I just finished watching Stage Beauty, starring Claire Danes and Billy Crudup.

The story is quite interesting: Edward "Ned" Knyaston (Billy Crudup) is a beautiful man, and as an actor in 17th-century London that means he's quite popular portraying women, since females are forbidden to tread the boards. His mischievous air of entitlement, unfortunately, soon sets in motion a chain of events that will see King Charles II (Rupert Everett) lifting the ban on actresses, allowing Ned's devoted dresser, Maria (Claire Danes), to become the city's reigning theatrical diva. Director Richard Eyre (Iris) is still best known for his stage work, and it shows: Stage Beauty is rich in character and attention to detail.

It's reminiscent of the difficult transition from vaudeville to radio which was brilliantly profiled in the movie musical There's No Business Like Show Business; the heartbreaking transition from silent film to the talkies, which is profiled in Singin' In The Rain; and of course The Buggles classic "Video Killed the Radio Star"...

By detailing how the world changed OVERNIGHT for men who played women in the 1660s, the movie conjures up memories of stage actors who couldn't make the transition to film; vaudeville acts that couldn't make the transition to radio; and silent film stars and directors that didn't make the transition to talkies.

The last transition -- silent to talkie -- was particularly painful. So many of the silent stars and directors couldn't make the transition, and ended up NEVER WORKING AGAIN.

For example, DW Griffith, the director of Birth of a Nation, ended up dying penniless and alone in a Hollywood flophouse: Although his funeral was attended by greats of the silent era like Lillian Gish and Mary Pickford.

What was particularly interesting is that the "gesture approach" to acting was alive and well in the 17th century, and this continued until the invention of film. The greater intimacy of film made the stagey gestures that were popular on the stage at the time seem artificial and "wrong". Mary Pickford was one of the first to impart a "natural" acting style into her films, and worldwide success and fame soon followed (not many know that she was one of the original founder of United Artists, along with Douglas Fairbanks, DW Griffith, and Charlie Chaplin. She was known in the media as "America's Sweetheart", but when she became the first actor to make $1MM per year, Chaplin renamed her "Bank of America's Sweetheart").