Lauren Hutton
Hutton came to films from modelling, and the modelling was the bigger event. Raised in the southern United States, she moved to New York in her early adulthood, was turned away by agents over the gap in her front teeth, and then signed with Revlon in 1973 on what was at the time the largest contract the industry had ever written. It was a landmark, and it made her one of the most recognisable faces in American advertising before most people had seen her act at all.
Hollywood used her accordingly. The seventies run is the good one: Billie in The Gambler, Nona Bruce in Welcome to L.A., Florence Farmer in the ensemble comedy A Wedding, and a woman under surveillance in the 1978 thriller Someone's Watching Me!. The peak is American Gigolo in 1980, where she plays Michelle Stratton opposite a leading man cast as an object of desire, which is an unusually pointed piece of casting for someone whose own fame was built on being looked at.
The eighties took her into genre and comedy: the Countess in Once Bitten, Kari Von Fursten in Lassiter, a disaster television film, a part in the Zorro spoof. The later credits are the interesting coda, because they hand her authority instead of glamour: 54, The Joneses, and I Feel Pretty, a comedy set in the beauty business, which is either a joke about her own career or a tribute to it. She plays it as both.
Movies (20)
- I Feel Pretty (2018)
- 54 (1998)
- American Gigolo (1980)
- The Joneses (2010)
- Malone (1987)
- The Gambler (1974)
- Gator (1976)
- Once Bitten (1985)
- Zorro, The Gay Blade (1981)
- My Father the Hero (1994)
- Fear (1990)
- A Wedding (1978)
- Someone's Watching Me! (1978)
- Starflight: The Plane That Couldn't Land (1983)
- The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1978)
- Lassiter (1984)
- Junket Whore (1998)
- Welcome to L.A. (1976)
- Guilty As Charged (1991)
- Joan Rivers and Friends Salute Heidi Abromowitz (1988)
TV (2)
Where to start with Lauren Hutton
One film uses her properly, and it is American Gigolo. Her Michelle Stratton is the still point in a movie that is otherwise all surface: a woman working out what she is prepared to risk, played without ever raising her voice.
Then go backwards. The Gambler and Welcome to L.A. are the seventies at their least glamorous, and A Wedding drops her into a huge ensemble where she has to earn her space. Someone's Watching Me! is the best genre thing here, a tight 1978 thriller about being watched inside your own apartment.
The lighter eighties material, Once Bitten and Zorro, The Gay Blade, is fun and disposable. Save I Feel Pretty for last, because a career that began with a Revlon contract arriving at a comedy about the beauty industry is the kind of symmetry nobody can plan.