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acting : page 4....----
Jodie Foster
I approach my work from a different perspective than other actors I know. Almost like an academic.
Most actors become actors because they need that moment, that emotional high.I can perform emotionally, but it's not my favorite part.
Part of me needs to be adored. My friends would definitely tell you I need to be adored, but performing isn't in my blood.[LA Times Sep 25 2005] ///
Acting is about being the unhippest person in the room, the least cool.[Inside the Actors Studio Sep 25 2005]
[photo from “Flightplan”]~ ~ ~ ~
Sometimes, I think the very, very best improvisers.. don't necessarily become enormously successful actors in plays and movies and other traditional material.
It's not that they're not wonderful, it's just that the spark of genius that those people have is in an area that isn't always utilized so much in scripted material. ...The stars of improv theater – Alan Arkin, Mike Nichols and Elaine May, Barbara Harris – as leading men and women, they were always left of center, or off-center... left or right of center.
They were never traditional leading men and women. They could have been, but they just never, ever were. I suppose they were too interesting to be that. If you're in the center of the thing, you're supposed to be a little more like regular people.[photo: Jemal Countess/WireImage]~ ~ ~ ~
I was asked to act when I couldn't act. I was asked to sing "Funny Face" when I couldn't sing, and dance with Fred Astaire when I couldn't dance - and do all kinds of things I wasn't prepared for. Then I tried like mad to cope with it.
I was born with an enormous need for affection, and a terrible need to give it. I never think of myself as an icon. What is in other people's minds is not in my mind. I just do my thing.Audrey Hepburn .. [imdb.com bio]
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Almost six years ago, before I was given the incredible opportunity to be in 'Leaving Las Vegas', I was going through a long period of artistic confusion.
I'd spent years doing work that hadn't pushed me enough, and I was beginning to wonder if I had any talent.
This book [The Artist's Way] helped me recall why I loved being an actress and why I had to continue.
I'd become disconnected from the childlike play that art could be. I was spending so much time fearing I wasn't good enough that I lost the sense that my artistic expression was worthy. This book is a wonderful step-by-step way to reclaim your youthful love of creating and your faith in yourself.
Elisabeth Shue*----[O - The Oprah Mag., Mar.2001] -
,,,The Artist's Way - by Julia Cameron
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White boys always get the Oscar. It's a known fact. Did I ever get a nomination? No! You know why? Cause I hadn't played any of them slave roles, and get my ass whipped. That's how you get the nomination. A black dude who plays a slave that gets his ass whipped gets the nomination, a white guy who plays an idiot gets the Oscar. That's what I need, I need to play a retarded slave, then I'll get the Oscar.
Kit Ramsey [Eddie Murphy] - Bowfinger (1999) [DVD]
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.. .. Lucy Lawless : I never thought about it like that [laughs]. I guess I just separate myself from Xena, and Xena can be somebody's fantasy. I mean, she's my fantasy too, in the sense that she doesn't exist and is just part of this fantastical world that I join every day when I put on makeup. I don't relate to her unless the camera's rolling. |
The
Advocate : So you think people aren't fantasizing
about you but about Xena.
Lucy Lawless : Right. Because how could they? They don't know me. Well, maybe they do. This happens with [film] editors all the time -- it's a professional hazard. They feel they know you intimately, though they've never met you, because they have seen all the rough cuts, all your goof-ups, your good days and bad days. So when you meet them, it's a very strange experience because you get that feeling of contemptible familiarity. It's like, "You're getting too close to me--go away. I don't know who you are." It's difficult for them--they really have to pull back because they can make you go cold. The Advocate : I think I've read too much academic Xena analysis on [the Web site] Whoosh! But I was just wondering whether it feels different to be an object of female fantasy than of male fantasy. Lucy Lawless : No, because I never relate it to myself. I go put on a funny outfit and makeup, and I act for the camera. It doesn't relate to who I am when I go home. from
interview: Xena
Cyberprincess - Lucy Lawless of 'Xena' -
|
> related article : Warrior Women On Screen - by Douglas Eby..related pages:....identity.....social reactions / interactions
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 .
. .. To serve an audience, I think, you have to give it to them. You have to go, "Here it is," whether it's a small performance or a big performance, and then it belongs to somebody else to analyze. I don't want to. ... |
Often
people think playing a character is about telling the truth.
I also think it's about knowing when your character is lying. A lot of the time actors will be searching for the truth, or, What does this moment mean? What am I trying to make this other person think or feel? What is my objective here? And I think a lot of that is bollocks. I think a lot of human beings are living in denial. A lot of them are waiting to speak--they're listening, but they are waiting to get their point across. But the way I approach people -- the first thing I do is look in a script and look at when they are lying to themselves, get my head around that. Samantha Morton from
Suitable for Framing - by Laura Weinert,
|
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When I saw a retrospective of my films, I learned something, which was - in its most gauche form - that I have a natural resistance to following the expected rhythm. 
..
..Sometimes to disastrous effect, and sometimes to enlightening effect. I can't resist trying to break that traditional rhythm. ...
Learn the rules so you can break them properly. So many actors are insecure.
And so many actors say, 'I'm waiting to be found out,' meaning they feel that what they're doing is false, that they're not becoming the thing they're supposed to be - with their character's voice in their inner ear. But when I say acting is easy I mean it.
Actors go through this whole thing about how difficult it is - 'It's the conscience of the world', of humanity, and so on - when it's really play.
We're playing metaphors about real people.
Tilda Swinton
from article "Tilda Moments" by Hilton Als,
The New Yorker, March 18, 2002quotes and photo from site : The Tilda Swinton Lovers' Page
*related pages:.....eccentricity........impostor feelings~ ~ ~ ~
| There's
a really delicious challenge to playing an antagonist because you're faced
with trying to find windows of opportunity into the human being within
the monster.
I'm trying to find places of empathy for the audience, so, hopefully, the audience understands why the character is doing certain things. [Acting] is a beautiful balance of dark and light and whether you're playing a protagonist or an antagonist, if you commit as a human being, you're going to carry both of those worlds. The more I can pack the character with a real human being, the more successful I am. .... When I watched Anthony Hopkins in The Silence of the Lambs.. it changed my perspective of acting. I suddenly understood stillness. The power of stillness. It's so powerful. And it's beautiful. And he's playing a villain, an antagonist, and you jack into [the character's] humanity. ... |
.. .. When she was young she was told she couldn't act her way out of a paper bag. I read her autobiography [My Side] and in my down times, I hear her voice saying, "Keep the faith. Don't face facts." Doug Hutchison ... [Venice, April 2001] photo: as Percy Wetmore in The Green Mile |
*related pages:......books: biographies..........the shadow self~ ~ ~ ~
| My advice
is just to do as much theatre as you possibly can. Because it's the thing
that will give you longevity. I know some people become an actor the way
some people become divers off a high board -- it's a wonderful, glorious
thing, and it lasts about five years.
But if you actually do want to be an actor for the whole of your life, you know, life is long. It's a long journey to go on, and you should be aware of that and prepare for that. As I say, if you think, I'll give it five years while I'm young and gorgeous, and maybe it'll work, and maybe it won't, and then I'll give it up -- that's another thing. But if you do have that flame burning inside you, and you're dedicated in that way, then do as much theatre as you possibly can. Helen Mirren [backstage.com February 20, 2002] |
 |
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Brecht once said that at any given moment an actor is three things: the character that he or she is playing, the actor playing the character, and a member of a socio-political society. I think this is a wonderfully liberating statement: it is a way of allowing myself access to audiences and to material. Also, it implies that there is generosity and compassion involved in acting. In a sense, it is the actor's responsibility to be present, rather than just representative.
I thrive on the idea of being present and accounted for. **Liev Schreiber***from book:**On Acting
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I've always wanted to work with Michelle Pfeiffer. Dakota Fanning [age 7] - about acting in "I Am Sam"
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Acting is like sex. You should do it, not talk about it. Joanne Woodward
photo from nativevideos.com
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Creativity is a selfless act, demanding you give of yourself simply for the sheer love of giving. We cannot give our work to the world expecting anything in return at all. That this simple act requires courage is merely creativity's gift back to us. ... Try this... Take a moment and assess: How exactly do you handle rejection? Are you a quitter? A pouter? A take it on the chin type? Are you someone who seeks revenge?
Or do you avoid rejection altogether by never starting anything in the first place? If you're not sure, try writing down at least three times you suffered rejections. ... Then carefully reconstruct exactly how you handled each experience. What is the status of those efforts today? Was anything learned?....
Suzanne Falter-Barns - from her book: How Much Joy Can You Stand / her site: HowMuchJoy.com
*related page:*courage*~ ~ ~ ~
| Ireally
believe they [the characters I portray] should have a history and you should
really know their history very well, because then they're a whole person
to you. Otherwise what you play is an evil person or a good person. It's
not up to you to make that decision.
Playwrights make that decision by the way they write the character. What you've got to do is find the character and show him. ... This sounds so corny, artsy -- but if you give all of yourself [to creating a character] -- it happens in life too -- if you give all of yourself to a person and they move away, they take what you've given them with them. Then who are you? Zoe Caldwell.......[LA
Times, January 6, 2002] |
 |
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| I think the major motivation
for people to be artists, and it can sometimes get complicated and/or corrupted,
is this powerful need to express their spirit. There's a passionate need
to be creative, to be expressive, to be seen and heard in all of the beauty
of what it means to be human.
You see children playacting from the time they have words and the ability to move. They begin fantasizing, playing, imagining, and creating. To me, that's the essence of the human spirit: the ability to imagine and create. What the actor does is refuse to let go of that most human of all our drives. Most of us get corrupted in that pursuit and go after other things like money, power, possessions. But acting, in its true sense, is the essence of the human spirit. Robert Maurer, PhD...[from article: The Vision Thing, by Karen Kondazian - from his site scienceofexcellence.com Dr. Maurer wrote the Introduction: Why Do You Want to be an Actor? for the book The Actor's Encyclopedia |
 |
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| I'm
a great believer in working on your talent. Stella Adler, a teacher I
had in New York, said it's not enough to have talent, you have to have
a talent for your talent. I think that means going to classes, working
on your voice and body, reading great plays, novels, history.
It's not that it's being intellectual, it's that you have to have an ability to understand people, and understand life. There's a lot of fantasy about acting, that if you're attractive and meet the right people, you can have a career. That's true to an extent, but that can be a nightmare, because the person that gets it on looks alone, they end up a disaster. ... Kevin Spacey said at the Actor's Studio interviews on Bravo, "I wanted so much to be successful, but I wasn't good enough. I had to work very hard." It takes an enormous amount of work. You have to study and feel things. You have to let yourself be hurt, and laugh, and be angry. You have to be aware of the five senses, what we see, smell, taste, touch and hear... it's an enormous part of bringing acting to life. You study them year after year. You have to experience acting all the time. No opera singer or tennis player or Wall Street broker would dream of not working every day on their craft. But an actor might say, I work out every day, and I have an agent, so I'm an actor. That's crap. You have to be a person of integrity, a person of true feeling. And you have to study. |
Larry Moss- |
**~ ~ ~ ~
I studied ancient Greek language and civilization and literature [at university]. It sounds far flung from drama, but it's where it all stems from: Classic literature. Jessica Brooks.....[scifi.com chat 2.27.03 about "Frank Herbert's Children of Dune"]
*related page:....mythology........~ ~ ~ ~
........Where would you say your performance actually comes from?
..
I'm humbly grateful to the collective unconscious. I absolutely believe in it, and it's kind of a fusion of text study and the imagination that is sparked off hopefully by the writing. It can actually be sparked off by anything.........Is performing an extension of your self or selves?
I think everybody is everybody. Everybody has the potential and that's why something can work; there has got to be some universality there. Your particular circumstances might help you to understand one character better than another in a situation, because of something in your childhood, but you've got to be able to produce more than one thing. You've got to be athletic, and you've got to encourage your capabilities to show as many different facets as possible of existence. I think that I make instinctive choices about work, which hopefully move me on in some way. .Miranda Richardson
from interview by Alison Oddey - from her book: Performing Women: Stand-Ups, Strumpets and Itinerants
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Maya Stange.. just finished a poetry course in pursuit of a literature degree at Murdoch University, located in her hometown of Perth. "I don't know what I'm studying for exactly," says Stange... "Study is completely different from acting, an antidote to the self-obsession of the profession." .. [Interview mag., Feb 2003]
*related page:.....ego / narcissism~ ~ ~ ~
You develop an aesthetic, and a taste, from watching movies. Maybe that somehow creeps into you. I try to be as unself-conscious as possible about how things are manifesting themselves when I'm working, I don't practice facial expressions or whatever. But there are moments where you are just inspired. You know, it takes a lot of guts to be still in a film. You can see it with Ingrid Bergman, or with others.
And I put a tremendous amount of trust in the audience. If I really believe it, and I know it, and it's there, I don't have to hit them over the head with it. We're so used to hammering people over the head, that we patronize audiences constantly... When you look at those classic films, that's one of the things you realize.
Susan Sarandon - from interview
~ ~ ~ ~
Deanne Bray [left] and Sue Thomas have a lot in common. For one thing, Bray is starring in a new TV series on PAX, "Sue Thomas: F. B. Eye," about Ms. Thomas' experiences in the F. B. I. For another, both women are severely deaf. ... Thomas serves as a consultant for the TV production. One of her jobs was to help in choosing the actress who would portray her. She told the producers it should be a deaf performer because "..only she would have the true, first-hand knowledge and insight into the isolation that deafness can bring to the everyday aspects of living in a hearing world..."
... [from Deaf Friends International article by Stan Griffin]
*related page:.....learning differences~ ~ ~ ~
I decided to come back to New York and keep studying acting. I felt it wasn't for me to get involved in engineering any more than I had. [He had been awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to MIT] ... [My technical background].. was actually working against me in the beginning, because you tend to be very intellectual and analytical, and as far as being an actor that can work against you: you tend to overthink things too much on a dramatic level. But now that I've gotten a little more comfortable with being an actor and working in front of the camera, analyzing material and planning a production, staying on top of every part of it - which you have to do if you're starring in the movie - then it's really been helpful. And on a purely personal level, getting involved in more aspects of life than acting has been helpful.
from interview with Dolph Lundgren*related page:.....awareness / thinking
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[You studied under Sanford Meisner in New York. What did you learn from him?] Listening. And really living in the moment. You learn your text and have it in the back of your head, without a thought as to how you're going to say it.
You work with some actors who decide how they're going to say this one cool line. In their trailer. And I'm like, "You're f**ked." Cause it's like a volume thing, it's the way we talk in life. All I really want to do is entertain people out there sitting in the dark, and for them to believe it.
Kelly Lynch***[MovieMaker moviemaker.com Issue 25]**related book:*Sanford Meisner on Acting
A text should be spoken without any additional signposts to the audience and all actors have to discover verbal habits which can clutter a speech; extra 'ohs' and 'ahs' can muddy up what you are trying to say. A clean, uncluttered performance is a difficult thing to achieve, but Steve Buscemi, Johnny Depp and Edward Norton regularly find the spareness I'm talking about.
Recently I've been bowled over by Russell Crowe's ability to represent his screen characters with such clarity, and I thought Mel Gibson's portrayal of Hamlet found a simplicity and truthfulness that was very moving.
I think it's best to be 'small' in acting. Temperamentally, I have an inclination towards the florid and can easily overact; directors frequently say 'Less, Miriam! Much less!'******Miriam Margolyes
..
..*from book:** On Acting by Mary Luckhurst, Chloe Veltman
> more books: acting
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.... acting: teen/young adult**....nurturing mental health : acting
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*acting : teen/young adult: resources: articles, interviews, sites, books
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