Celeste Holm Syndrome by David Lazar

Author:David Lazar [Lazar, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: PER004030 Performing Arts / Film & Video / History & Criticism
Publisher: Nebraska

Comedy and Pain

Eric Blore, with a Side of Franklin Pangborn

Eric Blore was born in Middlesex in 1887, and he began his professional life as an insurance agent, which makes perfect physiognomic sense—he looks like an insurance agent. He also looks very much like the roles that came to dominate his ninety or so film credits: butlers and valets, headwaiters and hotel managers, men who serve in some capacity. I suppose I’m saying that butlers look like insurance agents, which I’ve never quite considered, but now that I do consider, it has the ring of absolute truth, or, at the very least, mild plausibility or, as Robert Benchley might have said, but perhaps would have restrained from saying, errant possibility.

Eric Blore is certainly the name of a character actor, the producers-that-be never bothering to change it, never needing to, which is true, as well, for the names of many other character actors (for instance, Franklin Pangborn) by the same reasoning that they did change the names of their leading actors: character actors could have names with character, suggesting quirks or strangeness, even, at times, ethnic connections, whereas leading actors, the Issur Danielovitch Demskys (Kirk Douglas), William Beedle Jrs. (William Holden), Natalia Zakharenkos (Natalie Wood), and Doris Kapelhoffs (Doris Day) had to be smoothed out, WASPed, for a general audience.

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