A passport to Hollywood?

Time Out looks at some of the foreign actors and directors who have tried to find success in Hollywood, often with mixed results

My so-called career
Hollywood can be a cruel place. Most overseas interlopers find themselves treated like stripograms – trotted out for their party-piece, handed a fistful of grubby twenties and reminded not to let the door smack them on the ass on the way out. Some, however, continue to hang around like a bad smell. Drafted Stateside for baddie duties in so-so 1981 Stallone vehicle ‘Nighthawks’, Rutger Hauer subsequently found himself cast as ‘Batty’ Roy Batty in Ridley Scott’s futurist masterpiece ‘Blade Runner’ before sliding into straight-to-vid applesauce. Christopher Lambert (or Kristoff Lamb-Bear) and Aussie bludger Paul Hogan also just about managed to cling on to the Hollywood teat long enough to parlay the respective successes of ‘Greystoke’ and ‘Crocodile Dundee’ into lengthy and thoroughly unrewarding screen careers.
Ultimate Exponent: Maximillian Schell
Up and Coming: James McAvoy

Too hot to handle
With a face that wouldn’t look out of place spouting water from the towers of Reims cathedral and fingers the size of baguettes, winemaking roustabout Gérard Depardieu is as proudly Old Europe as they come. Vast charm and (often literally) bare-ass talent elevated him to iconic status in France and won worldwide acclaim for his passion, commitment and, naturally, panache. But for Hollywood, the wild-eyed Gallic Falstaff was far too redolent of his own culture to ever make it; when the cameras rolled on ‘Green Card’, the guy couldn’t even speak American, for Chrissake! Like Iberian firecracker Penelope Cruz and London’s own Danny Dyer, a benign disdain for the English language and wild cultural specificity leaves The Dream Factory blindly sweating the square peg/round hole conundrum.
Ultimate exponent: Burt Kwouk
Up and coming: Gael Garcia Bernal

What's not to love...?
On the indispensable commentary track that accompanies the DVD of ‘The Usual Suspects’, Bryan Singer recounts Stephen Baldwin’s confusion as to why the make-up girls would all immediately crowd around his craggy-faced Irish co-star Gabriel Byrne – rather than himself – whenever the director yelled 'Cut!'. What Stevie failed to understand is that such ‘intriguing’ features and a cute/preposterous accent are the passport to success for many a foreign chancer. French thesp Jean Reno, for instance, may have the face of a bug-eyed hatchet, but he’s made a niche for himself as the modern-day equivalent of all-time great Peter Lorre when the script calls for ‘Misc. European Turncoat’.
Ultimate exponent: Arnie
Up and Coming: Javier Bardem

The Welsh connection
For a nation so often culturally patronised by it’s near neighbours, the Principality produces an estimable stream of fine actors who, like their Irish cousins, look to Hollywood rather than Pinewood for their big break. Burning with righteous indignation at being left out of the ‘Englishman, Irishman, Scotsman’ joke cycle, Welsh actors continue to impress successive generations of studio honchos with their heady mix of raw intensity and alcohol dependence: Richard ‘The Burt’ Burton was succeeded by hard-living Richard Burton impersonator Anthony Hopkins, and the American box-office is currently being taught a lesson it won’t easily forget by brooding method-man Christian Bale. Oggy-oggy-oggy? Oi-oi-oi!
Ultimate exponent: Catherine Zeta-Jones
Up and Coming: Ioan Gruffudd

But I’m the funny one!
Though you might not guess as much from reading this column, we here at Time Out are big comedy fans. One thing that’s always made us curious, though, is the elimination process by which the LA Dream Machine decides upon which halves of our beloved British comedy duos make the grade across the pond. Our nation’s most beloved funnyman, Tony Hancock, was cast aside in favour of ‘ugly, frizzy-haired’ spiv Sid James, while Peter Cook could only look on as his diminutive, club-footed stooge Dudley Moore was cast as love interest to Bo Derek in ‘10’. And while not doing too badly himself, even Stephen Fry must spend the odd night coiled in his leather wingback pondering the ins-and-outs of Hugh Laurie’s spectacular Hollywood reinvention…
Ultimate exponent: Tony Hancock
Up and Coming: Nick Frost

So right, it's wrong
Which, coincidentally, is just what future husband of Brigitte Bardot, Roger Vadim thought when he first eyeballed the 15-year-old on the cover of Elle in 1950. Having ensured San Tropez’s place in the Humbert Humbert Guide To Beach Getaways, she splashed down in Hollywood in 1953 for ‘Un Acte D’Amour’ with Kirk Douglas, a minor hit in the US but greeted in France with a shrug and another flagon of Ricard. But it was to La France that Bardot returned, quick smart, as legions of fanny-packing American housewives pursed lips at their husbands’ new-found gosh-a-mamy trouser consciousness; Doris Day’s America just wasn’t ready for such atomic scale nubility and Bardot was reduced to eking out an existence as a European millionairess sex goddess. Loves animals.
Ultimate exponent: Isabelle Adjani
Up and Coming: Alexandra Maria Lara

Where are you from again?
He was King of Siam, Taras Bulba, hammer of the Polish Empire (no, really, they did have one), cowboy, both normal and robot: Yul Brinner was all things to all men while retaining the aspect of a boiled egg with a face drawn on in biro. He enjoyed the dream career of Hollywood’s non-specifically accented Indo-Caucasian Eurasian, with origins so impossible to pin down that, provided your enigmatic hero/villain didn’t hail from County Cork (see ‘Alexander’), this was your man. It was a status to which fellow ethnically plastic colleagues, Herbert Lom and Peter Lorre, could only aspire, confined as they were to assaying wheedling pan-European perverts and pantomime exotics.
Ultimate exponent: Ben Kingsley
Up and Coming: Vin Diesel

They just didn’t understand me!
After being wined-and-dined all the way from the film festivals of Europe and Asia, its rare for overseas filmmakers to find anyone returning their calls when the test-screening results from their effort filter in from the theatres of rural Delaware and downtown Detroit. Jean Renoir and Jacques Demy both had a shot at breaking the machine, but neither could translate their effortless style into filthy lucre (for the former, see rickety Robert Ryan vehicle, ‘The Woman on the Beach’, the latter, the underrated ‘Model Shop’). People like Barbet Schroeder and Wolfgang Petersen showed it could be done, but of the recent highbrow pretenders, Takeshi Kitano though the best way to woo the suits would be to make a film in which he wanders around LA stabbing people in the face with chopsticks (‘Brother’). He was swiftly handed his hat and coat…
Ultimate exponent: Yahoo Serious
Up and Coming: Oliver Hirschbiegel

Always the bridesmaid...
Poor, poor Guy Pearce. With a face like a Dadaist life sculpture and an irrepressible Oz twang sullying that otherwise velveteen drawl, he’s never really been truly accepted as West Coast man manna. Graduating from ersatz ‘issues’ drip tray, ‘Neighbours’ in the '90s, Pearce showed that he could chew scenery (amongst other things) with aplomb as a gay cross-dresser in alternative Variety Club coach trip, ‘The Adventures of Priscilla Queen of the Desert’, and reluctant cannibal in baroque red meat entreaty, ‘Ravenous’. Sadly, though, he’s never managed – beyond cult hits such as ‘Memento’ and ‘The Proposition’ – to get his name above the title with pride kept intact (see ‘The Time Machine’).
Ultimate exponent: Andy Garcia
Up and Coming: Harold and Kumar

Brits abroad
There’s a largely unwritten rule which says that British comics who manage to steal the nation’s collective heart – be it via sitcom, stand-up or extreme facial deformity (see Alan Carr) – are allowed a clear shot at worldwide (US) success. While Ricky Gervais and Simon Pegg are over there now attempting to ‘spread the funny' with various projects on the boil, perhaps they should take a moment to look up at the corpse-strewn steps which they’ll have to clamber in order to transcend the lower rungs of the fame factory. They said there were easier ways to keep up the mortgage repayments than go whiteface on film, but Lenny Henry wouldn’t hear a word of it, choosing to star in ill-fated (and we use the term lightly) Ealing-style racism farce ‘True Identity’ which saw him swiftly escorted through the Hollywood back doors and insouciantly tossed into the gutter (AKA, Sunday night primetime on BBC1). And lets not even mention factory processed ensemble follies such as ‘The Pope Must Die’ or ‘Blame it on the Bellboy’.
Ultimate exponent: Billy Connolly
Up and coming: Ant ‘n’ Dec

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