Now there is a certain snobbism today that says you don’t learn acting by. The only way you can learn your scale, that you can learn your job quickly - because that is what acting demands of you today - is through a studio, a school. You and your scale are an unknown quantity. Today’s actors don’t have this priceless resource. By being in such a company everyone found his scale. Nobody who played Falstaff could also play Romeo. You played a little comedy, a little drama. Nobody took you out of a drugstore and said, Play D’Artagnan. You can start anywhere they want you to start. Today you can start not holding the spear but on top. This is the essence of our job as actors. Was it for a great ceremony? Was it for warfare? You must understand those reasons.
In other times there were extremely important reasons for it, and for doing it right. Today there’s no reason to carry a spear. You have to see what it means to carry a spear at that time. And you’d never know why either.Ĭarrying a spear makes you a different person.
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But even if that dream did come true, if you shot right to the top, you’d be the poorer actor for never learning how to hold that spear. You only think you are, because you’ve been fed dreams of actors being discovered at drug store counters. That’s how you learned to hold a spear and, eventually, how to play Hamlet. They saw you weren’t holding it right and they showed you how to hold it. You joined the company, and you traveled through the provinces. They had seen you develop as an actor over a period of time. They wouldn’t dream of producing Romeo and Juliet, unless they were sure they had, right in their company, a capable Romeo, a capable Juliet, a good Nurse, a good Friar Laurence. You were a member of a company, and they’d seen you.
When I was a young actress you didn’t audition. People would have been astonished at an actress being required to audition for Juliet, for instance. However, what being an actor has meant for most of that time is not what it means now.Īctors today face certain requirements, certain realities that would have been unheard of, even impossible fifty years ago. You are about to embrace a profession that is 2,000 years old. You need 100 percent honorable selfishness toward you. You don’t care what happens in The New York Times. You must understand that while you’re in this room you leave the outside world outside. Then there’s the scattered person who doesn’t know where she is. Your baby is home crying, or your husband doesn’t love you, or your boyfriend didn’t call you. You didn’t have your coffee, or you grabbed it at the cafeteria. But right at the start I want you to know that you do matter. Over the next few months you will hear me say repeatedly that acting is not about you.
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