Mel Gibson (Vanity Fair, 1997) – To meet Mel Gibson, the amazingly blue-eyed, velvet-voiced, $20 million movie king, is to run into a wall of good humor and matinee-idol glamour. And yet, Cathy Horyn discovers, Gibson the practical joker may also be Gibson the thinker of dark thoughts, a man not unlike the revolutionary of Braveheart or the half-lunatic cabdriver he plays in his big summer movie, Conspiracy Theory.
Mel Gibson—The Heartthrob Factor (Vanity Fair, 1989) – The sexiest man alive? “Nah,” says Mel Gibson, whose Lethal Weapon II opens this month. He subscribes wholeheartedly to the Australian Male Ethic, and just wants to be one of the guys. But, writes Stephen Schiff, the gods have created him in the form of a heartthrob.
Geena Davis is the perfect movie star for the nineties (Vanity Fair, 1992) – Geena Davis is the perfect movie star for the nineties: she’s the most offhanded sex goddess since Rita Hayworth, and the liberated virago who blazed her way through the Zeitgeist as the co-star of Thelma & Louise. Now she’s stepping up to a lead role in Stephen Frear’s Hero. Kevin Sessums reports.
Mark Wahlberg (Vanity Fair, 2001) – How did a hip-hop punk who made his name modeling Calvin Klein underwear end up in Paris playing the Cary Grant role in Jonathan Demme’s upcoming remake of Charade? Mark Wahlberg, formerly rapper Marky Mark, turned to acting with all the determination, grit, and bad-boy charm that helped him survive Boston’s mean streets—and a stint in prison for taking out a man’s eye. On the eve of Wahlberg’s $10 million leading-man debut in Tim Burton’s Planet of the Apes, Leslie Bennetts and the 30-year-old star try to reconcile the darkness of his past with the brilliance of his future.
