More ‘breakthrough’ roles recalled

MARLON Brando

Our recent piece on some Filipino stars’ “breakthrough” film roles has prompted requests for a follow-up recollection of “global” luminaries’ own big, career-making breaks on the silver screen. Happy to oblige:

Decades ago, Warren Beatty was regarded as one of the most handsome movie actors the movie cameras had ever laid “eyes” on. His older sister, Shirley MacLaine, had become a musical-comedy star years before him, but she was no great looker, so fans were pleasantly surprised—and bowled over—when he came along.

His “introducing” role was in “Splendor in the Grass” with Natalie Wood, but he really got viewers all hot and bothered when he costarred with Vivien Leigh in “The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone,” as the male sex object and gigolo who made her forget that she was “old and cold.”

That great first impression led to Beatty enjoying a long-running stellar career, and also reaping acclaim as a scriptwriter-director with “Reds.”

For his part, Marlon Brando didn’t just become a screen sensation with the film version of his theater hit, “A Streetcar Named Desire,” and other early starrers, but he also helped launch an entire acting movement!

He became the prime American exemplar of the Stanislavski thespic approach, which replaced the “artful” performance style of yore with a much more real and felt “attack” that required an actor to live his role, down to its itches and mumbles.

WARREN Beatty

Brando made the raw but acutely real approach so exciting and trendy that an entire generation of actors, both stellar and -un, made scratching and mumbling their own acting style of choice, for decades on end!

They included another major find, James Dean, who scratched and mumbled even more famously in his own stellar bid for gutsy glory in “Rebel Without a Cause.”

Dean could have become an even bigger star than Brando, had a fatal car crash not tragically nipped his “flaming” career in the bud.

Despite the fact that Dean made only a few other movies in his abridged career (his last starrer was “Giant,” where his last shots were done “on the cheat,” using a double), but he’s still regarded as a seminal and influential screen actor for all seasons.

Other significant actors’ breakthrough roles: Peter O’Toole in “Lawrence of Arabia,” Daniel Day Lewis in “My Left Foot,” Sean Connery in “Dr. No,” Clint Eastwood in the “Dollars,” “Italian Cowboy” flicks, Haley Joel Osment in “The Sixth Sense,” Christian Bale in “Velvet Goldmine,” Jesse Eisenberg in “The Social Network,” Bruce Willis on TV’s “Moonlighting,” then onto the “Die Hard” films, Sean Penn in “Dead Man Walking,” Arnold Schwarzenegger in “Terminator,” Sylvester Stallone in “Rocky,” and Macaulay Culkin in “Home Alone.”

Most recently: Dakota Johnson in “50 Shades of Grey,” Alicia Vikander in “The Danish Girl,” Benedict Cumberbatch in “The Imitation Game,” Daisy Ridley and John Boyega in the new “Star Wars” film.

And, most appropriately of all, Anitta in the 2015 dance-drama, “Breaking Through!”