This year sadly saw the passing of the legendary Paul Newman. With a career spanning more than fifty years Newman was not only a superb actor with buckets of charisma, but also a great philanthropist and ambassador for human kindness. Today also happens to see the release of Clint Eastwood’s latest picture Gran Torino, in which Clint saw a man so ill tempered yet so stoic in his masculinity that he felt he had no option but to step back in front of the camera himself, for what could conceivably be the last time. So it really begs the question of who exactly is going to replace the likes of these guys when they’re gone?

The screen icon is a phenomenon as old as cinema itself and the so-called “first movie star” Florence Lawrence dates back to 1909. From there the clumsy process slowly refined itself and the likes of Charlie Chaplin flourished before giving way to stars such as Bogart and Bergman, and later the likes of John Wayne and Henry Fonda. In the seventies the new wave kicked in and the focus shifted somewhat to the concept of the maverick director, but by the dawn of the eighties we were awash with the likes of Sylvester Stallone and of course “Ah-nuld!”

The nineties saw something of a slow demise in icons and the birth of “star power.” For The Cable Guy Jim Carey became the first man to command a $20 million salary, for a film that was a cataclysmic box office disaster incidentally. Tom Cruise started to exert the kind of creative control over his image that would eventually see him fired from his Paramount gig. De Niro and Pacino have both sadly succumbed to painful self-parody, and Julia Roberts decided to become “Julia Roberts”, promptly disappeared up her own ass and hasn’t been heard from since.

So where exactly does this leave us? In this economic climate can studios even afford icons these days? Annual power listings this week suggest not with salaries shrinking and the always-bankable Will Smith the only $20m-a-movie man left standing. But even if they could who are the likely candidates to replace the larger than life heroes of old?

Looking at the action genre we appear to be in some big trouble. The Bourne films aside the closest thing we have to a bona fide action hero these days is Jason fricken Statham, and while he might look the part his movies are so middle of the road it’s a wonder they haven’t been hit by a truck. Besides, he still can’t get anyone to pay him $1 million a picture, never mind twenty.

Leading ladies are even thinner on the ground and while Agnelina Jolie continues to purse those ruby red lips with smoldering intensity chances are her quivering turn in the beautiful if vacuous Changling will bag her a statue and she will then join the likes of Halle Berry and Reese Witherspoon wander the post-Oscar career wilderness.

There are those who mock the very idea of the screen icon as shallow and passé with the tongue-in-cheek Internet championing of Chuck Norris as a perfect example of what the phenomenon now represents. JCVD sees Jean-Claude Van Damme offer a calculated rejection of the icon persona as something created by the audience for vicarious wish fulfillment as he plays a broke, somewhat pathetic version of himself raging at an image he can’t control. But the power of the icon persona is not to be underestimated. It’s no coincidence that Arnie’s gubernatorial run just happened to take place the same summer that Terminator 3 hit the theaters. So I ask you, is the screen icon dead? And if not who are they and where is the next crop of larger than life stars going to come from?

This entry was posted on Friday, December 12th, 2008 at 9:10 pm and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.