Pretty Women: Why Does Hollywood Hate Redheads?

Pretty Women: Why Does Hollywood Hate Redheads?

Posted on Tuesday February 16, 2010, 15:17 by Kat Brown in Empire States

Twenty years after Pretty Woman cemented red hair’s association with prostitution*, I’m looking at a rare breed of screen redheads. When I first saw, and fell in love with, Pretty Woman, I was a gangly ginger kid being picked on at school. “Never mind,” I thought, “by the time you’re an adult there’s sure to be loads of mainstream films with glamorous redheads in them.”

Well, I was half-right: there are whole cinematic genres based around gangly kids being picked on in school, but redheads? Not so much. While television has welcomed gingers with open arms thanks to the likes of Desperate Housewives, Mad Men, True Blood and Grey’s Anatomy, the big screen has proven to be a lot slower: the quirky redhead remains an art house or indie staple but has not made it into the mainstream. With just Amy Adams, Isla Fisher and Julianne Moore leading the charge of redheaded A-list leading ladies, and even fewer leading men beyond Damian Lewis and Kevin McKidd, Moore’s joke to fellow ginger Conan O’Brien that they should form a club seems less of a giggle and more depressing.

Why so few? Well, for starters, they are the few. At only 1-2 percent of the world’s population, redheads are rare. Natural blondes are nearly as rare at 2 percent, but significantly more people fake blonde so the numbers are amped up. Watching Stuart Hazeldine’s Exam (see below), it intrigued me that while pains were made to feature pretty much every other hair and race permutation, redheads didn’t get a look in. I prodded Chris to include a question in the Empire Exam papers asking why there weren’t any, resulting in “Who knows?” “Damian Lewis wasn’t available” and “Maybe I sub-consciously hate them.”

Fewer excuses – on, my God, so many levels – for Couples Retreat, whose UK poster campaign re-cast Malin Akerman’s wholly redheaded character as a blonde. Increasingly it appears that, while cartoonishly scarlet hair à la Red Sonja or GI Joe is fine on film posters, auburn hair is being toned down to avoid scaring the horses. Fine if you find red hair a bit on the weird side, but bloody annoying if you’re a ginger yourself.

Cate Blanchett in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Bryce Dallas Howard in The Village, Emma Stone in The Rocker and Nicole Kidman in To Die For all played ginger characters who were blonded or brunette-d for the poster. Spider-Man 2 cunningly merged Mary Jane’s hair with a flaming skyline and to this day Pretty Woman’s poster shows Titian Roberts with the scraggy brown locks of a dodgy bathroom dye job. Hepburn and Hayworth were lucky they could hide behind black and white.

So why should we care? Well, because films are a huge part of your life and occasionally it’s quite nice to have someone who looks like you on the big screen. If you see people on the street and can’t recognise them in the cinema, then you start to wonder what’s wrong with you. Thankfully, today’s little redhead girls have their own Disney princess in Amy Adams’ Enchanted as well as Harry Potter’s Ginny; Sex and the City fans can forget the horrors of redheaded car-crash Miranda thanks to Isla Fisher’s Confessions of a Shopaholic; while women who like thinking as well as fashion have Julianne Moore full-stop. Slowly, redheads are being promoted from the quirky best friend to centre stage: girls who don’t have “redhead tempers” and who don’t get ditched for a blonde or brunette once their exoticism’s been exhausted. Redhead boys have Damian Lewis, Eric Stoltz, Ron Weasley and then it’s back to TV.

And still the fact remains that the most iconic cinematic redhead of all time is a prostitute who ends up with Richard Gere. Much as I love Pretty Woman, I’ve got to hope that the next crop of ginger kids cling on to the Weasley family instead.

*Another Mary Magdalene; thanks for that.