ABSTRACT
What determines the parts that an actor gets to play on screen? An intricate, sometimes barely fathomable alchemy of factors: his/her potentialities and limitations – or at least how these are perceived and construed by the film industry; specific movie successes that suddenly give the actor a bankable association and create an image; the fact that any durable screen persona is usually a dynamic amalgam of various, even contradictory facets that can be used and combined differently in any given film; how the actor’s gender, age, physique, at any given stage of life, mesh (or fail to mesh) with a certain repertoire of standardised, narrative movie types; and, hovering over all of this, a certain, always powerfully influential force of the felt cultural meaning of this actor (if he or she has had any career longevity) as some kind of icon, some sign of his or her times.
