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Acknowledgements
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(1952– ). American actor.
Provided
voice for animated film: Captain Planet and the Planeteers (tv
series) (1990–1993); Goosebumps: Escape from Horrorland (video game)
(Guterman 1995); "A Fish Called Selma" (1996), episode of The
Simpsons; The Lost World: Jurassic Park—Chaos Island (video
game) (1997); The Prince of Egypt (Brenda Chapman, Steve Hickner, and
Simon Wells 1998); "The Substitute Spanish Prisoner" (2002), episode of King
of the Hill; Legend of the Lost Tribe (short) (Peter Peake 2002);
two episodes (2003, 2005), Crank Yankers; "Toodle Day" (2004), episode
of Tom Goes to the Major.
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, unusually, 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 such a surprise. Only minimally aided by the special effects, Goldblum's
blundering scientist cunningly started to act more and more like a fly as the
film progressed, 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. And as he entered his forties, Goldblum faced another problem: as
science fiction films were increasingly aimed at mass audiences, producers
became less inclined to employ those unappealingly brainy scientists as lead
characters, creating more roles for the sorts of handsome hunks who used to
posture as brilliant scientists but making it harder and harder to cast someone
like Jeff Goldblum.
Thus, the last decade has witnessed the
collapse of a once-promising career, as Goldblum has drifted into performing in
television series, in direct-to-DVD movies, and as a voice in animated films. As
a measurement of his steady decline toward obscurity, it was bad enough in 2001
that he was reduced to appearing in Cats and Dogs, but nine years later,
he was not even invited back to perform in its sure-to-be-even-more-dreadful
sequel. One hopes that somebody in Hollywood remembers Jeff Goldblum and will
think of him when a suitable part arises—perhaps as a father-figure to a new
generation of horny alien teenagers in a sequel to Earth Girls Are Easy?
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