STARS WHO PLAYED OTHER STARS

THE GOOD

• Bette Davies as Joan Crawford

Her relationship with Joan Crawford was dubbed Hollywood's "divine feud" so imagine Bette's delight when she realized she could play the role of an Oscar-winning actress who refuses to admit that her career was over as if she was Joanie! The character's name changed but this was a better Crawford impersonation than Faye Dunaway's in Mommie Dearest.

• Rudolph Nureyev as Valentino

When you're playing the greatest screen lover ever, you need charisma above all and Nureyev, at his first real film role, has it in spades even if his technique sometimes lets him down.

THE BAD

• James Brolin as Clarke Gable

Jimmy must have a certain something because he has wed diva of divas, Barbra Streisand. But whatever "it" is, is not apparent in this 1976 biopic where he plays the King of Hollywood. But it was a stretch for an actor best known as a guest on Markus Welby MD. Not that the script helped. As he inspects the wreckage of the plain in which his wife Carole Lombard had died, what does the King of Hollywood say? "I told her she should have taken the train". That's pathos. Or bathos

• Guy Pearce as Errol Flynn

When Pearce was still mainly known as wimpy teacher on Neighbours, he appeared in the biopic Flynn. If Errol had been alive when this was made it wouldn't have been called a biopic, it would have been called libellous.
THE UGLY

• Misty Rowe as Marilyn Monroe

Hollywood has been saying goodbye to Marilyn for 47 years now but never quite as nastily as in this sexploitation account of her rise. Six rapes later (and memorable dialogue like "I am somebody, I really am somebody") she has passed her first screen test. Rowe allegedly has a daughter called Dreama Jane but that may be just something her enemies have put around to discredit her.

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