“It was a huge influence”: the movie Cameron Diaz has seen “a thousand times”
Cameron Diaz’s childhood favourites ended up inspiring the work she wanted to do in her career.
The 1990s saw an explosion in the popularity of comedies, which proved to be just as likely to be box office breakouts as action films, sequels, and superhero origin stories. It was a decade dominated by men, with former standups and sketch artists like Ben Stiller, Adam Sandler, Jim Carrey, and Chris Rock beginning to make a name for themselves. However, this was also the period where Cameron Diaz proved that women could be equally as successful as comedy stars.
Diaz was hardly the first Hollywood actor to be the face of a comedy, but many of the most popular female stars of earlier eras had been forced to branch out; while Julia Roberts had become a star thanks to her more comedic role in Pretty Woman, she ended up taking on more serious parts in the immediate aftermath with Sleeping with the Enemy and The Pelican Brief. Comparatively, Diaz worked almost exclusively in comedy, which is something she took pride in.
Contrary to what some have come to believe, the supposedly Golden Age of Hollywood was filled with female-lead comedies that succeeded in reaching broad audiences. Diaz said that she had become obsessed with 9 to 5, a 1980 comedy that had starred Dolly Parton, Jane Fonda, and Lily Tomlin.
“I watched it a thousand times when I was child,” she admitted, “My girlfriend had a VCR with four movies, and that was one of them. We watched it constantly, and what I loved about this movie was the same thing. It was three women that would have never come together for any other reason except they had a common cause.”
9 to 5 was a highly influential film, as it addressed the realities of the American workplace, while also presenting a progressive story about women working together. Although Fonda has already given many great performances, including two that earned her Academy Awards for ‘Best Actress’, 9 to 5 solidified her as a massive box office draw. Conversely, Parton was already a world-renowned musician, but was able to prove she was just as talented as an actor.
Getting to be part of an ensemble comedy of this type is clearly an opportunity that Diaz sought, even if it was not an easy one to achieve, as many of her earliest roles, like There’s Something About Mary, Being John Malkovich, and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, were in films dominated by men.
This trajectory changed when Diaz joined forces with Lucy Liu and Drew Barrymore to star in the 2002 film Charlie’s Angels, which was based on the action-packed spy series of the same name, and while they weren’t greeted with the kindest reviews upon their initial window of release, both Charlie’s Angels and its sequel Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle developed a cult fandom among younger female audiences that grew up with them.
Diaz took an extended leave of absence from the industry after she starred in three box office bombs in 2014 with Annie, The Other Woman, and Sex Tape, but she has now returned after a decade of inactivity, with one of her most recent films, Back in Action, allowing her to reunite with her Any Given Sunday co-star Jaime Foxx, and has become one of the most viewed films in Netflix’s history.
