Tuesday, December 3, 2013

MOVIE ICONS: DANISH ACTRESS AND MISS DENMARK TRINE MICHELSEN, OF THE IIOTS AND CORRUPTION






Older readers of this blog will remember a couple of entries about Trine Michelsen, Danish stripper, actress, and - to my mind - absolutely blinding beauty. I just learned that the bone cancer she had been suffering with the last seven years finally killed her early this year. I feel very sad and personally deprived. It is not very rational for me to feel so. If we had ever met, we would have had nothing to say to each other; our backgrounds and experiences, let alone our views of the world, were too distant; and my opinion is that, as is so often the case in our time, she wasted some very real talent in the wake of the misguided "sexual revolution". But she came as close to my ideal of beauty as any woman who ever lived; and beauty, while no merit, is nevertheless a treasure, precious, irreplaceable, a light in the world. I said a prayer for this tiny, tragic beauty - and may God have mercy on us all in the day of our deaths.
 
Many years ago, about 1980, I created my main superhero character, the Silver Angel. From the beginning I had a very clear idea of what I wanted her to look like: small and gentle, but with very marked features, strong cheekbones, huge blue eyes and a thoughtful expression.

It was only about six years later that I began to notice, on the covers of various softcore mags, a hauntingly familiar face. It was the Silver Angel, as God is God, exactly as I had imagined her, with the same face, hair, expression, small, thoughtful, and hauntingly beautiful: like the realization of a dream.

This was Trine Michelsen, daughter of a famous Danish TV personality, Miss Denmark 1984, making her debut in nude modelling. The words "unforgettable", "breathtaking" and "heart-stopping" do not seem to me too much to describe her beauty at eighteen or twenty, and, what is more, many of her poses and most of her expressions were as like what I imagined and drew for the Silver Angel as if she were the character. I am not speaking of the many where she just followed the nasty little conventions of that nasty little trade, but in those where a better day or a more sensitive photographer allowed her to play to her strengths, not to reduce herself to brutal appeals to the crotch. There you saw heroic or meditative poses, dramatic images, or meltingly enchanting smiles; and again and again a wonderful, still, thoughtful, faraway look, suggesting the ocean and worlds beyond.

The real Trine, like so many strippers, was a troubled soul who time and again made the wrong choices. Her background is dense with tragedy. Her mother died in a road accident when she was seven, leaving her father shattered and incapable of coping. Trine grew up in an unwholesome atmosphere, caught between the celebrity status of her father - the most famous movie critic in Denmark - and the sordid secret drinking into which he had fallen after being widowed, and which he only admitted much later. Then, at 18, she ran for Miss Denmark and won, cementing her own celebrity.

Trine had dreamed of being a movie actress, and in the only three movies in which she has a major part - CORRUPTION by Salvatore Samperi, IDIOTERNE by Lars von Trier, and ANTENNEFORENINGEN by Soeren Fauli - she gave outstanding performances. But these were hardly noticed, for good reason. It was not only that the world at large knew her as a stripper with a more than active sex life, but that all three roles were either herself or a tart. Either way, reviewers and public fell into the trap of thinking that playing herself was easy, and failed to notice the native and exceptional talent she brought to filthy or rebarbarative material. More than one director said that her image put them off using her; and yet, there is one scene - her last scene in CORRUPTION, her very first movie, when she has been sacked and goes away carrying a large suitcase - which should, by rights, have established her for ever. The camera never closes in on her; she has to act with her body, her stance, her motion; and she gives so perfect and painful a picture of a young girl thrown out in the cold, with her pathetic attempt to keep some dignity, and the hurt and bewilderment inside, as to make our heart go out to her. (And forget the sluttish and conniving part she has played in the rest of a pretty conniving kind of movie.) Ladies and gentlemen, as Spencer Tracy once said of Laurence Olivier, you have just seen a professional act[ress] doing [her] job.

IN my opinion, that tremendous beauty of hers had turned out to be a genuine trap. At any point of crisis or difficulty in her life, she had been able to pay the bills by taking off her clothes; and so she had not been stimulated to commit herself to her acting career as much as she should have. She was not really committed to porn, either. She always refused to take part in hardcore material (a refusal broken, interestingly enough, in the von Trier film) and produced very little. Nevertheless, the reputation it gave her was a major obstacle in her attempts at a career.

Her life, indeed, shows a self-destructive pattern that it is hard not to connect with her unfortunate childhood. She herself admitted a preference for violent and destructive men, culminating in a strange marriage with a boxer that ended up in jail for bank robbery. (I say strange because, much later, her relationship with a school teacher collapsed because she really had no experience whatever of living as a couple; which makes one wonder what kind of relationship she had with her husband.) She became addicted to cannabis and cocaine and had to have surgery and rehab. There were stories of gang rape.

1999 was the year when she should have pulled herself back together. After unsuccessful stays in Italy and Britain, she had gone back to her country and had two successful film parts in a row. Then her relationship with the schoolmaster collapsed, she checked herself into a rehab clinic because of her fear that the pain might drive her back to drugs. After that, she more or less vanished from the news.

She reappeared early this year, with a ghastly and wholly unexpected story. She had been diagnosed with bone cancer in her shoulder, had been in therapy for two years, including six months of savage chemotherapy, and she still was granted only a 30% chance by the specialists. The last news is that she is dying. At the ripe old age of thirty-nine.

If we heard that she is dying of AIDS, papilloma, or syphilis, there would at least be a sense to this tragedy. But the horrible randomness of this, and the way it strikes someone who has not, in all honesty, had a happy or successful life, and prevents her from doing any of the things that might have made it make sense for her - have a child or children, resume her career as an actress, or start something else - and strikes her down, unfulfilled and unachieved, and so desperately young, is what really breaks my heart. That, and the obscene irony that, to judge by the most recent photographs


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