Acting Naturally by David Thomson

Author:David Thomson [Thomson, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2023-02-07T00:00:00+00:00

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There are large, haunting moments lost in history—like Edmund Kean (1787–1833) as Lear, or Alan Badel playing him in Sartre’s Kean in 1971. I saw the latter, and I knew it was astounding, but don’t trust me in remembering it. Charles Laughton did Lear at Stratford-on-Avon in 1959, with Zoe Caldwell as Cordelia and Ian Holm as the Fool. Was that his vindication or a final folly? Those glories are gone, so we will never know whether they were misguided or maps to the treasure. But if that controversial Lear did survive, in just a couple of scenes, would it hold the screen all these years later? A case can be made—Lillian Gish explained it to me once—that unless you saw a movie on the first weekend it opened you cannot know what it felt like. So my Captain Horatio Hornblower could be intertwined with the big new school I was about to start at and my apprehension that courage was going to be required there, more than I possessed. But in consternation, there can be an inspiring calm, in absorbing a presence on screen and believing, Yes, this is how things should be. If only we can behave naturally enough to persuade others, while marrying a sister the Duke of Wellington never had. If our follies can be believed.

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