“I didn’t have the pipes, I guess”: The actor Scarlett Johansson always wanted to be
At the moment, there’s an interesting head-to-head going on in the upper echelons of Hollywood, and that’s the back and forth between Zoe Saldaña and Scarlett Johansson for the title of ‘highest-grossing actor in history’.
For some time now, the two stars have swapped places for first and second while Samuel L Jackson watches enviously on in third place; every time one of the women releases a new movie, usually some kind of blockbuster, they reclaim their crown until the other does the same.
At the time of writing it is Johansson who can currently lay claim to being cinema history’s highest-grossing actor, with a running total of a scarcely believable $15.47billion, which was nicely topped up last year when the critically panned Jurassic World Rebirth pulled in $869million at the box office, illustrating that movie goers don’t really care too much about things like plot points as long as they get to see plenty of people getting munched by CGI ornithopods in a variety of increasingly spectacular ways.
Johansson, much as she’s fond of a popcorn franchise as her extensive work on Marvel’s Avengers, Transformers, Jurassic World and the Sing movies shows, is also more than able to pivot to more serious fare; with acclaimed roles in films like Noah Baumbach’s A Marriage Story and Spike Jonze’s AI masterpiece Her from 2013 outlining her generational ability all too well.
And although she had success as a child actor in the late 1990s, it was that kind of movie that saw her breakthrough, with Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation, co-starring Bill Murray in 2003, the melancholy romantic comedy set in Tokyo that was shot on a budget of just $4m but pulled in $118m on release.
The film was nominated for four Oscars, winning the Academy Award for ‘Best Screenplay’ for Coppola, and Johansson also picked up a Golden Globe award for ‘Best Actress’. She would then go on to mix commercial hits with more dramatic roles, and has spoken about one particular female influence on her career from years gone by.
She told Vanity Fair, “I watched a lot of movies from the golden age of Hollywood and was an enormous Judy Garland fan. She was so beautiful and vulnerable, and was such an incredible actor to watch on film. Her performances all felt so emotionally pure and available.”
Garland, like Johansson, was a huge star who found fame at a young age with 1939’s The Wizard of Oz, and although she died at just 47, she had a long career with a number of historic performances, not least 1954’s A Star is Born and 1961’s war trial epic Judgment at Nuremberg, both of which earned her Oscar nominations.
Garland was also a singer, although the modern actor is humble about any potential comparisons to her hero, once telling the Dinner Party Download, “When I was really young, of course, I thought I was going to be Judy Garland. You know, that didn’t happen. I didn’t have the pipes, I guess. Not the same pipes anyway.”
Nevertheless, Johannson has released two studio albums, both of which were well received, one of covers, 2008’s Anywhere I Lay My Head and Break Up a year later. On the movie front, it looks like she’s heading back to blockbusters as she’s signed on to reboot The Exorcist, joining Laurence Fishburne on the reimagining of William Friedkin’s classic, which will be directed by horror expert Mike Flanagan.
