A Chinese-American actress (or “female actor” if preferred), Chloe Bennet, accuses Hollywood of being racist because she has been forced to change her name from Chloe Wang. I dare say Hollywood is nefarious and manipulative – money is often its main priority – yet consider all those valiant Jewish actors of old who were forced to change their names to sound more like WASPs. And they never complained!
Bernie Schwartz became Tony Curtis, David Daniel Kaminsky became Danny Kaye, Issur Danielovitch became Kirk Douglas and Natalia Nikolaevna Zakharenko, who was Russian-Ukrainian, became Natalie Wood. Kirk Douglas, still with us, has always expressed gratitude for the great opportunities he had been given and the sacrifices his parents made.
Ms Bennet was praising Ed Skrein, the white actor who quit a role because he felt it should be allocated to an actor of Asian heritage. That’s decent and generous of him, although drama would be in dire straits if every actor had to be an exact ethnic replica of the character portrayed.
Irish actors, over the years, have often had to stand aside to allow more successful English or American stars play Irish characters. The movie star Julia Roberts looked glamorous but struck me as highly unsuitable as Mick’s fiancée Kitty Kiernan in Michael Collins. Sarah Miles and John Mills played rustic Irish characters in Ryan’s Daughter. Fred Astaire, literally on his last legs, and with a terrible accent, starred in Finian’s Rainbow, with Tommy Steele as a local lad and Petula Clark as a colleen – all roles which really should have gone to Irish musical performers.
Mind you, Irish actors have sometimes got their own back. Colin Farrell was the Macedonian in Alexander (the Great). It was widely regarded as a disaster and Mr Farrell hopelessly miscast.
There’s an argument for ethnically correct casting. There’s also an argument for “acting”. But I do like Kirk Douglas’s attitude of gratitude all the same.
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It emerged last week that one in three “sick notes” handed out by GPs is for a mental health problem. This is said to indicate there are soaring levels of anxiety and depression all across Britain.
There is some debate as to whether these problems have always been there – it’s only that nowadays people feel more open about admitting to them.
In times gone by, submitting a sick note for depression or a bipolar condition might well have invited, or at least risked, the stigma of being seen as “unstable”, if not deranged. And if elements of that stigma are still there, the Royal College of Physicians says we need to do more about it.
The alarming figure of a third of time off work being down to mental illness probably has several explanations. Perhaps people nowadays are more vulnerable to anxiety, or have been brought up in a more protected way.
A couple of generations ago, kids were raised to be tough: school bullying, for example, was par for the course and you were told to fight back. “Mollycoddling” was widely discouraged.
But I imagine that social media today also has a major role in increasing anxiety and depression. It prompts people to compare themselves, all the time, to others and these “others” seem to be so popular, successful and well groomed, and living such perfect lives.
Constantly comparing yourself to other people is known as a recipe for unhappiness: from the ancient Greeks to modern therapists, that is a point of agreement. But social media – Facebook, Twitter and all those other apps – seem to urge that comparison.
Small wonder if it spreads more anxiety and depression.
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Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor said, as he moved towards death, that he was entirely at peace. What a wonderful thing to be able to say at the end of a long life.
He was a very good-tempered person – always ready to have a merry conversation about rugby or music. I once asked him if it was true that he had played duets with the late Queen Mother – he was an accomplished pianist. He didn’t want to boast about such occasions, but didn’t deny that he had tinkled the ivories in her presence, and she seemed to have taken delight in his rendering of favourite melodies.
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