Why Acting Matters by David Thomson

Author:David Thomson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2015-03-02T16:00:00+00:00

It is striking how far these riddles coincide with 1947: the premiere of A Streetcar Named Desire occurred in the very year of the founding in New York of the Actors Studio. Two months before the debut of Streetcar, the Studio was established as a gathering place for actors. It was founded by four people: Bobby Lewis, Cheryl Crawford, Anna Sokolow, and Elia Kazan, who was the director of Streetcar and who had in the same year made a movie, Gentleman’s Agreement, that would win the Oscar for Best Picture. Soon after the foundation, Lee Strasberg joined the Studio to become its teacher and its most authoritative figure.

There are those who regard the Actors Studio as a Church (and it has had illustrious members as well as a strange, long-running television show ready to showcase any actor), but the more devout we are in considering it, the less respect we have for the riddles in acting, and their comic undertone.13

In many respects, the Actors Studio was an offshoot of the Group Theatre, which had been established as a theatre collective in 1931, founded by Harold Clurman (a director of plays), Cheryl Crawford (a producer and director), and Lee Strasberg (a natural godfather). The Group believed in the value of art and theatre in a time of worldwide depression and political unrest. It was an organization of the Left that encouraged radical plays and had several members with allegiances to the Communist Party. It was their feeling that America needed and deserved an acting style of its own that was naturalistic, intimate, rooted in psychology, politically committed, and pledged to an independent formula for good work in the theatre. It was a group that included writers and directors as well as actors, and so it had Clurman and Strasberg, Clifford Odets and Irwin Shaw, and Luther and Stella Adler (brother and sister, actor and teacher). Elia Kazan joined the Group as a young actor and all-purpose assistant.

The notion of an American way of acting presupposed that the theatre had been unduly dominated by English acting and English plays, and that the English style was grand but hollow or “mannered.” In part that was directed at young stars, like Olivier and Gielgud, but it was strengthened by an American sense of inferiority towards the grand manner and stagey eloquence of British theatre, and its influence on the movies. Hollywood in the thirties was a welcoming place for the English voice—Ronald Colman, Cary Grant, Charles Laughton, David Niven, Basil Rathbone, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., John Barrymore even (an actor trained in the English style), Claude Rains, Robert Donat, Leslie Howard, Clive Brook, George Arliss, Errol Flynn. Among actresses, there were many stars who were English, or non-American, or who often sounded English even if they had been born in America: Claudette Colbert, Irene Dunne, Olivia de Havilland and Joan Fontaine, Margaret Sullavan, Marlene Dietrich, Garbo, and Ingrid Bergman. In many parts of America, Bette Davis and Katharine Hepburn sounded English. Not least was Vivien

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