Cesar Romero, Lupe Velez, Anna May Wong, and
Yun-Fat Chow.
Native Americans, too, have suffered the indigni-
ties of either being stereotypically cast—usually as
the “bad guys” in movies depicting the “Old West”—
or of having non-Indians play Native American
parts. Notable actors in such cross-racial casting
include Douglas Fairbanks (The Half-Breed, 1916;
director: Allan Dwan), Pierce Brosnan (Grey Owl,
1999; director: Richard Attenborough), Sal Mineo
(Cheyenne Autumn, 1964; director: John Ford), and
Henry Brandon (The Searchers, 1956; director: John
Ford). However, Ford also cast genuine Native
Americans in Indian roles in his films, including
Chief Big Tree—who appeared in The Iron Horse
(1924), Drums along the Mohawk(1939), and She Wore
a Yellow Ribbon (1949)—and Many Mules, an
Apache, who plays the Apache antagonist, Geron-
imo, in Stagecoach(1939). Native American actors
who have taken major roles as Native Americans
include Eddie Spears (Black Cloud,2004; director:
Rick Schroder), Adam Beach (Smoke Signals, 1998;
director: Chris Eyre), Russell Means (The Last of the
Mohicans, 1992; director: Michael Mann), and Irene
Bedard (The New World, 2005; director: Terrence
Malick). Native American actors who play a variety
of roles include Graham Greene (Breakfast with
Scot, 2007; director: Laurie Lynd) and Gary Farmer
(California Indian, 2008; director: Timothy Andrew
Ramos). Many other movies have cast Native Amer-
icans in speaking roles as well as extras, including
Arthur Penn’s Little Big Man(1970), Kevin Costner’s
Dances with Wolves(1990), Terrence Malick’s The
New World(2005), and Charles Howard Thomas’s
Morning Song Way(2006). Native American direc-
tors include Chris Eyre (Smoke Signals, 1998),
Zacharias Kunuk (The Fast Runner, 2001), Sterlin
Harjo (Four Sheets to the Wind, 2007), and Sherman
Alexie (The Business of Fancydancing, 2002).
Traditionally, because audiences have shown
little interest in films about women older than
forty-five, the American industry has produced few
of them. Some women older than this cutoff—Joan
Crawford, Bette Davis, Angela Lansbury, Shirley
MacLaine, Debbie Reynolds, Elizabeth Taylor, Shel-
ley Winters—have taken roles as stereotyped
eccentrics, where the camp value of their perform-
ances translates into the triumphant statement “I’m
still here!” Furthermore, audiences love it when a
great star from a former era makes a rare come-
back, as Gloria Swanson did in Billy Wilder’s Sunset
Boulevard(1950). But even though many excellent
movies have featured older male actors—Henry
Fonda, Jack Lemmon, Walter Matthau, Jason
Robards, Jimmy Stewart, Spencer Tracy—the
apparent bias against older female actors remains a
box-office fact and thus a reality of casting in Holly-
wood. By contrast, the British seem to lack such
prejudices, for their actors—including Judi Dench,
Alec Guinness, Helen Mirren, Laurence Olivier,
Peter O’Toole, Joan Plowright, Vanessa Redgrave,
Ralph Richardson, Margaret Rutherford, and Mag-
gie Smith—generally work as long as they can. Their
popularity in the United States may say something
about American audiences’ cultural stereotypes—
namely, that they’ll accept and even expect aging, as
long as it happens to other people.
Complicating the issue of age is the ability of
young actors, in part through the magic of makeup,
to play characters older than themselves: think of
Jane Fonda as writer Lillian Hellman in Fred Zinne-
mann’s Julia(1977), Leonardo DiCaprio as Howard
Hughes in Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator(2004), or
Frank Langella as the CBS network boss in George
Clooney’s Good Night, and Good Luck(2005). Or they
can play characters who mature on-screen from
youth to old age, as did Orson Welles in his own Cit-
izen Kane(1941), Dustin Hoffman as Jack Crabb in
Arthur Penn’s Little Big Man(1970), Ben Kingsley in
Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi(1982), and Robert
Downey, Jr. in Attenborough’s Chaplin(1992). In the
standard variation on this approach, two or more
actors play the same character during different
stages of the character’s life, as Kate Winslet and
Gloria Stuart did in James Cameron’s Titanic(1997).Aspects of Performance
Types of Roles
Actors may play major roles, minor roles, charac-
ter roles, cameo roles, and walk-ons. In addition,
roles may be written specifically for bit players,314 CHAPTER 7ACTING