There’s a great podcast about entertainment, called The Rest Is Entertainment, from two British industry insiders, Marina Hyde and Richard Osman. Some time ago they had an episode in which they discussed who is cool based on a listener question. Here‘s a link to the episode. However, since then Hyde has had questionable comments regarding J.K. Rowling (something like “maybe she should be the prime minister” which is understandably a red flag for trans folk and anyone allied with them), so that is not an endorsement.
Marina Hyde brings up that it is harder to seem cool as a woman, because that is not generally how women are branded and a lot of this is just PR. Often women are expected to be hot, which doesn’t rule out being cool, but is also kind of the opposite. At least in the literal sense and those literal meanings do affect our thinking in various ways, which does make being cool and hot at the same time more difficult.
I do have to point out that while being cool is good, not being cool is not bad. I can appreciate people, who aren’t. Cool is a very specific and hard to pin down quality in a person. There’s some amount of detachment and the ability to break societal norms, but you don’t have to be a criminal, although that can help, if you are a criminal for the right reasons. Some of it is just pure charisma.
I mean, I had a crush on Jennifer Connelly when I was a teenager (and admittedly still have), but I don’t find her to be cool. She might be. I try not to keep up with celeb private lives, so i don’t know.
In general, I like to avoid using gendered job titles. I would much rather talk about police officers than policemen or firefighters than firemen, but I thought that in this specific case it felt apt to use a female-centric nomenclature, because of the nature of the topic at hand. However, we should also remember that a huge part of why we even call female actors actresses is that Oscars just wanted more time for the most famous people, so they made four categories for something that would otherwise only get one. (There is an Oscar for both supporting actor and supporting actress, but not assistant director or assistant editor.)
And yes, I’m the final arbiter of who gets to be cool. No discussion necessary. Maybe I should make a badge for this, one that these people would be too cool to wear anyhow, even if they knew of it’s existence.
A few people I just haven’t seen enough to make a final decision on or I’m not sure for other reasons: Aubrey Plaza, Rooney Mara, Noomi Rapace, Lupita Nyong’o, Vanessa Kirby. FKA twigs I think is cool, but I also think of her as a musician/dancer rather than an actress. There’s some people I wasn’t sure about, like Sigourney Weaver, who has fought for women in the industry to her own detriment, but also wouldn’t watch Alien, because she was afraid.
Katharine Hepburn
Initially I thought I’d do these in a chronological order, but then I couldn’t put Hepburn first, so I changed the plan.
Winner of four Oscars, all for leading roles, from 12 nominations (also all for leading roles) from five different, but non-consecutive decades (starting in the 30s up until the 80s, but none in the 70s). She is truly in a class of her own. But that isn’t about cool.
Yet, she is The Godmother of every cool actress after her. She did not give a fuck about your norms. There’s a story that once upon a time a producer wanted her to wear a dress and she refused, as she always wore pants. So the producer stole her pants to force her hand. Instead, she just continued as if nothing had happened until her pants were returned to her. She would also do her own stunts, because she felt the stunt performers couldn’t capture her movements the way she would have wanted.
Some choice quotes:
I don’t regret anything I’ve ever done; As long as I enjoyed it at the time.
Life is to be lived. If you have to support yourself, you had bloody well find some way that is going to be interesting. And you don’t do that by sitting around wondering about yourself.
If you want to sacrifice the admiration of many men for the criticism of one, go ahead, get married.
Ossi Oswalda
Moving on to someone I would assume is much more obscure than anyone else in here even though she was a huge star in her time and place. It just happened that the time was pre-sound film and the place was Germany.
First time I stumbled upon her was in a movie called I Don’t Want to Be a Man by Ernst Lubitsch in 1918, meaning that the WWI was still raging while they were making this movie. She is the main character who doesn’t want to be a man, but it doesn’t start that way. Initially she’s smoking, drinking and gambling, but her parents don’t like it. So they get her a guardian to teach her to act properly. Instead, she gets herself a tux and goes out as a man, only to find out that it isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. In a problematic ending, she goes back home, returns to womanhood and falls in love with her guardian. Yeah, problematic.
Anyhow, the real Oswalda (which was her real first name), ran around Europe causing scandals. She married an aristocrat to use his money to form her own production company and after she had drained the money she could get out of him, she divorced him. Later on, another aristocrat’s family stopped her from doing the same to him. It’s not clear why, but she fled Germany to Prague. This is pure speculation, but it might have been another con, as she moved in with a producer and maybe she just used the fleeing Germany thing as an excuse to do so. However, she did not feel a need to flee Prague even after it was taken over by the Germans and even acted on stage. She died shortly after WWII after being bankrupted.
Sadly, I couldn’t really find quotes from her.
Pola Negri
There’s a lot of similarities to Oswalda here. She also worked with Lubitsch, she started in the silent era and she also ran around Europe marrying aristocrats. The first movie I saw her in is called Wildcat. In it she’s the daughter of a bandit leader, but since everyone else is so
Didn’t have to do much in the way of research for quotes here, because all the quotes on IMDb are fitting:
I consider my work great, as I am a great artist.
Damn sympathy! I don’t care whether they love me or not. I don’t care whether I am beautiful or not. I want a chance to act.
Love is disgusting when you no longer possess yourself.
Lucy Lawless
Unlike the other people here, she is mostly known for TV. Xena, Spartacus, Battlestar Galactica, Ash vs. Evil Dead…
So, why is she cool? Many famous people are activists, but Lawless puts her money where her mouth is. She was arrested in 2012 for boarding an oil drilling ship to stop it from leaving the port. While she is straight (as far as I know), she has also stated that she is proud to have become a queer icon after her stint in Xena.
Some quotes.
We live at the edge of the world, so we live on the edge. Kiwis will always sacrifice money and security for adventure and challenge.
For the first time in my life, I put my body and reputation on the line to stand up for my beliefs and do the right thing. I hope I’ve encouraged other people to do the same.
I was black-and-blue for about two years, but it’s paid off tremendously. You know, if you get enough whacks, your reflexes pick up, and I’ve become quite good–if somebody throws keys or something, I can catch them.
Rachel Weisz
How many people marry a James Bond and are still the cooler party in the marriage? Well, Rachel Weisz is married to Daniel Craig.
The first movie I saw her in was Mummy (1999), the movie now primarily known for people realizing they are bi. Yes, really. It is a very male-dominated movie. There are only two named female characters, the other being the wife of the pharaoh from the intro. Yet, she holds her own. She isn’t the caricature of a “strong female character”, but instead she brings her own energy to the film. While everyone else is measuring dicks, she takes care of business with the tools she has available to her.
Of course, the role in which she best exhibited the qualities I’m looking for here is Lady Sarah Marlborough in The Favourite. Of course, you can’t just say that someone is cool, because they can act cool in a movie, but at the same time, you need to have a certain amount of cool to be able to act cool.
You just have to play every scene honestly and forget about a reaction and what the audience is going to think. I think the more seriously you take something, the more funny it might be.
Some of the material I’m attracted to is not commercial. Which means it’s really fucking interesting, you know? It’s off-center. It doesn’t fit a genre. I’m not trying to sound like I’m unaware. I understand that it’s a business to some extent, but I also think that with independent film, the stakes are not that high. There are things that are big-business-slash-small-art. This cocktail would have been low-business-slash-high-art. It’s about creativity rather than merchandising.
Michelle Yeoh
Speaking of Bond, we have a Bond-girl, but not in a traditional way. She broke the mold. She wasn’t just eye candy tagging along. She was his equal as they take on the techno-terrorist organization together.
This wasn’t the first or the last time she punched through the glass ceiling. Of course, eventually she became the first Asian woman to win the Oscar for Best Actress for EEAAO, but at that point she had an almost 40-year-old career which started with the unusual combination of being Miss Malaysia and a star in martial arts movies in which she largely did her own fighting and her own stunts. I don’t know if this is true, but it is said that Jackie Chan didn’t really believe women could do martial arts movies before working with her.
Choice quotes:
I prefer to be kicked four or five times well, you know, hard, than twenty or twenty five times not so good…
They won’t take you seriously because you are a girl. These guys had to understand that you are just as tough as them, and you have to take them on.
Delphine Seyrig
She isn’t very known these days, but some 50 years ago she starred in the movie that was chosen as the greatest movie of all time (Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles) a few years back, so maybe people should be more aware of her. While that role is decidedly uncool, we definitely should not judge her based on it.
She was very openly a feminist. She fought abortion laws in France even admitting to having had one when it was still illegal. She also went on TV to confront men who were discussing women’s issues without giving the actual women any voice in the matter. To make her point, she went in without going through hair and makeup, which shouldn’t be seen as cool if the world worked as it should, but with how the world is, it was.
She walked the walk in other ways as well and for a big chunk of her career she would only work with female directors.
Quotes from Seyrig:
I had always been in rage. I had been very angry since childhood. But what man would want an angry woman? The rage came out as charm.
Saying you’re not a feminist doesn’t mean you aren’t one. You may be afraid to saying so because you’re afraid of losing ground.
Here’s quote about her from Tilda Swinton:
She was so beautiful, but that wasn’t the most important thing about her. She knew she was beautiful, and she’d stare at you as if to say, ‘alright, have a look,’ but then she drew you in much, much deeper.
Tilda Swinton
Tilda Swinton has very different kind of cool. She does not obey the rules of mere mortals. There’s something alien about her, but I wouldn’t think of her as someone from another planet. More like another reality. A member of the fae, perhaps. In her past she has played men, nonbinary beings and even a trans woman. In her words, living and traveling in Europe, you just pick up expressions of languages here and there, which is true, but I wouldn’t do roles in Spanish or French or Italian like she has. When she realized a world might use a full course on filmmaking based just on movies made by women, she made one herself.
She also has the coolest namedrops like Delphine Seyrig (see above) and Derek Jarman.
Quote time:
There is something insane about a lack of doubt. Doubt, to me anyway, is what makes you human, and without doubt even the righteous lose their grip not only on reality but also on their humanity.
I don’t work the future – I don’t want to know what’s coming. I don’t feel I need any guarantees.
Cate Blanchett
She is one of the most acclaimed actors of all time. Two Oscar wins and a bunch of nominations and all that. At the same time, she is more than willing to take roles such as Hel and Lilith (in Borderlands). Sure, the latter failed utterly, but just being willing to just step so far outside of her comfort area is cool. On top of that she just does stuff because its fun, never mind her brand. This includes things like dancing through a Sparks video. Or that time she read a few lines for Taskmaster AU for one of the competitors.
Also, this brings us into a complete circle, as Blanchett won an Oscar for playing Hepburn in The Aviator, the only case of winning an Oscar for playing an Oscar winner. I think.
If you know you are going to fail, then fail gloriously!
If I had my way, if I was lucky enough, if I could be on the brink my entire life – that great sense of expectation and excitement without the disappointment – that would be the perfect state.
I’m not very cautious or careful. It’s always been more about having a variety of experiences than any planned trajectory… I think that in a way, projects choose you.