Data has been piling up lately. You've seen it on your televisions and in your movie theaters and tucked away in the pages of your People magazines and US Weeklies. The question is out there, just waiting to be answered. And I believe we're the ones best qualified to tackle this difficult subject:
Are British male actors getting hotter or is my eyesight just getting better?
Let's look at the evidence chronologically. In the 1930s and 1940s, we had Cary Grant, the standard bearer of British male pulchritude:
In the 1960s, we had Sean Connery and Michael Caine -- and let's face it, the standards got a little bit lower:
In the 1980s, we started doing a bit better with Julian Sands:
Things started rolling nicely in the 1990s with the likes of Hugh Grant and Liam Neeson:
And then, holy hell, the new millennium dawns, the dam of British hotness breaks and suddenly they're everywhere! There's Daniel Craig...
and Orlando Bloom...
and Gerard Butler...
and Henry Ian Cusick...
and David Tennent...
And dozens more. Besides the actors, even that old "unattractive inbred royalty" thing has been busted:
In fact, hot British men have become so ubiquitous, we even have them filling in as hot American men. To wit, there's him:
...and him
...and him
Ladies, this is but a small sampling -- and I'm not even bringing Australians into the equation!* I'm no kind of scientist, but I'd say the facts -- and the photographic evidence -- speak for themselves.What do you think? Are we in the Golden Age of Hot British Actors? And if so, what did we do to deserve this and can we do it again, please?
* ETA: Except I did, just there, with Simon Baker who I totally didn't realize was Australian. Oops. He's too cute to dock from the list though....
