The exact moment Madonna did the world a favour and realised her acting career was over: “I hate to admit it”
Nobody in their right mind is going to argue against Madonna being called one of the most influential, innovative, and iconic performers the music industry has ever seen, but it’s a lot harder to try and defend her work as an actor.
Since making her narrative feature debut in 1985’s Desperately Seeking Susan, the ‘Queen of Pop’ appeared in 18 live-action movies, and her track record does not make for encouraging reading. While there have been occasional bright spots, the overwhelming majority of her filmography is utter cack.
Obviously, it would be remiss not to point out that she’s a Golden Globe-winning actor, having scooped the ‘Best Actress – Musical or Comedy’ prize for Evita, which also gives her the distinction of winning every major acting award she’s ever been nominated for. Sure, it’s only happened once, but she’s undefeated.
She was undoubtedly great in Evita, and her turns in A League of Their Own, Dick Tracy, and the aforementioned Desperately Seeking Susan all passed muster. The rest? Not so much. In fact, the rest of her credits combined to form such an egregious body of work that no less of an entity than science itself declared her to be the single worst actor in the history of cinema.
Sylvester Stallone is the only person to have ever won more Razzies than Madonna, too, where she’s racked up five ‘Worst Actress’ wins, two for ‘Worst Supporting Actress’, and shared one for ‘Worst Screen Couple’, not to mention that she was designated ‘Worst Actor of the Century’ for every movie that had been made between 1900 and 1999, so the bad heavily outweighs the good.
She hasn’t appeared in a live-action picture since 2002’s Die Another Day, hasn’t played a fictional flesh-and-blood character since she swung by an episode of Will & Grace as Liz the following year, and hasn’t taken an onscreen gig in a movie of any kind since a voice-only turn in 2006’s Arthur and the Invisibles.
In what’s almost certainly not a coincidence, that was also the year Madonna signalled her acting adventures were over for good. “I hate to admit it, but I’ve decided to give that up,” she confirmed. “How can any film survive if everyone says it’s going to be a flop from the very day the project is even conceived?”
The answer would be to make better films, something she hadn’t been doing for a while, but she made it sound like there was a conspiracy afoot. “It’s already dead in the water,” she suggested. “To continue to try and do films with the knowledge that everyone will just spit on them, and enjoy doing so, just doesn’t make sense to me any more.”
Again, choosing better material and not giving terrible performances would solve that problem in an instant, but she turned her hand to directing instead. That didn’t go any better, to be fair, with Madonna’s two behind-the-camera efforts, Filth and W.E., hardly being showered in the critical praise that bypassed most of her acting oeuvre.
