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The Many Faces of HelenHow to find an actress who can launch a thousand ships.

By Julia Turner
Posted Thursday, May 13, 2004, at 7:44 PM ET

(Click here to see a slide show that explains how casting directors and artists have solved—and, more often, failed to solve—this problem.)

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For the producers of Troy, the forthcoming Warner Brothers spectacle, finding an actress to play Helen was tricky. There is no shortage of beautiful women in Hollywood, but faces that can reliably launch thousands of ships are scarce.

The Iliad, you'll remember, boasts a very improbable plot: Helen—who was universally considered the most ravishing woman around—was married to Menelaus, the Spartan king, until Paris, a pretty boy from Troy, seduced her and carried her off. Menelaus, incensed, then launched his ships, set sail for Troy, and fought a bloody 10-year war to get her back. The ensuing carnage calls for a woman who is literally drop-dead beautiful.

Which leaves casting directors with a dilemma: What does drop-dead beautiful look like these days? As we become increasingly convinced that beauty—and truth, and almost everything else—lies in the eye of the beholder, we're less likely to concur about how Helen should appear. Already, critics who've seen the film quibble that the Helen in Troy is not beautiful enough. This is not the fault of the casting directors, who considered Victoria's Secret models and improbable pop stars alike. How can you find—or, in the case of artists, paint—a woman who everyone will agree is the most beautiful on earth?

Click here to see a slide show that explains how casting directors and artists have solved—and, more often, failed to solve—this problem.

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Julia Turner is Slate's deputy editor. You can e-mail her at .
Stills from Troy © Alex Bailey/Warner Bros. Entertainment.
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Remarks from the Fray:

It's fairly obvious that our Helen won't be the prettiest one in the parade come Friday. That will be Brad Pitt. Warner Bros. just isn't willing to go there quite yet.

And it's too bad, really, because it might have been a chance to right the great wrong of Hollywood epic cinema: they do a pretty good job with Romans, and they're just terrible with the Greeks.

The best of the Roman films have Big Gay Subplots--Vidal's script for Ben-Hur, Trumbo's for Spartacus. The only way for the Greeks to answer would be to take all that "Don't tell Charlton"/"Oysters & Snails" wink-wink and throw it over for some fabulous Achaeans. Garrett Hedlund, who's been cast as Achilles's longtime companion Patroclus, isn't doing it for me, either.

Still, back in the real world of casting directors and the silicone/collagen cyborg anorexics they spend their days with they should have done better. When Peter Guber was producing Bonfire of the Vanities, he always made his "Oh face" when he described the role Melanie Griffith played. When Eisner was producing Flashdance, he showed pictures of the leading candidates for Jennifer Beals's role to teamsters and asked who they'd rather fuck. It's crass, it's sexist, it's Hollywood marketing. It's why "the men of Slate" (now there's a calendar I never want to see) picked Monica Bellucci. It also seems to have worked better than whatever process they went through here (although the jailbait model did seem to emerge from precisely this kind of thinking).

One way to make the concretized Helen interesting without having to buck up against the notion of the Ideal would be to put her next to her competitors in the judgment of Paris scene. Better, not The Best. Warner's didn't go there, either...

--MatthewGarth

(To reply, click here)


The Iliad shows a couple of dozen heroes, about half as many gods. . . and two characters, Achilles and Helen, who fall somewhere in between.

Helen and Achilles, the story makes clear, are no gods; but they have attributes that go beyond the merely human. "Man-Killing Hector" is the finest human warrior living, but the divine-blooded fury of Achilles brings him down.

Equal to Achilles strength in battle is Helen's eerie beauty, which unbalanced the minds and thrones of kings.

Seems to me that if you're looking for a beauty that's so intense as to seem superhuman, and to make its possessor larger than life. . . you're looking for an "A-List" celebrity. A Halle Berry, Rebecca Romijn, Gwyneth Paltrow kind of person. Someone who's larger than life in real life.

People won't believe that folks would go to war over the beauty of a pretty blonde from a shampoo commercial; but suspending your disbelief is easier if it's the beauty of Angelina Jolie.

--Thrasymachus

(To reply, click here)


Diane Kruger, the actress who plays Helen of Troy is very pretty . . .it seems cruel to say that her face could only launch 3 ships. But, much like the 'Friends' finale, no way could the final product live up to all the hype. And in Helen's case, the hype has been going on for what? 3000 years? Her legendary beauty has been celebrated in the world consciousness for millennia, but that legendary beauty may be just that--a legend. We don't have actual proof that Helen really existed. How could any mere mortal woman hope to compete with a towering poetical figure?

I personally have always envisioned Helen as a fiery brunette, rather than a cool blonde. In that vein, perhaps Catherine Zeta-Jones is our closest thing to a modern Helen. Or Sophie Marceau, whose incandescent beauty makes her, I think, worthy of legend.

--hikari

(To reply, click here)

(5/14)

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