It isn’t just about “looking good” or the extremes of eating disorders - body image relates to our identity, and how we think about and accept ourselves. And our self concept directly or indirectly affects how much access we have to the awareness and emotional energy we need for creating.

Body image issues can be particularly acute for people in entertainment, which also provides most of the icons and role models of appearance. 

But some highly talented actors such as Emma Thompson seem to revel in roles with a far from mainstream look, such as her character in "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban" [left].

She also played three roles in the HBO series “Angels in America”: the glorious angel, Nurse Emily, and the scruffy Homeless Woman, and is a governess with frightening features in "Nanny McPhee,” for which she also wrote the screenplay.

In her film Carrington (1995), she appears with short hair, dressed “mannishly” and Thompson said she did not feel any loss of femininity dressed that way, but rather “lots of freedom, complete freedom. When I went to university, I shaved my head, wore little wrap glasses and butch overalls, because I didn't want to be trapped in femininity.”

That “trap” can affect many talented actors. Katherine Heigl [tv series “Grey's Anatomy”] said she is “grateful people think I'm beautiful or sexy, and I suppose it's better than the alternative, but I do try to fight it a bit so it's not all people see me as. And I'd love to one day be in a position where I could choose a role to showcase my creativity versus just my bra size." [imdb.com]

Julie Taymor, who directed Salma Hayek in Frida (2002) noted “It can be difficult for a beautiful woman like her to find artistically challenging roles; so much attention is paid to all their facial expressions, and they keep seeing themselves all the time.” [Bravo TV profile of Hayek Sep 2003]

Miriam Margolyes [left], like Emma Thompson, enjoyed playing an eccentric character in a Harry Potter film, and is getting praise for her current stage performance in "The Importance of Being Earnest" in Los Angeles.

She commented in a recent interview [Los Angeles Times January 29, 2006] that playing character roles suited her just fine: "I think stars sometimes have a very lonely time. Not that I don't want to be a star, but I don't think people react to you for real. I don't have that problem. A lot of people don't think I'm an actress because I look so peculiar.” [My character in “Ernest”] is “bursting with sexuality, and I don't often get to play roles that are bursting with sexuality because I'm fat."

She adds, "I've always looked like this, and you know what? I'm happy about it. I really want to lose weight, and I'm going to lose a bit, but I'm always going to be a fat woman with a round, chubby face and kind of untidy hair. I like myself. I don't think fat is great, but it's not a sin."

But apparently many film and television producers do think it’s a “sin” to be other than very thin and very blond.

Toni Collette ["Muriel's Wedding," "The Sixth Sense" and two films at Sundance: "The Night Listener," "Little Miss Sunshine"] finds she “learns as a person from the role. It's not about work - these are life experiences for me."

"I don't understand why you have to look like a model to be a successful actor, what a character looks like is an extension of what they feel," she says.

"This is going to sound offensive, but for female actors there is a uniform of being you are meant to aspire to. There's this new batch of younger women who all look the same: the same rail thin body, the same blond hair - it's like they all go to the same hairdresser. It's kind of scary, and not the kind of image you should be putting out. What audiences and I respond to is what you can't see, what can't be fully explained. What's between the lines, unseen." [Los Angeles Times, January 29, 2006]

Not that a lot of us don’t appreciate thin blond women, particularly those with talent, depth and passion, but thankfully there are women in film and television of other body types as well. Though not nearly enough, which may be the fault of casting directors and writers.

Emily Procter, who played Detective Calleigh Duquesne on the tv series CSI: Miami, and Ainsley Hayes on The West Wing, said in a 2003 interview, “It’s so nice after 10 years as a blonde actress in Hollywood to have people let you do smart things.”

Actor/singer/composer Melora Hardin [tv series “The Office” among many other credits] thinks "blonde women have it harder. I was blonde for about two months for a movie, and people definitely treated me differently. I have never ever felt when I walked into a room as a brunette that anybody was testing my intelligence. But as a blonde, I certainly felt that way. That was really weird. I really enjoyed being blonde, but I felt myself being tested more, by men especially, but by women also."

She thinks ”in the last few years the media have done a pretty great job of trying to display different kinds of beauty - we have a lot of different prototypes of beauty, and we have Banana Republic ads that show women in their sixties. And we have Courtney Love on the cover of Rolling Stone, and she's one of the ugliest women I've seen, but there's something attractive about her because she's just who she is.” [quotes from my interview with Melora Hardin - also see her site melora.com]

Milla Jovovich has continuing success as a model [L'Oreal among others] and actor [photo from “Ultraviolet”] but is aware that beauty is transitory: "My mum always told me, 'Don’t fall into the trap of expecting your prettiness to open doors and carry you because it’s going to be gone like that,'" she says, snapping her fingers. "I really feel this is the time to establish the rest of my life.

“With a real job that I don’t just love but that’s also going to put me behind the camera so I’m not totally dependent on my physicality." [quotes from "Milla’s crossing" by Cat Callender, Telegraph (UK) Jan 14, 2006, posted on millaj.com] Also a singer and designer, she and her friend Carmen Hawk have launched a line of clothing called Jovovich-Hawk jovovich-hawk.com.

Actor Viola Davis [left] says there may often be a racial bias in film and tv casting decisions: "I feel like with white women, there are different kinds of beauty. You have the pre-Raphaelite beauty, then you have the girl next door, then you have the geek princess like Janeane Garofalo.

"So you have them playing the different kinds of roles. With black women, you're either beautiful or you're not. I'm not even just talking pretty. If you're not a classical beauty, you're nothing.”

Davis points out how much positive opinion and regard are affected by image, and this is perhaps the strongest reason so many women especially seek artificial means to try to stay looking youthful. But at what emotional cost, and possible loss of some uniqueness and personality?

Kate Beckinsale, commenting about playing Ava Gardner in “The Aviator” said, “They don’t make dames anymore. It’s really sad that one of the things we’ve lost in movies and in life is that, in the quest for everyone to get Botoxed to look like they were 30 when they’re 45, we’ve lost our dames.

"I hope that I’m going to be gracious and accept my wrinkles, gray hair and go for it. To be a great dame, you have to be secure in who you are.” [Hollywood Life, Jan/Feb 2006]

The light-skinned, wrinkle-free cheerleader look so prevalent in fashion and cosmetic ads, films and tv, must continually be impacting women’s [and men’s] sense of what body images are desirable.

According to the Eating Disorder Referral Organization [EDReferral.com] most 10 year olds are afraid of being fat, and half of 9 and 10 year old girls feel better about themselves if they are on a diet. The average woman is 5'4" tall and weighs 140 pounds, but the average American model is 5'11" and weighs 117. Most fashion models are thinner than 98% of American women.

Some other statistics on body image and obsession: 91% of women recently surveyed on a college campus had attempted to control their weight through dieting; 22% dieted "often" or "always" and 35% of "normal dieters" progress to pathological dieting.

Therapist Christine Hartline, MA, of EatingDisorderReferral EDReferral.com says in her article Dying to Fit In - Literally! : “Women are enslaved to a beauty myth, chained to the false belief that our value is based on our appearance alone. In the United States approximately 10% of girls and women (numbering up to 10 million) are suffering from diagnosed eating disorders. Of these at least 50,000 will die as a direct result.”

But even without having an actual disorder, many talented women - and more and more men - spend a great deal of time and money on appearance enhancement. Americans spend about $124 billion on medical treatments related to obesity, and $1.8 billion on diet books. And exercise obsessively and increasingly use cosmetic surgery: there were nearly 12 million cosmetic procedures performed in 2004.

Jane Fonda talks in her memoir "My Life So Far" about one of the most popular form of cosmetic surgery for women. In the 1980s, with her creativity flagging and marriage to Tom Hayden falling apart, she writes, "Instead off dealing with my crisis in a real way, I got breast implants. I am ashamed of this, but I understand why I did it at the time. I somehow believed that if I looked more womanly, I would become more womanly. So much of my life had become a facade; what did it matter if I added my body to the list of falsehoods?"

For all teens, body image issues can be difficult, but especially for gifted and highly sensitive people. Annette Revel Sheely, M.A., a counselor at the Rocky Mountain School for the Gifted and Creative, notes in her article Sex and the Highly Gifted Adolescent, “Highly gifted people tend towards a more androgynous style, and few of them act out gender role stereotypes. As children, gifted girls and gifted boys are more similar to each other than they each are to their non-gifted, same-gender counterparts."

But this can become a real problem in adolescence, she notes: "When gender roles increase in social importance among age peers, androgynous highly gifted teens are often subjected to harassment in school because they don't fit neatly into the gender norms of our culture.”

In the article The Dialectic of Fat [by Catherine Orenstein, Ms. magazine], psychotherapist Susie Orbach [author of book Fat Is a Feminist Issue] comments, “Feminists are buying into the idea that the way to feel good is to look after our bodies. We would have been horrified at this years ago, but it's just part of what we do now. How many hours are spent by accomplished, capable, intellectually interesting women in being frightened of food, then decorating or denigrating their bodies? Is the gym really about health?”

So the question is, how much of your personal resources of time, money and energy are you putting into body image enhancement, beyond just staying healthy and reasonably attractive? Maybe more of those resources could be used for developing your creative talents.

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some related pages:

body image

body image resources: sites  books

eating disorders

eating disorders resources: articles  books  sites

perfectionism

self-esteem / self concept

self-esteem / self concept resources sites  articles  books

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