As a culture, we’re hard on our beautiful blondes. We may automatically presume everything should be easy for a conventionally gorgeous, flaxen-haired performer with a visible-from-space smile. We may even assume that because she’s beautiful, she can’t be all that smart. Tell it to Marilyn Monroe, who felt pressured the whole of her all-too-short career to prove that she was a serious actor, something we can now see clearly in her body of work.
A comic actor is also, of course, a serious actor—there’s nothing more serious than the art of comedy. And sometimes we don’t know how much we’ve missed an actor until she’s been away for a long time. That’s what happened with Cameron Diaz: one minute she was there, the next she wasn’t. Actresses often take breaks to have children, a privilege we grudgingly allow them. But they usually come back after a year or two. Diaz didn’t. After 2014’s Annie, her IMDb trail grew cold—until now, with the release of her Netflix comeback film Back in Action, in which she reunites with Jamie Foxx, her co-star in Annie and the 1999 film Any Given Sunday. The movie isn’t great. But if it means there’s more Cameron Diaz in our future, let’s take it.
Why does a wonderful actor quit when she’s still getting roles, and when she’s still young and beautiful enough to dazzle a world obsessed with youth and beauty? Diaz has said she quit filmmaking to focus on raising her children, with Benji Madden (of the rock band Good Charlotte). To a selfish universe, this is a boring reason to step away from the entertainment business; to a human being, and the kids growing up in her care, it’s everything.
If you look at Diaz’s credits, from her debut (and surprise success) in 1994’s The Mask through Annie, you’ll see she worked steadily for two decades. Her films clearly made money—Hollywood doesn’t keep asking you back if your movies tank. Yet for every performance we remember vividly—as the good-natured…
