Why does everyone hate Katherine Heigl? In Britain we barely know who she is: she tends to play those hard-to-remember, pretty-blonde roles in not very funny romantic comedies. But in the States Heigl is famous, and suddenly loathed. A couple of weeks ago even Newsweek ran an article headed “Why is Katherine Heigl so Annoying?”
When Heigl first began to make the transition from television (she had by this stage won an Emmy for her role as a surgical intern in the series Grey’s Anatomy), she was adored. Her breakthrough role in film came in the comedy Knocked Up, in which she starred as an ambitious young TV executive who has a rather improbable one-night stand with Seth Rogen and becomes pregnant. By early spring last year she was regularly peaking on World’s Sexiest Women lists and being championed by gossip bloggers such as Perez Hilton. She smoked, which was a problem for the pundits, but their tone was generally forgiving.
Now Heigl, whose new film The Ugly Truth opened here to dreadful reviews last week, appears to have become one of the most hated actors in Hollywood. Following Newsweek’s lead, the internet is full of bloggers posting items such as “Yet Another Reason Why I Hate Katherine Heigl”, “Is Katherine Heigl Annoying or Just a Woman?” and “No One Likes Katherine Heigl”. What seems to have sealed her fate is an appearance on Late Show with David Letterman, in which she complained that she and her colleagues on Grey’s Anatomy had been forced to work a 17-hour day.
Hilton wasted no time in changing his mind about her and soon set about publishing various anonymous accounts of her behaviour on set (“She wouldn’t film any scenes until her assistant — who looked 12 months pregnant at the time — ran and got her a Coke Zero” ... “I filmed RIGHT next to her ... for ten hours straight, two days in a row, and she never said hello.”) It all started with a comment that Heigl made to Vanity Fair in which she said she felt that Knocked Up was “a little bit sexist”. An infuriated Rogen and the film’s director, Judd Apatow, retaliated in a radio interview. The gist of their riposte was: “Don’t bite the hand that feeds you,” though, for good measure, Rogen threw in the suggestion that Heigl was mad: “It’s not like we’re the only people that she’s said some crazy things about. That’s kind of her bag now.”
The quote in Vanity Fair continued: “It [Knocked Up] paints the women as shrews, as humourless and uptight, and it paints the men as loveable, goofy, fun-loving guys. It exaggerated the characters, and I had a hard time with it, on some days. I’m playing such a bitch; why is she being such a killjoy? Why is this how you’re portraying women? Ninety-eight per cent of the time it was an amazing experience, but it was hard for me to love the movie.”
Hilton says: “People don’t like her because she seems ungrateful for her success. She has repeatedly badmouthed those who gave her her breaks. There’s opinionated and there’s not knowing when to shut up. I know that people in the industry don’t want to work with her; you can be frustrated without alienating people.”
Heigl’s comments contain an element of truth. Nevertheless she seems to find it impossible to choose film roles in which she doesn’t play uptight, faintly neurotic, desperate singletons to a bone-headed male lead. After Knocked Up she played a bridesmaid in 27 Dresses. And in The Ugly Truth Heigl plays another romantically challenged television producer whose search for Mr Perfect has left her hopelessly single (until she is rescued by the uninspiring Gerard Butler).
Of course, Heigl is not the only woman in Hollywood to play such roles repeatedly. A recent article in the entertainment section of the Los Angeles Times criticised the sudden proliferation of identical female parts in Hollywood and claimed that a deficit of decent parts is forcing talented actresses to play “cardboard cut-outs of a controlling, manic working woman”.
Not only is this woman tragically single with a discernible obsessive-compulsive streak, but she is unknowingly dissatisfied by her essentially hollow and meaningless high-flying career, plagued by assorted neuroses and can be saved from a future of certain loneliness thanks only to the intervention of an “immature and/or emotionally abusive” slob of a man who teaches her “the true nature of love (which often seems to involve her quitting her high-pressure, high-power job).”
As well as Heigl, many well-established actresses are part of this trend: Sandra Bullock as the pushy boss in The Proposal, who forces her young male assistant to marry her so she doesn’t lose her green card; Jennifer Aniston, Jennifer Connelly and Ginnifer Goodwin playing assorted one-dimensional and desperate women in He’s Just Not That Into You; Renée Zellweger as the high-flying executive in New in Town, who finds true meaning in her life only when Harry Connick Jr shows her; Isla Fisher in the self-explanatory Confessions of a Shopaholic; and Kate Hudson and Anne Hathaway nursing a lifelong obsession about weddings in Bride Wars. In some way, says the Los Angeles Times, all these films are versions of The Taming of the Shrew, although “without the benefit of Richard Burton or Shakespeare”.
Heigl, though, is the only one on this list who has ever spoken out against this sort of typecasting. In the big film studios, pro-ducers complain that the economic climate has led to massive cutbacks by the companies that own them, fewer films being made and a timidity among the commissioning decision-makers.
“I’ve never seen a film that isn’t the spitting image of either the director or some kind of fantasy that he has about life or women,” says one (female) executive. “When the public retaliates against the actresses that play these roles, I think they’re really retaliating against the roles. People see Katherine Heigl playing a robot in Knocked Up. They hate her, and they hate her even more when she ends up having a personality off screen. It’s not as if there is a huge range of exciting parts out there; audiences often don’t realise that.”
And, given that Hollywood demands that its actresses not only play shrews on screen but are sweet, comely and unopinionated in real life, it’s a wonder that not more of them have turned to chain-smoking cigarettes and making spiky comments in the direction of the predominantly male screen-writers and directors who create their wooden on-screen characters.
The Ugly Truth is on general release
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