Was acting not simply a gift, something you either had or didn’t have? Or else a craft, a matter of technique, a set of skills, vocal or physical, to be mastered? Noël Coward was much quoted: “You ask my advice about acting? Speak clearly, don’t bump into the furniture and if you must have motivation, think of your pay packet on Friday.” The term “method acting” passed into the language, its terminology-“motivation,” “living the part”-partly mocked, partly viewed with awe.Ī few decades earlier, informed theatergoers had become fascinated by something new stirring in the Russian theater, the mysterious so-called System of Konstantin Stanislavski both the System and the Method were, in their day, intensely controversial with actors and audiences alike, as was the very idea of approaching acting systematically or methodically. One of the most notable instances of a shift in the vernacular of acting occurred in the early 1950s with the development of the Method, named and propagated by Lee Strasberg it was held, rightly or wrongly, to have produced an entire generation of actors-among them Marlon Brando, James Dean, Paul Newman, and Marilyn Monroe-who, specializing in extreme emotional states, seemed to embody the alienation and rebellion of the 1950s and 1960s. The shock of the new has a built-in decay, and it is in the nature of pioneers to believe that they have finally reached the promised land, the end of the rainbow. His acting had not changed the temper and taste of the times had. In 1935 Laurence Olivier’s performances in Romeo and Juliet (he alternated the parts of Romeo and Mercutio) were regarded as ultrarealist ten years later, in his Shakespeare films, it is clear that he was a somewhat stylized actor on stage twenty years after that he was dismissed by many as monstrously mannered. Each was initially admired for being more real than his predecessors actors are never admired for being unnatural. Garrick’s quicksilver transformations, so expressive of the Age of Enlightenment, were in turn supplanted by Edmund Kean’s dark and dangerous Romantic intensity. When David Garrick, nimble and quick-witted, first leaped onto the scene with his dazzling realism and lightning changes of mood, the portly and impressively slow-moving James Quin, hitherto the darling of the pit, was heard to remark, “If the young fellow was right, he, and the rest of the players, had all been wrong.” After all, as the writer-director Hamlet tells his actors, “The purpose of playing, both at the first and now, was and is, to hold as ’twere the mirror up to nature, to show…the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.” The notion that there is some sort of immutable gold standard for truthful acting is deeply unreliable: cometh the hour, cometh the actor. One of the challenges of writing about acting is that it constantly reinvents itself, always believing that its latest recension at last tells the truth about the human condition. Of acting itself, though, there is less mention. (“I wasn’t aware that I was ticking,” Guinness replied.) What do actors wear, what do they eat, how often and in which positions do they have sex, what do they think? This insatiable curiosity perhaps betrays a residual sense of the uncanniness of these shape-shifters, these emblematic embodiers of what it is to be human. The public still, it seems, longs to know, as a journalist put it to Alec Guinness on his first visit to America, what makes them tick. Fascination with actors shows no sign of abating.
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