Acting well is hard enough — but when parts of your face don’t seem to move, it’s even harder. In the age of high-definition TV, it’s easy to become unnaturally fixated on the frozen forehead — broad as the Hoover Dam and just as impenetrable — and the mouth that only opens partway (“What did she say?”).
But more and more performers have chosen to go forward with this Zen face, where no ripples of emotion can disturb the placid surface — and the trend hasn’t stopped Jessica Lange, Madeleine Stowe, Shirley MacLaine, Michael Douglas, Stockard Channing and other stars from getting work on good shows. You have to see it to believe it.
Elizabeth McGovern, ‘Downton Abbey’
In her 1920s “Downton Abbey” camouflage, Elizabeth McGovern blends nicely into the ornate background — but here, in this video for her band’s new album out Thursday, she exudes a youthfulness that belies her age of 53.
Stockard Channing, ‘The Good Wife’
The Broadway lioness has been around so long that she was in her mid-thirties when she played high school student Rizzo in the film version of “Grease” — way back in 1978. In this clip from “The Good Wife,” Channing, now 70, plays the mother of star Julianna Margulies, 48 — but looks like her older sister instead.
Madeleine Stowe, ‘Revenge’
A Morticia Addams for our troubled times, Madeleine Stowe went from film industry ingenue to camp goddess in her portrait of Victoria Grayson on ABC’s “Revenge.”
Leading with her drive-in movie forehead, Stowe takes no prisoners, and in the videos below — one as herself at a Paley Center panel discussion on the show, the other a classic scene from “Revenge” — she appears to be at home with her new self.
Jessica Lange, ‘American Horror Story’
Once she played Big Edie in HBO’s “Grey Gardens,” there was no turning back for Jessica Lange. She embraced her inner Gothic actress with a relish not seen since the high-camp brilliance of Bette Davis in “Baby Jane” and “Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte,” Joan Crawford in “Berserk!” and Tallulah Bankhead in “Die! Die! My Darling!”
Taut of forehead, skin stretched tight as a bongo drum, Lange was the perfect choice for the Emmy-winning, scary central figures of each installment of “American Horror Story,” captured in these two compilation clips.
Shirley MacLaine, ‘Downton Abbey’
Here’s a math quiz: Which actress is older — Maggie Smith or Shirley MacLaine? Cast as rich rivals on “Downton Abbey,” they collide and engage in genteel bickering, with one important difference: One can understand everything Smith says. Not so much with MacLaine, who speaks out of the side of her mouth.
Funny how the Hollywood-bred MacLaine, who was born in April 1934, looks younger than the British Smith, born in December of the same year.
Michael Douglas, ‘Behind the Candelabra’
As Liberace, Michael Douglas delivered a tour-de-farce performance that brought him an Emmy and a Golden Globe.
No problem there; he completely captured the baroque personality and bottomless vanity of the legendary entertainer, who insisted that his young lover have plastic surgery so that he could look more like . . . Liberace. But now Douglas, who miraculously survived a bout of throat cancer, looks way younger than his 70 years.