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This article was published 06/06/2009 (6321 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

TO strip or not to strip — that is the question.

In the emancipated Hollywood of 2009, you might think that nudity onscreen is less of an issue. And to a degree, that’s probably true with fewer performers admitting to hang-ups about baring all. Yet, it’s still a no-no for many stars, including high-profile names like Julia Roberts, while others wonder why there should be any controversy at all.

One member of the latter camp is Moon Bloodgood who portrays a sexy Resistance fighter in the current Terminator Salvation. During filming, she appeared topless for one sequence which was later removed because the producers didn’t want the film to get a Restricted rating.

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"It’s literally a quick silhouette," she explains. But it’s one that delivers a message to a fellow fighter played by Sam Worthington. "It’s not gross or in your face. It’s just a moment where you’re feeling naked, like: ‘Here I am. This is my sexuality. I’m a strong woman. Can you handle it?’"

Bloodgood denies reports that she fought fiercely to retain the scene, but she was still puzzled when it was cut.

"I just didn’t feel as a woman that I should be apologetic about my sexuality," she told Canwest News Service recently. "I thought the scene was appropriate. I thought it was beautiful. I have a very European feel about nudity. I just don’t, as a woman, feel that I ever have to confine myself and be a certain way when sexuality is a part of me…. Why do we make such a big deal about it?"

Well, it’s a big deal for Roberts, who gave her career a huge boost 19 years ago by playing a discreetly clad hooker in Pretty Woman. Roberts once famously explained her dislike of nude scenes this way: "To act with my clothes on is a performance. To act with my clothes off is a documentary." Now that she’s 41 and a mother of three, she’s even more fastidious.

Two months ago in London, where she was launching her latest movie, Duplicity, she confirmed to the tabloid Daily Mail that she had rejected a raunchy sex scene with co-star Clive Owen. The Mail decided Roberts also took a swipe at fellow Oscar winner Kate Winslet by criticizing nude scenes involving actresses who have children.

"You know it’s not really what I do, so if you are going to ask me to do it, you have to expect it to be toned down," she told The Mail. "As a mum of three, I feel like that."

Winslet’s Oscar-winning performance as a former Nazi concentration camp guard in The Reader was conspicuous for its nudity as her character pursued an affair with a 15-year-old boy. She was also nude in her other fall release, Revolutionary Road. But despite the fact that Winslet has bared her body in some 10 films, it seems she hates doing it.

"When you get up in the morning and you know you are going to have to go to work and take your clothes off, it’s the worst day of your life," she told the website PopSugar in 2006. "You feel awful. You feel sick. And you remind yourself, you must never agree to do this again."

A role often proved too good to turn down, but after Revolutionary Road and The Reader, her attitude is hardening. "I can’t keep getting away with it, and I don’t want to become ‘that actress who always gets her kit off,’" she told Time magazine recently.

Despite her Oscar for The Reader, some critics considered her full-frontal nudity gratuitous. Perhaps the most blistering attack came from New York Post art critic Charlie Finch, who accused her of "trivializing" the Holocaust.

"What is especially repellent is the use of Kate Winslet’s nubile body to create sympathy for a repellent character…" Finch complained.

Although Winslet may agonize every time she strips for the screen, other actresses have no problem. Academy Award winner Helen Mirren, now 63, was scarcely out of her teens when she first bared all for director Michael Powell and co-star James Mason in the 1969 film Age of Consent, which was recently restored for DVD. "I think I had the honour to do the first full-frontal nudity outside of a porno film," she proudly remembers.

The nudity debate is not really a generational thing. Feisty Jamie Lee Curtis is another actress who isn’t uptight about nudity. When she appeared nude in the 2001 movie The Tailor of Panama, reporters kept asking her whether, at the age of 42, she was embarrassed to do the scene with co-star Geoffrey Rush.

"I’m a big girl," Curtis said with a laugh. "After all, I’m in bed in the dark, and we’re going to have sex after he joins me in bed. What was I going to be wearing? A truss? A nun’s habit?" Sure she could have been in a negligee, "but then we would have had the whole thing of getting out of it — and quite frankly nudity seemed a more natural way of doing it."

Cynthia Nixon went the full female Monty in the film version of Sex and the City at age 42, but her three co-stars were more reticent. Kristin Davis, then 43, was horrified when director Michael Patrick King told her to strip. "He tried to get me naked in the shower scene. I can’t do that stuff. I get really panicky…" Even after her director backed off total nudity she was still stressed out. Kim Cattrall, who thought nothing of being naked in the original TV series, had second thoughts at the age of 51. Her nudity was more discreet: in her big scene, her naked body was covered in sushi.

Some actresses set legal limits on their degree of nudity. Such was the case with Canada’s Neve Campbell before she signed on for Wild Things. "You see my back and nothing else," she stressed at the time. "That was my personal choice, although I don’t have anything against someone who chooses to do nudity." She was amused at the legalities involved. "You wouldn’t believe the stuff that goes into these contracts. It’s all stipulated — no sight of breasts, no nipples, only the small of my back. It’s amazing the details that have to go in. But you need to establish these boundaries before you go on set."

If there’s been no real debate about male film nudity, it’s probably because it’s much less common — leading to the valid complaint that Hollywood pursues a double standard by letting male actors off the hook. But if filmmaker Judd Apatow, who specializes in good-natured raunch, has his way, every one of his movies will contain at least one scene containing full-frontal male nudity. Apatow delivered on this wish with a vengeance in Forgetting Sarah Marshall where Jason Segel is shown totally nude while his girlfriend breaks up with him. "I think for some reason I was born without a sense of shame or regret," said Segel. "That nudity was a calculated decision. I was dumped once while naked and when it was happening I was aware that it was the funniest thing ever, and I needed to recreate it."

— Canwest News Service