Who is the fairest of them all? If you’re an actor, anyone with access to a good make-up artist. We take for granted that the people on the small screens in our living rooms or on the big screens in our cinemas are wearing make-up. They’ve got to look perfect for the camera. That’s what’s the audience expects but is it what they need, when the character being portrayed should look more like the person next door.
More and more female actors are refusing to wear make-up. Sarah Lancashire in the UK crime drama series, “Happy Valley” appears without foundation just like any middle-aged policewoman might do in real life, when there’s more important things than lip gloss, like finding the killer or preventing a murder.
As Sheila Hancock pointed out in the MailOnline recently, more and more women actors “hardly wear any make-up at all and that’s why it looks so real.” She goes on to say “the public won’t notice that.” And she’s right, they won’t, because if it’s a good drama, they’ll be concentrating on the film but subconsciously it will filter through the different layers of the story telling. It will have a greater impact on the audience, on their emotions, and on their empathy for the character and long after the lights have gone up in the cinema and the TV screen gone blank, a small spark will keep the memory of what they’ve seen alive.
We still need heroes today, to look up to and emulate, whether they’re fictional or not. However, when those heroes are coated in layers of make-up, with not a hair or eyelash out of place, how can you have anything in common with them and therefore how can the story have any real meaning? Good stories should ripple out into our lives. It’s why we tell them. To make sense of our lives, we need to identify with the characters and it’s so much easier to do that without a layer of slap in between.
Writing is rewriting 