Colourful Characters: Lindsay Lohan

So far, the colourful characters feature has pretty much exclusively been a boys only club so, to put that wrong right, we’ve nominated another wrong of our own, Lindsay Lohan.

By Eoghan Doherty

The reason we’re picking her is because she is (allegedly) bat-shit crazy. Or she’s certainly colourful at least.

Lindsay started off as such a young, sweet, innocent girl and was the child star of a number of US ads, including this one for Jell-O co-starring Bill Cosby:

She went on to star in the critically-acclaimed remake of The Parent Trap, in which she played two roles as estranged twins. Two Lindsy Lohans, now there’s a thought...

Plying her trade with Disney for a  number of years, Lohan broke away from the Micky Mouse studio to star in what is probabbly her best role to date, 2004’s darkly funny Mean Girls.

Penned by the always amazing Tina Fey, Mean Girls also co-starred Rachel McAdams, Amanda Seyfried and Lacey Chabert. Here are the four girls putting on their best Santa Calus dance routine for the Christmas talent show:

A promising career beckoned...

After a number of independant productions, things started to go very slightly off the rails for Lindsay.

Over the course of the next few years, she became the main focus of Hollywood paparazzi, the gossip sites they provided photos for and tabloid media in general.

Saying that she turned into a bit of a wild child is just a little bit of an understatement.

As she dreamt of becoming a triple threat of actor, singer and dancer like her idol Marilyn Monroe, the antics of her personal life started to over-shadow her film career. Convicted of a number of very public disorder incidents, Lohan was responsible for some high-profile car accidents.

As a result of all of these mis-adventures, Lohan actually lost out a number of film roles, as directors and producers caught on to the fact that she would often be late when turning up to set and, in some cases, simply not turn up for full days of work. Also as a result of these misadventures, it’s now hard to imagine Lohan not being constantly dressed in an orange Guantanamo Bay-type jumpsuit.

In 2007, to make matters worse, she started dating Calum Best. If any inkling of hope had remained for maintaining some sort of sane outlook on life, then surely following this relationship it had all but disappeared.

In the same year, and harking back to playing dual roles like she had done in her earlier Disney days, Lohan starred in the beyond bad I Know Who Killed Me, a film she was then nominated and subsequently won the Golden Raspberry award for Worst Actress. In fact, to add insult to injury, she actually won the awards for first AND second place. Now, THAT’S talent.

Check out the really, really bad , yet really, really funny trailer here:

In recent years, Lohan has tried to get her acting career back on track but a lot of her latest appearances, or non-news-worthy ones at least, have mostly been terrible cameos of herself. She currently ‘stars’ alongside fellow colourful character, Charlie Sheen in the woeful Scary Movie 5 which, we’re guessing here, is probably the fifth film in the Sacry Movie franchise.

Probably her most recent decent role though was in the laughable Machete where she spent most of the film naked, off her face on drugs and part of the film dressed up as a machine gun-wielding nun. Something tells me that two of those things weren’t that much of a stretch.

She also returned to screens in 2012, starring in a TV movie called Liz & Dick. No, dirty-minded reader, that’s NOT what it’s about. It’s actually about the life of Elizabeth Taylor if you must know. Preverts.

It’s brilliant to see that though, in spite of everything she’s been through, Lindsay can still find time to have a laugh about her colourful past, as she demonstrates in this excellent spoof dating video she made for Funny or Die:

Hopefully the actress will be back to her best and starring in some decent films sometime soon. It's long overdue.