When you’re playing a character who’s cruel, look for the places where he’s kind. When you’re playing a character who is unhappy, look for the places where he has a glint of merriment.
Success is transient, evanescent. The real passion lies in the poignant acquisition of knowledge about all the shading and subtleties of the creative secrets.
The character has to have some kind of arch. The character has to go through an event, and be changed by the human event.
The main factor in any form of creativeness is the life of a human spirit, that of the actor and his part, their joint feelings and subconscious creation.
At times of great stress it is especially necessary to achieve a complete freeing of the muscles.
In talking about a genius, you would not say that he lies; he sees realities with different eyes from ours.
We have as many planes of speech as does a painting planes of perspective which create perspective in a phrase. The most important word stands out most vividly defined in the very foreground of the sound plane. Less important words create a series of deeper planes.
Doubt is the enemy of creativeness.
The direct effect on our mind is achieved by the words, the text, the thought, which arouse consideration. Our will is directly affected by the super-objective, by other objectives, by a through line of action. Our feelings are directly worked upon by tempo-rhythm.
In life we listen to other people. Listen with varying degrees of concentration and attention, right? Actors must learn to listen in a different way.
You must be so thoroughly immersed in the given circumstances of the play, then you decide what it is that the actor wants at any given moment.
Don’t go so deep in yourself that you no longer exist for your partner and for the character and for the play.
All art is autobiographical – if it’s not, it’s not going to quicken on-stage, and it’s not going to come alive.
I was born an ordinary actor. I will die an ordinary actor. But I’ve persisted.
Gratuitous cruelty borders on the pathological, psychotic and that becomes uninteresting because there is no choice.
Everyone at every minute of his life must feel something. Only the dead have no sensations.
The actor does not live, he plays. He remains cold toward the object of his acting but his art must be perfection.
The verbal text of a play, especially one by a genius, is the manifestation of the clarity, the subtlety, the concrete power to express invisible thoughts and feelings of the author himself. Inside each and every word there is an emotion, a thought, that produced the word and justifies its being there.
It is not enough to discover the secret of a play, its thought and feelings – the actor must be able to convert them into living terms.
If you speak any lines, or do anything, mechanically, without fully realizing who you are, where you came from, why, what you want, where you are going, and what you will do when you get there, you will be acting without imagination. That time, whether it will be short or long, will be unreal, and you will be nothing more than a wound-up machine, an automation.
You should first of all assimilate the model. This is complicated. You study it from the point of view of the epoch, the time, the country, condition of life, background, literature, psychology, the soul, way of living, social position, and external appearance; moreover, you study character, such as custom, manner, movements, voice, speech, intonations, All this work on your material will help you permeate it with your own feelings. Without all this you will have no art.