March 6, 2002

ho is Joanne Whalley?  A minor British actress, best known for playing Sorsha, the daughter of the evil queen in Willow.  Yes, it's a generous definition of "best known".

Why write about her? Read on.

Joanne Whalley.  She just kills me in Willow. Not that her performance is amazing or anything, but she is so goddamned cute, it just hurts to watch her strut around.  Perfect face, lips, smooth elegant neck, long messy hair, and cool black valkyrie style armor. You want to impress me ladies, dress up in a metal breastplate on our first date.

I recently got Willow on VHS (hey, it was $6 at Price Club) after having not seen it since it was on HBO at least 6 or 8 years ago.  Partially for the movie, partially since I remembered the red-head daughter being so cute.  I had no idea what the woman's name was, didn't remember seeing her in anything since then, but after watching it on tape, I had to hunt up some shots of her.  No one who was that hot in one movie could fail to be very pretty in other things, could they?

As it turns out yes, they could.  She's been in a bunch of other movies, mostly smaller UK fare, and she doesn't look good in a single one of them.  A summary.

The face shots are useful since they don't include her outfit in the movie, which skews my scoring even higher, since I love the fantasy gothic armor look.  So we're just looking at her face here, from three different times in the movie, in different outfits and lighting.  And all three look great, IMHO anyway.

Plus she looks depressed. She's not awful there, not for mid-30s certainly, but generally actresses look as good or better at 36 than 24.  Better make up, no baby fat, had some work done, etc.  Not Joanne.

In Scandal, the year after Willow, she looks 10 years older.  It's like Joanne's less-attractive aunt took over after Willow. How does this happen?  I realize that men are usually asking this question after a year of marriage, so lucky me it's just some actress, eh?

But seriously, how did she go from 8.5 to 4.0 in a year?  Did she intentionally take less glamorous roles to try and prove she was a real actress, not just a pretty face? Do UK movies not have any idea how to do proper make up and lighting? Was she hit with a shovel? Did she fall out of the ugly tree and hit every branch on the way down?

I don't know, and it makes me sad.  At least we've always got Willow, to remember her at her peak.

I realize this is sort of scary thus far; like I'm totally obsessed with the woman. I assure you I'm not, I hadn't thought of her in years other than vaguely-remembering that hot girl in Willow, and have never seen any other movies she's been in.  I only looked them up recently, to have some links for this article.

How is Willow anyway?  It's worth $6 for the tape, I'll go out on a limb and assure you of that. It's certainly not in the same orbit with Lord of the Rings, but in the long history of bad, cheesy fantasy films, it's one of the better ones.  Pre-LotR anyway. It was directed by Ron Howard in his early career, so you know it'll be amateurish and sort of childish.  It is, like a kid's comic book with very broad portrayals of all characters.

At the time it was released, 1988, it was heralded as a special effects tour de force.  It was at the time, I remember seeing it then and being amazed at the quality of the miniatures and trick photography and blue screen work.  Back then it seemed amazingly well done, where you could hardly tell the brownies (humanoids around 8 inches tall) were blue screened.  Most movies prior to Willow had obvious glowing lines around any superimposed images, but the insertion technology improved a ton in the late 80's.

The movie's special effects look pretty mediocre now overall.  There is very obvious claymation stop-action on the two-headed dragon thing, and there are a lot of glowing bluescreen remnants, but the effects aren't bad, as good or better than TV shows are now, anyway.  The plot (story by George Lucas) is pathetically derivative of Star Wars, but then Star Wars is quite derivative itself, though much more inventive than Willow. 

And Joanne's performance?  I dunno, nothing awful about it, but she doesn't leap off the screen, but she looks great to me in it.  So I looked her up on Google and found the shots linked to above, and thought it was amazing how much worse (than in Willow) she looked in all of them. Somehow her narrow face and big eyes that are bewitching in Willow just make her look bug-eyed and trout-faced in every other film, ones from the 80's, but then 90's also, as her apparently Methuselah condition kicked in.

Most actresses in shots from the 80's are hard to take now, just such giant hair and pasty-faced make up (The hottest shots of actresses from the 80's look dire now, as in this shot from Top Gun.) and Joanne is in mostly UK movies, so I'm assuming that's where the lived, and not a lot of tanning season in those parts, plus they were deep in the too-much-makeup big hair look in the 80's as well. Check out some older pics of Princess Diana with the frizzy hair and raccoon eyes.

If I were motivated I could dig up tons of pics of attractive women from the 80's and post them now, perhaps a whole section on "what the hell were they thinking" make up disasters.  But I'm not going there, Joanne has depressed me enough just by herself.

A female friend looking over this page has informed me that I'm insane.  She says Joanne looks just the same in every picture, or nearly so, and that she's aging quite well.

I will admit that in one of the 8 Willow headshots (top row, 3rd from left, with the helmet on) she's got the buggy eyes and bags beneath them, but that's the only picture on that page that she doesn't look far better in than any picture from any other movie.  Note that these are just face shots; they don't include the awful hair she sports in most every other movie, and I'll also admit that her clothing in Willow makes me feel tingly all over.

But I think the main difference is that my friend doesn't want to invent a time machine that can also turn movies into reality (or vice versa) solely for the purpose of returning to 1988 and making hot monkey love to Sorsha.  Therefore she's not really looking that hard.

All site content copyright "Flux" (Eric Bruce), 2002-2007.