Crazy Wins: Oscar Loves an Insane Character

Why does it take a nervous breakdown to get a girl noticed in Hollywood?

If you want to know why Natalie Portman is a shoo-in for the Oscar, here's one answer. It's not just that she lost 20 pounds for the role, spent nearly a year practicing ballet, and delivered a performance that made us forget she was once the annoying Queen Amidala.

It's because she played a crazy chick. Nina, Portman's overachieving ballerina, reads like a chapter from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

There's the obsessive-compulsive. There's the paranoid. There's the borderline personality and schizophrenia, says Mark Heyman, one of the film's writers. Heyman didn't consult a doctor for any help with the character. He asked his mother. She's a therapist.

"Mad Men" might rule TV, but crazy chicks have conquered the big screen. Not only do actresses win Academy Awards by playing insane -- just ask Kathy Bates ("Misery"), Nicole Kidman ("The Hours"), Angelina Jolie ("Girl, Interrupted"), or Jessica Lange ("Blue Sky") -- but movies featuring women beyond the verge play equally well with female and male audiences.

Women, we're told, like crazy-chick flicks because "they can console themselves, thinking, 'That woman is really attractive, but she's crazy, so I'm better than she is,'" explains Sharon Packer, a New York psychiatrist who is writing about "Black Swan" for a medical journal.

More: 'Like Crazy' takes Sundance grand jury prize

As for male audiences, Packer says, "I think it has to do with the Sir Lancelot feeling. Men might be more attracted to someone who has a degree of helplessness: Being crazy is being helpless."

Or maybe it's just that, as "Black Swan" fan Sean Kearney told us, "I can't think of a crazy girl who isn't hot." Kearney, 26, a videogame designer from Los Angeles, plans to be first in line when "The Roommate" opens Feb. 4. That film features "Gossip Girl" Leighton Meester playing an undergrad who is so delusional, she dyes her hair the same color as her roommate, Sara (Minka Kelly), slips into bed with Sara's boyfriend, and then chases everyone around with a gun.

Actresses say they enjoy playing characters who've gone around the bend because it allows them a chance to stretch.

"It's a lot of fun to act, I've got to say," says Barbara Hershey, who as the "Black Swan" matriarch plays "a mentally ill person taking care of a mentally ill person. It's a family of crazies!"

Erika Christensen, who portrayed a crazy chick in 2002's "Swimfan," says, "What appealed to me about the role was the fact that she was so different from me. She wasn't just someone where I could be playing myself."

For "The Roommate," Meester met with doctors who treated delusion. "It was really challenging," she says. "I tried to remain in the mood as much as possible."

Halle Berry, who has been missing from the screen for a while, recently received a Golden Globe nomination for her stripper with multiple personalities in "Frankie and Alice."

It goes without saying that, in real life, mental illness is a significant medical problem. Almost one in five Americans suffered some form of it in 2009, according to a study by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, and 11 million had a serious mental illness.

Nonetheless, very few people seem to get offended when Hollywood uses mental illness as a plot point.

While other Oscar contenders like "The Social Network" and "The King's Speech" have come under fire for questions about historical accuracy, the mental-health community hasn't voiced any qualms about "Black Swan" yet.

"Does it do damage?" asks Packer, the New York psychiatrist. "I think it brings attention to how prevalent eating disorders are or how perfection can drive someone to the brink. The psychiatric disorders do the damage."

The crazy chick has been a theatrical staple since the days of classic Greek drama, when vengeful women like Medea tromped around the stage, murdering their children.

Shakespeare's Ophelia went mad after her boyfriend killed her dad, and then handed out flowers like some proto-hippie before committing suicide. (Kate Winslet reprised the role in Kenneth Branagh's "Hamlet," and Kidman pays homage in "The Hours" when her Virginia Woolf drowns, Ophelia-like.)

The 1940s and '50s gave us the femmes fatales of film noir, with murderous women like Barbara Stanwyck in "Double Indemnity. "

And who could ever forget Faye Dunaway in "Mommie Dearest," her face smothered with cold cream, beating her daughter with a wire hanger?

But the actress who created the modern-day template is Glenn Close. "I'm not going to be ignored, Dan," Close warned Michael Douglas in "Fatal Attraction," before cooking him dinner (rabbit, anyone?). Ever since then, actresses have been going nuts to play women who are off their rocker.

For many actresses, playing crazy is good way to get noticed.

Audiences didn't know who Sissy Spacek was until she was crowned at the prom with pig's blood in "Carrie." Would Sharon Stone be a star if she hadn't wielded an ice pick and forgotten to wear her underwear in "Basic Instinct"? And before playing Winona Ryder's partner in crime in the loony bin in "Girl, Interrupted," Jolie was just Jon Voight's daughter.

Not only do crazy chicks light up the silver screen, they invade our homes. (And, really, how can you describe Snooki without using the words "crazy chick"?)

When Donald Trump invited Omarosa Manigault-Stallworth as a contestant on "The Apprentice" in 2004, she didn't just scheme, she came across as completely bonkers. The performance made her an overnight celebrity: Talk-show appearances and other TV gigs followed.


So did the imitators. There was Heidi Montag from "The Hills," who is so out there, she reconstructed most of her face; Paula Abdul, who slurred her way through eight seasons of "American Idol," and most of the cast of "The Bachelor" and "The Real Housewives" (we're talking about you, Danielle, from New Jersey). For these women, "crazy" is a backhanded compliment, a path on the road to fame.

Two of the most famous examples, Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan, wear the label "crazy chick" like a badge of honor, with the paparazzi trailing behind them to chronicle their every meltdown.

But for men, crazy doesn't carry the same cachet. We think of real-life terrors like Jared Lee Loughner or Jeffrey Dahmer.

"Men go crazy all the time in the real world," says Heyman, the "Black Swan" screenwriter.

The majority of insane male characters onscreen are violent sociopaths, explains Dr. Frederick Miller, founder of the Academy for Film and Psychiatry in Chicago, an organization of psychiatrists with an interest in film.

"The most classic character is probably the Joker," he says.

By contrast, mentally ill female characters tend to suffer from other personality disorders, he says, and are "women who desperately need the affection of a mate" (that is, until they stab their mate with a butcher knife).

These females aren't only more sympathetic than their male counterparts; they're a lot steamier. "The aggressive sexuality is part of the draw," says Erika Christensen. In most crazy-chick flicks, the female protagonist doesn't just lose her mind; she loses her clothes.

And sometimes she loses her sexual orientation as well. In "Chloe," Amanda Seyfried stalks Julianne Moore and winds up in her bed. And most of the Internet buzz around "Black Swan" centers on the fantasy scene where Nina and her frenemy, Lily, stage a bedroom ballet.

That's a major reason why 45 percent of "Black Swan"'s audience is male, a fact that surprised even Nancy Utley, president of Fox Searchlight, which released the Darren Aronofsky film.

When asked why men are so attracted to crazy chicks, Mila Kunis, who plays Lily, lets out a laugh.

"I can give you a [B.S.] answer," she says during the phone call. "I actually don't know. I think girls want stability and understanding, but I think..."

She's interrupted by a noise in the background.

"My father is changing a lightbulb. All my lights in my house went off at the same time. Dad, why are men attracted to crazy women?"

She pauses.

"He's thinking." She pauses again. "He won't say it. He censors himself around me. Dad, is it dirty?!"

Bristol Palin Loves Being 3,600 Miles From Her Mom

It's not always easy leaving home and starting a new life for yourself, but now that Bristol Palin has traded freezing Alaska for the dry heat of Arizona, friends tell me she has zero intention of ever returning to her mom way, way up north in Wasilla.

"Bristol loves her mom and family, but it was time for her to start her own life with her son," a friend of Bristol's tells me. "'Dancing With the Stars' changed her life. She had never left home before, and it gave her the confidence to know she can survive and finally step out of her mom's shadow."

Being a whopping 3,600 miles away from home has let Bristol make her own decisions, rather than letting her mom influence her every move.

She bought a property in Maricopa, Ariz., last year with the money she earned from 'Dancing,' and she has even met with the management at Mix 96.9 FM in Phoenix to discuss a job in radio.

"Bristol was always a shy girl," her friend tells me. "She thought she would be working in an office for the rest of her life. She thought she would always be the governor's daughter who was never as pretty or as talented as her mom. But now that has all changed."

It may not come as a surprise to hear from insiders that Sarah can be a touch overbearing at times with her kids, and I'm told she didn't exactly encourage Bristol to flee the nest at the ripe age of 20.

"All this was Bristol's doing," her friend tells me. "She wants to make it on her own and hasn't taken a penny from her now-multimillionaire mother."

Bristol has yet to comment on whether she will accept the radio job or not, but even if she doesn't, something tells me everything is going to work out fine for this ambitious young lady.