When someone sees a performance, these days it must be in a movie or on television because too few people go to and know live theater, when that performance becomes iconic and typecasts in the viewer’s mind, too often they can’t see that actor in any other role.

That syndrome betrays a lot of things. People are gullible. They believe what they see. The actor in the role is the person on the screen.

That’s why so often there is an outcry.

When Judi Dench took on the role of Old Deuteronomy in Cats, people cried, “Foul! No! She can’t be a fat old cat who lies down and lifts her leg and shows her costumed furry cat crotch to the wings and those sitting in the right side of the audience! That’s just wrong! It’s a betrayal! She’s M, James Bond’s boss, the Head of the British Secret Service!”

When Hugh Jackman took to the stage in Oklahoma, people cried, “No! He doesn’t do musicals! He’s Wolverine!”

When Pierce Brosnan joined the cast of Mama Mia! people cried, “No! He’s 007!”

People just don’t seem to know what acting is.

So many actors have resisted the confines of strait-jacket type-casting.

Melina Mercouri was archetypical comedy.

Irene Pappas was iconic tragic.

Mercouri said she always wanted to play the tragedies.

Pappas said she always wanted to do comedy.

They were actors who knew how to stretch the limits.

My brother was one who was taken in by what he saw. We were watching a movie where John Hurt was playing one of his iconic dying old man roles. My brother whispered, “He looks bad. Is he really that sick?”

I was impatient with him again and said, “It’s called acting.”

I tried not to be impatient with my brother because he couldn’t help being the way he was.

But he didn’t make it easy, the way there are some people you just can’t reach.

He was taking a music appreciation course at LACC. They listened to Faure’s Pavane. He liked it. He said it was written by Fower

I didn’t launch into a rhapsody about Faure and his place in the hierarchy of French music, how everyone loved him, respected him, learned from him. I just corrected the pronunciation.

“No,” he said, “It’s Fower.”

He would never agree that Judi Dench could lift her leg.