Amber Tamblyn on being an artist at multiple levels 

Venice mag.: You began writing poetry when you were nine.. Do you feel like it has become somewhat of a second form of expression for you?

Amber Tamblyn : Definitely! I did a lot of writing with my father (actor/choreographer Russ Tamblyn) who always encouraged my budding imagination. 

I think all true artists should be inspired on multiple levels. I wouldn’t consider myself an actress. I have a hard time even being called one because it puts you in a box, on a shelf where everybody else is picked from. ///

Venice mag.: It is intriguing and encouraging to see someone from your generation.. be involved in politics as you are.

Amber Tamblyn : I am fascinated by the original intent of what communism represented to people. Unfortunately, it got all jumbled up. But there are times when I also feel like talking about politics is not my place. I don’t know as much as people of the time.

Jessica Alba on Hollywood decision making
and stereotyping 

[What were you happiest about with Fantastic Four?]

In Hollywood movies now, if you’re 18 to 27, you’re this doe-eyed ingenue who just stands around, or you’re sexy and not that complicated. There’s no maturity allowed. 

Sue Storm was intense, complicated, sophisticated and opinionated. And hopefully, since the movie was successful, it won’t be so f’ing hard all the time. At the end of the day, they want someone who can open movies overseas. 

Everyone will see me as a big-lipped, dark-eyed girl until I have blond hair and blue eyes in a movie that makes a sh’tload of money, and then they can see me as an actor who can transform herself into anything. ///

Peggy Lipton as a teen
model and actor

Peggy Lipton, born in 1947 into an upper-middle-class family, to a strict father and a mercurial mother, began modeling for the Eileen Ford agency at 15 and studied acting at Uta Hagen's famed HB Studio in Manhattan.

She describes herself as a morbid, gloomy child, belying her sunny, attractive exterior as a tall, slender blond with huge brown eyes.

"Sometimes I would make myself very still and try to imagine myself dead," she writes. "I tried to invoke the feeling of the very last breath I would take."

At 17, Lipton moved with her family to Westwood, where she soon would discovered the power of her beauty and sexuality, which she used to mask her lack of self-esteem.

She also learned to self-medicate (marijuana, cocaine, diet pills) to deal with depression. ...

Lipton became a bona fide "It" girl and fashion muse. "Unfortunately," she writes, "I was hardly able to enjoy it. I was so unsure of myself. Off the set, I didn't know how to talk to people. I didn't know how to smile for the paparazzi."

on innocence and experience

-- At one point in the film ["Closer"], Larry [Clive Owen] says to Alice, “You have the face of an angel.” Do you, Natalie, worry how you’ll live up to a line like that?

Natalie Portman : Larry also says Alice has "the moronic beauty of youth." I think I've got the moronic look. [laughs]

It can seem angelic, because everything innocent and inexperienced isn’t hard to come by when you’re as inexperienced as I am.

-- But for a 23-year-old, you’ve got a lot of work and life experience. What are the advantages and disadvantages of that?

I just feel that I have a different life experience from anyone I know. I definitely had a period where I was conformist, the high school years when you just want to fit in.

Usually when you hear of someone having experience beyond their years, that has a negative connotation. But it hasn’t been for me; it’s been really positive.

I don’t feel jaded or that I have a burden of experience. I feel the world is so full, and every second so full of life. Every minute I’m so stimulated and interested and attracted by the world, sort of in wonder to the world. And it’s not related to youth, it’s related to how much you fill up your seconds.

"I'll act as long as I
continue to love it."

Danielle Panabaker and her family moved to Los Angeles three years ago... "The first year we were here, we were taking acting classes seven days a week," she says.

"We took them from anyone who would accept us. We spent our days doing school, afternoons auditioning, and evenings going to class."

She still tries to take classes when she has time, citing Marnie Cooper and Warner Laughlin as two local favorites.

[see listings on acting resources : schools groups coaches etc]

She adds that she also took something away from the bad classes. "You can always learn something," she notes. "Maybe it's a technique you don't like; maybe it's a style. But you learn different things." ///

Panabaker, who graduated high school at 14 and has been taking college courses ever since, is thinking of attending UCLA in the fall as an English major.

"I know enough about the business to know what a difficult and crazy business it is, and I love being a part of it right now, but who knows? Five years, 10 years, maybe even two years down the road, it may be too overwhelming or too something, or I could just not like it anymore, at which point I would definitely quit," she says.

"I've always said if this becomes too much of a job, I'm just not going to do it, because there's no point. There are so many other people who could be doing this and who have the passion for it, that me taking up space is no good. I love it, and I'll do it as long as I continue to love it."

Having a rich life
to be an actor

Camilla Belle, 18, is Rose to Daniel Day-Lewis’ Jack in "The Ballad of Jack and Rose."

For the film's writer-director, Rebecca Miller, it was easy to see the elements of old-fashioned star presence in Belle.

"There's really something timeless about her," says Miller, who picked Belle out of hundreds of young girls to play Rose. "It's a lack of self-consciousness. There's no vulgarity in her, no kitsch, and that's priceless.

"It was also important because [Rose is] somebody who had no influence from the outside, no TV. And [Belle] really had that quality about her." ///

"One problem with young actors is sometimes when they get successful, they have very narrow lives, and the lives don't feed them," Miller says.

"I think her life feeds her. Her interests are wide, she's very close to her mother, and she's going to have a very rich life."

Belle.. says ambition or hand-wringing over "craft" never interfered with her approach to show business. The idea was to have fun, to travel, to meet people.

"It was kind of a hobby," she says. "Like singing and sports for my friends. It was trying to enjoy myself as a kid."

She took three years off, though, starting at 13, to squeeze in some normal formative years in Los Angeles.

"I stayed in school, did plays, danced, sang choir, made friends, and then I started to really, really miss it." "Ballad" was the Los Angeles native's first film after the absence, and she realized her feelings for acting had developed into a passion.

"I now realize that it's serious and intense and takes a lot out of a person emotionally, and I need time to recuperate after each project."

Faye Dunaway on her
show "The Starlet"

Faye Dunaway used a line from "Master Class," the Broadway hit she starred in and is now developing into a film, to guide her in judging the starlets, ages 18 to 25, on their weekly screen tests:

"If you're any easier on them, you'll make them mediocre.

"Life is not going to coddle them, and this town and this business is certainly not going to coddle them, and you really have to have a lot of strength of mind," Dunaway said.

"If anything can stop you, let it -- because you should be stopped. Because you're going to need every ounce of resolve.

"It's a tricky profession. Many are called and few serve. It's a combination of a lot of stuff that creates success -- not just talent, not just craft, not just attitude -- but all of that together somehow."

> from article : Faye Dunaway has been an 'it' girl and a leading lady. On the reality show 'The Starlet,' she gets to play a role in influencing the next generation of acting hopefuls. By Maria Elena Fernandez, Los Angeles Times, February 27, 2005

The director
needed authenticity

Two years back, Catalina Sandino Moreno was a Bogota advertising student, her dreams of moving to New York and becoming an actor growing increasingly distant. ...

Still, she kept acting, but with diminished hopes, as she was starting to lose interest in theater.

Encouraged by her mother, she nevertheless tried out for the title role in American writer-director Joshua Marston's debut feature. With "Maria Full of Grace's" filming just weeks away, Marston hadn't yet found somebody who could credibly play a 17-year-old girl who becomes a drug mule. ...

Marston already had considered about 800 actresses to play the role, while others had encouraged him to cast a star like Penélope Cruz or Jennifer Lopez.

"She was not parroting another kind of performance," Marston says of what immediately struck him in Moreno's audition. The actresses he had rejected tended to be self-conscious, imitating the histrionics of Spanish- language soap operas.

"You could feel them doing a scene the way they might have remotely remembered seeing someone doing it on a soap opera. But Catalina was very natural. It's a characteristic that is really rare."

Frank Langella : The point about being a struggling actor is that it never stops. There's this cliché that you're a struggling actor, and one day you'll get to a point and you won't struggle any more.

You struggle till the day you die. That's part of the game. It's a myth to think that you struggle when you're young and somehow you reach some magical place and you don't struggle any more.

Getting the right jobs, that's a huge struggle too, at least for me. I'm grateful for the things that I do, but I struggle to try to get really great roles that I can feel good about that I'm proud of.

Once, I had just finished doing a scene, and the teacher threw a dime down on the stage and said, "Pick up that dime and go call your mother and tell her you'll never be an actor."