Nora Aunor: actress or robot?

Something I wrote to the Nora Aunor egroups thread, in reply to the charge that she's eccentric and inconsistent:

I understand where the wish that Nora Aunor would be more sociable and cooperative is coming from and I sympathize; in a perfect world, we would have Nora with all her passion and volatility wrapped in a perfectly malleable package...just like a lot of actors and actresses out there with proven staying power but just not that much talent, who have careers because they do what their agents tell them to do, say what their agents tell them to say. It's a career...but is it a life worth remembering?

But...let me put it this way: how do you bottle a bolt of lightning? How do you tame an earthquake, or keep the high tide on the shore? Nora is just like any other great artist, she has this incredible talent, and with that talent flaws and foibles just like any other human being; if anything, flaws are worse in a great artist, maybe because they have this power in them that they always (but not always so successfully) have to manage, to control.

So she's eccentric and inconsistent; the way I see it, that comes from her insecurities, from the demons inside her, and I suspect so does her great talent (I'm thinking of her performances in Bona (Lino Brocka, 1980) and Bakit Bughaw ang Langit (Why is the Sky Blue? Mario O'Hara, 1981) among many others; not to mention producing such films as Tatlong Taong Walang Diyos (Three Years Without God, O'Hara, 1976)). Take away the demons, and you probably take away the talent.

I'm not saying my reading of her is true, just that I suspect it is. So what do we want? An inconsistent, eccentric star actress who also happens to have given us some of the greatest performances (and films) in Philippine cinema, or a professional hack who performs like a robot? I don't know, but I personally prefer the actress to the robot.