Scales-tipping actors must stay heavy to keep working
While half of America skips lunch, or pledges to, and bemoans the thousand extra ounces flesh is heir to, one glamorously employed elite has a perfect excuse for staying plump. Fat actors and actresses—those who won their fame with an expansive physical image—often feel they must stay heavy to keep working.
Acting is usually a kind of seduction of the audience, and the conventionally unseductive, unless they are established stars, pay a price. They may be denied sympathetic or leading roles. They may be consigned to comedy, on the presumption that audiences think fat is funny. They may, like James Coco, grow "tired of getting scripts that were all fat jokes." They may, like Charlotte Rae, find it "depressing" to be offered lots of characters specifically described as fat. And offstage they worry as much about health, vigor and appearance as the well rounded in other walks of life. But in a notoriously unstable business, fat actors and actresses have a trademark that steadily gets them jobs.
Sometimes that trademark is chosen deliberately. Shelley Winters, now synonymous with matronly excitability, was an underemployed leading lady of about 35 when Director George Stevens gave her an idea. Says she: "He told me that if I gained 30 Ibs. I could successfully make the transition to leading character actress and I would work all my life." She did, and has since won two Oscars (The Diary of Anne Frank, 1959, and A Patch of Blue, 1965) while acting at varying weights —but "the fat pictures are the ones that are big and successful."
Sometimes weight is imposed by a role. When the late Vivian Vance played Ethel Mertz in I Love Lucy, according to Bart Andrews' The Story of I Love Lucy, she was obliged by contract to stay 20 Ibs. overweight so that she would look older and frumpier than Star Lucille Ball.
Robert De Niro gained 50 Ibs. to play the older Jake La Motta in Raging Bull, then quickly dropped most of it for his next role, in True Confessions.
Most often an actor's amplitude just happens, then turns out to be a help. It is especially useful to a gifted but lesser known journeyman such as Pat Mines, who after 29 years in show business is at last in a Broadway hit, playing the wily courtier Count Orsini-Rosenberg in Amadeus. Says he: "I'm sure there is a 'fat list,' perhaps even written down, that producers consult. You like to think you're hired strictly for your abilities, but I know my size has gotten me jobs." Among actors who might be on any producer's list: Orson Welles, an epic creator who is known to the television generation as the butt of Johnny Carson's fat jokes; William Conrad, TV's Nero Wolfe; Raymond Burr, old Ironside; and Burt Young, the Gibraltar of Rocky. Perhaps the most stereotyped of all is Victor Buono. Fat from childhood, Buono reached 400 Ibs. before a recent diet took him down to 350. He played Bette Davis' father in Hush, Hush'. . . Sweet Charlotte when he was 25 and Davis was 55. Now 43, Buono longs for varied roles but tells himself, "In a business of visual types, you are a mountain."