Michael Madsen, RIP

Do brothers and sisters tend to be more masculine or feminine, or do masculine brothers have more feminine sisters?

Actor Michael Madsen, who has died at 67, will of course be remembered for being the baddest bad guy in Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs, the one you can graphically remember slicing off the poor cop’s ear (even though Tarantino cut away at the last moment so nobody saw what everybody thinks they saw).

I liked him best the next year as the foster father in the kids’ killer whale movie Free Willy:

Stentz, one of the screenwriters of the fine X-Men: First Class, then raised an interesting human nature question:

Virginia Madsen got an Oscar nomination for Sideways:

My wife loved Alexander Payne’s Sideways, both because it’s a terrific movie (where was it on that top 100 list?), and because Paul Giamatti looks and talks much like her favorite uncle, an MIT grad and Air Force colonel. Giamatti’s dad, Dante scholar A. Bartlett Giamatti, was president of Yale and commissioner of baseball who died of a heart attack shortly after banning Pete Rose for gambling (a scandal that has returned to baseball).

She took this famous pinot noir vs. merlot scene to heart, except she got the two varietals mixed up and thus has been drinking merlot ever since. Neither one of us has more sophisticated taste buds than the average six year old, however, so we’re happy.

An interviewer once got up the courage to ask the glowering Michael Madsen if he found movies in which his sister Virginia does nude scenes to be uncomfortable. Michael replied that he never watched movies where his sister did nude scenes.

Anyway, to get back to Stentz’s observation, people differ on the masculinity-femininity continuum. For example, Michael Jordan was more masculine than Michael Jackson. Katharine Hepburn was reasonably feminine and only a little butch, but not as feminine as Audrey Hepburn.

What about brother-sister pairs?

Paywall here.

If the brother is extremely masculine, is the sister likely to be less feminine than average? On the other hand, what about all the medieval stories about the warrior prince and his lovely sister, the princess?

Clearly, human beings are set up so that, roughly, a brother of average masculinity will have a sister of average femininity. But what about when the brother is at the 95th percentile of masculinity? Is the sister at the 85th percentile of masculinity among women? The 60th percentile? Or the 40th percentile? Has anybody studied this?

I asked ChatGPT:

What are some famous athlete brother-sister pairs?

And it answered:

3. Bobby and Kristine Gronkowski

Sport: Football (Bobby's family includes Rob Gronkowski); Kristine played collegiate basketball and was an accomplished athlete in her own right.

Yet, as far as I can tell, Bobby and Kristine Gronkowski don’t exist.

The Gronk, of course, is at the 99th+ percentile of masculinity.

Rob “Gronk” Gronkowski (6’6” and 265”) is one of five brothers, no sisters. Four reached the NFL, the other played minor league baseball. Their mother is named Diane, not Kristine.

So, while I’d love to know what a Gronkowski sister would have been like, ChatGPT is just hallucinating about one existing.

In general, I don’t see all that many athletic brother-sister pairs. Back in the early 1980s, the best woman basketball player was Cheryl Miller of USC and then her little brother Reggie Miller became a major rival to Michael Jordan in the NBA.

But they seem fairly rare.

For example, Elle magazine featured 24 sibling pairs at the 2016 Olympics. 18 pairs were same sex, 6 pairs cross-sex. And the brother-sister pairs tended to be in pretty bogus sports like modern pentathlon, racewalking, and sailing, whereas the same-sex siblings tended to be more legit like the Williams sisters in tennis.

What about brother-sister pairs in acting?

The most famous is likely older sister Shirley MacLaine and younger brother Warren Beatty.

Beatty was treated as Hollywood’s ultimate alpha male, although only occasionally did he come across as that on screen.

MacLaine was seen by Hollywood as a gamine with short hair. Although, looking her up, she seems to have had numerous affairs with alpha males, such as Lord Mountbatten before the IRA blew up his yacht.

Anyway, what do you think?