But for the requirement that you first have to be dead in order to qualify, I think it’s the ultimate honor to have your mug immortalized on a postage stamp.  I picked up a sheet of the new 42 cent Edgar Allan Poe stamps a few weeks ago and I actually thought, for about five minutes after I bought them (“Now you’re working for the Poe-st Office” I cracked to the teller and we both did the horse laugh.), that I’d keep the whole sheet for the sake of posterity… but with the economy the way it is and my net worth the way it isn’t, I can’t indulge in an almost $8 keepsake.  I’ve been paying bills this week and slapping Poe stamps on all the outgoing mail and  little of me dies every time I let one of those suckers go.  But anyway, all this has me thinking about stamps, specifically those bearing the likenesses of movie stars and filmmakers from Hollywood and beyond.

Not so long ago, I wrote about monster stamps and my fascination with and covetousness of them.  That’s the apotheosis of my philately but I can and do get excited about other celebrity stamps.  Whenever a new one comes out, I try to pick up at least one sheet because sticking Buster Keaton or Frank Sinatra on the gas bill is more fun than using the liberty bell or American flag stamps you get from the machines.  Using celebrity stamps gives you a second each time you post a letter or pay a utility bill to reflect on the life and career of the personality in question and to meditate on what they mean to you.  Both the Humphrey Bogart stamp at the top and the amazing Alfred Hitchcock stamps above were issued by the United States Postal Service in 1995, when the rate for first class postage jumped up from 29 cents to 32 cents.  Technicolor Bogie is cool but I prefer the monochrome austerity of the Hitch stamp.

Although I think the Bette Davis, Cary Grant and John Wayne stamps that came out around the same time as Humphrey Bogart are all cool and classy, given a choice I’ll always go for the character actor over the headliner.  I’d have to say on a film to film basis that I’m probably a bigger fan of Bette Davis than I am of Hattie McDaniel but when a 39 cent stamp of the GONE WITH THE WIND (1939) cutup was released by the USPS in 2006 as part of its long-running “Black Heritage” series I had to have me some.  McDaniel was so honored alongside the likes of  abolitionist Harriet Tubman, singer Ella Fitzgerald, composer Scott Joplin, civil rights activist Martin Luther King, Jr., and singer Marian Anderson.  I sincerely hope that one of these days the series will get around to honoring black comedians like Eddie “Rochester” Anderson, Willie “Sleep-n-Eat” Best or Mantan Moreland.  I get positively giddy thinking about a stamp series devoted entirely to black second banana actors.

You’d think a Jean Gabin stamp would be a non-brainer in France but the best you can do is this Belgian timbre-post celebrating the fictional detective Maigret by way of honoring mystery writer Georges Simenon.  I guess the Belgians were honoring the prolific and by all counts inexhaustible Simenon primarily for his literary accomplishments and not just because he boasted of having bedded 10,000 women in his lifetime (8,000 of which were, by his own account, prostitutes – but sexy French prostitutes, I’d wager, with berets tilted on their pretty little heads and Galois smoldering between their painted lips).  Well, even if the stamp honors the pipe-smoking, pastis-drinking Commissaire Maigret, I can’t help but feel it’s a partial victory for Jean Gabin, one of France’s great movie stars (even though he annoyed them greatly by camping out in Hollywood during the Nazi occupation of Paris during World War II and for sleeping with Marlene Dietrich).  Not being Belgian, I missed out on these stamps when they were issued in 2003 to commemorate the Georges Simenon centennial.  C’est la vie.

I love these 2008 Canadian postage stamps of actors from the Great White North who made their fame in Hollywood.  I particularly like the Raymond Burr stamp because PERRY MASON and IRONSIDE were important TV shows during my formative years and because Burr so rocks the casaba in such films as RAW DEAL (1948), PITFALL (1948), REAR WINDOW (1954) and GODZILLA, KING OF THE MONSTERS (1956) – plus two movies about killer gorillas!  He looks really handsome here, don’t you think?

And speaking of dead fat guys who have my heart, check out this Gert Fröbe stamp, issued in Germany in 2000.  You’ll remember Fröbe for his immortal turn as GOLDFINGER (1963), one of the best James Bond villains of all time.  Although Fröbe was dubbed by another actor in the film (“No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die!”) his mountainous corporeality and frowning disdain for law and order in general and 007 in particular is what makes the part so memorable.  Born Karl-Gerhart Froeber in 1912 and a reluctant member of the Third Reich during World War II who used his party status to help Jews hide from the Gestapo, Fröbe often played good guys – Kriminalkommissar Lohmann in a couple of “Dr. Mabuse” mysteries and dogged detectives in THE SERPENT’S EGG (1978) and BLOODLINE (1979).  He was also adept at comedy and played the buffoonish Baron Bomburst in CHITTY CHITTY BANG BANG (1969).  I love the image of Fröbe here, captured in what seems to be the act of saying goodbye.  There’s also a nice German stamp of the actress Lili Palmer out there, too.

And here I bring my little stamp talk to a close with a look at this 41 cent issue devoted to that great character actor Yoda.  Doesn’t he look great? I love the blue hue of the stamp, which neutralizes Yoda’s natural inclination towards earth tones, and the wisdom of his penetrating stare.  Hollywood celebs don’t get more timeless or iconic than this.  Now I suppose there are some purists out there who may (and, for all I know, have) protest(ed) about Yoda’s deserving a spot on a first class USPS stamp.   I can imagine these nay-sayers would base their arguments on the fact that Yoda is 1.) not human by any stretch of the imagination and 2.) possibly not even actually dead… but the way I see it, Yoda has had big roles in at least five feature films, which is more than James Dean could say and he got his stamp in 1997.  Plus, think of all the guys whose ass Yoda has kicked over the years and compare that with James Dean’s score (number of asses kicked: 0, although he roughed up Jim Backus pretty bad that one time – but how hard could that have been?).  Well, anyway, it’s all academic because quite plainly Yoda got his stamp… and the way I see it, if you can’t lick ‘em, join ‘em and then lick ‘em.  Although I’m quite sure Yoda is self-adhesive.  But you get my point.