The King and His Court

First Runner-up in the Dean Martin Memorial Sweepstakes for So-So Singers Who Make Decent Actors is Diana Ross, whose looks, not her voice, won her the lead vocalist spot in The Supremes. An average singer fortunate enough to work with Motown's great songwriters, Ross was good in Lady Sings the Blues, okay in Mahogany, and no worse than anybody else in the nightmarish The Wiz, the most uninterruptedly cheerless musical ever made. In the latter, it should be noted, Ross made the fascinating choice of wearing both the hairdo and the dour facial demeanor of Clarence Williams III. But the hands-down winner of the Golden Deaneroonie is Bette Midler, who started out singing Barry Manilow's arrangements in New York's gay bathhouses, and who probably got her acting career off the ground after patrons of those very same bathhouses raised enough money for her to switch genres. (Bathhouses are bad enough without live renditions of songs like "Hello In There.") Like Cher, the Divine Miss M has labored long and hard to divert attention away from her wafer-thin cabaret voice by developing a screamin'-heebie-jeebie stage show, which worked well until her screen debut in The Rose, the Janis Joplin gagathon which demonstrated that, while Midler couldn't really sing, she could actually act. End of that career.

On the other hand, being a bogus or second-tier rock star who can't sing like Elvis Presley or Little Richard will not automatically guarantee success in the movies. Paul Simon's hair-in-the-electric-socket sidekick was never entirely convincing as a rock star back in the parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme era. But Art Garfunkel has been pretty much of a Johnny One Note as an actor, getting cast as a schmuck in Carnal Knowledge, as a schmuck in Catch-22, and as a schmuck in Bad Timing: A Sensual Obsession, while Simon himself, too short to rock and roll but too young to die, made his acting debut as a schmuck in Annie Hall, and then inadvertently came off as a complete schmuck in his own production, One-Trick Pony. Proving that the words of the prophets are written on the subway walls, and the words are: Fuck you, schmuck.

Speaking of schmucks, how about a few words vis-a-vis the Stingmeister? The Stingster--whose colossal self-importance has been captured for all eternity (well, for the next 25 minutes) by both Annie Leibovitz and by the Sting-guy himself (in Bring on the Night, he actually filmed the birth of his own son, presumably so that all those people in the Third World who don't have any children of their own could get a charge out of it)--is truly appalling. But he's a very good rock 'n' roller and by no means the world's worst actor--so long as he's not cast as the leading man. Stiff as a board, mannered and over-rehearsed in The Bride, in which he would seem to have been appropriately cast as Dr. Frankenstein, Sting was outacted not only by a dwarf (David Rappaport), but by a standup comic (Alexei Sayle) with a Yorkshire accent so thick that not even people from Yorkshire can understand it. Indeed, Lord of the Stings was so unstintingly wooden in this film that audiences the world over found themselves rooting for the star's destruction, bellowing, "Sting, where is thy death?"

Still, when Stingus Supremus is cast properly--in a smaller role where he plays a sinister or vacuous figure--he is quite competent, turning in decent supporting performances in Julia and Julia, Plenty, Dune, and Quadrophenia. People who saw the Stingmensch on Broadway when he appeared in Brecht's The Threepenny Opera a few years ago assure me that he cannot actually act, not in the sense of being able to behave in a psychologically coherent fashion for more than 90 seconds at a time. But when coached properly, His Most Excellent Sting is more than equal to the miniscule demands of movie acting, and can trade a few lines with Meryl Streep or Kathleen Turner without being completely burned to a crisp.

Some of the best acting jobs by rock stars have been served up by people who are not so universally well-known that their fame overshadows their performances. Gary and Martin Kemp are the leaders of the British art-rock band Spandau Ballet, a perfectly adequate, second-rank English rock group whose albums have not yet made les freres Kemp household names. Unburdened by the demands of Jaggerian, RogerDaltreyian or Stingeroonian notoriety, the brothers were thoroughly convincing as atavistic murderers in The Krays, which seems to underscore the widely held belief that English rock stars just naturally make convincing psychopaths. Along similar lines, Roland Gift of the fleetingly popular Fine Young Cannibals did a very nice job as an obsessed lover in Scandal and was also quite effective as a mysterious drifter in Sammy and Rosie Get Laid. But, again, Gift is not so famous that his celebrity would overshadow his own performance, or that of any of his co-stars in a film. Well, maybe Bridget Fonda.

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