Sharon Stone did it in Basic Instinct. John Travolta did it in Saturday Night Fever and again in Pulp Fiction. Lana Turner did it before either of them in The Postman Always Rings Twice. We're talking about the magical collision of good casting, good acting and great luck known as the Hollywood Breakthrough.
_____________________________________
Clark Gable in IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT
Wasn't it Joan Crawford who once defined Gable by saying, "You can hear his balls clang together when he walks"? For three decades Clark Gable pretty much epitomized spit-in-your-eye masculine swagger, charm, self-reliance, heroism and brute force on screen. But Gable did not claim his title of King of the Movies overnight. His path to breakthrough packs as much suspense, reversal of fortune and irony as a good old-fashioned Hollywood movie.
Gable didn't have much beyond musk to offer movies at first. A former handyman, lumberjack and telephone repairman, he looked thuggy in many of his earliest efforts, a leering, pomaded hustler on the grift. Darryl F. Zanuck himself turned down Gable's screen test, declaring, "His ears are too big. He looks like an ape." But Gable kept winning roles, women kept writing fan letters, and his screen temperature and prominence rose. He eventually turned up on the list of top 10 box-office attractions.
It was an accident--and not a pretty one--that led to Gable's going mondo. He killed a woman while driving drunk, and though MGM got him off the hook by having one of its executives take the blame (and the jail time), the studio punished Gable by lending him out to what was then a Poverty Row studio, Columbia, and a still-in-development director, Frank Capra, to star in what was perceived as just another screwball comedy, about a newspaper man hot on the trail of a runaway heiress. Nobody expected much from this project, least of all Gable or Claudette Colbert, his costar. The movie was It Happened One Night.
If Gable thought he was slumming, you'd never guess it watching him in what is now regarded as a Hollywood nonpareil. His flip, wise-guy dazzle and good ole regular-guy savvy set off sparks when rubbed against Colbert's wry, urban, pampered sophisticate. Gable's now-classic lesson to Colbert in hitching a car ride, not to mention his sexually revolutionary gesture of stripping off his shirt to reveal his bare chest, spotlighted him as one of the few male movie stars who could be aggressively sexy and unapologetically goofy in one fell swoop.
The movie Gable and Colbert didn't want to do won them both Academy Awards and was named best picture of the year. More than that, it was a gigantic breakthrough for Gable that confirmed his heartthrob status while winning ultimate respectability on the critical scale. Five years later, Gable didn't want to play Rhett Butler in Gone With the Wind, the movie that reinvented him for the '40s and '50s, nor did he go gently into playing the grizzled mustang rancher who finds redemption with Marilyn Monroe in The Misfits, the 1961 picture that might have eased him into character roles had he not died of a heart attack before the film's release. Imagine what a magnificent Sam the Lion Gable might have made in The Last Picture Show, or how terrific he might have been as Rooster Cogburn in True Grit. All that potential was put into motion in It Happened One Night, which crystallized the essence of Gable--tough, gallant, jaunty, racy and ball-clanging.
Tom Cruise in TOP GUN
Tom Cruise and his agent may well be knocking back flutes of champagne this minute in a toast to fate and themselves, since this is the 10th anniversary of Tom's ascension to superstar status--it was in May 1986 that the exceedingly well-crafted, boys-and-their-toys epic Top Gun was released in a blast of jet fuel and heavy breathing.
With 1983's smash hit Risky Business, Cruise had made his big entrance, the announcement that he was not just one of those boys in Taps ('81) or The Outsiders ('83); certainty not a dismissable side player as in 1981's Endless Love; and not the mere callow lad of Losin' It ('82) or All the Right Moves ('83). On the contrary, he was a guy who not only looked very good in underpants (which would help him get Top Gun), but had a far greater appetite and capacity for performance and for stardom than any of the previous films had displayed. That visceral desire, verging on screen into an edge of ruthlessness, but made attractive by the trademark Cruise grin, was a sight for the sore eyes of every power-player in Tinseltown. They know that all actors who become stars have to want stardom (actors like to kid themselves about this).
Making his final emergence all the more dramatic in retrospect, Cruise's next picture after Risky Business was a wretched bust--Ridley Scott's over-ambitious, disastrously inane Blade Runner follow-up, Legend. Cavorting with a unicorn as long-haired, adorable, youngster hero Jack would have been 179 degrees wrong for Cruise even if the movie hadn't been awful on its own. The next year, however, Top Gun, directed with Fate-inspired irony by Ridley Scott's brother, Tony, wiped Legend from memory.
Shorn, buffed-up, cocky, over-eager and able to sexualize everything within his range right down to the tarmac, Tom Cruise used Top Gun to strut out his own personal "need for speed." Cruise and Top Gun blew by the cinema snobs and went for the gut of sensation junkies across the planet. The film opened number one and went on to make kazillions of dollars.
Though texture has been added by each of Tom Cruise's succeeding performances, the boy-man cinema prince that Top Gun anointed in 1986 has remained intact--the father complex (usually overt, always a factor), the showy charm (watch Born on the Fourth of July to see how drab he is without it) and the narcissistic insensitivity that must be schooled by the right girl (even if it turns out to be Brad Pitt). The guy in the aviator shades and the flight jacket is the same guy you see in this summer's Mission: Impossible; he just hits his marks faster these days.
Marilyn Monroe in GENTLEMEN PREFER BLONDES
Even 34 years after her death, Marylyn Monroe is so shimmering and recognizable an icon that it's tough to remember a time when Hollywood thought her just another bottle blonde with a righteous chassis. The platinum hair, the grave, husky baby's voice, the eyes she would close to half-mast then widen, the sinewy way her lips wound around words, the teasing wiggle of her lethal body--you'd think that stuff must have broken through the minute anyone in Hollywood Said eyes on it. But Monroe worked on it, from forgettable bits in late '40s movies and scene-stealing bits in '50s prestige items like All About Eve and The Asphalt Jungle, straight through to ingenue leads in Don't Bother to Knock, Clash by Night and Niagara. In truth, she wasn't always good back then. She managed to come on like a girl fully aware of her lock on any guy she wanted, but she often looked cranked-up and flustered--and oblivious to anyone else in a scene but herself.
All that was before moviemakers figured out that Marilyn Monroe in a Color-by-DeLuxe musical number was a force of nature. Everything came together for Monroe in 1953 with Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Finally, the right role (the gorgeous, dumb-like-a-fox gold digger), the right director in the right mood (Howard Hawks at his most impeccably garish), the right costar (the strapping Jane Russell) and the right songs ("Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend" and "A Little Girl From Little Rock") turned Monroe into the surest thing Hollywood has ever seen.
Betty Grable, one of the bigger, blander, better-paid blondes in movies, had been the studio's first choice for the role of Lorelei Lee on screen. But Grable's box office had slipped and, besides, she'd had it with playing sexy ditzes, so 20th Century Fox cast the younger, hungrier Monroe instead. And right from the movie's opening image, in which Monroe and Russell tear back a screamingly violet stage curtain and strut their wares in spray-on tight, red spangly gowns, Monroe was made. She came on like Tinker Bell in heat. For the first time, Monroe was a knockout in movies, all the more so for the hilarity she put into Lorelei's pursuit of millionaires of all ages. And the obvious respect and delight in which Monroe held her fellow mantrap Russell was another first for her, an important aspect of her triumph here.
Monroe's breakthrough is notable not just for its intensity, but for its downside: the movie that made her was also her eventual undoing. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes trapped her in amber. Spectacular and assured as she was in How to Marry a Millionaire, Some Like It Hot and Let's Make Love, she was confined to playing variations on a theme. She was touching and persuasive in Bus Stop and The Misfits, movies in which she was trying to break free, but Lorelei/Marilyn was such a powerful icon that there was not to be any escape from it. Monroe's sex-as-one-big-joke in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes was so subversive and brilliant that she would never break out of her own breakthrough.
Successors like Madonna and Drew Barrymore, not to mention fabrications like Sheree North, Jayne Mansfield, Stella Stevens and Carroll Baker, have stolen and reworked what Monroe unleashed and became entangled in. But nobody since has been able to touch her, and though a breakthrough likes Monroe's are what many actors lives for, most of them are better off not achieving it quite this spectacularly.
Julia Roberts in PRETTY WOMAN
In the entire history of Hollywood few breakthroughs have ever registered as high on the star-maker Richter scale as Julia Roberts's grand entrance in Pretty Woman. Even Sharon Stone's blast-off with Basic Instinct pales slightly by comparison. Stone's turn as a provocative psycho went so directly for the groin that the intensity of her screen presence was not matched by the range of response it generated. Stone herself backed up that performance with calculated aftershocks off-screen--and gave her breakthrough staying power. Roberts's Pretty Woman coup, on the other hand, was so broadly powerful by itself that none of the ludicrous, off-putting stuff she did afterward dented her following.
Hollywood lives for the special moments when an actor's strengths collide so head-on with a role's opportunities that a megaton explosion like, Roberts's lights up the sky--and the marquee--in near-perpetuity. Insiders can claim they saw it coming as early as 1988's Mystic Pizza, but if you watch Pizza, you'll see that Roberts's presence hadn't blossomed yet. She was interestingly beautiful and had attitude, yes, but she was a diamond in the rough--a diamond so rough you couldn't be sure it was really a diamond. The silly but apt phrase "star power" was appropriately in operation by the time people got a look at the new. sleeked-down, studio-improved Roberts in Steel Magnolias (it helped, of course, that she was surrounded by drawling harpies), and Hollywood recognized her the way an arctic seal can smell its own pup a hundred yards away on a crowded iceberg. She nabbed an Oscar nomination for that performance, not because it was great, but because it was magic.
That magic got her cast opposite Richard Gere in the role that let her assets shine with absolute dazzle. Those assets were: a charisma that defeated resistance to suspending disbelief; an emotional vulnerability that extorted sympathy; and a radiating self-possession that inspired admiration. On top of all that, Roberts's smile, soon to be as beloved and maligned as Tom Cruise's, showed itself to be more powerful than the most potent dose of Method acting--it took on the iconic wattage of the Golden Arches. The gaiety and naturalness of her God-given trademark struck a chord in audiences that audiences will always, justifiably, want struck.
And so Pretty Woman made hundreds of millions of dollars, and made Julia Roberts. It is one of the interesting things about breakthroughs, though, that the world is often more ready for them than the actor. Sharon Stone was ready. Roberts, perhaps, was not. Both women have made a number of bad movies since grabbing the gold ring, but Roberts has been the more offensive wielder and more flagrant squanderer of acquired clout (this is a little like comparing Stalin to Hitler, but you see the point). It's a testament to the power of the Pretty Woman breakthrough that audiences are still eager to see whatever glimpse they can of the Roberts they fell in love with at first sight. In fact, Roberts's career since Pretty Woman can best be viewed as a test of that love.
Brad Pitt in LEGENDS OF THE FALL
Brad Pitt's first wake-up call to Hollywood--his larcenous lover-boy hitchhiker cameo in Thelma & Louise--was so loud and definitive that Tinseltown citizens wondered why it took Pitt so long (three fast years) to finally hit. Thanks to a combination of his own conscious strategy and gut instinct, plus the luck of the draw, Pitt's screen life between Thelma and his true breakthrough, Legends of the Fall, unfolded in a way that built remarkable flexibility into his image, so that unlike many other stars (like Marilyn Monroe), his success raised him to the relative heaven of true career choice instead of bogging him down in the confines of audience expectation.
Pitt is a Millennium guy, dispositionally so far beyond the conventional glamour of his Dean-like looks that you can imagine him spinning out with frustration if he had to devastate us too often. Had his breakthrough film been the one it would have been if a few more things had gone right with the picture--Robert Redford's A River Runs Through It--he wouldn't have had time to hit us with the grungily derivative psycho in the misguided Kalifornia, or the hilariously detached doper in the not-at-all-misguided True Romance.
Though it looked like (and may well have been) a self-destructive impulse busily trying to trash a career rather than an artistic drive to broaden one, Pitt's insistence on playing strange and/or ugly characters turned out to be in perfect keeping with the late '90s emerging Zeitgeist--heroically cranky disaffection. Hence, none of his bombs was a big enough mushroom cloud to contaminate his career. Instead, each one managed to add a little edge and scruff to the indelible, ravishing movie star presence that had beamed out of A River Runs Through It. As it happened, River was a little too classy (that is, slow) for its own good, so by the time Pitt played almost the exact same character all over again in Legends of the Fall, and his tragic visage once more took on the Montana mountain ranges in a head-to-head competition for sheer natural beauty, his audience had acquired at least a dim notion that the nastier aspects of heartbreaker Tristan were just as vital a part of the Brad Pitt picture as the killer charm.
Legends had an impact far beyond its ticket sales. It showed Pitt in his most broadly appealing incarnation in a full-tilt romantic tragedy that hit audiences in the hearts, and other regions south, and had them practically paying in advance for his next movies. That's what breakthroughs must do. A movie like Interview With the Vampire, which gave Pitt's good looks and florid sexuality a bravely creepy, perverse spin, works much better in the aftermath of a Legends, when we know the envelope is being pushed, not invented. A Seven absolutely has to come afterward-- a savvy, gripping, meaningless exercise in style is no way to win immortality, but it's an excellent way to state your sensibility once you've got everybody looking.
A blatantly movie-stealing, Oscar-bait supporting role like the lunatic in 12 Monkeys is how you get people to look at you in a new way. But Legends of the Fall is the film that got everybody looking at Brad Pitt in the first place, and while this actor's ambitious efforts to play against and away from what people saw in Legends can be viewed as commendable, they would very probably be unnecessary if Legends hadn't done its work.
Ingrid Bergman in CASABLANCA
In 1945, some wag cracked a soon-to-be-popular joke: he'd actually seen a movie which didn't feature Ingrid Bergman. For a joke like that even to have existed, the star had to have made a breakthrough of seismic proportions, Bergman had.
From the moment producer David O. Selznick imported her from Swedish films and introduced her to America in 1939's Intermezzo, audiences embraced Bergman as something the likes of which they had never seen before. Tall, fresh-faced and big-boned, she radiated a warmth and approachability along with wholesome carnality. She was, in fact, the antithesis of that other great Swedish import, Garbo. By the time of the afore-mentioned crack about her omnipresence in the movies, Bergman was drawing sell-out audiences at New York theaters simultaneously showing Spellbound, Saratoga Trunk and The Bells of St. Mary's.
But the movie that brought her to that place had come three years earlier. Constantly threatening to return to Europe if producers and directors misused her the way they did other female imports, Bergman was longing to act, and her instincts led her to masochism: she played a governess in love with her much-older employer in Adam Had Four Sons, the saintlike wife of a nutcase in Rage in Heaven, the whore ravaged by Spencer Tracy's eponymous Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Suffering seemed to burnish her beauty. When she fought for and lost (to Vera Zorina) the role of Maria opposite Gary Cooper in For Whom the Bell Tolls (even though Hemmingway himself favored her), she had to content herself with a shady lady/martyr role in a routine, modestly budgeted project that was to pair her with Humphrey Bogart. That film was Casablanca, one of the swooniest romances Hollywood ever concocted.
Luminously photographed, Bergman literally shines in Casablanca, whether she's being slandered as a tramp by her old flame Bogie, or being buffeted by her own conflicting memories, loyalties and desires. No wonder Casablanca, a smash hit, turned her into the definitive wartime icon. She was the archetypal innocent blown to hell by the winds of war.
Bergman's breakthrough was so dramatic that she ended up taking over the role of Maria in For Whom the Bell Tolls when the dailies showed that Vera Zorina wasn't performing up to snuff, and she made a hit of that movie too. She became the nation's biggest female box-office attraction, able, ultimately, to weather huge personal scandals and dubious career choices. Bergman was that rare thing, a bona fide movie star and beauty who could really act. And her break-through film, Casablanca, was a rare thing, too--a classic that lives up to its own gigantic reputation.
Keanu Reeves in SPEED
Whoever Keanu Reeves may be when he's not before the cameras, he spends less time being that creature than most actors spend being whoever they are. It's long been blood sport among critics to dis Reeves for his acting. But he has done, for better or worse, what he set out to do from the first moment he set foot in Hollywood: work. Reeves launched himself with five TV movies in 1986, and he's kept up a pace none of his peers can match. The quantity has been matched by variety: In 1989 he followed up his role as Uma Thurman's paramour in the period film Dangerous Liaisons with his delirious turn as late 20th Century Ted in Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure. We rest our case. The quantity and variety of Reeves's work have been matched by the sheer nerve of some of it: if critics were lambasting you for such fundamental acting sins as woodenness, would you tackle Hamlet on stage?
By the time Reeves happened on his breakthrough, he'd been in town for nine years, had made many movies of all kinds, had worked with every sort of director (e.g., Coppola, Van Sant, Frears, Bertolucci, Howard), and had built such a large audience that many people probably thought he'd already broken through. But the truth is that before Speed, millions of people who knew who Keanu Reeves was were still pronouncing his name "Keenoo"; after Speed, we all knew at least one word of Hawaiian.
Unlike most breakthroughs, which reveal a core element of a star's persona and connect it with a core element of the public's desire, Speed didn't present any core of Keanu or do the siren-song thing on audiences, either. It was a matter of Reeves pushing the physical aspects of his performance--something he's very good at-- to the exact pitch the material required, and then not acting too much. The movie is, after all, called Speed, not Leaving Las Vegas. Reeves knew he had a well-engineered, clever script. And though he couldn't have known he had a good director in first-timer Jan De Bont, he just put his faith in the project, did his job--and bingo. Johnny Mnemonic and Feeling Minnesota are proof that Keanu Reeves will keep doing exactly what he did before his breakthrough--choosing projects with a logic not available to someone who is not Keanu, then immersing himself in those projects with the dedication, if not the resources, of Robert De Niro. But every Keanu Reeves movie will now have a spotlight on it, and when a remotely Speed-like Reeves film turns up, the opening weekend will go berserk.
Gene Tierney in LEAVE HER TO HEAVEN
With her valentine-shaped face, the faintly Asian cast of her features, the mesmerizing gaze of the Wedgwood-hued eyes, the sexy overbite, and those astonishing cheekbones. Gene Tierney ranks high among the screen's all-time visual wonders. She had a look that could not be missed, and 20th Century Fox snapped her up for a long-term contract and cast her as exotic in Belle Starr, Tobacco Road and China Girl.
The movie that "got" her ravishing, somnambulistic allure was Laura, and that, following on her turn as the steadfast wife of a restless Don Juan in Heaven Can Wait, put her on a roll. But the performance that for the first time knocked out not just ticket-buyers, but critics as well, was her turn as the dementedly manipulative, possessive and deeply strange wife of Cornel Wilde in Leave Her to Heaven. It's one of the memorable bad-girl breakthroughs in Hollywood history.
Tierney nails every one of the flat-out stunning scenes she's handed in this lurid, noir-tinged Technicolor poison. Whether she's hurling her dead father's ashes to the four winds, throwing herself down a stairwell to deliberately miscarry her unborn baby, or impassively sitting in a rowboat as her husband's brother drowns (or just plain staring at Cornel Wilde), Tierney in Leave Her to Heaven is a creepy, shockingly beautiful stalker, far more plausible and frightening than Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction.
Leave Her to Heaven became one of Fox's biggest Technicolor hits of the '40s, and Tierney's performance won the film one of its four Oscar nominations. It was a full-fledged breakthrough that opened the door for serious dramatic roles. No longer considered merely decorative, Tierney was cast as the aristocratic odalisque in The Razor's Edge, the lonely widow befriended by a long-dead sea captain in The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, and the rich kleptomaniac in Whirlpool. Sadly enough, her story is proof that breakthroughs solve only certain kinds of problems. She suffered mental illness and was institutionalized; she gave birth to a retarded child; and she had a disastrous romantic life. All of which slowed her momentum and altered her looks. But watch her in the train sequence of Leave Her to Heaven just staring and staring at Cornel Wilde. Madness has seldom looked so breathtaking.
William Hurt in BODY HEAT
From the moment of William Hurt's first appearances in 1980's wiggy Altered States and 1981's pleasingly witless Eyewitness, this actor's impressive arsenal of tall, Waspy good looks, apparent smarts and seductively furtive gaze marked him as a potential postmodern Gary Cooper. He seemed like a guy aware he was destined for big things, juiced but able to activate the circuit breaker to regulate his own voltage. But it was Body Heat that made William Hurt, turned him into the leading man of the '80s. In the beautifully crafted role of a smug Florida lawyer about to take the big fall, Hurt brilliantly delineated the fatal hubris of a guy gone soft from believing he's way too fast and hip for the room. As breakthroughs go, Body Heat stands out on two counts. One, it wasn't a mass audience hit. Two, it didn't keep Hurt from going into eclipse a decade later. But it was most certainly a classic breakthrough--no one in Hollywood missed it.
Chosen, if legend is to be believed, over contenders like Tom Berenger, Don Johnson, Kevin Kline and Kevin Costner, Hurt bagged a stellar role. As written by Kasdan, Ned Racine, a randy, none-too-particular lawyer, is a replay Walter Neff, Fred MacMurray's randy, none-too-particular insurance salesman in Double Indemnity. Hurt and Kathleen Turner (making a killer movie debut in a replay of Barbara Stanwyck's Indemnity role) spark like a pair of street dogs in rut. In fact, Turner is such a show-stopper that it's all too easy to overlook how brilliant Hurt is.
And Hurt is brilliant, utterly convincing as the guy to whom Turner says, "You're not too smart, are you? I like that in a man." For sheer Hollywood breakthrough mojo, it's hard to beat the scene in which Hurt peers lustfully through the windows of Turner's house and then smashes his way in to take her on the spot. It's a Rhett Butler star turn, and Hurt grabs for it, making it as hilarious as it is hot.
Body Heat cleared the way for a run of showy movies: The Big Chill, Kiss of the Spider Woman, which won Hurt an Oscar--Oscar nominations, too, for Children of a Lesser God and Broadcast News. Then, around the time of The Accidental Tourist, which reteamed him with (a badly miscast) Turner, things soured and lesser actors began to pass Hurt by. He didn't help matters by being incoherent and pretentious in interviews. And what to make of his sometimes distracted work in such wayward projects as I Love You to Death, A Time of Destiny, Alice, Until the End of the World, The Plague and Mr. Wonderful? Hurt's textbook career breakthrough had a sequel--a textbook career breakdown.
Some make Hurt as a likely comeback candidate. A tough call, though--comebacks being as miraculous and tricky a phenomenon as breakthroughs. He'd have to get as lucky as Travolta did. Should Hurt be so blessed (or is it cursed?), it won't seem so improbable to anyone who looks back at what happened in Body Heat.
Nicole Kidman in TO DIE FOR
Anyone who would like to believe that a big-screen breakthrough can necessarily be engineered is easily disabused of that notion by looking at the case of Nicole Kidman. As Mrs. Tom Cruise, she stood an excellent chance, one might think, of being elevated to the first ranks by starring opposite her husband in a giant, good-spirited period romance filmed in glorious 70 millimeter. Surely her screen stuff would show itself for what it was, and Tom's presence would skew the odds heavily in favor of success for both of them. Well, the result was 1992's Far and Away, a big, immensely stupid dud in which Kidman did show her stuff (she was very good), but Tom, perhaps having taken too much care of his wife and too little of himself, played such an inexplicable blockhead (with the worst haircut in Cruise history) that the massive, overblown movie never took off. So much for taking Hollywood by storm.
Truth is, Kidman had shown herself to be "star material" long before she met Tom. Her potential was probably evident to Cruise when he had her cast in the deplorable Days of Thunder, and her palpable ambition may well have been much of what he fell for in her (Kidman was, and is, a like spirit to Cruise on many counts).
Back in 1989 she had been introduced to American audiences in the Phillip Noyce thriller Dead Calm, where she played Sam Neill's wife with an aplomb and fierceness that utterly belied her 22 years. With no stars to guide it, Dead Calm tanked, but Kidman won a foothold in the U.S. and was offered the lead (eventually Greta Scacchi's part) in the plausibility-free thriller Shattered, She chose instead a supporting part in Days of Thunder--a smart move not because she ended up marrying Cruise, but because (1) the smaller role was in the bigger film, and (2) if the bigger film tanked (it did) it wouldn't be her fault.
Marriage to Cruise could be seen as obvious career luck in a way, but Kidman had to wait for the odd kind of luck that makes for breakthroughs. She was given a righteous plum of a role in the big-budget Billy Bathgate in 1991, and she was terrific in it, but nobody liked the film. Then came the big push with the fruitless Far and Away. Next she was perfectly cast as a hilariously malicious femme fatale wife in 1993's Malice, and was terrific in it, but nobody liked that film either. The same year she was horribly cast as the saintly wife in 1993's My Life, and she was not terrific, and, again, nobody liked the film. Some people were writing Kidman off as Mrs. Tom Cruise by this point, but many people knew better. Jane Campion, hot off The Piano, had her eye on Kidman for the then far-off-in-the-future Portrait of a Lady. In the nearer term, Joel Schumacher saw in Kidman's nervy bad girl chops a gal after Batman's heart. Right there, Kidman had a role that would give her the monster hit she needed for broad exposure. Her true breakthrough came, though, in the sly, small To Die For, directed by the man least likely to hire Tom Cruise's wife, Gus Van Sant.
Kidman wrested her breakthrough role in To Die For--which wasn't just a role, it was the whole film--from the grasp of many powerful competitors, and she smacked it right out of the park. As the ruthlessly ambitious Suzanne Stone, she was bad, she was strong, she was beautiful, she was funny and she was offbeat--that last element being crucial in the task of winning over all those who might have held her husband against her. To Die For was the film that melted the defenses of those who doubted Kidman, and justified the faith of those who'd watched her come along. That's exactly what breakthroughs are all about.
________________________
Virginia Campbell is one of the executive editors of Movieline and Charles Oakley is a frequent contributor.