Word: actor
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...verge of creating a new, great theatre. We have today a larger number of good, if not great, playwrights than at any other time, with the possible exception of the Elizabethan era. It all depends on understanding the actor, on training our audiences to know what acting really is," Strasberg stated...
What are the chief requisites for a great actor or actress? "Most people will list a great voice and a good-looking body," he said. "But the greater performers have lacked one or both of these--David Garrick, Edmund Kean, Eleanora Duse, Pauline Lord and Helen Hayes, for example." In the movies, even such "good but not great actors" as Humphrey Bogart, Spencer Tracy, Clark Gable and John Garfield were not able to get anything but villain roles for a long, long time...
...conventional criteria just don't hold up," Strasberg said. "But something does happen when these people come on the stage. The basic requirement is this: the capacity to be excited by imaginary stimuli. The actor must be able to reproduce a reaction to a situation at will...
...must be convincing and believable in any kind of theatre. The two greatest feminine performances I ever saw were given by Duse and Mei Lan-Fang; and the latter was the more notable achievement, for it had to overcome the greater handicaps." (Mei Lan-Fang was the foremost Chinese actor, and head of the Ching-Chung Monastery, who specialized in female impersonations). "In all kinds of theatre, the basic emotions are always the same; only the techniques of handling them differ...
...believe Shakespeare was Shakespeare," Strasberg continued, "and that he was an actor." He said the best clue to Shakespeare's ideas on acting is not to be found in Hamlet's oft-cited directions to the Players (Act iii, 2), but rather in Hamlet's 'O what a rogue and peasant slave' soliloquy (Act ii, 2), especially the lines, "Is it not monstrous that this player here,/ But in a fiction, in a dream of passion,/ Could force so his soul to his own conceit/ That from her working all his visage wann'd,/ Tears in his eyes, distraction...