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Are Hollywood starlets getting too thin?

While actresses succumb to the pressure to look skinny, young girls may follow suit

BY RACHEL ABRAMOWITZ | Los Angeles Times

August 22, 2007

I'm searching for body fat in Hollywood. It's the 2007 MTV Movie Awards, and judging by the standards of the youth-obsessed network's magenta carpet, blubber, let alone curves or even softness, is out of fashion. Girls - and I mean girls, given their lack of womanly heft, glide by. Jessica Biel, in a loose black mini-dress. Jessica Alba, with sylphlike arms rising above her red puffy mini-dress. Cameron Diaz, at 34, the veritable grandma of the bunch, in a black micro-dress, only inches longer than a bathing suit.

Not one woman won an award that night, but the few female presenters hovered like ethereal specters over such giant, solid, male movie stars as Jack Nicholson, Adam Sandler and Will Ferrell. Host Sarah Silverman, in a parade of girlish dresses, presided like the tiny, squeaky-voiced, mean girl from every high school nightmare.

It's no news flash that women are skinny in Hollywood - by far, skinnier than the 66 percent of American men and women who qualify as overweight or obese. But are they getting skinnier? Or do we just read a lot more about them thanks to an endless stream of fashion mags? Such celebrity rags chronicle their corporeal exploits, alternately castigating them when their bones stick out (Attention: Angelina Jolie! Kate Bosworth! Mischa Barton! Nicole Richie!), then celebrating the personal resourcefulness they exploited to lose excess poundage.

Is thinness contagious?

Some believe that, yes, women in Hollywood are shrinking, even more than in previous decades. Amid the attention given recently to the finding, published in the July 26 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, that obesity is "contagious" - that people tend to get fatter when their friends get fatter - these days Hollywood is giving ample evidence that the reverse is true, as well.

It makes sense: Social norms affect a person's weight. When a woman's most successful peers have protruding bones, she's going to feel pressure to head in that direction as well.

One person who's noticed that Hollywood women are skinnier than ever is casting director Joseph Middleton, who has worked on an array of youth-oriented films such as "American Pie," "Go" and the upcoming fantasy "Jumper," starring Samuel L. Jackson.

"The girls that are considered the ingenues of the day are getting thinner," Middleton says. "You can tell, because the first year that you [audition] them, they come from Chicago, Ohio and Georgia, and they're really pretty girls who are healthy.

"A year later, you [see] them and they look like slimmer Hollywood versions. I can't tell you how many times producers and directors have said, 'Well, she's a little heavy for the camera.' I don't think they're saying, 'We want these girls to be unhealthy,' but they sure like that thinner version.'

Us Weekly editor in chief Janice Min, another close observer of Hollywood mores, agrees that extreme thinness "has definitely become an issue." Min says for many actresses, it seems like a question of survival. "Obviously, being a female celebrity, you're in constant competition whether you want to believe it or not. You're competing for roles, parts, male attention, and it's a competition primarily involving looks. It's a system of rewards, and you are rewarded for being the most beautiful, the sexiest, and the competition has almost extended to being the thinnest."

The rest of us, meanwhile, have gotten so used to it that we've stopped seeing it.

Skin is in

"On the red carpet, people used to wear outfits with sleeves, and necklines that went up to their necks," Min says. "There's been such a movement to show more and more and more, and it seems inevitable that the pursuit of the most perfect body you can achieve has consumed actresses. You don't want to be the one actress whose photo is taken with two skinny actresses and you look like Shrek. Everyone's eye has adjusted to the new reality that doesn't reflect reality in the least."

It's a sign of Hollywood's readjusted eye that whenever an average-size woman - a Jennifer Hudson or an America Ferrera - earns the limelight, there's the predictable magazine frenzy over robust women who manage to be successful without committing hara-kiri over being a size 10.

In the cases of Hudson and Ferrara, curves were specific to their breakout roles - in fact, they became a shorthand for their characters' feistiness, for their willingness to defy the expected norms of their environments.

Why are actresses shrinking? This certainly isn't a heyday of women's power, as behind-the-scenes female power players disappear, including former studio honchos Sherry Lansing, Gail Berman and Nina Jacobson. In front of the camera, it's the same story. From June 2006 to June 2007, 185 films featured male leads, while only 47 sported female leads - meaning that there's a lot of competition for parts.

It's unclear which female star, if any, can truly open a movie, given that Julia Roberts, the undisputed box-office queen of the past decade, hasn't appeared in a movie since 2004. It's true that TV is lately providing a font of great roles for women. Still, according to the Screen Actors Guild's latest statistics, in 2004 men dominated the TV landscape, too, with 84,108 roles to women's 56,603.

One unnamed manager notes that those who compete most in the weight realm appear to be the same ones who live in the tabloids.

"There's a difference between that iconography and the working actors. Scarlett Johansson, Natalie Portman, Amber Tamblyn - they all have very lovely, appropriate body types. They don't look like they've come out of a prison camp."

Skinny-minnies tend to be "the pop celebrities in the axis of fashion and celebrity. Instead of the fake boobs of 15 years ago, there's a whole generation obsessed with being thin."