Many, if not most, actors offer a dominant theme of characterization deployed with variations throughout their careers. In Tallulah! I analyzed the veritable critical furore over Tallulah “playing herself” and how much it had to do with the self she embodied both personally and professionally being a threat to the status quoa of acceptable female archetypes.
In Lesley Ferris’s Acting Women: Images of Women in Theater, she offers additional context. Surveying the chronology of the theater, when women’s roles were finally played by women rather than men or boys, “far from being credited with artistic invention, skill or talent,” they were stigmatized as able merely to enact themselves: “a patriarchal premise that conveniently and skillfully removes women from any possibility of cultural creativity.”