February 19, 1999
Camille Cooper Presents “What
Price Beauty?” at Middlebury College on March 3
— Noted Actor to Speak on Hollywood’s
Fascination with Thinness
“We retouch every photograph
of any girl over the age of fourteen.” —Ray the Retoucher,
a Los Angeles-based retouching lab
“More and more girls are getting
anorexia at an early age (10 or 11) because they know they are
expected to be thin.” —National Institute of Mental Health
On Wednesday, March 3 at 8 p.m. at
Middlebury College, actor Camille Cooper will offer a look at
Hollywood’s perspective on women’s beauty. In “What Price
Beauty?,” a multi-media presentation described as dynamic
and empowering, Camille Cooper delivers a unique, humorous, and
insightful look at a media industry obsessed with thinness and
stereotypically defined beauty. Free and open to the public, the
event will take place in the McCullough Student Center on Old
Stone Row, off Route 30.
At the age of 17, film and television
star Camille Cooper’s first acting role—with Dudley Moore and
Kirk Cameron in “Like Father, Like Son”—brought her
into contact with Rod Daniel, the film’s director. His first words
to her were, “Lose the baby fat.” Embarrassed and ashamed,
Cooper, then a five-and-a-half foot, 125-pound teenager, shed
15 more pounds and ended up in the hospital with a bleeding ulcer.
In her presentation, “What Price
Beauty?,” Cooper explores the national preoccupation with
Hollywood’s bone-thin starlets. She observes that although many
letters to magazines such as Elle and Glamour question the desirability
of presenting skeletal young women as the ideal, that particular
image prevails as a pinnacle of American female beauty.
“What Price Beauty” uses
multi-media imagery to describe how women are conditioned at a
very young age to believe that only certain roles are socially
acceptable for them, and how the majority of that conditioning
focuses on women’s physical appearance, thereby influencing them
from pre-puberty to post-menopause to equate their achievement—or
non-achievement—of fashionable beauty with their validity as
human beings in our society. Cooper’s presentation suggests that
such pressure contributes to women’s systemic struggle with low
self-esteem, depression, eating disorders, and ill health. She
points out that psychiatrists diagnose anorexia nervosa
when a patient weighs at least 15% less than what is considered
healthy, and that female actors and models typically weigh 23%
less than the average healthy woman. By using before-and-after
slides to demonstrate how retouching, lighting, and camera filters
routinely distort a woman’s actual looks, Cooper lifts the veil
of illusion to discover the truth about the media’s standard of
beauty—it is a fabrication, a parlor trick impossible to convert
from the printed page or video image to actual life.
Offering supportive information to
help people withstand the onslaught of the media’s beauty hype,
“What Price Beauty?” has been described by students
and educators as “shocking,” “uplifting,”
and “a relief.”
Camille Cooper is perhaps best known
for her portrayal of Nikki Langon on “General Hospital.”
She has worked professionally in film and television for the past
ten years, starring in five motion pictures and more than ten
other television series, including “Knots Landing.”
Since 1994 she has been active in Women in Film, co-chairing that
organization’s Committee for the Empowerment of Young Women. Dedicated
to forging strong bonds between women and girls to help meet challenges
and overcome obstacles created by the damaging preoccupation with
physical beauty, committee members share the realities of their
lives as professional women in the film and television industry.
“I’m really looking forward to
Ms. Cooper’s presentation,” said Mary Duffy, women’s studies
administrator at Middlebury College. “It is important for
all of us to recognize this issue, and we hope that a good mix
of men and women will attend—especially parents and their daughters.
It’s great that the show will also be at UVM on March 1, before
coming to Middlebury on March 3. That will give the community
a couple of chances to gain Ms. Cooper’s first-hand perspective.”
For more information contact Mary Duffy,
Middlebury College’s women’s studies administrator, at 802-443-5937.