The Creation of Vamps in Hollywood Melodramas

 Hollywood’s system of producing motion pictures using created starring luminaries is not an inadvertent and desultory process. Every idol in the last 80 years went through a well though-out plan, deeming where the actress came from, what her real personality was like, in what way could she be recreated. Though this phenomenon is only an intriguing addition to the bibliographies of the divas, in an extended observation it shows how the inclination of melodrama changed over the past century. We will monitor the classic, modern, and postmodern eras of Hollywood melodramas through Greta Garbo, Audrey Hepburn and Nicole Kidman.

Greta Garbo

In melodramas, in contrast to comedy, the body of the character is passive. This resignation is typical of Garbo, predominantly in her sound film epoch. The producers and directors visualized the Swiss actress as frigid, mysterious woman (coming from the fact that she is a foreigner), who hides her emotions behind a mask. While the paradox in Buster Keaton’s case was that his face was a piece of wood, and his body was supple, the perplexity of Garbo confines to her face: a mask made of flesh. Garbo was often referred to as the Face. When people went to the cinema back in the 30s, they said they are going to see 'the Face'. 

Audrey Hepburn

In Audrey Hepburn’s time, the Italian neorealism had an effect on Hollywood: the actuality of melodrama amplified. They shot the movies on the streets, contingency and fortuitous replaced fate. Directors built the scenes on Hepburn’s unexpected reactions on the set. She was open, active and transitional. Hepburn’s face was "constituted by an infinite complexity of morphological functions. Whereas the face of Garbo is an Idea, Hepburn’s is an Event." (Roland Barthes) 

Nicole Kidman
(dressed up in Jean Paul Gaultier)

In the postmodern melodrama, the actress is not composed. Garbo’s image was created by William Daniels cinematographer, who lighted her face in a characteristic, conventional way. At the present time, cosmetic surgery makes it possible to generate the appearance of a diva. Nicole Kidman looks exactly the same way on screen as she does in real life. They brought the body of an actress closer to the ideal look.

While Garbo’s was a created, irradiated face, Hepburn’s was light itself. The camera wanted to entangle her look, because she was not artificial. Kidman is between the former actresses. Though she is bogus, she is natural at the same time, on the grounds that they do not put make up on her to make Kidman look a certain way, as they did in Garbo’s position.