Mild at heart
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From a worm-swallowing paraplegic to a foul-mouth blackmailer, Willem Dafoe has cornered the movie market in scene-stealing weirdos. But when Lynn Barber meets the Hollywood heart throb, she discovers he's more trousers than mouth[/FONT]
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Sunday August 26, 2001
The Observer
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Sorry - I didn't ask Willem Dafoe about the size of his dong. It wasn't a failure of nerve exactly, more a failure of will. I couldn't bring myself to care enough. Also, I thought he was waiting for me to ask so that he could deliver some prepared putdown, and I wanted to deny him that moment of triumph. Anyway, there is plenty of independent evidence of its grandeur. When he appeared naked in a play in New York, a reviewer noted that, 'As one, the women in the audience let out a gasp of delighted astonishment.' Then Madonna chose him as her leading man for Body of Evidence and I'm sure she wouldn't want to waste her time dropping candlewax on just an average-sized willy.
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Enough already. We know Dafoe is King Dong - what else has he got going for him? Well, obviously he is a good actor - two Oscar nominations (for Platoon and last year's Shadow of the Vampire), plus an unforgettable cameo as the worm-swallowing paraplegic in Born on the Fourth of July, another as the morphine-shooting spy in The English Patient, and yet another as the motel creeper in David Lynch's Wild at Heart. He is always good at scene-stealing weirdos, but he was also good as Christ in Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ and as TS Eliot in Tom & Viv. In fact, his filmography is altogether impressive, largely because he chooses to work with interesting directors. He can afford to pick his films because the rest of the time he is fully engaged as a stage actor at the Wooster Group in New York, a company he co-founded with his partner, Elizabeth LeCompte, 24 years ago.
Most women find him gorgeous. He has a very striking face - big mouth, big teeth, big eyes, triangular flat 'medieval' cheeks. He can do a sudden teeth-baring grin like Jack Nicholson's, which can be either terrifying or seductive. And he moves well, like a dancer, with a natural grace and rippling pantherish muscles. But I have to say that meeting him in the flesh in London, I was terribly disappointed. First - like so many film actors - he is shorter than you expect, about five six or seven.