Life & Wisdom Quote by Richard Corliss

Celebrity is a special effect, and Corliss is winking at the crew who knows where the wires are. Tweaking the old proverb about no man being a hero to his valet, he swaps in a star and a makeup artist to drag glamour back to the fluorescent-lit reality where it’s manufactured. The line lands because it punctures the fantasy without sounding moralistic: it’s not that the star is secretly awful, it’s that intimacy collapses illusion. When you’ve watched someone’s face get sanded, shaded, and reassembled for the camera, “icon” starts to look like a job description.

Corliss, a film critic steeped in Hollywood’s mythology and its labor, aims the joke at our shared complicity. Audiences want transcendence; the industry sells it; the backstage worker sees the invoice. The makeup artist is the perfect figure here because their work is both invisible and decisive. They touch the surface that fans fetishize, and they do it with the brisk pragmatism of someone on a deadline. That practical closeness doesn’t breed contempt so much as it breeds literacy: you learn what’s sweat, what’s product, what’s lighting, what’s performance.

The subtext is almost tender in its cynicism. Stardom requires a small army of artisans, yet the story we prefer is singular genius radiating effortlessly. Corliss flips the spotlight onto the hand that powders it, reminding us that reverence is easiest at a distance and hardest under a magnifying mirror.