Film Studies: Forget the skin, but keep a close eye on the performance

Suppose you are 21 and very cute. Indeed, word has got back to you that some very big producer was heard to say of you: "If she's not the girl next door, I'm leaving home." This goes with your agent's breathless report that you are on the short-list to be one of the pretty girls that Esquire magazine "likes". If the photo accompanying that story, the agent calculates, had a little skin, it could prompt offers.

"But I don't really have skin," you say.

Your agent looks at you and he can't quite keep the despair from his polished eyes. For all you know, he thought of being a doctor once.

"But you could do skin?" he hopes.

"How do you do that?" you ask.

Once there were people who could teach you skin: the right bra, breathing in hard, and dipping your chin down towards your shoulder. It gave you a cleavage line. The rest was just the look on your face.

Suppose your name then when you were 21 was Meg Ryan, and suppose that someone wiser and kinder than any agent had taken you aside, and said: "Look, this is the deal. You will get work in pictures. You will have two or three movies that are undoubted hits - even if no one quite attributes the hit to you. But you will be earning very serious money in the $5-8m range. You will be popular. You will marry an actor who is also popular and for a time you will be what Hollywood calls happy.

"But then, just before 40, in the way of such things, there will be stories in the press wondering whether Meg Ryan is finished. Your pictures will do less well. The marriage will break up. And 40 is a road on which there is no return.

"And the nagging feeling has not left you that you are an actress - or ought to be - who has never had the right opportunities or the recognition you deserve. And then, at the age of 42, when you are learning to look after the way you are photographed, along comes the kind of movie and the kind of role you have always wanted. If you knew that whole deal for sure, could you wait half your lifetime, and would you rather - here and now, at 21 - take the marriage to the venture capitalist with the house in Connecticut and the apartment in town, and the being a major name in charity?"

There has always been a place for women like Meg Ryan in Hollywood. But because the place is so automatic, or so little thought through, the Ryans are left very vulnerable - to growing older, to lower-priced newcomers, and the general wisdom in the picture business that every year the new 25-year-olds with a fresh look, a terrific smile and skin, are better than they have ever been.

All I'm trying to convey is how hard it is for actresses to control their own destiny. About 10 years ago, Gus Van Sant wanted Meg Ryan for To Die For. The actress flinched. She felt that cool, ironic view of murder hardly suited her sweet, likeable image - the kind of thing that had been established in When Harry Met Sally (1989) and Sleepless in Seattle (1993). As Sally, she had had that great faked orgasm scene in the deli. That was her kind of sexy - not rolling around naked with this strange kid, Joaquin Phoenix. So she declined.

Nicole Kidman got the part instead - she had to call up and beg for it - and Kidman nowadays gets the pick of the roles there are for actresses.

I'd guess that director Jane Campion would have had an easier time setting up In the Cut if she'd had Kidman on board. With Nicole, the budget would have been bigger and the money would have lined up more quickly.

Kidman married an actor, too, survived the divorce, and the break looks like the chance to reveal herself as a great and important actress. Ryan got romantically involved with co-star Russell Crowe on Proof of Life, and that was the end of her marriage to Dennis Quaid.

In the Cut has some rough sex; and Ryan has children old enough to read the tabloid headlines "Have You Seen Meg Ryan Naked Yet?". She needs an extraordinary performance to reassert herself. And I think she can do it. On a couple of occasions - in Courage Under Fire and Hurlyburly - she has shown she can really act, without prettiness or defence. And she's been through wars enough to know now that toughness is her last strength. If there's a wounded intelligence there, a feeling of life lived, no one notices if you aren't any longer as pretty as the girl next door. Or else they just stop noticing.

d.thomson@independent.co.uk

'In the Cut' is screening at the London Film Festival (020 7928 3232) on Wednesday and Thursday and is released nationwide on 31 October