Brews and brows: shaping stories from eyebrows to scousebrows

Abstract

The distinctive acting style of María Félix (1914–2002), the highest-paid star of the Golden Age of Mexican cinema between the 1930s and 1950s, combined expansive physical movements with an eyebrow arch that served as a self-referential synecdoche for her star persona. During the course of writing her monograph on Félix,1 Niamh Thornton noticed the recurring use of the image of her eyebrow on the cover of several academic books, and yet it had rarely garnered any close analysis.2 Félix moved between highly stylised masculine and feminine performativity throughout her career, and her arched eyebrow was central to these hard-to-read yet iconic performances (figure 1). Her performative style fell into the ambiguous space between drag and masquerade, similar to that identified by Martin Shingler in relation to Bette Davis’s work on screen.3 Christine Geraghty has indicated that such gestures are an integral part of the tool-kit for actors to tell stories and convey emotion.4 In a recent edition of the textbook Film Art, David Bordwell, Kristin Thompson and Jeff Smith highlight the importance of eyebrows in shaping an actor’s performance and how an actor is read. They outline various shapes, angles and thicknesses to the eyebrow and detail how it may change the actor’s face.5 Beyond this, however, not much has been written in film studies about the significance of the brow to an actor’s performance.