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(1952– ). American actor.
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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