Word: actorisms
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...Atticus Finch. Fate decreed otherwise. Gregory Peck got the role of the small-town Southern lawyer in the 1962 film version of To Kill a Mockingbird. The hero of Harper Lee's Pulitzer-prizewinning novel had been a man much like her father, and when the author met the actor on the first day of shooting, she noted, "Gregory, you've got a little potbelly just like my daddy." The star replied, "Harper, that's great acting...
...inside of his skin and walk around in it." Tolerance ripening into empathy: that was Peck's gift in playing an elevated species of American, the man of strength and compassion. Today that species is more than endangered; it has nearly vanished. But it flourished for most of the actor's half-century onscreen, when Americans prided themselves on their fellow feeling for the downtrodden and their ability to uplift the races. Peck was liberal when liberal was cool...
Peck wasn't just an icon. He was an actor, a smart one. He picked hit properties in a wide variety of genres: romantic comedy (Roman Holiday), action (The Guns of Navarone), horror (The Omen). He was bold in taking roles--Ahab, General MacArthur--that twisted his noble-man image. He assayed his share of misanthropes (including Nazi monster Josef Mengele) and western hombres as craggy as a butte. But Peck will be best remembered as the movies' exemplary father figure, who often, and surprisingly, revealed the pacifism at the heart of heroism...
...Stewart, best known as an X-Man and sometime Star Trekker, was last seen in the West End 17 years ago, but his performance in The Master Builder, Ibsen's claustrophobic study of obsession and paranoia, has won adulatory reviews. After the first preview at the Albery Theatre, the actor was plainly exhausted as he sipped champagne in his dressing room. "It's so draining," he exclaimed, in mock agony, "How can I do this for 10 weeks?" Fiennes takes on an even tougher challenge at the Theatre Royal Haymarket, playing the puritanical priest of Brand. "You have to rehearse...
...Bruce Banner, the sweet, troubled scientist who, when his anger starts to bubble, hands the heavy lifting, mauling and rock smashing to a computer-generated, volatile giant. (Think Shrek, off his meds.) Bana's Banner is a Clark Kent who never gets to be Superman - which means the actor had to Act. "He exists on his own as a confused, complicated character," says Bana. "Ang basically said, ?There's light and shade, and you're the shade...