing that the journalist was told was, “There must be no mention of Mommie Dearest.” This is a truism that anyone should take to heart.

JULIETTE LEWIS & GIOVANNI RIBISI (THE OTHER SISTER)

One of the highlights in the hit 2008 comedy Tropic Thunder was Robert Downey Jr.’s solemn, hilarious, and riotously un-PC speech to Ben Stiller about “never going full retard” if one wanted to win an Oscar. It could have been invented for The Other Sister (1999), a half-baked, syrupy rom-com about two mentally disabled people who meet and fall in love. Juliette Lewis has never knowingly been understated but, together with Giovanni Ribisi, they deliver two of the most shockingly crass, insulting, jaw-droppingly inappropriate performances you’ll ever see. To pull off this kind of film, you need a Farrelly Brothers approach, where the situations are so funny that you laugh with such characters, and not at them, as is the case here. In the hands of mainstream rom-com director Garry Marshall (Pretty Woman), the results are simply mawkish. The only way to pull of this kind of film would have been to use genuinely disabled performers who would have brought an authentic sense of believability to the film. As it is, Lewis and Ribisi think that speaking by dropping all consonants and acting and reacting like children is an accurate portrayal of mental disability. It’s an horrific performance by the pair, leading to audience sniggering for all the wrong reasons. Lewis was rightly nominated for a Razzie as Worst Supporting Actress of 1999. On paper, the film had the potential to be a major success, but it’s absolutely ruined by these two performers, who “go full retard” with hideous results. Director Garry Marshall, however, disagrees. “The best film I ever made was The Other Sister,” he once said. “It wasn’t a hit, but that’s my favourite.”

NICOLAS CAGE (GHOST RIDER)

Vanity pieces are not that rare in Hollywood – witness Steve McQueen’s Le Mans (1972) or John Travolta’s Battlefield Earth (2000) – but seldom has a major film been greenlit with a star so miscast, and turning in a performance so over the top, that their mere presence guarantees that the film will fail. Such was the case with Nicolas Cage in Ghost Rider (2007). He brings to the role every exaggerated mannerism and facial tic that has been the trademark of his career, which is by now standard, but back in 2007 still packed something of a sucker punch. Cage obviously had high regard for the material, citing it as a “heady mix of horror, western, comedy, and classic literature like Faust and Beauty And The Beast.” Oh, really. Cage can certainly act, and his natural exuberance can be an attribute to a role. His personality has allowed him to cross over from drama to action to great effect, but given lousy material and a one-note director (Daredevil’s Mark Steven Johnson) with a similarly overbearing comic book fixation, the result is a celluloid train crash. Cage’s performance is one of such hilarious hubris that Ghost Rider becomes an immediate self-parody. Watching a grown man go bug eyed and bellow (he inexplicably plays Ghost Rider’s alter ego – stunt rider Johnny Blaze – as a near moron) all the way through a film is not an edifying experience, and when you come away thinking that his expressionless, CGI-flaming skulled alter-ago gave a more nuanced performance, you know that something is seriously wrong. In an absolute shock move, Cage appeared as Johnny Blaze again in the film’s inexplicable 2011 sequel, Ghost Rider: Spirit Of Vengeance, which equalled the original in its utter stupidity.

LAURENCE OLIVIER (THE JAZZ SINGER)

Was Laurence Olivier a great actor? Definitely. Was he a great screen actor? Mmmm. In movie versions of theatrical productions, he was fine, but in other films, his limited range was often cruelly shown up. Olivier’s theatrical style was at odds with cinema’s immediacy and intimacy, and his acting roles in the seventies and onward became more and more overbearing and at odds with actors more at home with film as a medium. In 1980, producers Jerry Leider and Martin Wiviott hit upon the less-than-brilliant idea to remake the classic early talkie The Jazz Singer as a debut star vehicle for pop star Neil Diamond. Who else to play the New York Rabbi father of Diamond’s character but Sir Laurence Oliver? He grabbed the role by the hem of the character’s prayer shawl and turned in a performance of such stunning stereotypical vulgarity that it’s a wonder the film wasn’t boycotted by the entire Jewish community of New York. Piling on an accent so thick that it needs circumcising, Olivier actually manages to take our minds off what a dreadful actor Neil Diamond is. If a single scene in the film captures the full horror of Olivier’s performance, it’s the one where Diamond’s character announces that he’s getting a divorce and (gasp!) taking up with shiksa Lucie Arnaz. Distraught and anguished, he shouts, “I haff no son!” (Project to the gallery, dear boy, project!), tears his clothing, and starts uttering the prayer for the dead, before practically throwing himself down a flight of stairs in despair. This profoundly overwrought performance practically defined the movie, and still elicits roars of laughter. “Acting is a masochistic form of exhibitionism,” Olivier once said, and in The Jazz Singer, he showed off way too much.

DUSTIN HOFFMAN (HOOK)

It must have seemed like a good idea to Steven Spielberg to make Hook (1991), his own version of the Peter Pan story, and shoot it through the prism of his own oft-tread agenda about childhood and innocence lost. Casting the ultimate man-child Robin Williams as Peter was stunt-casting of the most obvious kind. Signing Dustin Hoffman as Captain Hook was less obvious. Hoffman, ever the perfectionist, not so much immersed himself in the role but drowned in it, turning in a performance of such pantomime excess that he manages to make the rest of the film look like it was directed by Ingmar Bergman. With an accent that vacillates between Winston Churchill and Stewie from Family Guy, Hoffman tips the film from children’s romp into something that veers between scary and laughable. When that doesn’t work, he veers from caricature to genuine menace without a hint of irony. In a pompadour wig, dastardly moustache and wild eyebrows, the character should have worked a treat, but Hoffman seems so unsure of the tone that he wants to achieve that his Hook is a mess in search of a film. In a career that has included a fair few bizarre characters (e.g. Dick Tracy, Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium, etc), this role stands as his most empty vessel: all surface, no hook. “Bob Hoskins [who plays Hook’s first mate, Smee] and I realised about three days into shooting that these guys were gay,” Hoffman has said of his character motivation. “Smee was always making Captain Hook tea and giving him foot rubs – he made for a pretty good broad. We ran the idea past Spielberg, and his hair literally stood on end. Still, once we accepted that the characters were gay, the scenes just flowed.” Yeah…into the sewer.

ROD STEIGER (WATERLOO)

It’s tempting to think of Rod Steiger’s career as one big, over-acting, scene-hogging, scenery-chewing orgy of hamming. He was, however, capable of understated, nuanced performances. Unfortunately, Steiger was too often tempted to hit the button marked “Mental Anguish”. It’s actually pretty difficult to single out just one film that was sunk by Steiger’s propensity for taking a script and puking it through a grinder of awful accents and inappropriate emphasis, but Waterloo (1970) is as good a choice as any, if only for the sheer scale of the film that he managed to single-handedly scuttle. Waterloo was a Russian/Italian co-production produced by impresario Dino De Laurentiis. With an international cast including Christopher Plummer, Jack Hawkins and Orson Welles, the film accurately depicted the famous battle between Wellington and Napoleon at the eponymous landmark. With its multi-national cast and crew, the film was dubbed, and a decision was obviously made to never use dialogue when a meaningful look would do. Steiger really took this to heart, and his performance is all knuckle-chewing and grimacing whilst looking skyward for divine advice. Anytime the film’s verisimilitude appears to be taking hold during its admittedly sweeping battle scenes, it is soon sabotaged by Steiger as he proceeds to chomp the scenery in great, sweaty bites. His performance is pitched at such an agonised level that he makes the rest of the film seem like a dull documentary, and thus Waterloo is fatally compromised. Honourable mention must be made of Steiger’s “performances” in The Specialist (1995) and A Fistful Of Dynamite (1971). “It sounds pompous, but acting is the nearest thing I can do to being God,” Steiger once said. “I’m trying to create human beings and so does He.” Yes, Mr. Steiger, that does sound pompous…

RICHARD BURTON & ELIZABETH TAYLOR (BOOM!)

By 1968, the public was starting to tire of Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. At first, there was an unending thirst for news about this fabulous couple, and they capitalised by making several films together after first meeting on Cleopatra (1963). Some were good (1966’s Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf?), and some were bad (1967’s Dr Faustus), but none were so ridiculously self-indulgent as Boom! (1968), a now almost forgotten film based on Tennessee Williams’ play The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore. The pedigree is good, with Burton, Taylor and Noel Coward in front of the camera, and director Joseph Losey, composer John Barry and cinematographer Douglas Slocombe behind, but the ensuing film had audiences alternately walking out or falling asleep, and Boom! was a costly flop. “I might run from her for a thousand years, but she’s still my baby child,” Burton said of his relationship with Taylor. “Our love is so furious that we burn each other out.” It’s tempting to think that we’re having a peek into the actual Burton/Taylor relationship during The Age Of Aquarius – rich, bored, lotus eaters musing over sex, death and the meaning of life whilst swanning around a fabulous villa. But any notion that we’re seeing an engagingly adult story with two capable actors is quickly dispelled by the two lead performances, which are stultifyingly self-conscious. There are meaningless speeches, Taylor having a five-minute coughing fit onscreen, and Burton wandering around the film intoning “Boom! Boom! Booooom!” It’s an hilariously overblown scenario, and as the film progresses, the pair seem to visibly give up trying to act, and end up just drinking and shouting a lot. “I’ve done the most awful rubbish in order to have somewhere to go in the morning,” Burton once revealingly proclaimed.

ANTHONY HOPKINS (THE ROAD TO WELLVILLE)

 There are so many reasons why The Road To Wellville (1994) is bad. Quirky is one thing, but being willfully odd to the point of alienating your audience is another. Supposedly telling the true story of Dr. Kellogg (yes, the Corn Flakes guy) and the rather idiosyncratic health spa that he ran in the late 19th century, director Alan Parker seems to have made this film with the explicit intention of divesting himself of his desire to fill a movie with fart gags, wank jokes and shit. The fulcrum of the movie is in the shape of Anthony Hopkins’ bizarre performance. You could excuse the Bugs Bunny teeth, clipped goatee, adenoidal Roosevelt voice, and thick glasses had the real Kellogg actually looked like that, but he didn’t. Thus Hopkins’ performance is rendered in ever odder hues of strangeness. In a willful act of bringing the weird to a role that didn’t actually require it, your attention is relentlessly drawn to his performance against your will in much the same way as you’d be drawn to look at a public execution. Its awfulness is compounded by the fact that you know Hopkins is an exceptional actor, and you are constantly mystified as to why he appears to be committing career suicide with such a loony-tunes performance. You also have to wonder why Hopkins ever signed on to a film that’s chief preoccupation is with getting cheap laughs from bodily fluids. This is by far Hopkins’ most over-the-top film role, and he squanders the ludicrous elements of the part by just going for plain old weirdness instead. “I’m able to play monsters well,” Hopkins once said. “I understand monsters. I understand madmen.” The problem here is that Dr. John Kellogg wasn’t one…

ROBIN WILLIAMS (PATCH ADAMS)

Robin Williams’ film career has too often been derailed by his tendency towards the mawkish. An over-reliance on cheap sentimentality has been the hallmark of such films as Jack, Bicentennial Man, Jakob The Liar, When Dreams May Come and, most profoundly, Patch Adams (1998). In a role seemingly tailor-made for the corny Williams, the film tells the true story of a medical student convinced that treating patients with humour was the best medicine. One look at the movie’s poster – with Williams in hospital whites and a clown nose on his face, looking benignly down at an out of shot patient – lets you know what you’re in for. Williams thinks that he can have his cake and eat it too here, by delivering clownish behaviour and portentous gravitas in equal measure, while obviously believing that it can be palatable. Well, it can’t. The late, great Robin Williams was a brilliant comedian, and a fine actor, but his instincts weren’t always on the money. His performance in Patch Adams was also severely compromised by being showcased in such a mainstream, homogenous package. Had the movie been an indie feature, and been more faithful to its source material, it’s possible that he could have reined in the maudlin for something a little more edgy and vital. Under Tom Shadyac’s anodyne direction, however, Williams gives full vent to his inner syrup, alternating between his trademark quippery and graven sermonising. In one gooey swoop, Robin Williams manages to destroy the movie – and the good work done by the real Dr. Patch Adams – on almost every level. “I knew the movie would do this,” said Dr. Hunter “Patch” Adams. “I would become a funny doctor. Imagine how shallow that is relative to who I am.”

MILLA JOVOVICH (MESSENGER: THE STORY OF JOAN OF ARC)

It’s not exactly new territory for a director to cast his wife/girlfriend/muse/significant other in the lead role of a film. If the actress in question can actually act, who cares? But when your wife has the sole attribute of being beautiful, and when the film you’re about to helm is one of the most expensive in your country’s history, and when the subject of said film is one of the most revered icons in history, then you’d better make sure that your main squeeze has the acting chops to justify such hubris. Unfortunately for Luc Besson, none of this occurred to him when he made The Messenger: The Story Of Joan Of Arc (1999). To put such a then-inexperienced actress in a role as important as this simply killed the film. Jovovich is a black hole at the film’s heart, sucking all the life out of it until nothing remains. Someone obviously taught Milla Jovovich that great acting equals shouting, crying, going without makeup and, to show true despair, drooling snot down your face. On that basis, she is a wonderful actress; for everyone else, it’s like having to listen to fingernails being scraped down a blackboard for 158 minutes. In the scene where God has supposedly instructed Joan to cut off her hair, Jovovich’s tantrum is one of such infantile artifice that laughing at the film is no longer a sufficient release from the crass amateurism that is her performance. When asked why he thought his then-wife was perfect for the title role of such a mammoth project, Besson replied, “They have common points. They have no skin. They can cry in two seconds.” Oh, Luc, if only we’d known…it would have explained so much.

If you liked this story, check out our features on actors misbehaving on set; actors warring with directors; actors warring with other actors; and actors and their most deeply personal roles.