\n\tNorma Desmond \t\t\t\t\t\t \t\t\t\t\tGloria Swanson<\/p>\n \n\tGloria Swanson was just 50 years old when she appeared as Norma Desmond, the crazy washed-up relic of silent-era Hollywood in this famous film noir directed by Billy Wilder, in which she embarks on a deadly affair with Joe Gillis (William Holden), a younger, down-on-his-luck screenwriter, who she thinks will help her make a sensational comeback. Wilder\u2019s film still packs a punch, now with an added and more timely subtext about the way Hollywood throws older actresses on the scrapheap, and Swanson plays a part that should have been way beyond her years. By this time, however, she had already been in the movie game for more than 30 years, making it perfectly acceptable for postwar viewers to believe the film\u2019s most famous line of dialogue, one that resonates today: running by chance into her driveway, aspiring screenwriter, recognizes her and says, \u201cYou used to be big.\u201d \u201cI am big,\u201d she replies. \u201cIt\u2019s the pictures that got small.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tAlan Swann \t\t\t\t\t\t \t\t\t\t\tPeter O\u2019Toole<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tMGM\/Everett Collection<\/p>\n \n\tStrictly speaking, this is a movie about the golden age of television, but at the center of it is Alan Swann, a movie star on the way down who is booked to appear on a comedy show and entrusted to the care of a junior writer to keep him sober. Though the story was entirely fictional, the character of Swann was loosely based on Australian American actor Errol Flynn, the swashbuckling star of the \u201930s and \u201940s whose hellraising antics gave rise to the phrase \u201cin like Flynn\u201d and who wrote an autobiography appropriately called My Wicked, Wicked Ways. Much like Jay Kelly, the casting pool was limited, if the audience was going to buy into the character. Luckily, Peter O\u2019Toole was available, the (hard) drinking buddy of such hedonistic legends as Richard Burton and Richard Harris. An early casualty of O\u2019Toole\u2019s lifestyle was Michael Caine, who went for dinner with the actor in 1959 and woke up two days later to find they had been banned from the restaurant. \u201cNever ask what you did,\u201d O\u2019Toole told Caine. \u201cIt\u2019s better not to know.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tElsa Brinkmann\u00a0 \t\t\t\t\t\t \t\t\t\t\tKim Novak with Peter Finch<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tEverett Collection<\/p>\n \n\tJust as she did in Vertigo, Kim Novak does double-duty in this almost hallucinogenic behind-the-scenes expos\u00e9 of high-testosterone studio filmmaking (\u201cA story of Hollywood as you always knew it would be,\u201d warns the trailer). Only Rainer Werner Fassbinder could have made such a bizarre story into art, and director Robert Aldrich succeeded mainly in making a cult camp classic, but Novak\u2019s performance is dazzling as a young actress who is plucked from obscurity to play the lead in a biopic of a major star who died in mysterious circumstances some 20 years before. In echoes of Vertigo, Novak\u2019s character becomes consumed with the role she has been given, driven to drink and drugs by the men who try to control her. \u201cWhat am I supposed to feel?\u201d she asks the director of the movie-within-a-movie, played by Peter Finch. \u201cFeel, you stupid cow?\u201d he explodes. \u201cAll you have to do is what I say, and your feelings will be up on the screen.\u201d<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t \t\t\t\t\tAlden Ehrenreich with Ralph Fiennes<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tUniversal\/Everett Collection<\/p>\n \n\tHobart \u201cHobie\u201d Doyle \n\tThe Coens first broached Hollywood in their macabre 1991 Cannes hit Barton Fink, in which a pretentious New York playwright suffers a breakdown while trying to write a commercial script, and their return to la-la land was just as perverse. To anchor Hail Caesar!, a tale set in the Golden Age of the early \u201950s, the brothers devised a character based on Eddie Mannix, an MGM executive who worked behind the scenes as a firefighting \u201cfixer\u201d, keeping the indiscretions of his studio\u2019s talent out of the gossip columns. Played with grim determination by Josh Brolin, Mannix has a lot of news to bury, including a kidnapping and an out-of-wedlock pregnancy, but perhaps his biggest challenge involves trying to persuade director Laurence Laurentz (Ralph Fiennes) to cast cowboy superstar, Hobart \u201cHobie\u201d Doyle (Alden Ehrenreich) in lieu of Clark Gable. \u201cThis is a drama, Mannix, a real drama,\u201d Laurentz protests. \u201cIt\u2019s an adaptation of a Broadway smash. It requires the skills of a trained thespian, not a rodeo clown.\u201d Hobie proves him right, and Ehrenreich has a great time mangling the line \u201cWould that it were so simple!\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tBlanche Hudson \t\t\t\t\t\t \t\t\t\t\tJoan Crawford<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tEverett Collection<\/p>\n \n\tIn Hollywood movies about Hollywood, filmmaking has a bizarre effect on women\u2019s sanity that doesn\u2019t seem to affect men, and it\u2019s sobering to reflect that its warring stars Bette Davis and Joan Crawford were 54 and 58 respectively when Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? was first released, starting a trend now cruelly known as \u201chagsploitation\u201d. Though Davis played the title role \u2014 on the skids like Norma Desmond, a precocious music-hall child prodigy who no one now remembers \u2014 the real star is her disabled sister Blanche (Crawford), an actress whose fame is being revived by reruns of her old movies on TV. In a reversal of Baby Jane\u2019s fortunes, Davis got the limelight and an Oscar nom, which her co-star grudgingly accepted. \u201cSure, she stole some of my big scenes,\u201d said Crawford, \u201cbut the funny thing is, when I see the movie again, she stole them because she looks like a parody of herself \u2014 and I still looked like something of a star.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tGil Shepherd \t\t\t\t\t\t \t\t\t\t\tJeff Daniels with Mia Farrow<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tEverett Collection<\/p>\n \n\tIn happier times for Woody Allen and Mia Farrow they made The Purple Rose of Cairo, a return of sorts to the \u201cearly, funny\u201d movies that he referenced himself in 1980\u2019s Stardust Memories. The conceit is one of Allen\u2019s best, and, unlike a lot of his later films, it holds up all the way through. In 1935, New Jersey waitress Cecilia (Farrow) escapes the harsh reality of her unhappily married life by going to the movies. Watching a hokey adventure movie, also called The Purple Rose of Cairo, she falls in love with the film\u2019s hero, Tom Baxter. It\u2019s all just fantasy until one day Baxter meets her eye and comes out from the screen, even inviting her back into the film for \u201ca madcap Manhattan weekend\u201d (cue a \u201930s-style montage of dancing, neon signs and corks popping). This does not sit well with the studio, which sends Gil Shepherd (Jeff Daniels) \u2014 the actor who plays Tom Baxter \u2014 to sort it all out. Shepherd convinces Cecilia she is in love with him, not Tom Baxter, giving a bravura performance that proves as fake as the palm trees in his movie.<\/p>\n \n\tDaisy Clover \t\t\t\t\t\t \t\t\t\t\tNatalie Wood<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tEverett Collection<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cWish me luck \u2014 I\u2019m gonna make some noise in the world!\u201d Natalie Wood certainly turns up the volume in this seamy expos\u00e9 of the tinseltown production line, playing a teenage girl plucked from the rundown beachside shack she shares with her elderly mother and propelled toward the big time. Despite being a sassy, violent tomboy, her hair cut short into a scruffy, dirty-blonde beatnik bob, Daisy falls for all the traps that come her way, from the manipulative producer-manager (Christopher Plummer) to the unfaithful, predatory lover (Robert Redford). Wood certainly knows how to go from rags to riches, scrubbing up well for the inevitable transformation, even if some the musical numbers \u2014 notably \u201cThe Circus is a Wacky World\u201d \u2014 leave a lot to be desired.<\/p>\n \n\tRick Dalton \t\t\t\t\t\t \t\t\t\t\tLeonardo DiCaprio<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tEverett Collection<\/p>\n \n\tIn 1969, in stark counterpoint to the likes of Norma Desmond and Baby Jane Hudson, TV western star Rick Dalton, played by a middle-aged Leonardo DiCaprio, manages to accept the unwelcome news of his waning fame without becoming a) delusional and b) homicidal. \u201cIt\u2019s official, old buddy \u2014 I\u2019m a has-been,\u201d his character tells his friend and long-time stuntman Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt) at the start of Quentin Tarantino\u2019s still most recent film. But like a lot of actors of his generation, Dalton learns that sometimes you have to go away to come back, which is why he parlays his skills into the burgeoning Italian exploitation market, following the trail blazed by Clint Eastwood, in films like the spaghetti western Nebraska Jim and the police thriller Operazione Dyno-O-Mite.<\/p>\n
Gloria Swanson<\/a> in Sunset Boulevard, 1950<\/p>\n![\"Gloria](\"https:\/\/deadline.com\/wp-content\/themes\/pmc-deadline-2019\/assets\/public\/lazyload-fallback.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
Peter O\u2019Toole in My Favorite Year, 1982<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Kim Novak<\/a> in The Legend of Lylah Clare, 1968<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Alden Ehrenreich in Hail Caesar!, 2016<\/p>\n
Joan Crawford<\/a> in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, 1962<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Jeff Daniels<\/a> in The Purple Rose\u00a0 of Cairo, 1985<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Natalie Wood<\/a> in Inside Daisy Clover, 1968<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Leonardo DiCaprio<\/a> in Once Upon a Time\u2026 In Hollywood, 2019<\/p>\n<\/p>\n