Hottest Jewish Actresses Biography
The year is 1950. The setting is a dimly lit movie studio backlot. It’s the middle of the night, and an attractive young woman named Betty Schaefer is explaining to her screenwriting partner why she became a writer instead of what she really wanted to be — an actress. The movie is “Sunset Boulevard.”
“I come from a picture family,” Schaefer (Nancy Olson) tells Joe Gillis (William Holden). “Naturally, they took it for granted I was to become a great star. So I had 10 years of dramatic lessons, diction, dancing. Then the studio made a test. Well, they didn’t like my nose — it slanted this way a little. I went to a doctor and had it fixed. They made more tests, and they were crazy about my nose — only they didn’t like my acting.”
Though it’s never overtly stated, the obvious implication is that Betty Schaefer is Jewish. If you’ve ever wanted to understand the ambivalence Hollywood has felt toward Jewish women, there it is in glorious black and white.
Now, fast-forward three decades, to 1979, when the Jewish nose makes a self-assured — or in-your-face — comeback. This time, it literally figures front and center, practically raising the curtain on the film “The Main Event” starring Barbra Streisand. The opening sequence foregrounds a glass perfume bottle, which three male noses sniff, in close-up, before the camera pans to Streisand’s nose — long, angular, delicate — and then zooms out for the perfect profile. As Streisand, who plays the perfumery owner Hillary Cramer inhales her latest creation, one of her lab coat lackeys chortles: “They don’t call you ‘The Nose’ for nothing!”
It wouldn’t be the first time Hollywood reduced a talented actress to a stereotype. Streisand, of course, famously refused to “fix” her nose for fear it would alter her singing voice, and, over the course of her career, proved again and again that her nose was, in fact, everything — defining her as a singer, an actress and a Jew. She would become that rare entertainer who could seize control of a stereotype and transcend it, though for a long line of Jewish women, ethnic myths would endure.
The centrality of noses as a defining characteristic both on and off screen is evidence of traditional Hollywood’s cartoonish, clichéd understanding of Jewish women. With some exceptions, they were reduced to poufy hair and awkward noses, caricatured as loud-mouths with shrieking laughs, the spoiled princess or the insufferable mother. Jewish women weren’t allowed to be starlets or sex symbols; they were invisible, unacknowledged or relegated to peripheral roles that embodied tired, unflattering tropes.
Well, goodbye to all that. The image of Jewish women in contemporary Hollywood has become far more complex. While the token Jewish characters depicted as neurotic, anxious and graceless still exist, now those characters — in particular, Jewish women — are being counterbalanced with a rising generation of Jewish actresses who defy the clichés. Never mind the classically annoying Fran Drescher image — with the frizzy brown hair and shrill, nasal voice — American movie audiences can now see Jewishness in a sultry slate of actresses that includes Natalie Portman, Scarlett Johansson, Mila Kunis, Mélanie Laurent, Emmanuelle Chriqui and Rachel Weisz — women considered exotic, erotic and beautiful, each one as diverse in temperament and talent as the next.
But, as they say, beauty is only skin deep. If it were beauty alone these actresses offered, they’d run the risk of serving as cultural fetish, not feminist counterpoint, their contribution to the pop culture canon reduced to eroticism instead of empowerment. But even as their physical beauty may be most striking, fetching looks merely serve a broader sexual power, a combination of calculation and allure that amounts as much to an intellectual seduction as a physical one. Far from an unwitting ingénue waiting to be rescued by Prince Charming, the new Jewish actress is both sexy and cerebral, striking the perfect balance of sexual confidence and emotional vulnerability.
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The year is 1950. The setting is a dimly lit movie studio backlot. It’s the middle of the night, and an attractive young woman named Betty Schaefer is explaining to her screenwriting partner why she became a writer instead of what she really wanted to be — an actress. The movie is “Sunset Boulevard.”
“I come from a picture family,” Schaefer (Nancy Olson) tells Joe Gillis (William Holden). “Naturally, they took it for granted I was to become a great star. So I had 10 years of dramatic lessons, diction, dancing. Then the studio made a test. Well, they didn’t like my nose — it slanted this way a little. I went to a doctor and had it fixed. They made more tests, and they were crazy about my nose — only they didn’t like my acting.”
Though it’s never overtly stated, the obvious implication is that Betty Schaefer is Jewish. If you’ve ever wanted to understand the ambivalence Hollywood has felt toward Jewish women, there it is in glorious black and white.
Now, fast-forward three decades, to 1979, when the Jewish nose makes a self-assured — or in-your-face — comeback. This time, it literally figures front and center, practically raising the curtain on the film “The Main Event” starring Barbra Streisand. The opening sequence foregrounds a glass perfume bottle, which three male noses sniff, in close-up, before the camera pans to Streisand’s nose — long, angular, delicate — and then zooms out for the perfect profile. As Streisand, who plays the perfumery owner Hillary Cramer inhales her latest creation, one of her lab coat lackeys chortles: “They don’t call you ‘The Nose’ for nothing!”
It wouldn’t be the first time Hollywood reduced a talented actress to a stereotype. Streisand, of course, famously refused to “fix” her nose for fear it would alter her singing voice, and, over the course of her career, proved again and again that her nose was, in fact, everything — defining her as a singer, an actress and a Jew. She would become that rare entertainer who could seize control of a stereotype and transcend it, though for a long line of Jewish women, ethnic myths would endure.
The centrality of noses as a defining characteristic both on and off screen is evidence of traditional Hollywood’s cartoonish, clichéd understanding of Jewish women. With some exceptions, they were reduced to poufy hair and awkward noses, caricatured as loud-mouths with shrieking laughs, the spoiled princess or the insufferable mother. Jewish women weren’t allowed to be starlets or sex symbols; they were invisible, unacknowledged or relegated to peripheral roles that embodied tired, unflattering tropes.
Well, goodbye to all that. The image of Jewish women in contemporary Hollywood has become far more complex. While the token Jewish characters depicted as neurotic, anxious and graceless still exist, now those characters — in particular, Jewish women — are being counterbalanced with a rising generation of Jewish actresses who defy the clichés. Never mind the classically annoying Fran Drescher image — with the frizzy brown hair and shrill, nasal voice — American movie audiences can now see Jewishness in a sultry slate of actresses that includes Natalie Portman, Scarlett Johansson, Mila Kunis, Mélanie Laurent, Emmanuelle Chriqui and Rachel Weisz — women considered exotic, erotic and beautiful, each one as diverse in temperament and talent as the next.
But, as they say, beauty is only skin deep. If it were beauty alone these actresses offered, they’d run the risk of serving as cultural fetish, not feminist counterpoint, their contribution to the pop culture canon reduced to eroticism instead of empowerment. But even as their physical beauty may be most striking, fetching looks merely serve a broader sexual power, a combination of calculation and allure that amounts as much to an intellectual seduction as a physical one. Far from an unwitting ingénue waiting to be rescued by Prince Charming, the new Jewish actress is both sexy and cerebral, striking the perfect balance of sexual confidence and emotional vulnerability.
Hottest Jewish Actresses
Hottest Jewish Actresses
Hottest Jewish Actresses
Hottest Jewish Actresses
Hottest Jewish Actresses
Hottest Jewish Actresses
Hottest Jewish Actresses
Hottest Jewish Actresses
Hottest Jewish Actresses
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