Johann Hari On Botox/Collagen/Surgery

I was watching the hypnotically horrible Coen brothers movie, No Country For Old Men, and I couldn't shake off the sense there was something different, something thrilling and vivid, about the performances of all the lead actors: Tommy Lee Jones, Javier Bardem and Josh Brolin. It was only after half an hour of awe that I realised what it was. They can all move their faces.

[...]

Botox is much more extreme for an actor. It doesn't just tighten or alter skin; it paralyses nerves. In Sarah Churchwell's brilliant book The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe, there is a small story that shows how important the tiny, almost unreadable facial signals rendered impossible by Botox are to big screen acting. In the 1956 movie Bus Stop, Marilyn was cast opposite Don Murray, a much-garlanded stage actor breaking into the movies for the first time. When he shot scenes with her, he concluded that she was a dead, dismal actress, because she didn't seem to be doing anything in their scenes but standing there limply. Later, Dame Sybil Thorndike had exactly the same reaction.

But when they saw the rushes, they realised Marilyn was the only one among them who knew how to act for the camera: she had tiny, toned-down facial responses that were sure to melt the boy in the 22nd row.

If Marilyn had been Botoxed, she would have been turned into precisely the clothes-shop dummy Murray and Thorndike thought she was. Collagen is just as bad: if a face has puffed-up, immobile lips, its capacity for basic expression is largely gone. This is, I'm sure, one reason why British actresses have been doing so well at the Oscars for the past 10 years: they haven't been facially paralysed.