Word: comic
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...this week's release of Boomerang, his first film in two years. From the moment in 1980 when he burst onto Saturday Night Live, Murphy had the audience's eye. More, he had their affection; not just his talent but his boyish good nature won him that. And because comic charisma radiated through the characters he played on SNL, Murphy was able to jump from TV-sketch artist to big-screen draw. He took two roles Richard Pryor had rejected, in 48 HRS. and Trading Places, and overtook Pryor as the top black film star. He stepped into a Sylvester...
...stopped going to his films. Harlem Nights earned a respectable $60 million at the North American box office; Another 48 HRS., $80 million. Two: he hasn't lost his potential. "There are only a few others -- Robin Williams, Billy Crystal, Steve Martin -- in Eddie's league as a brilliant comic talent," says Jeffrey Katzenberg, the Disney sachem who worked with the young Eddie at Paramount and is shepherding Murphy's next film, Distinguished Gentlemen, at Disney. "Just as important, he's realigned his management team and has a great relationship with Brandon Tartikoff at Paramount. He's an ambitious, nailed...
...scene a lively child named Khandra Mkhize gives a little speech, with wide eyes and beautifully broad gestures, and Eddie mimics her, gesture for gesture, charm for charm. This is what he has always been: not just the performer but the audience too. He's us, with a little comic genius on the side...
...political creature, but these days everything is political. To stand in the middle of the mainstream, without being washed away by more violent social currents, is a bold stand in itself. So Eddie wants to please everyone. He's done it before. And on the evidence of this ingratiating comic fantasy, he's boomeranging back...
...lifelong fan, I keep waiting for the comic heroine of The Philadelphia Story to enter. Wouldn't Tracy Lord have chastened Dexter with a blithe reprimand and moved on? If not humor, what about understanding and empathy? But these, the critics found, were the very qualities she had trouble conveying, which limited her to light comedies and, in later years, to playing starchy, irascible eccentrics. Hepburn was dogged for years by Dorothy Parker's famous put-down of her performance in the Broadway play The Lake: "Katharine Hepburn runs the gamut of emotion from A to B." If her parents...