as ESTHER BLODGETT/VICKI LESTER
At the tender age of 22, Janet Gaynor forever cemented her place in film history by becoming the first lady to be named Best Actress by the Academy Awards. She had amazed Hollywood with her triumphant
triple-threat batch of performances, so it's almost perfect that she'd headline
A Star is Born, seeing as she was quite literally a star born only ten years prior. As the small-town girl who dreams of becoming a movie star and who eventually takes Hollywood by storm, even winning her own Oscar within the context of the film--you watch Gaynor in that famous scene at the Academy Awards, standing up at the podium and giving her acceptance speech while clutching her real life Oscar in her hands...and it's hard to deny that in that very moment on celluloid, her career had officially come full circle. Now, I say that it's
almost perfect casting because despite the perfect similarities between the artist and the character, I don't think Gaynor was a skilled enough actress to make the superficially written Esther truly flourish.
