I think she's almost TOO sexy. Yes, Rose has sex appeal, but it's supposed to be rather faded. The line "If I woulda, I coulda, and that's show biz" wouldn't make sense in my book...
Rosencrantz: "Be happy - if you're not even HAPPY what's so good about surviving? We'll be all right. I suppose we just go on."
- from Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
Enough already with the GYPSY revivals and remakes. It been done to death. Why don't they remake MAME? Now there's a movie that desperately needs to be remade.
I think CZJ would be a great Rose, but I'd prefer if she played Rose in ten or fifteen years. I know that she could look older on film, but I'd prefer it if she actually was the age of the character she is playing.
She IS the age of the character; she is actually older than the age of the character....are we going to have this debate ad naseum? The real Rose Hovick was born in 1895; the final scene takes place around 1933 when Louise was 21 or so; which would make Rose only 38!
Also found this interesting tidbit on the web:
"Rose (or Mama Rose, as she is best known), who was Jewish and lesbian, had married John Hovick, a newspaperman, at the age of fifteen, and was the classic example of a smothering stage mothe who insistently pushed her two daughters into stardom: stripper Gypsy Rose Lee and actress June Havoc; Gypsy's story about lives of the three women became the a 1959 hit musical, Gypsy: A Musical Fable.
Rose was no longer bothering with men. She had, as Havoc would write, 'turned toward her own sex,' at first runing a lesbian boardinghouse in a 10-room apartment Gypsy rented for her on West End Avenue, and then running a sort of lesbian farm in her country house in Highland Hills. At a party in that house, Rose pulled another gun, this time on one of the girls. She killed her. Because Gypsy was a star, it was covered up. "There were a lot of people there when it happened". says Erik Preminger [Gypsy's son], who had heard the same story from three people. "The girl was Rose's lover and she made a pass at my mother."