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?

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