43. Some actors don't

VINCENT.

Some actors obviously act.
Some actors don't seem to.
You couldn't have been Watching the Detectives during the past fortnight without watching Vincent.[ITV1).
Vincent is, of course, the splendid Ray Winstone.
Ray plays himself.
He always has.
As himself he is infinitely more watchable than any of the personae he is given to play.
Make no mistake about it:
Ray Winstone is a star.
And Vincent, played by Ray, is compelling.

REMEMBERING STARS,

To anybody of my age, the thirties and forties were awash with stars.
Larger than life people who lit up the screen in cinemas we frequented before television became the thing.
I talk of stars like Spencer Tracy, Ketherine Hepburn, Bette Davis, Gary Cooper and, later, Kirk Douglas, Burt Lancaster, Julie Andrews, Marilyn Monroe, etc.
The big screen was full of them.
Their secret was that you did not go to watch So-and-So played by The Star.
You went to watch The Star playing So-and So.
People went to watch Bogie, Cagney, Edward G.,Fred and Ginger, Judy and Mickey...
If you are of the right sort of age, you name 'em.
These were the people who had a screen character tagged onto them as a sort of after-thought.
Nobody cared much who the character was.
I make an exception when it comes to Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe who was played by Dick Powell, Robert Montgomery, Humphrey Bogart, Elliot Gould et al and Leslie Charteris's The Saint who was played by Louis Hayward, Hugh Sinclair, George Sanders, Roger Moore, Ian Ogilvy and possibly others I am too old and too disinterested to remember...
There was also Edgar Rice Burroughs's Tarzan, though he, depicted as he was by many muscular - and some quite good - actors, will surely be best remembered as played by Johnny Weissmuller, a non-acting olympic swimmer.

The memorable character was the exception.

Mostly you just went to watch the star(s) of a film.

JUST A FEW STARS

By the same token, nowadays on television a few, just a few, actors are far bigger than the characters they play.

I don't know why.

You'll have your own opinion.

Suffice to say that if I knew how it is done I'd be rich and famous, too.