Perhaps one of the most affecting performances of the year was given by a 10-year-old Louisiana fourth-grader who has never acted before or studied the craft.

Just as Tatum O'Neil proved in "Paper Moon" or Anna Paquin in "The Piano," Coronji Calhoun's turn in "Monster's Ball" is evidence that the gifted, untrained novice can often connect with a character and audience with more alacrity than a seasoned pro.

"A nonactor who won't freeze up in front of the camera will give a performance better than any actor can," says Billy Bob Thornton, the film's co-star. "The idea behind acting these days is to strive to be real, to be yourself. Actors by nature want to be noticed."

For his part, Thornton himself isn't sure what makes him tick as an actor.

"When I'm asked about my process I feel obliged to say something, but the truth is I don't know what it is and probably never will. I seem to have found movies to do that have paralleled my life at the time in some way," he says with a laugh.

Which is not to say one shouldn't study. Thornton took acting classes with John Whidlock in the early 1980s in Los Angeles and was a member of the West Coast Ensemble theater group.

Almost all successful thesps have studied at one time or another. Many A-list stars won't do a film without their acting coach close at hand. Katharine Hepburn may have once joked that Shirley Temple proved that acting was so simple that a child could do it, but Hepburn also studied.

And Calhoun will probably need to sign up for some lessons if he's going to continue to pursue a career. You can't rely on inspiration to always pull you through, say the experts.

One only has to recall the disastrous attempt of nonactor Lamberto Maggiorani, star of "The Bicycle Thief," to have a film career in the wake of the pic's international acclaim to know where that kind of thinking can get you.

"What separates actors from nonactors is their ability to understand intuitively what a scene is about and then be able to connect it to what's inside themselves to bring the material to life," says Howard Fine, a top Los Angeles-based teacher and acting coach to Brad Pitt, Kim Delaney and Sela Ward among others. "Not everyone can do that."

And it's not something that happens overnight.

"It takes at least a few years for a young actor to learn a way that works for them," Fine adds.

Where once the approach to acting training was dominated by a few major teacher/gurus -- Lee Strasberg and his Actor's Studio Method, Sanford Meisner's technique or Stella Adler and her interpretation of Konstantin Stanislavski's system -- the acting world today is far more Balkanized.

One thesp's mantra

"If you believe what you're doing then people watching you will believe what you're doing," says Anthony LaPaglia, who studied with Actor's Studio alum Kim Stanley in the 1980s. "You can't teach acting but you can help people with talent to develop a technique or a method of working that enables them to gain access to their own emotional world."

Like nearly all the actors and teachers contacted for this story, LaPaglia says the charlatans outnumber the genuinely great teachers by a large margin. "Many of them have an agenda. They misinform young actors who are vulnerable and who have no real way of separating what's going to be useful and what's just plain bullshit." 

Which was never a problem for Tilda Swinton. The actress, who received rave reviews in "The Deep End," has never studied with anyone. Her method?

"I read the script, and if my imagination and creativity gets caught up with the ideas then I'm fairly confident I can bring the story (of the character) to life," Swinton reveals.

In part, she sees acting as a detective story, but working backward from the solution to what gave rise to the problem.

"In order for the story to move forward, the character has to do certain things," she continues. "You don't have to be anything but interested in telling the story."

But as much as the Method of Strasberg and Elia Kazan has become the stuff of cliches and stereotypes -- the brooding young thesp with hollow eyes, a black leather jacket and a cigarette -- the questions it got actors asking in the 1950s are the same ones most thesps pose today when approaching a role: Who am I in this role? What do I want? How am I going to get it? What stands in my way?

But that was then, says Cameron Thor, another L.A.-based top acting teacher/coach who counts Cameron Diaz and [Drew Carey] among his clients.

"Realistically, the Method was style of performance largely created for the stage actor," Thor says.

Crying doesn't cut it

Where it was once a cultural phenomenon to see Marlon Brando wailing onstage, in 2002 emotional vulnerability real or staged is not dramatically interesting.

"Today it's less to do with how much you're willing to have genuine feeling as it is to do with using the feeling as a motor to heroic action," Thor continues.

It doesn't matter whether it's "The Matrix" or "Dude, Where's My Car?," in every story the hero has to do something he or she thinks they can't do.

"The problem with the Method was it began to say there's only one truth," Thor says, "but in storytelling there's always more than one truth."

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Variety, Jan. 14, 2002

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