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G Entries Frederic Gadette Beverly Garland Jeff Goldblum Jerry Goldsmith Bernard Gordon Bert I. Gordon Peter Graves Lorne Greene Sir Alec Guinness   GOLDBLUM, JEFF (1952– ). American actor. SCIENCE FICTION, FANTASY, AND HORROR FILM CREDITS Acted in: The Sentinel (Michael Winner 1977); Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Phil KAUFMAN 1978); Legend of Sleepy Hollow (tv movie) (Henning Schellerup 1980); Threshold (Richard Pearce 1981); The Right Stuff (Kaufman 1983); The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai: Across the Eighth Dimension (W. D. Richter 1984); "The Three Little Pigs" (1985), episode of Faerie Tale Theatre; Transylvania 6-5000 (Rudy DeLuca 1985); The Fly (David CRONENBERG (1986); Life Story [The Race for the Double Helix] (tv movie) (Mick Jackson 1987); Vibes (Ken Kwapis 1988); "The Town Where No One Got Off" (1989), episode of The Ray Bradbury Theater; Mr. Frost (Phillipe Setbon 1990); Captain Planet and the Planeteers (animated tv series; voice) (1990–1993); Earth Girls Are Easy (Julian Temple 1990); Jurassic Park (Steven SPIELBERG 1993); Futurequest (tv documentary series) (1994); Powder (Victor Salva 1995); Independence Day (Roland Emmerich 1996); "A Fish Called Selma" (animated; voice) (1996), episode of The Simpsons; The Lost World (Spielberg 1997); The Prince of Egypt (animated; voice) (Brenda Chapman, Steve Hickner, and Simon Wells 1998); From Star Wars to Star Wars: The Story of Industrial Light and Magic (tv documentary) (Jon Kroll 1999); Cats and Dogs (Lawrence Guterman 2001). In the 1950s, a scientist starring in a science fiction film was invariably suave, handsome, and muscular, the sort of fellow who quarterbacked his college football team to a championship before settling into a career as the world's most brilliant scientific mind. Producers of that era imagined this was the sort of hero their young male viewers wanted, and they were probably right. But filmgoers of all ages grew older and wiser, and by the 1980s we were all willing to accept the fact that male scientists are usually frail, nervous, nerdish sorts of guys. And nobody played those parts better than Jeff Goldblum. Goldblum first attracted attention as the co-star of the short-lived television series Tenspeed and Brownshoe, playing a bookish fellow obsessed with detective novels who attempts to navigate the real world of crime-solving while mentored by a streetwise Ben Vereen. Recognized from the very start as someone who could appear intelligent on the screen, he was a natural choice for Ichabod Crane in a television production of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and was cast as a college graduate turned writer for People magazine in The Big Chill (1983). But he didn't impress anyone with his work in The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai: Across the Eighth Dimension or Transylvania 6-5000—how could he, in such films?—which is why his work in David CRONENBERG's The Fly came as a surprise. Only minimally aided by the special effects, Goldblum cunningly acted more and more like a fly, not only making his transformation more persuasively horrific than the original film's David HEDISON donning a fly head but also conveying the intriguing notion that contemporary scientists, who may feel obliged to work very hard at the start of their careers in fear of an early burnout, have lives which are not entirely unlike those of the constantly moving, short-lived fly. Incredibly, Goldblum came close to emulating Fredric March as an Oscar-winning monster. Goldblum also displayed his talents in a lesser film, Earth Girls Are Easy: while screen partners Jim Carrey and Damon Wayans are doing their shticks, Goldblum is actually acting, inventively portraying both the uneasiness and delight of an alien discovering the pleasures of being a human being. But Goldblum was becoming typecast as Hollywood's favorite scientist in roles that seemed increasingly uninteresting to him—as one of the discoverers of the structure of DNA in Life Story; gaping in awe at empty spaces soon to be filled with computer-animated dinosaurs in Steven SPIELBERG's less-than-gripping Jurassic Park and The Lost World; and saving the planet Earth with the help of Will Smith in the rousing but silly Independence Day. As Goldblum struggles to maintain his status as a Hollywood star, it may simply be that he is now at the awkward age for science fiction films—too old to play the heroic young scientist, too young to play the older scientist with a beautiful daughter. One certainly hopes that he will be able to find better movies than Cats and Dogs, because you don't have to be a rocket scientist to know that Goldblum deserves much better than that.

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