‘Cutthroat Island’: the movie that brought Geena Davis’ career rise to a grinding halt
Geena Davis was the Julia Roberts of the 1980s. With picture-perfect dimples and flawless comic timing, she stole every scene she entered in 1982’s Tootsie and rocketed to the top of the list of Hollywood’s most promising newcomers. Although she could easily have been typecast as a romantic comedy star, she struck out into varied territory, starring in everything from David Cronenberg’s The Fly to Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice.
As the ’90s rolled around, Davis continued to take consistently stellar parts, including as a timid housewife who escapes her controlling husband for a road trip crime spree with her best friend in Ridley Scott’s Thelma and Louise and as a baseball star in Penny Marshall’s A League of Their Own. She was an actor who could do just about anything and had already won an Oscar to prove it. But just when she was at the apex of fame, her career came to a sudden halt.
In 1993, one year after her Oscar nomination for the wildly successful Thelma and Louise, Davis married director Renny Harlin, who had directed Die Hard 2 and the Sylvester Stallone mountaineering thriller Cliffhanger. He wanted to turn her into an action star, so he cast her in the 1995 film Cutthroat Island. In it, Davis plays a pirate who races to find an island with buried treasure. The production was beset with problems from the scripting stage, causing multiple delays in shooting. When shooting finally did begin, things got even worse. Key crew members quit, one broke their leg falling off a crane, and sewage filled the tank where the actors were meant to swim for underwater sequences.
When the film was released, it flopped hard and sustained the biggest loss of any movie up to that point. “I mean, who knows for sure why a film doesn’t work?” producer Joel Michaels said to The New York Times in 1998. “One can only conjecture, but I think the audience didn’t want to see a woman in a role that has traditionally been held by a man. What woman in the annals of film has been a consistent action star?”
When Davis and Harlin teamed up a year later for another action movie, The Long Kiss Goodnight, they were more conservative with the story and the budget, but it was only a modest success. The fact that Davis did, in fact, make a knockout action hero was apparently lost on audiences at the time. A year later, Harlin fathered a child with Davis’s personal assistant, and the acrimonious divorce further sank the actor’s status in Hollywood.
She took two years off, telling The New York Times that she needed time to reflect. When discussing which roles she planned to take, she said that she didn’t want to do action any time soon. “The word I would extract from my thinking over the past two years is ‘back.'” she said, “‘I want to go back.'”
Unfortunately, Hollywood didn’t seem to want her to go forward, either. When she started looking for roles again, she was cast as the mother in the children’s movie Stuart Little and quickly discovered that the range of parts that she’d enjoyed several years ago were no longer being offered to her.
Speaking to Vulture in 2011, she said, “Film roles really did start to dry up when I got into my 40s. If you look at IMDB, up until that age, I made roughly one film a year. In my entire 40s, I made one movie, Stuart Little“.
