The Actor Factor

As pop temptress Rihanna embarks on her maiden voyage of discovery, in the acting world, aboard Peter Berg’s Battleship, it’s as good as time as any to take a brief look at how other chart-toppers have fared upon leaving the relative comfort of the recording studio to try their hand at this alternative profession! Rihanna isn’t the first honey to don combats. Kylie’s already been there, done that… and surprisingly good in them she looked too. Street Fighter was terrible, also based on a video/computer game, but she was sufficiently distracting to take our attention from villain Raul Julia’s over-the-top performance. Sometimes the line is blurred as to whether or not a singer is a singer, from the outset of their career, or an actor/actress first. Kylie Minogue started out in Neighbours, of course, and she recently returned to acting for a one-off appearance in Doctor Who, appropriately on board the luxury Starship Titanic, but she’s best known as a pop starlet whose snug bottom fits golden hot pants to perfection! Rihanna’s debut, as Raikes, looks like being an even more explosive affair, as she kicks butt all the way to kingdom come, although the director insists that, unlike other movies of this type, Battleship doesn’t lose sight of its characters.

Billie Piper trained as an actress but started in show business, at the tender age of 16, as a pop star and it wasn’t until she joined the cast of Doctor Who that anyone seemed to realise. Unlike Kylie, we won’t be hearing any new recordings from Billie for a while… she now seems embarrassed by her former career and has put it well and truly behind her! The same seems to be the case for Hannah Spearritt. After initial success with S Club 7, she’s perhaps better known, at present, for her starring role in Primeval. But will she find any more acting work in the future, once the ITV sci-fi series has expired for good? Irish songstress Samantha Mumba also had a brief flirtation with the genre, when she appeared in the most recent adaptation of HG Wells’ The Time Machine, but it doesn’t seem to have led to greater roles or a return to pop. Britney Spears dabbled, in buddy movie Crossroads (no, not the Birmingham-based soap opera of the same name!), but seems happier when strutting her funky star-spangled stuff (spank her booty, one more time)!! The less said about Madonna the better, except when blow-drying her armpits, while playing herself opposite Rosanna Arquette, in Desperately Seeking Susan.

Perhaps the most successful collaborations between pop singers and moviemakers has occurred when the groove merchants have teamed up with director Nicolas Roeg. First there was Mick Jagger, working with James Fox, in gangster flick Performance. Art Garfunkel had a tempestuous relationship with Roeg’s wife, Theresa Russell, in Bad Timing. Best of all, however, was when David Bowie played alien Thomas Jerome Newton in Nic’s adaptation of Walter Tevis’s novel The Man Who Fell To Earth. I suppose you could argue Bowie was playing himself, after a succession of pop alter egos that include Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane and The Thin White Duke, but the result is still one of the most thought-provoking science fiction films about alienation ever made. Bowie’s had a reasonably successful stint as an actor, also starring in Tony Scott’s dreamlike vampire-fest The Hunger; as a goblin in Terry Jones’s Labyrinth, a sort of cross between Monty Python and Sesame Street; and alongside Tom Conti and Ryuichi Sakamoto in harrowing prisoner of war saga Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence. He even made a cameo in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks prequel Fire Walk With Me. So, I guess you could say the Starman is multitalented!