Where have you gone, Clark Gable? Hollywood redefines what it means to be a movie star

Timothée Chalamet in “Marty Supreme.”

Suddenly asked to perform in front of an audience, Alan Swann panics.

“I’m not an actor,” he protests, desperately. “I’m a movie star!”

Peter O’Toole’s plea in “My Favorite Year” got one of the biggest laughs in that very funny 1982 film. But it also made a serious point.

Although some rare people — like O’Toole, actually — excelled at both, being an actor and being a star are different jobs. And while they are equally important jobs, they rarely get the same amount of respect, particularly around awards time.

Draw up a list of the folks who have been picking up acting honors lately and you won’t see any mention of Brad Pitt or Brendan Fraser. George Clooney won one award for “Jay Kelly,” but only from — ouch — AARP.

But without Pitt’s effortless charisma, “F1” would just be a movie about cars going in circles. Without Fraser’s warm, big-lug decency, “Rental Family” would be a collection of cultural clichés. And “Jay Kelly” is practically unworkable without a genuine movie star like Clooney in the lead.

Critics might carp that those actors were just playing themselves — that they don’t deserve any special kind of acknowledgement. But while actors are often prized for being able to assume any role, a performer’s instant, constant, audience-friendly familiarity can be just as essential to great cinema.

It’s a quality that is often devalued, because we have been taught — by critics, by actors themselves — to marvel at a performer’s range. A light comedian plays a drunk in a drama and we’re immediately stunned; a great beauty ditches the glam to play a terminally ill patient and the Oscar drumbeat begins.

But the romantic leading man playing a romantic leading man, again? Yawn.

Teyana Taylor and Sean Penn in “One Battle After Another.”

Certainly versatility can be impressive. In 50 years of acting, Sean Penn has played a surfer dude, a weaselly lawyer, a mentally challenged father, a convicted killer, a heroic gay activist and more. In his latest film, “One Battle After Another,” he plays a sexually twisted fascist, a made-to-be-hissed villain with the world’s worst haircut.

For a surprising change, Penn’s showy tour de force isn’t the one that has been garnering all the awards. Just recently at the Golden Globes, that honor against went to one of the film’s other supporting players, Benicio del Toro — whose powerful performance is based on nothing more, or less, than the actor’s quiet, unfussy, inherent gravitas. But Del Toro’s wins this season are really the exception that proves the rule. Usually when it comes to handing out awards, the actors who aren’t shouting or sweating, who are supposedly just confidently being themselves, are the ones who are overlooked.

And yet they are the sort of performers the movies need more of.

At first, the studios wouldn’t even credit actors onscreen, knowing that fame brought power. They were right, too. “We had faces then,” Gloria Swanson bragged in “Sunset Boulevard,” but it wasn’t until those faces had names that they became stars. Fabulously rich ones, too. At her peak in the ‘20s, Swanson was making $7500 a week — when the average American made less than $30.

But stars also gave studios a powerful marketing tool, with every silver screen icon becoming a kind of brand name. Soon, you didn’t just go to the movies. You went to see “the new Garbo.” They weren’t just performers, they were an imprimatur of quality; you might enjoy song-and-dance shows, but “a Fred and Ginger musical” meant something special.

The stars who truly lasted developed their own personas — a unique, distinctive personality that persisted from film to film. Humphrey Bogart pretended to be cynical, but still had a code of honor. Joan Crawford suffered — oh, how she suffered. And Robert Mitchum didn’t give a tinker’s damn what the hell you thought.

It was an age of icons.

Jack Nicholson in “Chinatown.”

Even after the studio system collapsed, the power of personality remained. Although actors now created their own projects, and often pushed to play a variety of parts, the biggest stars regularly radiated some special something. Whatever the movie, you knew at some point, Al Pacino was going to shout. Jack Nicholson would take on the establishment. Diane Keaton would be, indefinably, Diane Keaton.

Even as the years went on, even within genres, the stars set the style. A Bruce Willis action flick was not the same as a Sly Stallone action flick. An Adam Sandler comedy went for different kinds of laughs than a Will Ferrell comedy.

But then the superhero tsunami hit, and the landscape changed. Suddenly the star was no longer the star; the intellectual property was. Fans showed up because it was Spider Man, not because it was Tobey Maguire (or Andrew Garfield, or Tom Holland). The lead actor no longer had to be a name. The hero didn’t even need to look particularly heroic; physical flaws were hidden under masks and costumes, and the rest tweaked with special effects.

And that’s when the star system truly began to fade away.

There are a few old-fashioned stars still around. The eternally boyish Tom Cruise continues to grin, and run, and reliably deliver action-movie entertainment. And there is a new generation of actors coming up, ready to fill such time-honored Hollywood job descriptions as Cocky Hunk (Glen Powell) and Smoldering Sexpot (Sydney Sweeney) — although the box-office jury is still out on their staying power.

Yet significantly, the most successful young actor today isn’t known for a consistent onscreen persona, but his mercurial talent.

Timothée Chalamet in “A Great Unknown.”

In just a little over a decade onscreen, Timothée Chalamet has built a broad base of fans without relying on any kind of predictable image beyond “youth.” What is a typical Chalamet character? A manic ping-pong player, a sexually uncertain teen, Bob Dylan, Willy Wonka, Paul Atreides? What, even, is a typical Chalamet movie?

Right now, it seems, anything different — which is exactly all his fans need to know.

And maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe it’s a nice change that successful movies are no longer driven by stars playing and replaying dependable archetypes. Certainly it’s more exciting for actors to be able to take on a variety of parts rather than carefully cultivating the same character in film after film. (Until, thrillingly — like Henry Fonda playing the icy killer in “Once Upon a Time in the West” — they don’t.)

But honestly, there was something marvelously comforting about those days when a Clark Gable or a Jimmy Cagney or a John Wayne came onscreen and you immediately had a good idea of what kind of picture you were going to see. And if they were only playing themselves … well, that was playing a part, too. And sometimes the hardest role of all — as the great Cary Grant well knew.

“Everybody wants to be Cary Grant,” he once said. “Even I want to be Cary Grant.”

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