The five saddest faces on Earth

Earlier this week I was walking along, happily lost in thought, when someone shouted at me from the window of a passing van, “Cheer up, it might never happen!” As this isn’t the first time it’s happened, it seems this is an occupational hazard of owning a face like mine. A face which in repose settles into an expression which apparently broadcasts the message, “I’m going home to drink bleach.” In one sense, then, I suppose I should be grateful to my have-a-go Samaritan, but on the other I would quite like to tell him to fuck right off.

It seems incredible in these enlightened times of awareness about mental health issues that some people still see fit to chip in with these “Cheer up!” comments. Do the same people drive past wheelchair-users and call out similarly pointless instructions for a better life? “Get some less rubbish legs, then you can walk around!” What are they possibly hoping to achieve? Do they somehow think that their shouted words will act like verbal anti-depressants and lift their patient out of their funk? Do they not realise that if that worked there would be no need for Prozac, just a series of drive-by mental health practitioners bellowing people better.

Anyway, who wants to live in an exclusively cheerful world? A world where everyone is sublimely chipper and we face all eventualities – even death (the one thing that we can guarantee will definitely happen to us all) – with a fat-toothed grin and a pair of bright and lively eyes? That sounds shit. So, to restore some balance to the universe, here is a short, downbeat celebration of the owners of some of the most naturally sad faces on earth. Their visages are lugubrious examples for us all and I, for one, offer them an unsmiling, watery-eyed nod of acknowledgement.

1) Mark Hughes
Despite being a successful football player and manager in his time, Mark Hughes has the appearance of a man who has spent the morning touring a badly funded animal rescue shelter. His eyes reflect those of the unloved animals he witnessed, his furrowed brow tells the story of the too small cages, and the pervasive smell of urine and thwarted hopes are indelibly etched on his defeated expression. Impressively, even his hair looks sad. A thistly mass of grey despair squatting on his head, contemplating if it jumped whether it would successfully end the numbing sadness of its existence. Mark Hughes: so sad that his hair wants to commit suicide.

2) Gordon Brown
Brown has a head start when it comes to looking dour, hailing as he does from Scotland. But even for a member of a country whose curriculum includes a compulsory GCSE in frowning, Brown’s face achieves an impressive level of jowl-based sadness. Disappointingly, the Prime Minister has recently attempted some public smiling – which is an ill-judged tactic for winning over voters, especially as when he smiles it looks as if he’s having a children’s television presenter forcibly inserted into him. Work the frown Prime Minister, the electorate don’t need or even want to see their leader’s teeth.

3) Nicole Kidman
A prime example that the brown luminous quality of sadness can shine through a beautiful face just as easily as an ugly mug. Kidman looks sad in a pink-eyed, timid way, like an albino mouse in a laboratory, aware that her turn will shortly come. The lachrymose qualities Kidman has are all the more evident if you ever see her in conversation. She seems to approach every sentence as if she’s just finished a 40-year sigh. It’s rumoured that the only time Kidman has ever laughed it was so piercingly hollow that it killed a bird in a nearby tree.

4) Timothy Spall
Fine actory-type Timothy Spall has used his big sad face to fine effect in several performances; notably Mike Leigh’s films where aspiring sad-faced actors come together to look at Timothy Spall and cry. Spall wins any “who looks saddest” contests by dint of the fact that he looks like a beagle owned by Phillip Larkin and Alfred Hitchcock. Occasionally, Spall is miscast in a film and has to attempt an expression other than eternal depression, in which case his expression is created on a computer by special effects artists and then digitally-stitched onto his face with CGI.

5) Tiger Woods
You would imagine that being the world’s best golfer would inject a little happiness into even the most Saturnine face and whilst it’s true that Woods’ mouth does smile when he has to heft another of those gaudy trophies in the air, all you need to do is look at the eyes to see his true feelings. If the eyes are the window to the soul then a quick peek through Woods’ joyless peepers reveals a little boy sat in a bare room, warming his hands on a fireless grate and singing the refrain from Joe Esposito’s You’re the Best in a weak soprano, over and over and over again. No matter how many titles he wins, will the little boy in the cold, empty room ever be happy? The eyes say no.