Students perform traditional dance as they take part in Pongal celebrations, the Tamil harvest festival, at a college in Chennai on January 10, 2024. (Photo by R. Satish Babu/AFP Photo)

TV personality Meredith Marks at Caesars Forum in Las Vegas, NV on Friday, November 14, 2025. (Photo by: Griffin Nagel/Bravo via Getty Images)

Photographer Howard Schatz had an idea: place actors in a series of roles and dramatic situations to reveal the essence of their characters. Such was the premise behind his book, In Character: Actors Acting, which captures some of Hollywood’s most emotive stars in the act of, well, making faces. Luckily for us, he continued the tradition for Vanity Fair. Here are some of the best.

Two dummy tanks being pushed along a road by German soldiers. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images). Circa 1925

The Tsaatan people are one of the world’s last groups of nomadic reindeer herders and they live in Khövsgöl Aimag in northern Mongolia. They are originally from across the border in what is now the Tuva republic of Russia. (Photo by Pascal Mannaerts/Rex Feature/Shutterstock)

A woman raises her fist during events to mark Juneteenth, which commemorates the end of slavery in Texas, two years after the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation freed slaves elsewhere in the United States, amid nationwide protests against racial inequality, in the Harlem neighbourhood of Manhattan, in New York City, New York, June 19, 2020. (Photo by Andrew Kelly/Reuters)

In this Wednesday, August 21, 1991 file photo, appreciative muscovites hand bread, sausages and flowers to a Soviet tank's driver who helped stop the failed hardline coup in Moscow, Russia. When a group of top Communist officials ousted Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev 30 years ago and flooded Moscow with tanks, the world held its breath, fearing a rollback on liberal reforms and a return to the Cold War confrontation. But the August 1991 coup collapsed in just three days, precipitating the breakup of the Soviet Union that plotters said they were trying to prevent. (Photo by Czarek Sokolowski/AP Photo/File)

A performer and his son parade during a gathering of sapeurs in Kinshasa, capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo, on February 10, 2023. Flamboyant dandies paraded near the tomb of one of their icons in DR Congo's capital Kinshasa, flaunting coveted designer labels in stark contrast to the grinding poverty surrounding them. Dozens of extravagantly dressed dandies, known locally as sapeurs, turned up on February 10, 2023 to commemorate the death of Stervos Niarcos, a pop star and one of the most famous of Congo's legendary dandies. Niarcos, who died in 1995, epitomises the fanatical pursuit of elegance for many in the abysmally poor central African country. (Photo by Alexis Huguet/AFP Photo)