Blonde roots

Smart as a whip or dumb as a blonde? Susan King combs through the many variations of the 'blonde' characters steeped in movie history.


Even with her au courant designer outfits - her dog Bruiser is always in coordinated attire - Elle Woods, the irrepressible heroine played by Reese Witherspoon in the just-released sequel Legally Blonde 2: Red White & Blonde, is steeped in the tradition of the not-so-dumb blondes of the 1930s, such as Jean Harlow and Carole Lombard.

Like the blond-haired characters created by Harlow, Lombard and Barbara Stanwyck in such films as Dinner at Eight, My Man Godfrey and The Lady Eve, Elle is the catalyst of both Legally Blonde movies.

Because of her trendy outfits, blond hair and little-girl voice, she is often mistaken for a living Barbie doll. But she knows who she is and what she wants, and although she has moments of self-doubt, her anxieties are short-lived due to her strong determination.

In the new film, not only does Elle find time to plan her wedding and change the lives of several lonely people, she also takes on the bureaucracy in Washington, D.C., and gets a bill through Congress to stop animal testing by cosmetics companies.

Film historian Cari Beauchamp says the first film - a surprise summer hit two years ago - had a solid feminist agenda. "Her priorities are so clear," Beauchamp says. "There are self-worth issues. Women are taking care of women. Women who are friends are really important to each other, and they have to love each other first. All of that with this veneer of lip gloss and the Guccis and last year's Prada."

Blondes - smart, dumb and otherwise - have, so to speak, deep roots in movie history. The first true "blonde" character in movies, says Beauchamp, was actually a brunette - Gloria Swanson - in the Cecil B. DeMille comedies Male and Female and The Affairs of Anatole, made in her late teens and early 1920s. "It was the end of the war and the Jazz Age is just starting," Beauchamp says. "Prohibition is coming in. In terms of the film, she was the first full-blooded blonde character."

Writer Anita Loos added a certain va-va-voom to the blonde persona in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, her 1925 best-seller that followed Lorelei Lee, a blonde who "usually gets what she wants". Lorelei was brought to life by Carol Channing on stage in the late '40s and by Marilyn Monroe in the 1953 film. Just like Elle, everybody treats Lorelei "like a dummy", Beauchamp says.

"But she's as smart as a whip. She's the ditzy blonde who knows exactly what she's doing."

They didn't hit their stride until the 1930s, but Harlow, Lombard and Jean Arthur began honing their blonde personas in movies in the late '20s. These actresses, Beauchamp says, created characters who had "that spunk, that pizazz. They walked into the room and they turned heads".

Marion Davies was another early actress who played the "dumb" blonde. Although her riend, newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, kept casting her in serious dramas, Davies excelled in comedies as the girl who knew what she wanted, especially in such silent comedies as Show People and The Patsy (both from 1928).

Monroe continued that tradition in the 1950s, as did Judy Holliday, who won the Oscar as Billie Dawn, the platinum-haired woman who decides to better herself in Born Yesterday (1950). Dawn, Beauchamp says is the kind of fabulous female protagonist who values herself. Holliday played variations of that character during her short-lived movie career, especially in her last film, the 1960 musical Bells Are Ringing.

Goldie Hawn began perfecting a similar character as the giggly blonde on Laugh-In in the late 1960s and parlayed it into a best-supporting-actress Oscar for her first film, Cactus Flower (1969), in which she played a blonde free spirit. Even in her most recent film, The Banger Sisters (2002), Hawn is playing a 50-something version of her Cactus Flower blonde.

Her daughter, Kate Hudson, who began her career as a brunette, has followed in her mom's footsteps, notably in this year's How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days. She plays a writer who pretends she is a stereotypical blonde for a story on all the stupid things women do to drive a man away.

There are many variations of the blonde character. Although the blonde comediennes dominated the 1930s, Bette Davis actually began her career as a dramatic blonde at Warner Brothers, winning her first Oscar as an actress on the skids in Dangerous (1935).

But after appearing in The Petrified Forest (1936) as a blonde, she reverted to her natural brunette hair colour. She didn't play blonde again until What Ever Happened to Baby Jane (1962), in which she appeared as a demented former child star.

With High Noon (1952), Grace Kelly ushered in the blonde who no one ever thought of treating like a ditz. Her sophistication, intelligence and flair caught the eye of Alfred Hitchcock, who cast her in three of his classic films, Rear Window and Dial M for Murder (both 1954) and To Catch a Thief (1955).

Before Witherspoon hit it big with Elle, she explored darker aspects of the blonde character in such films as Cruel Intentions, Best Laid Plans and Election (all from 1999). Even in last year's comedy Sweet Home Alabama, her blonde Melanie Carmichael is dismissive of family and friends in her Alabama hometown she left years before for New York City.

Witherspoon is now in London filming the latest version of William Makepeace Thackeray's Vanity Fair. She plays ambitious Becky Sharp, a poor girl in 1840s London who ascends the social ladder. It's a role with a rich blonde tradition. In 1935, one of that era's best-known blonde actresses, Miriam Hopkins, played that role in the film, Becky Sharp.

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