Actors/actresses who never got to fulfill their potential

I was at a party for most of the weekend and this was on one of the 1990s loops. Amazed to find it still gets drunks on their feet.

Enigma were de rigueur at shagathons back in the day. Eurotrash it may be, but it worked at some blissed-out primal level.

Isn't one of Enigma's videos nudity-heavy, or have I imagined that?

Dunno, but I forgot what a wonderful sexuality Sharon Stone had. You can see it in that vid. Shame she never found anything other than Basic Instinct to showcase it.

Hitchcock would have used her in every sense of the word.

Verhoeven sort of used that aspect of her persona in "Total Recall".

True. I didn't think much about Stone in the '90s other than it was unusual for an actress to break into mainstream Hollywood at such an age (must have been in her mid 30s), but perhaps I underrated her. She was generally better than her material, Verhoeven's stuff excepted.

I used to think Stone had a drag act quality to her, which turned me off, but she's grown on me since.

Stone already had a longish career by the time she got her big break on "Basic Instinct". She was 34 years old when that movie was released.
Apart from the aforementioned "Total Recall", she hadn't been in anything I'd deem good or even decent. Among her more high-profile credits were two female leads opposite Richard Chamberlain in the Alan Quartermain movies and a role as Steve Guttenbergs love interest in one of the many horrible Police Academy sequels.
Though I remember reading an article that deemed her big break (as in when she got noticed by North-American audiences) to be the role of a trophy wife in "Action Jackson".

*edit* This actually might be a good topic of discussion for another thread, about actors/actresses who never got to fulfill their potential.

Salomé wrote:

*edit* This actually might be a good topic of discussion for another thread, about actors/actresses who never got to fulfill their potential.

Maybe one of the mods could split off the Stone posts and make that thread. (Shark and Hilly seem to have decided a resurgent BaB is the time to contribute less, which is somewhat counter intuitive, but maybe Python could do the honours.)

I found Casino repulsive, but people with stronger stomachs for mindless violence tell me it's Stone's best performance. I thought she was good in Basic Instinct, but then I like pulp.

Largo's Shark wrote:

I used to think Stone had a drag act quality to her, which turned me off, but she's grown on me since.

I have always liked her.
Even as a teen I realized that she was perhaps the one actress amongst that stable/generation of Hollywood leading ladies (Pfeiffer, Roberts, Basinger, Bullock) who had anything interesting to say and who seemed to have an interest in the world outside of just Tinseltown.
She never truly capitalized on that Basic Instinct success though.

Erica Ambler wrote:

Maybe one of the mods could split off the Stone posts and make that thread. (Shark and Hilly seem to have decided a resurgent BaB is the time to contribute less, which is somewhat counter intuitive, but maybe Python could do the honours.)

Done. Not of us work from home, yaknow.

Stone's post Basic Instinct credits are a bit depressing.
I guess Casino is the one other decent movie she made after her collaboration with Verhoeven ended.

I like ANTZ. A surprisingly adult kids movie.

I'd say she's great in CASINO. After that film, I can't recall anything else she's been in. My memories of SPHERE and THE QUICK AND THE DEAD (where she plays an Eastwood type gunslinger) are at best vague. I'd like to revisit the latter though. A duel between Sharon Stone and Gene Hackman sounds great, though I suspect it was underwhelming.

I think part of Stone's problem was her attempts to distance herself from Verhoeven after Basic Instinct did so well.  He took a chance on her and she complained that she was exploited, which seems ludicrous. After all, Basic was nothing but a pulp exploitation movie despite its big budget.

A far more spectacular career implosion was that of Thora Birch. Last I heard, Birch hadn't even got an agent. It's not exactly another 'Veronica Lake working in a bar' story, but I doubt anyone predicted things would go so badly.

Thora Birch sadly fell into the same trap as most child actors. Either they lose everyone's attention once they become an adult, or they bury themselves in drugs. I guess not every child actor can have Kurt Russell's career.

Erica Ambler wrote:

I think part of Stone's problem was her attempts to distance herself from Verhoeven after Basic Instinct did so well.  He took a chance on her and she complained that she was exploited, which seems ludicrous. After all, Basic was nothing but a pulp exploitation movie despite its big budget.

A far more spectacular career implosion was that of Thora Birch. Last I heard, Birch hadn't even got an agent. It's not exactly another 'Veronica Lake working in a bar' story, but I doubt anyone predicted things would go so badly.

If you only had "Ghost World" to go on and you had to put your money on one of those young actresses to make it big, then surely no one would have gambled on Scarlett Johansson?
IIRC, Birch burned a lot of bridges through her fathers meddling in her career.

Salomé wrote:

IIRC, Birch burned a lot of bridges through her fathers meddling in her career.

May be some truth in that, but I think Birch is more than a bit difficult. There was an undeserved profile in The Grauniad earlier this year where she came across as an overgrown adolescent. The interviewer (Hadley Freeman, not exactly God's gift to journalism), asked Birch what she made of Johansson's success and Birch replied. "Whatever." Yeah, that's a good soundbite, Thora...

Speaking of Ghost World, what happened to Terry Zwigoff? I thought Crumb, Ghost World and Bad Santa were pretty good films, but he doesn't seem to have worked much since.

He's been having trouble getting one off the ground for legal reasons: http://blogs.indiewire.com/theplaylist/terry-zwigoff-talks-battling-over-bad-santa-turning-down-juno-and-the-beaver-and-much-more-in-candid-interview-20121220

Cheers for that, Python. The continuing woes of the small filmmaker in corporate Hollywood. Zwigoff sounds as pissed as Birch, but at least he's articulate, outspoken and funny. Love this line:

Quote :

You have to go back to the '30s and '40s to see a film that's any good.

I'll have to see the Director's Cut of BAD SANTA this season. I've only owned the original theatrical cut. Never saw "BADDER SANTA" because I knew the "unrated cut" was just a marketing gimmick and I saw enough of those to learn that studios don't know how comedies work.

Michael Biehn.....kind of odd that he never went on to become a bigger star. You would have thought his turn as Corporal Hicks would have launched him to super-stardom, but the hit films he was in were all James Cameron films. Outside of Cameron's films, Biehn was not able to build up a good body of work.

I don't think he could carry a film. He was better off as a character actor that was part of an ensemble, the best one being TOMBSTONE. Was THE ROCK his last blockbuster appearance? I don't remember him being in anything after that, at least outside of GRINDHOUSE.

I was going to mention Biehn whenever I see him its always with the thought....why did he disappear so quickly?