It was another Jennifer – Jennifer Grey of Dirty Dancing fame – whose desire to tamper with the face that the good Lord gave her made her the object lesson in not fixing what ain’t broke; especially, in her case, one’s nose.
At the age of 26 Miss Grey was pretty enough to be believable as the teenage paramour of heart-throb Patrick Swayze in the wildly popular film, but not so pretty that she alienated the female majority of the potential audience. She was the perfect rising star.
But a totally pointless nose-job two years later, and a second procedure to allegedly fix an issue with the cartilage, so altered her appearance that it made her unrecognizable. Grey herself was extremely frank about this unfortunate turn of events, writing in her memoir, “Overnight, I lose my identity and my face.” An airline employee looked at her ID and said “Oh, Jennifer Grey, like the actress.” When Miss Grey replied, “Actually, it is me,” the woman said, “I’ve seen Dirty Dancing a dozen times. I know Jennifer Grey. And you are not her.”
Now it’s not beyond belief that another film-star Jennifer will find herself having her identity questioned due to what appears to be a new face. This time it’s even more puzzling, as the “culprit” is the extraordinarily beautiful Jennifer Lawrence.
Lawrence really did appear to be the girl with everything. Still only 36, her films have taken over $6 billion; she started working as an actress while a teenager and was only 20 when the film Winter’s Bone bagged her her first Best Actress Oscar nomination. Her character in The Hunger Games was the highest-grossing action heroine of all time; serious films would win her Academy Awards, BAFTAs and Golden Globes, but she became famous for falling over at award ceremonies and not taking herself too seriously – she was the anti-Gwyneth.
In 2014 she handled public exposure of saucy snaps she had sent to her then-boyfriend with guts and gravitas. She is involved in charities ranging from the Special Olympics to the anti-corruption RepresentUs and has said that she finds acting “stupid” compared to serious professions and therefore tries not to be “cocky” about her achievements. Her appeal went right across the board, from women who thought she’d be fun on a night out to teenage boys who dreamed of Katniss Everdeen. In 2014 the philosopher Alain de Botton published an essay called “Jennifer Lawrence Is My Girlfriend” – “It would be thrilling to have sex with Jennifer Lawrence,” the kinky thinker wrote in the New Yorker. But the account itself was rather drab and kvetchy, with much along the lines of “The problem is, after we’ve argued, she doesn’t want to have sex for ages. I feel I’m being punished twice and that makes me edgy and even more likely to create another conflict.”
Everyone loves Jennifer Lawrence; even me, who hasn’t really approved of a female film star since Brigitte Bardot. All of which makes it odder that, in recent photographs to promote her new haircare brand “Mes,” she looks like a toppled mannequin. In words, she did that anti-Gwyneth thing again: “I didn’t want the goal to be my hair is perfect, I wanted something that would fit in with the messiness of life,” she also blithely told InStyle: “I think with age I can have more agency, just feeling like I can look more like myself as opposed to somebody else’s doll.”
But X is now alive with the sound of indignant gals and gays fuming over their favorite’s about-face. “A crime,” wrote one, over Before and After photographs of Lawrence.
Comments below included, “Her surgeon absconded with her face” and “The Capitol finally captured Katniss.” “New Jennifer Lawrence wouldn’t even win in a Jennifer Lawrence lookalike contest,” said another. The overall feeling is one bordering on outrage.
To give Lawrence credit, in a new interview with the Cut she ’fesses up to a breast enlargement and goes on to list her plans for the future, including a facelift and buccal fat removal. She already uses “baby Botox” but avoids fillers as they hinder the facial movement, which has traditionally been associated with acting.
She has brought the same plain dealer attitude to having her face mucked about with that she previously brought to getting drunk and falling over, in a world where other Jennifers as different as Aniston and Lopez deny point blank that they have ever dabbled in cosmetic surgery and that their youthful looks are down to sleep and water. Surely we should admire this consistency, this character?
Another thing that “civilians” don’t think of – women, unless they are Mary Beard, become less valued in the workplace as they visibly age. Although I said that Lawrence is “only 36,” this is middle-aged for a woman in Hollywood. We laugh at the old days when Anne Bancroft as “Mrs. Robinson” was a mere six years older than “the Graduate” Dustin Hoffman, but in the HBO show House of the Dragon, 30-year-old Olivia Cooke portrays the mother of three children played by actors who are 25, 27 and 29. It can’t be long before an actress actually younger than her “son” appears. Lawrence was the world’s highest paid actress in 2016. But that was a decade ago.
The whole issue of fixing one’s face in order to gain or keep fame and fortune is a complex one. Deny it outright like Aniston and Lopez and have everyone scoffing at your duplicity. Do it before you make it, as Megan Fox so brilliantly did. Do it shamelessly in public, as Madonna does, and have the world look on in horror as you start to resemble something out of Sid’s Mutant Toybox from Toy Story.
Nicole Kidman has always been good at the “la-la-can’t-hear-you” move, often barely recognizable from one year to the next, all the while laughing blithely about the time she tried a bit of Botox but would never do so again because it stopped her from expressing emotion.
She’s currently fronting out another X firestorm due to a Vogue shoot which saw her dressed like a teenager with a face to match and whereas Lawrence is being spoken of more in sorrow than in anger, there’s a real savagery to some of the criticisms of 59-year-old Kidman.
On the other hand, if what we liked about Jennifer Lawrence was her willfulness, isn’t it a bit weird of us to now get prissy and say “Oh, letting the side down!” The Girl Code/I’m a girl’s girl stuff can often be a cover for making sure that a woman tows the line when she may well have her own reasons for disobeying them.
Legions of women saying “You shouldn’t be doing that” is what women have done to keep other women in line from time immemorial. “Why can’t women be natural, like they used to be?” is a complaint which usually comes from misogynist men. It would be a shame if women joined in, especially when we consider that the “classic” screen beauties such as Rita Hayworth and Marilyn Monroe had quite a bit of alteration done before they became stars.
With the advent of airbrushing, and now AI, there is almost something old-fashioned and down-home about going to the bother of having cosmetic surgery. Perhaps the day is not far away when facial fiddling will be worn like a badge of honor (you put yourself through that pain rather than have the creases smoothed out in the editing suite?) and when one altered body part is spotted, the shameless star will point out another.
Perhaps the shallow studs and starlets of the silver screen will echo my favorite Stoic, Epictetus: “If anyone tells you that a certain person speaks ill of you, do not make excuses about what is said of you but answer, ‘He was ignorant of my other faults, else he would not have mentioned these alone.’’’ On the other hand, they should bear in mind that while fame may well be a mask that eats the face, the last thing the fame-seeker wants is – like poor Jennifer Grey – to be reduced by over-enthusiastic application of cosmetic surgery right back to the status of a nobody.
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