The Player A Profile Of An Art

^1

A PROFILE OF AN ART

I

,N THIS BOOK, fifty-fivfe outstanding
actors and actresses of our time are
given an opportunity to play them-
selves. Appearing in a vast drama ar-
ranged for them by the authors, Lillian
Ross and Helen Ross, they make their
separate entrances and speak lines that
reveal who they are, how they became
what they are, what they think about
themselves and their work, and how
they go about creating the theatrical
illusion that helps sustain the rest of
us mortals. Employing a literary form
they devised for the purpose, the au-
thors let these fifty-five people tell their
own stories, and, seeing actors as artists
whose medium is nothing more and

(Continued on back flap)

*^_~^

KANSAS CITY. MO. PUBLIC LIBRARY

7 7

Boss

DATE DUE

A

^

Lillian noss ana rlelen Ross

THE PLAYER

a Profile of an Art

WITH PHOTOGRAPHS BY LILLIAN ROSS

SIMON AND SCHUSTER NEW YORK

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

INCLUDING THE RIGHT OF REPRODUCTION

IN WHOLE OR IN PART IN ANY FORM

COPYRIGHT 1961 BY LILLIAN ROSS

COPYRIGHT 1962 BY LILLIAN ROSS AND HELEN ROSS

PUBLISHED BY SIMON AND SCHUSTER

ROCKEFELLER CENTER, 630 FIFTH AVENUE

NEW YORK 20, N.Y.

Twenty-one of these pieces originally appeared in
The New Yorker Magazine

SECOND PRINTING

All the photographs in "The Player" were taken by Lillian
Ross, with the exception of those of Eileen Heckart and Lee
Remick, which were taken by Eli Wallach; and those of Joan
Crawford and Michael Redgrave, which appear by courtesy
of Miss Crawford and Mr. Redgrave.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER: 6216986
MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

CONTENla

KIM STANLEY 9
CEDRIC HARDWICKE 19
MELVYN DOUGLAS 26
INGRID BERGMAN 38
BRANDON DE WILDE 43
SOPHIA LOREN 50
HUME CRONYN 55
ZERO MOSTEL 6G
JOAN CRAWFORD 66
ALEXANDER DAVION 73
HENRY FONDA 83
JANE FONDA 92
SIDNEY POITIER 103
JULIET MILLS 113
WILLIAM HOLDEN 117
BURGESS MEREDITH 123
EILEEN HECKART 132
ROBERT SHAW 138
PATTY DUKE 150
ELI WALLACH 156
ANNE JACKSON 163
PAUL SCOFIELD 171
WARREN BEATTY 188
KATHARINE CORNELL 195
EDDIE ALBERT 198
FRANgOISE ROSAY 207
ANDY GRIFFITH 215
MARIA SCHELL 224
MAXIMILIAN SCHELL 231
PAUL NEWMAN 239
LEE REMICK 249

INDEX 439

DONALD PLEASENCE 256
CAROL LYNLEY 268
ROD STEIGER 275
CLAIRE BLOOM 282
DANA ANDREWS 290
MAUREEN STAPLETON 297
RICHARD WIDMARK 304
VLADIMIR SOKOLOFF 310
KIM HUNTER 316
HAROLD SCOTT 326
MICHAEL REDGRAVE 334
BEN GAZZARA 344
JANICE RULE 351
FREDRIC MARCH 359
ANGELA LANSBURY 364
ANTHONY QUINN 373
JASON ROBARDS, SR. 380
MARGARET LEIGHTON 386
ANTHONY PERKINS 394
SIMONE SIGNORET 399
ROBERT PRESTON 404
WALTER MATTHAU 416
GERALDINE PAGE 424
JOHN GIELGUD 429

All the pieces in this book, while cast in autobi-
ographical form, are based on interviews. The inter-
views, which took place between 1958 and 1962, were
conducted informally and in the traditional manner;
they were not tape-recorded. The authors talked with
more than a hundred actors and actresses, and al-
though, for various technical reasons, only fifty-five of
them could be directly represented here, the others
indirectly contributed a great deal of background, and
the authors are grateful to them for their time and
help. Among the fifty-five whose stories are told in this
book so assembled, it is hoped, as to make an
aesthetic whole, and thus give a balanced and defini-
tive picture of the art of acting are some of the most
eminent and most talented and most devoted people
in the theatre, but the authors are very well aware
that another fifty-five, equally eminent and talented
and devoted, could be gathered together to the same
purpose. If time and chance and the mechanics of
book production had permitted, they would have
been included, but since that was not possible, the
authors wish to dedicate their book to all actors and
actresses, outside as well as within these pages.

L. R. AND H. R.

KIM STANLEY

Unlike other artists, the actor has only his own body
and his own self to work with. To exhibit oneself on
the stage is quite a brave and wonderful thing to do.

I was born on February 11, 1925, in Tularosa, New Mexico. My par-
ents were divorced when I was three. My father, J. T. Reid, is part
Irish and part Cherokee Indian, and he married my mother, a German-
English girl named Ann Miller, when she was sixteen. He's a retired
professor of philosophy and education, and he now teaches a fishing
class at the University of New Mexico, and writes about fishing and
hunting. My mother paints as a hobby, and lives in Greenwich Village.
I took my maternal grandmother's maiden name. My family were
farm people on both sides. I had three older brothers: Howard, now

THE PLAYER: KIM STANLEY

a psychiatrist in Milwaukee; Justin, a lawyer who recently gave up
his practice to write, and who lives in New City, New York; and Ken-
neth, who was killed in the Second World War. My mother was an in-
terior decorator, and moved us from one part of the Southwest to an-
other. 1 felt lonely as a child; I dreaded the feeling of coming home to
an empty apartment after school. I was a skinny kid. My mother likes
to say that I inherited acting talent from my father, because he did
some professional singing to work his way through college. Actually,
nobody in the family was in acting. My first experience with it came
when I was in the third grade, in Albuquerque, where my teacher,
Violet C. Moore, took an interest in me. We still correspond occa-
sionally. She took me home with her, gave me cookies and milk, and
was very good to me. She is a lovely, warm, kind lady. She got me to
act in a school play called "New Mown Hay." It was all about new-
mown hay and a young man haying, and I was the ten-year-old ingenue
in it. I can clearly remember the experience, doing something up there
on the stage, and getting a feeling that was powerful and special, un-
like anything else I had ever felt. I went to three high schools first
in San Antonio, then in Albuquerque, and, for my senior year, in
Taos, where my father was working for his Ph.D. on a plan for adult
education among underprivileged Indians. I spent that whole year
with him, and I was one of three non-Mexican pupils in the school.
I wrote a lot of poetry in my teens, and fluctuated between a desire
to be an artist or a poet and a desire to be popular and be things like
the May Queen. Ever since I was fifteen, I have painted and drawn
mostly charcoals and water colors, mostly of people. My husband,
Alfred Ryder, an actor and director, is a wonderful sketcher.

I did my first real acting in 1942, when I was a sophomore
at the University of New Mexico. I played the part of the young girl
in "Thunder Rock." There was something about that character that
I really responded to. I played a young, sort of selfish Viennese girl,
who was, like all the other characters in the play, dead* At the time,
I thought she was terribly poetic, because when you're seventeen it is
poetic to be dead. I really felt I was not myself but this girl, and that
hooked me. It meant escape from my own life then. Later on, of
course, I learned that that isn't what the theatre is all about. Al-
though I did really feel something about this girl I played, I wasn't
thinking seriously about acting as a career. I had a Hard-Shell Baptist

10

KIM STANLEY

family background, for one thing. I went to a lot of movies in those
days, and was a big fan of Bette Davis which I still am but I never
considered myself pretty enough to be a movie actress. I saw Laurence
Olivier and Merle Oberon in "Wuthering Heights" about twenty-five
times. I just loved it. I went to see it again recently, and had exactly
the same experience I had the first time. My father always thought
acting was very silly, and I wanted his approval. To him, acting was
not a serious occupation. I think he still regards fishing as more im-
portant. My mother was the only one who encouraged me to think
about acting. I didn't see a professional play until I was in my teens,
when "The Philadelphia Story," with Katharine Hepburn, came
to San Antonio. I was overcome. I was transfixed. The impact of
Katharine Hepburn's personality was fantastic. It was a comedy, but
after the curtain came down I sat there and cried, because I wanted
it to go on all night.

I got a B.A. in psychology at the University of Texas in 1945. I had
intended at first to go on with my studies in psychology and to
study medicine, but I had no enthusiasm for that. Besides, the
director of the Pasadena Playhouse had seen me act in college, and
offered me a scholarship. So I went to Pasadena, even though everyone
in the family except my mother was against it. Pasadena turned out
to be like a glorified junior college, and I quit after one year. I felt
I was ready to take on life in a less diluted form. My experience in
"Thunder Rock" had apparently released something in me, and I
seemed to want to develop it. I had a friend working with a stock
company in Louisville, Kentucky, who had also quit Pasadena. She
wrote me that they needed a walk-on, so I went there and did a season
of winter stock, at the Equity minimum of fifty-seven-fifty a week. I
played mostly walk-on parts, although I had a couple of lines as a
manicurist in "Boy Meets Girl." After four months there, I took a
Greyhound bus to New York.

When I arrived in New York, in the spring of 1947, I had twenty-
one dollars. It was raining. I got off at the Thirty-fourth Street station,
and took the first room I saw in a rooming house in the West
Thirties. I didn't know one single person in the city. I still had a
heavy Texas accent, although I had been working to get rid of it.
Stanley Walker, who was a cousin of my mother's, had given me a
list of names of theatre people to see about a job. I saw them, and

11

THE FLAYER: KIM STANLEY

they all told me to go back to Texas. But by then I had made up
my mind that I was going to be an actress. I had no fear at all. I
knew I was Duse. In a short period of time, everything had crystallized.
I stayed in that first rooming house, in a room with a bedbug-ridden
bed, for a month and a half; I slept on the floor. Then I got a job in
summer stock at Pompton Lakes. I played the ingenue in "Kiss and
Tell" and leading roles in other plays, which were presented in the
local high-school auditorium. But after playing the lead in "The
Pursuit of Happiness" I got fired. It didn't make me feel that I
couldn't act, but it came as a terrible blow. In those days, however,
I was more sure of myself than I am now. It was the only time in my
life that I was able to get myself to make the rounds of offices of
producers and casting agents. Making the rounds is like trying to sell
yourself, as if you were something on the hoof. I'd never be able to
do that again. You couldn't get an agent unless you were known or
were fantastically beautiful. I would get paralyzed, once in an office,
and would be unable to remember the name of the play I was trying to
get a job in. I hated the whole procedure. It was humiliating. They'd
ask me what I had done on Broadway, and I couldn't speak. Emotion-
ally, I couldn't take it. My hands would start sweating. I would feel
like a cipher. Nothing was worth that. After about six months, I de-
cided to get a job outside the theatre and save enough money to work
in the Off Broadway theatre. I answered a newspaper ad for models to
work in the dress house of Herbert Sonclheim, whose son Stephen later
wrote the lyrics for "West Side Story/' I was hired as an outdoor-girl-
type model four showings a clay for fifty-six dollars a week. It was
deadly work. After about a year, I got married to the actor Bruce Hall.
We lived in a cold-water flat at Third Avenue and Thirty-sixth Street,
and we devoted all our spare time to readings at home with other ac-
tors. I read Juliet, Ophelia, and everything. Then I thought I'd save
more money if I gave up modelling and got a job as a waitress, and I
went to work in the cocktail lounge of the old Sheraton Hotel. In a
good week, I'd make about ninety dollars in tips. I wore high-heeled
shoes and a transparent skirt, and ads for the lounge would show a
picture of me with the heading "I'm at the Sheraton Lounge, Where
are you?" Bruce, in the meantime, got a job in Maxwell Anderson's
"Joan of Lorraine," playing the part of one of Joan's brothers. I got to
meet Ingrid Bergman, who played Joan. It wasS a very exciting time.

12

KIM STANLEY

Then I read a want ad tor models to tour Southern towns, modelling
Balenciaga, Fath, and other designers, at a salary of eighty-five dollars a
week, plus expenses. 1 did that for six months, and got home with two
thousand dollars.

Back in New York, I knew I couldn't make the rounds any more, so
I started going to the various Off Broadway groups to see if they
would give me any little thing to do. I joined the Interplayers at the
Provincetown Theatre, and they let me make and serve the lemonade
at intermission but didn't let me act. My husband and I decided to
separate, and I got an apartment in the Village. All the while, some-
thing was working in me, pushing me to be an actress, and it wouldn't
let me alone. Michael Vincente Gazzo and Gene Saks were at the
Provincetown, and the next year we formed our own company Off
Broadway, Inc. and rented the Cherry Lane Theatre for our head-
quarters. Mike taught acting. It was my first, brush with the so-called
Method. The word "Method" has been so abused that it's lost its
meaning. At the Actors' Studio itself, which is generally thought of as
the home of the Method, it's referred to now as "the so-called Method."
It was a real eye-opener to me. Mike was an exciting teacher. New
things began happening to me as I attended the various classes in
speech, dance, and acting. In the classroom exercises, I found myself
doing things I hadn't known had anything to do with acting. I hadn't
known that this was the way to get at those acting things, to use them
in your work. There are times during your life when you suddenly
have insight, and this was one of those times for me. I began to under-
stand why I didn't like some of the acting I had seen, or why I missed
something onstage even when I might like what I was seeing very
much. In June, 1949, I appeared at the Cherry Lane in Gertrude
Stein's "Yes Is for a Very Young Man," with Anthony Franciosa.
We got very good reviews, and the agents began calling.

I was having a wonderful time doing plays that I didn't understand
but that were very provocative. All kinds of new things were opening
up for me. Like a new play by Robert Hivnor, called "Too Many
Thumbs," which featured an ape turned man turned saint, who com-
mits suicide. I played the ape's girl friend. Then I played the lead
in "Saint Joan" at the Equity Library Theatre, and I really began
to feel how much I had to study. There were so many problems in
the play I couldn't solve. I didn't have the technique. In 1950, after

13

THE PLAYER: KIM STANLEY

making my Broadway debut in "Montserrat" in November, 1949, re-
placing Julie Harris as Felisa, I went to the Actors' Studio for an audi-
tion and was accepted. After that, I was in the Broadway produc-
tion of Lorca's "The House of Bernarda Alba," in which I had a
beautiful part the young daughter, Adela and played with Katina
Paxinou. It was a lovely play. Late in 1952, I was asked to read for
"Picnic" for the lead part of the older sister, I felt I couldn't play
it. I had never been the prettiest girl in town. I wouldn't know how
to play it. So I asked for the part of the kid sister, Millie Owens. I
was told I was ten years too old, but I was determined to play the
part. After I got it, I worked on it at the Actors' Studio with the
Artistic Director of the Studio, Lee Strasberg. Strasberg is the greatest
man in the theatre today a completely dedicated man. He's an actor
and director and an artist in his own right. He made it possible for
the whole world to open up for me. I'd feel, That's what I want,
that's what I've always felt. It was like coming home. It can't be un-
derstood by people who have never been to the Actors' Studio. The
Studio is the place where you can learn under the most thoroughly
trained eye. Wearing a leather jacket doesn't make you a Method
actor, and Method actors do not mumble. The Method simply makes
you as free as possible. I have a healthy respect for throwing one-
self into a part, even with crudenesses, as against the polite, mecha-
nized sort of thing. But I'm also a great admirer of Gielgud and
Olivier, who are masters of their art, who know how to use the voice,
who are experts at economy of movement.

I had a number of bad habits as an actress when I first met Stras-
berg. Like many actors, I mistook showing off for acting. He taught
me the difference. Showing off mars a lot of good work. You shouldn't
be busy showing how* cute you are in front of the audience instead
of exploring the person you're playing. You shouldn't let the au-
dience control your performance, so that if they giggle, you do some-
thing else cute to get another giggle out of them. Being cute is not act-
ing, and it's sad when a good actor falls into the being-cute trap. What I
want to do on the stage is to express the playwright's meaning, to have
an experience playing my part that expresses that meaning and illumi-
nates it and lets the audience experience it, too. Whatever the actor
calls it, that is, I think, what every good actor tries to do. It doesn't
matter what kind of actor he says he is or whether he says he's Method

14

KIM STANLEY

or non-Method. I don't use the word "Method" if I can help it. The
word doesn't matter. Whatever it is, it is there if you want to learn
anything from it that might help you as an actor. It's a combination
of things that help you do what you want to do in a part. Through
his teaching, Strasberg gives you tools that make it possible for you
to accomplish what you want to do. When you're playing a part
and, say, the first scene begins to dry up, he may get you to think
of something about the kind of day it is, the way the wind is blowing
just anything to reexcite your imagination. You may do some
little thing differently without changing it so much, however,
that it throws the other actors. Each person Strasberg works with
comes out a much broader, fuller, deeper person, because Strasberg
is interested not in exploiting talent but in nurturing it and making
it grow. He insists that I work on comedy, for instance, which I
haven't done on Broadway since "Bus Stop." I'm usually cast in tragic
things. By doing comedy I can avoid some of the pitfalls getting lost,
copying myself. Talented people often try to copy themselves. One
very famous actor, a leading star in movies who's been very success-
ful in recent years, could have become the greatest actor of our time
if he hadn't confined himself to making movies. They were superior
movies but not enough for his talent to feed on. He acted superbly in
the movies, but after a while he started imitating himself. He should
have played "Hamlet" on the stage four years ago, instead of re-
stricting himself to movies. No matter what you do in a film, it is,
after all, bits and pieces for the director, and that's marvellous for the
director but it doesn't allow the actor to learn to mold a part. In
films, it's the director who is the artist. An actor has much more chance
to create on the stage. I'm not an authority on movies. I've been in
only one myself, "The Goddess," and it was a very bad one. It fell
so short of what the real thing might have been. It more or less ex-
ploited itself. And that always makes a potentially good movie much
worse than simply a bad movie. I don't mean that actors shouldn't
make movies or shouldn't make them in Hollywood, but I do think
that Hollywood can't contain a really great talent, because even the
best films are not enough to nurture that kind of talent. It's in the
very nature of the medium waiting for lights and technicalities,
starting and stopping your part for a take of only a minute or two
that your sustained feeling gets cut off. Good film actors have to be

15

THE PLAYER: KIM STANLEY

fantastic magicians. A great actor must continue to act on the stage
if he wants to keep his talent alive. That isn't to say that any great
play is better than any great movie. We need both. All I mean is
that when you stay only in movies say, for ten years your talent
feeds on itself. But if you work on a part even a little part, in a
Chekhov play, for example, there is somewhere for you to go because
you're the one who is molding your part.

When I first look at a script, my immediate responses and impulses
are terribly helpful. I put down a lot of notes that make no sense
to anybody but me. I don't study the script for character. I just read
it. When I first read "A Far Country," the image of Freud's patient,
Elizabeth, my part, came absolutely full-blown to me a many-faceted,
hard jewel that cracks open. Then, when you start to rehearse, with
other people, something begins to happen. What it is exactly I don't
know, and don't even want to know. I'm all tor mystery there. Most
of what happens as you develop your part is unconscious, most of
it is underwater. Painting isn't the same kind of joy. Or cooking a
good dinner, however marvellous that is. Or planting something in
the ground and seeing it grow, which I love. No, in acting you get
taken over by some force outside yourself. Something happens. And
I do get affected in my real life by my parts. When I was playing
Millie Owens in "Picnic," I always felt younger than my age. The
only time I got really depressed by a part was when I played Blanche
in "A Streetcar Named Desire," for eight weeks in Houston. By the
end of that time, I was practically a basket case. At rehearsals, I wear
the kind of clothes I wear in the part. It gives me a sensory feeling
for the part. Wearing tight corsets and high heels while I was rehears-
ing L6a in "Ch<ri" actually affected my emotions in the role.
And I find my own painting and looking at paintings helpful
Before we opened in "Ch&ri" in New York, I went to the Phillips
Gallery, in Washington, and as I was standing there looking at the
Renoir painting "Boating," I actually got feelings from it that I could
use in my part the way those women lean on their hands, the
physicalization of it, that lovely roundness that they have. Paintings
can be a help if you're working on a part that doesn't belong to your
own immediate background. Each age has its own texture. You then
have to make it somehow your own. I consider my portrayal of L6a
in "Ch&i" a failure, but I couldn't have gone on to play Elizabeth

16

KIM STANLEY

in "A Far Country" if it hadn't been for my experience in that
part. Until I played La, most of my roles had been of the American
genre. There had been nothing in my life to give me references to an
aristocratic or upper-middle-class European style and milieu. I don't
like to hear about actresses' doing extensive research for a part, but
the fact is I did spend days and days in the New York Public Library
working on the part of Elizabeth. I not only read Freud's writings
about Elizabeth, I also looked at late-nineteenth-century Viennese
prints that showed the physical constriction of women of the time,
and studied the social context of the part. Also, because Elizabeth
walks on crutches, I rehearsed on crutches. I was quite pleased when
several Viennese members of the audience at "A Far Country" came
backstage to congratulate me on what they said was my convincing
portrayal of an upper-middle-class Viennese woman of that period.

I have two children, Lisa and Jamie, by my second husband, the
director and actor Curt Conway, and a third, Laurie, by my present
husband. I find I can't go straight from my kids to a part. I am with
them, at our home in Suffern, until five, and I get to the theatre an
hour and a half before the play starts. I can sleep on a picket fence,
and on matinee days I take a long nap between performances. I get
up every morning at seven to have breakfast with the kids, and then,
if I'm working, I go back to bed. After a long run, I still find new
satisfaction and new experiences in a part, but I begin to count the
number of performances left to go, because I'm so anxious to be
alone with my children. I try never to stay in a play longer than nine
months the length of time I played in both "Bus Stop" and "Picnic."
After nine months, it begins to sound like a tape recorder at least
to me. By the time I reached my eighth month in "A Far Country,"
it was extremely hard work to keep it fresh and creative, and not
sound as though I were calling in from Chicago. I don't see how some
people can stay year after year in the same play. I'd go absolutely
around the bend. To keep it fresh, I try to begin all over again in
each performance, and I try to look at my character with new eyes.
It's no fun to act the other way. I feel lousy afterward if it's just blah-
blah-blah and I experience nothing. There are enough of those per-
formances accidentally. Very long runs are good for producers but
bad for actors. What originally drove me into acting, perhaps, was
that I wanted to get away from home, and wanted to get into some-

17

THE FLAYER: KIM STANLEY

thing my three brothers couldn't compete with me in. It's changed
now. I would like to be able to spend more time with my husband
and my children. And the pleasure of acting no longer has to do with
the business of Just Look at Me. The pleasure now lies in the actual
work. It's fascinating to show what the life of another person is like,
when you have only yourself to draw on.

18

CEDRIC HARDWICKE

I do not regard the theatre as a place for literature; it
is for the art of acting.

I was born on February 19, 1893, in Lye, Stourbridge, Worcestershire,
which is ten miles from Birmingham. I'm the eldest of three children;
the others, both girls, are married and lead conventional middle-class
lives, one in Ireland and the other, a widow, in Canada. My father
was a physician, and wanted me to study medicine. At the age of twelve
months, I won first prize a guinea in a beauty contest sponsored by
a paper called The Baby. At four, I was taken to a Wild West Show,
and I immediately afterward set about putting on my own version of
it, with one of my sisters as a bareback rider on a donkey. I wanted to
be an actor from the time I was ten. I never wanted to do anything
else. I was fascinated by acting. I'm the only actor I know who never
wanted to do anything else. Acting is a wonderful profession, if it is
properly pursued. It's far more enjoyable pretending to be a doctor
than actually being one. I attended day school at Stourbridge, a couple
of miles from home. I had a makeup box at home, and after school I'd
constantly experiment with various kinds of disguises. I used to lead
excursions of my classmates to the Prince of Wales's and the Theatre
Royal in Birmingham and to the Alhambra in Stourbridge, the last
wooden theatre in England, where I saw such classics as "East Lynne,"

19

\<\

THE PLAYER: CEDRIC HARDWICKE

"The Fatal Wedding," and "The Grip of Iron." To get me away from
the Alhambra, my father sent me to a small boarding school, Bridg-
north School, in Shropshire. I was a strong student in English, history,
and geography, and a shockingly weak one in mathematics. My parents
liked the theatre and opera, and took me to see some of the great ac-
tors of the time, including Duse, Bernhardt, Coquelin, Ellen Terry,
and Lucien Guitry, father of Sacha. I was seven or eight when I saw
Coquelin as Cyrano, but I never forgot his impressive performance
and his power of suggestion. Coquelin at that time used a long false
nose in the first act of the play, a shorter nose in Act Two, and no
false nose at all in Act Three, and nobody including me ever
noticed it. The elder Guitry still seems to me in many ways the most
magnificent actor I've ever seen. He was tremendously economical in
his use of gesture, and when he raised his hand you would shudder.
One barely perceptible gesture, and a thrill would go through the
audience. All the great actors then had the same thing that great
actors have today the power to rivet your attention on them. How-
ever, many actors of the past were real spellbinders. John Barrymore
was the last of them. They couldn't fit into the theatre today. Life was
thundering away for them, not going off in little pops. If Henry
Irving and Edmund Kean were alive today, they would probably be
in business as executives or tycoons. The theatre wouldn't be big
enough to hold them. Laurence Olivier and John Gielgucl are the last
of the great romantic actors. But even they are mild compared to the
great actors of the past. You hear actors today being described as great
actors, but they are not great actors until they are tested in a great
part, like Macbeth or Hamlet a part that challenges greatness, that
demands a tremendous range and ability to express the great emotions.
The misfortune of the theatre today is that it is denied its master-
pieces. Producers don't find commercial success in "Hamlet." The
great parts as they were played by the great actors called for a suspen-
sion of disbelief. They destroyed one's critical faculties. Of course, it's
entirely possible that in the old days acting by candlelight permitted
the actor to get away with more than when he acted by gaslight, when
the audience could see more of what was going on on the stage, What
is known as the ham actor was discouraged by gaslight. Long before
my time, there was no way to dim the candles in the house, and the
audience sat in a lighted auditorium during the play. These days, the

20

CEDRIC HARDWICKE

theatre is dark and the light is fully on the actors. The audience does
not have to work so hard to see the actors. The microphone has ruined
the ears of the audience and made lazy listeners of them. All this has
had its effect on acting. When I started acting, it was behind gas foot-
lights. I remember the intense heat they gave off, and I remember how
different acting in electric light felt at first. Fortunately, I was young
enough to be plastic in the face of the change.

At twelve, I was organizing Shakespearean productions in the
kitchen of our home, where I played Antonio in "The Merchant of
Venice." At fourteen, I first played Hamlet, with a forty-three-year-old
friend of my mother's playing Ophelia. My father regarded my theatri-
cal ambitions with alarm. In England, actors were and still are classed
as rogues and vagabonds. Bernard Shaw fought as nobody else did for
recognition of the actor as an intelligent member of the community.
Henry Irving was the first actor to be knighted that was in 1895 and
since then the actor has had to be given some recognition. Once I had
definitely decided to beowe a professional actor, my father wanted me
to have the best available training. So I went to the Academy of
Dramatic Art, originally known as Tree's Academy, which had been
founded by Herbert Beerbohm Tree. Roland Young and Carlotta
Monterey, who later married Eugene O'Neill, were a couple of my
classmates. I got very impatient with the Academy. It didn't take me
long to learn that you can't really learn to act; you've got to get out
and do it. Like most successful actors, I was atrocious as a young ac-
tor. Most good actors start by being very bad ones. I remember Olivier
as a young actor. He was very noisy. He had no trace of subtlety. He
shouted every part. Yet I knew instinctively he'd be a great actor. I was
unorthodox, and had I been unorthodox in a manner that arrested
attention, it might not have been so bad, but I could hardly be com-
pared to any other living thing on earth. I fancied myself as an actor of
character parts. All this sort of thing the determination to be dif-
ferent is good in a young actor. But what I liked in myself I did
badly. One of the first lessons I learned was the tremendous sense of
discipline one needs in acting in order to share one's experience with
an audience. Today, so many young actors don't want to share any-
thing with the audience, although sometimes I think that the inartic-
ulate actor of today is perhaps the most merciful one. In the beginning,
I never felt I had any personality of my own. I was happy only when I

21

THE PLAYER: CEDRIC HARDWICKE

transformed myself with putty noses, moles, and all sorts of things I'd
stick on. Then, as I began to work, the nonsense was beaten out of
me. Development is something you're unaware of. Gradually, you dis-
card the young rubbish, the overacting, the exaggeration anything
that diverts the attention of the audience from the important to the
unimportant. Acting is a profession with no rules. But the actor must
be creative, or else he's no good. It's an interpretive art, but only when
it ceases to be simply interpretive and becomes creative is it any good.
I got on the stage in my first professional role in 1912, in London's
West End; it was a walk-on part as a gentleman of the court in "The
Monk and the Woman." My first speaking part was in "Find the Wo-
man," doubling as a hotel lift operator and a butler, replacing my
friend Roland Young, who was going to America. I had little to do in
the play, but I was never bored. I'd stand in the wings, night after
night, watching the other players Arthur Bourchier, Violet Van-
brugh, A. E. Matthews, and James Carew, who had married Ellen
Terry. Seventeen years later, I played with Carew again, in Shaw's
"The Apple Cart." In 1913, I joined a touring company called the
Benson North Company and toured South Africa and Rhodesia, and
when I returned to London the next year, I played small parts in
Shakespearean productions with the recently launched Old Vic Shake-
speare Company, with Sybil Thorndike and William Stack and Estelle
Stead. Then I enrolled for officers' training in the Army. I started with
the infantry and was switched to the cavalry, and then to the Royal
Army Service Corps Horse Transport. I landed in France in January,
1916. I saw front-line action, and about half a dozen times during the
next few years I organized concert parties for the troops in France. I
was discharged from the Army in the fall of 1921, and while I was spend-
ing some time at home, I joined the Birmingham Repertory Theatre,
in nearby Birmingham, I returned to the stage to find the theatre
changed. The cardboard theatre was gone* The play of ideas had come
along to stay. Bernard Shaw, almost singlehandecl, destroyed the old
romantic theatre with his plays. Shaw taught me the social importance
of the theatre. He dealt with the outstanding social and economic
problems of the time. From him I learned that there is not much
humor in truth but a hell of a lot of truth in humor. I came to know
Shaw, and Shaw was a sort of godfather to me. After the war, the
theatre was taken over by the playwrights, and away from the actors,

22

CEDRIC HARDWICKE

and Shaw taught me the importance of the theatre critic, and the
effect of the theatre on the times. It was the beginning of a long and
marvellous friendship. While I was with the Birmingham Rep, I
played many Shaw parts, including Captain Shotover in "Heartbreak
House" and the He-Ancient in "Back to Methuselah," which was put
on in London. It was my first leading role in London since I had
started acting, twelve years earlier. Shaw directed the production not
officially, but he came around about a week before the opening and
took over the direction. I not only learned about theatre from Shaw;
he gave me significant and extremely helpful advice. One thing he al-
ways insisted on was that I not direct myself as an actor, because he
believed you couldn't divide your attention. And early in 1950, when
I was going to be in a charity performance of his "The Dark Lady
of the Sonnets," Shaw wrote to me and said that I must positively not
play the Beefeater that I must play the part of Shakespeare or noth-
ing. He wrote me that Burbage did not play Bernardo or Marcellus in
"Hamlet/' Anybody could play the Beefeater, he said, just as any-
body could produce. He was against my taking on what he called
"tuppenny-ha'penny jobs."

The year 1925 was for me the beginning of over a quarter century of
playing leading parts in many great and good plays "Caesar and
Cleopatra," "Othello," "The Apple Cart," "The Barretts of Wim-
pole Street." In 1936, I came to Broadway, where I've appeared in
over thirty plays, including "Antigone," "Candida," and "Don Juan in
Hell." I've acted in about a hundred movies, some of which were "The
Winslow Boy," "Becky Sharp," "On Borrowed Time," "I Remember
Mama," "The Moon Is Down," "The Ten Commandments," and
"Around the World in Eighty Days." I've been married twice, and I
have a son by each marriage; Edward, the elder, is an actor in London,
and Michael, the younger, is at Menlo School, in Menlo Park, Califor-
nia. While I was playing a Japanese businessman in the play "A Major-
ity of One," I began writing my autobiography, which I wanted to call
"Fifty Years Without Being Found Out." It was published as "A Vic-
torian in Orbit." Lately, I've very much enjoyed acting in "The
Gertrude Berg Show," on television. I'd say that the two big influences
on me have been Bernard Shaw and Gertrude Berg.

I've reached an age where I feel I don't have to prove I can act. If I
haven't proved it by now, I never will. Every actor goes through

23

THE PLAYER: CEDRIC HARBWICKE

periods when he has to earn a living in a routine way. Your greatest
reward comes when you do exactly what you enjoy most. My greatest
reward came when I was able to do the role of the Statue in "Don Juan
in Hell/' There have been and are times when I have felt that what
I would like most is to be a circus clown, a part in which I could rely
entirely on my own sense of invention. I may do it still. Acting in the
theatre requires that you sustain a performance, and I find it harder
work than acting in movies. In a film, when all is said and done, good
cutting can make a good actor out of a donkey. I never go to see myself
in the movies thanks to Bernard Shaw, really. I once said to him
that it might be a good idea to go and see yourself, as a way of seeing
what you do and learning to correct your faults. You're more likely,
he told me, to destroy your virtues. If you watch yourself in the movies,
you become terribly self-conscious and begin trying to make yourself
like other people, when the one thing you have that counts as an actor
is whatever you have that makes you different. You don't ever want
to destroy that individuality. Theatre acting gives you a rehearsal
period of three weeks. The movies don't allow time. During rehears-
als for the stage, you adapt the character to yourself just as much as
you adapt yourself to the character. You begin to feel it's right when
you feel one little bit of it is right. The rest of it will then fall into
place. You have an awareness of what you're doing, but it's instinctive.
The best effects are the ones you are not conscious of. Actors began
to decay when they began to understand what they were saying. All
this playing around with psychoanalysis, all this looking deep within
yourself, is ruining actors. It's ruining everybody, for that matter. The
great Shakespearean actors didn't have the vaguest idea what the hell
they were saying. Ellen Terry didn't know what it was all about, but
she never made a mistake, I once saw her when she was quite old. She
forgot her lines, stepped out of the play and said something to the
audience, then stepped back into her part, I've always remembered one
piece of advice Herbert Beerbohm Tree gave to an actor who was in-
clined to underact. He told him, "When an actor in my beautiful
theatre carries onto the stage a candle, I tell the electrician to turn on
two limelights, two whole battens of lights, and twenty lamps in the
footlights, representing in all some six thousand candle power. In my
beautiful theatre, one candle is represented by six thousand. Remem-
ber that when you act here." The theatre is for big dramatic effects,

24

CEDRIC HARDWICKE

Unless the audience gets it immediately, the audience doesn't get it at
all. Acting is a physical thing. You're always part of the picture. You
suggest physically as well as with your voice. Actually, the low point
of acting is when you are using your voice. Ellen Terry, who had a
most destructive charm, gave me her best advice when she told me,
"My boy, act in your pauses."

The more I see of life, the more I prefer the world of the theatre
to the real world. Strangely enough, the world has become more
theatrical, while the theatre has become more drab. Good acting is
good faking, really. You start to become the person you play only at
the moment you start to play. When I wash my makeup off, I wash the
part out of myself. For many people, a fake life is more interesting
than a real one. The art of acting has always been the art of faking
your own life and faking life for other people. You act for the audi-
ence. The amateur acts for his own pleasure; the professional acts for
the pleasure of other people. Actors today have power. They go into
every home by way of television. They give pleasure to millions. When
I started out in the theatre, only a few people came to see actors act
in the theatre. Today, because actors have power, a great many of
them kid themselves into thinking that what they do is important. The
attention they get and their publicity are way out of proportion to
their real importance. I'm always embarrassed when I'm stopped on
the street because I'm an actor. After all, what are we doing? We are
the fakers of the world.

We live in an impatient age today. An actor wants to make a lot of
money in a short time. When I started out, it took me twelve years to
get an important part to play in London. But I was willing to wait.
Acting was an obsession with me. It still is. Your only true guide is
"I want to be an actor, and I cannot be anything else." If you ask
"Should I be?" you should keep away from the theatre and not go
into it at all.

25

MELVYN DOUGLAS

At times, I think that acting is no business for a self-
respecting man. At other times, I feel that, in this
ghastly, mechanical world we inhabit, anyone con-
nected with any of the arts is very fortunate indeed,

1 was born on April 5, 1901, in Macon, Georgia. My real name is
Melvyn Hesselberg. My father, Edouard Hesselberg, was a musical
prodigy, a concert pianist. He was a Russian Jew, from Riga, who
came to America on tour as a young man and was persuaded to
stay and teach at a college in Colorado, where he met my mother,
Lena Shackleford. She was a Southern lady from Kentucky, and she
died in 1960, at the age of ninety-three. My father died in 1936. I
have one brother, George, two and a half years younger than I am,
who lives in California and is in the real-estate business. I have a
son, Gregory Hesselberg, born in 1925, by my first marriage, which
lasted about a year. He is a painter, is married and has three
children, and lives outside New Haven. I've been married to
Helen Gahagan Douglas since 1931, and we have two children:
Peter, twenty-eight, who i a Public Welfare Administration worker
and is married, with two children; and Mary, twenty-three, who has
a bent for both painting and acting. I live in New York, in an apart-
ment on Riverside Drive, with one of the loveliest views of the Hudson

26

MELVYN DOUGLAS

River in the whole city. When I was three years old, my father moved
us to Nashville, Tennessee, where he got a job as head of the Music
Department of Ward-Belmont School, a women's college. One of my
horrible memories is of going to a grammar school that was set up in
this women's college for the children of faculty members. Then, at the
age of seven, I went to school for a year in Wiesbaden, Germany, where
my father took the family for my mother's health. I learned to speak
perfect children's German. My father tried to get me to study the
piano and then the violin, but I resisted anything having to do with
music; it was the old story of the musician's trying to force his art down
his child's throat unsuccessfully, to my sorrow in later years. When I
was eleven, we moved to Toronto, where my father taught at a con-
servatory of music, and five years later we moved to Lincoln, Nebraska.
My father was in charge of the Music School of the University of
Nebraska for two years. I was a wild kid tall, slender, and blond. At
the age of fourteen, in Toronto, I lied about my age and tried to
enlist in the Canadian Army, but my father stopped them from taking
me. I had no interest in the theatre in those days no appetite for it.
I had seen one touring production of "Peter Pan" and a comedy
based on "Buster Brown," a comic strip of the time. In Lincoln, a
drama teacher at the university tried to get me to act in a school
theatre he was running. I played a Hindu in a play called "The Little
Princess," but I had no idea what it was all about or what I was doing.
All it meant to me was a lark, a chance to get away from school for a
day. In high school, I acted in one play, Barrie's "Quality Street."
I played Valentine Brown, the lead. I became hopelessly confused
in my lines, but my classmates presented me with a bouquet and
I emerged feeling as important as a star athlete. I belonged to a high-
school imitation of a college fraternity, a secret society of about twenty
boys that was devoted to smoking, drinking beer, and staging violent
initiations. Halfway through my junior year, the school authorities
found out about us and we were all expelled. After that, I hung
around the community stock company in the vague hope that it
might lead me to adventure. We put on a play a week, and I had a
few walk-ons, at a dollar a performance, in plays like "The Trail of
the Lonesome Pine."

When I was seventeen, I ran away to Omaha and enlisted in the
United States Army. I spent my service in Fort D. A. Russell, in

27

THE PLAYER: MELVYN DOUGLAS

Cheyenne, Wyoming, and in Camp Lewis, Washington, as an orderly
in a hospital ward and operating room. Just as I was about to work
with a sanitary train a sort of field-hospital unit the war ended and
I was discharged. In the Army, I met a young painter from Chicago,
a well-read fellow, who gave me books to read. I read the works of
Isaac Newton, Spinoza, and Schopenhauer, and I heard about artists
and the arts. A whole new world was opened to me. In the mean-
time, my family had moved to Chicago, and after my discharge
I joined them there. My father was giving piano lessons and working
for a music-publishing firm. My parents wanted me to go back to
school for a high-school diploma, and they wanted me to go to
college. We had a lot of arguments about it. Around that time,
I met a man named William Owen, who was well known in the Mid-
dle West as an actor, and who was a member of a group of artists,
musicians, writers who got together regularly. Mr. Owen talked about
the theatre in a way that was new to me. The stage, he said, was a place
where you could do something creative. He lived in a rooming house,
where he also gave acting lessons, and after a big row with my mother
one day I left home and went to live in that rooming house. I studied
with Mr. Owen for two years and supported myself by doing odd jobs
reading gas meters, and selling hats at Marshall Field's department
store. Before I came into contact with Mr. Owen, being an actor to me
was just an excuse for sleeping late. I more or less came of age in Chi-
cago. Mr. Owen was an old duck with enormous enthusiasm and ex-
traordinary idealism about the theatre, which he communicated to me,
in terms of art. I'd tried to write poetry, and I had a feeling, no matter
how undisciplined, for music, and I was doing a lot of exciting reading,
and all this awakened nebulous, shapeless things in me yearnings to-
ward some sort of creative endeavor. It was 1919, and Chicago was a
very lively place then. It was the time, in Chicago, of Maxwell Boden-
heim and Floyd Dell, of Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, and our
idols were Carl Sandburg and Clarence Darrow and Eugene Victor
Debs. We were all sort of left of center. It was long before the days of
commercial airlines, and most of the creative spirits of the Midwest
came to Chicago and stayed. It was really a yeasty atmosphere. George
Bellows had started teaching at the Chicago Art Institute and given it a
shot in the arm, and it became an exciting place. And there were so
many other things. Everywhere you went, you could hear good jazz.

28

MELVYN DOUGLAS

I sometimes think I've never known anything since that was quite
so heady and exciting. The bohemian gathering place of the day in
Chicago was the Dill Pickle Club, on the Near North Side. The club,
which was run by a wild-eyed man named Jack Jones, and which had
its entrance in an alley, was a focal point for meetings, debates, plays,
and weddings. You'd go there to hear about Charles MacArthur's
latest newspaper exploits, which were renowned, or to talk about Ben
Hecht's regular column in the Chicago Daily News, which was called
"One Thousand and One Nights." You'd hear from or about Harriet
Monroe, the editor of Poetry, or Jane Addams, of Hull House, or
Alfred Kreymborg, an avant-garde poet who was then living in Chi-
cago. Another of Mr. Owen's students was Ralph Bellamy. Mr. Owen
taught me idealism and the importance of imagination in the theatre.
He'd organize little dramatic presentations, which we'd do in schools
or churches or meeting halls. We'd do "As You Like It," with me play-
ing Orlando, for a flat fee of fifty dollars, split up evenly among the
cast. Or I'd go out and do readings of Oscar Wilde's fairy tales, set to
music, for five or ten dollars a night.

In 1920, Mr. Owen put together a Shakespearean repertory company,
and I went with it on a short tour of Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, and
Wisconsin, playing second parts, like Mereutio in "Romeo and Juliet"
and Claudius and the Ghost in "Hamlet." After that, I joined another
small Shakespearean company, run by a man named John E. Kellerd,
and toured with it throughout a good part of the country west of
Chicago, and in Canada, playing such parts as Cassius in "Julius
Caesar" and Banquo in "Macbeth." Those were the days before Actors
Equity, and you went out on a tour at your own risk, hoping that it
would get customers and you'd get paid. Nowadays, of course, a bond
is posted, and if the tour is a flop you're brought back. In 1920, on a
Kellerd tour, I found myself stranded in Toronto, with about twelve
dollars. I couldn't get home, so I set myself up as a teacher of acting
until I had enough money for my fare back to Chicago.

By the time I returned to Chicago, I was professional enough to
acquire an agent, who got me into my first really commercial job
with the Dorothy LaVerne Players, a stock company in Sioux City,
Iowa, where I did six months of stock. Like most of the stock com-
panies in those days, we did all the current New York successes.
I played Billy Benson in "East Is West," by Samuel Shipman and

29

THE PLAYER: MELVYN BOUGLAS

John B. Hymer, which Forrest Winant had played in New York,
and an underworld character in Bayard Veiller's "Within the Law."
I was paid fifty dollars a week, out of which I had to buy my own ward-
robe and pay my living expenses. I played seventy-five different parts
in seventy-five weeks. A tour took the company to Evansville,
Indiana, then to Madison, Wisconsin, where I met the girl, a student,
who became my first wife. I started my own stock company, with
which I made some money, and for the first time in my life I found
myself with some money in the bank. After my marriage broke up,
I took this money and went off to Europe for five months. I in-
tended to go to Berlin and ask Max Reinhardt if I might work
with him, but when I'd got as far as Paris I stayed there, because
I became so fascinated with the city. Those were the Ernest
Hemingway-Ezra Found days in Paris. I went to the theatre constantly,
and saw Moli&re performed at the Comdie-Francaise and Shakespeare
at the Odon. I saw Louis Jouvet play Faust, and found him startlingly
interesting.

When my money ran out, I came home. I landed in New York with
about fifty dollars in my pocket, and tried to get a job here, but no*
body knew me. I lived in a residence club and went around to all
the agencies. I'd been playing in stock companies for almost three
years, and I'd played every kind of part imaginable, including all
the big parts that had been played on Broadway by the stars of
the day Holbrook Blinn, Richard Bennett, Otis Skinner, Walker
Whiteside, and, in farce, Ernest Truex. I thought I was pretty good.
Actually, I hadn't begun to ripen in terms of searching the in-
sides of a part. I had quite extraordinary facility; I spoke distinctly;
I moved with assurance; I had developed an at-homeness onstage,
which I have to this day, and which I think is terribly important for
young actors. But I had not yet reached the point of inquiring deeply
into the characters I was playing. It was all pretty superficial If I had
got a part on Broadway then, I would have fallen on my face. I had just
agreed to take a job running an elevator in an apartment house on
Park Avenue when I heard, via the grapevine, that Jessie Bonstelle,
who ran two of the best stock companies of the time one in Detroit
and the other in Buffalo, the latter in a theatre owned and managed
by Katharine Cornell's father was in New York casting for her Detroit
company. I barged into the Packard Agency office, where she was

so

MELVYN DOUGLAS

supposed to be, and was told she wasn't there. I saw her walk across
the inner office, so I vaulted a railing and walked in there and began
to talk. They tried to drag me out, but Miss Bonstelle said "Let
him talk," and I wound up with a job in the Detroit company, at
eighty-five dollars a week. Just before going to Detroit, I returned
to Chicago. I played second parts, which was a bitter pill for me to
swallow, but instinctively I knew that it was a sound thing for me
to do. In my second season with the company, I played leading
parts. It was good work. For the first time in my life, I was getting
good direction, and I began to have some insight into what I was
doing. Up to that point, I'd been learning the lines and putting on
the makeup, and that was about all. Now I began to ask myself,
"What does this particular man think about? What goes on in his
heart to make him behave the way he does?" When I joined Miss
Bonstelle, she was adamant about getting me to change my name.
She said that Hesselberg was much too cumbersome to go up in
lights. Douglas was the name of my maternal grandmother; by taking
it, I felt that at least I was keeping a family name.

In 1926, I returned to New York. William A. Brady, who, along
with David Belasco, Arthur Hopkins, and Brock Pemberton, was one
of the big producers of the time, signed me to a three-year contract,
at a salary of a hundred and fifty dollars a week, to do anything he
wanted me to do. I tried out in a few farces in Great Neck and Atlantic
City, and then I made my Broadway dbut, on January 12, 1928, in
"A Free Soul," by Willard Mack. I played Ace Wilfong, a young San
Francisco gangster-gambler a Great Gatsby character but not nearly
so good. It was a modest hit, and I went along with it for its run of
a hundred performances. Two or three producers were asking to bor-
row me by then; I'd made enough of an impression for that. I was
lent to A. H. Woods for a tour of "Jealousy," by Eugene Walter, with
Fay Bainter, and then to John Tuerk, for a tour of "The Command to
Love," by Rudolph Lothar and Fritz Gottwald, which Basil Rathbone
had played in New York. The play had a big-shot cast people like
Mary Nash and Violet Kemble Cooper and Henry Stephenson, all top-
flight exponents of what in those days was called drawing-room com-
edy. I'd never played with such accomplished actors before. I be-
gan to learn a great deal about poise and style, and I developed into
a rather adept comedian or at least they all told me so. In the sum-

31

THE PLAYER: MELVYN BOUGLAS

mer of 1930, a writing team named Frederick and Fanny Hatton sent
me to see David Belasco, because they thought I'd be right for a play
he was planning to do called "Tonight or Never." I was ushered into
his office, on top of the Belasco Theatre, on Forty-fourth Street. He
sat behind his desk, with his white hair and his clerical collar, and as
I went in I was picked up, as everybody was who went in there, by a
spotlight. He asked me about my background, and what I told him
seemed to impress him. When I said that I had one month left to go
in my obligation to Brady, he sniffed a sniff of relish, and I could see
that his interest was piqued. I wound up engaged for the lead in the
play, at five hundred dollars a week the best salary I'd ever had in my
life. By this time, too, I had a New York agent, who did the talking
about money for me. I played the part of a man-about-town, the
Unknown Gentleman an impresario who while scouting for talent
meets the Prima Donna, played by Helen Gahagan. The play was a
success, as almost anything Belasco did was bound to be. And Helen
and I fell in love and were married during the run of the play. The
wedding was held at her home, in Brooklyn. What days those were!
Life hadn't become so mechanized. The theatre was far less com-
mercialized. Conformity still hadn't taken hold.

It had never occurred to me up to this point that I would have any-
thing to do with motion pictures, but now I suddenly got offers. In
1931, I went out to Hollywood under contract to Samuel Goldwyn, at
a salary of nine hundred dollars a week. My first movie was the filmed
version of "Tonight or Never," with Gloria Swanson playing the lead.
She was at the height of her career, and the rumor was that she was
going to make four pictures a year, at two hundred and fifty thousand
dollars a picture. She'd arrive on the set with a retinue of servants,
and at four o'clock she'd stop work. The servants would serve tea from
a silver service, and we'd sit around and chat. Then we'd wrap up and
go home. With that kind of beginning, I got an erroneous impression
of how movies were made. Not many were made like that even in those
halcyon days. I found the mechanics fascinating and exciting, and ut-
terly different from anything I had known in the theatre, At first, I
was impressed by the tricks the miniatures used for sets, the staging
of crowd scenes. Then I became aware of the difference in the acting.
It seemed to me that acting in movies was personality exploitation.
Acting was the most important part to me, and I found out after a
32

MELVYN DOUGLAS

while that it wasn't very interesting. I didn't think I was very good in
movies. I didn't think I was photogenic. I didn't feel I belonged. I
thought I was a run-of-the-mill leading man. I didn't like it. I was
a body slave to the producers, like a ballplayer. I had neither the time
nor the ability to enjoy what I was doing.

My second movie, "As You Desire Me," based on Pirandello's play,
was with Greta Garbo. It was the first of three movies I made with her.
She was a provocative girl. I found working with her an extraordinary
experience. She wasn't a trained actress and she was aware of that
herself but she had extraordinary intuitions, especially in the realm of
erotic experience. I've never seen anything like her sensitive grasp of
colors and shadings. Her acting made you feel that here was a woman
who knew all there was to know about all aspects of love. I think her
"Canaille" is one of the greatest things of all time as a fantastic por-
trait of a woman in love. I was a little awestruck by Garbo at first, but
I found her a very easy person to be with. We talked about everything,
including her awareness of how she'd never really learned to be an
actress. She was much more adept in the love scenes than in any other
scenes. This impression was reinforced in my two other pictures with
her "Ninotchka" and "Two-Faced Woman." She produced an ex-
traordinarily comic effect in "Ninotchka," not so much because of any
comic sense she may have had as through the genius of the director,
Ernst Lubitsch; he knew just how to make use of the stolid Scandi-
navian in her. But her love scenes left all of us astonished. She was ut-
terly superb. In the scene in "Ninotchka" in which we come back to
the hotel after drinking champagne and she behaves like a girl in love,
she achieved a quality and a feeling that were literally breathtaking.

Movies give you a kind of buildup and national reputation that
aren't always possible in the theatre. Altogether, I made fifty or
sixty movies. Occasionally, now, I watch myself in them on television,
and my feelings about what I see range from horror to some slight
pleasure. I'm interested and amused to see what I did in those movies.
By 1942, 1 was earning thirty-five hundred dollars a week, with a guar-
antee of at least forty weeks' work a year. I'd make over a hundred and
eighty thousand dollars a year. But the money very soon ceased to be
an attraction for me. Almost every part I played was a series of
ghastly frustrations, especially when I had the kind of director I
couldn't hold an intelligible conversation with, and I had a lot of that

33

THE PLAYER: MELVYN DOUGLAS

kind. If you work with an open-minded director, the part can become
a voyage of exploration and discovery. Otherwise, it's just a matter of
"Does the uniform fit properly?'' and "Does he know his lines?" and
"Let's shoot it." I rarely carried away the feeling of having lived
through the experience of my part; I carried away only the memory
of the plot and some of my own lines. Of all the movies I made, I
liked just two or three, and that was chiefly because of the directors.
The pleasure and satisfaction came from my relationship with the
directors, rather than from the parts I played. Under the direction of
Ernst Lubitsch, I had great pleasure making "Angel," with Marlene
Dietrich and Herbert Marshall, and "That Uncertain Feeling," with
Merle Oberon and Burgess Meredith. It was always a joy to work with
Lubitsch. To begin with, he was an enormously engaging man, and
brilliantly imaginative. Attempted imitations of his work are still
going on in Hollywood, but the imitations don't come off. It's like
trying to imitate a writer by using some of the same words he uses.
Lubitsch loved actors. He loved seeing an actor's wit work. If the
actor had anything to offer, Lubitsch had the ability to stimulate his
imaginative processes, to help him find nuances of character and
amusing ways of doing things. And you felt you could rely on his
taste, which is a wonderful thing for an actor to be able to feel. One
other man I was grateful to and happy to work with was Richard Bole-
slawski, who directed me in "Theodora Goes Wild," with Irene Dunne.
He was a really creative guy, too different from Lubitsch, but another
one of the kind you always hope to find working in a supposedly
creative field. Boleslawski was a person of substance, of taste and imag-
ination, who was completely articulate and was able to make his own
quality felt in his movies.

After nine or ten months in Hollywood, under contract to Gold-
wyn, I got so I hated it. My wife didn't make movies; while I worked
in pictures, she worked in the theatre in Los Angeles. I had a seven-
year contract, but in 1932 I was able to get out of it, and my wife and
I took a trip around the world. We returned from Japan to California,
where our son Peter was born. In January, 1934, I went back into the
legitimate theatre, playing the lead in "No More Ladies," by A. E.
Thomas. My wife went to Hollywood during that season to do "She,"
the only picture she ever made, and when my play closed, I went out
there to spend the summer with her. While I was hanging around, I

34

MELVYN DOUGLAS

was put under a joint contract by Columbia Pictures and M-G-M.
Columbia asked me to do a film called "She Married Her Boss," with
Claudette Colbert. I agreed. They made it a condition that I do
three pictures a year for seven years, with options. I did that, never
thinking they'd pick my option up. But that first movie turned out to
be one of the most successful pictures Columbia ever made, and the
studio did pick up the option. So there I was, stuck again, and feeling
that I was in the wrong place again that it was the theatre that was
natural to me. Then they began to give me the same kind of part over
and over. My comedy role in that one successful movie was a salable
commodity; they began exploiting what was supposed to be the comic
Melvyn Douglas. Think of what M-G-M did to a fine actor like Frank
Morgan. He just happened to do a few trick laughs in a picture, and
from then on that was all that Frank Morgan did. I earned what be-
came an international reputation for being one of the most debonair
and witty farceurs in Hollywood. I was cut off from the world I knew.
In 1941, I went to Washington to work in the Office of Civilian De-
fense, and in 1942 I enlisted in the Army as a private. I'd been deeply
involved with the Fight for Freedom Committee, headed by Wendell
Willkie and Herbert Agar, and inasmuch as I'd been saying from the
time England declared war that it was our war, I felt I had to
take part. After basic training, I wanted to get overseas, which was
impossible for an enlisted man of my age. I was offered a commis-
sion by the Officer Procurement Division and was sent to the Special
Services School, and, finally, to the China-Burma-India theatre of war,
where I had the job of organizing entertainment for troops in the
area. My wife, meanwhile, had been elected to Congress from Cal-
ifornia. She served from 1945 to 1949. I was demobilized in November,
1945, and found myself still under contract to M-G-M and Columbia. I
hung around New York for a while, and in 1946 I co-produced, with
Herman Levin, the New York musical revue "Call Me Mister/ 1 Then
I reported back to Hollywood, made a picture for M-G-M "The Sea
of Grass/' with Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn, directed by
Elia Kazan and made "The Guilt of Janet Ames/' with Rosalind Rus-
sell, for Columbia. Fortunately, at that point my lawyer found a
loophole in my contract and was able to get me out of it. I made a
couple of pictures on a free-lance basis, and then, in March, 1949, to
my delight and satisfaction, I returned to the Broadway stage, in

35

THE PLAYER: MEL-VYN DOUGLAS

"Two Blind Mice," by Samuel Spewack. Being on the stage again was
an exhilarating experience the rehearsal period, developing in a part,
playing to a live audience, the whole thing. The play lasted for a
hundred and fifty-seven performances, and when it closed on Broad-
way, I went on a fairly long tour with it. I went right on with the
stage, starring in "Glad Tidings," by Edward Mabley, in October,
1951, which I also staged, and which lasted for a hundred per-
formances, and appearing in Edmund Wilson's unusual play "The Lit-
tle Blue Light," which was produced by Peter Cookson, Hume Cronyn,
and Martin Manulis, and the Brattle Theatre Company, at the ANTA
Playhouse, in the spring of 1951. In November, 1952, I opened in
"Time Out for Ginger," by Ronald Alexander, which had a season
on Broadway and played about nine months in Chicago alone.

I did some television work, and then, in 1955, stepped in as Henry
Drummond in "Inherit the Wind," by Jerome Lawrence and Robert
E. Lee, for three months, in New York, when Paul Muni became ill,
and continued playing the role on tour for a year. The years since
then have been, except for my very early years, the most productive
and most satisfying of my life. I took the leads in three other plays:
"The Waltz of the Toreadors," by Jean Anouilh, on tour and then in
New York; "The Gang's All Here," also by Lawrence and Lee; and
"The Best Man," by Gore Vidal. And I've done acting in television and
in movies as a free agent, doing what I wanted to do. In "Inherit the
Wind," I toured all over the country. The play was about the Scopes
trial. People who remembered Clarence Darrow would come by the
dozen to see me after the play. Some people had loved him and others
had hated him, but they all wanted to tell me what Darrow had meant
to them. I was real to them in the part. I found it exciting to make
the ideas in the play come to life. "The Gang's All Here" was based on
the life of President Harding, but this time the authors didn't dig
deeply enough into the hero's character. It was something of a chal-
lenge to take him, this very weak man, and make the audience sympa-
thize with his ignominious defeat.

I don't know how good an actor I am. I have mixed feelings about
doing the work. In acting, I draw on my own real experience or imag-
inative experience, and try to do it vividly and truthfully, so as to con-
vince the audience. I begin by taking the text of the play as a guide.
Step by step, I imagine what the character is his personality, his

36

MELVYN DOUGLAS

thinking, his feeling. Sometimes a director can help you find these
things. Then I call on the tools of the trade my body movement, my
voice, my physical relationship to the others in the play. I start
slowly, in rehearsals, and then gradually speed up. I start loud and
then gradually get softer. I never have an exact idea of what I'm
going to do until I start rehearsals. Right in the middle of playing
a scene, I sometimes think of something new to do, and do it.

An actor can't be a prude or a moralist. If he is, he shuts his eyes to
the possibilities of feeling for or with another kind of human being,
whatever he may be. In September, 1958, I played Joseph Stalin in a
"Playhouse 90" television show, "The Plot to Kill Stalin." I was
limited by time, but I did my best to understand what Stalin was
and why he functioned as he did. Some young actors tend to use
acting as a way of making a public show of their own attitudes toward
life. An actor must put himself in the background. You must keep
yourself out of the play. You must concentrate fully on the character
in the play. The actor's self will come through automatically. His job
is to portray his character with the greatest sympathy and under-
standing. No matter how well written the play is, it's the actor who
brings it to life. At its best, acting is more creative than most people
realize.

37

INGRID BERGMAN

What you bring to a part is what you have within
you. It's your very first intuition about a part that
comes out in the end.

I was born on August 29, 1917, in Stockholm, Sweden. I was an only
child. My father, Justus Bergman, a painter and photographer who
operated a camera shop on the ground floor of our apartment build-
ing, on the Strandvagen, the most beautiful street in the city, died
when I was twelve. My mother, whose maiden name was Friedei Adler
she was a German, from Hamburg died when I was two. My
father was a handsome man dark, tall, and heavy, but not fat.
He took a lot of photographs of me, but I could never sit still for
portraits. After my father died, I lived with his unmarried sister
for six months, and then she died. Alone again, I went to live with
my father's brother, who also lived in Stockholm. He had five chil-
dren, the youngest of whom was a girl my age. I was a very lonely
child. I didn't have many playmates. I grew up mostly with older
people. I withdrew from younger people, making up my own stories,
my own plays. My father took me to the opera, but I didn't like it.
I asked him why they sang, why they didn't talk. My father was a
good singer and had me take singing lessons. A year before he died, he
took me to see a.Swedish play, "Patrasket," by Hjalmar Bergman, which
was about poor people. I loved it so much. My relatives had always

38

INGRIB BERGMAN

called me silly for making up my own plays, living in a dream world.
Now I saw grown-up people doing it on the stage, and nobody thought
it was silly.

I went to the Lyceum School for Girls, in Stockholm, until I was
seventeen. I didn't do any acting, but I read dramatic poems at school
or in the evening for visitors to my uncle's house. I wanted to attend
the state-supported Royal Dramatic Theatre School, but it was
difficult to get into. My uncle was against my acting, but he said if I
got into the school, it would be all right. I did get in. For my audition,
I did three things: Strindberg's "The Dream Play," in which nothing
happens but talk about the misery of life and death; a burlesque,
from a German play, of a peasant girl teasing a boy; and Rostand's
"L'Aiglon." Everybody else was doing "La Dame aux Camelias," and
I wanted to be different. I was shy and scared, but I was also a show-
off. If I was asked anything, I would blush. (I still blush today.) If
I went into a room, I would knock a chair over. But although I was shy,
I had a lion roaring inside me that wouldn't sit down and shut up.
Everybody in the theatre, I think, is like that. People teased me, ask-
ing, "Why do you want to be an actress? You don't even know how
to walk into a restaurant." To this day, I hate to make an entrance.
It is difficult for me to get up on a dance floor, because I feel that
everybody is watching. But if I played somebody else walking into a
restaurant or getting up on a dance floor, I could do it. I couldn't be
blamed. It wouldn't be me. After a year at the Royal Dramatic
Theatre School, I was offered a contract with the Svensk Filmindustri.
I was so young I had no patience with school. The school head has
never forgiven me for leaving. He says I should have stayed and
learned more about acting. But I was eighteen and confident. I
thought the movies would be a short cut. I don't know much about
acting, even today. I have never read anything about acting. Instinct
is what I go on. The one year of school was wonderful training, and
I'm sure I learned a lot about using the voice, using the body, listening
to other people. Way down, whatever you learn stays with you.

I was married for the first time in 1937, to Peter Aron Lindstrom.
My daughter Friedel Pia was born on September 20, 1938, and the
Swedish version of the film "Intermezzo" was released late that year.
I went to the United States the following year to make "Intermezzo"
in Hollywood. In my first three movies in the United States "In-

39

THE PLAYER: INGRID BERGMAN

termezzo," "Adam Had Four Sons," and "Rage in Heaven" I played
exactly the same kind of woman placed in three different stories. I
started to get terribly worried. I felt I must change. For "Dr. Jekyll
and Mr. Hyde" they wanted me to play the same kind of girl again,
but I said no, I wanted to play the prostitute. So I did. 1 was against
typecasting; I fought against it. The public already had me set in
their minds as a type, but I fought it. I have always been called the
great outdoor girl, but it is a big mistake.

It's true I love to live in the country. My home is now in Choisel,
thirty miles from Paris, in an old French farmhouse with flowers and
vegetable gardens. My son Roberto and my twin daughters Ingrid
and Isabella are with me, and we have four dogs, six ducks, and some
cats. My husband, Lars Schmidt, produces several plays in France
and Scandinavia each year. We are in the heart of Europe, near the
most enchanting town in the world. In the summer, we go to our
place on Danholmen, an island off the Swedish west coast, where
we don't have electricity and there is no telephone and we swim and
read and eat only the fish we catch. We love to travel to New York,
which is even bigger and noisier than Paris and is a very exciting place
to work. I enjoy coining to New York. I find it very stimulating to
work here in television. Television acting combines the best of the the-
atre and the best of movies. It is another new thing to do and to try. In
making a movie, you say a line over and over, and by the time you've
said it for the take, you don't remember what it is you're saying.
Acting in the theatre, you have to shout, so that people up in the
balcony can hear you. But when you do a television play, there are
four cameras working at once, and you have both the wonderful in-
timacy of the screen and the live acting of the stage. In television, I
know I have to be calm while everybody else is rushing around, and
I love it.

When I first saw Roberto Rossellini's "Open City" and "Paisan," I
thought they were so marvellous. I hated the monotony of making
pictures in Hollywood. I had a very good life, but it had a certain
boredom. With Rossellini I started all over again, and it was very
good for me. When we made "Stromboli," we had the most difficult
locations never a comfortable dressing room and we had to work
with rank amateurs. Other people may not want that, but it was won-
derful for me. But I wanted to change. When I gave birth to little Rob-

40

INGRID BERGMAN

erto, the whole world started to throw stones at me. But I knew I had
friends when I received a letter from Ernest Hemingway saying he
wanted to be the baby's godfather. And when I came to New York
to accept the New York Film Critics award for "Anastasia," Heming-
way said, "I'll come with you and punch the first one in the nose who
says anything bad to you/' In Sweden, almost everybody hides inside
himself. Everybody is afraid to be himself or herself. I have
changed my life so many times. Each time, I started out with a
suitcase and my clothes, and that was the way I wanted it. But what-
ever I do, I couldn't ever stop my career. My enthusiasm today is
exactly the same as it was when I started going to dramatic school. I
can't imagine what it must be like to get up every morning at the
same time, go to a job, work for somebody you hate, doing typing.
I remember in California, when I worked for Warner Brothers, driv-
ing to the studio early in the morning, coming over the mountains
the way the morning looked, the way the morning felt. And I was so
grateful that I had got into work that I loved so much. You don't
act for the money. You do it because you love it, because you must.

I never do a part that I don't like. I love working with actors. It is
like being with one big group of children. The best actors have
presence and personality, a gift that you have to be born with. You
know what it is when you see it an actor comes onstage, and if he
has it, you wait for him to come back. Then, you need talent and
discipline. To act with performers who have these qualities gives me
great happiness. But I also feel that doing certain parts has significance
for me. My playing Joan of Arc meant much more to me than just
entertaining people. People had to know there were such people as
Joan of Arc in the world. I think I have carried Joan of Arc with me all
my life. She is like an old friend. I've always known her much better
than anyone else. I've always loved the role of Joan, which I've played
in a movie, a play, and an opera* I don't believe actors who say they
become the part. You are, to some extent, carried away, and the part
should become true to you, but you are always there. When you play
a murderer, you don't go out and murder somebody. Creating a role
is like making a painting it is separate from you. Whenever I read
a play or a story, I read leaning toward the part I feel I am going to
play. It's the same as when I go into a projection room to see myself in
a movie. I watch myself and nothing else. I sometimes don't even know

41

THE PLAYER: INGRID BERGMAN

what the rest of the. movie Is about. I always feel embarrassed when
another actor asks me "How did you like me?" because I haven't
even seen him. Many people say that actors can't grasp the quality
of a part when they read a script for the first time. It's true that I may
be somewhat off balance, but I feel I can read. I always try to figure
out why a person behaves the way she does. I have to make my own
foundation, my own little staircase. It's possible that the audience will
never get it, but I always have to try my own way. When I played the
part of Anastasia, I believed she was the Czar's daughter, so I
played it that way. The director told me I played it so sincerely
that everybody would believe she was the Czar's daughter. But my own
idea was that she was; otherwise I couldn't have played it. How could
I play it and lie? When I do a part, I always invent characteristics to
bear out what I understand the part to be. If it is clear in your head,
you can convey it. It's the little things that the audience sees. This we
learn from films. I always want an explanation for everything in a
part. What does this mean? Why open a window? I have to have it
terribly clear in my mind. Then I try to behave as though I were an-
other person. But I use my own ways. If you play twenty parts, you are
certainly bound to repeat things, but I try within my limits to make
each character a different person. There is a kind of acting in the
United States, especially in the movies, where the personality remains
the same in every part. I like changing as much as possible. The
Swedish idea of acting is that you do change; you play another person
each time. To me, doing that is natural.

BRANDON DE WILDE

Once, in a television play, the role called upon me
to ask a girl to pass me the salt } and I wanted to
give my line certain meaningful overtones, so I said
to myself , "Sal* is the most important thing in the
world."

1 was born on April 9, 1942, in Brooklyn. I'm an only child. My
parents, Frederick and Eugenia Wilson de Wilde, are both former

actors, My mother gave up acting when I was born. My father has been
in the theatre since 1985, and is now a director and one of the most
highly regarded stage managers in New York. I've been acting since I
was seven. My father handles my professional affairs. We are free-lance
and independent. There is nothing for us in life but the theatre. We
love it, in a very realistic way. I spent the first three years of my life
in Young&town, New York, where, during the Second World War, my
father was a first lieutenant and then a captain in the Army. After
his discharge, we bought a house in Baldwin, Long Island, which we
sold recently. We now live in a ten-room apartment in the West
Eighties, in New York, As a very small child, I didn't have any special
interest in acting. In the first grade at school, I was one of three silent
little kittens in a class play. It embarrassed me. I kept trying to creep
out of the room. I saw a lot of plays when I was a little kid, and the first
show I loved was "Oklahoma!" When I was seven, a friend of ours

43

THE PLAYER: BRANDON BE WILDE

named Theresa Fay, who was, and still is, casting director for the
producer Robert Whitehead came to dinner at our house. She
mentioned that they were looking all over New York for a boy to play
an important role in a new play, 'The Member of the Wedding," by
Carson McCullers. I was in the second grade at the time, and was
having trouble with my schoolwork, especially reading. When Terry
suggested that I read for the role in the play, my father and mother said
no; they wanted me to have an average, normal life. But Terry was
persuasive. She told them that Harold Clurman was going to direct
the play and that Ethel Waters and Julie Harris were cast for leading
roles. So we decided to try it. I could read well enough to be able to
memorize lines, and after I knew my lines, my father went over them
with me. Then I was taken to Mr. Whitehead's office for a reading. He
told us almost immediately that I could have the part, and we told
him we would have to think it over. After I was cast, we had to drive
down to Norfolk, Virginia, for my Aunt June's wedding. My father
and mother taught me the lines of the play on the trip down. It was
pretty much left up to me whether I wanted to become an actor. On
the drive down, my father and mother asked me in many different
ways whether I really wanted to do it. I still wasn't sure. On the trip
back up, we worked on the lines carefully and seriously. My father
would cue me, and I would say the lines, trying to understand them.
When we got back to New York, Mr. Whitehead asked me whether
I really wanted to do it, and I just said yes.

I was never nervous in "The Member of the Wedding," but I re-
member that the first time I got onstage, for a rehearsal, it looked like
the biggest place in the world. Everyone and everything on it except
me seemed big. When we opened in Philadelphia, an orchestra started
playing, and I began to cry. I hadn't known there would be an orches-
tra, and the unexpectedness of it frightened me. But I quieted down
before going onstage. The play itself didn't mean anything to me. It
was about a twelve-year-old girl whose brother was going to get mar-
ried, and who wanted to participate in the wedding. My part was that
of her seven-year-old cousin, who wanted to be part of it all, too. But I
didn't understand the play or the role. All it meant to me was acting
being on a stage with other actors. The excitement of it was what I
liked. I loved the whole feeling of being in the theatre. I loved Julie
Harris and everybody else in the play. I think we were a terribly

44

BRANDON DE WILDE

close cast. All the others were always so nice to me. They were my
friends. We would often have dinner together. We were in Philadel-
phia during the Christmas holidays the first time in my life I'd
been away from home at Christmas. My father and mother were with
me, but it was still different from being home. On Christmas Eve, when
I got to my dressing room I found a little tree, all trimmed, and pres-
ents from the cast. I had my eighth birthday during the run of the play,
and the cast gave me a party. I received a Donaldson Award, for the
best male d^but performance of the 1949-50 season. My father and
mother casually mentioned the award to me, but I didn't see it until
two or three years later. Even then, it didn't mean anything to me,
though now I know it's a fine award. All my awards are hanging on
the walls of our den. I was never allowed to read reviews. My parents
didn't tell me about all the praise. I think they tried to keep me from
getting conceited. My school life changed when I started to act pro-
fessionally. In the morning, I would go to a private tutor's house a few
blocks away from us in Baldwin, and the tutor would give me gram-
mar-school lessons for two hours. In the afternoon, I went to regular
classes in the regular school. I hated a lot of what happened at school.
I think I became a bit of a wise guy; I know I got beaten up a lot.
There was a big football field next to the school, and sometimes
while I was walking across it a bunch of kids would come along and
say, "Let's get that actor." There are bullies in every school. Lots of
the other kids were my friends and still are. In my last three high-
school years, I studied in private tutoring schools for the most part, and
today I go to a local tutoring school Searing Schools that gives ad-
vanced-placement courses. There just hasn't been time for me to go
to college.

From the beginning, my father taught me that I had to believe in a
character in order to have the audience believe in it. He showed me
how I had to feel that I was the character. And he told me I must
never try to imitate anyone else, even him. I got the idea, in my own
way, from the start. I just always knew I was someone else on the stage.
My father was stage manager of my first three plays, and made all the
main decisions about what plays I did. It was natural for me to follow
his advice. After I opened in my first play, I was offered roles in a lot of
television dramas. We accepted two plays for "The Philco Television
Playhouse," on N.B.C., and I had the experience of playing with all

45

THE PLAYER: BRANDON DE WILDE

kinds of actors. I was In a play called "No Medals on Pop/' with my
father. It was about a kid in school who didn't worship his own father
but did worship his gym teacher. My father had the part of my father
in the play. Formerly, when I had watched my father on television,
he had always been my father, not the character he was playing. But
this wasn't the same as watching him, because in this one I was an
actor with him. Then, at home, he was my father again, helping me
with this part, too.

After appearing in "The Member of the Wedding" for about
two years, I went out to Hollywood with my mother to make my
first movie, "Shane," which was produced and directed by George
Stevens, and which starred Alan Ladd, Jean Arthur, and Van Heflin.
I was sort of bored by the long-drawn-out movie procedure, but the
picture went over in a big way. In "Shane," I played a hero-worship-
ping boy who idolized a gunfighter. We made part of the movie on
location in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. It was fun to be there, riding
horses and wearing cowboy clothes. I'd been riding since I was five,
but now instead of riding on bridle paths 1 could ride in the wide open
spaces. On weekdays when I wasn't working, my parents, Jean Arthur,
some wranglers I knew, and I went horseback riding, and I used to
imagine that we were cowboys in the old West. By the time the movie
was finished, I was nine. It was not long afterward that I made the
movie version of "The Member of the Wedding." After "Shane," I
rejoined "The Member of the Wedding" on the road, and then I
went into my second Broadway play, "Mrs. McThing," by Mary
Chase, with Helen Hayes. It opened in February, 1952, and I was
with it for about six months. I never got bored while I was doing
it, any more than I did while I was in my first play. I'm never
bored onstage. When I first met Helen Hayes, I had no idea
that she was a famous actress. I liked being in the play with her, but
I never got to know her well. She was a good friend of my parents'. We
often went to her house in the country for dinner, and while my par-
ents talked to her I would try to play with her son, James MacArthur.
He's about four years older than I am, and I guess he didn't like the
idea too well. But sometimes he and I sneaked cigarettes together. By
the time that play was finished, I was ten and a half, and in the fourth
grade. My third play was "The Emperor's Clothes," which was written
by George Tabori and directed by Harold Clurman. It was about the
threat of Communism, and although it was a failure, lasting only

46

BRANDON BE WILDE

sixteen performances, I thought it was a beautiful play. But the critics
didn't dig it. Lee J. Cobb played my father and Maureen Stapleton
my mother. The play had a feeling of mystery and heavy drama. It was
the first time that I began to understand what I was doing as an
actor. I was about eleven.

When I was eleven and twelve, I did a live-television series, called
"Jamie," for a little over a year. It was specially written for me. I
played an orphan who was shifted around from one family to another
and finally found a home. My father was associate producer, together
with David Susskind and Julian Claman. But it was all too much for
me. The work was too hard. I had to go to school and learn things like
geography and arithmetic, and learning lines for a new show every
week was just too much. I began to hate rehearsing at home with my
father. I liked rehearsing in the theatre, but when I was home I liked
to go outside and play with the kids. I had terrible battles with my
father. They would usually wind up with my calling him stupid and
his calling me stupid the way a lot of kids and their fathers yell at
each other. We did that until I was about fifteen.

For four years, between the ages of eleven and fifteen, I did a lot of
travelling back and forth between coasts for television and movies. One
movie was "Good-Bye, My Lady," directed by William A. Wellman,
which I made for Warner Brothers. It was really a beautiful movie,
about a boy and his uncle played by Walter Brennan and a dog
they found. The dog was a basenji, from Africa, which doesn't bark.
After the movie was made, the studio gave the dog to me, and I named
her Lady. I still have her. The movie is a real tear-jerker, but lovely.
In some ways, that's the best part I've ever had. I like roles that are
quietly emotional. Anybody can rant and rave. One picture I was in
that my parents and I didn't like was "Night Passage," with James
Stewart and Audie Murphy, It was the biggest clich< picture ever
made. It had all the cliches from every other clich picture in history.
The only thing it left out was the Indians. About thirty-five people
had a say in it. It was about two brothers, one good and the other
bad, and when the Utica Kid, the bad brother, robbed a train, I
carried the money in a shoe box. It was a mess. We call it "the money
picture," because the only thing that we remember it for is that money
in the shoe box.

We say no as often as we say yes to offers that come our way. We
turned down twenty-five movie offers before we decided to do "Shane."

47

THE FLAYER: BRANDON BE WILDE

We've turned down at least a hundred and fifty movies since I started
working. All three of us discuss every script that's sent to us. We each
read it separately, then we talk about it usually at dinner. We tear
it apart and each of us gives his opinion. We turn down a script if it
sounds too Hollywoody a shallow, ha-ha, yippee thing. I'm always
being offered parts as the good ail-American boy. I suppose I have
that kind of face. But I like to play parts with a little more depth. I'd
prefer to play a kind of nut, with a kind of nastiness and meanness in
him, rather than the boy next door who gets into a little trouble and
then gets out of that little trouble. When we read the script for the
recent movie "All Fall Down," which I made with Warren Beatty, we
all came to the conclusion that the best part was the one offered to
me that of the younger brother because he was not only the most
sympathetic character but, in the end, the strongest and best. I got so
wound up at one point in the movie while I was telling my brother
what a bum he was, because he'd made the girl who loved him, Eva
Marie Saint, pregnant, and he'd disappointed his whole family that
I forgot that I was really just acting. I narrated the whole picture.
Angela Lansbury played my mother, and Karl Maiden played my
father. I worked hard on that part. It's my favorite. I played a
sixteen-year-old boy, but I felt bigger and older than I'd ever felt
before. It may be because I felt I was really playing somebody apart
from myself, for the very first time. I could play a sixteen-year-old
boy rather than be a sixteen-year-old boy. I was older nineteen
and still I could understand how a sixteen-year-old boy felt. I read
the book the movie was based on four times, and felt I understood
all the other characters as well as my own. It was the first time my
father hadn't helped me with a role. When he saw the picture, he
said my performance was great. That meant a lot to me. I was lucky
in that movie. We had a good cast and a good director, John Franken-
heimer, and we were given two weeks for rehearsal, so that it was
almost like being in a play. Everyone came to the first day of re-
hearsal knowing his lines and ready to rehearse, with the exception of
one actor, who kept the script in his hands up until the last day and
annoyed everyone else. It's difficult to act with someone who just sits
and reads during rehearsal and is probably thinking he'll save the
work until later. A selfish actor can throw a whole performance off.
Once in a while, I'm selfish, too, but I try not to be. If the part calls

48

BRANDON BE WILDE

for another actor to communicate with me, and he just sits with the
script in front of his face, that's selfishness for its own sake. Some of
our greatest actors are selfish actors, but they're not selfish in petty
ways. They're not just upstagers. Lesser actors might get in front of
other actors, which is strictly an amateurish thing, or they might step
on somebody else's laugh or talk at the top of their lungs or make
some gesture to take attention away from the actor who happens to be
saying his lines. It's even possible to be selfish unknowingly. My father
has taught me that many actors play for themselves only and don't
listen to the other actors. I just don't ever want to be like that myself.
No really great actor is selfish in that sense. Everything I've ever done
with my father's guidance has turned out to be good. He can explain
meanings in a character that are deeper than I'm capable of finding
or understanding by myself. I've learned almost everything I know
from my father, and when I understand as much about acting as he
does, it will be all I need to know.

One of my favorite actors is Laurence Olivier. He never does any-
thing in a part that's similar to something he's done in a previous
part; he makes every role different. I don't think learning to act ever
comes to an end. In addition to what I learn from my father, I learn
technique by going to plays, listening to other actors, working with my
directors, and asking a lot of questions. When I was in Hollywood mak-
ing the movie of "Blue Denim," in which I played the part of the
adolescent boy in love, I thought the way I played it was good but
not good enough. I should have done better. I didn't make a good
enough transition from being a boy to the realization that I was
going to be the father of a baby. By then, I was seventeen. I work very
hard when I'm learning a part. I spend three or four hours a night
studying the script, alone, in bed. Along with memorizing my lines,
I like to make a lot of notes about how I should move or look.

By the time I'm twenty-five, I want to be a director as well as act.
My father and my lawyer and I have recently become a corporation,
and we may do a television series soon, starring me. My true love is still
the theatre, but the movies and television are also fine, as long as I can
be acting. I haven't done a lot of things other kids get to do I've
gone to only three or four dances in my life but I'm not sorry. I'd
never want to give up acting.

SOPHIA LOREN

Acting and living are quite close. You grow as an
actress when you grow as a person. The first essential
for an actress is to seem human.

I was born on September 20, 1934, in Rome, Italy, as Sophia Scicolone.
I have one sister, Maria, four years younger than I am, and we are
very close. She is smaller than I am, and plumper, and has a good sense
of humor. As a child, she was always getting sick; she had every ill-
ness. I was always very healthy. My parents never married. My father
is a construction engineer. Before I was born, my mother won a contest
in Naples as a look-alike for Greta Garbo, and M-G-M asked her to
come to America, but my grandfather would not let her come. She
played the piano very well, but she never performed in public, because
she was afraid of going on the stage. She and my sister and I lived with
my grandparents in a small town, Pozzuoli, a few miles from Naples.
My mother dreamed of my someday becoming an actress, but she was
also afraid for me, because it is difficult for an actress to have a private
life, and the men are always around you. But the tendency of people in
a small town is to see everything small, and my mother, who had come
from Rome, felt confined, so I felt confined. Sometimes my mother tells
me now that she sees herself through me; everything I've done she
wanted to do. When she goes to see one of my pictures, she doesn't see
anything the first time. The second time, she recognizes me. The third
time, she begins to understand the picture.

50

SOPHIA LOREN

I wouldn't change a thing I've done in my life. I was a very happy
child. Not a thing troubled me. I enjoyed anything and everything. I
had fun. I didn't worry. I am shier now than I was as a girl. Every
Sunday after church, I went to the movies with my Aunt Dora, my
mother's younger sister, who worked as a typist. She is totally, ex-
clusively enthusiastic about my career and my work, without the slight-
est reserve. When she writes letters to me now, she writes on the
envelope, "To the most distinguished and refined actress Sophia
Loren." The first movie I saw, at the age of four, was an American
film of "The Picture of Dorian Gray/' with Kurd Hatfield, Angela
Lansbury, and George Sanders. Next, I saw a film with Yvonne de-
Carlo, whom I adored. After I saw Tyrone Power in "The Mark of
Zorro," I went back to see it over and over again. I would go the first
thing in the morning and stay through the last showing at night. There
was always something magic to me about movies. I couldn't get over
the way it was: on the wall, persons suddenly started to live. For years,
I always used to look where the projector was, to see where the people
came from. As a child, I was placid and optimistic and good-natured.
I attended the Scuole Elementari for five years and the Scuole Magis-
trali for five years, and would have needed two more years to be a
schoolteacher. By the time I was nine, I was quite grown-up. I
started to have my own thoughts. I always wanted what I have now.
I am quite satisfied. If I had stayed in Pozzuoli, I would have been a
teacher or I would have been a housewife, with six children. I am not
sorry I left. I wanted a career and also a husband. Money doesn't count
very much no\y, but I have it. I have beautiful homes: a country house
on the Biirgenstock, near Lucerne; an apartment in Rome, where my
husband, Carlo Ponti, the movie producer, has his office; and a big
house at Marino, in the country near Rome, where we are surrounded
by olive trees. This house was built in the eighteenth century by a
cardinal, and there are beautiful frescoes on the walls.

When I was fourteen, I entered a beauty contest for the selection
of the "Queen of the Sea" of Naples and her twelve "Princesses of the
Sea." There were three hundred and twenty contestants. I won second
place and became one of the Princesses. The audience didn't like the
girl who was chosen to be Queen, and when they don't like something
in Naples, they get really excited; they threw things at her and
shouted insults. After the contest, I went to a restaurant with my

51

THE PLAYER: SOPHIA LOREN

mother and ate pizza. I have always had a good appetite. Sometimes
now I have days when I am nervous and don't eat at all, but most of
the time I have a large breakfast two eggs and bacon, bread and
butter, orange juice, and coffee and, for lunch, tuna salad with ham
and bologna; and then a large Italian dinner. My prize for winning
second place in the beauty contest was twenty-five thousand lire, and
also some new wallpaper for my room. I still have that wallpaper in my
room in my grandfather's house; it's white, with a pattern of big green
leaves. I was also awarded two big enlargements of my photograph. I
took these and the money and went with my mother to Rome. We
had talked for years about doing it and now we did it.

In Rome, we stayed with relatives for the first three months, and
went almost immediately to the big movie studio Cinecitt&, where
they were making "Quo Vadis," because we had heard that they were
hiring many extras. A production manager accepted us, and later the
director Mervyn LeRoy saw me and asked me if I spoke English. I
said yes, of course. I had learned some English in school and also from
the G.Ls when the Allies liberated Naples. So Mother and I both
worked as extras in a crowd scene. We worked for one night,
all night long, and went home at five o'clock in the morning with
thirty-two dollars. We were so happy. It was the beginning of a dream
coming true. Then my sister became ill in Naples, and Mother had to
leave me and go back. I registered with an agency to do modelling
and got some jobs posing for photographs for Italian comic-strip maga-
zines. These Italian comics are called "fumetti," or "little smokes," and
have novels illustrated by photographs, with the words coming out of
the characters' mouths inside balloons. After two months, I entered the
Miss Rome Beauty Contest of 1950. I did not win the contest, but I
met Carlo Ponti, who was already a successful producer, and who is
now my husband. He was a judge in the contest. He asked me to come
to the judges' table, and invited me to come and see him in his office.
I was very skinny and my hair was very, very short. I went to see him
wearing a red dress with white dots that I had borrowed from a friend,
because I did not have a good dress of my own. I made a screen test,
and Carlo told me I did not photograph well and could never be an
actress, so I left. But now I was known. My photographs were appear-
ing in the fumettL Photographers saw me on the street and stopped
me. They are like that in Italy. Producers began to call me up and
offer me little parts in movies. So I started.

52

SOPHIA LOREN

In 1952, 1 took the name Loren, because it sounded melodious,
and would be easier to remember and easier to pronounce than Scico-
lone. My first real part, in 1952, was as a swimmer in an Italian movie
called "Africa Sotto i Mari," and my first leading role, in 1953, was as
Ai'da in "Aida," for which Renata Tebaldi did the singing. After that,
Carlo offered me a four-year contract with him, and I signed. We were
married in Mexico in September, 1957. From the start, Carlo was dif-
ferent from all the other producers; he knew how to help me in every-
thing. I was very fortunate to find a man like Carlo, who knows how
to bring out what I have inside me. He has always made me under-
stand. He never lectures. With him, I feel much more rational. When
I first came to Rome, I was really an irrational Neapolitan kid. I was
making mistakes in my life and my work, doing everything on instinct
and doing everything wrong. I know now how wrong it all was. I
learned so much from Carlo about acting and how to act. The only
time I feel really tranquil and really complete is when I'm acting. I
hide myself behind the character I play. It is very difficult when you
are not cultivated and not educated enough to know what you are in-
side. At the age of eighteen, I did not know what I was inside. I went to
a dramatic school for three months in 1952 and learned a little bit
about walking and dancing, but after that I learned by myself. Most of
all, I learned from Carlo.

I am scared to death of a live audience. When I appeared on "The
Ed Sullivan Show" on television, I was terribly afraid. I don't feel
prepared spiritually to face the public. But I am always happy when
I am acting. Then I can do all the things I am afraid to do or cannot
do in my real life. I had always wanted to be a nun, and some
years ago I was offered the role of Mother Cabrini, the saint of immi-
grants in America, but the film was never made. Also, I had always
wanted a daughter, and in "Two Women" I played the mother of a
young girl and I really felt she was my daughter. I tried to understand
how the character I played the peasant mother would feel. The
movie was made on location in a part of the countryside between
Rome and Naples that is called Ciociaria a name that comes from
"cioce" a special kind of peasant shoes. It is very beautiful country,
picturesque and full of color. The most luxurious plantations alter-
nate with stony areas. Its people seem harsh and uncommunicative,
and they are of fiery character, but they are very frank, sincere, and
reliable when you get close to them. I observed the peasant women of

53

THE PLAYER: SOPHIA LOREN

the region very carefully and tried to imitate their gestures and man-
nerisms. I hate to hear actors say things like "When I play a king, I
become a king," because to me this is really phony talk. You feel what
the character you play feels, but not completely. You never lose con-
trol. When you kiss on the screen, you don't really kiss.

I am good-natured when I work, and I do not mind working very
hard. I do a lot of dubbing for my pictures. For example, I dubbed
my own English for "Two Women," which was made in Italian. When
you dub, you do not have as much feeling as you had when the movie
was originally shot, and it is hard work. After I have been dubbing,
I eat and then go to bed right away, because it is so tiring. I never
rehearse a part in front of a mirror. It is phony, I think, to do that.
I want to get it the way it should be when I am on the set, in front of
the camera. Before I start to work on a part, I read the script, but
when shooting starts, I like improvisation right on the set. Even when
I'm not consciously thinking about a part, I'm really thinking about
it all the time. When I get to the set, I sometimes know suddenly what
I will do. I didn't rehearse at all for "Two Women." I get frightened
when people watch me, but as soon as the camera starts to run, I feel
protected, because I feel that everybody has his own work to do and
is not looking at me. In public, when I am in a joking mood, I do not
mind if people stare at me; I can enjoy it. I know they look because
they are interested, and I try to imagine what they are thinking.

Everything about my work is very tiring, but also it is very fascinat-
ing. You always learn new things. I learned many things working with
Cary Grant in the movie "Houseboat." He has such tremendous con-
centration. Many actors do not have the courage to stand still. They
do not know how to look you in the eye. I often want to tell them
especially the new, young actors "Please look at me." Cary Grant
knows how to concentrate, how to look directly at you, but always with
great relaxation. It is very important for an actor or an actress to
look around at everything and everyone and never to forget about real
life.

54

HUME CRONYN

Perfectionism is a terrible burden.' It's a drive I wish
I didn't have.

1 was born on July 18, 1911, in London, Ontario, the youngest of five
children three boys and two girls. My great-grandfather was the first
Bishop of Huron. The house I was born in was the same house my
father was born in. One of my sisters lives there now. We were fairly
prosperous. I was thirteen years younger than the next-youngest child
in our family, and I was alone a lot as a child. My loneliness and the
whole business of pretending led me into acting, which I decided to do
at the age of six or seven. I was sent away to an Ottawa day school,
where I was the only boarder, when I was seven, and then I went to
Bishop Ridley College, a Canadian preparatory school, where I played
football, hockey, and cricket, and boxed. Nevertheless, I was miserable
at school. I was interested in poetry and drawing, and I was physically
the smallest boy in the school, and these things added to my feeling of
loneliness and isolation and homesickness. When I was ten, I put on an
impromptu production of "The Green Goddess." I played George
Arliss's part and loved it. I was my own audience in those days. It was
pure living in a dream world, which was much richer, much gayer, and
much more delightful than the world I really lived in. It pulled me out

55

THE FLAYER: HUME CRONYN

of myself, and I didn't care much for myself anyway. My father had a
wonderful voice and a wonderful build. If the Almighty had given me
his gifts in addition to my own, I might have done more as an actor.
My mother was a lovely woman. My father's sister once said about
her and I had it engraved on her tombstone "Her entrance into a
room was as though another candle had been lighted." Both my par-
ents were great theatregoers and travellers. At fifteen, I was taken to
London, England, for the first time, and saw plays there, all of which
fed the fire in me.

In 1930, at McGill University, where I was studying law, I caught
a kidney punch while boxing, and got a chill at the same time, with
the result that I developed a cold in my kidneys. My doctor had a
friend playing in the National Theatre Stock Company in Washington,
and while I was convalescing, the doctor and 1 drove there. I wasn't go-
ing to pass my examinations anyway. The friend introduced me to the
director, and I joined the company, at a salary of fifteen dollars a week.
I played my first professional role, a newspaper boy in "Up Pops the
Devil," at the age of nineteen. Six weeks and three bit parts later, I
went home and told my family I wanted to give up law and go into the
theatre and become an actor. I felt in my heart that acting would
help me realize that wonderful line "Almighty God ... So may we
live ... to catch the music to which this world is set by Thee." When
my family realized that I was determined, they felt I ought to have the
benefit of the best possible training, so I came to New York and en-
rolled in the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, where I stayed for
two years 1932 and 1933. You may not learn how to act in a school,
but you do learn a number of useful things, including vocal exercises
such as "She left the web, she left the loom, she made three paces
through the room," and "A wise old owl lived in an oak; the more he
saw the less he spoke; the less he spoke the more he heard; why can't
we all be like that bird?" When I left the Academy, I wrote to the
administrative director, the late Charles Jehlinger, telling him how
much the experience of studying there had meant to me. He wrote
back and told me, "What you need is increased and never-ending ex-
perience in life." He was a great man. In 1934, I made my tlfbut on
the New York stage, playing a janitor in "Hipper's Holiday." Then I
worked in the Barter Theatre, and in 1935 I got a chance to audition
for the job of assistant stage manager and understudy in the national

56

HUME CRONYN

company of "Three Men on a Horse." In the worst tradition of Holly-
wood films about the theatre, I was given the leading role of Erwin,
which I played for nearly two seasons on tour. I worked with George
Abbott, a real, thoroughgoing professional, when I played in "Three
Men on a Horse" and "Boy Meets Girl" on tour, and then in "Room
Service," on Broadway.

My first marriage was made when I was terribly young, and it was a
failure from the start. I'm married now to the actress Jessica Tandy.
My wife and I have played together in several stage productions, in-
cluding "The Fourposter," in which we played on Broadway for two
seasons and six hundred and thirty-two performances. We've been in
movies together, in one of which, "The Green Years," I played Jessie's
father. We had a television series for a while, called "The Mar-
riage," and we've been in a number of television plays, including
"The Moon and Sixpence." If a husband and wife work together, it
can make life better for both of them.

After you've been in about fifteen movies, as I have "Lifeboat,"
"Brute Force," "The Seventh Cross," and others and directed six
Broadway productions, and written screen treatments for movies, which
I have also done, you develop too many ideas about acting. Most of us
are a little pathetic in our assumptions of artistry. Actors don't often
fulfill their obligations as artists, or transmit their experience in a form
that is clear to the audience. Acting can be an art, but it very rarely is.
An actor's instrument is himself. To have a responsive body and a
responsive voice requires a great deal of physical and emotional dis-
cipline. Your pores must constantly be open, to soak up what you later
give out. The best absorbers are the best emitters. There's a great
danger in trying to perfect detail. There are times when I feel I have
the soul of a filing clerk. Writers are the luckiest of all artists; they
have the greatest degree of independence. I used to write poetry. After
I made "The Seventh Cross/' for M-G-M, in the early forties, I
went thirteen months without working; during that time I dis-
covered some of the pleasures of writing. I wrote some short stories,
sold a story to R.K.O., and wrote a screen treatment of "Rope" for
Alfred Hitchcock, which he directed, and which his company pro-
duced. For a long time, I've been attracted to paintings, and I built
up quite a distinguished collection, which I later sold an early Pi-
casso, two Modiglianis, a Renoir still-life, two Vlamincks, and a Mary

57

THE FLAYER: HUME CRONYN

Gassatt "Mother and Child." I think there is a strong relationship
between painting and'acting. When I'm building a role, I start with a
series of mental pictures, and feel, This should have this shape, like a
drawing.

There are two legitimate ways of approaching acting- Jessie's way,
which is to start with what is inside yourself and go to the outside, and
my way, which is working from the outside to the inside. I've learned
that you need endless patience in working with actors, especially if
you're directing them. Some of them seem to work so slowly. Then
suddenly they begin to bloom. As an actor, you have to learn what
kind of roles you can do. I took a bash at Hamlet in 1949. I found that
I wasn't equipped to play him. I read Salvador de Madariaga's book
about Hamlet as the poetic Hamlet, and that gave me an image to
hold on to. What I learned is that to play Shakespeare well you should
start as a young actor, doing small parts at first, giving yourself time
to benefit from the growing process. The actor makes no profound
contribution to society. He reveals a moment of truth, poetry, humor.
God knows we're short on those things, but the actor's contribution
isn't very much. And it isn't anything at all without the spark of
talent. That's God-given and bloody rare, and even that doesn't
amount to much without education, intelligence, and experience. A lot
of acting is drudgery, and a lot of it is so dull: learning to put on
makeup, learning to control your breath, learning not to let your face
go to pieces. To act, you must have a sense of truth and some degree
of dedication.

The first time I look over a play, I respond to the situations and to
the characters as they're caught in the situations. Later on, I begin to
see what may have to be erased. I always go through a process of col-
lecting far more material than I can use. Then I try to retain what is
essential. Intellection is important as a process of getting the best out
of yourself. Once I get into a part, I find myself thinking about it all
the time. It can become a kind of nightmare. Actors have no social life.
We're constantly working. To go on being an actor, you need sheer
animal energy. If you can't restock your energy, you have to hide your
lack of it. Like getting above a cold. You can't have a cold onstage.
When I'm working, I look forward all day long to that one drink be-
fore dinner. I don't want to talk then. Nor do I want to talk at all for
fifteen minutes before going to sleep, or at breakfast. Jessie and I have

5$

HUME CRONYN

a small island in the Bahamas, on which we've built a house. It's our
retreat, cut off from everybody else. We get there by chartered sea-
plane, and we have our own electric generator. We need that island. I
come to life when I hit it and hit that water. After I've finished with a
play or a television show, I'm desperate to hide out, to get away. Every
actor has his own way of coming to life again. Going to the island is
mine.

Some actors have a tendency to get absorbed in the details of what
they do in a part, and that often makes the thing become mechanical.
I try not to get trapped by the peripheral elements. I try to be guided
by the questions, "What's basic here? Is it true? Can I make it sim-
pler?" Olivier tells me there's no such thing as overacting. You can go
as high as Everest, he says, if you can fill the space. Your own feelings
are unimportant. You're not in a part to indulge in what you may feel.
It simply doesn't matter how you feel. It's how the audience feels
and how the author felt first that count. If you're acting a part, you've
got to jump in and do it.

59

ZERO MOSTEL

The theatre is like a cathedral I mean a shul. At the
end of it, therms a cup of hot tea.

I was born on February 28, 1915, in the Brownsville section of Brook-
lyn. I am the next-to-the-youngest child of my father's second set of
children; he had four children by his first wife, spaced three years
apart, and four children by his second wife, also spaced three years
apart. All but two of us are boys. One brother is in philanthropic
work, and my other brothers are in various kinds of manufacturing or
accounting. My father moved us from Brownsville to the lower
East Side to Moodus, Connecticut, where he was in charge of a
kosher slaughterhouse, and then to the Bronx, where he made sacra-
mental wine. I went to P.S. 188, on the lower East Side, and I gradu-
ated from Seward Park High School, in Manhattan, My real name is
Samuel Joel Mostel. The kids in school started calling me Zero, be-
cause I was always cutting up in class and appeared to be a hopeless
student. I weigh two hundred and thirty-five pounds now; as a kid, I
was terribly skinny. When I was seven, I played the part of a Red Cross
nurse in a school pageant. I loved doing imitations and getting laughs
from the other kids. My family always frowned on acting. My father,

60

ZERO MOSTEL

who died in 1945, was a very good-natured man, but he never came to
see me on the stage, or when I worked in night clubs or in movies.
Being an entertainer of that kind came under the heading of making
fun of human beings, which is objectionable according to the
orthodox Jewish religion. Both my parents had great humor. My
mother was a wit, but never a sentimental one. Once, when some-
body in our house stepped on our cat's paw, she turned to the cat
and said sternly, "I told you not to go around barefoot!" For all
the occupations I chose, my mother had one word: "Bum!" When I
kept asking my father to give in and come to see me entertain, he
would say, "I don't want the publicity."

In school, I found that I was very good at drawing and painting. I've
never stopped painting. I've always had a studio to go to; even while
I'm in a play, I try to go every day to my studio, which is now on West
Twenty-eighth Street. I graduated with a B.A. from C.C.N.Y. in
1935 and went on to N.Y.U. to study art at night. During the
day, I went to work, turning sleeves in an overcoat shop belonging
to one of my brothers-in-law. I quit after four weeks. Then I got on the
W.P.A., and moved into a ten-by-ten-foot room with another artist.
The W.P.A. had classes in many branches of art life drawing,
painting, industrial arts. Most of the good artists were on the project,
teaching and working. I taught life drawing and painting at the
Ninety-second Street Y.M.H.A. We gave Artists' Balls, at which I
would get up and joke and deliver chalk talks. Barney Josephson, who
was running Caf Society Downtown and Caf Society Uptown at the
time, heard me at one of the Artists' Balls and, in 1942, hired me to do
an act at Caf Society Downtown, at a salary of forty dollars a week.
Then I moved to the Uptown, at a salary of a hundred dollars a week.
Here I was a big night-club star, and yet when I had a date, all I knew
to offer was "Let's go for a bite at Rudley's." A year later, I was booked
into the Martinique at a salary of thirty-seven hundred and fifty dollars
a week.

By this time, I knew that I wanted to be an actor. I was a comic.
Most comics never bother to equip themselves as actors. Most of the
young comics today have the misconception that if they do a series of
gags in a certain pose, that's enough. But the best comics are also good
actors. Chaplin is a wonderful actor. W. C. Fields and Willie Howard
and Bobby Clark were real actors, and so are Bert Lahr and Joey

61

THE PLAYER: ZERO MOSTEL

Adams and Shelley Berman. In France, the word "comedieri* actually
means both "comedian" and "actor." I wanted to play in the classic
comic literature. I wanted to act in the plays of Moliere, the daddy of
all comic invention. I felt that I had to study everything if I wanted to
act. I felt that an actor was better if he knew what was going on, if he
was aware of the literary stage tradition. I wanted to know how to do
Lear and Toby Belch and Falstaff. I had read all of Shaw and Moliere
by the time I was nineteen. In college, when my English professor was
writing "You can't beat Thomas Wolfe" on the blackboard, I was
reading "Ulysses" out loud in an alcove with other rebels. Years after-
wards, when I was going to play Leopold Bloom in the Off Broadway
production of "Ulysses in Nighttown," I found that I knew whole sec-
tions of it by heart. I was also fascinated by Moli&re in college, and
when I read "The Miser" and "The Imaginary Invalid" and "The
Bourgeois Gentleman," I automatically imagined what funny things
you could do at this point or that point while playing the parts. I
wasn't even thinking of acting then myself, though. In 1949, I went up
to the Brattle Theatre, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and played Argan
in my own adaptation of "The Imaginary Invalid." A couple of years
later, I went back there and played Sganarelle in "The Doctor in Spite
of Himself." The part of Argan offers the finest of comic material. I'd
never worked in a play until then, and I found it exciting, playing
with an ensemble and in a part that offered the opportunity for me to
do so much acting, comedy, singing, and dancing, as well as creating a
complete character. The part utilized what I felt I had. And I didn't
have to work with a microphone or wear a blue suit and a tie. Bloom in
"Ulysses in Nighttown" was another very rich part, and I enjoyed
playing it. I wish I could play in "The Imaginary Invalid" on Broad-
way, but producers go wild when they hear the name Moli&re. They
immediately start figuring out the cost of the costumes.

I was married in 1944 to the former Kathryn Harkins, who was a
Rockette and a ballet dancer. We have two children Joshua, who
was born in 1946, and Tobias, born two years later. Both my sons are
musical and are good chess players. I was in the Army for a while,
serving in the infantry at Camp Croft and Fort Meade. Then I played
all the big night clubs as a comic, was in the Duke Ellington musical
"Beggar's Holiday," on Broadway, and played the London Palladium
for three weeks. In the summer, I'd try to go where I could play

62

ZERO MOSTEL

Moliere. In 1950, I moved my family out to Hollywood to live while
I made some movies. I played in "Panic in the Streets/' directed by
Elia Kazan, and in "The Enforcer," "Sirocco," and other pictures. I
took a studio on Santa Monica Boulevard and spent a lot of time
painting. But I hated Hollywood. Everything about it the people,
the climate, the business. Everything. My wife hated it. The kids
hated it. We were all happy to get back to New York.

I've always been very choosy. I turned down the part of the peddler
in "Oklahoma!," which the producers wanted to build up for me. The
idea, they told me, was to get into a musical and make nineteen million
dollars. I didn't want that. I wanted to be free to act and to paint. I'm
constantly trying new things in painting. After I've done one thing, I
go on to try something new. In the early forties, I painted socially
satiric things, and later on I did more abstract painting. Lately, I've
been working with a mixture of mediums oils, crayon, pastels. Only a
monomaniac does the same thing in all the arts. What I do in acting is
something different. A guy's painting, if it's true, is of himself, always.
Painting is a much more creative field than acting. You take up an
empty canvas; you fill it. In acting, you've got something to start with.
You're not always satisfied with what you put on the blank canvas, and
here painting is like acting on the stage, you have a chance the next
day or night to do it over. Painting comes from color, not from draw-
ing. I'm a colorist. I never stop painting. You can't do it by fits and
starts. If you paint, you've got to paint every day. Otherwise, the
simple mixing of the colors becomes a terrific problem. I'm not un-
usual in wanting to act as well as paint. During the Renaissance, they
worked at everything jewelry, painting, dam-building, sculpture.
There's no way of knowing which I need more, painting or acting. It's
just that I have a need to do both.

I don't like to do a lot of things you have to do to become a success
as an actor. I was the same way in painting. I never got into the social
life of being a painter. When I finally succumbed and got myself an
agent as a painter, only recently, he died. As an actor or anything else,
I don't go to ladies' clubs. I'm not willing to make a business out of
myself. If an actor gets that involved with himself, he's doing photo-
graphs in the morning, .and then comes the meeting with the publicity
man, then the session with his psychoanalyst, then the hot lunch at
Sardi's. If you do a lot of that kind of thing as an actor, you get farther,

63

THE PLAYER: ZERO MOSTEL

but then you don't have time to paint if you want to go to your studio
and paint. I'm particular about what I give my time to as an actor. 1
hate all plays with mothers and fathers in them. If I had to play the
father of one of those terrible families, I'd flip my lid. I don't like act-
ing when I have to do John loves Mary. I'm just as antagonistic to an
Andy Wyeth painting or anything else I don't like: I like to do what I
like, even if it's a commercial flop. I don't care what the theatre critics
say. Critics don't know anything about acting. They slaughtered
"Beggar's Holiday," and it didn't touch me.

I have an inclination to do wild things in plays. That's why I loved
playing Bloom in "Ulysses in Nighttown." I started going to the
Actors' Studio in 1950. The only part of it I like is where you get up
and act. I like working from time to time at the Studio, but I haven't
won any certificates for best attendance. I like to be with actors, to
see what they do. I'm suspicious of ambitious people, though; I'm sus-
picious of too much conversation. I've worked with all kinds of direc-
tors. Some of the big-name directors destroy the most wonderful thing
an actor has. Just because he has power and importance, the destructive
director tries to bend you to what he calls his sense of production in-
stead of letting you use your own configuration, your own way of
merging your own personality with the character you're playing. A
good director knows how to bring out your talent. One of the
best directors I've ever worked with is Burgess Meredith, who directed
me in "Ulysses in Nighttown." He's a wonderful actor himself very
inventive and very creative so he can do a lot of the things he wants
you to do on the stage. Sometimes he can make a single little gesture
when he steps into a part, and it rubs off on you. He sees things a cut
above realism. He has a conception of what a thing is, what it means.
He knows how to make use of you as an actor, but always in good
taste. It's very stimulating. And I don't feel the breath of ambition on
him, which is always disturbing to an actor. I feel that his concern is
for the play. Joseph Anthony, who directed me in "Rhinoceros/' is one
of the most wonderful directors, a guy with a world of patience, who
knows exactly what you can do. He lets you do what you can do, and
he's a marvel to work with. A bad director comes to a decision, and it's
wrong, and what is primarily important to him is to prove that it is
right The best guide to acting is Bernard Shaw's phrase "the life
force." When all the elements of art enter into it the distortion, the

64

ZERO MOSTEL

reality, the nai*vet you have the life force. "Ulysses in Night-
town" is larger than life, and my role in it was more than an adequate
one. Working on a role like Bloom requires the exercise of your own
taste in large measure. I played in "Ulysses in Nighttown" on and off
for two years in New York, London, Paris, and Amsterdam, and never
got bored; there was always something new to do, something interest-
ing, something alive. I suppose that because I'm a painter I am auto-
matically guided in acting by things that influence my painting. When
I played in "Rhinoceros" and was supposed to turn into a rhinoceros,
Joseph Anthony at first wanted me to run offstage, stick a horn on my
forehead, and become a rhinoceros that way. I preferred to do it -all
in front of the audience. That's a painterly thing to do.

For me, the greatest actor in history was Raimu. There's never been,
an American playwright who conveyed a corner of American life the
way Marcel Pagnol conveyed a corner of French life in his film trilogy
"Marius," "Fanny," and "C6sar," starring Raimu. Raimu captured life
for me. He did everything full-scale, without an arid moment and with
no tricks. The greatest actress was Laurette Taylor. I saw her eleven
times in "The Glass Menagerie" on Broadway. The great ones just do
it, and it's never vulgar.

JOAN CRAWFORD

I had the great advantage of growing up in front of a
camera. I know just how to turn, just what to show
on my face, and when to let the other actor have it. A
movie actor or actress paints with the tiniest brush.

I was born on March 23, 1908, in San Antonio, Texas. My real name
is Lucille Le Sueur. I did not meet my father, Thomas Le Sueur, until
I was an established movie star. My mother had divorced him before
I was born, and when I was a few weeks old she married Henry
Cassin, who owned a small vaudeville theatre in Lawton, Oklahoma,
so I spent my early years in Lawton. At six, I had an accident that kept
me in bed for a year I stepped on a broken bottle and cut my foot
so badly that the doctors said I would never walk again and
when I was eight and a half, we moved to Kansas City, Missouri. My
childhood is vague to me now. What I mostly remember is that it was
exhausting. I went to school at St. Agnes Academy, in Kansas City, as
a day student. When I was nine, my mother and my stepfather sep-
arated. My mother took over a laundry agency; my older brother, Hal
Le Sueur, got a job as a soda jerk. I began waiting on tables and doing
housework at the Academy to pay my tuition. After the sixth grade, I
went to Rockingham, another private school, where I was the only
working pupil. The school occupied a fourteen-room house, and I

66

JOAN CRAWFORD

cleaned all fourteen rooms and also cooked meals, made beds, and
washed dishes for thirty boys and girls. When I attended classes, I was
too tired to absorb what I heard, too tired to learn very much, but I
was always healthy, and I loved to dance. I learned every dance step
I could, and I entered one amateur dance competition and won. I
could do the Charleston and the Black Bottom better than anyone else
in town. I knew I could beat the other kids, and I did. I knew I was
born with talent, though I didn't know exactly what it was. After
getting out of high school, I attended Stephens College, in Columbus,
Missouri, as a working student, but I gave it up after three months.
I wanted to take dancing lessons, but I didn't have the money. I got
a job as a salesgirl in a Kansas City department store, for twelve dollars
a week. After a quarrel with my mother, I went to Chicago and got a
job doing one song and one dance at an out-of-the-way cafe, for
twenty-five dollars a week. Two weeks later, I was dancing in the
chorus line of the Oriole Terrace Club, in Detroit. From there, I went
into the chorus of the J. J. Shubert revue "Innocent Eyes/' in New
York, and then into the chorus of the revue called "The Passing Show
of 1924." After eight months in that, I was asked by an M-G-M talent
scout to take a screen test.

On New Year's Day, 1925, I left for Hollywood to begin working
for M-G-M, at seventy-five dollars a week. When I signed my contract,
I thought that M-G-M wanted me because I could dance. Now I know
that right from the start I was considered promising as an actress. I
hardly had a chance to know what I was doing. My first role was as a
chorus girl covered with imitation snow in "Pretty Ladies," in 1925.
Dancing roles in movies were easy for me, even though I had never
made the front line of the chorus on the stage. At that time, movies
were still silents. We would work late at night, and on Sundays, if nec-
essary, and it would take us all of four weeks to make a movie. I
danced in almost every role. From the very first, it was important to me
to become known as a movie star, to show the people back home in
Kansas City what I really was. They had never believed in my talent.
In "Sally, Irene, and Mary," which was made in 1925, I played the
role of Irene, a dancer, and it was then that the studio changed my
name to Joan Crawford. Among my other early films were "Old
Clothes," with Jackie Coogan, and "The Only Thing," with Eleanor
Boardman, and in 1926 I was Harry Langdon's leading lady in

67

THE FLAYER: JOAN CRAWFORD

"Tramp, Tramp, Tramp," and then played in "Paris," with Charles
Ray. I was still a teen-ager, and even though I still wanted to be
a star, I was really dancing to please my leading man and my
director and my producer. I would do any kind of part they asked me
to. I was working so hard I didn't have time for anything else. I
played ingenue roles in "The Unknown," with Lon Chaney; "Twelve
Miles Out," with John Gilbert; "West Point," with William Haines;
and "Across to Singapore," with Ramon Novarro. It was work I
thrived on and loved. In 1928, 1 was still thinking that dancing was my
inborn talent. When I played in "Our Dancing Daughters" that year,
and appeared dancing on a table, after coming out of a huge cake, I
became known as a movie star, and my salary was raised to five hun-
dred dollars a week.

The next year, 1929, I danced in "Our Modern Maidens," with
Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., and I also danced in "Hollywood Revue of
'29." It was between these assignments that I first had a chance to look
around me and see what acting was. I admired Eleanor Boardman, and
I watched Greta Garbo on her sets every chance I could get. I grew
determined to become a dramatic actress. I started nagging Louis B.
Mayer and Irving Thalberg to cast me in more and more dramatic
roles. I would hang around the studio and get my hands on the new
scripts, then take them home with me to read, and decide on the role I
wanted. I relied on my instinct in choosing what was right for me,
and my instinct rarely let me down. After deciding that I wanted a
certain role, I got up and went after it. The written words weren't too
important. I knew that if certain words or phrases stuck in my throat,
I could call a little conference right on the set and have them changed
to suit me better. I would go off in a corner with the director and the
leading man, and together we would decide what we wanted the writer
to change. I knew that the writer would be grateful to me. His words
were dead words. They were brought to life by me.

I was at M-G-M for seventeen years. In the thirties, I was considered
one of the ten biggest money-making stars for six straight years. Once
I'd started on a role, it became like a horse race. I couldn't wait to go
on. I worked hard on my preparations. If the script had been based on
a book, I'd go back and read the book. I have almost total recall and
a vivid imagination. I usually chose my own writers, producer, and
director I still do and I'd enter them in the race. Once in a role,

68

JOAN CRAWFORD

I eliminated myself completely. I became the character I played. I
portrayed so many girls and women who went from rags to riches that
L. B. Mayer thought I represented Cinderella to the public. My
audience was composed mostly of women. I began to beg to play
bitches, so I got that kind of part, and liked it. I've known so many
bitches, who never cared about the feelings of other people as long as
they could get their own way. They just never gave a hoot how many
people they rode over and hurt. Then I'd play another kind of role,
and it was exciting to become the queen bee again. I've made about
seventy-five pictures, and I remember every one of my important roles
the way I remember a part of my life, because at the time I did them
I was the role and it was my life, for twenty-four hours a day. When
I was a teen-ager, comedy was the most difficult thing for me to do, and
it still is. But dramatic roles are easy for me. In 1916, I won an Oscar
for my role in "Mildred Pierce," and it was the easiest thing I've ever
done. I've always drawn on myself only. That's one of the reasons no-
body has ever been able to imitate me. And nobody can duplicate
anything I've done. You always see impersonations of Katharine Hep-
burn and Marilyn Monroe, but no one can imitate me.

The pictures I loved more than any others I've ever made were the
films with Clark Gable "Possessed" and "Chained," among others
and "Mildred Pierce" and "Humoresque." The picture and espe-
cially the opening that I keep trying to forget is "Rain," in which I
played Sadie Thompson. I did it in 1932, and I didn't understand that
role then. If I were to do it now, I would understand it much better.
Today, I would start my characterization from the inside. For the most
part, though, the roles I've played have been right for me, even if not
all my pictures have been successful. In the old days, we seldom had a
single rehearsal. Our dream was to have two whole weeks just for a
rehearsal period. Before going into a picture, I'd have a talk with
Adrian, my costume designer, and then I'd have a talk with the direc-
tor and the leading man. I'd work on getting the clothes fitted, and my
wardrobe tested and just right, and the dialogue changed to suit me.
When I make a picture today, it's still the same; there are so many
people involved that I have to please the co-star, the cameraman, the
director. And I love to please them. Sometimes, in a difficult scene,
when I have words I simply can't say, I call in the director or the dia-
logue director and I suggest just walking through the scene not really

THE PLAYER: JOAN CRAWFORD

doing anything, just indicating what I can do. That helps in getting
the dialogue set.

When we actually start to shoot, I ask for one minute by myself.
Then I go off into a corner and bring up the exact feeling I want to
show. It can be tears, hysteria, laughter anything. I need just one
minute, and I can do it as high as the director wants it. If it feels true,
and if techniques don't get in your way, it's right. Techniques grow
with experience. Developing techniques is not like getting a whole new
wardrobe; it's not planned. For me, a role isn't something you daub on
and take off, like makeup. At the end of a day, I leave the part locked
inside me. Only the makeup and the wardrobe are left at the studio.
When I get home, I don't discuss my roles with my four adopted
children. I have one son, Christopher, aged nineteen, and three
daughters, Christina, aged twenty-two, and Cynthia and Cathy,
fourteen-year-old twins. Around the age of ten, each of my children
began to be proud of me. Before that, whenever we went to the movies
to see me in an unhappy role, they would cry and wail, but I would
say to them, "Look, darling, I'm right here/' I'd hold their hands, and
it would be all right.

A true actress is a woman who can portray a true character honestly
and with pure emotion, and weave her way into the hearts of her
audience and make them understand the character. The emotion must
be honest and pure. I've learned about life from writers and directors,
but mostly from myself. Writers give their words to paper. I give life
to their words. I act more for myself than for others. But I never refer
to a character I'm playing as "me." It's "her." Except for one picture
I made in 1951, a cheap and corny one called "This Woman Is Dan-
gerous," I've revelled in everything I've ever done. Acting is stimulat-
ing. It's exciting. It's competitive. It's challenging. It can be electrify-
ing. It doesn't matter if the character is Mary Turner, in "Paid," or
Mildred Pierce, I mold it, perfect it. A good actress can bring her
audiences into her world and permit them to throw off their cares and
fears temporarily.

My instinct in choosing the right part has failed me very seldom. In
something called "Great Day," I was supposed to be a little Southern
girl, digging her toe in the sand. Well, I'm a big gal I'm only five feet
four and a half, but I have very wide shoulders, and they give people
the impression that I'm big. We had been shooting for ten or eleven

70

JOAN CRAWFORD

days, and each day I began to feel more wrong for the part. I sought
out L. B. Mayer and pleaded with him to look at the rushes with Thai-
berg and to take me out of the movie. I cried, and told him that I was
a big dame and I couldn't, for the life of me, dig my bare toe in the
sand. After ten or eleven days of rushes, they called the whole thing
off, with $280,000 still sitting on the shelf. They told me to stay home,
and I've never been sorry. I was just too big for the part. I'm so broad
I would look dumpy if I put on a little weight. My measurements have
changed very little since I started acting. I learned to stand tall right at
the start, and I've always exercised to look tall. Dancing did a lot for
me, giving me more freedom of body movement and more grace. If an
actress has no talent, she may just as well quit before she begins. Every
actress must have inborn talent.

In June of 1929, I was married to Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., and we
worked with each other to improve our acting. We were divorced in
1933, and two years later I married Franchot Tone, and began to
think seriously about going on the stage. I began to learn about things
like the Moscow Art Theatre. We built a theatre in back of our house,
in Brentwood, where we rehearsed and co-starred in radio perform-
ances of several adaptations of movies. We studied singing, too. I
started to study opera, and continued with it after our divorce, in
1939. In July, 1942, 1 was married to Phillip Terry while I was making
my last M-G-M picture under contract, "Above Suspicion," and we
were divorced after two years. I am a contralto, and for seven years I
thought I might become an opera singer. In opera, the whole body
moves and has a rhythm to it. It can contribute to acting a role. Every
actress should take some singing and dancing lessons. The opera lessons
gave me better control over my voice. Many beautiful actresses are
spoiled because they have no control over their voices. I've always
been terrified of the stage and of live audiences, and I still am. Some-
times when I go backstage to pick up Ethel Merman or Mary Martin
for supper and have to wait for her to dress, I go out on the stage
and, remembering her lines, I begin to imagine myself in her role and
start speaking her lines. Then, suddenly, I see all the empty seats
and imagine how it would be to see that many faces instead, and I
just get sick. When my fourth husband, the late Alfred N. Steele, who
was chairman of the board of the Pepsi-Cola Company, started taking
me with him on business trips for Pepsi-Cola to make promotional

71

THE PLAYER: JOAN CRAWFORD

appearances, I was terrified. Once, in Chicago, I was asked to appear
before the food editors of every publication in the city and answer
hundreds of questions. The only way I could answer in front of them
all was to have the questions submitted on cards first. Acting in front
of movie crews is different. You know they are friends, part of the
family, and are watching out for your best interests. Now, after work-
ing for Pepsi-Cola for several years, making appearances on my own,
it feels like a family, too. I prepare for each appearance the way I do
for a movie role. It's all part of acting. Acting is the greatest of all the
arts. I wish I had five hundred years to study it.

72

ALEXANDER DAVION

You must never lose your sense of fun, even if you're
doing a very serious part.

I was born on March 13, 1929, in the heart of Paris. My father, Thomas
Davion, a timber importer, is French, and my mother is English. I
have one brother, Jack, a year and ten months younger than I am, who
works as an engineer for Rolls-Royce in Montreal. My family moved
to London when I was three. We lived in a lovely town house in St.
John's Wood, near Lord's Cricket Ground, where actors go to
watch the matches when they're out of work. I remember sounds
and shapes in Paris from my first three years there, and I still have a
tremendous nostalgic feeling for it. I always had a yen to act, as far
back as I can remember, but I never used to say anything about it.
Acting was something I just somehow felt that I could do. As a child,
I could tell stories. I could make people laugh. I could romp about,
pretending to be somebody else, pretending to be something else. It
was always great fun. I was good at movement and dancing. At the age
of two or three, I would dance for what seemed to me like hours at a

73

THE PLAYER: ALEXANDER DAVION

time. I have always loved music. I once started taking piano lessons,
but I was too lazy to keep it up. My family hoped that I might become
a lawyer or a doctor. I went to kindergarten in Hampstead, where I
knitted a long pink scarf, and after that to a prep school, Hall School,
where I had my first part in a play. It was all about spies and spying,
and I played Nitro Glycerinsky, wearing a slouch hat and an overcoat
with the collar turned up. When I was thirteen, I was sent away to
boarding school the Cheltenham School, in Gloucestershire. It was
like any other public school, where your life is miserable, where the
discipline is unbelievable, where everything around you does irrep-
arable damage. The school was very tough, very hard. We worked
long hours, and the prefects were allowed to beat the younger boys.
The idea is that it supposedly stiffens your backbone. Boys who go
there usually want to enter the Army. You must pass a stiff exam to get
into the school. I chose Cheltenham myself, I suppose, because the war
was on and I was very excited by it all. I discovered my mistake the
first day I was there.

It was while I was at Cheltenham that I saw my first play, other than
pantomimes I was taken to as a child. One of the masters took us to a
local theatre to see a touring production of "Othello," with Frederick
Valk, a famous German actor, as Othello, and with Bernard Miles as
lago and Hermione Hannen as Desdemona. I was terribly impressed.
Valk could hardly speak English, but he had such a brilliant and im-
posing presence. And he had a magnificent voice. He could speak al-
most in a whisper, and one could hear him in the back of the theatre;
his voice had fantastic resonance. He was a thick, big, ugly man but a
marvellous, marvellous actor. I started going to movies when I was
about ten. I grew up on American movies. The first one I saw, I be-
lieve, was "Modern Times." I was moved to laughter by "Modern
Times," but I was also terrified by it. To me, Charles Chaplin is the
finest artist there ever was. He's so moving and so beautiful to watch.
In a personal way, I feel a certain part of London every time I see
him I feel Kennington, where he was born. I've read all the books
on him there are. I understand his sort of comedy the essence of
his humor, his outlook on the whole thing. I had a sort of school-
boy crush on Clark Gable. To me, he was the epitome of masculinity,
charm, and roguishness. I saw "Gone with the Wind" four or five
times. I was also mad about Edward G. Robinson, Alan Ladd, and

74

ALEXANDER DAVION

James Cagney. I loved the gangster and Western films. I still think
a good Western film is the best entertainment. At Cheltenham, I
was very good at Rugby, and one year I broke both my ankles play-
ing it. I never did any acting at public school, and I never talked
about acting. It was considered sissy. I was in school during most
of the war. I'd go home to London on vacations. One night when I was
at home, we decided not to go to the shelter, and a bomb hit the house
right next door to ours. I was in bed. I fell two floors down in my bed,
and was pinned under debris. It took them three hours to dig me out,
but I came off with only a broken wrist and a few bruises. My parents
and my brother were cut by glass. I stayed at Cheltenham for two and a
half years; then my father got into financial difficulties, because of the
effect of the war on his business, and I was hauled out of school. I
didn't want to go to one of the country schools. I'm not a snob, and
wasn't then; it was just that I was becoming independent. I was sixteen,
and I wanted to earn my own way. I decided I wanted to be a foreign
correspondent, so I took a job as an office boy with Hulton Publica-
tions, Ltd., which published weekly periodicals. My main function
was to run out for coffee. After six months of this sort of thing, I
began to realize that one had to work one's way up. I decided to apply
for admission to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. I never sat down
and thought specifically, I'm going to become an actor. It was more
that I was drawn to anything make-believe and theatrical. I wish now
that I'd gone to a university, but at sixteen I just felt that I wanted to
get out into the world. For my R.A.D.A. audition, I gave Shylock's
"Hath not a Jew eyes?" speech from "The Merchant of Venice." I was
superb as only a young person can be, I suppose. I gave it all the guns
I had. I raved. I moved myself to tears. And I was accepted. I followed
what is a more or less standard pattern for young actors. You start off
with no knowledge just raw talent and the consciousness of acting.
Then you become terribly aware of all your thoughts of what to do
with yourself, and so on at which point you're learning your tech-
nique the hard way. Then, after you've got a certain amount under
your belt, you lose confidence, and you feel that you're being awful and
that the talent isn't coming out. And then a day arrives when every-
thing clicks into place, and you have the added element of experience
behind you. Some actors never reach the fourth stage. Some never reach
the third stage. And some never reach the second. I spent quite a bit of

75

THE PLAYER: ALEXANDER BAVION

time in the third stage. My teachers told me things like "You never
stand still when you're listening onstage." So I became conscious of
being very bad. Eventually, I was able to assemble everything and work
at it. The goal is quite simple: to get onstage and to create by visible
and audible means a character that is not yourself and that will hold
and move an audience.

A lot of actors have a pretty smile and are simpatico in a certain way.
They have perhaps a five-year lease on life in acting. The great actors
are quite another matter. Paul Scofield is the finest young English
actor at this moment. Laurence Olivier has everything. He has enor-
mous imagination and talent. He is so constructed, physically, that he
is neither tall nor short, neither handsome nor unhandsome, neither
fat nor thin, so he can be fat or thin, handsome or unhandsome, tall or
short, or whatever the part calls for. He has a wonderful voice, which
he has worked on. He has stamina. He can play a heroic character, and
he's one of the few actors who can. He can portray a character with
tremendous sweep and magnificence. He wants a theatre with life in
it, and he cares about its modern as well as its classical aspects. He's al-
ways commissioning writers to write plays. He's willing to gamble by
taking a part in a modern play. He's in the theatre because the theatre,
in all its aspects, is to him the most important thing in life. Everything
that has to do with the theatre the lighting, the scenery, the makeup
is fascinating to him, just because it does have to do with theatre.
He doesn't use the theatre as a means of making money. He is a
completely dedicated man.

I was at R.A.D.A. for something less than a year and a half. The
usual stay is about two years. At R.A.D.A., I was a bit of a rogue. I
didn't really take life too seriously. I'd try to get away with all kinds
of things by using charm. It was a cover-up, I suppose, for the way I
felt about some of the people I encountered there. I've always been
aware of the feelings of those around me, and I was then. I think every
good actor must be aware. I can't stand people I call unaware, who
are conscious of nothing and nobody but themselves, who don't respect
other people's feelings. I'm no saint, but I believe there are two kinds
of people, aware and unaware, and the same two kinds of actors.
Awareness makes the difference between actors with a direction in life
and actors who are interested only in material gain and have no feel-
ing for the art of acting. With the second kind, it's all a selfish thing.
76

ALEXANDER DAVION

Those people usually have no humor, and I don't think an actor with-
out humor can dig very deep. At the end of each term at R.A.D.A.,
there is a performance for the public, when promising students put on
excerpts from plays. At the end of my third term, I played Harry, Lord
Monchensey, in "The Family Reunion," by T. S. Eliot, a verse play
that is very, very complicated. I didn't know what I was talking about,
but I did it with my usual bravado. The next day, I heard from the
Myron Selznick office, which was then an agency. They asked me to
come in, and when I did, they promised me the world. I was full of
high hopes. I felt, We're on our way. Then I went back to R.A.D.A. for
my fourth term. It was right after the end of the war. Everybody, it
seemed, wanted to become an actor, and there were too many people
in every class. There were fewer good parts to play, and I had too many
distractions. Again, I had that powerful feeling of wanting to get out
into the world. I walked straight out at the beginning of the fourth
term, right after prayers. There were frantic telephone calls from the
school the next day. People got on the phone and said, "You should
stay, at least until you do your public show." But I was too impatient.
I said, "I'm leaving," and I left.

After that, the agent who had been interested in me sent me around
to a lot of auditions, but nothing happened, except that I acted in a
club theatre called the Q, playing the role of Paris in the pantomime-
within-the-play in "The Rose Without a Thorn," with Francis L. Sulli-
van, for two weeks in December of 1947. Then I auditioned for the
1948 season at Stratford and was accepted, together with Edmund
Purdom. I carried spears for nine months, and was bored stiff. But I
learned a lot things like how to find a yardstick for yourself, and
what is good and what is not good. We also learned the plays of
Shakespeare, and all that one can learn from watching actors like
Godfrey Tearle, Ralph Richardson, and Paul Scofield, and Diana
Wynyard and Margaret Leighton. Tearle was what I call one of the
best actors in the grand manner. But you can watch only so much.
That first season, I had two lines in "Othello;" I was the first officer
in the first act, who says "A messenger from the galleys" and "Here is
more news." The most terrifying parts are messengers. You come on in
a rush, out of breath, and set the tone of what is to follow with your
announcement that the soldiers are approaching. In a way, it's quite a
responsibility. Or so I told myself when I had those two lines. Between

77

THE PLAYER: ALEXANDER DAVION

seasons, in December, I played in "Toad of Toad Hall/' in the
parts of Fox, Chief Stoat, Turkey, and Chief Weasel. The second
season, I played Young Siward in "Macbeth/ 1 I had about six lines,
fought Macbeth at the end of them, and got killed. They asked me to
roll down twenty steep steps after I got killed, and I did it, every step,
just to show how cooperative I was. The third season, in 1952, I played
Donalbain in "Macbeth" one of Duncan's sons. The other son,
Malcolm, was played by Laurence Harvey, who has since gone on to
spectacular activities in films. John Gielgud directed, and he called us
the wicked brothers. Gielgud is such a marvellous man. He'll change
a whole scene in five seconds if he thinks of a better way of doing it,
and you've got to keep right up with him. That production of "Mac-
beth" had Ralph Richardson in the title role and Margaret Leighton
as Lady Macbeth. I was impressed by the cast, but after the King is
murdered, Donalbain says goodbye to his brother and disappears for-
ever. I felt I couldn't register in a small part. I was a bit frustrated,
because I wasn't doing much at Stratford at all. My best work that
season was as understudy at rehearsals to the actor playing Laertes in
"Hamlet," with Paul Scofield and Claire Bloom. It was a lovely pro-
duction. I played all the echoes offstage. Every time the Ghost spoke, I
echoed.

I spent two very comfortable, closeted years at Stratford, though they
did include a four-month Australian tour with the company's produc-
tions of "Much Ado About Nothing," in which I played a page and
was used mostly to push scenery around, and "Macbeth," in which I
again played the role of Young Siward. We toured four Australian
cities Melbourne, Adelaide, Brisbane, and Sydney. When I was asked
to come back to Stratford for a third season, I said no, left for London,
and wrote to a lot of repertory companies for a job. They were all full,
and I couldn't get in. In 1950, I joined a small repertory company at
Windsor, opposite Windsor Castle. It's a lovely theatre to work in. It's
attended by local people, and the Queen usually makes an appearance
once a year. It's her little baby. It's dead opposite the castle, and she
can look out the window and see it. The theatre is very old, built of
stone and wood, and it's a full professional theatre, with an orchestra
pit and everything. At first, I was taken on for three weeks, at five
pounds for the first week and ten pounds a week after that. In "The
Lady's Not for Burning/' I played the juvenile lead, Richard, the

78

ALEXANDER DAVION

copying clerk in lave a spiritual love with the daughter of the
household, and when that was over, I was kept on for the rest of the
season. I had six very happy months there. I played Albert Strachan,
the lead, in "Pink String and Sealing Wax/' a murder mystery, and a
poor young violinist in "Pick-Up Girl/' a sort of social play.

Next, I auditioned for Laurence Olivier for his own season at the
St. James in 1951, and was signed by him. I replaced actors who were
playing Bel Affris in Shaw's "Caesar and Cleopatra" and Dolabella in
Shakespeare's "Antony and Cleopatra." It was a marvellous engage-
ment, with Olivier and Vivien Leigh, who was his wife at the time
the King and Queen of the Theatre. Olivier would play Antony in
"Antony and Cleopatra" at a matinee and Caesar in "Caesar and Cleo-
patra" that evening, with Vivien Leigh playing Cleopatra all the way
through. As Bel Affris, I ran in and said, "Take heed, Persian. Caesar
is by this time almost within earshot." I played it with bravado. Olivier
said, "You're absolutely hopeless. Even if you do nothing but take
your trousers down onstage, the feeling must be just as big. The gesture
must have something behind it. When you make a gesture and there's
no feeling behind it, that is ham acting." I was twenty-two. I've never
forgotten it. Dolabella is a very good, well-rounded part. He's a young
chap in Caesar's army who comes in to warn Cleopatra that Caesar is
coming, and tries to stop her from killing herself. Anthony Quayle,
who was running a season at Stratford, saw me and made me a very
nice offer for a season there. Olivier had asked me to go to America
with the tour of his season's plays, but I told him I wanted to go
to Stratford, and he said, "Have my blessing." So there I was at
Stratford again. I played Ferdinand in "The Tempest" and Silvius
in "As You Like It," but it wasn't a very successful season, and I
behaved rather badly, because I was bored. In 1953, I went back
to Windsor for a season, and I did a lot of radio broadcasting,
which in England is serious acting work. One day, the telephone
rang at seven in the morning and a voice said, "Larry Olivier
here." He was making the film "Richard III," producing and di-
recting as well as acting, and his stand-in was ill. He said, "Would
you come and play the scenes for me, so that I can look through the
camera at how it will be?" I spent a marvellous ten days acting Richard
III for him while he mapped the whole film out. Then I played a small
part in the film one of those awful messengers again, one of three

79

THE PLAYER: ALEXANDER DAVION

who come in with bad news. After that, I went to Germany and toured
British Army and R.A.F. and American Army camps there in "Sea-
gulls over Sorrento," by Hugh Hastings, in which I played a Scots
sailor. In January, 1954, I played Koch, the student who finds the
woman dead, in "Crime and Punishment/' in a production put on
at the Arts Theatre. Later in 1954, I worked with the Ipswich Reper-
tory Theatre, one of the best such theatres in England, for a few
weeks. In 1955, I replaced another actor as Ambrose Kemper, the
artist, in "The Matchmaker" for nine months in London, where
it was a steady commercial success. Tyrone Guthrie, who directed
the play, said that my part was one of the dullest, dreariest parts
any actor could ever hope to play. After London, I opened with
it in December, 1955, on Broadway and then played it for six
months on the road. I went along with it all the way. We were with
it in Hollywood for three weeks. Then I came back to New York.
I was torn between wanting to make a big success on Broadway
and wanting to return to London, where I was better known. I
stayed in New York, as an understudy in "Look Back in Anger," and
then played Romanoff in "Romanoff and Juliet" for six months on
tour. We ended the tour in Hollywood.

Being keen on movies, I decided to stay on in Hollywood. I stayed
for two years until late 1961. I appeared in one movie, "Song With-
out End," in which I played Chopin a supporting role. I hated it.
Hollywood is fine for some people, but for me making that movie was
very dull, very boring. The movie had shots of some of Europe's
beautiful concert halls, but it was a complete distortion of Liszt's life.
I'm glad I stayed as long as I did, because I got rid of a lot of
notions about the desirability of becoming a rich, glamorous Holly-
wood actor. I'm keen on movies, but I got disillusioned very quickly
with the kind of work you have to do there as an actor, and with the
whole feeling of the place the slavery to the dollar, and the tremen-
dous effort that is put into sheer rubbish. I won't ever try to do what I
did in those two years not ever again. It just isn't worth the price
you have to pay. Deep down, you know whether or not you've got the
talent, and if you feel you've got it, you just have to handle ^yourself
with integrity. It would be easy, in a way, to travel the road of some
English actors who have become big stars in Hollywood. To me, how-
ever, they are a big joke. I'm glad that no serious offer came my way

80

ALEXANDER DAVION

while I was in Hollywood, because I might not have had the strength
to turn it down. You're really at a low ebb there. In Hollywood, actors
rely completely on their agents. Actors sit there basking in the sun
and waiting for calls from their agents, and getting more and more
demoralized. In my two years there, I worked mostly in television
movies the worst of all. I got hired for about seventy-five per cent
of the jobs that my agent sent me to be interviewed for. I had been
looking forward to making Western movies, but the television ones
I was hired for were entirely different. I was in a couple of Westerns,
each of which was made in about two and a half days, and was all
very hit and miss. I was in one "Have Gun, Will Travel/' with Rich-
ard Boone, and I was in one "Zane Grey Theatre/* with Mel Ferrer.
I was in a "Perry Mason" as a rich young man who was suspected of
murder but hadn't done it. In "Hong Kong/' another series, I played
a captain of the Hong Kong police got out my gun and shot a few
people, and tracked down a few people. I was in "Thriller," playing
a young man in love with somebody very dreary, and I was in "Roar-
ing '20V playing a king on a visit to New York who falls in love
with a gangster's moll.

In the fall of 1961, I returned to New York, to see what I might
find in the way of a job in the theatre, and I saw a billboard outside
the Lyceum Theatre announcing that Robert Shaw, Donald Pleasence,
and Alan Bates were rehearsing in "The Caretaker." The play was
one I had read and loved. Bates was going to leave the cast after the
pre-Broadway tour plus four weeks, and I auditioned for his part and
got it. It's the best contemporary play I've ever been in. There are
so many bad plays one must be in just to keep working, but this was
a play I had no doubts about. I started out pushing things a bit too
much. In one scene in particular, in which I shared a sandwich with
the old tramp, I was missing points; I wasn't getting the reaction I
knew I should be getting from the audience. After a while, I relaxed
a bit in the part, and the reaction came back from the audience. I
found that by doing it naturally, playing it as simply as I could, with-
out bravado, I created the effect I wanted. The lines of the play are
so good, so right; there isn't a line that is redundant. I compare this
play to a musical score. The play is all in the text. There wasn't much
for the director to do. He had only to be a referee; there was nothing
for him to mold. In a good play, the director's main function is to

81

THE PLAYER: ALEXANDER DAVION

cast the parts. In a bad play, the director comes into his own. "The
Caretaker" was a tremendous exercise in concentration. You could
never let go for a moment. If one of the three of us in the cast was
off key, the whole play went down the drain. It is said that actors
give two or three performances a week and do the rest of the eight on
technique. In "The Caretaker/' I think we did five or six perform-
ances a week. I learned an incredible amount simply by working with
Donald Pleasence in this single play. Things like how to hold a pause
just pure know-how. The audience dictates the sort of performance
you give. If the audience has a sense of humor, you know it and are
affected by it. Audiences do, strangely enough, take on a personality
in the actor's mind. You know whether you have a tremendously
sympathetic and intelligent audience that enjoys what you do, or
whether it's just a lump of pudding. Donald is particularly good at
sensing what the audience will take. I don't mean he ever panders to
an audience. But if he feels that it's getting the fine points, he'll dwell
on them a little longer. American audiences sometimes seem to want
things cut and dried. There's a kind of desperation you sense in some
American audiences. In America, the ticket prices are so high that
audiences become frantic. They want their money's worth; they want
to be sure of getting something culturally important. In England,
there's a greater interest in the actors. Audiences go to see the actors
and talk about them: He was good in "King Lear" and not so good
in "Hamlet."

The theatre is terribly important today. People are so self-concerned
now, so wrapped up in how much money they're making, and the
theatre gets them all together and takes them out of themselves and
makes them think. There's an enormous sense of satisfaction onstage
when you achieve a moment you've worked very hard for when you
have a welding of the audience and the actor, and the actor lets the
audience in on what he's doing. It's important to keep your enjoy-
ment of acting. If acting becomes too intense and too lacking in fun,
it can turn into a terrible chore. If you go on with the feeling that
success must happen, everything is bound to become boring and pomp-
ous. Acting for yourself is a bit of a bore. You act for the audience. It's
a marvellous, marvellous profession.

82

HENRY FONDA

Acting is putting on a mask. The worst torture that
can happen to me is not having a mask to get in back
of.

I was born on May 16, 1905, in Grand Island, Nebraska, just west of
Omaha. I'm the oldest of three. My sisters, Harriet and Jayne, are
married to businessmen and live in Omaha and in Pasadena, Califor-
nia, respectively. My father, William Brace Fonda, owned a printing
company in Omaha, where I was raised. He died in 1935. My mother,
an angelic woman, died the year before. I look like my father. To this
day, when I walk past a mirror and see my reflection in it, my first
impression is: That's my father. There is a strong Fonda look. It's in
my sisters, in their children, in my children. The name Fonda is Italian
in origin. There were Fondas in the Apennine Valley, near Genoa, who
migrated to Holland around 1400 during a religious revolution.
Around 1628, Fondas were among the Dutch settlers who settled in up-
per New York State, where, in a town called Fonda, both my father's
mother and his father were born. Omaha has never ceased being my
home. I always stop in Omaha when I'm going from one coast to the

THE PLAYER: HENRY FONDA

other. As a child, I lived in four different houses in and around
Omaha, and went to three different grade schools. Then, when I was
thirteen or fourteen, we settled down in a big wooden clapboard house
in Omaha, and I attended Omaha Central High School. I got my full
growth when I was a senior in high school. My son Pete grew in the
same way. He stands six feet two an inch taller than I am. I had what
I regard as a normal youth. My close friends today are the friends I
grew up with: Bill Reed, an insurance man in Omaha; Charles Box, a
banker in Chicago; Bill Johnson, a California businessman. We swam
naked in sand pits and built shacks out of lumber we stole off construc-
tion jobs. As a kid, I'd go downtown on the streetcar to my father's of-
fice, and he'd give me a nickel to go to the nickelodeon, where I saw the
early Charlie Chaplin and William S. Hart pictures. Starting when I
was twelve, I worked in my father's printshop in the summers, at two
dollars a week. When I was going to high school, I always worked in
the summers. It never occurred to me to question it; I just assumed
I'd have to work. My mother was a Christian Scientist. My grand-
mother was a Second Reader in the church. Dorothy Brando, Marlon's
mother, who was an amateur actress, was a close friend of Mother's in
and out of the church.

I started out wanting to be a writer. At ten, I wrote a story called
"The Mouse," which was told from a mouse's point of view. We were
living in a suburb of Omaha called Dundee, and the story was pub-
lished in the Dundee newspaper. I took up journalism at college, at
the University of Minnesota, and I worked at two jobs while studying
trouble-shooter for the Northwestern Bell Telephone Company, and
director of various sports and other activities at a settlement house.
I'd take the streetcar from the campus to the settlement house,
on the other side of town, in temperatures that went as low as thirty
below zero, and in the basketball season I'd play on the team as well
as coach it. For all that I got thirty dollars a month, plus room and
board. Dad sent me ten bucks a week. It was exhausting. I did it for a
year, and then I went home for a rest. While I was home, I got a mes-
sage from Do Brando to call Gregory Foley, the director of the Omaha
Community Playhouse. She knew that I was at loose ends, and that I
was the right age and type to play a juvenile lead they were looking for.
I called Foley, and was told to come over to his headquarters a studio
with a skylight, which was kind of bohemian for Omaha. Foley, a short,

84

HENRY FONDA

red-headed Irishman, handed me the published version of "You and I,"
by Philip Barry, and asked me to read the part of Ricky, the juvenile
lead. First thing I knew, I was cast in the play. I was sure I didn't want
to do it. At rehearsals, I found myself in another world. It was a night-
mare. I didn't dare look up. I was the kind of guy who thinks every-
body is looking at him. I was very reluctant. I had no ambition to be
an actor. But it was summer, and I had nothing else to do, so I joined
the company. I stayed on at the Playhouse as an actor for two nine-
month seasons and did four principal roles. I practically lived at the
theatre. I painted scenery, soaked up the sight of the lines of rope that
go up to the grid, smelled greasepaint, smelled smells I had never
smelled before. My parents weren't particularly for it, but they ac-
cepted it. After the first season, in the summer of 1926, I answered an
ad for the job of office boy with the Retail Credit Company. I got the
job filing and cross-filing. I was just learning the system when Foley
called me to ask if I would play the lead in George Kaufman's and
Marc Connelly's "Merton of the Movies" the part Glenn Hunter had
played on Broadway. I said yes, but when I came home with the news,
I was greeted by ice. Dad said it wasn't a good idea to quit my Retail
Credit job. However, I was twenty-one and stubborn, and I said I was
going to leave home, if necessary. My mother tried to straighten things
out diplomatically, but Dad wouldn't speak to me for a month. The
upshot was I did both; I went to work at Retail Credit at seven in the
morning and rehearsed for the play at night and on Sundays. On open-
ing night, I got my first feeling of what acting was all about. I liked the
whole idea of getting up there and being Merton. I was given an ova-
tion. When I got home, Dad was sitting in the living room behind his
newspaper, and one of my sisters was starting to criticize my perform-
ance when, from behind the newspaper, Dad said, "Shut up. He was
perfect." One of the reviews of the play said, "Who needs Glenn
Hunter? We have Henry." I played Merton for one wonderful week.
I might easily have become a credit manager in Omaha and done
community theatre for kicks, but then, in the spring of 1927, I sud-
denly had an offer to spend a week in New York seeing all the shows,
as a present from the mother of a local Princeton boy. I was supposed
to pick him up and drive him home for Easter. When I told the
manager of the credit office, he was shocked. He had big plans to send
me to the home office in Atlanta for managerial training. But I made

85

THE PLAYER: HENRY FONDA

the trip to New York, and saw nine plays in six days, including "The
Constant Wife," with Ethel Barrymore. I loved every minute. When
I got back from New York, Foley offered me a job at the Playhouse as
assistant director, at a salary of five hundred dollars, for the next sea-
son. It seemed fine to me. I did a lot of things, including acting and
designing scenery. Ever since kindergarten, I'd been able to draw. My
mata acting assignment was to play opposite Do Brando in Eugene
O'Neill's "Beyond the Horizon/' I was living at home, and I was be-
ginning to think there was such a thing as making a living in the
theatre. By the end of the season, I knew I wanted to go to New York.
For three months in the summer of 1927, 1 did some one-night stands
throughout Iowa and Illinois promoting a new movie about Abraham
Lincoln; I had written a sketch for an actor named George Billings,
who hired me to assist him in his act, which consisted of his doing an
impersonation of Lincoln while the orchestra played "Hearts and
Flowers." Then I went back to the Playhouse. In June, 1928, a friend
of the family drove me to Cape Cod, where I wanted to get a job with
the Provincetown Players. I was apple-cheeked, and I looked like a
farm boy. I had about a hundred dollars saved up. I walked into the
theatre, was told they had nothing, and walked out. I took the train
over to Dennis and, in the middle of the afternoon, walked into the
Cape Playhouse, where the company was rehearsing. I stood around,
too scared to ask anybody anything, and then I went to a nearby board-
ing house to arrange to spend the night. It turned out that all the com-
pany were staying there Laura Hope Crews, Peggy Wood, Minor
Watson, Romney Brent. I told them my name, and they were all very
kind, all terribly nice people. It didn't occur to me to ask if I could
join the company, but there must have been something in my face, be-
cause they asked me if I'd like to stick around, as third assistant stage
manager, at no salary. I stayed. They gave me a bit part in Kenyon
Nicholson's "The Barker/' and I was as unprofessional as possible
stood in a corner learning my lines while the others were rehearsing.
The mark of an amateur. I was a really naive guy. Then the actor
who was going to play the juvenile lead dropped out, and the part was
given to me. A friend of mine came to see me in the play, and he in-
vited me to drive with him to Falmouth, where a group he knew called
the University Players Guild had just founded a summer theatre, with
John Swope, Bretaigne Windust, Joshua Logan, Charles Leatherbee,

86

HENRY FONDA

and Kent Smith. All of us loved each other at first blush. Margaret
Sullavan came to Falmouth in the second year, and Jimmy Stewart in
the third. I moved to Falmouth, and in the next four summers I was in
about twenty plays. Everybody did everything box-office work, usher-
ing, painting scenery. The first summer, I had my first lead, in "Is
Zat So?" I felt I was now in the world of the theatre. I was committed
to it.

At the end of that summer, everybody else went back to college,
and I went to New York. I was excited. I was nothing but optimistic. I
hardly had anything to eat for weeks. It never occurred to me to be dis-
couraged. I wasn't terribly smart. If I'd been smart, I would have given
up and gone home. Bretaigne Windust had told me, "Let's face it,
Hank. You're a scenic designer." But I wanted to be an actor. I was
making myself a little dizzy. I was damn sure I was a good actor, and
sure that eventually I was going to prove it. My first season in New
York, I became the best-known unknown actor in town. All the offices
knew me. All the agents knew me. I lived on 114th Street in a ten-
dollar-a-week room. I joined Equity. I learned that Equity listed all
plays in production on its bulletin board. I didn't present myself well
to producers, but I knew I was good. I had learned I was good when I
played Merton in Omaha. Thirty-five years later, I can still remember
the way I felt as Merton. There was a kind of breathless feeling I
couldn't ever recapture. It was like being ten years old and playing
cops and robbers.

Practically everything that has ever happened to me has been the
result of coincidence. It's been a matter of getting the lucky break,
of being in the right place at the right time. For the next few
years, I took odd jobs, such as doing plays for children, including
plays of Shakespeare's that I not only hadn't ever acted in before but
hadn't even read. I had a walk-on part in "The Game of Love and
Death," a Theatre Guild production about the French Revolution.
On Christmas Day, 1931, during a winter season I spent with the Uni-
versity Players Guild in Baltimore, I was married to Margaret Sulla-
van. It was a first marriage for both of us, and it didn't last long. She
was established, and I had to find a job. I went back to Omaha in the
spring of 1932 and played at the Community Playhouse in "A Kiss
for Cinderella," in which Dorothy McGuire, then fourteen, played
Cinderella. I worked as a backstage helper with the Surrey Theatre, in

87

THE PLAYER: HENRY FONDA

Maine, in the summer of 1932. 1 moved actors' trunks, and so on, until
the scenic designer quit halfway through the season. Then I became
the scenic designer. In the summer of 1933, I designed scenery for the
Westchester Players, in Mount Kisco, and played some parts. Any
summer theatre would have hired me as a scenic designer. In the spring
of 1934, I was in Leonard Sillman's "New Faces/' on Broadway, in
which I did comedy skits with Imogene Coca. Leland Hayward, an old
friend, saw me in that show, and he became my manager-agent. That
summer, I went back to the Westchester Players as the star, in leading
parts. I knew then that the door was going to open. I could smell it
coming. The graph had been in that direction. Leland Hayward wired
me to come to Hollywood, but I wasn't interested. The theatre was my
first love. It was. It is. But I went out anyway, and when Leland asked
me to sign up with Walter Wanger, I asked for what I thought was the
impossible amount of a thousand dollars a week. But Wanger said
yes, so I signed a contract to do two pictures a year, with provisions for
my going back to the legitimate theatre, and the next day went right
back to Mount Kisco. June Walker, who had seen me as the tutor in
Molnar's "The Swan/' at Mount Kisco, told Marc Connelly to get hold
of me for a new play he had written with Frank B. Elser, "The Farmer
Takes a Wife." Connelly borrowed me for it from Wanger. I did it first
as a play and then as a movie.

It was easy to make the transition to movies. I started to act in the
film version of "The Farmer Takes a Wife" the way I always did for a
play, and Victor Fleming, the director, told me I was mugging. And
that's all it took. I just pulled it down to reality. You don't project
anything for movies. You do it as you would in your own home. Be-
cause of all the experience back of me in the same part, it didn't bother
me to work out of continuity, the way you do in making a movie. Of
course, there's very little personal satisfaction in doing those bits and
pieces for a movie. You don't really have any recollection of having
created a role. But in the beginning the money made it pretty at-
tractive. After doing "The Farmer Takes a Wife," I made two movies
for Wanger "The Trail of the Lonesome Pine," with Sylvia Sidney,
and "The Moon's Our Home/' with Margaret Sullavan. I wanted
to get my feet back on the boards, but I wasn't getting any plays
submitted to me, and I kept making more movies, including "Jezebel,"
with Bette Davis, "Jesse James," with Tyrone Power, and "Young

HENRY FONDA

Mr. Lincoln," in which I played the title role. One movie I was
eager to do was "The Grapes of Wrath*' the part of Tom Joad
and I had to sign a seven-year contract with Fox to get the part. I re-
gretted it, but signed. Then I couldn't get out of the contract I made
all kinds of movies I hated. My gorge rises when I remember them. I
did make a few I liked, though, including "The Lady Eve" and "The
Male Animal," on loan-out. After "The Grapes of Wrath," I made
"The Ox-Bow Incident/' but it took long sessions of violent argu-
ment with Darryl Zanuck to get him to allow me to do it. In 1956, I
acted in "12 Angry Men," which I co-produced with Reginald Rose,
and which won many awards. I'm prouder of that than of almost any-
thing else I've done in my career.

In 1942, I was thirty-seven. I enlisted in the Navy and served as
quartermaster third class on a destroyer in the Pacific. Later, the ex-
ecutive officer on the destroyer recommended me for a commission;
I was flown to 90 Church Street and discharged, was then immediately
commissioned as a lieutenant (j-g-) and joined Air Combat Intelligence.
At that time, I wasn't eager to go back to movies, but after the war I
did go back. I made a John Ford picture, "My Darling Clementine,"
and other pictures, and then I went into Thomas Heggen's and Joshua
Logan's "Mister Roberts" on Broadway. Yd never been in a long run
before, except for a hundred and four performances in "The Farmer
Takes a Wife." "Mister Roberts" was a love story backstage. We were
all just crazy about the play. If anybody let down, he had thirty other
guys on him. It really was like being in love. You had this good feeling
in the guts practically all the time. I love to act, and in this play I al-
ways knew everything I was going to do but could make it look like not
acting at all. It was so wonderful acting with a guy like Robert Keith,
who played Doc. Being on the stage with this man was the most fun
I've ever had. I'd still be in my dressing room waiting to go onstage and
I could feel the hackles rising in anticipation, the skin tingling. One
of my joys was for Josh Logan, who had directed the play, to come to a
performance and say, "Fonda, you son of a bitch!" To have him recog-
nize the way the part got better all the time. It never got static. The
pitfall you get into in most long runs is you stop listening. It's a subtle
thing. It never happened in "Mister Roberts." The thing I try to do
onstage is to create the illusion that it's happening for the first time.
In two years, not a performance got by of all the performances we did

THE PLAYER: HENRY FONDA

that the audience didn't get what it came for; for them it was happen-
ing for the first time. I never got tired of it.

I'm suspicious of anything that happens too fast or too soon. When
you have the part you are playing under control, it seems to be effort-
less, but it's not. I baby up on a part. I get the feeling gradually. I
learn the lines gradually. You feel your way in every instance. You
find your way onstage. You get closer to your lines, then begin to find
ways of doing them. I always know when it feels real to me. My
daughter Jane and my son Pete both have stage presence. You're not
aware that you've got it. It's just the magic thing the audience can see
when the actor walks out on the stage. There are a lot of actors who
have only presence. If you've got it, you thank your lucky stars, because
you don't have to work so hard. It's wonderful to know you can get
your audience just by walking out on the stage, because of your good
voice, other physical things, and a lot more that are absolutely intan-
gible. But in addition to having stage presence you have to know what
you are doing. I was surprised and delighted when I found that my
children knew. In fact, I was absolutely floored. Recently, Jane told me
that something had happened to her in a play she was in. She said,
"Dad, I felt that my real emotion had taken over/' When my emotions
take over in a part, it's like a seaplane taking off on the water. I feel as
if I were soaring. If five times out of eight a week the emotions take
over, you've got the magic. But you hold it back just enough. It's
just like holding a horse back. It's got to be thought out, and you've
got to listen to the others, or you start blubbering all over the place.
Normally, when I start working on a play, by the second week I don't
have the script in my hand any more and I can feel the character com-
ing to life. I get frantic when it's not happening, because it means to
me that the words, the scenes are not right. When it's difficult, it's aw-
ful. When it begins to be less difficult, I begin to find the blood, the
breath of the part and I'm less myself.

The theatre is where I really get my kicks. When you make a movie,
and people say you're great, you like to hear them say it, but you
don't have the feeling you've lived your character or built your emo-
tions one on top of another. In movies, you hit emotion maybe once
in a scene. Live television is like the theatre. You're on and you're com-
mitted to it, the way you are on the stage. Film television is like movies.
You do television movies to make a buck and save a buck. I was damn

90

HENRY FONDA

lucky I became an actor. Theatre is the only thing I understand. I can't
really talk about anything else. In company, I don't have small talk.
It's pretty silly to begin with, and I don't know how to do it at all.
When you've exhausted the weather, and where you've been, and
where they've been, you're stuck. When I get stuck, I feel everybody is
looking at me and I want to hide. I like to be the observer.

I've had practical problems to face as an actor. On the practical
side, I recently appeared in a television series called "The Deputy,"
which is now bringing me an income from reruns. My first reaction was
to resist it, because I still feel I have a future and I didn't want to be
identified with one character. But we found a way for me to limit my
appearances in the weekly films; in some of them I appeared in just
one scene. I did the series because the show is something I produced
and partly own. If I didn't do things like that, I wouldn't be able to
live the way I do raise a family, put the children through college,
dress well, have a town house in New York, have a villa on the
Riviera, go to Cape Cod, travel when I feel like it, and do a play
once a year. This is what being an actor has given me, and I say,
Thank God that's what I am. But what I get out of acting is worth
more than any money. I'm happiest and most relaxed when I'm on-
stage. I look forward to it. It's terribly important to me to be good.
When strangers come up to me, wherever I am, and say, "Mr. Fonda,
I hope you don't mind, but thank you," I am very pleased. They're
not just fans who want to say they've seen a movie star. They have had
pleasure, and you've given it to them.

91

JANE FONDA

What I like even more than the acting itself is just
being in the theatre, especially during rehearsals, as
a member of a group working together ; in the same
place, for the same goal, under one spotlight sur-
rounded by darkness, like a family in the living room.

I was born on December 21, 1937, in New York City, and was taken
at the age of a few weeks to Hollywood, where my father, Henry
Fonda, had been persuaded by Twentieth Century-Fox, his movie
studio, to make his home for a while. I have a brother, Peter, two
years younger than I am, who left the University of Omaha in 1960,
his junior year, to act in a comedy on Broadway, then got married
and went out to Hollywood on a movie contract. I have a half sister,
Frances, six: years older than I am, who is a painter and lives in
Rome, and an adopted sister, Amy, sixteen years younger than I am.
Amy was adopted by rny father and Susan Blanchard, his third wife.
My mother, Frances Seymour Fonda, who was my father's second
wife, died when I was twelve. She was the eldest of seven children,
and was a great beauty, and had a great head for finance. Before
marrying my father, she was married to George Tuttle Brokaw, a
lawyer and sportsman who came of a famous New York family. Even
though I was never close to her, I know how loving and generous she
was. If you lose your mother before you're old enough to get close to
her, you almost never understand her as an individual in her own
right, and that's what happened with me. As children, Peter and I lived

92

JANE FONDA

on a twenty-four-acre farm in Brentwood. It was quite isolated around
there, and Pete was my main companion. We had three dogs and a
cat, and a lot of chickens, and some rabbits who were my best friends
for a while and we had flower and vegetable gardens. I loved my
job, which was to collect the newly laid eggs. Our house was unusual
around there; it was a sort of New England setup transplanted to
California. My father did everything possible to make it look like a
genuine old New England house; it had shingles made to look weather-
beaten, and a lot of Early American furnishings cobblers' benches,
braided rugs, lamps made from butter churns. We had a large dinner
bell on our roof that could be heard for a mile around. We had a
swimming pool, but my father disguised it to look like a pond. My
father loved the farm and often plowed the fields himself. We had
two mules, and Pete and I would go out in the hills on them and ex-
plore. There were bobcats, coyotes, and rattlesnakes in the hills; one
of the things I learned at school the Brentwood Town and Country
School was how to treat rattlesnake bites. In the hills, Peter and I
played big roles in our own kind of Westerns, living the way we
thought our father lived in the movies we'd see him in. I was scared
to death when I saw my father in John Ford's "Drums Along the
Mohawk." For two days, in the movie, my father ran from one fort
to another as a settler, and then there was a big life-and-death battle,
with the Indians massacring the whites, but the whites finally winning.
It was the longest movie of my life, as I waited for my father and
the whites to win. Peter and I saw "Fort Apache" when we were in
our teens; in that one my father was the bad man and got killed.
Recently, in a Hollywood theatre, I saw two of my father's old movies
"Jezebel," with Bette Davis, and "The Lady Eve," with Barbara
Stanwyck both of which he made shortly after I was born. At home,
my father always wore levis and work clothes that made him look like
a cowboy, and Pete and I would try to copy him in every respect. My
father would bring his Hollywood friends in John Wayne, Ward
Bond, and John Ford who dressed the same way, and they would
sit around the house playing cards and talking like cowboys.

I don't remember owning a dress until I was about eight. I was
always in blue jeans, day in and day out, and my hair was cut short.
I'd sit on the roof of our house with Pete and I'd say, "Tell me the
truth, Pete. Which one of us could lasso a buffalo better?" I didn't

93

THE PLAYER: JANE FONDA

have much to do with my half sister Frances. I didn't understand her.
I'd sometimes watch her through a window when she gave what I
thought were wild parties. She got married very young she has
since been divorced and after that I hardly saw her. Every once in a
while, I'd be taken to a birthday party given for one of Joan Craw-
ford's children. I was abashed to learn how different their life was
from ours. Joan Crawford's little girl and her friends wore pretty,
frilly dresses and knew what to do with their hands and how to be
polite and how to stand and how to walk and how to talk. At those
parties, I usually ended up by crying, and our nurse would have to
take me home early. What I liked best as a child was horses. I
started riding when I was five. I used to spend a lot of time hanging
around riding stables near our house. When I was ten, my father left
for New York to appear on Broadway in "Mister Roberts." Six months
later, the whole family moved to Greenwich, Connecticut. I went to
Greenwich Academy for three and a half years. At first, I lived with my
maternal grandmother in a house in Greenwich my mother had rented
before she died, and later the same year I lived with my mother's
sister and her husband, who also had a house in Greenwich. They had
no children of their own. When I was fourteen, my father was staying
at Oscar HammersteuVs town house in New York, so I stayed there, too.
If you have glamorous parents, you just have to live a special way. I
loved New York, but I didn't have any friends here. I felt sort of special
living my way, but I rather envied girls with what looked like normal
family lives, and I often pretended to my classmates that my life was
like theirs. Four months after my father married Susan Blanchard, Mr.
Hammerstein's stepdaughter, in December, 1950, I went to live with
them. I was very fond of Susan, and it felt almost like having a whole
family again. The following summer, my father was making the
movie version of "Mister Roberts" in California and Hawaii, and I
went along; part of the time we stayed in a hotel at Waikiki Beach.
Between the ages of thirteen and seventeen, I attended the Emma
Willard School, in Troy, New York a boarding school. I was poten-
tially a good student, but I was always getting into trouble of some
kind. In my first year, my best friends were the white mice we used
in biology class, and on my first vacation home my father was making
a movie in Hollywood, and since he had sold the farm, we stayed in
the old Marion Davies mansion, which had been turned into a hotel

JANE FONDA

I brought the white mice with me and let them escape in the back
yard. I got into all kinds of scrapes at school, and depended on the
Fonda name to get me out of them. Once, I poured lighter fluid
down the hall from my room to the room of a girl I didn't like,
and set fire to it, knowing it would burn itself out before it did any
real damage, but at the same time would leave no doubt that I didn't
like that girl. In my second year at school, I joined the drama class.
I acted in a few school plays and gave some readings during the
next three years. I loved doing it. I wasn't self-conscious yet, and
I didn't know what it meant to develop a character. I liked my
costumes, and putting on the makeup, and getting all that attention.
I would always go up in my lines. It was a bit of a romp. It had
nothing to do with acting. My very first part at Emma Willard was
the male lead in the Christopher Fry play "Boy with a Cart," put
on as a Thanksgiving Day special in chapel. All I remember about
it was wearing green tights, a green burlap-sack blouse, and a
green hat with a feather in it. I also played Lydia Languish in "The
Rivals." Acting was better than studying math, and that was all it
really meant to me. I was supposed to be learning the feminine
graces how to walk, what to do with my hands, and so on but it
was all puzzling to me. People always said I was a fine, healthy girl,
and called me a mature child. So helpful, they said, and so under-
standing. I wasn't a mature child at all. At home, I never showed
anything I felt. I kept a poker face, and that made people conclude
that I was mature. We were not a demonstrative family. I grew up not
knowing how to show hatred, anger, or grudges. I just stored it all up.
It was a great disadvantage to me as an actress, I discovered later on.
There was an exception, though. Around the stables, I'd get into
fights with the stable boys. I'd usually start the fights with the boys. I'd
kick them and hit them. My arm was broken once in a fight with
a boy. I also broke an arm in a fall from a horse. Another time, I broke
my wrist while I was roller-skating in a hall at home. I was always
banging myself up. I'd seen so many of my father's movies where he
was a hero and beat people up that I got the idea that I had to do
it, too. Physical prowess was what counted. When I was nine, I had
my first crush on a boy. At first, he didn't notice me, and that was
fine, because I could just melt into the background and watch him.
But one day he asked me to go to a dance with him. My answer was

95

THE PLAYER: JANE FONDA

to hit him as hard as I could. I just never got the idea of how people
were supposed to behave with each other.

The summer after I graduated from Emma Willard, I lived with
my father in Rome while he made "War and Peace." We lived on an
estate outside the city, and I had nothing to do except eat figs and
get fat and watch Gina Lollobrigida, a neighbor, through binoculars.
Then I went to Vassar College. I stayed two years, trying to study
French and the history of music, among other liberal-arts subjects,
and just got by. I didn't like it. I kept thinking how expensive it
was and how someone else ought to be in my place, getting some
benefit out of the school. I had a few friends at Vassar not very close,
except for Leland Hayward's and Margaret Sullavan's daughter,
Brooke, who was considered very beautiful and very talented and was
expected to become an actress. She had been a lifelong friend. I never
went to dances, because I considered it square to go to school dances.
And I never had dates. I considered myself ugly. The college put on
the Lorca play "Amor de Don Perlimplin con Belisa en su Jardin/'
and I played the lead, a young Spanish girl who stood in a window
and sang songs, and cuckolded her husband. I knew almost nothing
about the motivations of the character I played. By then, I was self-
conscious enough to look for things in the character, but I didn't
know how. There was nothing behind the emotions I showed. I
didn't know how to show that the emotions came from something
and that the words had meaning. I really hadn't decided to become
an actress at that point. I even thought that I didn't want to be an
actress. What I wanted was to get out of Vassar. When I was in my
second year, I told my father that I wanted to get out of the United
States, that I wanted to go to Paris and study painting. Ever since my
finger-painting days in kindergarten, I'd been rather good at it. I'd
done quite a bit of it always still-lifes. After my second year at Vassar,
I went to Paris, and lived with a French family. I enrolled in two
schools the Academic Grande Chaumi&re et Colorassi and the Aca-
dmie Julian. I went in with my canvases and paints, and then began
to feel very lost. I didn't know anyone at either school and couldn't
understand French and thought everyone was watching my clumsy
efforts to paint. I still go in for some of that nonsense; when I go to
ballet school, for instance, I feel that everyone is watching me. In
Paris, I gradually spent less and less time in art class and more and

96

JANE FONDA

more time on the Left Bank, hanging around little bars and
antique shops and the Flea Market. I was supposed to stay a year.
After a month, I was sleeping more and studying less. That Christmas,
I came home to spend the holidays with my father, and he persuaded
me to stay home. He wasn't fooled. He knew pretty much how it was
for me in Paris.

Back in New York, I began to study French and Italian at the
Berlitz School. I lived with my father and his fourth wife, Afdera
Franchetti, in their town house, on East Seventy-fourth Street. Next
door was the Mannes College of Music. From my bedroom I could
hear the students practicing. I decided to study piano there, and
took lessons for a few months. But it was too frustrating. I wanted to
jump in and start playing concertos, instead of studying scales. I
kept on with painting lessons, at the Art Students League, but paint-
ing became steadily less enjoyable and more difficult to do. I thought
people who looked at what I painted expected something of me that
I couldn't live up to. As soon as I finished a canvas, I'd be hyper-
critical of it. I thought about becoming an actress. That was what I
wanted to do more than anything else, so I spent a lot of time
figuring out reasons I didn't want to act it was selfish and egotistical,
it gave no enjoyment, I wasn't pretty enough, and so on. Once, when
Brooke Hayward and I were riding in a car with David Selznick, he
told Brooke that she had star quality, that she was beautiful, glam-
orous everything I thought I wasn't. All I felt was awkward. But I
longed to act. I would think about it and tremble. I knew I'd have to
please so many people fellow-actors, authors, directors, producers,
and critics whereas in painting I was my own master. When, years
later, I finally committed myself to acting, I never again picked up a
paint brush or felt the need to.

My father had nothing to do directly with my wanting to act.
Something must have rubbed oft, though a temperament, a need
for the theatre. I really admired my father's acting. He's never bad,
no matter what he's playing in. My favorite movie of his is "The
Grapes of Wrath," which he made when I was two years old. It was
beautifully written and directed, and deals with a subject that was
important to my father. He believed in it socially and politically.
He was Tom Joad, and he loved that character, and it shows, and
that's why I like it the best of all his movies. When I was six-

97

THE PLAYER: JANE FONDA

teen, I appeared with him in "The Country Girl" in a summer benefit
in Omaha. I had about five small scenes, in the part of the ingenue
and my real father's granddaughter, in the play within the play. I
was supposed to act very tremulous. For preparation, I asked a stage-
hand to shake me up and push me out onstage. At another point, I
was onstage with Dorothy McGuire, who was playing my father's
wife in the play, and I was supposed to be upset, so I tried to pretend
to myself that my father was dead. I didn't really know what I was
doing. I had no awareness of the other players, and I didn't like the
experience. After my first year at Vassar, my father played in "The
Male Animal" at the Cape Playhouse, in Dennis, and I played a
small part with him the young sister of the English professor's wife.
I did it because I had nothing else to do. And I kept wondering what
people would think of me. I wasn't able to forget that the only reason
I was in the play was that Henry Fonda was my father.

In the late summer of 1958 came the turning point in my life.
That's when I met Lee Strasberg. I'd gone out to Hollywood to be
with my father while he made a movie. I was feeling sort of desperate.
I was almost twenty-one. I knew that at the end of the summer I'd
have to come back to New York with my father. I still didn't have
anything definite to do. None of the things I'd tried to do really
satisfied me. I had become friendly with Susan Strasberg, and one day
she introduced me to her father. He was out there with his wife,
Paula, who was coaching Marilyn Monroe in "Some Like It Hot." I
told Lee I was interested in acting, and after talking with me he
agreed to accept me as a student in his acting classes. For the first
time in my life, I felt I was talking with someone who didn't feel he
had to be nice to me because of my father. He was the only person
I'd ever known who was interested in me without having to be. I told
him I had exhausted all the things I'd thought I wanted to be. He
didn't ask me to read for him. He just asked me questions. Why was I
interested in the theatre? What did I expect from the theatre? Who
was my favorite actress? And so on. At the time, my favorite actress
happened to be Geraldine Page, because I couldn't forget her perform-
ance in "Mid-Summer." As soon as I came back to New York, three
weeks later, I set about becoming independent. With a roommate,
Susan Stein, I moved into a small apartment a block from my father's
house, and I started modelling. I'd done one fashion layout for Town &

98

JANE FONDA

Country earlier that year, so I was able to register with an agency
and start getting modelling assignments. I was a success as a model,
which surprised me, because I'd always thought that I had a bad
figure, that I was too fat, that my hair was wrong, that I was clumsy.
I would compare myself with other models, who seemed so willowy
and graceful, and not at all like me. But there must have been some-
thing about the way I photographed that caught on, I was paid fifty
dollars an hour, only ten dollars short of the top fee. I kept thinking
that anyone who didn't look like Suzy Parker might as well give up,
but apparently I came along at a time when they were beginning to
use more natural-looking models. In July, 1959, my photograph, by
Irving Penn, appeared on the cover of Vogue; I was wearing a gold
linen sheath. I used to hang around the newsstands watching the faces
of the people who bought the magazine. I thought I looked pretty but
not really beautiful. In January, 1960, in my second Vogue cover, also
by Penn, I was shown wearing a blue silk dress. I have had pictures on
six magazine covers since I began modelling.

In October, 1958, I started classes with Lee Strasberg. Before that,
everything I'd done had seemed wrong. Now I knew I'd never be satis-
fied doing anything but acting. Lee's classes, which are separate from
the Actors' Studio, are held above the Capitol Theatre. He takes
students who are of interest to him, and he doesn't care what any-
body else says or thinks about it. Once he's picked people who are
of interest to him, he tries to find out who they are. He brings out
what is in you. He shows you how to use yourself, and not something
borrowed from someone else. The classes are a groundwork for acting,
like grammar for English. He told me I had too much of a facade
and that it would greatly limit me in acting if I held on to it. The
first time he met me, he said, he couldn't tell anything about me ex-
cept that I had a certain look in my eyes. Lee somehow imparts dignity
and gives you confidence in yourself. With Lee, I learned that every
need has a counter-need. I also learned that somewhere inside you is
an experience similar to the one you are playing. For example, if you
play a murderer, you don't have to have had the experience of actually
murdering someone, because somewhere inside yourself you will find
some relevant experience. In one of my recent movies, "The Chap-
man Report," I play a frigid woman, a widow. To do it, I don't
have to be like that woman. Instead, I call on what every woman has

99

THE PLAYER: JANE FONDA

felt at some time in her life doubts about herself. This feeling is
enough to give me insight into the way that woman feels. In January,
1961, I did my first audition for the Actors' Studio. After my final
audition, I plan to work there as much as I can.

When I'd been studying with Lee for six months, I went out to
Hollywood to make my first movie, "Tall Story/' with Anthony
Perkins, which was produced and directed by Joshua Logan. Just
before I left New York, I got a chance to play the ingenue in "The
Moon Is Blue," with Harold Lang, for two weeks at the Fort Lee
Playhouse, in New Jersey. I jumped at it. This time I was on my own,
and it felt pretty good. After that taste, I knew I'd be out looking
far parts. "Tall Story" is about a tall girl who goes to college to find
a husband and chooses a school with a championship basketball team.
A subplot has to do with the bribing of team members. I found
it all very strange. I felt alone, surrounded by lights. I didn't question
Josh. I'd known him all my life, and I thought that if he believed
I could do it, I could. But the role itself didn't mean very much to
me. I just came to the set whenever I was called. Three years later, I
was walking along Forty-second Street and saw the words "Tall Story"
in lights, with my name, on a movie marquee, and I felt proud. When
the movie was finished, Josh told me he was going to direct the Broad-
way production of Daniel Taradash's "There Was a Little Girl," and
asked me if I wanted to play the lead in it. I was enthusiastic, and
said yes. My father thought the play and the part weren't right for me;
it was about rape, and I was to play the girl who was raped. I think he
wanted to protect me from what he thought might be a disaster. But
I thought, Who am I to turn down such a part the leading role in a
Broadway play? I knew that practically every young actress in New
York had auditioned for the part, and after I had read for it ten or
fifteen times, the director and the producers wanted me. Three days
before I accepted the part, my father called me up and begged me to
turn it down. But I didn't. I went into the play with a complete lack
of fear. I loved the rehearsals. I loved working with Josh Logan. I
loved working with a group, and I began to see for the first time
that when a group work together with real love, art happens. I
savored every morsel. It was like belonging to a family. I was doing
exactly what I wanted to be doing. I enjoyed making myself fit the
part, making myself frail as a woman, and vulnerable, and weak. I

100

JANE FONDA

had always -thought of myself as strong and independent, a self-
sufficient type, in blue jeans, and I enjoyed playing a dependent-girl
role. Before that, in my real life, I used to sit and wonder just what
it was that other people did and what there was to do. Now I began
to have some idea of what there was to do, and what I had been
missing. I loved the routine of acting in a play every night. I had
had so little responsibility in my life that I loved having demands
made on me to be someplace at a definite hour, with something
definite to do. I began to feel a connection with myself. I felt ac-
cepted. Everything I do now leads up to and goes into my acting. For
my second Broadway play, "Invitation to a March," in October, 1960,
I'd get to the theatre a good two and a half hours before the other
members of the cast.

Everything is best for me when I'm onstage. That's when I come
alive. Everything seems so much fuller when I can discover some-
thing I can add to a part I play. I do it all for myself. I care about
the audience, but I don't act for it. I used to think how nice it would
be if I could do all my acting as readings, on a bare stage, alone, under
a hard light. But I act for myself first In order to act for others. I
started out acting for myself in "Invitation to a March." The part of
Norma Brown was the story of me of a conventional girl, a sleeping
beauty who is awakened to love by the kiss of a boy. I knew just what
I wanted to do with the role, but other people had other ideas, and I
think we lost the human reality of the girl. When the play opened,
I was acting for others. I was doing what they thought the audience
wanted me to do, rather than what I wanted to do, so I came out
like a thin, slick, Ginger Rogers ingenue. I wanted the humor to
come from the conflict in the girl, her struggle with herself, but
instead I had to do a funny painted poster of a girl. Anyway, I
went on doing what others wanted me to do. Finally, what I came
to like about the play was going to the theatre and just knowing
what I would be doing day after day. I had a sense of belonging.
It didn't matter to me in the least how many people came to see
the play. Often it felt better when we had a small house. I had so
little experience and knew so little about the technique of how
to sustain a performance, and after the play opened, I lost what
little I had had when I believed in the part. I might have sustained
my performance if I had been able to hold to what I originally felt

101

THE PLAYER: JANE FONDA

about the part. My father, however, thought all along that the play
was marvellous. One thing I did like about the play was not having
to carry the main responsibility of it. I enjoyed the opportunity of
working with two fine actresses, Eileen Heckart and Madeleine Sher-
wood. I learned that they were able to sustain their performances
whether the audience was or wasn't responding, and laughing at the
expected times. They could play to a full house or to a small house.
At first, I used to wonder at the way they did it, and then I found
that I was able to do it myself. In the beginning, when I first went out
onstage I always felt like apologizing to the audience. I suppose I
felt unworthy to appear before it. If I sensed resentment on the
part of anybody in the audience, I'd start to fade out. For a long
time, I felt I had to know who was in the audience. Sometimes I'd go
up to the balcony to look at the faces and guess how they were going
to respond to me. If I saw mean faces, I'd feel terrible.

I'd like someday to be as good an actress as Geraldine Page or
Kim Stanley. The better I get as an actress, the freer I feel. Actresses
have to exhibit themselves, to hang themselves up on a clothes-
line. Onstage, you often find that you're free to do what you can't do
In real life. When I first read a script, I wonder about the kind of
person my character is. I don't think very much about the others in
the cast. I get the smell of the character I'm going to play. I try to
establish rapport with her. The first time I read "Invitation to a
March," I was so moved that I laughed and cried. I knew just what
I wanted to do with the role. The girl was like me, in that she tried
to reconcile her strong emotions and what she knew was possible in the
world with what she'd been told she could expect in life. I loved the
idea of doing that. In my own life, I was brought up to be well-man-
nered, no matter where I was or what I was doing. At parties, even to-
day, I work at being charming, though I may not feel in the least like
being charming. I show an interest in people I'm not the least bit inter-
ested in. Onstage, I found, I didn't have to do anything of that kind.
Playing a role, I was free to reveal exactly what I felt.

102

SIDNEY POITIER

When I experience a moment of total communication
between me and the audience, I feel, Well, maybe
they do accept me as an actor.

I was born on February 20, 1924, in Miami, Florida. I was the
youngest of eight children, but now there are only six of us; my sister
Teddy died several years ago, and my brother Cedric, who was a
waiter in Nassau, died in 1961, leaving six children of his own. My
father also died in 1961, in a little house in Nassau that I'd got for
him and my mother a few years before. To my parents, what started
happening to me after I left home was all very strange. I was still
their baby so much so, I'm afraid, that it was sickening. They'd see
me in movies, and they'd wonder what on earth I was doing there.
Most of the time, I've felt exactly the way they did. My eldest brother,
Cyril, is forty-six and does odd jobs in Miami. He has twelve children.
The other children are Ruby, a housewife in Miami; Redis, a waiter
in Nassau; Reginald, a maitre d' at the British Colonial Hotel, in
Nassau; and Carl, a waiter in Nassau. When I was three months old,
my family moved to Cat Island, in the Bahamas, where my father
worked as a tomato farmer. We stayed on Cat Island until I was eleven,

103

THE PLAYER: SIDNEY POITIER

and then we moved to Nassau. I could swim when I was three. I could
climb trees as well as Tarzan himself. There were no automobiles on
Cat Island, which is about fifty miles long and averages ten miles wide,
and there was nothing to get in my way. I had freedom. I was never
watched. From the time I could walk, I had complete freedom to learn
by trial and error. When I was three, I would go out and be alone on
the island all day. I had my own imagination as a companion. I'd
imagine I was a big fisherman going after big fish, or I was a farmer
working in the fields. When I was five, I once walked across the island,
all by myself, which would be like walking from Brooklyn to the
Bronx. I got to the middle of the island, and there wasn't a human
soun d only birds and little insects. Finally, I came to the other side
of the island, and I played out there for half a day, all alone, hunting
turtle eggs. My mother used to cook the turtle eggs I brought her. Our
kitchen was outside, with an open grill. Our house was stone and had
a thatched palm-leaf roof very primitive. When I got home after be-
ing out on the island all day, nobody ever noticed. My mother just
said, "Sit down and eat your dinner."

In Nassau, I went to school for a year and a half, then quit to work
at odd jobs, to help support the family. My father was unable to work,
because of arthritis and rheumatism. I was always hungry as a kid.
To this day, between huge meals, I'm hungry, and I fill in with Mars
bars, Snickers, Oh Henrys, and Life Savers. So far, I've never been to a
dentist. When I was fifteen, I was sent to Miami to live with my brother
Cyril. I felt I wasn't wanted there, so before very long I set off for
New York City. It took me three and a half months to get here. I rode
a freight train, then walked, and then worked in the kitchen of a
summer-resort hotel in the mountains in Georgia, where I saved up
thirty-nine dollars enough to take a bus the rest of the way. I arrived
early one morning, with a dollar and a half and no clothes except what
I had on a shirt and blue jeans and one extra shirt. I took the sub-
way to Harlem, and then came downtown that same afternoon, walked
down Broadway from Fiftieth to Forty-second Street, and spent all the
rest of my money on hot dogs and malted milks. That night, I got a
job at the Turf Restaurant, as a dishwasher, for four dollars and eleven
cents a night. For the next few months, until I had saved enough
money to buy myself a coat and a suit, I slept either in Penn Station
or in the Greyhound Bus Terminal that opens off it or on the roof of

104

SIDNEY POITIER

a building on Fifty-first Street, across from the Capitol Theatre. Soon
after Pearl Harbor, I enlisted in the Army. I was trained to be a physio-
therapist, and I served with the 1267th Medical Detachment, stationed
at the Northport, Long Island, Veterans Hospital, which was a mental
institution. I was discharged in December of 1944. In the Army, I was
very rebellious. I was always restless, and the restlessness manifested it-
self in a violent thrashing about something I still have as a carry-over
today. The minute I have to do something and I don't want to do
something, I become rebellious. It was a strange period for me. I
couldn't read as well as I wanted to. To me, words were terrible. I was
unable to learn them from the dictionary; I had to hear new words, or
read them in a cluster of old words, so that I could figure out their
meanings in relation to the words I did understand. I used to read
anything I could get my hands on newspapers, magazines, Army man-
uals. The other guys used to make fun of my West Indian accent, but
I could always take that kind of ribbing. I had the qualities of a regu-
lar guy, even though I was never admitted into the inner circle.

After getting out of the Army, I continued to read the newspapers,
not only to help myself learn words but to follow the want ads. The
New York Journal-American had the best ads for manual laborers, and
I learned a lot of new words about industry and the trades from those
ads. One day, I read in the Amsterdam News that the American Negro
Theatre was looking for actors. I was not satisfied with the idea of
working with my hands, so I went over to the American Negro The-
atre, which was in the basement of the 135th Street branch of the
Public Library. It was a small place, with a small, low stage, and it had
a capacity of about a hundred. The ad said that they were holding
auditions. There were a lot of wooden chairs, unoccupied, in the audi-
torium, and onstage were the people holding auditions. A giant of a
man Frederick O'Neal, co-manager of the A.N.T., who is now a good
friend of mine was in charge. He told me they were looking for actors
for a play called "Walk Hard," adapted by Abram Hill from Lew
Zinberg's novel "Walk Hard Talk Low." He handed me the script,
pointed to a place somewhere in the middle, and said "Read." So I
started to read. I read it terribly. I was a lean, lanky kid. I had just
about my full growth then six feet two and a half but I had a baby
face, and my voice was sort of high; it has deepened considerably over
the years. And in reading I sounded like a West Indian. O'Neal was

105

THE PLAYER: SIDNEY POITIER

bugged with me. He said "Forget it." If he had said "Thank you very
much. Sorry, but not right now," or something like that, I would have
walked out of there and never come back or tried to do anything like
that again. But the way he said "Forget it" made me feel as if I had
been attacked. I felt chopped down a peg. Don't chop me down a peg,
or, if you do, do it for good reasons that you tell me about. I was ex-
tremely sensitive then about not being able to rise above working with
my hands, so I walked out of there determined to go back and show
that man I was not destined to be a laborer all my life. I had to vindi-
cate myself.

I bought a radio and embarked on listening to voices, night after
night, for the next six months. It was a cheap little box radio, but it
had good reception. Every night, I'd start at the top of the dial and go
all the way to the bottom. I was living in a five-dollar-a-week room
rented out in someone else's apartment the way they still do in Har-
lem on 118th Street near Morningside Avenue. I'd take my supper,
usually a loaf of raisin bread and a bottle of Pepsi-Cola I never drank
milk; I hadn't tasted fresh milk since I was twelve years old up to my
room. I'd lie on my bed and listen to the news, to plays, to
commentators to everything. The point was that I was going to rec-
tify what was wrong with my speech and go back and say "Aha!" and
thumb my nose at that man and then walk out and go on and pursue
my life. In addition to listening to the radio, I read whatever I could
get my hands on mostly magazines. I went to see my first play, "Anna
Lucasta," and was completely taken with how the stage looked so
bright, so pretty, with all those lights. Late in 1945, I went back to the
American Negro Theatre. This time, the A.N.T. school auditions were
being held from seven to eleven at night, and there were three judges
O'Neal, the director Abram Hill, and the acting teacher Osceola
Archer. I wore my only suit a handsome brown suit and a yellow
shirt and a great big flowery yellow-and-brown tie and brown shoes. I
was decked out to beat the band. I sat there listening to other people
audition. They knew what plays were, and they read scenes from them,
I had come prepared to read a paragraph from a story in True Con-
fessions a girl was talking to her boy friend about her ideas of life
and marriage, or something like that. Then they called my name, and
my throat went dry. My legs began to buckle. I got up onstage and
read, in a shaking voice, my paragraph from True Confessions. The

106

SIDNEY POITIER

judges weren't indulgent. They were cold cold and exacting. They
said, "O.K., now we'll give you an improvisation. You're in a jungle.
A sniper shoots at you, and your buddy is killed, and you can't see
the sniper, and you crawl along the ground and then get up and say,
'Come and get me.' " So I did my improvisation. I got down on the
floor and got my famous brown suit all dusty. Then they said "All
right, thank you," and I went home. I didn't know whether I had
shown them anything or not. All I knew was that I was on pins and
needles. About a week later, I got a postcard from the A.N.T. saying to
come in. I hadn't expected it, and I hadn't not expected it. I went in,
and they said they'd take me into the school for three months, on a
trial basis.

I didn't have much money, but I was able to pay the A.N.T. a few
dollars a week, and for the rest of the tuition I did odd jobs and
janitor work backstage. During the day, I worked with my hands,
washing dishes in a restaurant or pushing a handcart in the garment
center, but my mind was always on the A.N.T. At night, I went to
A.N.T. drama classes diction, body movement, arid so on. Soon I was
hooked. At the end of the three months, they wanted to let me go, be-
cause they didn't think I was very good. I begged them to give me an
extension, and they did. I was still very inhibited, because of my ac-
cent. The more people snickered at the way I talked, the more I with-
drew, until a friend of mine in the class helped me to come out of
myself. In the fall of 1946, I was hired by the director James Light
to play Polydorus in an allrNegro production of "Lysistrata" at the
Belasco Theatre. It closed after four performances, but I was a sensa-
tion, because I was scared to death, and that was exactly what the part
of Polydorus called for. When I got out onstage on opening night and
looked into the sea of faces in the audience, I went panicsville. My
one thought was, If only I can get out of this. I had twelve lines to say,
and I think I managed to get six of them out. I couldn't talk above a
whisper. I was shaking all over. Finally, I ran off the stage before I was
supposed to. I stopped the show cold. The next morning, while I was
trying to get lost, I learned that the notices killed the show but
some of them mentioned me, and people were asking about that young
actor who played Polydorus. I was offered a job right away, at sixty-
five dollars a week, as understudy to all the young actors in a Broad-
way revival of "Anna Lucasta." I was with the play from 1947 until

107

THE PLAYER: SIDNEY POITIER

1949, and sooner or later I played all kinds o parts in the play, in-
cluding the male lead for a while on tour.

At that point, I knew that I really liked to act. I was green, I was
pretty bad at it, but I knew I was bad, and I knew how much better I
could be. I began to have a feeling for what I was doing. My experience
was restricted. Whatever natural ability I had was getting me by. But
now I had a feeling for acting, and knew that what I needed next was
experience. In 1949, 1 played in my first movie, an Army Signal Corps
documentary called "From Whom Cometh My Help." The next year,
I made my first Hollywood movie, "No Way Out." Then I was in "Cry,
the Beloved Country/' "Red Ball Express/' "Go, Man, Go," "The
Blackboard Jungle/' "Edge of the City/' "Something of Value/' "The
Mark of the Hawk/' "The Defiant Ones/' and "Porgy and Bess." I re-
turned to Broadway in March, 1959, to take the lead in Lorraine Hans-
berry's play "A Raisin in the Sun." I was married in 1950 to Juanita
Hardy, a dancer, whose sister is married to the fighter Archie Moore.
We now have four small daughters and own an old house up on a hill,
with seven acres of woods, in Pleasantville. There's a lot of room for the
kids, and it's quite beautiful. I like the summers there, but I've never
been able to negotiate winters around New York. I was born in the
sun, and I always feel the cold and the dreariness of winter. But I want
to stay near New York, and I tell myself that it's the winters that make
the summers so wonderful When I have to go to Hollywood to make a
movie, I'm all right. Actors, like other artists, can live anywhere.
Wherever I am, I gather and store up impressions, whether I just stay
home and cook and go to bed or visit friends or explore new territory
and sample local tastes. An actor can be anywhere.

If I had stayed in the Bahamas, I would probably have become a
waiter, like my brothers. I became an actor not for self-expression but
for success. To have money. To be recognized on the street. When I
thought of what I wanted to do, I wanted to rest for three months on a
boat, fishing in the Bahamas, just kind of lallygaggin' around, never
coming into port except for food and supplies. Without success, that
would be impossible. I got no satisfaction from working in a kitchen.
I never settled; I was always moving. I wanted to make a better-living.
I knew from reading the gossip columns that actors made money. For-
tunately, I became an actor early enough to apply what the actor
mostly applies his body. Acting is the only area in which you don't

108

SIDNEY POITIER

have to have a high-school education or a degree or a special skill.
When you are creative, you have to work with the life you are familiar
with. The reality I carry into the theatre is the only reality I know.
I've always had imagination, but my imagination is part of my reality.
When people talk about my talent, I really don't know what they
mean. Even if you are gifted with genius, you are only the sum total
of your environment. To me, my wherewithal, in addition to my body,
is what I simply feel as my freedom. After I got to Nassau, at the age
of eleven, I discovered the movies. I used to go all the time. They were
mostly Westerns. I used to relive all the movies for the other kids. I
played the good guys and the bad guys, all at the same time, and I used
to have a spellbound audience. I could do that because I had freedom.
I act now with the same freedom.

We can try to intellectualize about the satisfactions of acting. We
search the intellect, but that is one of the most dangerous areas to look
for anything in. When I listen to people trying to talk about their
ideas, I see the intellect straining at its own limits. For the most part,
my work in movies, especially over the last few years, has brought me
diminishing creative satisfaction. To get pleasure out of being in a
movie, I have to work with a director who is able to inspire me. If the
director knows more than you know and can find a way to bring out
what is in you to be brought out, then you come alive. But if you know
in your heart that the director is making a mistake, or maybe that a
whole movie is a mistake, it's like going up a dead-end street. You keep
looking and hoping for a little opening in the fence where you can
slip through, but you never find it. That's what happens when you try
to make a film with people who are not essentially film-makers. I have
tried to do the best I could with every picture I've been in. But all my
experience has taught me that films, to be any good, should be made
by film-makers. By Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, Michelangelo
Antonioni, Roberto Rossellini, John Huston, Stanley Kramer, Billy
Wilder, William Wyler not all necessarily in the same class but all
film-makers. A film-maker is somebody who is able to exercise com-
plete authority over the film he is making.

I went back to Hollywood in the summer of 1959 and made an in-
nocuous, pointless film for Columbia Pictures called "All the Young
Men." It had no rhyme or reason. It was a waste of time. I played a
Marine sergeant who took command of his unit in a perilous situation

109

THE PLAYER: SIDNEY POITIER

in Korea. Why spend a million dollars producing a picture about war
that makes no salient point about war, pro or con, and is hardly a work
of art? That movie was a menagerie of violent exercises in human de-
struction. You saw an awful lot of people blown up, you saw an awful
lot of places bombed, and by the last reel you were asking "Why?" Just
to kill some time. I was unable to work in that movie, even on an ele-
mentary level, with any degree of imagination. The producers seemed
willing to settle for what would have been the first step in a stage re-
hearsal, and print it. I signed for it while I was in New Haven with
"Raisin in the Sun." I was committed to do it. The original script
said an awful lot about people and war, but then we didn't do what
was in the script. On the other hand, I enjoyed making "A Raisin in
the Sun" as a film. I knew every facet of the character and of the play,
and I felt I had control and was able to take care of myself. However,
the next year, "Paris Blues," in which I played a jazz musician, was all
wrong from beginning to end. The novel on which the movie was os-
tensibly based really went into the lives of jazz musicians in Paris, but
what we did was not that. Also, the original script I read, by a wonder-
ful screenwriter named Irene Kamp, was not the script we wound up
with. By the time we were finished, five other writers had been called
in, one after another, to change the script according to some idea that
one or another of a dozen people connected with the movie had for
making it a success. It was a shambles. I found out once and for all
that a bunch of people can't do it. One person has to do it. A group of
people engaged in a collaborative creative effort must respond to one
person. Mistakes are probably going to be made, but they will be the
mistakes of one person, and so they won't be so bad, A halfhearted mis-
take is a devastating mistake.

When I act on the stage, it's a total experience. With me as with
other actors, I believe it's quite a job to prevent the work from be-
coming mechanical. You have to find ways to keep refuelling the im-
pulse. You can't hang an impulse up on a peg and then take it down
the next night. It's instantaneous. It cannot be repeated. If you try to
harness it, you take away the newness of it. But it has to be manufac-
tured synthetically when things aren't going right when your energy
is low, when you've eaten too much, when you haven't cleansed your
mind of your own thoughts and worries so you can flood it with the
part you're playing. You cannot will a response. When I feel good and

110

SIDNEY POITIER

right, I experience complete communication with the audience. But
each performance is different, and if I expected to feel that good every
night, I'd be disappointed. There's no one way of acting, but my way
is to try to feel the experience of the moment and to have each moment
flow out of the last and into the next.

There is a sense of self that is important to me when I try to work
creatively. I find it in what I think of as the gears of the mind. So
far, I've discovered only three speeds, but maybe there are more. At
the most common speed, the mind is open to all distractions and sensa-
tions. It is giving constant attention to one or another of a thousand
different things. At the second speed, the mind is working between two
opposites, feverishly, because it wants something and is evaluating
things in order to put them to use. The third gear is the idle gear.
That's the gear we live in all too little, the gear we shift into after a
hard day's work, when we couldn't care less whether anything happens
or not. That's when all your thoughts are held momentarily in abey-
ance. You have just enough of a buzz on to encourage the opposite of
good sense. I get myself into a part by shifting my gears in that order.
When I go from second to third, I'm shifting from the battle of the op-
posites to a state of timelessness. All I know about it is that that's what
happens when I act. It feels good. For me, acting is a refuge and a res-
pite from the battle of the opposites: to be successful or not to be suc-
cessful, to go home or not to go home, to smoke or not to smoke,
to eat lobster or not to eat lobster to be or not to be. The only way
I can transcend the battle is to act. When I play someone else, I am
no longer caught in the battle; the person I'm playing is caught. I ac-
cept someone else's circumstances and I cease to function as Sidney
Poitier. I have peace. I feel it. It's now. It's great. It's encompassing.
It's got you. You're secure. Everything you do is absolutely meant to be
done. It leads you, every now and then, to transcend the battle so com-
pletely that you give a performance that is absolutely shattering, even
to yourself.

People call me an artist. Even though I don't deserve it most of the
time, it's nice to hear. Only, I always ask myself, "Now, what have I
created?" And that immediately pushes me back into the battle. I'm
always asking myself whether or not I'm an actor. The essence of the
actor is a composite of his physical construction, his voice, his disposi-
tion, and the intangibles of his own character. I'm always asking myself

111

THE PLAYER: SIDNEY FOITIER

what makes the difference when he walks onstage, instead of somebody
else. What is it that creates the illusion for the audience? Acting is not
only an interpretive art, it's a creative art. A play stands as still as
death itself unless the actor brings it to life. People aren't going to get
up off the paper and walk around. The actors do that for them.

112

JULIET MILLS

I know that someday I'm going to play Shakespeare's
Juliet.

I was born on November 21, 1941, in London, during the blitz.
My father is the actor John Mills, and my mother is Mary Hayley
Bell Mills, the playwright and novelist. My godmother is Vivien
Leigh, and my godfather is Noel Coward. My little sister, Hayley,
has played in "Tiger Bay/' with my father, and in "Pollyanna"
and other movies. I also have a little brother, Jonathan, born in
1949, who wants to be an actor. I never had any doubt that I
would be an actress. When I was a very small child, my mother would
pack a lunch and take me to the motion-picture studio where rny
father was making a movie, and the three of us would have lunch
together. My mother is like a little mother hen, always running around
the world trying to keep us all together. Since Hayley became a movie
star, Mother has had to stay with her in Hollywood when she makes
a film there, and she doesn't like it there, so she leaves whenever she
can bring us all together again. I love my godparents. Whenever
Vivien Leigh needs me to talk to, I'll be there.

113

THE PLAYER: JULIET MILLS

I've always wanted to be an actress, and really wanted to act. I
never wanted my appearance to be the main thing. I do worry about
my weight, because I have a tendency to be on the plump side. But
just think of Charles Laughton. Right from the start, he was on the
plump side, but look at the wonderful actor he turned out to be.
Or Shelley Winters, who gets heavy once in a while, yet is such a
good actress. So your appearance can't really stand in your way.
When I was nine, my father sent me to ballet school. He told me
that learning to dance would help me learn to act. Dancing gave
me control of my body, and grace in my movements onstage. By the
time I was sixteen, I was dancing five hours a day. I stopped when I
got my first stage role, in "Five Finger Exercise," which I played in
the West End and on Broadway. I had gone to a toddlers' school in
Kensington and then to the Old Vicarage School, in Richmond, Surrey,
and after that, at the age of nine, to Elmhurst, a private boarding
school just outside London. There was no question of my going
to college. In England, the only girls who go to college are the type
who expect to become doctors. I've never thought about getting
married, but then you never know, do you? A lot of girls I've known
kept saying they were never going to get married, and then suddenly
I would be getting invitations to their weddings. I believe that every
girl should go to boarding school. At boarding school, I found out
how lucky I was to have such a happy home. At school, every
person is an individual, and you have to cope with her. I wanted
to be head girl, and our headmistress did pick me. My last year at
school, we did a play about the French Revolution. I played a very
old, filthy, grotesque revolutionist. I loved it. At Elmhurst, I worked
in dramatics. When Hayley started to act, I wrote a play .about an
orphanage, with a special part for Hayley called Angel one of the
orphans, who is deaf and dumb, and a boy. Hayley's got a face all
her own. I've already been in three films with my father, and I'd
like someday to be in a play with both Hayley and my father.

I love to go to movies, and I especially love the movies starring
my father. I've seen "Great Expectations" thousands of times. That's
my favorite. When I was four and used to watch him making the
movie at the studio, I could never see any similarity between watch-
ing him in front of the camera and actually watching the movie.
When I see "Great Expectations," I get thoroughly involved in the

114

JULIET MILLS

film. There's a scene in the beginning where a little boy is suddenly
confronted in a graveyard by a convict. It used to frighten me. For
years, I had nightmares about that scene. Even now, I can watch
my father making a movie and then, when I see the film, get all in-
volved in it. I haven't learned anything at all from watching movies
being made. Everything I've learned has been from watching people.
I watch people on the street when I'm walking. I watch them in
shops when I'm doing my marketing. I watch them in Central Park,
at the Wollman Memorial, where I go skating when I'm in New
York. I'm aware of how people behave when they think no one is
looking at them. A good actor also watches the good or bad points
in other actors' performances. I'm always thinking of how I could do
a part that someone else is playing. In New York, after the theatre,
I go to old movies and watch the way the actors do their parts.

More than anything else, I want to play Juliet at Stratford. I
know I can do it better than anyone else. Nearly always, actresses who
play Juliet are women in their thirties or forties. Producers seem to
think that older women can understand Juliet's feelings better than
a girl who is actually Juliet's age. I think I know how Juliet felt, and
understand what she did. I think I understand a lot more about
Juliet than women in their thirties do. I think women in their thirties
have forgotten how a girl feels when she's in her teens and in love.

Everyone I admire leads a disciplined life. Personally, I hate getting
up late. I never drink. I don't smoke. When I'm in a play, I am
usually in bed by 1 A.M. and up by 10 A.M. I like to do things and
see things. In New York, I have gone for rides on the Staten Island
ferry a dozen times, and I love taking the boat that circles the island
of Manhattan. I've seen through the glamour and excitement of the
theatre since I was ten. I knew by then that all was not bright lights
and greasepaint. All the marvellous applause can be exciting and in-
spiring, but it can also be nerve-racking and disappointing if you
aren't succeeding at what you are doing. I can still be impressed
by an actor, though. When I first met Montgomery Clift, I could
hardly speak.

When I'd played in "Five Finger Exercise*' for two years, I got a
little bored in my part. I'd explored every corner of it, it seemed.
The thought of getting stale simply terrified me. It's very important
to me to feel my own individuality in acting. I want to be me. When

115

THE PLAYER: JULIET MILLS

I started working on my part for "Five Finger Exercise," I didn't
learn the role line by line. At rehearsals, when I was asked whether
I could do this or that, I'd say yes to everything. Then I'd try it out
on the quiet by myself. For example, I had to fall down some stairs
in the play. I didn't know how to do it at first. I would come to the
theatre very early and try it out by myself, and that way I learned
how to do it. The best way is not to think about it, just to do it.

I have no ambition to have a flat of my own in London. We live in
the country, and unless I get a good part I just want to stay home. I
don't see enough of Hayley. Whenever I talk to her on the telephone
and she's far away someplace, she cries. Daddy says that to be a good
actor you have to have something in you. You can let it go or you
can do something with it. A great deal can be learned, but not unless
you have the talent to begin with. Acting is a gamble. You are paid
only when you are working. It is also an adventure. From month to
month, you have no idea what is around the corner. Acting is definitely
an art, but, as in all art, there are good artists and bad artists. Some
actors get into a rut and then don't seem to make any effort to get
out of it. They seem to enjoy their own misery in staying in the rut.
They never ask themselves what it is they are doing. I think it is in
your own hands whether or not your acting makes you happy
makes you feel good about what you are doing. England has lots of
repertory companies. I'll join one of them and look for new and
different roles. I think I'm going to be a good actress.

116

WILLIAM HOLDEN

Once you make up your mind about what you're
going to do in acting, you can pretty well slot it. I
like to think of emotions as being a series of cloaks
hung on pegs; I take them down as I find I need them.

I was born on April 17, 1918, in O'Fallon, Illinois. My real name is
William Franklin Beedle, Jr. When I was three, my father, a chemist,
moved the family to Pasadena, California, where he went into the
chemical-analysis business. My brother Bob was a Navy pilot who
died at the age of twenty-one; he was shot down in the South Pacific
on January 1, 1944. My brother Dick is in business with my father in
Los Angeles. My mother taught English in the Pasadena and Monrovia
school systems for many years, then retired, and now is active in
various church groups. My father, an amateur gymnast, gave me spe-
cial lessons in tumbling and physical training. My mother encouraged
me to sing in church choirs and to mind my manners. I played my
first dramatic part at the age of ten Rip Van Winkle in my school's
annual sixth-grade play. I kind of liked it. At Pasadena Junior Col-
lege, I studied chemistry, which I hated. Everybody in the family but
me took it for granted that I would go into my father's chemical
business. In 1938, I got my first big acting opportunity, in the Pas-

117

THE PLAYER: WILLIAM HOLDEN

adena Workshop Theatre's production of "Manya," a play about
Marie Curie. I played the part of her father-in-law, eighty-year-old
Eugene Curie. I was seen on opening night by Milton Lewis, a talent
scout from Paramount Pictures. A couple of years earlier, I had taken
a seven-month auto trip with a friend. We had visited New York,
and I had decided then to go to New York after graduation from
college and study acting. Instead, two weeks after I was seen by the
scout I signed a contract with Paramount at a salary of fifty dollars
a week, and had a part in "Million Dollar Legs" in which I said two
words "Thank you." I was one of a group of promising youngsters
known at Paramount as the Golden Circle, which also included Betty
Field and Robert Preston. I wanted to be the best motion-picture
actor in the world. My heroes were Fredric March and Spencer
Tracy. They were my ideals. I used them as a kind of goal for myself.
I had enough of the extrovert in me to want that kind of recognition.
Paramount took stock of my hobbies: in addition to doing gymnastics, I
liked to ride my motorcycle at very high speeds; I was an expert
horseman and rifle shot; I played the piano, clarinet, and drums. The
studio executives decided that I needed a new name. "Beedle,"
they said, sounded too much like an insect. So I was named Holden,
after a West Coast newspaperman.

Rouben Mamoulian, at Columbia Pictures, saw my screen test and
hired me for the title role in "Golden Boy," with Barbara Stanwyck
and Adolphe Menjou. It was my starting point. I don't think anybody
had as much determination and ambition as I had the day I started
making this movie. Then, one day in 1939, I went to the opening
of "Golden Boy" and saw my name up on the marquee. There was my
name in lights. And I suddenly knew that it didn't mean a damn
thing to me. It's been that way ever since. I don't enjoy seeing myself
on the screen. You might say I'm not my type. I'm ugly. I'm too fat
and would like to be thinner. I'm simpdtico with people who are not
gross. For twenty-two years, I've put up with a lot of asinine sug-
gestions made by various studio experts about how to change myself
to fix the shape of my eyebrows, and stuff like that but I've always
refused to do it. I may not like the way I look, but I take myself the
way I am and do the best I can with it. Being a movie star and seeing
myself on the screen don't make me feel good. In fact, they make
me feel kind of sad. But I .do the best I can with all that, too.

113

WILLIAM HOLDEN

I'm not like Garbo or Gregory Peck. I can walk down Fifth Avenue
and I won't have any trouble with people staring at me. They don't
recognize me. I just look like one of them. I think of myself as a fair
contemporary actor-reporter of scenes in which people pretty much
like me figure. I never think of myself as an actor the way Alec
Guinness is an actor. He can do anything. He's completely devoted
to acting. He can act anywhere. I can act only in films, and even there
I'm limited. I'm best at playing someone relevant to our lives today.
Rarely have I stepped into a period film. I've just never felt qualified
to do it. When I work, I work hard, and I always try to satisfy my
own taste. I'm not a great believer in audience appeal or in fans. I
don't believe the fans establish the criterion in films. I think we
establish the criterion for the fans. The motion picture is not a pure
art form. It has its place as a business art form, and I'd hate to see
it die out. I've made a good living out of acting, but I'm not dedicated
to it. I can see how men like John Gielgud and Alec Guinness, who
give the work their complete devotion, must get a deeper satisfaction
out of it than I do. I have my hand in a lot of business interests.
Anyone with as many diverse interests as I have couldn't get that
really deep satisfaction out of acting. I could probably out-operate
Alec Guinness in any field of business, and I get some satisfaction out
of that. These days, because of the international distribution of pic-
tures, my work as an actor involves not only acting in a movie but go-
ing on the road with it, all over the country or all over the world, to
sell it. After all, I pour the original energy into the acting, and I feel I
might as well do the other. However, I refuse to ingratiate myself with
the public in ways I don't respect. I haven't given a fan-magazine inter-
view in the past dozen years. But what I will do is go on the road to
sell a picture.

During the first few days of work on "Golden Boy," I was so
intense I found myself on the verge of a nervous collapse. Then
Barbara Stanwyck, one of the stars of the movie, spent night after
night, after a hard day's work, rehearsing with me, and she pulled me
through. For the past twenty-two years, I've sent her flowers to com-
memorate the anniversary of the day that work on "Golden Boy"
began. That picture was a high point for a beginning; after that
things went down. I spent the next couple of years playing ordinary
roles in ordinary movies. I didn't feel that my talents, major or

119

THE PLAYER: WILLIAM HOLBEN

minor, were being fully utilized. In 1941, I married Ardis Ankerson,
a young actress known to the public as Brenda Marshall. At my re-
quest, she gave up acting as a career. She had a three-year-old daughter,
Virginia, whom I adopted legally. Ardis and I had two children to-
gether Peter, who is seventeen, and Scott, who is fifteen. Eight months
after I was married, I enlisted in the Army Air Forces, and for four
years I did public-relations and entertainment duty and made training
films all over the country. In 1946, I returned to Paramount, where I
got into the rut of playing all kinds of nice-guy, meaningless roles in
meaningless movies, such as "Father Is a Bachelor" and "Dear Wife/'
in which I found neither interest nor enjoyment. By 1949, I had ap-
peared in eleven movies that, for me, added up to one great big static
blur. Then, in 1950, I played the part of Joe Gillis, the opportunistic,
caddish writer in "Sunset Boulevard," with Gloria Swanson. It was a
turning point for me. I not only found the part interesting and ex-
citing but was noticed and liked by the critics. In 1953, I played an-
other interesting part Sefton, the amoral sergeant in "Stalag 17."
I won an Oscar for it. In the meantime, I did assorted odd jobs out-
side of acting. I worked as vice-president of the Screen Actors Guild. I
was Commissioner of Parks and Recreation in Los Angeles. I de-
veloped interests and partnerships in businesses such as exporting and
importing, aviation, and radio stations here and abroad. I now have
a large measure of control over what I do in pictures and how I do it.
I receive a percentage of the gross of all pictures I make, pretty much
the way Gary Grant and James Stewart do.

Long before I realized the power of the dollar, I had a tendency to
express myself. Fortunately, I was able to combine the two. As a boy,
I'd see things in movie acting that cried for a better interpretation. I
always felt that, with a little study, I could do them much better. Just
before I signed my first contract, I was a little vague about it, but I
wasn't floundering. I wasn't old enough to flounder. I've always had
an idea of what was right for me and what was wrong. In making my
first movies, whenever I felt lost or puzzled I had one simple way of
working my way out of it. I'd always ask myself, "Well, what would
Fredric March do? What would Gary Cooper do?" And it would al-
ways solve the problem for me. I'm not like some movie actors, who
feel that they must pretend they're just dying to act in the theatre.
I've been tempted by it only once, when I briefly thought about doing

120

WILLIAM HOLDEN

"Mister Roberts." Henry Fonda was in it then, and he had some kind
of knee trouble. But I didn't replace him, and that was all right with
me. I've never pretended I could be an Alec Guinness in the theatre.

Movie acting may not have a certain kind of glory as a true art, but
it's acting, and it's damn hard work. You kiss your wife goodbye at
eight in the morning, and an hour later you're on a set pretending
to be killing somebody or whispering sweet nothings into some glam-
our girl's ear. It's a terrible emotional drain. It's devastating. The
most demanding thing about it is that you must keep up the level of
your performance. The way I do it is to think of myself as a reporter.
My job is to portray the character and bring it to the audience in a
way that will enable them to involve themselves emotionally. I read
a script and analyze it. I find that if you develop an attitude toward the
character the mannerisms for it come later. You attempt to stay as
detached as possible. Then there's a kind of final melting in your mind
about a week before the picture is supposed to start. Once you're in
it, you're involved in how you're going to develop the character. Once
I'm fairly entrenched, I find that the character almost takes care of
itself. Then the demands on you are the demands of a particular day
of work. It's terribly exhausting. My most difficult roles have always
been ones that are unlike me. Still, I've been able to find their
motivation acceptable. If you're going to be Gillis in "Sunset
Boulevard," for example, you must get it across that there but for
the grace of God go I. I may not be able to understand Gillis, a gigolo,
but I can sympathize with him. I've found that sympathy is about all
you need if you want to act a different kind of person from your real
self. When I was doing the part of Sefton in "Stalag 17," I had a
really tough time sympathizing with him the way he used marked
cards, and all the rest of his unscrupulousness. What I used to go on
was my observation of men like that. I've seen them. I know what
they're like. I'm not sure how to explain the talent or whatever it is
that makes it possible for me to act by using that approach. Maybe it's
just knowing a little more than the next guy. As I tell my older boy,
who has some interest in acting, you'll know if you have talent when
you get there.

In every man's life, there's a period when he determines how his
energies are going to be directed. Every man has a basic problem in
deciding that. My decision was, is, and will be to be a good motion-

121

THE PLAYER: WILLIAM HOLDEN

picture actor. Between the ages of twenty-nine and thirty-six, I had a
period when I was easily able to handle a lot of outside activities.
I don't kid myself that I can still work an eighteen-hour day. I
hate to become sloppy. In 1956, I made a picture called "Toward the
Unknown/' for which I was an actor by day and, by night, a caster,
a cutter, and a producer. I'll never do anything like that again. My
blueprint is to make one very important picture a year one that is not
only artistically satisfying to me but successful at the box office. Ideally,
I'd like to spend six or seven months on my vocation and five or
six months on my avocational activities. One of my pet avocational
projects is the Mount Kenya Safari Club, which I started with two
other men Carl Hirschmann, a Swiss banker, and Ray Ryan, an oil-
man from Indiana. We bought the Mawingo Hotel the name means
"The Clouds" on the slopes of Mount Kenya, outside the town of
Nanyuki. We've got sixty acres, with fruit and vegetable gardens, ten-
nis courts, swimming pools, trout streams, and a hundred and twenty
servants, and also five hundred adjacent acres, complete with an Afri-
can village, as well as the prize rose garden on the continent. Our mem-
bers include John Wayne and Winston Churchill. We're about twelve
thousand miles from Hollywood, and about six thousand miles from
St. Prex, Switzerland, where I now make my home. From the club,
you can get to Hollywood in one full day. These are, after all, times
of galloping transportation. I take care of a million things in my
import-export business importing electronic equipment from Tokyo,
and things like that. After all that avocational activity, I get back to
acting and I feel refreshed.

122

BURGESS MEREDITH

You have to act with joy, and not mislocate the center
of the emotions, which is in the head, not in the
stomach. The center of the emotions is right above the
eyes.

I was born on November 16, 1908, in Cleveland, Ohio. My father,
William George Meredith, was a doctor, but he gave up the practice
of medicine early, retired, and moved to Canada. My parents separated
then; I was four, and I stayed with my mother, who was the daughter
of a well-known Methodist minister in Cleveland. I was the youngest of
three children. My brother, George, who was born in 1895, started
out as a jazz drummer and later became a farmer in New England;
he died in 1960. My sister, Virginia, who lives in Nashua, New
Hampshire, and is married to an engineer, is fifteen years older than I
am, and helped bring me up. My sister has never missed one of my
openings, and she sees every movie I'm in. My parents died in the
thirties. I lived in Cleveland until I was eight, when my mother took
me to New York, because I had a scholarship to the Paulist Choir
School, a Roman Catholic school. In 1920, 1 entered the choir school at
the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, because it was closer to my reli-
gion. I was a famous boy soprano in town, and won various prizes for
my singing. At St. John, there were about forty students in all, and we
had prayers, athletics, and regular school subjects, with very good
teachers. The background there was beautiful and cultural, and we

123

THE PLAYER: BURGESS MEREDITH

were all proud of the cathedral. On Sundays, we sang in the cathedral,
which was rather difficult, because the services were often long, and
some of the choir boys would faint. The choir music was lovely. I
especially liked the Palestrina and Bach things. When I was a student
at St. John and this happened to me at other schools, too the teach-
ers took a liking to me. When I was about ten, I played the title role in
a Paulist School production of "Peter Pan," and got the feeling some-
how that I was very good in it. My teachers would speak of it in later
years. I had the ability to take on a part quickly. I saw my first play
"Cyrano de Bergerac," with Walter Hampden when one of the teach-
ers at St. John took some of the boys to a matinee performance. I was
fifteen at the time. I remember the strength and power of Hampden's
performance. He had one of those big, resonant voices, almost nasal,
and utterly magnificent. The nose, the duelling, the balcony scene it
was all very glamorous and moving. Mostly, though, I was influenced
by my teachers. The years at the school were a good time for me. My
sister was married by then and was living near New York, with her hus-
band, and I was allowed to go out with them. In 1923, when I was
fifteen, I started attending the Hoosac School, in Hoosick, New York.
It, too, was a church school, but it didn't have much in the way of sing-
ing or dramatics. I was head prefect at one time, though I was a spo-
radic student without much drive. I was very bad at mathematics. I al-
ways thought I would be a writer, and I wrote short stories and poems
for the school magazine, of which I was editor in my final year. My
sister kept all the old magazines for years. One of the great non-
tragedies of our lives was a fire she had in her house in which all the old
magazines were burned up. At Hoosac, too, the teachers liked me. The
headmaster recommended me for Aniherst College, and I went there.
I didn't like Amherst, and stayed there only four months. I was ap-
palled by the social snobbery.

From Amherst, I went to Stamford, where my mother was staying
with her sister, and I got a job on the Stamford Advocate. I thought it
was a good and romantic thing to be a newspaperman. I wrote obitu-
aries and covered Darien for a few months and then decided it was
not so good and not so romantic. Then, when I was eighteen, I went
to live with my sister, in East Orange, while I looked for a job in New
York. After that came a whole series of experiments, of the kind that
everybody goes through working as a runner on Wall Street, selling

124

BURGESS MEREDITH

neckties at Macy's, a six-week trip to South America on a freighter in a
brass-polishing job. By then, I'd decided that I wanted to be an actor.
I ran across an old piano teacher from the choir-school days, who sug-
gested that I try out for an apprentice job with Eva Le Gallienne's
Civic Repertory Theatre, on West Fourteenth Street, so I went down
there, asked for an appointment with Miss Le Gallienne, and got it.
Right away. She didn't talk with me more than fifteen minutes, and
she said, "Why do you want to be in the theatre? There's no money
connected with it, and we have a long waiting list." But she took me
on. The moment I walked in there, it all felt comfortable and right.
It was just an old, musty, broken-down building, with the dressing
rooms tacked on at the back, and she was running it as a one-woman
enterprise, but it was theatre, and full of atmosphere. Many famous
people were there, including John Garfield, Jacob Ben-Ami, Alia
Nazimova, J. Edward Bromberg, Howard da Silva, Paula Strasberg,
and Ria Mooney, who was in charge of the apprentices and is now a
producer and an actress with the Abbey Theatre, in Dublin. For two
years, I was at the Civic Rep as an apprentice without pay. My sister
supported me in those years, and by the spring of 1930 I was paid
twenty dollars a week. I received lessons in fencing, dancing, and
improvisation, and my constant association with a good repertory
company gave me a kind of training that is pretty special in this
country. I'm not a fellow who can concentrate greatly, and never have
been, but I felt immediately that I could make a go of acting. I en-
joyed it. I didn't have many doubts. The main source of stimulation at
the Civic Rep was Le Gallienne. She was a leader, and she was glamor-
ous and talented and full of idealism. We were then on the threshold
of a decade of idealism, and it all seemed so right to me. Le Gallienne
was a very precise director, as she is today. Her fight was a fight on the
side of the angels. It was a very exciting thing for me. We played every
night except Sunday, and we had a new play every four weeks. I felt
I was a part of a living organism. My first speaking part was that of
Peter, the servant to Juliet's nurse, in "Romeo and Juliet." Le Gal-
lienne played Juliet, and was very famous in the role. She was only
thirty-one at the time. She believed in the classics and exposed you to
them. We did a lot of the Russian things, especially Chekhov. She was
always encouraging and helpful and kind, and she had humor. I re-
member that she charged a two-twenty top for tickets, and never took

125

THE PLAYER: BURGESS MEREDITH

anything for herself. The Civic Rep embodied an ideal of hers. There's
never been anything like it since.

In the summer of 1932, I played a season of stock. I was with three
different companies but always in the same part Marchbanks in
Shaw's "Candida/' I played it in Mount Kisco and Ivoryton, and then,
with Pauline Lord and Tom Powers, in Philadelphia, where first-
string critics reviewed it. The critics praised me, extravagantly, and that
kind of lit the fuse. I began to feel I wanted to move on. I had an
urge to move uptown. Early in 1933, I left the Civic Rep. I gave my
notice in the middle of the run of "Alice in Wonderland," in which
I played the Duck and the Dormouse and Tweedle-Dee, and I went
into a walk-on part Crooked Finger Jack in Bertolt Brecht's and Kurt
Weill's "The Threepenny Opera," then trying out in Philadelphia.
"The Threepenny Opera" lasted twelve performances on Broadway,
and I didn't get to play in it there at all, because while we were still
in Philadelphia I was offered the lead the role of Red Barry in
Albert Bein's "Little OF Boy," which was about the horrors of life in
a reform school, and I took it, commuting from Philadelphia to re-
hearsals in New York until I got my release from "The Threepenny
Opera." The play also lasted for twelve performances on Broadway,
but I made all there was to be made in the way of reputation out of it.
O. O. Mclntyre called me "the most thrilling young actor of his day,"
and Stark Young wrote that my performance was "as near perfection as
could be imagined."

I wasn't surprised to be playing leads so soon after starting in the
theatre, because I could get right into a part, just as I had done as
a boy at school. And I had had good training at the Civic Rep.
As Marchbanks in "Candida," I probably had a kind of vitality
and realism that were just beginning to come into the theatre.
Looking back, I remember that the words used about me were "real-
istic" and "sensitive." What I did was to believe absolutely in the cir-
cumstances I found myself in onstage, so that the play was an actual
experience for me and the emotions were real to me. We didn't have
Methodology at that time, but later on I sought it. In 1937, after I had
starred in "Winterset," I studied with Benno Schneider, who gave les-
sons much like the ones given at the Actors' Studio now teaching im-
provisation, memory of emotions, intention, being able to verbalize
what you do, so that you can put your finger on it instead of leaving it

126

BURGESS MEREDITH

to God. Sooner or later, especially if you're in a long run, you have to
find a way of putting your finger on what you do. The interesting thing
I discovered with Schneider is that emotions on the stage come from
your head, and that you have to bring them from there. When I see
young actors dragging emotion up from their middles, I try to tell
them it's a mistake.

Immediately after "Little OF Boy/' I was offered several parts. Then
and later, I made some dubious choices too many of them. I had my
choice between the lead in "She Loves Me Not" and the lead in "To-
bacco Road," and I chose the former. It was a farce comedy by Howard
Lindsay, and I had a very gay part. The play was a smash hit, and it
opened new horizons for me. I realized I was arriving. You could tell
that people recognized me, on the street, in restaurants. I was both glad
and worried. I began to wonder whether I was making the right choices
for my own development as an actor. My mother died during re-
hearsals of "She Loves Me Not," and that made it an unhappy time.
My father saw the play and liked it. I had been living in a one-room
cold-water flat over a plumbing shop on Hudson Street, and now I
moved into a two-bedroom apartment on East Sixty-seventh Street, and
hired a butler. I didn't have any trouble at all adjusting to the but-
ler. If you have a streak of laziness in you, you know what you want
done by a butler. It got complicated a bit later on, though, when I had
two butlers. Things piled up rather fast. I played in "She Loves
Me Not" for a year in 1933 and 1934 and simultaneously I was
doing a soap opera on radio, in which I played a character named Red
Davis, whose name was later changed to Pepper Young. In 1934,
Guthrie McClintic, who was always interested in the new young actors,
had me come up to his office and said he hoped to have a part for me
someday. The next year, he asked me to play a small part in a revival of
"The Barretts of Wimpole Street," starring his wife, Katharine Cornell.
I enjoyed working with them. She was always very warm, very protec-
tive, very maternal. If McClintic yelled at me, she'd find some way of
touching my arm, to give me reassurance. I found McClintic an
extraordinarily effective director. He was a great raconteur, and dur-
ing rehearsals he'd spend half the time telling you stories, to get you
into the spirit of the theatre, of the play, of your part. Then he would
get these flashes for the high points of the play, and act them out for
you. He did it in a kind of broad caricature, so that you wouldn't

127

THE PLAYER: BURGESS MEREDITH

imitate him but would see just what it was that he wanted you to
do. He was not a man who went into theory. He loved the theatre and
felt a tremendous awe of it, and somehow he transmitted it all to you
in a way that worked for you. After "The Barretts of Wimpole Street,"
I worked with Katharine Cornell and McClintic again, in John Van
Druten's play "Flowers of the Forest." In fact, I was associated with
McClintic for several years, and also in "Winterset," "High Tor," and
"The Star-Wagon" with Maxwell Anderson and Jo Mielziner. After
doing "Winterset" on the stage, I went out to Hollywood, for the first
time, to act in the movie version. Hollywood has always proved very
difficult for me to function in.

In 1932, between seasons at the Civic Rep, I got married for the first
time to Helen Derby Berrien, a girl from Montclair, New Jersey.
My second wife was the actress Margaret Perry, the daughter of An-
toinette Perry, after whom the theatre award is named. We were mar-
ried during the run of "Winterset." She was very charming, but that
marriage didn't last, either, and we were divorced in 1938. I had five
years of bachelorhood during the Second World War, when I was
called into the Army Air Forces, where I was assigned to the Air
Transport Command but was given time to make orientation films,
like "Welcome to Britain" and "Salute to France/ 1 My next wife was
Paulette Goddard. I'm married now to Kaja Sundsten, a former
dancer, and we have two children Jonathan, born in 1951, and Tala,
born the following year. They're lovely kids. We live near Suffern, in
a house I built. My wife has a Cessna 182 Sky lane, which she
keeps at the Teterboro Airport and Spring Valley Airpark, and she
instructs student pilots in instrument flying. When I'm working in a
play in Chicago or Philadelphia, and have to go to Idlewild to catch
a big plane, she flies me around. It makes it handy. Once, she flew me
to Westhampton, left me at the theatre, and then told some people
she had to beat it back home because she had a turkey in the oven.

In 1938, I embarked on a program of doing a lot of different things,
including being acting president of Actors' Equity, which someone
should have been but not I. I was fascinated then by the talents of
Orson Welles I still am and I joined him in his production of
"Five Kings," based on "Henry IV," Parts I and II and "Henry V."
We thought we'd combine our immortal geniuses, but we shared colos-
sal disaster instead. Our plans didn't come off. Neither Orson nor I

128

BURGESS MEREDITH

was the kind of person who could organize things. I played Henry as
Prince and King, and he played Falstaff, but we closed out of
town and "Five Kings" never got to New York. I've never known
anybody I could have more fun with than Orson. At the time, I was
searching for something. I wasn't disciplined. And Orson was so re-
markable and refreshing, and had done things with such imagination,
like the modern-dress "Julius Caesar" and the all-colored "Macbeth."
He was a child of the theatre and was doing new, great things. Those
were the days of turning away from the status quo, of finding new
forms that seemed to be an end in themselves. I felt myself retreating
from the position of conservatism I had settled into with McClintic
and Anderson. I was going off with people who felt that acting wasn't
important that what was important was saving the world. The New
Deal was so exciting, and there were so many causes to take up and
so many committees to be on. There was nothing like the Actors'
Studio in those days. Today the actor is working at his craft and isn't
ashamed to say that he likes it and that the theatre is a fine thing in
itself. Still, in everything I did from that point on, I was learning, and
I have never stopped being interested in new forms. The only thing I
regret is never having had an opportunity to be exposed to the classic
theatre, which I think is sort of right for my nature poetic, if you like.
There was no place I could go for it. I had success fall into my lap
when I was twenty-four, and as I look back I feel some sorrow that I
didn't go to the Old Vic for classical training. Today there are about
ten good British actors for every good one we have here. Great actors
get that way by using their muscles on the classics.

In April, 1942, 1 was granted a leave by the Air Forces to play March-
banks in a benefit revival of "Candida," by the American Theatre
Wing War Service with Katharine Cornell and Dudley Digges. Richard
Maney called it one of the ten great productions of all time. In March,
1940, just before going into the Army, I had played in "Liliom," with
Ingrid Bergman and Elia Kazan, and in 1944 I was placed on inactive
status to play Ernie Pyle in the movie about him, "The Story of G.I.
Joe." Also before entering the service, I'd been in the film of John
Steinbeck's novel "Of Mice and Men," and later, with Paulette God-
dard, I spent three years in Hollywood another of my regrets. I
shouldn't have gone there and tried to beat that racket, though I was
in quite a few movies, including "The Diary of a Chambermaid/'

129

THE PLAYER: BURGESS MEREDITH

which I wrote and co-produced. Those of us who came up in the
middle thirties were stirred with a pretty wild spoon. We either fell
by the wayside or continued up. Elia Kazan went to the top and
stayed there. Jose Ferrer took a longer time getting started, but he
got there. My story is a little more hair-raising, because it goes up and
down. You have to use your creative abilities; otherwise, they swell
up on you and explode. At least a modicum of your talent must be
used. When you do things you don't believe in and don't feel, they
leave a sour taste in your mouth. If you want to see what I mean, go
out to Hollywood and look at some of the people there. What hap-
pened to Orson in Hollywood was a tragedy; he attacked Hearst, and
anyone who attacked Hearst was bound to be pursued. They got
Chaplin, too, in a way. But the real reason for what happened to
Welles and Chaplin in Hollywood is that strong individual talent is
somehow frowned on there.

I still enjoy trying different things, just as I did when I was with
Orson. I am fascinated by the problems of directing. While I was
playing in "Major Barbara," in 1957, 1 started working on plans for the
production of "Ulysses in Nighttown," with Zero Mostel. It's always the
style of a thing that intrigues me. ANTA turned the project down,
saying the play was too off-color, but Barry Hyams, Oliver Saylor,
Marjorie Barkentin, and a few other private individuals got thirteen
thousand dollars together for the production. It was great fun, and it
was all done with our bare hands. When we were trying to think who
could play the role of Leopold Bloom, we knew it had to be somebody
very special. I'd always been an admirer of Zero's, and when I asked
him to play Bloom he was touched. He grasped the part almost im-
mediately. He didn't have to go very far to find it. He seemed to know
just what the man was. He is charmed by the characters he plays, and
he knows them sympathetically, and he approached the part in a way
that made it really bigger than life. His performance was as impor-
tant as my own contribution, as director, but I wouldn't have traded
places with him. We had four weeks' rehearsal, and our group was free
of any difficult personalities, which is no unimportant thing. And
Zero was a strong leader. It was one of those happy groups. We played
in New York for a year and a half, and in the Arts Theatre in London
and the Theatre Sarah-Bernhardt in Paris, and we won prizes for the
play all over the world.

ISO

BURGESS MEREDITH

I enjoy directing, but I still like to act when I feel it's called for.
I find, however, that I'm more involved when I'm thinking of a whole
production than when I'm just concentrating on what I'm doing with
the inside of a character. I've experienced marvellous happiness three
or four times as an actor in the revival of "Candida," for one, when
I felt I absolutely and finally got Marchbanks. Before that, I'd always
felt that my parts weren't successful that I didn't have the right
motivation or the right tensions, or else that something was off. Finally,
as Marchbanks with Cornell, I was satisfied with my performance.
Curiously, I felt the same way about Edmund Wilson's play "The
Little Blue Light," which I did in 1951, with Melvyn Douglas and
Martin Gabel, and in which I played Gandersheim, a kind of homo-
sexual, neo-Fascist Christ image. I also enjoyed playing in "The Tea-
house of the August Moon/' when I took the part of Sakini for the
road. And I was happy in the 1946 production of "The Playboy of the
Western World," directed by Guthrie McClintic, when Maureen Staple-
ton stepped up into the lead at the end of the run and played opposite
me. But whether a play comes or goes is not so important to me when
it's set alongside a child or a woman I love, or friends, or the life that I
lead in general.

131

EILEEN HECKART

I don't feel the need to be a star. I can walk freely
through a supermarket without being stopped for my
autograph. Thafs just fine.

I was born on March 29, 1919, in Columbus, Ohio. My parents were
divorced when I was two. My father died when I was about eleven.
Five or six years later, my mother married a businessman named Van
H. Purcell; I have a brother and two half sisters.

My mother loved movies. She would go to two double-feature movies
a day when I was in high school. Before I could walk, she would take
me with her. I cut my teeth on Joan Crawford movies. Joan Crawford
was always so rich, so beautiful, so lavishly dressed, and she dragged
a mink stole better than anyone else. I made up my mind when I was
eight that I was going to become an actress. I was attending Girl
Scout camp at the time, and one of the Scout leaders told me I had
talent. Once, I played in a camp play. I don't remember a thing about
it except that the audience laughed. The audience enjoyed me. I
smelled blood. That start was enough to keep me going for the rest
of my life. We were always poor. I had to work from high school
on. By the time I entered Ohio State University, I belonged to five
different dramatic societies in Columbus. I decided almost at the

132

EILEEN HECKART

start to be a character actress or a comedienne. I knew I had to be some
kind of actress, and since I wasn't beautiful, I knew I could never
expect to become a leading lady. But I knew with everything in me
that I could act. It took me five years to get through college. I worked
my way through by selling merchandise in Lazarus, a Columbus
department store. They put me in what was called the hot-items sec-
tion. They had a special sale on hot items every day. I was good at
selling very fast, very persuasive, very sure of myself. Even now,
when I go shopping I want to grab the sales slip out of the sales
clerk's hand and make it out myself. I gave makeup demonstrations
for Max Factor cosmetics, and meanwhile I did commercials for local
radio stations and, eventually, did drama in radio. I booked fashion
shows into sorority houses and distributed samples of Philip Morris
cigarettes to the other kids. In college, I majored in English and
speech, and I was a very average student. I didn't have time to study.
I had to travel eight miles by streetcar to get to the campus. But I
wanted that degree; I wanted to make good. When your family
doesn't have money, you try to prepare yourself to do anything. I
knew from the beginning that in acting so many start out and so
few succeed. I wanted a cushion. The Max Factor people wanted me
to take a job after graduation demonstrating and selling cosmetics
in Hollywood or on the road. Lazarus wanted me to represent them
as a buyer in books or candy. I turned both their offers down. Getting
through college was a hardship, but I was determined to graduate. I felt
that if I had that degree I could get any kind of job I wanted. I got by
in my studies, and I kept up with all the college dramatics. In 1943,
after graduation, I married a former classmate, John Harrison Yankee,
Jr., who was in the Navy, stationed in Jacksonville, Florida. He's now
an insurance broker. We have three little boys, all under ten, and
we live in New Canaan. My family life is important to me. I love
my three little boys. Recently, I joined the Roman Catholic Church
as a convert, by my own choice. Our boys are being raised as
Catholics. I couldn't devote my life to keeping house. I don't have
that much creativity in the kitchen. Cooking bores me. When I'm
onstage, playing a character other than myself, I feel I'm creating. I
enjoy it. I go out there to play seriously play to win. I loathe ama-
teurs. It gives me chills to think of myself as part of an amateur actors'
suburban group, laughing and gossiping. Even when I play bridge, I

133

THE PLAYER: EILEEN HECKART

play to win. Once, on location for "Heller in Pink Tights," I stayed
up four nights in a row playing bridge, because I was determined to
improve my game. I played seriously. I wouldn't be acting if I weren't
acting seriously.

Ten years ago, when I saw movie or stage stars, I'd think how won-
derful to have your name in lights, your picture in front of the
theatre. Now I'm grateful for my freedom as a character actress, or
non-star. In "A Family Affair," the producers said that the show would
be thrown out of focus if my name didn't appear above the title, with
Shelley Berman's. I agreed with them, but I am still a character ac-
tress. The billing just meant that the two leads were equally im-
portant in the show. A star has to watch herself every second. When
she shows herself to the public, she has to be sure the public sees her
as a nice human being. As the star of a show, furthermore, you have
to carry the entire responsibility for the show, and every other member
of the cast is dependent on you. Being what I am, I have the freedom to
accept any role that appeals to me. And my little boys need me to be
what I am. I want them to become good citizens. I can spend my
time with them, instead of doing all the things a star has to do to keep
herself in front of the public all those things that have nothing to
do with acting but that you are obliged to do to keep the public from
forgetting you. Stars have to be seen. They have to go to openings of
plays that they care nothing about. They have to appear on television
panel shows. They have to keep themselves in demand in demand by
all those people somewhere in Kansas who can see them only in movies
and on television. They have to do all that extra work, while I'm
lounging around in blue jeans with my three little boys.

At college, my first lead was in "Stage Door," by George S. Kaufman
and Edna Ferber. I played the lead in George Brewer's and Bertram
Block's "Dark Victory," and then in one play after another, for three
years. In school, you play everything and believe you're at your best.
But New York is different. I came to New York in 1942, just before
my future husband went into the Navy. After making the rounds of
producers' offices, I auditioned for the Blackfriars' Guild, a Catholic
dramatic group, and I did three shows for them. In 1946, I began
studying at the American Theatre Wing. The Blackfriars were ama-
teurs. I wasn't satisfied. I kept wandering into one dead end after an-
other. It was tough. You do need something in this business to lean

134

EILEEN HECKART

on, something to help you help yourself and accept yourself. All o us
in this business know each other so well, and yet it's still possible to
get hurt, and get hurt often. The meek may inherit the earth, but the
strong survive in the theatre. Acting is not entirely inborn. Only to a
certain degree is it inborn. Anyone can become a good technician, be-
come proficient, and have a fairly good life in the theatre. The dif-
ference between anyone and a great actor is made up of those moments
in the life of some actors in which they kindle a spark something
that makes a moment so real that what they are doing becomes great
acting. Marlon Brando will go down in acting history for having had
several such moments. Other actors I've watched and admired have
had those moments Orson Welles in "The Third Man," for instance,
and Shirley Booth in "Come Back, Little Sheba." Kim Stanley is the
best young contemporary actress I've ever seen. When she doesn't get
anything onstage from the other actors, she can be almost as great as
when she does. And some nights during the run of "Picnic," when
others did give to her, she became even better. Watching her operate
is an experience I'll never forget. In my roles, unless the situation is a
blatantly obvious one I can't tell how I come across. The very friction
with other actors brings some actors alive. Actors work on each other's
emotions. They know each other, and the better they know each other,
the more they have to work on. It wasn't until I got the role of the
schoolteacher in "Picnic" that I felt I had got my first big break. Ac-
tually, I played the part for eight months before I felt that I really
understood it and gave a good performance. I didn't know what I was
doing. I didn't think I was any good. I was unhappy. I kept telling
myself to respect myself in the part. It seemed to me that others in the
cast didn't like what I was doing. I was in a hit, but the kicks were
fewer than they should have been. I had read four times for the part
before the director, Joshua Logan, finally said yes to me. I was un-
known, and he may have thought I couldn't sustain a performance.
Logan kept trying to tell me I was having my first success I was a
pro; I couldn't act for a kind of pleasure only; I had to go out there
and win. I received two awards for my performance in "Picnic," but
the main thing I learned from it was not to rip myself apart over a
role. I'm not a natural-born comedienne, like Lucille Ball or Vicki
Cummings. I don't have that kind of timing or sense of comedy. My
comedy comes from a situation. But I know how to tune in to an audi-

135

THE PLAYER: EILEEN HECKART

ence. These days, I know I can sustain a performance, no matter what
kind of house we have full or small. In 'Invitation to a March," a
play I did in 1960, I'd get a hand just for the cross going from one
side of the stage to the other in tight purple slacks. Audiences vary.
Timing comes from them, not from you. Any time you press or reach
for an audience, you lose it.

Every role I've ever played has been somewhat outside me and my
life with my husband and little boys. If feeling is real, it's no longer
acting. I was strongly affected in myself by only one part the mother
of a child who is murdered, in the Broadway production of "The Bad
Seed." I was happy to leave that play; it made me feel sick. There are
only a few moments here and there in my acting when I am close to
my own personality. But there is a reality I try to establish in my
relationships with the other actors in a play. In "Invitation to a
March," I was confused during the rehearsals and didn't hear half
of what was being said on the stage. I had a talk with the young man
who played my son, and we tried to find some way of making our
relationship more real, in order to strengthen the performance. Every
actor tries to do this. The best Broadway work I've done was as
Lottie Lacey in "The Dark at the Top of the Stairs." But the part
was beautifully written, and allowed for a full characterization. That
helped. And Elia Kazan, the director, had four ideas for me for every
one I had. I usually cross out the author's stage directions. Authors
should write the words and leave the rest to us. However, three
years ago, I went out to California to do "Mother Courage" for John
Houseman's Theatre Group, at U.C.L.A., because I wanted to do
Brecht. The material is so big and specific. The part of Mother
Courage should be played by a European. I'm too American. But I
had a rapport with that woman and with her strength. I had a lot to
give to that role, and I've never worked harder. Brecht says to cut
off all emotion in a performance, and to Method actors that's
news. We're always trying to turn on emotion and to deal with it on-
stage. When Brecht confronts Mother Courage with her dead son, he
tells you to drain yourself of all feeling and expression. I worked on
that scene through three bad performances, but for the last four per-
formances the scene, the whole play worked. To play Mother Courage
emotionlessly and to feel those audiences responding in a way I'd
never before experienced was unforgettable. Those four performances
were the most gratifying of my life.

136

EILEEN HECKART

When I get a new script, I begin by spending days reading and re-
reading it and thinking about it. I have no idea, at first, how to play
the part. Some actors begin with nothing and gradually build a role.
I would rather make a decision after a fifth reading and have it be bad
than remain uncertain. I make notations in the script of how I am
going to act as the director makes his suggestions to me during re-
hearsals. I write it all down. Then I have a mental picture of what
I'm going to do. But I can't set it until we start the out-of-town try-
outs. My greatest satisfaction in acting is that I am able to give of
myself. It's difficult, but I like it. And because I like it, it becomes an
indulgence. The money is attractive, too. It wasn't at first, but now I
don't turn up my nose at money. Also, it takes years of involvement
to learn just a little bit about acting, and I'm happy about having
learned something. These days, a lot of actors go in for psychoanalysis,
because they think it will make them understand their own feelings
better and thus help them become better actors. Actors work on emo-
tion all the time. But actors who think psychoanalysis will make them
better actors are misguided. They ought to take a look at Garbo. She
gives of herself and makes believe simultaneously, compelling the
audience to forget the dishes in the sink. An actress is out in the
world. The very aliveness of acting makes it attractive to me. I'll never
retire.

137

ROBERT SHAW

So many people in the theatre don't like us to get
down to the bones of a thing. It's been such a fight
for the freedom to do it.

I was born on August 9, 1927, in Westhoughton, Lancashire, in the
North of England the heart of the cotton-mill country. My father,
Dr. Thomas Shaw, a general practitioner, killed himself during the
Second World War, when I was twelve. My mother is a remarkable
woman, extraordinarily independent. She was born in Piggs ]Peak, in
Swaziland, South Africa, and she met my father while she was a nurse
at the Truro Hospital, in Cornwall. She returned to Swaziland in
1953, and now teaches reading and writing to white children in a small
country school there. I'm the eldest of five children. Elizabeth, two
years younger than I am, is married to an English professor at Franklin
and Marshall College, in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and has four chil-
dren; Joanna, four years younger than I am, also lives in Lancaster,
and is married to a man who raises money for the college; Alexander,
born in 1932, lives in London, studying pathology, and is married and
has two children; and Wendy, the youngest, born in 1938, is married to

138

ROBERT SHAW

a Dutchman, a purser on the Queen Mary, and they have two children.
I have four daughters by my marriage, in 1952, to the actress
Jennifer Burke. My brother and one of my sisters went to Cambridge,
and another sister went to Oxford. After the war, my mother said
to us, "All you children are so clever that I'm going to do some-
thing, too," and she went off to one of those training centers for people
back from the war, and became qualified to teach. My father was un-
usually talented in many ways. In his younger days, he was a famous
Rugby football player and played Rugby football in the trials for
England, and also was an amateur boxing champion. He was decorated
in the First World War. I am a novelist as well as an actor, and I wrote
a bit about this episode in my second novel, "The Sun Doctor." (My
first novel was "The Hiding Place.") The day my father killed himself,
he told my mother, "I'm going to kill myself." My mother said, "Don't
do it in front of the children." My mother says to this day that he
didn't mean to kill himself that he had two bottles labelled "Scotch,"
one containing poison, and took a drink from the wrong bottle. I was
in boarding school at the time the Truro School, in Cornwall, about
a hundred miles from where we then lived, in Keinton Mandeville, in
Somerset. The headmaster told me that my father had killed himself,
and that he was driving up there and I could come or stay in school.
I said I'd stay in school. My father's drinking had been an enormous
strain on the family. In the English middle-class milieu we were
ostensibly a part of, his drinking was something to be ashamed of.
I've spoken with old aunts who were too ashamed to know anything
about it. It must have had its effect on me. Even now, I often dream
that my father is still alive.

When I was six, my father moved us to Stromness, a small town in
the Orkney Islands, north of Scotland. It was a wonderful place for
children. It was a tough, simple life. My father was terribly well liked.
He was a courageous man, and would go off by boat to visit his
patients, even in the stormiest weather. He is still spoken of with great
affection in the islands. When I was ten, my mother packed up and
took us to Cornwall, where she had lived as a girl. My father moved to
Somerset, where he bought the house that Henry Irving was born in.
After a while, we joined him in that house, where he was to die. I
started going to boarding school when I was eleven, and continued
there until I was eighteen. I loved school. I was good at Rugby and I

139

THE PLAYER: ROBERT SHAW

was good at running. In fact, I was a very good all-around athlete, and
that always makes things easy for you in an English public school. I
was good in classes, too, but I was terribly lazy. I'd work in spurts. I
was made head prefect when 1 was sixteen, and for eighteen months
of bliss I had a study of my own, with a wireless. I did a lot of acting
in school. I had a great competitive instinct; I was always going on the
stage to prove that I was the best actor. I was competitive in general.
I never resented it if anybody else was praised. I just wanted what was
due me. The most dead-giveaway story about me has to do with some-
thing that happened when I was thirteen. We were having Under-
Fourteen Sports Day at school I said to the other boys beforehand,
"I'm going to win the hundred-yard dash/' Another boy said that I'd
be second, and that a boy named Thomas was going to win. We came
to Sports Day, and I won the dash easily and Thomas was second. I
said to the boys, "I told you I was going to win it." They seemed to
begrudge me the victory. That made me feel resentful. All I wanted
was my due. From the beginning, I felt that way strongly about act-
ing. When I was twelve, I won the dramatic prize at school for playing
Richard the Lion-Hearted in a one-act play. Everybody said I was the
only one who could be heard. My name was put on a scroll, and there
was a lot of applause. For me, at school, and for a long time after
that, acting was a matter of showing off. But it wasn't all that simple,
because I always disliked people who didn't do it well. These days,
I quite often have a great sense of pleasure when I can feel that I am
actually communicating something onstage. Truro was a very theatri-
cal school. Every dormitory did a one-act play each term. In school
plays, when I was fourteen I played Lady Macbeth, and at fifteen I
played Mark Antony in "Julius Caesar." I was the leading lady in
these dramatic-society plays for two years; once, I had to play the part
of the blond Russian vamp in "Idiot's Delight."

I had one schoolmaster who got me to read all sorts- of things
pretty well everything, including all the classic novels. He was just
one of those bits of luck one has in one's life. His name is Cyril
Wilkes, and I still see him from time to time. He must have been
lonely, and that was his life teaching boys and helping them. He
used to take three or four of us to see plays in London. The first real
play I ever saw, in the autumn of 1944, was "Hamlet," with John
Gielgud, in a repertory production put on at the Haymarket.

140

ROBERT SHAW

Mr. Wilkes took some of us to London during a school holiday.
We saw Gielgud's "Hamlet" at a matinee. That evening, we saw
Margaret Leighton and Ralph Richardson in "Peer Gynt," and the
next day we saw Laurence Olivier in "Richard III" at a matinee,
and Alastair Sim in the James Bridie play "It Depends What
You Mean" that evening. The third day, we saw Laurence Olivier
in the film "Henry V" in the morning, and in the evening we
saw John Gielgud again, in "Love for Love." I was quite dazzled.
Gielgud made an extraordinary impression on me. I can see him
now as he looked in "Hamlet" that long, angular body in the black
costume. That first night, I went back to the hotel room, picked up
"Hamlet," and read it from beginning to end. Mr. Wilkes taught
French and directed all the school plays. He always had time to talk
to the boys. We used to sit in his room until two or three in the morn-
ing talking about books and politics. Mr. Wilkes was one of those
English liberals of the thirties a member of the Left Book Club, who
had probably thought about going to fight Fascism in Spain but then
hadn't done it. He was that kind of teacher. He directed me in the
school plays, but he told me not to try to become a professional actor.
He said that I had the wrong temperament for it that I was too rebel-
lious and wanted my own way too much. Later on, I found out that it
was his policy to say that to everybody, on the theory that if you're set
on doing a thing, you'll go ahead and do it anyway.

Somehow I got through all my exams, and in 1945 I received a
scholarship to Cambridge. To fill in the time between Christmas, when
I left school, and the start of the university year, in October, I took a
job teaching at Glenhow, a prep school, in Saltburn, Yorkshire. I was
particularly good at teaching cricket and Rugby, but I taught regular
subjects besides English, French, arithmetic. I still had to take a
special Latin exam in order to qualify for Cambridge. Suddenly, the
prospect of sitting down to study Latin appalled me. Also, I was rather
broke then, and if you wanted to get a bigger grant at Cambridge, you
had to agree to stay on and teach for a year at Cambridge, and I didn't
want to do that. It seemed to me a good idea to go on to an acting
school, so I wrote to the principal of the Royal Academy of Dramatic
Art and asked for an audition. When I read for him, he told me that I
wasn't talented enough for a scholarship but that I was good enough
to get in. I thought I was really good. I knew I could hold an audi-

141

THE PLAYER: ROBERT SHAW

ence. For me, acting was a pleasurable thing the most pleasurable
thing I knew except scoring in a football match. It was much the same
kind of thing not quite the same, though. It gave me the same feel-
ing I used to get walking back up the field after scoring a try, with
everybody clapping. What always disturbed me about acting was that
you could never prove exactly what you had done, while if you scored
a try, there was no doubt about it. I went to the R.A.D.A. for two
years from 1946 to 1948. I didn't do at all well my first year. The
teaching was appalling, but one gradually learned from the older
actors there; they were wonderful. I couldn't have found a better
toughening-up school. If you weren't liked, you only got two-line
parts in the students' plays. Toward the end of my last year there, I
won a competition for the best actor of the afternoon by playing Lord
Byron in "Bitter Harvest" before an audience of agents and managers,
and from then on I got good parts in a lot of plays. In those days, I
was completely without nerves. I never worried about acting.

In 1948, I was asked to go to Stratford, and I went. I stayed for two
seasons, at seven pounds a week the first season and nine the next. I
had great energy then, and great attack. I was never one of those
actors who don't understand the text. Something that used to annoy
me at Stratford was the way actors didn't understand what they were
saying. They used to tell me, "I just say the lines." I had great intel-
lectual arrogance. I had no humility then at all. For one thing, I used
to try to prove how masculine I was. I would stand in certain ways
and attack things very vigorously. In my early years of acting, there
was often no relation between what the author had written and what I
did. When you're young, you can get away with things like that. You're
attractive, and you don't know you're doing it, and you go along on
enthusiasm. I was far too outspoken in those days. I had no social
graces. If I didn't think I was in a good position onstage, I would say
so. In my first season at Stratford, I was playing a tiny, tiny part
the Duke of Burgundy in "King Lear." I was supposed to stand in a
tiny corner. John Gielgud was directing, and playing Lear, and I said
to him, in front of fifty or sixty people, "I can't possibly give any idea
of the majesty of the Duke of Burgundy with my back to the audi-
ence/' He was so astonished! At the end of the season, he sent for me
and said, "I do admire you and think you've got a lot of ability, and
I'd like to help you, but you make me so nervous." I suppose we were

142

ROBERT SHAW

poles apart in temperament. While I was at Stratford, I went to Lon-
don to see "The Lady's Not for Burning" when Gielgud was playing
in it and was also directing at Stratford. After the play, we drove back
to Stratford together. On the way, I told him that I didn't like the
play that I had liked his performance very much but not the play. I
said, "That's no way to write plays, and besides a lot of the writing is
imitative," and I quoted lines from W. H. Auden, among others, to
prove it. I knew quite a bit about poetry, and used to write poetry
myself in those days. I was able to substantiate everything I said. I
really hated that play, and told him so. It was pretentious, I said. The
images were never illuminating. There was no discipline in the writ-
ing. There was no economy in the writing. The characters were one-
dimensional. It was all sort of a word game. But the play had dazzling
costumes, so the public loved it. I think Gielgud was impressed, but
wary of me.

I was so anxious to prove that I was the most talented young actor
in the company. I thought I was terribly well read. Most of the others
at Stratford didn't seem to know anything except theatre. They
seemed to me to be so effete, so physically run down. I was quite in-
tolerant of them. I used to be terribly critical of the tendency of so
many of the actors to be forever listening to their own voices all of
them, including Gielgud, Diana Wynyard, Peggy Ashcroft. I'd get
terribly angry about the way the middle ranks were chosen for their
usefulness to the star. It was all so stratified. Very often not the best
actor but the most amenable actor would get the job. We had a phrase
for that kind of actor; he was a "good company man/' Of course, it's
now very understandable to me that the director just didn't have the
time to bother about the actor playing a messenger or some such tiny
part. But in those days I said some pretty silly things. Besides that, I
was thoroughly irresponsible onstage. Once, when Alex Davion was
playing a courtier and I was playing a gnome in "A Midsummer
Night's Dream," at Stratford, I tied the wings of one of the other
gnomes to a tree. It was an outrageous thing to do, of course. After-
ward, the actor playing the other gnome said it was a very unprofes-
sional thing to do. He was a mild man, and smaller than I was, and I
admitted that he was right. I always admit a thing like that when it's
pointed out. Nothing frightens me more than a mild man who is right-
eously indignant. I don't mind it so much if I think he's wrong, but I

143

THE PLAYER: ROBERT SHAW

mind it a lot when I know he's right. We were so bored, though. We
thought we should be playing leads. Furthermore, there was an awful
lot of dishonest, ritualistic acting that made me want to do rebellious
things. In Shakespeare, they'd assume personalities, put on voices, and
never grasp the reality of the part at all. In acting Shakespeare, the first
requirement is to be real, to present a human being. Of course, you
have to have a sense of rhythm you have to know how to phrase. But
the English are so concerned with externals. They're so proud of being
able to wear costumes well. I was warned three times at Stratford that
I'd be sacked. Edmund Purdom was sacked. He and I used to sit in the
wings playing chess until it was our turn to go on and open doors, or
something. We were full of frustrations. We took ourselves seriously
as actors, but we felt that the power was in the wrong hands. One of
the older actors we admired and liked very much was Godfrey Tearle,
who died in 1953. He used to understand us. He thought we were
funny. We could make him laugh at us, and somehow that always
seemed to ease the situation.

At Stratford, one night in 1950, Alec Guinness saw me as Conrade,
one of the villains in "Much Ado About Nothing," and he came
around and said, ''My name is Alec Guinness. I would like to compli-
ment you on your performance." He then asked me to join the cast of
his own West End production of "Hamlet," produced in May, 1951.
For my London debut, I played Rosencrantz, at twenty pounds a week.
It was my first play in the West End. The play was a famous, disastrous
flop, but I liked working with Guinness. He and Godfrey Tearle were
the first star actors I felt at ease with. They treated me as an equal. I'm
not somebody who is popular, but I've always been able to have four
or five people around me whom I can trust. I like to be with people
who will tell me the truth as they see it. Now that I know I can be a
writer, I don't care as much about success in the theatre, but I do care
about maintaining my position. Though I have always been very
competitive as an actor, I've never been able to fight a selfish actor or
a calculating actor. Now I've simply resolved that I will never again
work with anyone I don't like. I've come to understand why John
Gielgud surrounds himself with people who are sympathetic to his
ideas.

In my first five years as a professional actor, I didn't utter a line that
wasn't Shakespeare. I learned pretty fast in those days. One learns taste
144

ROBERT SHAW

as one goes along. At first, I forced the charm somewhat. Most actors
tend to play for sympathy from the audience, and I think I did it all
the time, I was selling myself to the audience not so baldly as some
other people but doing it all the same. In some plays, of course, you've
got to sell yourself, because it's up to you to improve on the text. But
gradually, over the years, I learned, just by doing it, how to play parts
as people would behave, instead of jazzing them up. In the long run,
the audience likes it better that way. I always understood it in my
mind, but in the early days I couldn't put it into practice. Eventually,
I began to be able to weld everything together. For example, in Harold
Pinter's "The Caretaker" I played a young man who has had a tragic
experience in a mental hospital and, at one point in the play tells
what happened in the hospital. I could play that scene for sympathy
and get the whole house with me on a certain level, and it took a lot of
honesty to do it the way I should, and often did, do it, which was to tell
about it as simply as possible. I so respect Pinter. I always had an
image of him sitting out in front. I knew how he wanted it played;
theatrical effect was not what Pinter wanted. "The Caretaker" was the
most wearing play I've ever been in, because I wasn't anything like the
character I played. If I dropped my concentration for a second, the
play would fall on the floor. I had to listen so intently, and I had to
restrain myself so not to play for sympathy, that by the end of the per-
formance I would be exhausted.

One advantage that English actors have over Americans is that they
have the opportunity to act much more. Everything I've learned I've
learned by doing. From what I've been able to see of American actors,
I'd say they are much less secure than British actors. I'm sure part of
the reason is economic. There's simply more work to be done in
England. There you can do the equivalent of an Off Broadway play
and do television at the same time, but here the actor is split right
down the middle. If he's lucky enough to have a job acting in New
York, he is faced with the choice of staying where he is or going to
the Coast to do rubbish television. And actors are treated with more
respect in England. Here they seem to be bullied by everybody else.
The stagehands are paid more money than they are in England, and
they tend to push actors around. American actors seem afraid of their
directors afraid they'll be sacked if they argue with directors. If
you're frightened of arguing with your director, you're in a bad way.

145

THE PLAYER: ROBERT SHAW

In England, producers are prepared to run to half-filled houses and
give a play time to build up an audience, but here it seems that costs
make that sort of attitude impossible. George Devine, who runs our
Royal Court Theatre, the equivalent of a leading Off Broadway the-
atre, has said, "We are not here to make money," and he's been
criticized for saying it, but I do think that his idea is sound.

After doing "Hamlet" with Guinness, I joined the Old Vic, at the
invitation of Tyrone Guthrie, who had directed me as the Duke of
Suffolk in "Henry VIII" at Stratford. I played Cassio in "Othello"
and Lysander in "A Midsummer Night's Dream," and toured Europe
and South Africa with the company. I got married in Rhodesia;
my wife was playing a fairy in "A Midsummer Night's Dream,"
a serving maid in "Othello," and a witch in "Macbeth." In those days,
I was sold on Shakespeare. I thought Shakespeare was going to be my
theatrical life, and the following year I returned to Stratford. The best
part I played that season was Edmund in "King Lear." The rest was
frustration, shared with me by Donald Pleasence; we dressed together.
At the end of the season, I wasn't asked back. The next three years
were a bad period. I was really poor. I got bits and pieces to do. I
made my first film, "The Dam Busters," in which I was on the screen
quite a lot but had about eight lines. In June, 1955, I played in the
London production of "Tiger at the Gates" the part of Topman,
who comes on in the beginning and reports on what Helen is doing
in Troy and says "I can tell the sex of a seagull thirty yards off,"
which is a good line to have in any play. It wasn't a success in London,
where we played for eight and a half weeks after taking it on
tour for eight and a half weeks. I wrote two plays dUring "Tiger
at the Gates." I'd written rny first play while I was in Guinness'
"Hamlet" a verse play about an actor and his girl friend. During
those three bad years, I used to borrow money to live on. I never
minded borrowing it, somehow, and people never minded lending it to
me; we all knew it would be repaid. I made a few more films, and in
one, "Hill in Korea," I had quite a nice part, that of a simple country
boy. I've never been in a good movie, though. My parts in films have
never been remotely as good as my parts on the stage. I also did quite a
bit of television work. But I was usually desperate for work. Lying in
bed one day, I went as far as to look through the ads for jobs, and I
applied for one at the H. J. Heinz factory in London putting beans

146

ROBERT SHAW

in cans. I didn't get the job. They said I was too well educated. They
probably thought I'd make trouble. I can remember praying for a job
at one point, though I wasn't religious.

In 1957, in London, I made a television series for C.B.S.-TV called
"The Buccaneers," in which I played the part of the hero, Captain
Dan Tempest. Up to then, I had never earned more than sixteen
hundred pounds a year. For the series, I was offered ten thousand
pounds for eight months' work. Naturally, I took it. After a while, I
began to hate it. 1 enjoyed the swashbuckling. The captain was a sort
of Errol Flynn character, and I'd always admired Flynn in the movies.
But the scripts were so bad, and I couldn't go anywhere in England
without being recognized. They didn't speak to Robert Shaw any
more. They spoke to Captain Dan Tempest. It was slave work. I didn't
write a word while I was doing the series. I'd get up at six to go to the
studio, and I couldn't get home before eight at night. The conscien-
tious actors in television work of this sort learn all their lines at night.
I didn't bother to learn more than the first two lines and the last two
lines; I paraphrased the rest. That was the only way to keep sane. It
was a cheerful series, however. At least, I was gay in it, and laughed a
lot. When in doubt about anything, I'd laugh. I was very good at the
fencing, too. I bought my first car, a yellow-and-black 1933 Rolls-
Royce. That's about all I bought with the money. I was uninterested
in clothes. The week I started filming "The Buccaneers," I had one of
my plays produced at the Arts Theatre. Called "Off the Mainland," it
was one of the plays I'd written during "Tiger at the Gates," and was
based on the Paolo and Francesca story. I played Lazslo Rimini, the
lead, myself. It lasted six weeks. We played to half-empty houses.
Until the play opened, I thought it was marvellous. One of my friends,
Lindsay Anderson, told me that it was bad but that it had flashes of
good writing. He said one has to know what one is trying to say, and
I didn't. I was probably quite hurt by all this. I was making two
hundred and fifty pounds a week filming "The Buccaneers," and I
probably decided to take refuge in the commercial world. So I came
to America to help promote "The Buccaneers," which not only was
being made by an American network but had an American sponsor.

I spent a week in New York, going to a press party at the Stork Club
and appearing on a lot of television shows and being in the Macy's
Thanksgiving Day Parade. It was all very glamorous and exciting.

147

THE PLAYER: ROBERT SHAW

Then I went back to London. I was offered a lot of work on television,
but it was rubbish work. I turned it down. I took my family and went
to live in the country for a bit. Something a London manager had said
that the first act of one of my plays was written like a novel stuck
in my mind. So I started to write "The Hiding Place/' One day, Don-
ald Pleasence came to visit me in the country. I asked him if he would
lend me some money. He asked why, and I said because I was writing
a novel. He lent me a hundred pounds. The novel was a success, selling
twelve thousand copies in England and about the same in France and
in the United States. I wrote a dramatization of it that was produced
on commercial television in England. "Playhouse 90," in America, had
a different dramatization of it on television. After the novel, I think I
began to grow up a bit. It was a turning point for me. All the com-
petitive thing went when the book became a success.

But as an actor I had become a joke. It was ironic, because people
all over England knew me and my name, but to the people in power in
the theatre I was nothing. I did some thinking about the way I had
behaved at Stratford, and thought, Whom do I like in the theatre? I
liked George Devine and what he was doing at the Royal Court. It was
the most interesting theatre in England. I had worked for him at
Stratford and given him a bit of trouble. So I sat down and wrote a
letter to Devine at the Royal Court, saying that I thought he was
doing marvellous work, and that I was so sorry I had been so stupid.
I had an answer in a week, offering me a part in "Live Like Pigs," by
John Arden. That's when it all began. I got on marvellously with
Devine and did two more plays with him. All of them were worth
doing. I was doing what I could do. I was rehabilitated as an actor. I
was in "The Long and the Short and the Tall," by Willis Hall, with
Peter O'Toole. It was a hit, and moved to the West End. I played
a sergeant in control of a patrol in Burma. It was the best part
I had ever had. The acting was worth doing. In that play, I was
the father figure, suddenly. Suddenly I was in a position of re-
sponsibility in relation to three or four actors more irresponsible
than I was. I was actually forced into a position of responsibility. My
greatest personal success around that time was in the Jacobean play
"The Changeling." I played an ugly servant in love with the mistress of
the house played by Mary Ure who persuades him to murder her
fiance. He does, and then claims her. They become obsessed with each

148

ROBERT SHAW

other, and are discovered, and he kills her. The play was directed by
Tony Richardson, and played a limited engagement two months
to packed houses.

I don't act for the audience now. I act for a few individuals. Pinter,
for one. Pleasence, for another. And I act for myself. What I like now
is just the work. I don't think I could do anything now that I didn't
like. I wouldn't mind a sort of Errol Flynn part in an epic, treating it
on that level, but I wouldn't be in anything dishonest. Most actors are
very vulnerable. It's so easy for them to lose their integrity. You have
to learn how to stand up to the pressure of success. All this kind of
thing takes so long to assimilate. It was only when I was past thirty-four
that I began to prefer the truth.

149

PATTY DUKE

My biggest problem as an actress is growing. I grow
at the rate of one inch a year.

I was born on December 14, 1946, in New York City. My parents,
John and Frances Duke, were separated when I was about seven. My
father is a cab driver. I don't see him. I have one sister, Carol, who is
six years older than I am and works as a secretary for an insurance firm,
and one brother, Raymond, four years older than I am, who became an
actor before I became one. When Ray was eight, he joined the Madison
Square Boys' Club. We were poor then, and lived in a tenement on
East Thirty-first Street, and the club was in our neighborhood. He
used to come home and tell us about the activities at the club the
boxing matches and the plays and all the rest of the fun. It sounded
very exciting. Then, when Ray played the lead in "The Ransom of
Red Chief" at the club, someone there recommended him to Mr. and
Mrs. John Ross, who specialize in finding children with talent and
managing them. When I was about seven, the Rosses, who are ex-
tremely kind and serious people, without children of their own,
got Ray some jobs to do on television. He'd come home and tell
about acting in commercials and how much fun it was to kid

150

PATTY DUKE

around with Paul Winchell and all the other people he worked with.
Around Christmastime of 1954, he did a toy commercial that was
really something, and then the Rosses got him some work to do in a
television series called "Crunch and Dez." It was made in Bermuda,
and he went all the way to Bermuda on a plane, and when he came
back, he told us how wonderful the plane trip was, and how he had
fished in Bermuda and gone swimming, and how beautiful the water
was, and he told us about how he had driven a boat. It sounded like
such fun to me. I had never seen a play myself. I didn't even know what
acting was. I was going to the Sacred Heart School, near where we
lived, and we never put on plays except for little Christmas things.
After school, I would play in the street with the other kids. Every once
in a while, my mother would take us to Coney Island, but I was bored
by it. I was smaller than the other kids my age, and usually went
around with kids younger than I was. That was boring, too. I knew
television and the movies, but I didn't think of them as having any-
thing to do with acting. Acting to me then was something different.
Acting was going to faraway places, doing things you never did around
our neighborhood, and having fun. I wanted to do acting, the way
Ray did. Now that I am fifteen, I realize that everyone has a dream of
doing something other than what he is doing, but not everyone can do
it. I was sure I could. I wanted to become an actress right away. I didn't
want to just dream of becoming an actress when I was grown up. So
one day Ray took me along to a party at the Rosses', to meet them. I
was just eight. The Rosses were very nice. They began to give me train-
ing in diction. I love the Rosses. They've looked after me ever since.
I now spend as much time at their house as I do at my own.

After a while, the Rosses began taking me around to some offices
for interviews. None of the people we saw seemed to believe that I
wanted to be an actress. I knew they wanted someone prettier than I
was someone with a round face and blond curly hair and dimples.
We kept going around for interviews. After a few months, we got dis-
couraged and stopped. But I knew that the Rosses would remember
me if something came up, and they did. When the sinking of the
Andrea Doria was dramatized for television, there was a part for a
little Italian girl, and I got it. It was my first part. I was nine. I had
been discouraged, but when I finally did start acting, it was just as
much fun as I had thought it would be. I had to use an Italian accent

151

THE PLAYER: PATTY DUKE

as this little Italian girl. The Rosses helped me get the accent right.
And they kept telling me, "When you are acting, always make a dis-
tinction; one part of you is the character, another part is you, Patty
Duke. Patty Duke knows what is coming, but the character does not
know what is coming." My mother in the play had to throw me over-
board, but I wasn't afraid. I acted as though I was very frightened, but
I wasn't, because I knew I had a nice soft mattress to fall on. In order
to seem frightened, I just thought of how I might have been frightened
by a height like the fear of being pushed off a diving board or a
snowbank. I always remember the part of me that is the character, as
long as I'm onstage. Once, when I was playing the part of Helen
Keller as a child in "The Miracle Worker," one of the lights fell to the
stage and crashed. It was an accident. Everyone else in the cast and
everyone in the audience was scared. Some people screamed. But I
didn't. I remembered that I was playing a character who couldn't see
or hear, and I kept it up, because we were onstage. I was holding an
Irish setter, a real one,, and I squeezed it, but no one knew I did that.
For about four years after my first television part, I did a lot of
dramatic parts on television, and made other appearances. I was very
good at doing British accents. When I was in the television play
"Wuthering Heights," with Richard Burton and Rosemary Harris, in
May, 1958, 1 played Cathy as a child. I was the only member of the cast
who wasn't really British. I loved doing the British accent. Working
with Richard Burton was great, and I loved the beautiful costumes.
It was all such fun. In one scene, we had rain. I looked up and there
was a big hose with holes in it, and all of a sudden there was rain. In
about four years, I appeared in almost forty television shows, including
"The Prince and the Pauper," "Swiss Family Robinson," "The Power
and the Glory," and "Once Upon a Christmastime," and a number of
times in two television series called "Kitty Foyle" and "Brighter Day."
And I made appearances on a lot of shows where they kidded around
and were kind, and it wasn't even like work Phil Silvers', Frankie
Laine's, and Paul Winchell's shows. I had the most fun of all when I
played Tootie in "Meet Me in St. Louis," with Ed Wynn, who played
my grandfather. I had to sing and dance. I had never danced before,
but Mrs. Ross, who used to be a professional dancer, taught me how
to do a waltz clog, and I did it with Ed Wynn. In 1957, I was in a
documentary movie, "The Deep Well," with my brother Ray. It was

152

PATTY DUKE

all about this boy who is a delinquent, and his sister. They come from
a broken home. It told about this home for children in Pleasantville
where children from broken homes go. The film was shown to social
workers and people like that. Making it was very exciting, because it
was filmed at this home in Pleasantville, and it was the first time I'd
gone on location, and Pleasantville was the farthest I'd ever gone from
home.

In the summer of 1961, I worked in the film version of "The Mir-
acle Worker." I'd been in a few movies the documentary with Ray,
and "The Goddess," in which I played Kim Stanley as a child, and a
couple of others so I knew a little bit about acting for the movies.
Mr. Ross explained that a film and a play require two completely
different techniques. He told me about closeups, and how when D. W.
Griffith made the first closeup, showing only the face, enlarged, on the
screen, the audiences started to scream, "What happened to everybody
else?" Mr. Ross also explained how your movements, and so on, are
much more confined in a movie. In a play, you have to make things
broader, and you have to project more; you have to reach the
last row in the balcony with your voice. And another thing he ex-
plained was that while everything in a play is done in continuous
sequence, in a movie you may shoot a one-minute indoor scene on the
sound stage and then shoot the next minute of the film on location four
weeks later. It's harder to do, but you learn to do it. Mr. Ross teaches
me everything. He works with me until the first rehearsal of a movie
or a play I'm doing, but he never interferes with the director. Working
with Arthur Penn, who directed me in both the stage and the screen
versions of "The Miracle Worker/' was a fabulous experience. He's so
considerate and patient and kind and gentle, and really fun.

Fifteen months before "The Miracle Worker" was produced on
Broadway, Mr. Ross heard that it was going to be put on. He immedi-
ately began to plan ahead for it. We knew we were going to get that
part. We started to work on it a couple of days a week after school. I
would go to his house, and he would read about Helen Keller to me.
He bought every book about her childhood that he could get hold of,
to find out what she was like. The Rosses both read a lot about her to
me, and they told me a lot, too. I learned that Helen Keller loved food
and loved to smell flowers. She liked to feel the sun on her skin and to
lie in the grass. I'd think about things like that every morning while

153

THE PLAYER: PATTY DUKE

I was getting dressed to go to school. In the afternoon, after school,
the Rosses would sometimes take me to the park, where I would lie on
the grass and smell the flowers. After we'd done that a lot, we began
working on the blind part. We started by having me keep my eyes
closed. Then the Rosses heard that the director was going to want the
girl to have her eyes open in the play, so we started practicing it that
way. The Rosses made a game of it. I would sit on the couch in the
Rosses' living room, looking straight ahead of me, and the Rosses
would put something in my line of vision. If I looked at it, I lost. If I
didn't, I won. Then we started on the deafness. I would sit on the
couch pretending I couldn't hear, sometimes for two hours at a time.
Mrs. Ross would come in and ask me if I wanted a Coke, or something,
and if I answered, I lost. If I didn't show anything, I won. After we had
decided to go out for the Helen Keller part, we turned down a part in
"The Sound of Music," although I occasionally appeared on television
in a play, like "One Red Rose for Christmas/' with Helen Hayes. Aside
from that, all I did was go to school and then practice every day that I
was blind, deaf, and dumb. We worked for almost a year before I had
an audition for the part. At first, the producer and director thought I
might not work out, because if I grew two inches I'd be too tall. But
Mrs. Ross put two-inch heels on an old pair of shoes of mine and stood
me next to Anne Bancroft with the heels, and they decided that even
if I grew a little it would still be all right. I was at the Rosses' apart-
ment when the agency representing me telephoned Mr. Ross and told
him the part was mine. We were so happy, and we'd worked so hard
for it, that now it was here, we cried. It was really great. I've been
having fun ever since.

When I'm in a play, I get up at eight-thirty every morning. I go to
Quintano's School for Young Professionals, on West Fifty-sixth
Street. I get the top marks in my class. I always get all A's in history
and French, but I also like English, general science, and earth science.
Languages are very easy for me. I like history best of all, though. I want
to know why things happened the way they did. I'm planning to go
to finishing school and maybe to college, but I'm not sure yet what
I'm going to study. I am sure I want to stay in the theatre. I love it.
My mother and my brother and I live in Elmhurst, Queens. When I'm
working, I go to school from ten in the morning until one in the after-
noon. Then, if I don't have a singing lesson, I go home or to the Rosses'
154

PATTY DUKE

place. I have two sets of school books. I keep one set at home and the
other set at school. When I'm in a play, I may go home after school, if
I want to go ice-skating or, something, with the children in my neigh-
borhood, or I may go to the Rosses'. During "The Miracle Worker/' I
went to the theatre by bus and by subway, and sometimes in a taxi, and
then, at the end of the play, a taxi would usually pick me up and either
take me home to Elmhurst or take me to the Rosses', depending on how
I felt or on my schedule. The Rosses like me to get as much rest as pos-
sible, so I try to get to bed by midnight. My mother or one of the
Rosses is always with me at the theatre. I found it a lot of fun to act in
"The Miracle Worker," even though I didn't get to wear pretty clothes
or have my hair curled. Opening night was especially exciting. Every-
one was so friendly. What I like about being in a play is pleasing the
audience and making them laugh or feel things. Every night there's a
new audience. If they applauded the big fight scene in "The Miracle
Worker" and if the jokes got big laughs, we'd all know we were going
great. If the applause or laughs didn't come well, we'd just go to
work right away and keep working until the applause and laughs came
back. The play ran from October, 1959, to July, 1961, and except
for the last five weeks, when I left to begin work on the movie version
of the play, I didn't miss a single performance. After we'd been playing
for several months, sometimes someone in the cast would say, around
eight-thirty, "Well, here we go again" and give a great big sigh.
But I never felt that way. Every night was a new night for me.

Best of all, better than being in a play, I love going places with Mr.
and Mrs. Ross. Once, they took me on a two-week vacation to Florida.
We flew in a plane, and chartered a boat there. It was just as much fun
as I'd thought it would be. The Rosses have taken me to Atlantic City,
too to the Barclay Motel, which has a swimming pool, with a plastic
dome, where you can swim the year around. In New York, sometimes,
we pack some steaks and have a picnic under the George Washington
Bridge, or we go to Palisades Park and have a cookout there. That's
my idea of fun.

155

ELI WALLACE

Acting is the most delicious experience in life. When
I'm supposed to be feeling despair on the stage, what
I really feel is that I'm sitting on top of the world.

I was born on December 7, 1915, in Brooklyn, in the Red Hook section
known as Little Italy. My parents had a candy store named Bertha's.
Bertha was my mother, who died in 1955. I had just come back from
England, where I had played Sakini in "The Teahouse of the August
Moon" for almost a year. My father is now eighty-six, and lives in
Brooklyn with my brother. I was the third of four children. The three
others became teachers. In Red Hook, we were the only Jews in a sea
of Italians. I grew up feeling Italian as well as Jewish. I attended hun-
dreds of Italian winemaking sessions, carrying boxes of grapes to
winemaking cellars and getting bunches of grapes as a reward. Every
summer from the age of eight to the age of fourteen, I spent two weeks
in a summer camp in Raritan, New Jersey, run as a charity by the old
Life magazine. I made my debut as an actor in that camp. When I was
fifteen, my parents sold the candy store and, around the same time,
bought a three-family house on Bedford Avenue, in Flatbush; we lived
on the first floor and were supported by the rent paid by the families

156

ELI WALLACH

we had as tenants on the two other floors. I went to Erasmus Hall High
School, where I was an indifferent student, and unhappy. I never went
to dances. I was a miserable adolescent. Across from Erasmus, how-
ever, was a Boys' Club, where I played ping-pong and swam. And that's
where I really found out about acting. I starred in a play called "Fiat
Lux/' playing a sixty-five-year-old man who was bitter because he had
lost his children and his belief in God. When one of the kids in the
audience yelled out "That's Eli!" I wanted to jump off the stage and
pot him. I still get sore if I think people don't believe what I want
them to believe. It's very important to me that they believe. It gives me
an added sense of power, or something. From the time I was a kid, I've
never been afraid to make believe. But during my first performance in
a role I'm terrified. After the first plunge into the water, I seldom have
stage fright.

I graduated from high school in 1932 one of the worst years of the
depression. I then went to the University of Texas, where the tuition
was thirty dollars a year, which was all I could afford, and majored in
history. My family and everybody else I knew told me I should become
a teacher, and I agreed with them. I stuck it out in Texas for four
years, working at odd jobs and National Youth Administration jobs to
pay for my board and room. The university had no Drama Depart-
ment, but it did have the Curtain Club, which I joined. I swept the
stage, painted scenery, and, in 1936, my senior year, played the lead in
"Liliom" for one week. At the end of the week, I began to think it
might be possible to earn a living as an actor. Zachary Scott was the
leading star of the club. He wore a dressing gown with style with a
scarf around his neck and he looked at home in a tuxedo. I had a
kind of built-in hostility toward a tuxedo, and I didn't own one until
two years ago, when I was given one. I don't look bad in it, but I
don't feel like Zachary Scott.

I graduated from Texas with an A.B., but to teach in New York I
needed a Master's degree, and I got it at City College in 1938. While
I was studying education, and also Chinese painting, I worked with a
little-theatre group, was a playground director in some tough neighbor-
hoods in Brooklyn, did radio plays for WLID in Brooklyn, and read
Theatre Arts Monthly. After a while, I began to study acting in New
York. I was a little guy, and I knew the odds were against me, but I was
determined anyway. My family thought I was misguided, but I told

157

THE PLAYER: ELI WALLACH

them all, "This is what I am going to do/' Acting was an avocation in
the eyes of everybody but me. My parents' resistance in a way was
lovely and wonderful. I guess part of everybody's drive is based on his
parents' disapproval and on wanting to show them they were wrong.
But in 1938, to please my parents, I went through the motions of tak-
ing an exam required by the Board of Education for a city teaching
job. I was one of nineteen hundred and sixty out of two thousand who
took the test who failed. So I felt free to do what I wanted to do. My
sister Shirley was going out with a guy whose brother knew Sanford
Meisner, of the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre, so I
went there regularly, on a scholarship. I thought I was terrific. I felt I
had great emotions, and believed I could pretend to be anybody. Also,
I always felt I moved well onstage what the books called "the graceful
cross." I could bow with great flair. At the school, I learned a kind of
rudimentary technique, and because Meisner was one of the first to
bring Stanislavski's teachings to the United States, I got my first insight
into these, as an antidote to the commercial cliche theatre. In the old-
fashioned Delsarte system, actors acted by conventional signals to the
audience. By Stanislavski's method, the actor is free to accept a stimulus
while he's onstage and to react naturally to it. I loved that. After the
first year, the Neighborhood Playhouse dropped students if they
weren't satisfactory or promising. They thought I was good. They not
only renewed my scholarship for a second year but lent me money
about eight dollars a week for eight months so that I could keep go-
ing with food and cigarettes. Today, I'm on the school's board of
directors.

The summer of 1939, I worked as a playground director again, but
through James Parke, director of the Curtain Club, I got a part for a
week in Locust Valley, Long Island, playing at night in "The Bo
Tree," with an exciting bunch of actors that included Richard Wid-
mark and Vincent J. Donehue. The play was about college boys, and
my part was that of a young radical who goes to fight in the Spanish
Civil War. It was a rounded part, with humor and a lot for me to do,
and I loved it. I was ego incarnate. I thought I was a much better actor
then than I think of myself as being now. These days, I know too much
about the awesome amount of work that must go into making a part
your own. But at least, at that time, I had the playground work to go
back to during the day, and that was a great leveller.

158

ELI WALLACH

I drew a low number in the draft, and I went into the Army in Jan-
uary, 1941, before Pearl Harbor. I was in the Army for over four years,
as a Medical Corps administrator. I served both in the Pacific and in
Europe, and was discharged as a captain. The only theatrical work I
did was to organize a couple of soldier revues for hospital patients and
staffs. In 1945, I started looking for jobs as an actor. One of my first
roles was in an Equity Library Theatre production of Tennessee
Williams' one-act play "This Property Is Condemned/' Here I was,
thirty years old, with ribbons and stuff, and I was playing the part of a
boy of fifteen. I liked it. It made me feel good. The girl in the play was
Anne Jackson, whom I married in 1948. She's always delighted me. We
now have three children and live on Riverside Drive. I have tre-
mendous respect and admiration for her as an actress, and more and
more we're getting to appear together in plays. We were in "Major
Barbara" together in 1957, and recently played together in "Rhinoc-
eros" for six months. We have a tremendous working compatibility
when we're in the same play, and especially when the play means some-
thing important to us, as "Rhinoceros" did. On November 13, 1945, I
made my first Broadway stage appearance as the crew chief in a play
called "Skydrift," about a plane crash from which the ghosts of the men
killed go home. I couldn't raise my voice above the roar of the sound-
effect plane engines, but I survived in the play as long as it did on
Broadway seven performances. In 1946, 1 joined the American Reper-
tory Theatre, and I had a chance to play Cromwell in "Henry VIII;"
Spintho, the coward, in "Androcles and the Lion;" minor roles in "Yel-
low Jack" and "What Every Woman Knows;" and the Duck in "Alice
in Wonderland," a part that had been played by an actor wearing
skates on his knees. I played it in a continuous deep knee bend but
without skates. I also played the Two of Spades and one of the other
voices. Annie, my wife, was developing in her acting career, but I kept
getting more and more discouraged. It wasn't money I cared about. We
were getting along fine on unemployment insurance, living in a one-
room, thirty-five-dollar-a-month apartment on lower Fifth Avenue in
the Village. But I was always too young or too old or too small never
right for a part. I drove poor Annie nuts with my griping and grousing.
At one point, I thought Yd go into medical administration my old
line of work. But in my heart I always knew that if I couldn't act I'd
go mad.

159

THE PLAYER: ELI WALLACH

I spent a few summers in summer stock, and a lot of weeks in insur-
ance lines, G.I. as well as unemployment. In 1949, I got a part in
"Mister Roberts," which I played for two years, and then, in February,
1951, I played the Sicilian lover in Tennessee Williams' "The Rose
Tattoo/' opposite Maureen Stapleton. I received an Antoinette Perry
award for a distinguished feature performance. After a year and a
half in "The Rose Tattoo," I went directly into another Williams
play, "Camino Real," directed by Elia Kazan. The producers didn't
have all the money that was needed to begin rehearsals, and while
I was waiting I was offered the movie role of Angelo Maggio in
"From Here to Eternity" the part Frank Sinatra played that launched
him on his career as an actor. I felt I should do the play with Kazan,
and so I asked the movie producers for the ridiculously high salary
of three thousand dollars a week to do Maggio. Sinatra thought
I was insane not to try to get the part. Whenever he sees me now,
he says to me, "You crazy actor!" But I've never been sorry. What
do I need a movie for? The stage is on a higher level in every way,
and a more satisfying medium. Movies, by comparison, are like
calendar art next to great paintings. You can't really do very much
in movies or in television, but the stage is such an anarchistic
medium that the mavericks still can come in and do something.
I made a gangster film recently "The Lineup" working five weeks
at ten thousand dollars a week. After that, I felt so guilty about
having been paid all that money, and had such a need to do penance,
that I went to London and, at a tiny salary, played Elmer Rice's
"Counsellor-at-Law" on the B.B.C. live with no commercial to
break it up, and from there I flew to Rome and gave a lecture to actor-
students on acting. I came back to New York, but I still felt guilty, so I
did "The Chairs," by lonesco, at the Phoenix Theatre, for twenty-two
performances, at eighty-five dollars a week. By that time, I had ex-
punged my guilt, so I went on TV and played a gangster again.

In 1947, when Elia Kazan, Cheryl Crawford, and Bobby Lewis
started the Actors' Studio, I was one of the twenty who were the nu-
cleus of the senior group. Others were my wife, David Wayne, Marlon
Brando, Patricia Neal, Mildred Dunnock, Tom Ewell, Kevin Mc-
Carthy, Maureen Stapleton, Sidney Lumet, John Forsythe, and Wil-
liam Redfield. I believed, and still believe, it's an antidote to clich
acting. Some people say that the Studio has formalized a style of its

160

ELI WALLACH

own. That is possible. Maybe someday there will be a new movement
as an antidote to the Studio. In the meantime, I believe in the Method.
Laurence Olivier once said to me, 'Isn't it greater artistry when you
can communicate emotion but you don't feel a thing?" It's an old ar-
gument. A lot of English actors say, "Never mind about all the talking,
just get on the stage and do it." We say, "Do what?" Acting is the most
alive thing I can do, and the most joyous. The old-fashioned actor de-
velops a facility that is predictable. When he wants to show anger, hell
clench his fists, and so on. We say, "Believe what you act." Naturally,
you don't really believe, but it does give you a sense of something, and
that gives your part life. As the curtain goes up, you're there, and
you're willing to let something happen to you. The tendency at first is
to absorb so much technique that you abuse it. Only as you mature as
an artist do you leave out all the curlicues. You -become less ornate and
more perceptive. The zenith of the acting craft is when you can leave
yourself alone. Each part you play has what can be called a spine a
line. You build a person's wants and needs around the movement of
that line. Anna Magnani once told me, "When I do a character, if it's
not right a shadow comes over rne, because I act from the heart." That's
her method, her own means of arriving at a character. She has a tech-
nique of her own. She's incapable of understanding any other method.
What an actor learns, eventually, is that everyone has to find his own
method and has to do what is right for himself. That's all that really
matters in the end. The trouble today is that a lot of young people in
acting go around saying that they're Method actors, and they don't un-
derstand that they are merely technicians, doing what they think is
Method. They're losing all the joys of acting. And they're the ones
some of our finest actors latch on to as examples of Method actors,
saying that these youngsters should stop making such a to-do about
creating and just create. Lee Strasberg would be the first to agree with
such criticism. He's always told us that a technique is there only to help
you, and if it hinders you, don't use it. All good actors aspire to the
same end. True simplicity in art is what we all strive for. You use any-
thing you can to achieve that end. If the Method is part of what I can
use, I'm for it.

I've used at least a small part of my real self in every part I've ever
played. Sometimes you use things inside yourself that you didn't even
know were there. When I first read the part of the Sicilian lover in

161

THE FLAYER: ELI WALLACH

"The Rose Tattoo," and first read a television play I did about the
gangster Albert Anastasia, I immediately knew certain things about
these men with my feelings, because I was brought up with Italians like
them, and I knew their temperament. One o the Anastasias, as a mat-
ter of fact, lived across from the house I was born in, in Brooklyn. The
guy became a killer for money. With him, it was a business. That
means something special to me. Not that it's all crystal clear. Acting is
always looking, always searching out the behavior of people. It's always
wanting to know why people do things the way they do. But onstage
you're always conscious of the audience. You know you're deluding
them. Your own protection, and theirs, too, is the knowledge that it's
make-believe, in a darkened theatre.

162

ANNE JACKSON

I adore finding out about people's behavior , and after
I find out I want to show it to somebody in acting.

I was born on September 3, 1926, in Millvale, Pennsylvania, on the
outskirts of Pittsburgh. My father, John Jchekovitch, was born in
Croatia, came to America in 1918, at the age of seventeen, and settled
in Pittsburgh. He changed his name to John Jackson. He played the
violin, the mandolin, and the accordion, and sang Slavic folk songs,
and he spoke Hungarian, Polish, and Russian as well as Croatian.
After getting his high-school diploma, he worked as a barber and ran
a beauty parlor. He died in 1956. My mother, born Stella Murray, was
the daughter of a Pennsylvania coal miner and was one of twelve chil-
dren; she died when I was seventeen. She was always frightened and
inhibited, and she was one of those terribly partial-to-the-Irish Irish
Catholics. My father was an agnostic. I'm the youngest of three sisters.
My sister Catherine, eight years older than I am, is married to a tool-
and-die maker, lives in Manhasset, Long Island, and has two children.
My sister Beatrice, three years older than I am, is also married to a
tool-and-die maker, and she lives in Valley Stream, and has three chil-

163

THE PLAYER: ANNE JACKSON

dren. I was the shyest child who ever lived. I loathed my bright-red
hair. When I was four, Catherine made me a costume of yellow-and-
blue crepe paper, hung a blanket on our porch for a curtain, and
put on a show for the kids in the neighborhood. I recited a corny
poem she taught me, which she had cut out of the Ladies' Home
Journal. Up to then, I'd never opened my mouth, and suddenly I got
up there and recited and everybody yelled and clapped. It was wonder-
ful. That's when I became an actress. When I was five, we moved to
another little place near Pittsburgh, called Job, just outside the town
of Tarentum, where my father had a barber shop. We lived in a
little wooden house up in the hills that he'd bought for five hundred
dollars. It had no heat and no plumbing. We got our heat from a
pot-bellied stove, and we had to carry water from a well, but we were
on the edge of a lovely forest and we had a garden, where my father
raised beautiful flowers. I walked a mile to get to school. I was good
in English, art, and history, and awful in arithmetic. I started going
to movies when I was six, at the movie theatre in Tarentum. The
first one I saw was "Letty Lynton," with Joan Crawford, Robert Mont-
gomery, and Nils Asther. I couldn't get over the beautiful dress Joan
Crawford was wearing all satin, with fur on the bottom. My sisters
had taken me to the movie, and as soon as we got home, we played the
whole thing for ourselves; Catherine was Joan Crawford, Beatrice
was Nils Asther, and I was Robert Montgomery. From then on, we'd
always act a movie out right after we saw it. It was such a gorgeous
world. You spent all your time being loved and kissed. Nobody ever
washed the dishes in those movies, and the people always died so
beautifully.

During the depression, my father couldn't make a living in Taren-
tum, and when I was eight he decided to move to New York. We lived
for two months in an abandoned windmill on stilts in the marshes
somewhere in Brooklyn, and then we moved to a tenement on Liberty
Avenue, near a cemetery. I went to P.S. 214, then to P.S. 171,
and finally to Franklin K. Lane High School. My sister Catherine
joined every dramatic club she could find. Beatrice followed, and
I got pushed into their footsteps. There was a movie house on
Liberty Avenue that held an amateur-night contest every week.
When I was ten, I wrote a skit with a girl friend who went to dancing
school and was a genius at acrobatics, and we entered a contest. We

164

ANNE JACKSON

pretended we were Dead End Kids, and after some patter my friend
did flips and a tap dance, and I did imitations of Charles Laughton
in "Mutiny on the Bounty," of Jeanette MacDonald in "San Fran-
cisco/' and of Katharine Hepburn in "Morning Glory." We won first
prize three dollars. That clinched it. There was no turning back.
At eleven, I was doing imitations of Shirley Temple. At twelve, I had
a whole Sonja Henie routine. Around then, I had an English teacher
in junior high school, Miss Edwards, who used to write monologues
for me to do, including one as Topsy and one as Anne of Green Gables.
I recited them in junior-high assembly. I recited so much that the
kids got bored with me. Then Miss Edwards introduced me to Shake-
speare, and I recited speeches from the tragedies. I was so crazy to
recite that I went to other people's churches to get on their entertain-
ment programs. At fourteen, I played the lead in a school production
of Ring Lardner's "June Moon." I was awful. I felt that the audience
was bored. I knew there was something wrong, but I didn't know what
it was. I didn't do any more school plays. I bided my time.

In 1943, when I was in my senior year, I took part in one of the
auditions that the producer John Golden regularly held for young new
talent. They were attended by agents and directors and casting people.
I got up and tried to do a dramatic scene, playing a woman who
stabbed her husband to death. The man running the auditions called
me aside and said, "Look, you're a little girl. Can't you do something
more appropriate for a little girl?" So I did Miss Edwards' monologue
as Anne of Green Gables how she was an orphan, and hated the color
of her hair. I was immediately offered a job by George Abbott's secre-
tary to go to the Orient with a U.S.O. show and play in "What a
Life." But I was sixteen, still under age, and my father refused to sign
the necessary papers. He wanted me to finish school. Impatiently, I
finished school and graduated. That summer, I worked as a salesclerk
in a Viennese candy store near Times Square. I knew a boy named
Steve Sdieuer he was a Yale boy I had met at my John Golden audi-
tionand he introduced me to Herbert Berghof, the actor, who was
then with the New School for Social Research, and who became my first
acting teacher. Berghof told me that I should be an actress, that I should
study full time. I went to my father and said, "Daddy, this man says
I'm an artist." My father put me out of the house. Acting, he said, was
a profession for a whore. Catherine was married by then, so I went to

165

THE PLAYER: ANNE JACKSON

live with. her. Berghof helped me get a scholarship to the Neighbor-
hood Playhouse, and in September of 1943 I started studying there
full time, from morning to night. My first real part was in the school's
demonstration performance of a scene from "Peer Gynt/' in which I
played the ingenue in love with Peer Gynt. My father came to see
me. He didn't say anything to me afterward, but he sat there all the
way through.

At the Playhouse, I was battling to be the best. That was all. It
was a purely competitive feeling. I didn't think anyone else could act.
I thought I was the only one. I was absolutely blind to the needs of
everyone else. I was thrown in with other actors, but I was a complete
egotist. When I was told that I had to learn to speak well, or that I
was showing off rather than doing the part, I was furious. I didn't
know how to cope with something like that. I was a monologist. I
was a loner. I didn't know the first thing about what it meant to work
with other people. The main effect the school had was to shake me up;
I began to get my first inkling that the theatre was a group effort. But
I didn't wake up completely until much later, and then it was thanks
to the influence of Lee Strasberg. He is, I think, a saint for actors. Ac-
tors are looked down on by so many people. A young, uneducated
actor battles to find strength by using his own abilities. Lee Strasberg
helped me find that strength. The reason so many actors and actresses
talk about him with a kind of reverence is that they know from tough
experience how rare it is to find a teacher who really knows how to
help them. I had joined the Actors' Studio when it was founded, by
Robert Lewis, Cheryl Crawford, and Elia Kazan, in 1948, but the
class was too big and I was among those who had to leave; then, in
1950, when Lee was brought into the Studio, I was asked to join again.
I have been extremely lucky in being exposed to some of the most
dedicated teachers in the theatre to Herbert Berghof at the New
School and Sandy Meisner at the Neighborhood Playhouse as well as
to Lee Strasberg, They are all purists and dedicated men. Strasberg
makes the actor all-important. He gives the actor a tremendous sense
of security. He's an extremely practical man, and he knows how much
time it takes to develop an actor. He's the most loving, patient teacher.
He levels with you. He knows how to praise the actor; in your worst
work he will always find something that is good, even while he is expos-
ing the trickery and the fears that lead an actor to resort to trickery. He

166

ANNE JACKSON

always leaves the actor his self-respect. I learned more about acting
from him than from anybody else. I started out as an instinctive ac-
tress who was absolutely terrified of taking direction and advice. I'd
always say, "No, I'll find it myself," and then immediately get into a
kind of contest with the director. I learned from Lee how to listen
to a director. I learned how to take help from a director and not care
about whether it was his idea or my idea to begin with; I learned
that by working with other people I'd find a way to make my per-
formance as good as possible the only thing that mattered.

Altogether, it took me over ten years to gain confidence in myself.
In 1944, after a year at the Neighborhood Playhouse, I was suddenly
offered the part of Anya, the ingenue, in Eva Le Gallienne's road-
company production of "The Cherry Orchard," directed by Margaret
Webster and Eva Le Gallienne. I put down my fee of seventy dollars
and joined Actors' Equity as a full fledged member. Suddenly I was
being paid seventy-five dollars a week for sixteen weeks on tour. I'd
never been anywhere on a trip, and suddenly I was going to Boston,
Chicago, Cincinnati, and all kinds of whistle stops, too. I was com-
pletely uneducated, I knew nothing about Chekhov's plays. I didn't
even know who he was. Eva Le Gallienne was the star, playing Lyu-
bov Andreyevna, and I didn't know who Eva Le Gallienne was, either.
Joseph Schildkraut played Leonid Andreyevitch. I had never heard
of him. I didn't know that he was a fine actor, and the son of a fine
actor. I roomed with two other girls, and one of them, Madeleine
L'Engle, who understudied the role of Charlotta Ivanovna and ap-
peared in the party scene with me, took me in hand and introduced
me to books about the theatre and its history, and to 6ther books. We
had discussions; it had never occurred to me before that actors dis-
cussed what they called "the author's intention." In the cities, Made-
leine took me to museums. The only museum I'd ever been in up to
then was the Museum of Natural History once. I began to get a
smattering of knowledge of the arts. And I began to learn something
about procedure and routine in the world of the theatre. I missed a
cue once in a performance, and although Miss Le Gallienne didn't get
furious, or anything like that, she let me know what it means if you
hold up the progress of a play. I learned that you didn't call Eva Le
Gallienne "Eva;" you called her "Miss Le Gallienne." I learned what
respect means, and learned something about how to behave. I learned

167

THE PLAYER: ANNE JACKSON

that when you were on the road you saved your money; you didn't
eat much, and if you bought anything, it was a book. None of this
was really in my own nature to do, but I went along with the others
In order to belong, and by going along I began to develop my own
knowledge and taste.

When I returned to New York, I took a thirty-five-dollar-a-month
room, with bath and linen service, on lower Fifth Avenue. I began
to learn that people can be terribly generous when they believe
in you. At one time, when I was practically starving, and couldn't
afford a telephone, Sam Jaffe, a very fine actor who lived in the
neighborhood,* would deliver messages to me about available jobs.
Later on, Mainbocher, who had worked on costumes for me for a
play, would recommend me for jobs he heard about. I had played in
a classic. I had an agent. Now I went and read for what turned out to
be a series of smash flops. In February, 1945, I played a hillbilly
in "Signature," a melodrama by Elizabeth McFadden, which
closed after two performances. I acted with Jessie Royce Landis in
two plays that lasted about a week "The Last Dance," an adapta-
tion by Peter Goldbaum and Robin Short of "Dodsdancen," by Strind-
berg, and "Magnolia Alley/' by George Batson. I was in a flop with
Shirley Booth "Love Me Long," by Doris Frankel. In March,
1946, I was in the Equity Library Theatre production of "This Prop-
erty Is Condemned," by Tennessee Williams, in which Eli Wallach
played the male lead. When I first saw him, I said he was too old for
the part. (He was thirty.) I was told by Terese Hayden, a good young
actress, who directed the play for the E.L.T., "When you learn to act
as well as he does, then you can make statements about people being
too old or too young for a part." Three days later, I fell in love with
Eli. We were married in 1948. He moved into my room, and we bought
a refrigerator and a hot plate. Just before my marriage, I was in the
first play I had respected since "The Cherry Orchard." It was the
Broadway production, with Margaret Phillips and Tod Andrews, of
"Summer and Smoke," by Tennessee Williams, which lasted for a
hundred performances and wasn't put on again until April, 1952, when
it was produced Off Broadway, with Geraldine Page, and was a big
hit. I played Nellie Ewell, the little girl. I had good actors to work
with Margaret Phillips and Tod Andrews and it was a beautiful
play. It was exciting and interesting to play a character who had a

168

ANNE JACKSON

mind and knew all about life. After that, I got in on the heyday of live
dramatic shows on television. In those days, you'd get a different part
to do every three weeks. One week I'd be playing Annie Oakley on
"The Quaker Oats Show/' and the third week after that I'd be play-
ing a murderess in some mystery drama. In 1951, our first child, Peter,
was born. A few weeks later, I was right back in television.

In December, 1953, I was in my first Broadway hit, "Oh, Men! Oh,
Women!," by Edward Chodorov. It was a fine comedy, and I felt that
in it I was doing my first really good acting. I'd been studying with Lee
Strasberg for three years by then, and I had begun to discover some-
thing about the exciting process that takes place when, beginning in
rehearsals, you really get to work on a part. You get to know the per-
son you play. You protect the character you play. You can make the
audience shut up and listen. You show one of the wonders of life
that every human being is different. The rhythm of the character
takes over, but you're never mesmerized; you're the one in control.
In 1954, I went to live in London for a year, while Eli appeared there
in "The Teahouse of the August Moon." After our return, our second
child, Roberta, was born. When she was three months old, I appeared
on Broadway, with Edward G. Robinson and Gena Rowlands, in
"Middle of the Night/' by Paddy Chayefsky. Occasionally, I'd bring
the baby backstage and leave her in my dressing room, asleep, while I
went on. The stagehands sometimes baby-sat for me. It worked out
fine. I learned a lot in that play. For one thing, I was still learning
how to take advice. In one scene with Eddie Robinson, where he told
me I played his daughter that he wanted to marry a young girl, it
was supposed to be a blow to me. So I wanted to dramatize the point
that it was a blow. I wanted to walk away. Eddie said, "No, she would
never do that." At first, I was sore. He said, "It's more effective if you
don't show them. The cliche is to show them." And he was right. Not
because he was an older, more seasoned actor but because he was an
actor.

I want to be the best actress I can be. I'm competitive about it, but
I'm not obsessed by it. When I go to the theatre and see Kim Stanley
or Geraldine Page, I'm thrilled by what she is doing. At the same time,
I work constantly to make myself free to act to my fullest capacity.
Playing in "Brecht on Brecht," with Lotte Lenya, Dane Clark, George
Voskovec, Viveca Lindfors, and Michael Wager, I have admired

169

THE PLAYER: ANNE JACKSON

them all so much. Viveca is capable of opening her mouth and letting
out a scream. I am still afraid to do that. I don't take big chances. For
that, you need freedom. Maureen Stapleton has it. Kim Stanley has it.
Geraldine Page has it. And, of course, Eli has it. They dare. And
Marlon Brando is the daddy of them all in that. He dares and defies,
and I love it in him. In all of them. I love them for it.

170

PAUL SCOFIELD

People talk of magk in the theatre. "Magic" is a mis-
leading word. The pure work is all that matters to
the actor. Magic is for the audience to discover. Magic
is no concern of ours.

I was born on January 21, 1922, in Birmingham, England, and was
taken at the age of a few weeks to Hurstpierpoint, in Sussex, where my
family lived about eight miles from Brighton and forty miles from
London and where my father was headmaster of the Hurstpierpoint
Church of England School. I have one brother, John, who is three
years older than I am, and who works as a local-government official
in Brighton, in the Rate Office in the town hall. I have one sister,
Mary, six years younger than I am, who lives with my parents in
Hurstpierpoint. My parents, Edward Harry and Mary Scofield, just hap-
pened to give all three of us children Biblical names. My father, who
has retired as headmaster but still occasionally teaches at nearby schools,
is a literate kind of person and also a very open-air man. When we
were children, he had us play cricket and other games; he is that kind
of schoolmaster. His main interest, however, has always been in teach-
ing. He taught children up to the age of fourteen mathematics, history,

171

THE PLAYER: PAUL SCOFIELD

geography, and the rest. Our family is still somehow very close, al-
though parents so easily lose track of their children. I live about seven
miles north of my parents' village, at the edge of the village of Bal-
combe, in Sussex in an Edwardian house my wife and I bought in
1951. I was married in 1943 to the actress Joy Parker, and we have two
children Martin, seventeen, who goes to The King's School, a board-
ing school in Canterbury, and Sarah, ten, who lives at home and goes
to Trevelyan School, a girls' school, in Haywards Heath, about
four miles south of Balcombe, and whose main passion at the mo-
ment is riding. I recently bought Sarah a horse of her own absolute
lunacy which we keep at a farm near our house. I ride a bit myself;
I learned just in order to ride with my daughter, and now I love it.
Sussex is very beautiful. I wanted to go back to that part of the
country where I lived as a child, at the foot of the South Downs, in
Hurstpierpoint. We lived near wonderful bare chalky hills, where I
used to walk. Now we live a little bit inland on the weald, where
the plain is undulating and wooded. My wife is not a dedicated ac-
tress. Often, she takes a part in a play, many times with me. My
children aren't the least bit interested in what I do in the theatre.
Children like to forget about their parents' careers, I think, and all
the claims that their parents' work makes on them. When I came to
America to appear in "A Man for All Seasons," my children stayed
in England, in school. It was our first long separation. I wasn't in the
least startled to have a letter from Sarah in which she wrote, "I hope
you're enjoying yourself in America. I doubt it." It pleases me that
the theatre means nothing to the children. I like to leave it behind. I
just like to go home. Children eventually get recognized as totally in-
dependent creations. They seem to lead the way for you to understand
them. It's easy for me to see what they want and what they are. That's
the kind of thing actors are so good at putting themselves in other
people's shoes. I'd never lived in a big city for any length of time be-
fore I came to America. I'm sort of a country actor. When I'm in
England, my schedule is bound up with my family. When I'm in a
play in London, I'm part of my family until four; then I catch a
train to London. I get to the theatre about an hour and a half before
a performance. Commuting from the country is quite hard work but
still worth it. I like the silence of the country. I like to be by myself
a good bit. Mostly, I walk among the beautiful chalk hills. Profession-

172

PAUL SCOFIELD

ally, I've never done anything I haven't wanted to do since being in a
position to refuse work. I could live without acting, I think. I could
very easily work on a farm.

I somehow don't think literally of being born just of being brought
up. I attended my father's school, as a day student, until I was eleven.
At that time, it was in a Victorian Gothic building, with an arched
stone doorway and imitation church windows. My father is a terribly
fair's-fair man, and I was never favored because I was the son of the
headmaster. He was very much the disciplinarian in those days, and I
got the rough end of both sticks, in a superficial way. The children at
Father's school were my friends. I sledged with them on the short grass
in the hills, and played football with them, and looked for birds' eggs.
I played a great deal of tennis with my brother, who was much better
at it than I was. I played a rather defensive game; it wasn't my instinct
to rush to the net, and all that. I was not a good student. I couldn't
do mathematics. All I seemed to be good at was reciting poetry. At
the age of nine, I did the "quality of mercy" speech in a recitation
of the trial scene from "The Merchant of Venice," put on at Christ-
mastime. The school was hung with paper chains and holly, and
had a general kind of cozy feeling then, at the end of the term. In
choosing parts for the boys to do in the play, my father decided that
I should be the Portia.

At the age of twelve, I started going to school in Brighton, commut-
ing by train and bicycle to Varndean School for Boys, where I was a
leading member of the Dramatic Society. My first part, when I was
thirteen, was Juliet. The Romeo was not very good, but my Juliet was
a sensation. It's the only part I've ever played of which I can remember
every word. It has just stayed. At fourteen, I played Rosalind in "As
You Like It." Then my voice went a little low, and I next played
Prince Hal in "Henry IV," Part I. From then on, it seemed pretty
clear to me that I would become an actor. For a boy who was hopeless
at everything else, acting was a tremendous release. I wasn't used to the
kind of freedom that doing something well gives one. That made it all
the clearer. My parents were sensible about it. They could see that I
was totally blank to the sciences and to mathematics, and that acting
was a practical thing for me to do. But they warned me about it.
"Precarious" is the word they always used about it.

When I was fifteen, I made jny professional debut, in a touring pro-

173

THE PLAYER: PAUL SCOFIELD

duction of "The Only Way," at the Theatre Royal in Brighton, which
is one of the loveliest theatres in all England, with a horseshoe-shaped
circle, and red plush and gilt, and all the old theatre atmosphere,
pretty much as it has been for a hundred years. It's very much alive as
a theatre today. There's always something to see there. The play "The
Only Way" was an adaptation of "A Tale of Two Cities," starring
John Martin Harvey, who was more or less the Henry Irving of his
day. He was making one of his ostensibly farewell tours. They asked
for volunteers for the crowd scenes. I turned up at the stage door,
was taken on at ten shillings a week, or about thirty cents a perform-
ance, and was given a cudgel to brandish in a crowd scene. The play,
and being part of it, was awe-inspiring. Sir John had a remark-
able style of acting, in the tradition of Irving highly dramatic and
rather operatic and I was deeply affected. Not that I couldn't sleep
at night; hardly anything has ever made me not sleep at night. It was
just that one was aware that one was close to something as authentic as
the boqks one read, as authentic as "Jane Eyre/' I was in the play for
two weeks. At the end, I liked that cudgel they'd given me so much
that I took it. I walked out with it under my mackintosh. I still have
it.

In my last term at school, I was due to take an examination for my
school certificate, but suddenly I was fed up with commuting. I left,
and never graduated officially. I was sixteen, and was very much aware
of my failure to make headway as a scholar. It was rather depressing,
especially inasmuch as my brother was good at school. I was quite fair-
haired in those days, the way one sometimes is before going dark. I
was round-faced, but I'd already begun to have lines in my face. It's
always surprised me that I grew so many of them. I suppose it has
something to do with the way the flesh settles down over the bones of
one's face. I don't think it has anything to do with what life has done.
The time was a year or so before the start of the Second World War.
The manager of Brighton's Theatre Royal and the headmaster of
Varndean School helped me get a scholarship at the Croydon Reper-
tory Theatre School, in a suburb of London, where I went for two
terms. It was all very unnerving. I wasn't at all strengthened as an
actor, but I did get on with a bit of practice. I did some public per-
formances, including a big chunk of "Peer Gynt," in which I played
the feeble-minded peasant bridegroom. It was the first time I'd done

174

PAUL SCOFIELD

anything that gave me the feeling of bringing a character to life. It
was a beginning the simple business of taking part in productions
and the Croydon brought me into a kind of contact with the profes-
sional world of the theatre. Then the Croydon was disbanded. It was
a time in England when everyone was being given a gas mask. I didn't
know what to do at all. I wanted to get on with some work. I heard of
a school called the London Mask Theatre School, which was attached
to the Westminster Theatre. There I made my student debut, on April
16, 1940, as the Third Clerk and the First Soldier in John Drink-
water's "Abraham Lincoln/' starring Stephen Murray. I had hardly
been to the theatre at all before I left Varndean School. The first
play that touched me was "Desire Under the Elms," put on at the
Westminster Theatre, in which I played somebody in the family
party. The school was a very lively one. We had good teachers,
including Eileen Thorndike, Sybil Thorndike's sister, who gave
voice lessons. She had an aptitude for teaching Shakespeare, and be-
cause she was a teacher who had been an actress, she communicated
an extraordinary love of the work. By showing me her own mas-
tery which Sybil also has, of course of the meanings and of the
changes of tone necessary to keep it interesting, she was able to make
me understand Shakespeare and the value of each word. Sussex has
a kind of Cockney accent, and at this point I started gradually
to lose it. We had bombs in London in 1940, and the school
moved to the country to Bideford, in Devonshire. I stayed for ten
months after the move. It was rather like college life. Teaching acting
is a tremendously intangible business, because how can you? Often, a
dramatic school is a very difficult place to progress in. But you can
find out some technical things, and you do get physical practice. At
that time, we all felt the stretch toward John Gielgud, Ralph Richard-
son, Laurence Olivier, Michael Redgrave, Edith Evans. We had to
encompass big scenes of Shakespeare according to standards we were
already aware of. But acting is not a job for someone who is good at
learning or who has an aptitude for copying. It's got to be more than
that. It's got to be positive understanding and illumination. But the
school, for what it was, was fine. From a nucleus at the school a theatri-
cal company was formed, in which I played Dan in "Night Must
Fall," by Emlyn Williams, and it was a big step forward for me. We
went to Cambridge with our production of "Noah," by Andre Obey,

175

THE PLAYER: PAUL SCOFIELB

and hoped to start a repertory theatre there, but Eileen Thorndike be-
came ill, and we had to abandon our plans. That was the end of that.
It was a sad time.

I still hadn't been called up by the Army. I returned to London, and
in running around to agents' offices looking for a job I tracked down
Robert Atkins, a splendid old gentleman of the theatre, who had a
company called the Bankside Players. He gave me a job, at seven
pounds a week, with his tour of "The Taming of the Shrew," which we
did for the troops all over England. Atkins occasionally played the
lead himself, with Claire Luce, the American musical-comedy star,
playing Katharina. I played Vincentio, an old character part. At nine-
teen, I had the kind of competence that was approved of in those days.
I never had any illusions about the quality of the work I was doing. It
was a routine thing. I had seen enough theatre by then to know. That
job ended after a few months, and through friends of Eileen Thorn-
dike I found my next job, in a very portable tour of "Medea," with
Sybil Thorndike and Lewis T. Casson. I was supposed to join the
tour in a village near Aberystwyth, in Wales. They were stuck for a
man, and I was hired to play a messenger. I'd never seen "Medea"
up to the night I reached the village and saw that production, just
before I was to join the cast. I was shaken and shattered by it. It had
extraordinary simplicity and a kind of magnitude. One recognized that
one was seeing something big. The power of the play and the size and
range of the emotions in it were clear and overwhelming. The produc-
tion had a necessarily imposed stark simplicity, because the scenery
and everything had to be moved from village to village. It gave the
play an extra strength. I was impatient to start work. Before I could
even begin, however, I came down with the mumps, and I was left
behind in hospital for four weeks while the play went on with the
tour.

On my return to London, I searched for work, more or less going
where the wind blew me. I went on several tours one with "Jeannie,"
by Aim6e Stuart, a fragile Cinderella story set in Scotland, and another
one with "Young Woodley," by John Van Druten, in which I played
Ainger, the head prefect, Woodley's best friend. It was a time of flux in
England. The theatre was waiting to see what would happen in the
world. At one point, when I was in Newcastle upon Tyne, in Northum-
berland, it turned out that my Army-application record, which I had

176

PAUL SCOFIELB

filled out in Devonshire, had been destroyed in a bombing, and I was
ordered to have another physical examination right there and then. I
was turned down for military service on medical grounds; I could only
suppose it was because my toes were crooked, since I heard an examiner
say I wouldn't be able to wear Army boots. Nevertheless, I happen to
be a tremendous walker and have never had a bit of trouble with my
toes. So I went on with the tours. There was nothing much to the work,
yet there was no other work to be had. It was a lowering time for me; I
was trying to achieve a kind of competence, and generally absorbing
the feeling of acting, and that's about all. Then Basil C. Langton asked
me to join a production of "Hamlet" he was producing and starring in
in Birmingham. He had seen me in "Young Woodley/' and he asked
me to play Horatio. He had temporarily taken over the theatre occu-
pied by the Birmingham Repertory Theatre, whose owner and mana-
ger, Sir Barry Jackson, had given up the theatre during the bombings,
Margaret Leighton played a court lady, and Joy, my wife, played
Ophelia. She was marvellous as Ophelia better than I was as Horatio.
She had just the quality for it at the time, a kind of limpidity. It was
a full-length "Hamlet," divided up into two sections, which were
played on two successive nights all very odd, but a splendid produc-
tion. Life suddenly had purpose for me. It's easy to lose one's sense cf
direction in the theatre, in the early jobs. Now I found I had a sense
of direction, and had an opportunity to develop what abilities I had. I
was able to bring some imitative flair to the character of Horatio
some knowledge of another person. I went as far as understanding
Horatio's relationship to Hamlet and the rest of the people. It all fell
into place. The audience felt it. There was the quality of silence, of
intentness, that you get when they're listening and know what you're
talking about. You know you've succeeded in showing them something
they can believe in. The audience at Birmingham was very good, a very
special audience, of the sort that attaches itself to a theatre rather
than to the theatre. The audience got to know me. I became familiar
to them, and that gave me a feeling of sureness. It's a very good feeling
for an actor to get that the audience knows him and a difficult one
to get in the commercial theatre. One of the fascinating things about
an audience is that it always takes on a collective character. The kind
of audience you have creates an atmosphere. I hate London first-night
audiences. They're so cold, and always very unrepresentative. I was

177

THE PLAYER: PAUL SCOFIELD

braced to hate my first night in America, with "A Man for All Sea-
sons" which, incidentally, was a better production than the one in
London but it went off with a bang. It was quite intoxicating. I
didn't become a focus for the audience in Birmingham. There were
plenty of other actors. It was just that I was a contributing member
of the group. For most actors in the formative stage, the spotlight is
harmful. It makes one set hard too soon, and possibly it makes one
become a personality. There's no harm in it if you want to become the
kind of actor whose primary concern is expressing your self to the
audience. I hadn't, and haven't, any interest in doing that. The point is
that if you're a personality to the audience, it becomes increasingly
difficult to put yourself in other people's shoes, which is what I like to
do. It's a much more interesting job to try to illuminate as many types
of people as possible. I'm very, very cagey about my own personality.
I've always been very secretive.

Basil Langton took me along on a tour, underwritten by the Council
for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts, of Shaw's "Arms and
the Man/' starring himself. Yvonne Mitchell was in it, playing Raina
Petkoff, and so was Joy, playing Louka, the gypsy girl, and I played
Major Sergius Saranoff. We had quite a good standard of work. We
used to go to factory hostels and give performances before and after
night shifts. It made one extremely adaptable. One learned to act
under any conditions, and I loved it. At the end of that tour, Basil
Langton produced John Steinbeck's "The Moon Is Down" on tour
and then in London, in June of 1943. I played a sort of major small
part. In one free week between the tour and London, Joy and I got
married. I stayed with Basil Langton for another repertory season, at
the Theatre Royal in Bristol this time, and played Tybalt to his
Romeo in "Romeo and Juliet." I knew the day was coming when
I'd be leaving Langton. There was a good standard of work with him,
but I was going along hit-or-miss professionally and I felt I had to
move on to something else.

When I left Basil Langton, I went on a second factory tour spon-
sored by the C.E.M.A. of J. B. Priestley's play "I Have Been Here
Before," in which I played Oliver Farrant. In the late summer of
1944, I wrote to Barry Jackson, another splendid man in the theatre,
asking him if he could give me a job in the Birmingham Repertory
Theatre. At first he said no, and then a place turned up for me and

178

PAUL SCOFIELD

he asked me to come along. My preoccupation at this time was to im-
prove my equipment mainly my voice, and my use of it. You can
train your body as a dancer does, and that's fine, but an actor doesn't
dance. I was with the Birmingham Rep for two seasons, and it was
there that for the first time I felt I had some power to choose and
control what I wanted to illuminate. But it was all done in very
embryonic fashion, and was not completely successful. One aspect of
it was my finding the most economical way of doing what I wanted to
do cutting out what was unnecessary to do. This may have come
as a result of my playing a leading part in a play for the first time
the part of Philip the Bastard in "King John." It isn't simply that one
has more lines to speak in a leading part and so one must work
harder. In a leading part, one stapes the whole structure of the play.
One can't help doing that. Whatever the work of the director, it's got
to be done through you. Another aspect was my finding, in most of
the plays, the essence of the character; I found that in some odd spot
or other it was actually illuminated, so that the character was made
alive for the audience. The people in the audience could look and
say they recognized that person. They could look and say they saw
what the author meant. Not that you see the author's meaning stand-
ing there on the stage. The actor should make you forget the existence
of author and director, and even forget the actor. If an actor is
devoting himself to what he is doing, the talent will be there, but
in its least self-conscious manifestation. Some actors have the gift of
being able to see and to do things by intuition, without knowing
what it is they're seeing and doing. But it isn't enough to see and to
do; you must know how to have control over your intuition. And try-
ing to be natural is not the whole story. You find the truth within
yourself only about twenty-five per cent of the time. The rest of the
time, you find it outside. Yet being observant is a very tenuous kind
of process. A great deal of conscious observation is not relevant. It's
what remains with you without your having said "This is what I
want to remember" that has the profoundest effect. This may be be-
cause every one of us carries within himself something of all aspects
of human nature. We may know Hitler because in some tiny part of
us we're capable of being what he was and doing what he did. It can't
all be observation. There are times when I can see more of myself
in a part than I can at other times. In 1957, when I played in "A

179

THE PLAYER: PAUL SCOFIELD

Dead Secret," by Rodney Ackland, in London, about a murder case
of a particularly sordid kind, I took the part of a man who murdered
just for money. I found the man a fascinating character, because he
was so mean, so narrow, with his mind so shut to life and to humanity.
1 could understand him. One could make the audience feel great
sympathy for him because of his blindness. I found that part very
exciting to do, and by then I felt that I had complete control over
what I wanted to show. What an actor contributes onstage follows
from his craft. His talent is something that is individual enough to be
noticed. It is what any actor has to have. Whatever it is, it is no
business of mine. My business is to have control over what I do.

By 1946, after my two seasons at the Birmingham Rep, I had
achieved a kind of technical balance. In addition to "King John," I
now had behind me considerable experience in such parts as John
Tanner in Shaw's "Man and Superman," and Dr. Wangel in Ibsen's
"The Lady from the Sea," and Konstantin in Chekhov's "The Seagull,"
and also Mr. Toad in A. A. Milne's "Toad of Toad Hall," a show, with
music by H. Fraser-Simson, based on Kenneth Grahame's "The Wind
in the Willows." Odd as it may seem, a musical is tremendously good
experience for technical purposes. Working with music brings you into
much closer contact with the audience. You are not confined to the
three walls plus the imaginary fourth wall; you include the audience
more in the show a contact that is valuable later for ordinary plays.
Once having got that crude kind of contact by singing and playing di-
rectly to the audience and not pretending it's not there, you develop a
kind of awareness that is with you when you are pretending the audi-
ence is not there. In so many ways now, I was steaming ahead. I had
come to know that too little technical ability results in affectation; one
does things in one's own fashion, but ineptly and repetitively, as when
one finds that using one's voice in a certain way is effective and then
continues to use it that way because it is so effective. If one hasn't got
sufficient resources to choose from, one falls back repetitively into the
same old ways. I had a kind of routine now, the rhythmic pattern one
achieves in one's work as a result of experience. I had had regular
practice. Now I was free, and eager to explore.

In 1946, Barry Jackson was asked to be an administrative director
for three years at Stratford on Avon, and he asked me and Peter Brook
and one or two others to go along with him. It was a very good pro-

180

PAUL SCOFIELD

fessional opportunity, from a purely practical point of view. I went
to Stratford, and stayed for three seasons. My voice developed, and 1
had a chance to act with known and successful actors. I found Godfrey
Tearle particularly helpful; he gave one a feeling of self-confidence,
not by specific encouragement but by the way he treated one in general.
And I must have been influenced in those days by Richardson, Gielgud,
and Olivier, although I had then seen Olivier only in films. I was paid
twenty pounds a week at first, which was quite a lot, and I started on
a new phase of acting. The first character I played was Cloten in
"Cymbeline;" I was able to make this oafish character, who is a little
bit stupid, come very much to life. I was finished with the groundwork
that I had had to lay and that every actor has to lay, and was able to
find the clearest, simplest way of building the structure of the char-
acter. Then I played Don Adriano de Armado in "Love's Labor's Lost/'
and the title role in "Henry V," and again I found I didn't have to
waste much time on the technical requirements of the part, and was
free to create the character. I was now exploring aspects of human
nature that I wanted to make clear to the audience. Shakespeare is
particularly well suited to an actor who wants to make his own com-
ment. The lines spoken by Shakespeare's characters mean something
different to every actor, just as everybody who reads a book reads it
differently. In contemporary plays, the actor is much more interpre-
tive of the author's intention. Stratford was altogether different from
Birmingham in many ways. I attracted attention that was national
instead of purely local. Most of the critics gave me notices, some bad
and some good, the latter more or less to the effect that here was a
good new actor who had a faculty for getting under the skin of very
different types of characters. The second season, I played Mercutio in
"Romeo and Juliet" and the title role in "Pericles/* and I was able to
consolidate what I had learned during the first season. Between sea-
sons, I got some London jobs that were good for me professionally
the part of Tegeus-Chromis, the lead, in "A Phoenix Too Frequent,"
by Christopher Fry, and the juvenile lead, Young Fashion, in Sir John
Vanbrugh's "The Relapse, or Virtue in Danger," with Cyril Ritchard
and Madge Elliott

In 1948, my third season, I was asked to play Hamlet for the first
time. The production was in Victorian dress, and Robert Helpmann
and I played the lead on alternate nights. I played Hamlet again in

181

THE PLAYER: PAUL SCOFIELB

1955, in a more conventionally costumed production, which we opened
in Birmingham, took- to Moscow, and then brought to London. Any-
one can play Hamlet. Any actor with facility and technical skill can
play him, because the character has such universality. Macbeth is
rather more specific. When I was first asked to play Hamlet, I was
happy, of course, but I was immediately preoccupied with how I was
going to play him. We rehearsed for the play off and on over a period
of two months that had been allotted us for rehearsals of the three
plays of that season; the others were "King John/* in which I played
Philip, the King of France, and "The Merchant of Venice," in which
I played Bassanio. In 1948, I was an actor with less developed abilities
than in 1955, when I had more to bring to the part, and less. The first
time, I was much more vulnerable, because I was younger; I had a less
sophisticated approach to the play I was more naive. In 1955, I had
more knowledge and more control over my abilities, and less frailty.
One man can play Hamlet only one way. But the first time I wasn't so
capable of analyzing what I was doing as I was later. However, I do
know that I was temperamentally suited to the part in 1948, when I
was twenty-six, in a way that is difficult to recapture. My Hamlet of
1948 was frail. Claire Bloom played Ophelia, and she was so young
then that she had a green ration book, the color of the ones given to
children; mine was buff. In 1955, Mary Ure played Ophelia. The sec-
ond time, my Hamlet had more positive assurance and there was
probably less of Hamlet in it. The acting was better, the approach was
more assured, but something had been lost. If I were to do it a third
time, I might learn from the mistakes of the second. That second
Hamlet aroused less sympathy, because I was deliberately trying to
play it in a more positive way. The Russians were tremendously en-
thusiastic about the production, however. We played for fourteen days
in Moscow. Ours was" the first English-speaking dramatic company to
have visited Moscow since the revolution. During the run, we were
given a large reception by the Artists' Club. The Russians were inter-
ested in us, and admiring. I felt a tremendous rapport with them with
their vitality and their warmth and their enormous self-knowledge.
You remember foreign voices coming out of faces; you don't remember
what was said. But you know. Just as you know when people mean
what they say. An actor can always gauge whether he has attention and
approval from an audience, of any size. At the reception, we spoke to

182

PAUL SCOFIELD

the Russians through an interpreter. We were all feeling rather tired
but were trying to do our best, and the effort to communicate took
tremendous concentration and energy. They were so hungry for every-
thing they could learn about us. When we arrived for the reception,
one of the other actors happened to tell me that he was so tired he felt
he couldn't cope with it. There was a little old Russian actress near
us, and she immediately gave us a lecture in Russian. She was such a
fierce little old lady. I didn't understand a word she said, but I knew
exactly what she meant. She meant that one relies on energy to gen-
erate energy. And she was so right. Output in the theatre requires
greater energy than anything else I know. Doubt of one's energy is
the worst of all. One's output in the theatre requires energy of a sort
that is never a factor in family life. Family energy generates itself.
Social life outside the family can be exhausting. I don't care much for
social life with people in the theatre. I'm rather good at being with
people when I want to make the effort, but I'm bad at listening to
people when I know what they're going to say. It isn't very interesting,
and on the whole it's very draining. The interesting thing in the
theatre is the work and working with people. I usually like the people
in the work, but I can't go on with them outside the work as long as
most actors can. And when I'm working on a part I'm thinking about it
all the time, going over all the possibilities in my mind. I like to be
alone when I'm working.

After the 1948 season at Stratford, I went to London in a big way,
playing Alexander, the lead, in Terence Rattigan's play "Adventure
Story." It was a flop, but was artistically successful, and it led to my
playing Treplef in a West End production of "The Seagull," with
Mai Zetterling, Isabel Jeans, and Ian Hunter. For two years, from
1950 to 1952, I was in "Ring Round the Moon," Christopher Fry's
adaptation of a Jean Anouilh play, with Claire Bloom and Margaret
Rutherford. During the run of "Ring Round the Moon/' I appeared
on two Sunday nights in my own production of "Pericles," in London.
Then I did a season of plays with John Gielgud at the Hammersmith
Lyric Theatre, which is sort of Off Broadway. He and I took the lead
parts, and most of the time he directed. We put on "Richard II," in
which I played the lead and my wife played the Queen; Congreve's
"The Way of the World/ 1 with Gielgud and Margaret Rutherford, in
which I played my first comic role in London Witwoud with a lot of

183

THE PLAYER: PAUL SCOFIELB

splendid ladies; and Thomas Otway's "Venice Preserved/' directed by
Peter Brook, with Pamela Brown and Eileen Herlie. Gielgud, of course,
was one of the ones we had gone to see and learn from in the early days.
He has a tremendous interest in anybody who is new in the theatre,
because he cares about new life in the theatre. He is a very considerable
person, a genius, who brings life to everything he does. As a director,
he never tried to impose his own conception of the role on me, but
paradoxically, with an actor as individual and powerful as Gielgud it
is impossible not to feel that his way is the way you should follow.
He has total mastery of all aspects of the theatre. He participates
with tremendous energy in every aspect of a production he is in-
volved in. His knowledge is very stimulating. He has style. Every-
thing he does he informs with a beauty of style, both vocal and physi-
cal. But one doesn't model oneself on anyone else. One wants to go
one's own way. I'm aware of being referred to by some people as the
new Olivier. Every strong new actor is called the new Olivier at some
point. How can one be the new anything? I've never worked with
Olivier, but I've always admired him.

One of the most important seasons I've ever played in was the one at
the Phoenix Theatre in London in 1955-56, with Peter Brook directing.
We put on three plays, in all of which I played the lead; one was T. S.
Eliot's "The Family Reunion," with Sybil Thorndike, and the others
were the "Hamlet" we took to Moscow, and Dennis Cannan's and
Pierre Bost's adaptation of Graham Greene's "The Power and the
Glory." The program of three plays depended mostly on me, and it was
the most that had ever been demanded of me. After the overwhelm-
ing experience of seeing Sybil Thorndike in "Medea," I was a bit
wary of her, but I found her very down-to-earth and warm and
friendly not the remote type of leading actress at all. One of the most
enjoyable plays for me was "The Power and the Glory," in which I
played the priest, because I had to go further in one direction than I'd
ever gone before. The play presented me with bigger demands on my
abilities and also took me in a new direction. The character of the
priest was an extremely intricate one he was drawn as a mess of a
human being and I had to make a truthful character of him
somehow. The man was a priest; he was also a peasant. I didn't know
how I should make him sound. It gave me an opportunity to work in a
completely nonclassical, realistic style, in which I could still use more

184

PAUL SCOFIELD

of my classical training than ever before. In "Venice Preserved," I also
had to go further, playing an extremely violent revolutionary. This
role demanded that I be extroverted and tough. Up to that point,
sensitivity was mostly what had been demanded of me.

In a sense, I feel that I'm part of no group in the theatre. I come
sort of halfway between two schools one exemplified by John Giel-
gud, with the classic style of speaking, and the other by the Royal
Court Theatre, which puts on the work of so many of the good new
playwrights. I'm somewhat detached from both groups, although I do
come out of the same sort of stable as most English actors, in a
general way. There's something about English actors that makes them
depend on themselves. I was brought up in the theatre of articulate-
ness. The plays of Shakespeare and Shaw deal with articulate people
people who can express their thoughts. In the plays of Chekhov, on
the other hand, everything the characters say has nuances. I don't have
a psychological approach to acting; fundamentally, I have an intuitive
approach. For me, the totally intellectual approach is never satisfactory.
What matters to me is whether I like the play, for one thing, and, for
another, whether I can recognize and identify myself with the charac-
ter I'm to play. My intuition for a part has failed me only once for
the part of Thomas More in Robert Bolt's "A Man for All Seasons/'
which opened in London in July of 1960. I felt a tremendous warmth
toward the character. Then I came to play him, and I didn't know
how. As the play is written, it gives nothing more than the bare lines
of what the man is saying. It's all in the lines. There is no opportunity
for embroidery. I had to start from scratch and just work on facts,
making myself totally faithful to what was on the page: More was a
lawyer, a man of tremendous faith, a complex and subtle character.
Everything in him led inevitably toward a kind of forensic point of
view. It was a rather cold-blooded way of ordering one's mind. I found
that the part had what seemed like dogmatic exposition. Simply saying
the lines for what they were worth would make More sound like a very
pompous and noisy man. If I said the lines with all the intensity they
seemed to require, he would seem an aggressive man. And he was not
an aggressive man. So I had to find a way of making the man sound not
pompous and not aggressive. And yet he had to sound strong. If you
can see it, then you can do it. First, I had to find the way the man
would feel; then I was able to find the way he should sound, Eventu-

185

THE PLAYER: PAUL SCOFIELD

ally, I discovered that if I used a specific range of my voice, and char-
acteristics of my voice that I had never used before, I might make him
sound mild, even though what the lines themselves said was not mild.
When I played Hamlet, I used a lot of voice. For Thomas More, I used
a voice you wouldn't hear at all if I used it for Hamlet. I used an ac-
cent for More that was absolutely a bastard thing of my own. My
parents are Midland people, with a very regional accent, and I drew
somewhat on this accent and mixed it with some others. The way More
sounded just came out of my characterization of him as a lawyer. His
dryness of mind, I thought, led him to use a sort of dryness of speech.
It evolved as I evolved the character. I would flatten or elongate a
vowel in a certain way to get a certain effect I wanted. Not too much
happened to the voice as a result of More's being a man of faith and
spirituality. One of the great traps in playing a man of spiritual depth
is that one is given only a certain number of lines, and if they are not
made to sound absolutely true they are likely to sound very self-
satisfied and sentimental. The false note is so often struck. Next, I
discovered More's humor, and knew that that would be the thing to
make him not smug. Then, More was a flesh-and-blood man, with
strong family affections. His spiritual attitudes did not put him at all
in a backwater of life. He was fully alive and sensual, in the true sense
of the word. He used his senses. He enjoyed the things of life food
and wine and the rest. He was reluctant to die. He didn't relish physi-
cal discomfort. And he wouldn't want to be hurt. At one point in the
play, he says, "This is not the stuff of which martyrs are made." Be-
cause you're thinking and feeling all these things, the voice comes out
in a certain way. It's constant communication between thinking and
feeling. Otherwise, the muscles don't work right, don't take the right
shape. One's voice follows the rest. It somehow becomes a willing in-
strument. I didn't go very far in my idea of how I should look as
Thomas More: thin and pale, with a hat on and a gown on. That's
the picture. Actors get into some awful habits through their preoccu-
pation with their faces. You have to look at your face in order to get
it looking right, but you get more tired of your face than other people
do. As soon as you're in rehearsal, it's necessary to start thinking about
what you look like. You're enclosed by the structure of the author's
writing. You have to hold back on deciding how you should look until
you find what is commensurate with what the lines require. I don't

186

PAUL SCOFIELD

think very often of how I myself look: I've got hair brown hair with
gray in it and lines in my forehead, lines down past my mouth, and
bags under my eyes, and my height is just over six feet. That is the
kind of professional knowledge one has.

I find radio a marvellous medium for an actor to work in, and I've
done a lot of radio work in England, including reading the whole of
"The Fall," by Albert Camus, and Gogol's "The Diary of a Madman."
I've played in movies "That Lady," with Olivia de Havilland, in
which I played Philip of Spain, and "Carve Her Name with Pride,"
in which I played a British spy. I would like to work in more films, if
I could be sure of the director. But I've got the stamp of the classical
actor, and I don't know whether film people want that. The greater
amounts of money to be earned in films are no inducement. The minute
one begins to earn large money, one is burdened with so many superflu-
ous and extraneous preoccupations. My wife and I both feel that way.
I don't like working in television. It seems to have the worst of both
worlds the responsibility of a play in a three-hour stretch, together
with all the disadvantages of the proximity of the camera and the
hazards of a mechanical medium. At the age of forty, I plan to play
King Lear for the first time. Forty is just the right age to play him.
I long ago decided I must play him when I was not too young. Yet to
play that kind of old man you need a particular kind of energy that an
old man doesn't have. He must be old for the audience, but not an
ordinary old man.

187

WARREN BEATTY

As an actor, 1 have plenty of time. I'm in no rush.

I was born on March 30, 1937, in Richmond, Virginia, the younger of
two children. My sister, Shirley MacLaine, the movie star, is three
years older than I am. Until I was in high school, my mother,
born Kathlyn MacLean, taught acting and directed plays put on by
local amateur drama groups, and her mother had done the same. My
father, Ira O. Beaty, used to be a psychology teacher and public-school
administrator, and is now in the real-estate business. He's a very good
violinist, and he might have become a concert violinist if he had taken
the gamble as a young man. I changed the spelling of my name so that
people would pronounce it "Batey" instead of "Beety." Shirley, who
changed the spelling of the name MacLean for the same sort of
reason, took dancing lessons from early childhood, and she grav-
itated naturally toward the stage. All through our childhood, she
was bigger and stronger than I was, and it seemed to me that she
always knew what she was doing. What I'm doing now is still a
little bit of a mystery to me. We were brought up as Baptists, and
attended church and Sunday school regularly. To this day, I don't
smoke much, or drink. When I had to smoke cigarettes as the dissolute
and amoral young Italian in "The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone," I

188

WARREN BEATTY

could do it, but I didn't like it. When I was five, my mother gave me
a walk-on part in a play she was directing. I walked across the stage,
saying nothing, and that was it. She told me I was very good. My first
real acting part came about then, too in a class play at school, before
an audience of parents. It was a Christmas play, and I played the part
of one of three toy soldiers under a Christmas tree. All three of us wore
soldier suits, and we were required to take a bow to music. I made a
big, sweeping bow, the biggest of all, holding my soldier's peaked cap
in my hand. I loved it. My mother told me I was very good. I did it
right, she said. I didn't waste it. My next part was in another of my
mother's productions, the play "My Sister Eileen," put on by her
little-theatre group in our neighborhood. I was one of a group of boys
who rattled sticks against the grating outside Eileen's basement apart-
ment. I was seven then, and felt I was kind of cute. Everybody in the
cast had a crush on the actress who played Eileen. I was the young,
young, young one with a crush on Eileen. I got in everybody's way
most of the time. Shirley was in that play, too. I thought she was good.
My last childhood appearance on the stage was at a local movie house
in Richmond, in a stage show directed by my mother; all I know is
that I was in there somewhere. Shirley went on working with my
mother until she was about twelve. In the summer of 1944, when I was
seven, we made a family excursion to New York. We stayed with an
uncle in Larchmont and saw a lot of Broadway shows. "Oklahoma!"
was the first one. I was thrilled by it. I fell in love with musicals. We
bought the recording of the songs from "Oklahoma!/' and when we
went home, I listened to it over and over. I'll never forget that over-
ture. The next year, we came to New York again, and I asked to see
"Oklahoma!" again. My father took me, and left me at the theatre.
When the movie version came out, in 1955, I went to see it about a
dozen times.

In my early teens, I decided that I didn't want to miss any of the
advantages of a normal life. I was an above-average student in high
school, and took part in a lot of extracurricular activities. I went out
for football and made the first team. I was a letter man in baseball
and basketball, and was elected president of my senior class. In high
school, I didn't do anything in dramatics, because I considered it
sissy. Because of my football record in high school, I was offered
athletic scholarships at ten different colleges and universities, but

THE PLAYER: WARREN BEATTY

I decided to turn them all down. I'd had enough of football. Foot-
ball can get into your blood and ego. The cheers and admiration
can go to your head too easily. Besides, I wasn't really passionate
about athletics. In basketball, I'd often been more interested in
kidding around and having fun than in winning games, I'd never
taken anything very seriously. I'd always got good grades without
studying. I'd talked vaguely about studying law, but I'd been sort
of a goof-off, always clowning around. After high school, I said
to myself, "Now 111 do what I want to do," and in 1956 I entered
Northwestern University, where I attended classes regularly and joined
one of the fraternities. I did two plays in college: "Bus Stop/' in which
I played Bo, the leading man, and "Under Milk Wood/' by Dylan
Thomas, in which I played three characters a clothing salesman, a sea
captain, and a poet. After a year, I suddenly realized that I wanted to
be an actor, and that I wasn't going to learn acting at Northwestern. In
1957, I left college and came to New York. I lived from day to day. I
stayed in a rooming house and got a job as a sandhog at thirty dollars
a day. Then I got an easier job playing cocktail piano at a little res-
taurant. I had taken piano lessons for a couple of years while I was
going to high school, but I'd never practiced; I'd just picked up
enough facility to get away with a simple rendition of "Tea for Two."
After I'd been in New York a short while, I started to take acting
lessons with Stella Adler. Six months after that, a friend of mine
asked me to audition for a "Kraft Television Theatre" play called
"The Curly-Headed Kid," and I got the leading role a rebel, a vaga-
bond, a kid who went from town to town searching for affection and
attention. The part came to me easily. I also appeared in "Lamp
Unto My Feet," a television series, in which I played a son who
couldn't communicate with his father, and a sailor who came home
from the service and couldn't adjust to his family again, and things
like that fifteen shows in all, each lasting half an hour. From then
on, I belonged to the agents. I signed up with the Music Corporation of
America. I did a lot of daytime soap opera on television and ap-
peared several times in a series called "Look Up and Live," and
was in a five-part program called "The Family/' with Hiram
Sherman and Edward Andrews. Very often, I had little more to do
than walk across the stage, but I earned about three hundred dol-
lars a week. By this time, I was living in a furnished apartment in the

190

WARREN BEATTY

West Sixties. I also got a job, for an additional hundred dollars a week,
playing cocktail piano at a couple of cocktail lounges. It was a lazy
job, but I was quite content with it; the only thing that upset me was
when a hip saxophone player told me I was a square, musically. I
had come to New York thinking I knew everything about acting. But
the more I acted, and the more I learned from Stella Adler, the more
I realized I had a lot to learn. I auditioned for the role of Artie Strauss
in "Compulsion/' for Broadway, but Roddy McDowall got it. I finally
played the part in winter stock, with the North New Jersey Playhouse,
in Fort Lee. Playing this role showed me more clearly than ever that I
had a lot to learn. It's easy for me to fall into a state of inertia. I need
to be kicked out of it. Progress, after all, comes through conflict. When
I'd been in New York for about two years, William Inge apparently
saw me in a couple of the television dramas, including one in which I
played the part of a student who cheated in high school. Joshua Logan
must have seen me, too, because in the winter of 1958 he asked me to
make a screen test for his movie "Parrish." He wanted Vivien Leigh
and Clark Gable to play my parents in that one, but he couldn't get
them, so he abandoned the idea of directing the movie. In the mean-
time, M-G-M had seen my test and called me to the Coast and signed
me to a contract, and then they shelved the movie they'd had me in
mind for. I then met Elia Kazan through William Inge, who was out
there working on his screenplay for "Splendor in the Grass," and who
wanted me to appear in it. Inge asked me if I'd do his play "A Loss of
Roses" on Broadway first, and I agreed. The play was a flop, but I got
good notices. I felt it might have been a much better play if we'd
had more tryout time with it out of town. As it was, I felt, we were led
to depend a lot on cliches. The play deserved more. I'd get laughs at
times when I shouldn't be getting laughs. The play was about a boy
in trouble, and I didn't think it was funny, but the audience reacted
as if I were doing boffo scenes. Variety said I was an acceptable
actor. I respect the opinions of others, but I knew I could do much
better.

Right after the play closed, I played the leading role in the movie
"Splendor in the Grass," with Natalie Wood and Pat Hingle, which
was directed by Elia Kazan. I worked on the picture from May to Au-
gust of 1960. From that I 'went right into "The Roman Spring of Mrs.
Stone," with Vivien Leigh, directed by Jose Quintero. We made it be-

191

THE PLAYER: WARREN BEATTY

tween November, I960, and February, 1961. Then came "All Fall
Down," with Brandon de Wilde, Eva Marie Saint, Angela Lansbury,
and Karl Maiden, and directed by John Frankenheimer. I worked in
that movie from July to September of 1961. All in all, I got a con-
centrated education in making movies. I felt terribly frustrated when I
first saw myself in "Splendor in the Grass" and "The Roman Spring of
Mrs. Stone." From every indication, I was very successful. I was very
much in demand; I was getting a lot of publicity; I was on my way
to becoming what is known as a movie star. But when I saw myself in
those first two movies, I realized that if I had done the same parts on
the stage I would have had the opportunity to come back and do them
again, in a better way, trying to find new meanings in them. In
the movies, they were recorded in one way for all time. On the
other hand, I knew I was learning how to combat out-of-sequence
shooting, how to sustain a performance, and how to come to the set
prepared, in my own mind, to play it. In acting, I've always tried to
make the most of whatever I was doing, no matter what. My father
tells a story about a man who is captured by cannibals in the jungle
and is about to be boiled. He says to himself, "There is nothing I can
do about it, so I may as well enjoy it."

192

KATHARINE CORNELL

I love the pretending, but I've never been terribly
happy on the stage. I've never found it easy to act;
acting to me is agony.

I was born on February 16, 1898, of American parentage, in Berlin,
where my father, Dr. Peter C. Cornell, was taking a postgraduate
course in surgery. I was an only child. At the age of three months,
I was taken to Buffalo, where my father settled and started to practice
medicine. He was a martinet. I had a very disciplined childhood. In
those days, I wanted to be a trained nurse. When I was eight, my
father gave up medicine to become manager of the Majestic Theatre
in Buffalo. He booked all kinds of touring attractions there. He died in
1948, at the age of eighty- three. My mother, who died at forty- three, was
an amazingly lovely creature and very outgoing. Both my father and
his father were amateur actors. Grandfather Cornell was a friend
of John Drew. My mother was frightened of acting. As a child, I was
gawky and not attractive, and a tomboy. At boarding school the
Oaksmere School, in Mamaroneck I coached tennis, basketball, and
drama. I was also the amateur swimming champion of Buffalo. I love
to swim, and do a lot of it these days at my place on Martha's Vine-

193

THE PLAYER: KATHARINE CORNELL

yard. I first went to the Vineyard with my maternal grandmother, and
fell in love with it immediately with the sweet smell of fern by the
sandy road. I adored my grandmother. I always felt I had a completely
theatrical background. Not that I took to the stage as a child. One of
the vaudeville acts at my father's theatre was an elephant act, and chil-
dren were brought out onstage at the end of an elephant act to feed an
elephant. Once, I was supposed to go on and give the elephant a bun,
but when the moment came to do it I was afraid. My father said I was
going to do it, and so I was thrust shrieking onstage holding a bag of
buns. I threw the buns at the elephant and ran screaming from the
stage.

At boarding school, I had a feeling that I wanted to be a director.
I wrote plays for the school, designed the sets, and acted in the plays
as well as directed. Theresa Helburn came to the school to coach the
cast of "Twelfth Night," in which I played Malvolio, and then she
coached "Play," which I wrote. After that, I felt I must go on acting.
When Edward Goodman, the director of the Washington Square
Players, came to the school to help coach one of my plays, he suggested
that I try out for the Players. I moved, with my aunt, to New York in
1917 and lived in Miss Pennybacker's Boarding House, at 15 East
Thirty-eighth Street. I got along on an inheritance from my mother,
and earned about forty dollars over a period of two years, play-
ing bit parts with the Players. The biggest day of my life was when I
got a one-line part in a Japanese no drama, "Bushido," without pay. I
played a Japanese mother, and spoke four words "My son, my son."
I was so nervous I didn't know how to read a part. But I knew the
stoicism of that woman, and knew I had to say that line without over-
doing it. I grew with this part and made it something of my own. By
then, I was talking easily with actors, and I loved them.

During the summer of 1919, I played small roles in Detroit and Buf-
falo in a touring stock company owned by Jessie Bonstelle, a friend of
my family's. Stock is fantastic training for an actor. You have to prepare
so quickly to do things. You learn a lot of tricks. The difficult side is
that sometimes a stock actor learns the tricks and is never able to get rid
of them. I had a pride about what I was doing. Also in 1919, I played
Jo in "Little Women," in London, in a production Miss Bonstelle put
on there. I felt I was becoming abler as an actress, but didn't talk to
anybody about it. I had the feeling for it, the knack and the instinct. In

194

KATHARINE CORNELL

1921, I made my Broadway debut in "Nice People," by Rachel
Crothers. I had met Guthrie McClintic a few years before, while I was
in stock, and had fallen in love with him. At that time, he had been a
talent scout for Winthrop Ames and had written opposite my name in
the program, "Interesting. Monotonous. Watch." We were married in
1921, and today live a quiet life. I'm a farmer, basically. I love the early
morning. I usually have breakfast at eight, even when I'm working. I
have dogs, read a great deal, walk, scrape and refinish wood. Guthrie
says I'm always either putting paint on or taking it off. I cook mostly
spaghetti alia marinara. We don't entertain much. After I've finished a
long tour, like the one with "Dear Liar," Jerome Kilty's adaptation of
the Shaw-Campbell correspondence sixty-seven cities and twenty-
seven thousand miles I just want to do nothing. That mood may last
quite a long while. Guthrie has been a wonderful help to me, has be-
lieved very much in me. When I work, I love to work with him. As an
actress, what I've had has been an instinct for being somebody else, just
as some women have an instinct for doing their own hair. I've never
had an instinct for doing my own hair, and I have no instinct about
clothes. But I knew I had the acting instinct.

My first big part on Broadway was in "A Bill of Divorcement," in
1921, and then I played the title role in "Candida" in 1924, and in 1925
I became strongly identified with Michael Arlen's "The Green Hat."
What you try to do in the theatre is to give a universal picture, through
your own eyes and feelings, of the person you play. You try to be, in
your own way, what that person would be. You have a feeling about
the thing. If you don't feel strongly about a part, or if it doesn't appeal
to you, it's a mistake to do it. I loved Candida, but when I read what
Shaw said about Candida I didn't think it was anything like the
woman I acted. I felt the maternal quality of the woman. The only
time I met Shaw, he said he wished he'd seen me as Candida and Joan,
and I told him I didn't think he would have liked the way I played
them. You have to play a part in your own way. It's always a struggle
to do it. You have to keep on struggling to get through. Sometimes you
accomplish it, and sometimes you don't, but you have to keep on trying
to get through, through, through. There are three ways of doing it, in
general; you might call them auditory, tactual, and visual. I think I
do it in a tactual way. I always have in mind a lovely thing Willa
Gather wrote about art's being "a mould in which to imprison for a

195

THE PLAYER: KATHARINE CORNELL

moment the shining, elusive element which is life itself." It's so won-
derful when it happens in acting. When it does happen, a bell rings,
but it's very rare. It happened once when I was playing Elizabeth Bar-
rett in "The Barretts of Wimpole Street" for the men overseas in the
Second World War. It's a tiny little thing that happens. You then
say to yourself, "That was right." Sometimes you can be wrong about
it, but when it happens it's wonderful, and usually you're not wrong.
Kirsten Flagstad can do it again and again when she sings. Myra Hess
can do it when she plays. As an actress, when it happens, I make you
confident of me as a human being on that stage. I get a wonderful
sense of accomplishment doing that. In the beginning, I didn't want to
play Elizabeth Barrett. I thought she was a dreary girl, always lying on
that couch. Elizabeth Barrett bored me. I had never read any of her
poetry except "Sonnets from the Portuguese." Guthrie, however,
thought it was a wonderful part, and read the play aloud to me, and
then I began reading about the family. I read six books about the Bar-
retts and Robert Browning, became interested in the father-daughter
psychology, and ended up fascinated by Elizabeth.

Sometimes, you read a part over and over, and you get lost in many
things you think about it. You flounder around, struggling with it.
Little by little, some line emerges and you've got it. The audience
never gets half of what you've thought in your mind. Guthrie felt that
Iris March in "The Green Hat" was not at all in my vein, but I always
felt I had an understanding of her as a woman. She had a kind of
burned-up quality about her. Her whole set had that quality, and I
knew it, even though I didn't know the set had and never belonged to
it. The play had a seduction scene with Leslie Howard and me. He
played it beautifully. My husband directed, and at the point where
Leslie Howard said to me, "Iris, Iris, what do you want?," I replied,
"You baby" And I turned out the lights. My husband said that
Howard should turn out the lights and that I should say, 'Tow, baby."
I said no; I said I had to turn out the lights myself, and I knew it was
more natural for me to take the comma out and say, "You baby'' To
me it was an extremely interesting part. She was a disillusioned woman.
You had to underplay it and distort it so that people wouldn't laugh
at it. You do what is the right thing for you to do in any kind of acting.
No two people play the same character in the same way.

You can emasculate a part with too much thought. I know that some

196

KATHARINE CORNELL

of the Method actors are fine actors, but sometimes they do think a
little too much and I don't understand them. We have a prescribed
movement on the stage, and what you do must not interfere with some-
body else. You have an obligation to your fellow-actors. Some of these
Method youngsters are a deadly bore. It's so exhausting to play with
these people who have to talk to their analysts all the time and then
come back and tell you what the character is all about. One never knows
where they're going to be on the stage. You can't be willful on the
stage. You can't be arbitrary. You have to belong to the team. But there
are good ones among them, and some are among the best we have.
And the art goes around and around, and actors do have to explore.
It gets harder to act as you go on. There's more responsibility, not less.
You can't ride along on anything you've had. You must always take a
part and make it your own. And when you're playing on the stage,
every night is an opening night for an audience. Often, you try too
hard. It isn't easy for it to come through. You always try to be fresh.
I'm still frightened of acting. It's that egotistical thing that makes you
want to be so good that turns around and frightens you.

The star thing is utterly indefinable. It's there or it isn't there.
Sometimes a star isn't a very good actor, but he has that peculiar
quality that makes him a star. It's almost a chemical thing. I know that
some great actors have some moments that are so electrifying as to be
absolutely delirious. I can't say exactly that for myself, but I do
know that some of my moments have been wonderful for me. I
worked on preparing "Dear Liar" for five months. It was terrible tor-
ture, because I couldn't get that woman. The letters didn't give me
the bitchiness of Mrs. Campbell. When you're not good, you just
know it. And that is what I call suffering. But I worked on it and
worked on it, and I thought, I'm going through with it even if I never
act again. I had to find a way of using those letters to bring out what I
wanted, and finally I had the feeling that I had done what I wanted.
I had done the job as far as it was possible for me to do it. I like to do
a job as well as I can.

197

EDDIE ALBERT

No one but an actor can run the gamut of life's ex-
periences.

I was born on April 22, 1908, in Rock Island, Illinois. My full name is
Eddie Albert Heimberger, and I'm the eldest of five children. My
parents were both of German descent. When I was a year old, our
family moved to Minneapolis, where my father first owned and man-
aged a couple of small restaurants, then gave them up and went into
the insurance business. My parents now live in Los Angeles, with my
brother John, who works as a mechanic for the Lockheed Aircraft Cor-
poration. My other brother, Frank, works for the telephone company
in Los Angeles as a circuit-installation supervisor. My sister Margaret
is secretary to a Hollywood lawyer, and my other sister, Mary, is
married and runs a ceramic factory in Minneapolis. My father is re-
tired now, and spends his time painting in water colors. I was brought
up as a Roman Catholic. I attended St. Stephens, in Minneapolis, and
then went to Central High School. At the age of six, I started working,
as a newsboy, and I had my own delivery route by the time I was nine.
I worked at one job or another soda jerk, usher, theatre manager

198

EDDIE ALBERT

all during my school and college years. I loathed going to school.
I was always disrupting things. When I was in the second grade, I
discovered I had the ability to make the other kids in the class
laugh. One of the nuns would catch me clowning around, making
jokes, and I would get beaten up. I was a real troublemaker. But I
loved getting attention from the other kids. Little by little, during
my childhood, I was singled out for special work in class plays, camp-
fire shows just the usual small stuff, like playing the Spirit of the
Castor Oil Bean in brown muslin. In one school play, I was the pig
that hid in a churn and rolled down the hill to escape the fox. On
Sundays, I sang soprano in the St. Stephens Church choir. I grew up
in the twenties. All through those years, I was taught that to be
a man you had to be a businessman. You had to work. When I was
in high school, I worked, for thirteen dollars a week, at a soda
fountain from six in the evening until midnight. I never got to
sleep before one in the morning. I was a shy kid. Making other
kids laugh was the easiest way of getting their approval. I played
the lead in the senior-class play, which was part of our graduation
ceremonies. It was the part of the Policeman-Prince in "A Kiss
for Cinderella" by J. M. Barrie. It put me on top of the heap.
The rewards were immediate and unmistakable: the applause, the
newspaper notices, the approval. I graduated from high school with
a bang. I've always envied those people who just go along and don't
give a damn about who approves and who doesn't. I've always been
one of the others.

When I began to plan what I would spend my life at, I thought it
would be business. Prosperity was at its height then. You couldn't
pick up a newspaper or magazine that didn't have some big-business
success story staring you in the face. When I graduated from high
school, I planned to try the same thing my father was doing selling
insurance. But first I was going to go to college, and to get the
money I spent two years working as a salesman for an uncle who had
a furniture company in Aurora, Illinois. Then I entered the Univer-
sity of Minnesota and started studying business administration. It was
fashionable to study business administration at that time before 1929.
At night, I managed a fourth-run movie theatre. It still showed only
silents, so I used to entertain between shows, doing magic tricks,
raffling off dishes and other prizes, and occasionally singing popular

199

THE PLAYER: EDDIE ALBERT

songs and playing a banjo-ukulele. In my classes, I was always tired.
I couldn't concentrate. I slept through my classes. My education plans
began to seem absurd to me. I wasn't really interested in business
administration. After two years of it, I simply walked off the campus
in despair one day. For a while, I worked as manager of another
theatre, but I didn't like it, working from noon to midnight; it just
didn't seem like a proper businessman's life. Then I went into insur-
ance selling. For extra money, while I was trying to get going in
insurance, I joined up with a couple of friends, Herb Nelson and
Grayce Bradt, and we did some singing over two Minneapolis-St. Paul
radio stations KSTP and WCCO as a trio. I was a kind of garden-
variety baritone. We sang stuff like "Sweet and Lovely" and "Happy
Feet" and "St. Louis Blues." Then Herb and Grayce had an offer
from station KMOX, in St. Louis, and they asked me to go along.
Since I wasn't doing very well in insurance, I decided to do it tempo-
rarily, in order to eat. I had really sold no insurance at all except to my
father. So, in 1931, I became a radio singer, at a salary of fifty dollars
a week, which was the same pay the two others got. I stayed in St.
Louis for eight months. I took some singing lessons, learned something
about the technique of both singing and dancing, and developed
a sense of comedy, of timing. But I still hadn't decided to go into
entertaining as a permanent profession. I lived in a hotel apartment.
It was a lush time for us, and we were doing extremely well. But I
was not in an emotional position to enjoy any of it. I was bewildered.
I was not a happy young man. When I wasn't working, I'd go off
and take long walks by myself in Forest Park, a lot of the time walk-
ing in the rain, which in St. Louis is nearly always very warm.
Eventually, I began to get a feeling for what I was doing. Not only
were there the immediate rewards of applause and laughs but I was
being paid, and paid quite well. By the end of the year, I'd fallen
in love with what I was doing. With the others, I went to Cincinnati,
and for the next couple of years we sang as a trio there, on station
WLW. Then the act broke up, because Herb decided to drop out
and become, of all things, a businessman, managing a radio station
down South. It was 1933. Grayce and I decided to come to New
York and try our luck here. Nothing happened for a while, but I
didn't feel disappointed. I always had the illusion that my next job
was just coming up. I lived over a speakeasy Caesar's, on West

200

EDDIE ALBERT

Forty-eighth Street in a one-room apartment without electricity.
I had always read a lot, and I'd read the newspapers by the light
of the electric sign "William F. La HifFs Tavern" flashing into the
room from across the street. Sometimes, the chef of the speakeasy
would give me a handout of cold leftover spaghetti. Every day at noon,
I'd go to the Leo Feist office, on Broadway, together with a lot of
other guys some of them would be wearing their tuxedos and
maybe carrying their horns to get bookings, at three or four dollars
a night, with pick-up bands in Elks clubs or joints in places like
Red Bank, New Jersey. I'd sing and play the guitar. Once, I sang
as the Silver Mask Tenor for the Big Ten Polish Pals Dance, at the
Grand Paradise Ballroom, in Williamsburg. The silver mask I had to
wear gave me a splitting headache, but I sang, and also danced with
the ladies, which I was required to do as part of the job. In those days,
if it was too late for me to get home, I often slept in a park, or in
a saloon. I got to meet and talk with more people than I've ever
been able to since I started making some money. I enjoyed congregat-
ing with the bums and hoboes. After six months or so in New York,
Grayce and I got a job, through a song plugger, doing our act on an
N.B.C. weekly variety show called "Morning Parade/' We got ten
dollars apiece every week for about fifteen beautiful weeks. That
led to our getting hired by N.B.C. as a singing team to do a daily
show called "The Honeymooners Grayce and Eddie." We were on
every morning at eleven for fifteen minutes, singing duets from our
repertoire and carrying on running patter in little scenes with our
neighbors, played by various actors. My income jumped to fifty dollars
a week. On one broadcast, one of the actors playing a neighbor was
sick, and a friend- of his, Garson Kanin, played the part. Grayce and
I paid a man forty dollars to write some special material for our act,
so we could get into night clubs, but he took the money and gave us
nothing. We still weren't very sophisticated about it all.

That summer of 1933, I played in summer stock in Mount Kisco. I
made my debut on Broadway, on January 8, 1936, in a small part
in a Zoe Akins play called "O Evening Star/' which closed after five
performances. In September of that year, I got a call from George
Abbott, who said that he was going to produce and direct "Brother
Rat," written by John Monks, Jr., and Fred F. Finklehoffe, and
that Kanin had suggested me for the leading part of Bing Edwards.

201

THE PLAYER: EDDIE ALBERT

It was that easy. I was hired at a hundred and fifty dollars a
week. The play was a huge success. We had a good cast, with
Jose Ferrer, Ezra Stone, and Frank Albertson. But I was still pretty
unsophisticated, and I didn't know how to enjoy it. I played in
"Brother Rat" for four months, and then I went into "Room Service,"
in which I played one of the leads. I was in that for a year. I remained
bewildered, but not unhappy. Opening nights, though, were sheer
torture. My wife, who is the actress Margo, maintains that for me
acting is like boxing a tough contest. She says that I'm Teutonic
in that way that I feel I must always be sweating and suffering.
She's Mexican, and the exact opposite of me. Unlike the Teutons,
the Latins believe in fun, gaiety, the sheer joy of living. Living
and enjoying life go together for them. Margo and I have a son,
who was born in 1951, and an adopted daughter, who was born
in Spain in 1954. We live in Pacific Palisades, in Los Angeles, with
the Pacific Ocean as an extension of our back yard. Yd give up acting
in a minute if it ever came to a choice between my family and my
career, but I don't think I'll ever have -to make that choice. Success is
a silly kind of goal. Hollywood is full of people who made success
their goal and were more miserable after achieving it than when they
were striving for it.

After I'd played on Broadway for a year and a half, I was offered
a seven-year standard contract with Warner Brothers, and I took it.
I repeated my "Brother Rat" role in the movie version. It was a big
success at the box office, but the studio was greedy. "Brother Rat"
was a beautifully written script, and the movie was carefully made,
but because it was a success the studio immediately made a sequel,
"Brother Rat and a Baby/' to take advantage of the success, and I
was put in that, too. It didn't have the class of the first movie. I was
miserable doing it. Then I made two or three other bad movies. I got
very upset and discouraged. In 1938, Warner Brothers permitted me
to return to Broadway for eight months to play in the Rodgers and
Hart musical "The Boys from Syracuse." I played Antipholus, one
of the twin brothers, and loved it. Then I had to go back to Holly-
wood. The next year, I bought a boat, a thirty-nine-foot yawl, and
sailed for Mexico in it, with a crew of five friends. I bummed around
Lower California and Mexico, and hooked up with a one-ring circus
in Mexico for a while as a clown and trapeze artist. In 1941, 1 planned

202

EDDIE ALBERT

to go on an expedition to excavate Mayan ruins on the Isthmus of
Tehuantepec, but the war came along. I wasn't getting much to do
in movies, so I spent my time wandering around by myself. In 1942,
I joined the Navy and went to Officer Candidate School for ninety
days and was commissioned a lieutenant, junior grade. I saw action
in the South Pacific and in the Central Pacific, at Tarawa and other
islands. I was discharged on December 4, 1945, as a full lieutenant,
and the very next day I got married to Margo. We settled down in
Hollywood, and I made more movies, such as "Rendezvous with
Annie" and "The Dude Goes West." At the same time, I started
making educational films at that time a kind of pioneer work. With
the University of Oregon, I produced "Human Beginnings," a film
for six-year-olds about having a new baby in the home, to help them
over their jealousy. It seems to me I've been searching all along for
things to do that would mean more to me than the commercial
movies I make, most of which I've made to earn a living. When I
was making the movie "The Roots of Heaven," in 1958, I flew from
Central Africa to Lambaren to visit Dr. Albert Schweitzer. I've
admired his work, and I've tried to help in Meals for Millions, a
philanthropic project he is interested in that makes high-protein meals
available to underprivileged peoples at a cost of two or three cents
a meal.

In my early years in Hollywood, I was pretty miserable, and I often
did pretty hysterical things. I was making more money than I had
ever believed existed. I had made a hundred and fifty dollars a
week on Broadway, and I jumped from seven hundred and fifty
dollars to a thousand dollars a week during my second year in Holly-
wood, and, of course, I threw it all away. Then, I found myself
questioning my ability to act. I didn't think I was making real
progress. I was successful, but I wasn't a success as an integrated man.
I began to question what an actor really was. With enough luck and
drive, plus intelligence, anybody can become an actor in Hollywood.
Out there, movies are an industry, not an art. I've made about
forty Hollywood movies. I've enjoyed about a quarter of them.
Making a movie requires such a high degree of collaboration. Often,
I find myself in conflict with the authorities. And the industrial aspect
of it is always so important. Money is so much in evidence. Like tele-
vision, the movies are geared to high ratings,

203

THE PLAYER: EDDIE ALBERT

Acting of any kind is part of the machinery of man's looking at
himself and evaluating himself in terms of growth. An actor makes
his interpretive contribution to something that if it's a movie is
seen by millions of people, both adults and children. For me, that in
itself makes acting exciting and worth while, provided the movie, or
whatever it is, has anything to recommend it. In Africa, while we
were working on "The Roots of Heaven/' the temperature reached a
hundred and forty degrees and members of the company were getting
sick all over the place, but I loved the excitement of it. When I
worked on the role of the photographer in "Roman Holiday," I
always found something new, something stimulating, some new
detail of my part that I could study. The drawbacks, of course, are
always there. An actor has to worry about so many things that have
nothing to do with his acting like whether his agent is a good
agent or a bad agent, or whether to have an agent or not. When I was
a kid, I used to pray, "Please, God, make my life interesting." I think
He did, by making me an actor. All sorts of roles, whether they
were happy or tragic, have given me satisfaction. When I'm playing
an unhappy role, the director usually tells me to stay concentrated
on ft not to laugh it up on the outside but to make myself feel
lousy. That's all right with me. It's all part of life. To avoid pain in
life is never to know the joy of life. When you play a part, you're be-
ing yourself in some ways. In "Brother Rat," I played the shy-athlete
type of fellow, a baseball-playing student. I was new to acting then,
and mostly I just memorized the role. Many people who are not very
good actors get parts that are so right for them that they make
them look like terrific actors, and that's what happened to me in
"Brother Rat." All I did onstage was wander around and say the
lines I had memorized. In that part, I was an uninteresting, un-
imaginative, and unresourceful actor, but my appearance was right.
In "The Boys from Syracuse," I sang the songs well and I wore the
tights well; I had boyish charm and good legs. If you have the
proper voice and a good body, it helps a lot, especially when you're
starting. I was able to do much more when I had ten or eleven
years' experience, and when I played good parts in good movies and
worked with good directors. For example, I was able to do quite a lot
as the salesman in "Carrie," produced and directed by William Wyler.
I had worked as a salesman myself. I knew the manners of salesmen,

204

EDDIE ALBERT

the facades they built up, their way of dressing. Before I played the
part, I read Vernon Lewis Parrington's "Main Currents in American
Thought" and then spent months studying the author, Theodore
Dreiser everything he had written. I wanted to know everything
Dreiser had ever said about salesmen in any of his writings. I learned
that Charles Drouet, the "Carrie" salesman, wore topaz cufflinks, I
learned how he selected his ties, and I learned his manner of talking,
his brave, hearty way of commanding attention, the forceful personal-
ity he developed as the facade he needed for selling. I deliberately
avoided the stereotype of a salesman. I knew that the loud, cigar-
smoking cliche salesman wouldn't go over with audiences, because
they usually know what a salesman is really like. Actually, a salesman
can sometimes command attention by standing still in a room. I knew
if I played him truthfully, the way I understood him to be, it would
have a strong impact on the audience, and it did. I think I was
also able to do a lot in the movie "Attack!," released in 1956, when
I played a villain an Army captain who is a coward and who gets
drunk and sends his men out to be killed without good reason, and
then is shot and killed by one of his own men. I started out, for this
part, with a belief that there are no villains. A villain may be an
honest, sincere man who is his own victim. The captain I played in
"Attack!" was a highly neurotic man, the victim of an authoritarian
father, and was unable to act on his own initiative. I tried to make
him a well-meaning, unstable person, a man who had been at the top of
the academic list at military school but who was incapable of taking
any real responsibility in battle. To ease himself over his own suffer-
ing, he drank. He refused to send help to the men he had sent out
to die, and rationalized his decision by telling himself that the men
would die anyway. I felt miserable in this role. I was supposed to.
I kept myself simmering with drunken terror throughout the role.
Away from the movie set, I worked on the role with the actress
Stella Adler, a wonderful teacher, who has an incisive, brilliant way
of getting to the heart of a character and to the heart of a script.
She taught me to design scenes in accordance with the chemistry of
the thing. She shows you how to get at what Stanislavski calls "sense-
memory." I have no trouble being miserable for a part I have so
much to draw on.

The more characters I played, the greater my thirst became to

205

THE PLAYER: EDDIE ALBERT

enjoy all the facets of life as they have been experienced by all kinds
of people. I don't mean I can really feel everything that the character
I play feels. I can show what it's like to be an officer or a doctor, or
I can go back in time to the twelfth century and get a little of the
feeling of what it was like to live in those times just enough of the
feeling to enlighten and satisfy me. In a Western movie/ 1 learn how to
ride a horse, and I get to know something of what it was like to live
in the open spaces in, say, 1870. Or in a boxing picture I get in the
ring with the fighters and throw some punches with them, listen to
their speech, find out something about their hopes and their terrors.
An actor gets a taste of all this. A taste is often all that you want. To
know deeply what an actual fighter feels and fears is not for me.
Every man is a part of every other man. An actor, similarly, is a part
of every role he plays, and every role becomes a part of him.

206

FRANOISE ROSAY

You must believe you are the person you play. Be-
lieve in it that is the secret.

I was bora on April 19, 1891, at nine o'clock in the morning, in Paris,
near the Place Pigalle. My mother, Marie-Therese Chauvin, was an
actress, whose professional name was simply Sylviac; my father, Count
Gilbert Bandy de Naleche, was an Army officer. My parents, both of
whom died in 1948 my father at eighty-five, my mother at eighty-
four separated when I was about three, and I was their only child.
I have a half brother, Henri, of my father's first marriage. As a child,
I never had a home life. We lived in a huge apartment, where I was
very lonely. It was there, one might say, that I started acting. At the
age of four, with the servants as my audience, I made up little plays
pretending to be a farmer, pretending to be a lion tamer, putting pots
and pans on my head. Mother would find the pots and pans out
of place, and she did not like it. My mother was very intelligent,
very clever, with great wit, but she was not very motherly. Al-
though she was an extremely good actress, she never became
really famous, because she was always flitting from one thing to
another. She did her best work with a great actor and producer

207

THE PLAYER: FRANOISE ROSAY

named Andre Antoine. I loved to watch her act. When I was five,
she took me to Russia, where she played in the Theatre Michel,
a theatre in St. Petersburg that belonged to the Russian govern-
ment and in which plays were given in French for Czar Nicholas
II and the Russian nobility. I do not know why, but the memory from
that visit which has stayed with me most clearly is the way the poor
people drank tea. They would hang a small piece of rock sugar on a
string from the ceiling and swing it from one person to another, and
each person would dip the sugar in his cup or take it right in his
mouth. I found that ravishing and very painful at the same time.

When I was eight years old, my mother sent me to a boarding
school. From then on, it seemed I was always away at school. At
thirteen, I was sent to England and attended Norland Holmes, in
Hove, near Brighton. I was to be there for only two months but I wrote
and asked my mother if I could stay a year, and she permitted me to
stay, so I learned English. Then I went to school in Germany, and I
learned to speak German. I also attended the Lycee de Versailles. I
went from one school to another, and didn't get a degree from any.
My mother's ideas were always changing. When I was sixteen, I wanted
to sing. I was a soprano, and loved music. I had started to take piano
lessons when I was five, and had learned to play quite well. But when
I told Mother I wanted to sing, she said, "You are going to act. You
are going to work.'* There was no discussing anything with her.
Mother said she would teach me acting, and she did teach me for three
or four months. Then I was ready to start acting in the small theatres
in Paris. My mother was still acting, of course, so I wanted a stage name
of my own. A playwright named Maurice Donnay, who served as my
godfather for the stage, gave me advice about taking a name; he sug-
gested I take Francine Rozay, the name of a character in his play
"Amants." But I liked my real first name, Fran^oise, better than
Francine, and I liked the spelling "Rosay," so I became Fran^oise
Rosay. My first part was in one of the earliest plays of Sacha Guitry. I
got paid nothing the first week, which was a trial period. Then I re-
ceived thirty-five francs a week my first real job. I was playing in a
small theatre near the house where I was born. Mother came to see me
on the opening night. I had the part of a young lady, and I was wear-
ing a long dress for the first time. I could see Mother in the first row,
looking at me reproachfully, and I wondered why. Only later did I

208

ROSAY

learn that I had been so nervous that I kept tugging at my skirt and
pulling it above my knees something that was not done in those days.
After a short while, I passed the entrance examination for the
Conservatoire National de Musique et Declamation, where I studied
with Paul Mounet, a well-known actor with the Comdie Fran^aise.
I studied acting there for three years, meanwhile continuing to play
in the small Paris theatres the Theatre Moncey, the Theatre Mont-
martre, the Theatre National de 1'Odeon, and so on. I played all kinds
of small parts in the classics by Moliere and Racine as well as in
modern dramas of the day. During my last two years at the Conser-
vatoire and during the years immediately following, I worked at the
Odeon with M. Antoine, the director who had worked with my
mother. Antoine was a sort of Stanislavski of his time. He engaged
you on the understanding that you would learn everything. You
had to do old people, young people, small parts, big parts, classic
parts, modern parts, comic parts, tragic parts everything. At the age
of twenty-one, I went to St. Petersburg to play in the very theatre
my mother had played in when I was a small child. I was there for
six months. Our company played something new every week
twenty-six plays for the season. The nobility liked to see all the
new successes from Paris, so we did many modern plays that were
hits in Paris, in addition to the classics. We gave several special
performances of Moliere for an imperial school for the daughters of
Army officers, and all the little girls came to see us. When I went to
Russia, I was timid. I was frightened. I took my little dog along with
me from Paris a Brussels griffon, the dog that looks like a monkey,
which was the fashion then. St. Petersburg was so cold that when
people spat outdoors, they spat ice. Everything was wet and gray
and overcast. The city was sad, I thought. The architecture seemed to
me to be more German than Russian. I did not like St. Petersburg.
I remembered that it had been just the same when I was there
at the age of five with my mother. People in St. Petersburg were
either very rich or very poor. I used to see a concierge trying to sleep
on a wooden bench outdoors; his job was to open the door for
people, all night long with the temperature fifteen below zero. I was
shocked. In the large houses, when I gave food to my little dog the serv-
ants would watch, and would grab the scraps of food that the dog left.
It was not normal in those days to observe all that and to care about it

209

THE PLAYER: FRANfOISE ROSAY

and feel hurt by it, but I did feel hurt by it. Today, too, I do not like to
be in places where I see a great deal of poverty. For example, I do not
like Rio de Janeiro, where you see enormous fortunes and terrible deg-
radation and nothing in between. I am not happy in Spain, where one
eats in a restaurant and looks through the window and sees people
starving. When 1 was in Russia, I took a trip to Moscow as soon as I got
the chance. Moscow I liked much better than St. Petersburg. It was the
Russian city par excellence. It had a character of its own. There it was
wonderful. In Moscow, one could see the sky, and one could see all
the beautiful, golden churches, with their spires reaching into the sky.

When I returned to Paris from Russia, I had enough money saved
up to move out of my mother's apartment and into an apartment of
my own, at 195 Rue de FUniversite. It was on the Seine, near the Eiffel
Tower, and when I took it there was nothing there no Metro or
anything and the people of Paris thought that it was the provinces.
It was on the fifth floor of an apartment house built around 1880.
There was no lift and no electricity and no private bathroom. How-
ever, it had a beautiful view one could see the Palais de Chaillot and
Montmartre from the windows, and one could see the sky and
the trees so I took it. Soon after that, I began, at last, to take voice
lessons, and then I returned to the Conservatoire and entered the de-
partment for the study of opera singing. I studied very hard, and
won the first prize for singing and acting, and eventually I was en-
gaged to sing at the Paris Opera, where I appeared in "Castor et
Pollux/' "Thais," and other operas. But then I became ill for some
time and was unable to continue. The voice goes when health goes.
Before that happened, however, my singing took me to Lyon, where
I was engaged to play the leading role in Goethe's "Egmont" a part
that required an actress who could sing two songs by Beethoven. And
there, in Lyon, I met Jacques Feyder, the man who became my hus-
band. He was playing a small part in the play. I still have the affiche
for that play. We were married in 1917, and he came to live in my
apartment on Rue de FUniversite. Our children, three sons, were all
born there.

Right after we were married, my husband became a film director.
He fell in love with films when they were just beginning. I was not
considered photogenic in those days, and did not play in films until
the talkies arrived, in the late nineteen-twenties. In 1929, my husband

210

FRANgOISE ROSAY

was invited to Hollywood to direct Greta Garbo in "The Kiss," and I
went with him. We were filled with enthusiasm and excitement. And
voila! My husband's producer, a man named Al Lewin, suggested,
when he saw me reading the script, that I play in a movie based on the
Molnar play "Olympia." We stayed in Hollywood, and I went on to
appear in twelve other movies, including "The One Woman," "The
Trial of Mary Dugan," and "Jenny Lind." We returned to France in
1931. With my husband, I made more movies "Le Grand Jeu,"
"Pension Mimosas," "Les Gens du Voyage," and "La Kermesse
Heroique." With Julien Duvivier, I made "Un Garnet de Bal," and
with Marcel Carne I made "Jenny" and "Drole de Drame." I also made
movies after the Second World War: in England, "Quartet," among
others; in the United States, "September Affair" and "The Scarlet
Pen;" in Italy, "Femmes Sans Nom" and "Sur le Pont des Soupirs;"
in Spain, "La Princesse Eboli." And in the fifties, in France, I
made "L'Auberge Rouge," "Le Long des Trottoirs," "Le Joueur," and
"Du Rififi Chez les Femmes." In 1960, I made "Les Bois des Amants,"
and in 1961, "Le Cave Se Rebiffe." Of all the directors I have worked
with, none has been better for me than my husband. I trusted his
direction completely. It was always right for me. He loved his work and
lived for it, and all the films I made with him I enjoyed.

The Second World War separated me from my husband and my
sons. But many other sad and terrible things happened before
that. In the early years of the war, my husband and I would
stand by our windows and watch the Nazi planes flying past.
I felt sorry for the German people, but I despised the Nazis. Then
a certain Frenchman, a traitor, using the false French name
Ferdonnet, made a number of broadcasts from Germany, speaking
against France, ancf this enraged me. I decided, because I was known
in Germany through my films, that I would answer him on radio
broadcasts addressed to Germany, and would speak under my own
name. I made five radio talks, and was the first person in France to do
that to speak on the radio to the Germans and use one's own name. I
never spoke against Germany; I spoke against the Nazis and what
they represented to us. I would begin by saying, "I am Fran^oise Rosay,
the mother of three sons." I spoke against the things the Nazis did, and
pitied the German mothers for what would eventually happen to
them. I received many letters from Germany. They pretended to say

211

THE PLAYER: FRANfOISE ROSAY

things against me, but when I looked under the stamp on the en-
velope I would find the real message: "Go on, go on with what you are
doing/' Finally, I was condemned to death, in absentia, by the Nazis.
When they began to come near Paris, I went to the South of France,
where I acted in sketches written by my husband that were inspired by
Ruth Draper's sketches. When France fell, I went to Tunis. After about
a week, the Nazis arrived there, and I had to escape again. I made my
way through a kind of no man's land until I reached some French
troops, who arranged for me to be flown to Algiers in an English plane.
I settled down in Algiers, and appeared in plays there. Meanwhile,
my husband and my sons escaped from France to Switzerland. When
the Allies recaptured Tunis, I went back there, and soon I was flown
out again, this time to England, where, separated from my family, I
remained until the end of the war.

My husband died in 1948, and today I still live in my old apartment,
with my old furniture, and with recollections. All three of our sons
now work in the cinema. Marc Frederix, who has kept my husband's
real surname, is an art director; Paul Feyder, who took my husband's
working surname, is a first assistant film director; and Bernard Farrel,
who chose a name of his own, is an assistant film director, too, and a
television director as well. When I am with my children, who know
more about the cinema today than I do, I listen; with my grand-
children I have two I talk un pen. I now divide my time between
films and the stage. In 1961, I acted in Sam Spewack's play "Once
There Was a Russian" on Broadway, but it closed after one per-
formance. It was my first time in a play in New York. I found it
interesting. In 1962, I played the part of a hundred-year-old woman
in Michael Redgrave's adaptation of Henry James's "The Aspern
Papers/' again on Broadway, and this time the play did better. It
was the first time I had ever played a woman a hundred years
old, and that, also, was interesting. I have enjoyed my experience of
acting in New York. I like the audiences here, and if I wish, I can
take Metrecal a wonderful invention. When I want to see what is
going on at home, I can go to the Librairie Fran^aise and buy Le
Figaro, France-Soir, and Le Figaro Litteraire. Whatever country you
act in, you always have to prove that you are a real pro. In our
metier, we must always remember that each time we have to begin
all over again. When you arrive in a new country, the theatre people

212

FRANOISE ROSAY

look at you; when they see you work; they decide. When I hear people
say, "She is a real pro/* then I know it is all right. To be a real pro
is to know your business. But there is more to acting than just that.
You must have your own personality, and not copy anybody. In
France today, we have too many Bardots. We have big Bardots and
small Bardots, fat Bardots and thin Bardots and they all pout. But
still there is only one Bardot. She has something of her own. She was
born Bardot.

In our metier, when you are just beginning, people are very severe
with you. Then, if you have a certain success, you are alone. Either
people are too friendly or they say you are bad; it is all very difficult.
Yet it is a wonderful metier. In "L'Homme Get Inconnu," Alexis
Carrel said that everyone is born with seven personalities but that,
only one of these personalities will emerge in a lifetime which one
being determined by such circumstances as whether one is born rich
or poor, in this place or that. What is wonderful about our metier
is that you can show all seven personalities. When I have done
a certain kind of part once, I like to change to another kind of
part. Whatever one I play, I try to become the person. That is, I
become the part in my thinking. I believe in the part, even if I
play a tart or a murderer or a woman a hundred years old. In the
theatre, I like all the work onstage, and I also like the rehearsals.
But I do not like the effect that the audience has on the acting.
You wait for them to laugh, you wait for them to cry, instead of con-
centrating all your attention on the acting itself. It is like being a
painter and waiting for the people to come and tell you they like this
color or that, dislike this one or that. And, en passant, I will say that
I do not like to bow. Altogether, acting in films is much better. You do
not wait for the public to react. And the day after you do a scene you
can study the film and see what you did wrong, so that you can cor-
rect your errors as you go along. Whereas on the stage you do a whole
performance and then there you are it is gone, beyond repair.

Whether for the stage or the films, acting ability is a gift. It has noth-
ing to do with intelligence. I have known one or two great actors who
were perfectly stupid and yet looked very intelligent on the stage. For
the stage, of course, an actor has to have the vocal power and has to
articulate; he has to make himself heard and understood. But for any
kind of acting you have to observe a lot, and read a lot. And you need

213

THE FLAYER: FRAKfOISE ROSAY

great discipline. These, days, of course, acting is not always a career. A
beautiful young girl can become a star for four or five years without
really becoming an actress; she can be enchanting just by being her-
self. But she does not necessarily think about following a profession.
They take a chance, these girls, and if they are lucky they become
rich and known. After a few years, they may not go on with their
careers. In former days, when a girl thought of becoming an actress,
she never thought of making millions or becoming known. She wanted
to make a career. Now, because the cinema needs many new faces, a
girl may think only a few years ahead and may earn in a few years
what an actress used to earn in thirty. When I was starting out and said
I wanted to be an actress, it was as one might say, "I want to be
a lawyer/' or "I want to be a scientist." Acting was a metier. I would
be a young actress, I would be a middle-aged actress, I would be an
old actress, and I would die. Acting was a lifework.

214

ANDY GRIFFITH

What I like is to play a character like me. I don't care
for it too much when I have to get away from myself.

I was born on June 1, 1926, in Mount Airy, North Carolina an
only child. My parents, Carl and Geneva Griffith, still live there.
My daddy worked in a furniture factory, first running a handsaw
and then being a machine-room foreman, and now he's retired. I was a
little old white-headed boy, and the other kids made fun of my
blond hair. And they teased me about a birthmark on the back of
my head. My mother told me she had seen a strawberry patch just
before I was born, and she always called the mark my strawberry
patch. We lived in a little old wooden house. We had an old Majestic
radio, which provided our only entertainment, and which gave us
much joy. We heard good country music over the radio. I was raised
a Baptist, and most of my early social life revolved around the church.
Later on, I joined the Baptist Young People's Union and did my
early courting there. I started entertaining when I was in the third
grade at the Rockford Street Grammar School, in Mount Airy. I sang
two choruses of "Put On Your Old Gray Bonnet." The other kids
laughed at the way I sang it and called me 'Tandy Andy" and "Andy

215

THE PLAYER: ANDY GRIFFITH

Gump," from the funnies. Everybody listened to "Amos 'n' Andy"
over the radio in those days, and the kids were always yelling to
me, "Hey, Andy! Where's Amos?" Kids do that. All it did was make
me mad.

I started going to revival meetings as soon as I could walk. The
first show I ever saw was when I was five and my daddy and mother
took me to Winston-Salem, about thirty-five miles away, to see a road-
company production of "Carmen." All that clapping and clanging
and carrying on! I sure did enjoy it. At the age of eleven, I played a
farmer in a Christmas play about religion put on at the Second Bap-
tist Church in Mount Airy. When I was fourteen or fifteen, I got
attracted to swing music, and about that time I went to see a movie
called "Birth of the Blues," with Bing Crosby and Mary Martin.
In it, there was a man playing a trombone. I had been asking for a
musical instrument of some kind, but my daddy couldn't afford it.
He fed me and clothed me, but he couldn't stretch his pay far
enough to buy me a musical instrument. My daddy worked hard. The
people in that part of the country mostly worked for the furniture
factory. They were very proud, and so was my daddy, so I couldn't
borrow from anyone for a trombone, which was the kind of instru-
ment I wanted after seeing that movie. I was in the Mount Airy
High School by then, and I got myself a job with the N.Y.A. sweep-
ing out the school after classes. I started making monthly payments of
six dollars on a thirty-three-dollar trombone I had seen advertised in
the Spiegel mail-order catalogue. It took me five and a half months,
but then I got this trombone, and I was the happiest boy in all North
Carolina. It was a tenor trombone silver-plated. Then I started
looking around for someone to teach me how to play it. Just about
that time, a new minister, a man named Ed Mickey, came to our
town for the Moravian Church, which had a band made up entirely
of brass instruments. Many Moravian preachers going back to
Germanic custom know how to play in a band and how to lead
one. Ed Mickey began to make the whole town ring with beautiful
music. So I took my trombone to him, and he said he would teach
me how to play it. For three years, he gave me a free lesson once a
week. Ed Mickey taught me to sing and to read music and to play
every brass instrument there was in the band, and the guitar and
the banjo besides. I was best at playing the E-flat alto horn.

216

ANDY GRIFFITH

When I was sixteen, I joined the church, together with my mother
and daddy. We had been Baptists, but it was all Protestant anyhow,
so it didn't make any difference. I was very happy with the Moravians.
All the other band members accepted me. They didn't ever make fun
of me. When Ed Mickey had a call to serve another Moravian church,
somewhere else in the state, I became the leader of the band until
the church could bring in a new preacher. A lot of the people used
to point to me and say, "There's our next preacher.'* I was beginning
to get that idea myself. The preacher was the cultural leader of the
whole town. When I was a sophomore in high school, our class
put on a show fashioned after the Major Bowes "Amateur Hour"
on radio. We called our show "Major Knows," and I was Major
Knows. Occasionally, I said something I hoped was funny, and a big
roar of laughter came at me, and I began to feel great pleasure. It
was the first time I'd realized it could please me to be laughed at.
I had a teacher Miss Haymore, who taught English and Latin and
had our home room who was the kind they used to make movies
about. She was the one who selected me to be Major Knows, and she
encouraged me to go all out for music, if that was what I wanted. She
got me to understand that I was really doing something pleasurable
not only for other people but for myself by getting them to laugh.

After the Major Knows experience, I relaxed and became an A
student. In the summer of 1944, I entered the University of North
Carolina, in Chapel Hill. I started out studying for the ministry. I
took courses in sociology, and I hated them. I took Latin and Greek,
too, and I found the classes long and dull. I missed my music. So I
went to Bishop Pfhol, who was the Bishop of the Southern Province
of the Moravian Church, and told him how I felt. I asked him if I
could get permission to specialize in music, which he granted. I
started playing the E-flat bass sousaphone in the college band and
singing in the glee club, and I got to fooling around in the Drama
Department. They had a group called the Carolina Playmakers, which
put on an operetta once a year usually Gilbert and Sullivan. I au-
ditioned just to get into the chorus, if I could, and was lucky enough
to get the role of Don Alhanibra del Bolero, the Grand Inquisitor,
in "The Gondoliers." When the review of the show came out in the
school paper, my performance was referred to as the best. From that
point on, I was in every musical show they produced. I began to think

217

THE PLAYER: ANDY GRIFFITH

I might be an opera singer, and decided to drop studying for the
ministry.

I met my wife, Barbara Edwards, in the Carolina Playmakers. She
was a music major, and was an accomplished singer and actress. We
graduated together in June, 1949, and that August we were married.
Today, we have two small children, Sam and Dixie, and we have
a home on Roanoke Island some three hundred miles from Mount
Airy with fifty-five acres of land, which we bought in 1956. None
of us in the theatre can make any permanent plans, but someday soon
I would like to move back to Roanoke Island for good. I'd like to farm
our land, if I can, and set up a tree nursery for holly and cedar. Most
entertainers have something they feel strongly about, and I feel
strongly about North Carolina. It's the greatest place in the world
for freedom of the mind and freedom of the spirit. You have to see
it and experience it to know what I am talking about. I'd like to see
our children grow up in North Carolina, on Roanoke Island. For
a boy, it's the finest place in the world. There's oystering in the win-
ter, fishing in the spring, summer, and fall, and hunting in the fall
and winter. You can get in a boat and go all around Roanoke Island.
You can go to Roanoke Sound, Pamlico Sound, Croatan Sound, and
Currituck Sound, to mention just a few. Or you can go out in the
woods and walk.

While I was in college, I didn't have any notion of how I was
going to become a professional entertainer. All I knew was that I
wanted to get up there and perform. I spent my summer vacations
working at the furniture factory in Mount Airy. It's always been
typical of the Southern states to stage historical pageants. I made my
stage debut in one "The Lost Colony," by Paul Green. It's still
put on every year on Roanoke Island, in a place called Manteo,
which is the site of the first English settlement in North America.
The pageant is based on the story of Sir Walter Raleigh. For
three seasons, I played Sir Walter Raleigh at night, after work in
the factory. In my last school vacation, I worked out a combina-
tion monologue and comedy routine for a variety show with others
from "The Lost Colony," and appeared professionally at the Nags
Head Beach Club, about nine miles from Roanoke Island. In a
duet with a girl, I sang "It Ain't Necessarily So',' and then I did a
preacher act, in which I sang a song called "The Preacher and the

ANDY GRIFFITH

Bear." Then, when I wanted to get married, I realized I had no
visible means of support, so I took a job as the music teacher at
the Goldsboro High School, in the western part of North Carolina.
I taught for three years, through the spring of 1952. I wasn't talented
at teaching. I couldn't handle the kids. I wasn't a good teacher. It
wasn't that I didn't want to be a good teacher, it was that I couldn't
do it. I didn't enjoy it. I could very well be there today, not enjoying
it, but I've been fortunate. I discovered that entertaining and making
people laugh was something that I could do. Also, I enjoyed it.
There's no point in doing a thing if you don't enjoy it. When you
find you can do something, it's wonderful. It's like the way my daddy
made furniture the way he'd know how to make sample chairs to
look at and show and later make thousands of copies of. My daddy
was able to look at that wood and that piece of paper with the plan
diagrammed on it and figure out the way to make the seat of that
chair, the back of it, the legs, and all, and make all the pieces fit to-
gether. It was something he could do, something he learned over the
years that can't be described. I'm not in the entertainment business
to make money. I've never particularly cared one way or the other
about that. I came from a poor background. I was happy as a child.
I was happy as a teen-ager. I was happy as a young adult. I never
had capital, but I was never unhappy because of that. When I dis-
covered I could entertain, I worked hard at it. It's the only thing I
do well. I can't be a company director, I can't be an accountant, I
can't make furniture, but I can entertain.

While I was teaching high school, my wife was the musical director
at the Methodist and Episcopal churches in Goldsboro. In the
spring of 1952, we were both studying singing with a teacher
named Katherine Warren, in Goldsboro, when a publicity man who
was a friend of hers stopped to see her on his way to New York. He
offered us a ride to New York in his car and suggested that he set up
an audition for us at the Paper Mill Playhouse, in Millburn, New
Jersey. We jumped at the chance. That was our first visit to New York.
We stayed at the Statler Hotel for a week, and went around to night
clubs to watch other performers, and got scared to death by the city
a large, overpowering, frightening thing. At the audition, we lined
up with over two hundred other people. Barbara sang "In the Still
of the Night," and I sang "Dancing in the Dark." We were turned

219

THE PLAYER: ANDY GRIFFITH

down. Someone standing around there told me my voice was overly
brilliant almost unpleasantly so. I didn't mind so much. In my own
heart, I believed it. So I decided to quit singing and start telling
jokes. When our week in New York was up, we went back to North
Carolina, by bus. I wanted to go to Florida and look around for
something to do in Miami, but Barbara talked me out of it. She
said we'd starve to death. So that fall I took out three hundred
dollars in teachers' retirement pay that I had accumulated, and we
borrowed a thousand dollars, and we bought a used station wagon.
We rented a house in Chapel Hill, seventy-five miles from Goldsboro,
and then wrote a brochure about ourselves, describing a song-and-
comedy act, and got it printed up. We got lists from civic organiza-
tions of every convention or dinner that was planned in the State
of North Carolina for the next six months. We figured that at least
one out of every hundred would have need of entertainment. Pretty
soon, job offers began to trickle in. We got into our station wagon
and travelled to each and every job. Our usual fee for our act was
sixty dollars. Barbara sang Puccini arias and popular standards. I
played the guitar while she did interpretive dances. And I delivered a
monologue I'd made up, called "What It Was Was Football." It
went over in a big way. There were some civic clubs, and so on, that
asked us back for a second appearance. At one luncheon show,
after I had done "What It Was Was Football/' a representative
of Capitol Records came up to me and said he wanted me to record
the monologue for his record company, which I did. We had been
paying eighty-five dollars a month in rent for our house, which we
hadn't been able to furnish very lavishly, and we had a student
boarder who paid us twenty-five dollars a month. Our record started
selling all over North Carolina, and then all over the United States,
and we began to make enough money to furnish our house and pay
off our debts.

We moved to New York four days before New Year's of 1954, with
the intention of trying to get work to do in night clubs. Capitol
was paying me a salary of about a hundred dollars a week to live
on. We lived at the Park Sheraton Hotel, and then we sublet an
apartment in Kew Gardens, Queens. My first big, important profes-
sional appearance was on Ed Sullivan's "Toast of the Town" in
1954. 1 felt numb and was scared to death. I was too frightened to do

220

ANDY GRIFFITH

my football monologue the way I was supposed to do it. I was too
nervous. It came out amateurish. I couldn't time it out properly. To
this day, I can't actually remember doing it at all. But I knew it was
a failure. My second professional job was at the Blue AngeL I felt like
a failure there, too. In a night club, people are eating and talking
and moving around. To control them and command them to pay
attention to you and enjoy it is the hardest job in the world. I did
"What It Was Was Football" and other monologues that I wrote, in-
cluding "Conversation with a Mule" and a couple on "Hamlet" and
"Carmen." The night after I closed, Burl Ives opened there. I
went to the opening. What I saw was a master at work. Your eyes
reflect what you feel. My eyes had reflected fear. The eyes of Burl Ives
reflected what he was doing and singing. He sang some of the songs
that were my own favorites. He even had a community sing in that
supper club everybody singing "GohY down the Road Feelin'
Bad." I learned a very important lesson from that experience, and
that was how to draw and hold your audience, and that a person with
something to say has to get the attention to be heard saying what he
has to say. After that, I continued with my own monologues and put
songs back into my act and went out on the road for two years, working
night clubs in the South and Southwest. I learned how to entertain. I
would stand there and look at the audience and expect it to look back.
I'm always very, very aware of the audience and what the audience is
doing and feeling.

In 1955, I was cast in the leading role, Will Stockdale, in the
dramatization of "No Time for Sergeants," by Ira Levin, on Broad-
way. That was my first big chance. I had read the book "No Time for
Sergeants," because I'd met the author, Mac Hyman, while I was travel-
ling in the South. I auditioned first for the television presentation of
the play, on "The U.S. Steel Hour" in March, 1955. 1 did my "Hamlet"
monologue for the audition and read for the part and walked right out
with it. After I had appeared in "No Time for Sergeants" for almost
the entire run of three hundred and forty-five performances, Elia
Kazan put me in the movie "A Face in the Crowd." When I showed
up to work on that movie, it was the first time in my life that I had
seen a motion-picture camera. I was petrified on that first day of
work. The motion-picture camera is a fantastic instrument. It can
record something happening at the moment and it will be there,

221

THE PLAYER: ANDY GRIFFITH

recorded on film, forever. I worked with some pretty outstanding
people in that movie some pretty fine men and women. Two of
them were Patricia Neal and Walter Matthau, who were the first
professional actors I ever got to know well. Making that movie
was three months out of my life I wouldn't swap for anything. That
was the first time I was called upon to play a serious dramatic part. It
was the part of a guitar player, a down-and-outer who achieves fame
and sudden acclaim. The reviews of that movie in New York were
five good and two bad. I learned all I know about acting in making
that one movie with Kazan. Now, Kazan knows people; he under-
stands them and knows how to get the best from them. In a movie,
or onstage in a play, you talk to the other actors, and you would
think that's the most natural thing in the world to do. As a way
of saying something, it turned out to be the most difficult thing
in the world to do. I could sing along with other folks, or listen
to other folks, or enjoy country music or popular songs like "Careless
Love" or the blues, but it didn't necessarily follow that I could act
or talk naturally with other actors in a play or in a movie. However,
in "A Face in the Crowd," with Kazan's help, I acted. Most of my
acting came from Kazan. He has a secret. He knows exactly how
to keep an actor happy and excited. He treats an actor as though
he had hunted all over the world to find him. He makes you feel
like a very important part of what is going on. His attention was on
me every second. In the very first scene, on a set built just like the
jail in Piggott, Arkansas, where I was lying on the floor of the jail
asleep, I was supposed to wake up suddenly, turn around, and be
like a wild animal. A block of wood was propped under my arm. We
took the scene first by having someone pull the block away, so that
I would fall. I did it that way and it was filmed. But I had a question.
It was in my eyes. Kazan saw it in a second. He called out "Don't move
the camera!" and he came over to me. I told him it would be more
natural if someone kicked me. Then I would naturally get mad and
kick back. We did it that way, and it turned out to be right, and that
was the shot that was used. We worked that way all through the pic-
ture. I knew the character I played in that movie; he was a drunk, a
drifter, and a bum. There wasn't much similarity between him and me
in my real life, because I lead a very respectable family life. But from
every little similarity there was, and from every experience I had ever

222

ANDY GRIFFITH

had, Kazan knew how to dig out what was needed. He taught me how
to relate anything I had ever heard or ever read to what I was doing
at the moment for the movie. I'd go over and tell him, "I had an ex-
perience once." And he'd say, "Yeah, tell me/' Then he'd listen, and
say, "Yeah, that's right, that's right/' And I'd transfer that thought to
what I was then doing. Since my experience in that movie, I've tried
to do everything I could to make myself feel any part that I was play-
ing. I'm like a person in back of me, watching me. When I first saw the
rushes of "A Face in the Crowd," I enjoyed watching myself. If I hadn't
gone to see the rushes, I wouldn't have known what I was doing.

In 1959, I went back to Broadway, singing as well as acting in the
musical "Destry Rides Again." I was in the show for over a year, but I
didn't develop much as an actor. It was too much like being back in a
night club. I'm limited as an actor. There are things other actors can do
that I can't do. Other actors can act in a lot of fine things. I know I
can't do the conventional serious dramatic acting. I'm not cut out to be
a dramatic actor. I tried it. I played in "The Male Animal" on "Play-
house 90" in 1958, and I just couldn't do it. There's no point in
doing what you don't enjoy, and if you don't do something well you
can't enjoy it. I have an excellent time now doing my television show,
called "The Andy Griffith Show." It's a weekly filmed situation
comedy in which I star as Andy Taylor, the sheriff in a small Southern
town. Making the television series takes a great deal of concentra-
tion, and you have to know what you're doing. But I enjoy doing
the same character every week, and I don't have any difficulty in
getting into that character at all. When I'm supposed to feel happy
or angry or humorous, I'm able to make myself feel those things. I
wouldn't mind playing the same kind of man for the rest of my
life. I would like to continue to give people some small thing to
make them laugh. What I would like to do, whenever I act or enter-
tain, is to say some small truth. No preaching just to have some small
thing to say that is true.

MARIA SCHELL

There is a powerful drive in any artist to transmit
something, to give it form. In the actor, it is the urge
to show moments of human existence in their essenti-
ality.

I was born on January 15, 1926, in Vienna, as Maria Margarethe Anna
Schell. I am the eldest of four children. My father, Hermann Ferdi-
nand Schell, is Swiss and a Catholic; my mother is Viennese and a
Catholic. My father is a fairly successful novelist, playwright, and poet.
My mother, Margarethe Schell von Noe, is a former actress who now
runs the acting school of the Conservatory of Arts in Berne. Her
father was a well-known Viennese psychiatrist named Karl Noe von
Nordberg. I have two brothers, Carl and Maximilian, and a sister,
Editha, and all of them are engaged one way or another in acting.
My parents met and were married when my mother was eighteen and
a very promising actress, and they lived with Dr. von Nordberg in
his apartment, in the heart of Vienna, on the top floor of what used to
be the palace of Maria Theresa. In 1938, to get away from Hitler, my
father took all the family but me to Zurich. I was placed in the Con-
vent of St. Odilia in Colmar, Alsace, for a year before joining the

224

MARIA SCHELL

others in Zurich. Then I attended the Gymnasium in Zurich, but
quit at the age of fourteen and went to work as a Stijt, or apprentice,
in a bookdealer's office to learn secretarial routine, including parcel-
tying. My father wanted me to have something to fall back on in case
I could not get work as an actress. He has always been a very pure,
idealistic man, but in this respect he was practical. I have a very sweet
family. As children, we were brought up to be independent. When
people asked my brother Max as a child what he wanted to be when he
grew up, he always said, "Pope." I am religious now in a very private
way. My father always taught me that you must try to be appealing by
what you are inside, more than by what you put on from the outside.
My mother tried to give me acting lessons, but it was impossible. A
child somehow goes outside for idols. But my mother did give me the
foundation of my self-discipline. From her I learned that what you
undertake you must complete to the best of your ability. When I was
eight, my parents took me to a hospital, where my grandmother was
lying ill, to hear a recital they were giving for the patients. During the
intermission, my mother looked in on Grandmother, just in time to
see her die. Mother told me of how she closed Grandmother's eyes and
then went back and finished the recital. It was my mother who gave
me the courage not to be afraid of a powerful dramatic style. In the
Greek plays, with her old-fashioned style, she was a wonderful actress.
She is now a very good director.

As a child, I saw many plays based on fairy tales. At the age of
eight, I starred in one, called "The Princess Searching for a Good
Human Being/' I played the part of a fool who accompanies the prin-
cess to fairyland, called Schlaraffenland, where rivers are of milk, birds
fly into your mouth, and apple strudel grows forever. My mother tells
me that I stopped acting in the middle of the play and started eating
apple strudeL I never attended a formal acting school. I do not like
being taught. I like to learn by myself. All my life, from the time I was
a small child, I felt a desire to experience life as deeply as possible.
What made me go ahead in acting was that urge. Today, I have learned
that I can go only as far as my body will materialize my thoughts,
When I was fifteen, I had my first professional acting job, the
leading role in a movie called "Steinbruch," made by the producer
Karl Stapenhorst in Zurich. I played a twelve-year-old girl. The
next year, I was given my first stage role, the part of Clarchen

225

THE PLAYER: MARIA SCHELL

in Goethe's "Egmont." I created an uproar in the theatre. I stood
in the wings trying to feel my part, and then I came onstage,
opened my mouth, and said, "I'm sorry, but I can't get the feeling,"
and rushed off the stage in tears. After this fiasco, the manager of the
theatre assured me that I was a great comedienne, and gave me a comic
role in a play called "Drunter und Driiber," meaning "All Upside
Down." Right after that, I had my first real success as a comedienne in
"Scamplo," by Dario Niccodemi, in which I played the part of a na-
ture professor's daughter. I was seventeen, and I came to the theatre on
the eve of the opening and saw my name being posted up in big letters.
I then had the very strange experience of becoming paralyzed. I sud-
denly grew aware that I was expected to be very good. I became like
the centipede with the fly in an old German story. The fly says to the
centipede, "I have six legs, and I know how to walk, but you have a
hundred legs how do you walk?" So the centipede starts to think, and
then he becomes paralyzed and cannot walk. I was so afraid. On open-
ing night, I wanted to stay home in bed. My mother made me get up
and go to the theatre. She told me something I never forgot: "An
actress never fails her audience. If you cannot be good, then you must
have the courage to be bad."

From Zurich, I went on to a theatre in Solothurn, Switzerland, where
I spent two years, off and on, at a salary of fifty dollars a month, play-
ing in Shakespearean dramas and other classics. Then I found a job
in the State Theatre of Berne, at a hundred and fifty dollars a month,
and I played in dramas by Shakespeare, Shaw, and Moliere. In 1949, I
played my first grown-up film role, in a German production of "The
Angel with the Trumpet," starring Paula Wessely. That led me to the
Viennese theatre, and while I was playing the lead in Elmer Rice's
"Dream Girl" in Vienna, Alexander Korda asked me to fly over to
London for a couple of days to see him about going into films in
England. I visited Korda in his flat at the top of Claridge's, and he
asked me to sign a seven-year contract with him, but I said no. I told
him I did not want to leave Vienna. He said he would give me four
months off each year to be on the stage there. Still I did not want to
do it. As I was ready to go back, he said he wanted to give me a few
words of advice. We were speaking in German, and he said, "I like
your idealism, M aria, but the day will come when you are forty-five,
and you will look back, and see that all your hopes and expectations

226

MARIA SCHELL

did not turn out the way you thought. And you will wonder, Did I
miss my chance, even if it was only a chance to learn to speak Eng-
lish?" It was that last question that convinced me, and I signed the
contract. In London, I learned to speak English in three months. I
played in an English film version of "The Angel with the Trumpet,"
and then in "The Magic Box," with Robert Donat; "So Little Time,"
with Marius Goring; and "The Heart of the Matter, with Trevor
Howard. I took time off from making these movies to go on several
long theatre tours in Switzerland, Holland, and Belgium, playing
Gretchen in "Faust," with Albert Basserman, and Nora in Ibsen's "A
Doll's House." In 1953, I made a movie in Yugoslavia, "The Last
Bridge," and in 1955, in Paris, I made "Gervaise," directed by Rene
Clement. I have made movies in Hollywood, including "The Brothers
Karamazov," "The Hanging Tree," and "Cimarron," and I have been
in "Playhouse 90" television dramas "Word from a Sealed-Off Box"
and "For Whom the Bell Tolls" taped in New York. I speak smoothly
in English and in French as well as in German. In acting, I can think
and feel in whichever language is called for. I was married in 1957
to Horst Hachler, a young German film director who had worked as
assistant director of "The Last Bridge." We have a son, Oliver Chris-
tian Hachler, born in January, 1962. We live twenty-eight miles out-
side of Munich, in a newly completed house of natural stone, with a
swimming pool, a fireplace, and verandas overlooking the lovely
Bavarian hills and the town of Wasserberg, which is a thousand years
old.

There is a point in life when one has to make a very clear decision
about one's life and sources of life: whether to accept life with all its
chaos and disorder or whether to attempt to find harmony in it;
whether to take life as it comes or to try to guide it. I think I'm capable
of living either way, but the second way is more important to me. For
example, when I got married, I decided, This will now have to be part
of my own life. Strangely enough, I never decided to become an actress.
It was always completely natural to me. I want to be part of all of life,
of the world, of the universe, and it is in acting that I find a way of
being part of all three. That is why I love acting. It guides me to all
experience and to all feeling. There is a certain moment in life when
you must free yourself from all others. I have now reached that plateau
in my life, and I am free of everyone else. It developed this way step by

227

THE PLAYER: MARIA SCHELL

step. In Zurich, when I first got to know the theatre, which was then
built up mostly by refugees from Hitler, I was moved by what I saw
by their fantastic teamwork. I admired four actresses Elisabeth Berg-
ner, Kathe Dorsch, Paula Wessely, and Kathe Gold. Kathe Gold was
my idol for many years. In Zurich, too, I had my first experience, in a
childish way, of trying to bring some truth to the part I was playing,
which was a laundry girl. I knew about Stanislavski, but I had not
absorbed his ideas. I devised my own little ways. I went around with a
laundry basket in the old town of Zurich, trying to find streets that
corresponded to my images. Whatever I had in my head I tried to find,
so that I could touch it. I wanted to make it real. The process of form-
ing and shaping had started. Today I don't need so many tangible
things to help. It was also in Zurich that I had my very first feeling that
I was another person, not myself. I was in a small part, but I was on-
stage most of the time during the play. For the first time, the stage
became for me another world. Now I have the capacity for concentra-
tion, for losing myself, for believing I am someone else. There's not
even a second mind that tells me I'm on the stage, only an awareness
that tells me where I am going.

It was on the "Faust" tour with Basserman, however, that I had, for
the first time, strange and wonderful experiences of the mystical sort.
Before the play, I used to sit for an hour trying to concentrate away
from myself. I tried not to think, so that everything that was worrying
me would go away all my fears, all my ambitions so that the con-
fidence that I was the girl I was supposed to play would grow within
me. Then, one night, I had the feeling that the girl was alive, even
though she was only a thought of a poet. And the girl spoke to me. She
said, "Oh, I loved him much more." And I knew that for me the girl
was alive. I didn't talk to anyone about my experience. All I thought
about was how I could transform myself completely into another be-
ing's truth. Stanlslavski's ideas worked within me. I found my own way
of constructing another being out of what I consist of myself my past,
my present, and the circle of my presence. Three girls, German, French,
and American, with the same capacity for feeling, will expect and give
different things; they will be made profoundly happy, or profoundly
unhappy, by different things. Everyone has an inner nationality. I
think that I am very German in my urge to make things deeper, in the
way small things are large to me. When I am working, all that I think

228

MARIA SCHELL

and feel and want, and all that I have learned and experienced, con-
centrates itself within the limits of the character I am playing. When I
read a script, I receive an image corresponding to what I. have gone
through in life. With what I call my talent, I try to make this image
strong with my heart, my body, my thoughts. My thoughts test it,
doubt it, and build it within myself. Then I put this image together
with my ability, and the image and the final result get closer and
closer together, until they are one. Once in a scene, I try, by remaining
as empty as I possibly can, to come to this identification with the char-
acter I'm playing. I try then to avoid thought. I try to be nothing but
the result of what has happened before. I try to live this person. On
the stage, there is the advantage of working step by step, growing and
developing together with the other actors. In television, there is still a
chance for some development, even though the atmosphere is very
hectic. In films, you are alone. For the first two or three days, in making
a movie, my body still hasn't experienced all the thoughts, feelings, and
images, and I am slow and awkward, but then it begins to happen, and
I can make the image live. Movies are a wonderful medium. Through
a closeup, you can say something with your own heart that is the
equivalent of the monologue on the stage. However, in films the image
is very fragile; it can be easily disturbed if you don't work toward giv-
ing it form. The way I have found to strengthen the image for a movie
is to write on the script what the author did not write about the char-
acter. In films, I cannot rely on my intuitive feelings of the moment,
which may mislead me. I can't talk to myself. I can't rehearse with
myself. So I write out my thoughts until the image becomes more and
more clear. I like movies, possibly because I have such an urge to make
things last. I have learned that good results can come from tension and
argument as well as from harmony. Sometimes I disagree with a direc-
tor. In "Gervaise," I wanted to bring out what there is in the character
that touches us today, while Rene Clement wanted to show life the way
it was in those days. I wanted to show how the little things, not the big
things, can destroy us, how the small daily failures lead to catastrophe.
Clement wanted to show the drama and social life of the time. So we
argued, and I learned, and began to understand it in his terms. And
now I'd go with blind eyes to work with Clement again. He opened the
way for me in so many respects.

Today, I am capable of bending my talent to what the subject calls

229

THE PLAYER: MARIA SCHELL

for. I know how to find the true meaning and structure of a play. I
now have the courage to give, to open myself. Actors are artists. I
believe that acting is a small manifestation of life. On the stage, we
create a concentrated form of life, but it is on a small scale. I don't
consider acting essential to life. We are re-creative rather than creative
artists. The painter or the writer is dependent only on himself, while
the actor is always dependent on others. But each actor has a little
workshop inside himself that is his own, and there is something im-
portant going on inside actors who really love their profession. Even
though every individual is different from the next, I think that human
feelings can be conveyed. When the artist gives his feeling form, it is a
bridge. Art can transmit something that even people who are close to
each other cannot communicate directly. We actors are the very poor
artists; still, there is a little space for us. In my own self as an actress,
I keep to myself, but I sense the worlds of other people. Each person
has his own world. My inner world is the most important thing I have.
I try as much as I can to respect people. The world of another person
may be a big circle or a small one. What is important is to explore each
circle, whatever the size, to the outermost edge. When I am in another
person's circle, I am quiet quieter than I used to be when I was very
young. When the moment comes, I can be open. I like to communicate
with people, but I need time by myself. Alone, I take in new strength;
then I can give it out. It is very much like breathing in and out.

230

MAXIMILIAN SCHELL

There are two souls in every actor. One watches the
other. When both are content at the same time, you
have a good moment.

I was born on December 8, 1930, in Vienna, the third of four children
of a Viennese actress and a Swiss playwright, novelist, and poet. My
father was never enthusiastic about the idea of his children's acting-;
he felt that acting was too intense an occupation to allow for real
happiness. But my two sisters and my brother and I were all attracted
to the stage and are now acting. I grew up in a theatre atmosphere and
took it for granted. I remember the theatre, as a child, the way most
people remember their mothers' cooking. Acting was all around me,
and so was poetry. I made my debut in the theatre at the age of three,
in Vienna, playing a blade of grass in a children's sequence in an
allegorical play written by my father. When I was eight, my father
moved our family to Switzerland, away from Hitler. When I was

231

THE PLAYER: MAXIMILIAN SCHELL

about ten, I wrote a play called "Klitos/' about the friend of Alexander
the Great who always told him the truth about everything, and how
one day, when Alexander was drunk, he killed Klitos because he told
him the truth. The play was produced by my school, the Humanistisches
Gymnasium in Basel, and I acted the part of Klitos myself. I also
appeared in a professional play, in the part of William Tell's son. I
grew up reading the classics. When I'd read the books of writers like
Zane Grey, my father would always say to me, "Why don't you read
Goethe?" My father today is not impressed by my acting in movies.
For my father, the film is not a real art, and as he is a poet, he does not
care about outside success. When I see him, we talk about poetry and
writing. I attended the University of Zurich for a year. I was a good
soccer player and a member of the champion Swiss rowing team. To
earn money, I worked as a newspaper correspondent, writing sports re-
ports for Swiss newspapers. I appeared in many student productions
and also found small acting jobs on the professional stage, and played
many classical as well as modern parts. I studied philosophy and the
history of art. Then I felt I wanted to go away, to learn about life. I
continued my studies at the University of Munich, and then I had my
Swiss military service for about a year. After that I returned to the Uni-
versity of Zurich for a year and attended the University of Basel for
about six months. I then decided, Either you are a scientist or an artist.
A scientist is always trying to take things apart and an artist is always
creating things and putting them together, and you can't do both un-
less you're a genius, which I am not. To me it is much more important
to look at the stained-glass windows in Chartres and to admire and feel
and be stimulated and inspired than it is to figure out the mechanics
and workmanship of how the windows were made. Art comes out of
chaos, not out of a mechanical analyzing. So as soon as I made up my
mind there was no sense any more in continuing to study and in
getting a degree. It is like an award; it does not mean anything in it-
self. If you get an award as an actor as I did from the New York Film
Critics as the Best Actor of the Year for "Judgment at Nuremberg" it
does not mean you are a better actor. A university degree is just a title.
I don't think an artist should have a title. It was time fc>r me to con-
centrate on acting.

For the next four years, I worked in many theatres in the Swiss
provinces, and also in Germany, Austria, and France. I spent six

232

MAXIMILIAN SCHELL

months in Munich, with the Kammerspiele Theatre, one of several
there that are supported by the city or the state. My older brother,
Carl, is acting there now, and in other theatres throughout Europe. My
older sister, Maria, is a movie star, and my younger sister, Editha, is be-
ginning to make a name for herself as an actress in Germany and Swit-
zerland. I can't remember when I first saw my mother on the stage, and
I can't even remember seeing her off the stage when I was a child. My
mother has often been called one of the most beautiful women in Eu-
rope. I remember seeing her play in "Snow White and the Seven
Dwarfs" when I was eight. She played the part of the evil queen. The
play was done with music, and it made a strong impression on me.
When I was a child, I always took the atmosphere of the theatre, and
my being in it, for granted. I didn't especially want to become an actor.
Acting is such a reproducing art. What I wanted was to become a
painter, a musician, or a playwright; I particularly wanted, and still
want, to be a writer. I have written several unproduced plays and one
unpublished novel. I can't tell whether what I write is good, but I
can tell whether it expresses what I want to express. The world now
tries to put everyone and everything into a category. When a play
is put into a category, it loses so much the secret of what it has
to say. I suppose I'm an actor and a writer because I come from
an acting and a writing family. If I had been the son of a musi-
cian, I suppose I would have become a musician. But I am the son of a
playwright, and now I would prefer to be a playwright.

Still, I love to act. I began to love acting when I played Hamlet in a
two-and-a-half-hour television show made in Cologne and broadcast all
over Europe on New Year's Day, 1961. It was like falling in love with a
woman my feeling about acting. You meet a woman once, and noth-
ing special happens. Then you meet her again, and after a while you re-
alize you are in love. I had known acting all my life, but not until I
acted the part of Hamlet did I have a moment when I knew I was in
love with acting. Something in me had told me I was going to play
Hamlet someday. When the role came to me, I was ready for it. I felt as
if I had known Hamlet all my life. Hamlet belongs to me. Laurence
Olivier is best known for his Hamlet. It has brought him great success.
When I saw it, I didn't like it. Every actor reaches two or three high
points in his lifetime. Marlon Brando reached a high point in "A Street-
car Named Desire/' Montgomery Clift reached one in "Prom Here to

233

THE PLAYER: MAXIMILIAN SCHELL

Eternity." Olivier reached one in "Hamlet," but, perhaps because I
feel so strongly that the role of Hamlet is mine, he seemed to me to be
more Olivier than Hamlet. In "Henry V," though, he seemed to be
more Henry than Olivier. I've appeared on Broadway once, in an
ANTA production of "Interlock," by Max Levin. It opened on Feb-
ruary 6, 1958, and lasted for four performances. The play was a flop,
but it was an experience I enjoyed. It was interesting to open in try-
outs out of town. In Germany we open cold, without tryouts, and you
know you have to do it, and the faults make it beautiful.

My first screen role was in a German film called "Kinder, Mutter,
und ein General," and then I played in eight other pictures, mostly
German. In 1958, I made my American film debut as Hardenberg, a
strong-minded German army officer, in "The Young Lions," with Mar-
lon Brando, Montgomery Clift, and Dean Martin. After appearing in
the part of the defense lawyer in the "Playhouse 90" television
version of "Judgment at Nuremberg/' in 1959, I played the same
part in the movie version, with Spencer Tracy and Richard Wid-
mark. By the fall of 1959, I had earned enough money acting in tele-
vision here to return to Germany and rent an apartment in Munich.
I plan to write and produce stage and television plays in Munich.
When I was given the New York Film Critics award for my per-
formance in "Judgment at Nuremberg," I received the most wonder-
ful letter from Maria. It was just two weeks before her baby, and my
godson, was born. She wrote: "Now, when you have my letter in your
hand, a beautiful day is coming for you. I will be with you, proud, be-
cause I knew such recognition would come one day, leading to some-
thing even greater and better. Maybe you thought somehow that it
would be difficult for me. No. It was not difficult, or if it was, then not
more than perhaps for a tiny second not only because you are close to
me but because I count you among the truly great actors, and it is won-
derful that besides that you are my brother." Maria and I are very close.
When she played in "Ninotchka" in American television, in 1960, she
asked me what to do in one scene, and I told her, "Give it all that you
are." When I was playing Hamlet, I asked her the same kind of ques-
tion, and she gave me the same kind of advice. I can act in French,
German, English, and Italian, but I like best, and think I "am best,
acting in English, because I have to think about the meaning of every
word. Someday I want very much to produce and act in a play on

234

MAXIMILIAN SCHELL

Broadway. I still find that the classical figures are the most stimulating.
The Greek heroes, an Achilles, a Klitos, are the greatest of all,
greater than any of the Western heroes.

Socrates once said, "Know yourself." I do not agree. I think that is
bad advice. You should not know yourself. By knowing, you take away
the secret of yourself. That sentence is one of the most dangerous
sentences ever written, especially for an actor. If you are conscious of
what you are doing, you are thinking about it, and not doing your
best. You are not acting spontaneously. Every actor has a little bit of
every other man inside him. And this is how it must be, for it is this
that enables him, in each part he plays, to reach what he is or what he
is hoping to be. Almost always, the first time I read a script it seems
a little silly. It is difficult for me to find any good in it. Shakespeare is
different. It is easy to read his plays, and they always seem good. When
I was twenty, I played Romeo in rehearsal at Basel. Today, I still find
Romeo interesting, new, and different. There will always be some new
way of playing him. One of the great tragedies of our time is that we
are never willing to admit that anything can be new. We just try to
cover up, with our actions, what we don't know. It is very important
for an actor to find and touch the nerve of his time. As I see Hamlet,
he is a man who knows he can't get the world for himself, or become
godlike, no matter what he does. My Hamlet is like a man who has read
John Osborne and Jean-Paul Sartre. He is a modern intellectual and
a real man, not weak but a very strong man. I think Hamlet is very
clear-minded, a very outspoken human being. He loves to go to bars,
and he fences. He is a real prince and a hell of a guy. When I played
him in Cologne, I made the dialogue conversational. It was as though
the words were being uttered for the first time. The production was
a very unusual one. We had one very simple set black curtains,
and just suggestions of steps. It was abstract in this way, but we never
lost the reality. I think I played Hamlet truly, and in a way that no
one else ever had. In playing him, I tried to touch the nerve of our
time. Marlon Brando discovered very early how to do this, and it made
him the important and successful actor he is today. He knows that in
these times an actor can't say "I love you" openly to the girl he loves
but has to cover up his feeling of love with some gesture. If John
Barrymore another really successful actor were alive today, he
would do the same, in his own way. He would respond to the times.

235

THE PLAYER: MAXIMILIAN SCHELL

An actor has to have success. A great painter can work within four
walls, and his work can be recognized after his death. But an actor
has nothing to leave. He has to have an audience during his lifetime.
An audience wants entertainment, and an actor doesn't want to be
boring; he wants to be interesting to his audience. An actor needs
those people in the audience who are impressed with what he is doing,
and he needs them right away. But he also needs the ninety per cent
of every audience that doesn't know what the play means or what the
actor means. The actor needs one hundred per cent of the audience.
Nevertheless, I don't play for the audience; I play for an idea. Going
to a play like "The Best Man" is like going to a football game. "Sweet
Bird of Youth" made me a little sick. Tennessee Williams is a good
playwright, but he is not a poet. The classics are different. The classics
say something and offer something more for an evening than watching
a football game. But most classics are wrong for the time and have to
be brought up to date. In any event, I need the audience to be there.
And I need reviews, good or bad. If there were no reviews, the actor
would be completely defeated, because the reviews tell ninety per cent
of the audience what to think. When I act, I do exactly what / want,
not what the audience wants. In all my early years in acting, I was not
accepted by the audience. The critics thought I was bad, and the
public didn't applaud me. All through my years in repertory, I kept
hoping to find expression for the secret I knew I had inside me the
kind of secret that Gary Cooper has in "High Noon," the movie that
was his high point. In Hamlet, I think I found what I was looking
for. When I act now, I know how to concentrate on one feeling at one
moment in one manner. One of my first true moments in acting was in
a small part in a television play called "Child of Our Time," about a
concentration camp, on "Playhouse 90," in February, 1959. I played a
prisoner of war. The exact point at which I reached my true moment
was when I was going to die. Then I knew I wasn't just acting. I was
being. At that moment, I knew that happiness lay in being alive. In
any circumstances, just to be alive was happiness. This I felt, even
though I knew that all of life was a preparation for dying. But, as Her-
man Hesse says, in every truth lies its contrary, which is equally true.
Just before doing Hamlet, I played in "The Three Musketeers"
on American television. I played d'Artagnan, just to prove that I still
was not too old to play a dashing twenty-year-old. Then I made

236

MAXIMILIAN SCHELL

three films, one after another: "Judgment at Nuremberg," "Five
Finger Exercise/' and "The Reluctant Saint/' The last movie is
the one that is closest to my heart. It was made in Italy and directed
by Edward, Dmytryk, and in the film I reached what I always wanted
to play, a kind of Chaplinesque comedy, very close to Dostoevski's
"The Idiot/' Everything the saint is is the opposite of an actor's
qualities. An actor has to be brilliant and vain, and open himself to
the world. This character is humble and modest, and he loves to do low
work, to clean the stables and to beg maybe in the begging the saint
and the actor are relatives and later he becomes a monk. In "Judg-
ment at Nuremberg," I was able to do a good straight piece of acting,
but in "The Reluctant Saint" I felt for the first time that I was able
to make something strongly my own in a film.

Before I became successful in American films, my best notices from
international critics came after I played Hamlet on German television.
The notices were overwhelming. When the critics think I'm good, they
rave about me, and when they think I'm bad, the same critics tell me
I should go back to acting school. Actually, I've never gone to a school
for acting, although I've taken speech lessons and classes in fencing and
dancing. In Europe, a school isn't needed, because we have repertory
theatre to give us experience. Acting talent is something that all chil-
dren are born with. They naturally play cops and robbers, mothers and
daughters. True art in acting is different. To be an artist, you must be
lonely. I feel that I must keep my life lonely in order to be as free as
possible. I cannot think or act unless I am free, and I cannot be free un-
less I am alone. So far, I have lived like a hermit, alone, and I expect to
die alone. My hours are irregular. I get up at any time two in the
morning, eleven in the morning, five in the evening. My parents have a
house in Zurich and a farm in Austria, and since I have my own apart-
ment, I can visit them as I please. The farm has been in the family
for a hundred years. There are two hunting cabins on the property,
which is surrounded by mountains and forest. My father and my uncle
hunt deer there, but I do not like to hunt. I like to walk through
the forest by myself. In 1948 and 1949, when I wrote part of my first
novel, which I have never shown to anyone, I isolated myself in one of
the hunting cabins for three months, without a telephone, without
electricity, with heat only from a large open fireplace. I like to work
in the woods, cutting trees. I want to continue writing especially

237

THE PLAYER: MAXIMILIAN SCHELL

plays. I have a piano in my apartment in Munich, and I play for hours
at a time for my own pleasure. After I make a film, I find I need to rest.
An actor must have pauses in between work, to renew himself, to read,
to walk, to chop wood. Now that I have had success, I find there are
some drawbacks greater demands on my time for myself but I like
it. Freedom I always had, but now the possibilities are so much greater
for me to do what I want. When you want to do something that is
really in your heart, you keep it there until you do it. I do not like
to say what these things are. Picasso would not say, "I am now going
to paint something." He would do it first. I, also, want to do it first.

258

PAUL NEWMAN

I like all the preparation that goes into acting the
exploratory work, the intellectual stimulation, all the
peripheral things. But as soon as I hear "Roll 'em!"
for the camera, or the curtain goes up, and I'm com-
mitted to exposing myself, I find the experience of
literally standing out in front of people to be un-
comfortable and sometimes painful.

I was born on January 26, 1925, in Cleveland, Ohio. My father, Arthur
S. Newman, ran a sporting-goods store. He died in 1950. My mother
lives in Cleveland and comes to New York for all my openings and for
visits. My father was Jewish, and my mother was a Roman Catholic
and is now a Christian Scientist. I was raised as a Christian Scientist.
We lived in the rather well-to-do neighborhood known as Shaker
Heights. I have one brother, Arthur S. Newman, Jr., a year older than
I am, who lives in California and is going to work as a production or
unit manager for my new producing firm. I grew up with the idea that
I was going into the sporting-goods store. My whole family, including
a couple of uncles, took it for granted. Nobody in my family was con-
nected with acting, although my mother was always, in some way,
drawn to it. She used to go to see the plays at the Hanna Theatre, in
Cleveland, and was just spellbound by it all. She never took me along,
but she used to tell me about it. At the age of seven, I was in a gram-
mar-school play about Robin Hood. A song for the play was written by
one of my uncles, Joseph S. Newman. I played a court jester. I didn't

THE PLAYER: PAUL NEWMAN

like it. I felt as uncomfortable and disturbed then as I do now when
I'm onstage. I had one entrance and one exit. I was a big hit. My
family was hysterical with pride and admiration. Five years later, I
was in a children's play about St. George and the Dragon, put on at
the Cleveland Playhouse. I played St. George and poured salt on the
dragon. Again I was a big hit. I didn't enjoy it, and I wouldn't enjoy
it now* My wife, Joanne Woodward, is just the opposite. Whenever
she's acting, she gets a real jolt out of it. Some people get a sense of
satisfaction out of their own torment. For me, acting is simply a mat-
ter of getting out there onstage or in front of the camera and get-
ting the motor running and keeping it going. One trait I've always had
is a kind of tenacity in whatever I set out to do.

At Shaker Heights Senior High School, I stage-managed and acted
in plays in the usual extracurricular routine, and I remember that
one of my big disappointments was not getting the role of the First
Gravedigger in "Hamlet/' (I got the job of stage manager.) But while
I was in high school and college I never considered going into acting
as a profession. After graduating from high school, in 1943, I enlisted
in the Navy for flight training. While I was waiting around to be
called, I attended Ohio University, in Athens, Ohio, for four months,
and majored in beer-drinking, though I did manage to wander into
auditions for the Speech Department's production of "The Milky
Way/' by Lynn Root and Harry Clork, and come out with one of
the leads Speed McFarland, the middleweight champ. I couldn't wait
to be a pilot, though. I loved to fly. But in July, 1943, I flunked the
physical because of color-blindness, and was kicked out of pilots' train-
ing. I wound up as an aviation radio man third class on a torpedo
bomber, and served in the South Pacific for nearly three years. While
I was in the service, I didn't spend one minute thinking about act-
ing. After my discharge, in April, 1946, I went to Kenyon College, in
Gambier, Ohio, ninety miles southwest of Cleveland, where I con-
centrated on economics for a couple of years and then switched to
English and speech. Kenyon is one of the most highly respected men's
colleges in the country. My days there were the happiest of my life. I
managed to get on the second-string football team. I weighed only
a hundred and fifty pounds I weigh a hundred and fifty-six now
but in those days I had a lot of energy. I also used to drink a lot of
beer. One high-spirited day early in my junior year, I was kicked

240

PAUL NEWMAN

off the team. I hadn't thought about acting in the two years
I'd been at Kenyon, but I had to do something with my spare
time, so I went over to the Speech Department, where they were
holding tryouts for "The Front Page/' They handed me the part of
Hildy Johnson. I went on to appear in nine more Kenyon College
plays, including "Charley's Aunt," "R.U.R.," "The Taming of the
Shrew/' and "The Alchemist." I was probably one of the worst col-
lege actors in history. I didn't know anything about acting. I had no
idea what I was doing. I learned my lines by rote and simply said
them, without spontaneity, without any idea of dealing with the forces
around me onstage, without knowing what it meant to act and to re-
act. I didn't really learn about any of that until I got into the Actors'
Studio, in August, 1952. But I got some measure of local recognition
out of being in the plays.

I didn't have any singleness of purpose about acting until 1 became
successful at it. In those early days, I was thinking of becoming a
teacher. I more or less stumbled into serious acting. I wanted to run
from the sporting-goods business, and acting was as good a way as any.
People dedicated to an art are usually running toward something, but
I was just running away, and where I arrived was the result of a series
of accidents. In 1948, after my junior year, I did a summer of stock at
Plymouth, Massachusetts. Then, in the spring of my senior year at
college, I was offered a room-and-board scholarship for a season of
summer stock at Williams Bay, Wisconsin. My graduation was at two
in the afternoon on June 13, 1949, and by four that same afternoon
I was on the train for Williams Bay. My first part was the soldier in
Norman Krasna's "John Loves Mary/' My second was the Gentle-
man Caller in Tennessee Williams' "The Glass Menagerie." At the
end of the summer, I went to Woodstock, Illinois, near Chicago, and
played a season of winter stock. That spring, I took a job as a laborer
on a farm near Woodstock. In April of 1950, my father became seriously
ill, and I went back to Cleveland. He died in May, and I stayed in
Cleveland, and worked at the sporting-goods store with an uncle and
a cousin and my brother. Then the store was sold. I took on some
odd jobs, including one as manager of a golf range outside Cleveland,
where we picked up golf balls and cleaned them for reuse. I did a
little acting over a local radio station for the McCann-Erickson adver-
tising agency and for the Ohio Bell Telephone Company. In 1949, I

241

THE PLAYER: PAUL NEWMAN

had got married for the first time. My first wife and I had three chil-
dren; the children now live with their mother. I have two children with
my present wife, Joanne. We live in an apartment on Park Avenue.
New York is our base of operations. My roots are here now. It's my
home. There are a million things I like about the city, and I walk
around it a lot, from one end of Lexington Avenue to the other, and
up and down Fifth, up and down Second. Joanne and I are pretty self-
sufficient. We enjoy being alone together.

By September, 1951, I had had enough of hanging around Cleve-
land. I decided to go to Yale and study for a Master's degree, so that
I would be qualified to teach speech, possibly at Kenyon. I moved
my family to New Haven. We lived on the top floor of an old wooden
three-family house. I went around New Haven as a salesman of en-
cyclopedias and managed to earn enough to support my family while
I attended the Yale School of Drama. I specialized in directing. I
heard a lot of talk about acting at Yale. I heard a lot of reverent
talk and rightly so about the Actors' Studio, in New York. It
was the first time I had heard of the Studio. I acted in three or
four full-length plays and half a dozen one-act plays, and was also
in one of the three major productions of the year, an original play
called "Beethoven/' in which I played Beethoven's nephew a very
formal guy. The part certainly wasn't anything like the all-American-
boy parts I got to do later on. William Liebling, an agent from
New York, saw me in the play and suggested that if I ever came
to New York I should look him up. So after nine months at Yale
I decided to try New York. It was the summer of 1952. I was prepared
to try it for a year, and, if I got nowhere, to go back to Yale and get
my degree. I had a family. I had responsibilities. Things were a little
crowded in New Haven, financially, but I was making out fairly well
with the encyclopedias; I once made about nine hundred dollars
in ten days. I was committed to the theatre in a general way
not specifically as an actor but I wasn't going to subject my family
to the hanging-out-at-Schwab's-drugstore-in-Hollywood routine. I had
no intention of waiting around till I was old and bruised and
bitter. I moved the family into a sixty-dollar-a-month apartment on
Staten Island. I picked Staten Island because my wife's aunt lived
there and would give us a hand with the kids; we couldn't afford a
baby sitter. I went around selling encyclopedias on Staten Island. It

242

PAUL NEWMAN

was one of the hottest summers I can remember in New York. I had
one decent suit in those days an old seersucker and I'd put it on
every morning. I'd start out at eight every morning, take the ferry to
Manhattan, make the rounds of the casting agents, follow up all the
tips in the trade papers, and then get back to Staten Island in time to
peddle encyclopedias. After a month or so, I got two walk-on parts in
live television shows. For one "The March of Time/* in which I ap-
peared as an old man applauding at the inauguration of President
McKinley I was paid seventy-five dollars. I auditioned for the Ac-
tors' Studio doing a scene as Val Xavier in "Battle of Angels" with a
girl and, to my amazement, I was accepted. I attended faithfully. I
felt adulation for Eli Wallach, Rod Steiger, Geraldine Page, Maureen
Stapleton, and Kim Stanley, who were at the Studio. But the most I
hoped to accomplish for myself was still to become a teacher of
dramatics. And I still dreaded being drawn back into retail business,
which had given me no sense of accomplishment at all. There's a great
deal of romance in merchandising if you have an interest in it to begin
with. I didn't have it. However, I thought I was a- very bad actor. My
body movements were all wrong. I was an untuned piano. I had a lot
to overcome. I discovered that I was primarily a cerebral actor as I
still am. I began to understand that actors who are instinctively emo-
tional are much luckier. The instinctively emotional actor like Lee
J. Cobb, Geraldine Page, Kim Stanley, and Marlon Brando when he's
clicking, and also my wife, Joanne work, I think, from the inside
out. Their emotional equipment is much more readily available to
them.

Soon, I auditioned for Maynard Morris, a Music Corporation of
America agent, and through him I got my first speaking part in a
television play. It was called "Tales of Tomorrow" and was about
a big block of ice that was forming off our West coast. The story
was full of the pulsations of cracking ice, and made one of the
funniest shows in television history. But all I felt was scared to death.
I played an Army sergeant and had two dozen lines to speak, and I
was so overwhelmed by the magnitude of the occasion that all I could
think about was the possibility that I'd drop a line. I didn't, though.
A few weeks before, through Bill Liebling, the other agent, I'd
gone to see William Inge about getting a part in his play "Picnic."
I'd been scared stiff. I'd read for him and thought I read very

243

THE PLAYER: PAUL NEWMAN

badly. Then, a month after that, I read for the director, Joshua Logan,
and I came away with the job of understudying the lead, Ralph
Meeker. After a few weeks of rehearsals, I was given the part of Alan
Seymour, the rich young man who didn't get the girl, played by Janice
Rule. So there I was. All I had behind me was nine months at Yale
and a couple of months at the Actors' Studio. "Picnic" was a hit. I
was paid a hundred and fifty a week as understudy and two hundred a
week after I got my part. I moved my family to Long Island to a
two-bedroom, eighty-eight-fifty apartment in Queens Village. I was
with the play until just before the end of its run of four hundred and
seventy-seven performances.

Even after I had my part in "Picnic," I wouldn't say I was
exactly self-confident. While we were out of town with the play during
tryouts, I was constantly fearful that the whole thing was going to
turn out badly. After the play opened in New York and I had played
in it for a year, I began to get a little self-confidence. By then I was
even beginning to wonder if I couldn't really make acting my profes-
sion and earn a living at it. After doing "Picnic," I went out to Holly-
wood, under contract to Warner Brothers. I took my family with me,
and we lived in a motel in Burbank, near the studio, while I made my
first movie, "The Silver Chalice." I have to say "Ouch!" every time I
think about it. I played a sculptor who was supposed to model the chal-
ice to hold the Holy Cup. My acting was very, very bad, and I knew im-
mediately that it was bad. It felt terrible. I was uncomfortable with
what I was doing. I couldn't handle the language I was supposed to
speak. After a couple of weeks, I sent a frantic message to my agent
in New York telling him he'd better find me a play to do, to get me
back here. I was flailing around, and got a reputation in Hollywood
as a very difficult actor. Every time I asked a question, there was
trouble. When the movie was finished, I lit out for New York and did
a couple of good television plays, one by Tad Mosel and the other by
Stewart Stern. In Tad Mosel's script, I played a guy who has an Army
buddy whose death he feels responsible for, and when he goes to the
buddy's home and meets his mother she was played by Fay Bainter
he tries to take the buddy's place with the family. I felt comfortable
in the part. It was the first part I'd ever played that I found the
character for. Luckily, after doing "The Silver Chalice" I had got the
job of playing on Broadway in Joseph Hayes' "The Desperate Hours,"

244

PAUL NEWMAN

about a trio of desperadoes who take over a man's home. I played
Glenn Griffin, the leader of the trio. In order to get permission from
Warner Brothers to do the play, I had to sign a new contract. Instead
of a five-year contract to make two pictures a year, I signed a seven-
year contract giving them an option for a third picture. I played in
"The Desperate Hours" for eight months at a salary of seven hundred
dollars a week and I continued going regularly to the Actors' Studio.
The play was very melodramatic. My part was a flashy one, which I
didn't particularly like. The critics liked me a lot in the play, but I
don't know why. At the end of It, I went back to Hollywood.

I was lent to M-G-M for my second picture "The Rack," written
by Rod Serling and Stewart Stern, in which I played a soldier in the
Korean War who cracks under pressure from the Chinese Communists.
I found that movie quite rewarding from an artistic standpoint,
though it wasn't a hit at the box office. I then made one movie after
another. For Warner Brothers, I made "The Helen Morgan Story"
and "The Left Handed Gun." On loan again to M-G-M, I made
"Until They Sail." In 1957, I made "Somebody Up There Likes Me,"
about the life of Rocky Graziano, which did more for my career than
any of my earlier pictures. Playing Rocky was great fun. I spent a
couple of weeks with him drinking with him, finding out how he felt
about things. I didn't try to imitate him in the part, however. I tried
to find a balance between him and me him as the part, and the part
in me. I tried to play a Graziano, not the Graziano. Right after that,
I was lent to Fox for "The Long, Hot Summer," in which I co-starred
with Joanne, before our marriage. And I kept on going from one pic-
ture to another. In 1958, I played in my first comedy, "Rally Round
the Flag, Boys!," for Fox, and I wasn't very good, but trying a new kind
of acting at least gave me an opportunity to stretch. Then I was turned
over to M-G-M and played in "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof," with Eliza-
beth Taylor. That was the first of my pictures, except for the one I
made with Joanne, that I didn't have to carry pretty much on my own.
Before that, it had just worked out, somehow, that I'd never played with
a star. In working with Elizabeth Taylor, I was astonished to find that
she was a real pro. She's not afraid to take chances in front of people.
Usually, stars become very protective of themselves and very self-
indulgent, but she's got a lot of guts. She'd go ahead and explore and
risk falling on her face. I've made three movies with Joanne since our

245

THE PLAYER: PAUL NEWMAN

marriage, in 1958, and we find we like working together. We respect
each other tremendously, and if one of us criticizes the other, the
criticism is taken as gospel When we do a scene together, we both
know we can't rely on tricks, and if one of us tries to, the other is sure
to sound off about it. You have to be married to have that kind of
freedom. Marriage is a wonderful area of comfort. In 1959, Warner
Brothers got me to make "The Young Philadelphians," with the under-
standing that it would buy my release to appear on the stage later that
year in "Sweet Bird of Youth." After I'd been in the play for a year,
I had to start making "From the Terrace" on location here in New
York during the day while I was performing in the play at night, and
when that was over, I was presented with an opportunity to buy my
way out of the Warner Brothers contract. I had to pay half a million
dollars for my freedom, but it was worth it. If I hadn't done it, I would
soon have had ulcers. There are always limitations in making a movie
unless you have control over what you're doing. Today I have my own
producing company, with Martin Ritt, the director. It's called Jodell
Productions, after the first syllable of Joanne's name and the second syl-
lable of Ritt's wife's name. Some pictures purport to be profound,
penetrating analyses of the contemporary scene, and just aren't. If you
do a comedy, you know it's fluff; you know exactly what it is. So you
grow a bit doing it. But when a picture pretends to be something it
isn't, I find it Infuriating. I never want to do that kind of picture
again if I can help it. A guy has got to come home at night with some
sense of accomplishment. In making my own movies, I'll be taking a
salary, as if I were working for somebody else. The main advantage is
artistic, not financial. I made seventeen thousand dollars for my work
in "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof," and two years later, for the picture
"Sweet Bird of Youth," I got a three-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar
guarantee, with a chance to make more if the picture did very well.
I can live very comfortably on my earnings, but I don't have much in
the way of material possessions beyond the furniture in our New York
apartment, a few paintings, a Volkswagen, and a Lambretta motor
scooter, which I use for getting around in the city. I've never put any
of my salary into investments. We go out to Hollywood to live when-
ever Joanne or I have to work there, but we'll never buy a house there.
What we want is a place up in Connecticut where we can go in the
summertime; apart from that, we want to be as free as possible.

246

PAUL NEWMAN

In all the pictures I've made, I've tried to do the best I could. The
character of the young lawyer that I played in "The Young Phila-
delphians" was much closer to me as a human being and much
duller than Eddie Felson, the character I played in "The Hustler,"
in 1961. But the characters that are farthest away from my own
personality are the ones I feel most successful with. The farther
away from me a character is, the more I find there is to dig into. If
an actor gets one good script every three years, he's doing very
well. I've been unusually lucky in what I've had a chance to do.
These days, an awful lot of stuff comes through the door at least
three or four books and six scripts a week. Joanne is the only person
whose judgment I trust in helping me to decide what parts to take; it's
impeccable. Making a movie is always a challenge to find out whether
your intellectual judgments about the character you play are right, and
whether the things you do, out of continuity and over a long period of
time, blend together to make a consistent character. What you do is
limited by your own imagination and your own experience, and to
make it all jell is very, very challenging. All three of the main mediums
for an actor are interesting, and while I don't mean to slight any of
them, I do feel that the best is live television. That gives you every-
thing: having it go non-stop; rehearsals beforehand; all the excitement
of the first night. Whatever medium I'm working in, though, I'm always
aware of a heavy responsibility to the author and to the other actors.
One of the strains of going to the theatre each night is bearing this
responsibility, even if you're feeling like death warmed over in your
own personal life.

When I begin working on a part, I find that the first things I do are
usually wrong. After rehearsals start, however, I find that I get rid
of the wrong things bit by bit, until I get the part so that it feels
fairly comfortable and fairly right. Nowadays, for movies, I always give
a director or a producer three or four weeks for nothing, in order to
have a rehearsal period. I won't ever do anything again without re-
hearsals. For "The Hustler,'* we had three weeks of rehearsal, using
television technique, where you lay out tape on the floor to mark the
sets. The motion-picture business is unlike any other in the way it
forces you to walk into tight personal relationships and direct, close
contacts for a period of three months, and exactly three months, and
then boom! it's over. From there you walk into another batch of

247

THE FLAYER: PAUL NEWMAN

relationships for another movie, and you have close contacts with an
entirely new bunch of people. You have to see the new bunch, and
that leaves you no time to see the previous bunch. When you're like
Joanne and me, and like to be self-sufficient, you're in a bit of trouble.
Another thing is that we don't feel it's right to burden our two small
children with the fact that their parents are movie stars, so we try to
keep them away from it all.

There's a tremendous fascination about the idea of acting trying
to be the kind of person you'd like to be, or wouldn't like to be, or
think you are. Everybody does it to a certain extent runs for Presi-
dent or makes imaginary speeches before the United Nations. I love
acting in the theatre. I love taking a script apart and trying to find
the true person in the written character. The reward of acting on the
stage is the continuity. We took three weeks to rehearse the Broadway
production of "Sweet Bird of Youth." For the most part, I relied on
the director, Elia Kazan, for what I did. He has broad shoulders.
His invention, imagination, and patience are extraordinary. He
helped me see that I had four things to comment on in portraying
the character of Chance Wayne: the beauty of the relationship
between men and women; the social disaster of a family that has
lost the esteem of others; the fetish of youth and the importance
of the fetish in our country; and the loving remembrance of youth.
Well, that was a lot. But there were areas of Chance Wayne I
never really got, including the aspect of the male whore. So it was
always interesting to see what I could do with him. Nevertheless,
after ten months of playing him on Broadway it got so that going
to the theatre each night was like facing the dentist. I'd try to
get to the theatre early. I'd have to have my dinner at five o'clock.
Before every performance, I'd drink a couple of jiggers of honey
for energy and for my throat; I'd lose three pounds every perform-
ance. I'd sack out from about seven to five minutes to eight. Then I'd
sit in the shower at the theatre and collect my wits. As I was going to
the theatre for my last performance in the play, I thought, I feel utterly
exhausted. And all of a sudden I started bawling like a baby. I
thought, I'll never say these words again. I'll never have this specific
laugh again. I'll never have this kind of quiet near the end of the
third act. Never this specific quiet.

24$

LEE REMICK

Everyone has a false image of himself. When I first
saw myself on the screen, twenty-five feet tall, what /
saw was so unexpected that I couldn't look at anyone
else in the picture.

I was born on December 14, 1935, in Boston. My parents were divorced
when I was twenty-one, and both have remarried. My father, Frank
Remick, owns a department store in Quincy, Massachusetts. My
mother, now Mrs. Frank Packard, is an actress under the name of Pa-
tricia Remick. She did most of her acting between 1947 and 1957.
These days, she lives in New York but leaves most of the acting
in the family to me. She was a stand-in in "The Millionairess'* and
a replacement in "The Small Hours/* on Broadway, and also
played in summer stock in Dallas and on the Gape, and appeared
in some television plays. She acted in comedy, mostly. I saw her
a few times when I was a small child, and thought she was mar-
vellous in everything. I have a brother, Bruce, two years older than I
am, who lives in Puerto Rico, where he does soil and sugar-cane re^-
search for a sugar plantation. My family moved to New York when
I was seven. I was immediately entered in Miss Hewitt's Classes, then
on East Seventy-ninth Street". My brother and I were taken to the

249

THE PLAYER: LEE REMICK

theatre constantly; I remember that the first thing we saw was Eva Le
Gallienne's production of "Alice in Wonderland/' with Eli Wallach
and Bambi Linn. I took it all for granted, naturally assuming that all
children went to the theatre. One of the early shows I saw was "Ca-
rousel/' again with Bambi Linn, when I was ten. Watching Bambi
Linn dance as the little girl whose father has died made me cry, and
I cried all through the rest of the show. I was a very intense little
girl. My mother wanted me to take ballet lessons, because she thought
I wasn't getting enough exercise. She arranged for me to take lessons a
couple of times a week at a school run by a Russian woman called
Mme. Swaboda. It wasn't long before I was taking a lesson every day.
I loved it from the start. I went there from the age of eight until I was
a tall eighteen. When I was eighteen, I studied modern dance with
Charles Weidman for over a year. I decided that I would become a
ballerina.

At school, I was a fairly good student in everything except mathe-
matics. At the age of twelve, I joined the dramatic club at Miss Hew-
itt's, because my mother wanted me to, and I played the part of Mrs.
de Winter in "Rebecca." Compared to dancing, acting seemed absurd
to me, but there was some fun in dressing up and pretending. I had
no notion what I was doing. All the parents and teachers came to the
performance, and everybody applauded, and that was that. I hated
the dramatic club; it was no fun to play adults in the kind of plays
they put on. When I got to the dating age, I had no dates. I thought
they were silly. My brother went to the Kent School, in Connecticut,
and then to Cornell, and he'd bring his friends home and they
would invite me to school dances. I went to a few and hated them.
The kids would sit around and talk about who could drink the most
and who could do the most popular dances and who was dating whom,
and so on. I never knew how to handle myself in large groups of
people. I never had anything to say. Nothing really mattered to me
except dancing and working at Mme. Swaboda's. As soon as I was
old enough to get around by myself, I went to every possible perform-
ance put on by the Ballet Theatre or the New York City Ballet. My
idols were Alicia Markova, Nora Kaye, Maria Tallchief all of them.

In March, 1952, when I was in my next-to-last year at Miss Hewitt's,
I read in a newspaper that auditions were being held in a midtown
rehearsal hall for dancers for the Music Circus Tent, a summer-stock

250

LEE REMICK

theatre-in-the-round at Hyannis, on Cape God. I went and auditioned,
without telling anyone. I was sixteen, but I thought I looked past
eighteen. There were about sixty boys and girls, in practice clothes.
Like the others, I got up, did a few steps, and left my name, telephone
number, and age, which I said was eighteen. The next day, to my sur-
prise, I got a call telling me I was one of three girls chosen. I quickly
joined Chorus Equity which has since merged with Actors' Equity
and then told my mother. She wasn't exactly overjoyed, but she didn't
object. Then I arranged to go up on a weekend and asked my
father to drive me to Hyannis to see the theatre. When we got
there, all we found was a big hole in the ground. We hadn't
understood that the theatre was a real tent, put up in June and
taken down in September. That June, I went to work. It turned
out to be a summer of magic for me. We put on nine shows in ten
weeks, including "Kiss Me, Kate," "Where's Charley?," "The Firefly,"
and "Carousel." I was paid about sixty-five dollars a week, and I saved
all of it except twenty dollars a week, which went for room and board.
Before each performance, we rehearsed from nine -in the morning until
six in the evening for the following week's show. I never felt tired.
I would have done anything they asked of me. I loved everything I
did, everything around me, including my primitive dressing room a
tiny cubbyhole in a cottage across from the tent. The high point of
that beautiful, exciting summer came when we did "Carousel." I
played one of Enoch Snow's daughters, and I was given my first real
lines to say "My father bought me my pretty dress," and "Your father
was a thief." They were my lines, and it was my show. There wasn't
anything being done by anyone anywhere, we all felt, that could com-
pare with what we were doing.

At the end of the summer, I had to go back to Miss Hewitt's Classes.
My parents approved of my interest in the theatre, but they were ab-
solutely firm about my completing my studies and graduating. Al-
though they were separated, they were together in whatever concerned
my brother and me. So off I went to Miss Hewitt's. More than ever, as
a result of my sophisticated experience in summer stock, Miss Hewitt's
Classes and I just didn't mix. I was even less interested than before
in the other students and what they did with their time. That fall, I
continued with my ballet lessons, and then I started getting calls from
producers and directors to read for parts in television dramas. I'd

THE FLAYER: LEE REMICK

never had an acting lesson in my life, but I'd go down and read and
get the parts. It was still the early days of television. We did live one-
hour plays. My first big part, in an "Armstrong Circle Theatre" pro-
duction, was that of a high-school girl, the class brain, who has no
dates, and who one day meets a high-school boy who is in the same fix
brainy and no dates so they get together and then everything is
dandy. Things just seemed to snowball for me. I started going to lunch
at Sardi's on Saturdays, because that was one of the things to do. One
day when I was there, I waved to a theatre director and writer named
Reginald Denham. Waving was a thing you were supposed to do at
Sardi's. Then I stopped at his table on niy way out, and he said to me
"Can you act?" I said "Of course." He asked me to read for a part
in a play called "Be Your Age," by him and Mary Orr, with Conrad
Nagel, Loring Smith, and Hildy Parks. So I had my first reading
in a theatre. It was the most frightening and exhilarating thing
in the world. There I was, onstage, all alone, under a bright light,
with blackness out front, and the sound of voices. I read what
they handed me the part of Lois Holly, a smart-aleck teen-ager who
is always shocking her family. From out front, I heard laughs. I loved
the sound. I loved the smell of the whole thing. I loved the whole idea
of getting up and saying words written by someone else. I felt proud
that I could do it. After a third reading, they gave me the part, at a
salary of a hundred dollars a week. I told my mother I was in the play,
and we were in seventh heaven. The play lasted for exactly five per-
formances in New York. Miss Hewitt's wanted to expel me because of
my appearance in "Be Your Age." It led to quite a battle. My mother
made a fuss, and dear Miss Hewitt who is no longer with us called
a meeting of the school board, at which, egged on by my mother, she
held that experience in the theatre broadened one, and so on. So I
wasn't expelled. Another play, "Time Out for Ginger," had opened a
month and a half before ours, and, unfortunately, was about the same
sort of thing. But there were agents and producers in our first-night
audience, and the phone started ringing constantly, and went on
ringing after the play closed. I started getting more television parts.
I was in a number of television shows before I graduated from Miss
Hewitt's Classes, in 1953.

In the next four years, I appeared in about forty television shows,
mostly dramatic plays. I worked in dozens of different parts a good

252

LEE REMICK

many of them the lead in a triangle situation. I did a lot of crying on
television. I worked with all kinds of directors and producers and ac-
tors and sponsors. Just being immersed in all that gave me some idea
of what acting was all about. 1 got a lot of pleasure out of acting, al-
though I never abandoned the idea of dancing professionally; there
just weren't enough hours in the day to do both. Actually, I was
beginning to find the same thrill in acting that I had found in
dancing; they had one aspect in common that of entertaining. As
long as I could entertain in some way, I was satisfied. 1 did so many
television shows that they all run together, somehow. All gave me some
pleasure. For the "Kraft Television Theatre/' once, I was a piano-
playing prodigy, and another time I was a teen-ager in trouble and
going around with the wrong boy, who was also in trouble of some
kind. I played one of the leads in an adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's
story "The Diamond As Big As the Ritz," and I fell in love with the
wrong boy in that one, too. Once, I was a girl who lived on a farm
during the Civil War and fell in love with a Confederate soldier. In
the "Playhouse 90" production of "The Last Tycoon," I fell in love
with a movie mogul. In another "Playhouse 90" show, I was a juvenile
delinquent in love with a man on trial for his life. I almost always
played the part of the sweet young thing in love with the wrong boy
or else the wrong boy was in love with me. After I was in a television
show called "All Expenses Paid," in which I played a salesgirl who
wins a trip to Nassau in a contest and falls in love with an older man,
I had a telephone call asking me to come in and see Elia Kazan, who
was going to direct the movie "A Face in the Crowd." I read for the
part of the high-school cheerleader in the town visited by the tele-
vision hero, played by Andy Griffith. I was so thrilled when I learned
they wanted me for the part. It felt like something special, mainly be-
cause Kazan and others associated with the picture were so highly
respected in the theatre. It was the biggest project I'd ever worked in.
The scale of it all the publicity and attention and noise was impres-
sive. For the movie, I had to learn how to do little pieces of a part
at a time. The nice thing was that if you goofed, you had a chance
to try again. I learned how to have the piece I was doing figured out
and prepared before I got to the set I was lucky to have Kazan as my
first movie director, even though I wasn't able to appreciate fully what
he was doing for me until the next movie we made together "Wild

253

THE PLAYER: LEE REMICK

River/' with Montgomery Clift three years later. I'd been very criti-
cal of myself, even on television. Every time I saw myself on the screen,
I would cringe. I didn't like the way I looked. I didn't like the way I
walked. I didn't like the way my voice sounded. I didn't like the way
the various parts of my body were put together. My own image of
myself just didn't match what I saw on the screen.

It wasn't until "Wild River" that I was able to be more objective
about myself. My part in that movie of a raw mountain girl, warm
and loving, who isn't satisfied with her life and who chooses to follow
her own desires instead of what her family wants for her was my
favorite up to then. Working with Kazan on that part was a revela-
tion. He has been an actor himself, and he knows how actors feel. He
knows that anyone who is fool enough to get up on a stage or go before
a camera is exposing himself in so many ways, and needs someone to
give him support and confidence. Kazan always made me feel that I
was the only person in the world who could do my part. There's so
much to Kazan. He knows how to listen to actors; most actors love to
talk, and never have a chance to say enough. He's observant of every-
thing relevant to the actor. He's eloquent, and he knows how to extract
the best performance from an actor. Actors confide in him. They tell
him things they'd never tell another living soul. Then, whenever it's
needed for your performance, he pulls something you've told him
out of a hat and hands it back to you, and you know what to do
in the performance. My interpretation of the role in "Wild River"
was the truest in my experience, and it was Kazan who enabled me to
make it true. In one scene, for example, it's raining outside, and I'm
in my house waiting for Montgomery Clift, the man I'm in love with.
Kazan suggested that I have a towel in my hands while waiting. He
wanted me to give the towel to Monty in a certain way. Kazan kept
telling me, "It's wet outside, wet and muddy, muddy and wet, wet, wet,
and as soon as Monty comes in you'll want to give him the towel."
Then, when Monty came in, I don't remember how I did what I did,
but somehow I was feeling Monty's wetness. There was a certain feel-
ing in it that couldn't have been there without Kazan. That was only
one of a million things he does with actors.

In making movies, you need to be able to rely on your director, be-
cause there is no other audience, the way there is in the theatre, or
even in live television. In movies, there are so many people trying to

254

LEE REMICK

tell you what to do and how to do it, and then, when the movie comes
out, they are still there, trying to tell you about what you've done.
You need the support of the one man who is really in charge of what
you do, and that is the director. I like to have an audience when-
ever I can, though. That's why I like to do live television plays. I hate
doing taped television, which has all the disadvantages of live televi-
sion and of film, and none of the advantages of either. The first thing
I think of in considering a new part is whether / am going to enjoy
doing it. No one can advise me in that respect. Not even my husband,
William Colleran, who is a television and film director. He's my worst
critic, because he adores everything I do. I met him at a party when I
was nineteen, and we were married on August 3, 1957. We live quietly
in California with our two children Kate, born in 1959, and Mat-
thew, born in 1961.

I want to try everything in acting. In February of 1960, I played
Miranda in "The Tempest" on the "Hallmark Hall of Fame/' with
Maurice Evans, Richard Burton, Tom Poston, and Roddy McDowall.
In "Anatomy of a Murder," the movie I played in with Ben Gazzara
and James Stewart, I had to think of my part as peculiar in order to
do it, because it was the part of a girl who was fooling around with
other men while her husband was facing a charge of murder. In "A
Face in the Crowd," I was a high-school girl who was proud of her
body and flirted like mad. In the movie "Days of Wine and Roses,"
I played an alcoholic. That was the first time I'd felt that what had
happened to the character I was playing might have happened to me
that in every human being there is a certain frailty, and no one is
immune. I'm not a martyr to truth. I play within my own limits. And
second best to acting a part for which you can draw upon yourself
is acting the part of someone you are curious about.

255

DONALD PLEASENCE

There comes a moment onstage when you can't deny
yourself and you can't deny the part you are playing.
Somehow these two things come together when you
act.

1 was born on October 5, 1919, in Worksop, Nottinghamshire, which
is D. H. Lawrence country, on the border of Sherwood Forest. My
parents, Thomas Stanley Pleasence and Alice Armitage Pleasence,
were also born in Worksop. It's about thirty miles from Scunthorpe,
in Lincolnshire, where my father was a railway stationmaster in 1919.
The only other person I know who comes from Scunthorpe is Joan
Plowright. Theatrically, the place is a standing joke. It's a town no
one goes to, so you say, "The play did very well in Scunthorpe." My
grandfather was a railway signalman. I have one brother, Ralph, four
and a half years older than I am, and he is a stationmaster at Smeeth
Road, in Norfolk. My father, now retired, is a solid British Labour
Party member, and likes the simple things. He's a keen gardener. My
mother was taken from Worksop to America as a child and was
brought up by her grandfather in Momence, Illinois, which is near
Kankakee. She lived there for about fifteen years before returning to
England. My parents recently came to America together for the first
time, on a three-week holiday. They saw me in the Broadway produc-

256

DONALD PLEASENCE

tion of "The Caretaker/* and then went to Momence, where my
mother found the house she'd lived in as a child. I think she was
pleased, but, like most North Country women, she doesn't believe in
expressing emotional satisfaction. All she said was "Very nice." My
father is the same. If, after seeing me in a performance, he were to say
to me, "You were very good, love," I'd know he had been impressed,
but that's as far as he'd go. My parents' visit to America was rather
marvellous, actually. I took them round to see the sights in a 1955
Oldsmobile, a splendid machine, and they had a chance to spend
considerable time with my wife, Josephine, and our daughter, Lucy,
who was born in May, 1961. I have two daughters by a previous
marriage Angela, who was born in 1941 and is a student at the Royal
Academy of Dramatic Art, and Jean, who was born in 1944 and wants
to do social science.

Until 1939, I had always lived in railway stations. Now it's be-
coming usual for the stationmaster to get a house outside the
station. I found the .stations wonderful places for a boy, especially
the station at Grimoldby, in Lincolnshire, where my father became
stationmaster when I was about nine. Grimoldby is a village in the
wilds of flat fen country near the sea. It's very attractive country
in a bleak kind of way. My brother and I played in the goods yard,
climbing in and out of freight trucks, and we had animals about
a pig, dogs, and turkeys. We lived there for about five years. It was a
very happy time. Then we moved to Ecclesfield, right outside Sheffield,
in Yorkshire, and a few years after that to Conisborough, which is a
rather dirty colliery town in Yorkshire. I went to dozens of schools,
including some wretched ones. The main one was Ecclesfield Grammar
School, where I went until I was seventeen, and then quit. My parents
were much concerned about the possibility that I wasn't going to be
clever. Lincolnshire was very backward country educationally mostly
farming country, with a few industrial towns. By the time I got to
Yorkshire, which is very education-minded, I found that I was some-
what behind in school. I was good in English and literature and
terribly bad at all practical things, like math; science was a closed book,
but I find that I've become rather interested in it now and can under-
stand it. I was good at all theatricals, won a dramatic-reading prize
at the age of fourteen, and was elected a Member of Parliament in a
mock election held at school. I was the Socialist candidate, of course.

257

THE PLAYER: DONALD PLEASENCE

I was one of those awful children who go and recite poetry at musical
festivals. I had a fairly sunny disposition and was quite personable and
probably a bit spoiled and rather horrid. I suppose I recited quite well.
From the age of eight or nine, I knew I was going to be an actor. I
never considered being anything else. I didn't know how I would do
it, but I knew I would. It was a marvellous feeling to stand up on the
stage and do things while people watched you. My parents always
encouraged me. They had me attend classes in voice production at
two guineas a term, which they could ill afford. At the musical festival
that was put on each year by the town authorities, there would be
competitions in categories like Verse Speaking for Boys Ages Seven
to Nine, and I'd often win the silver medal for my category. To this
day, my mother has a drawerful of my medals. The first part I played
was Caesar in "Caesar and Cleopatra/' at Ecclesfield. I was fourteen.
I would have been a very good child actor, I'm horrified to say. Then
I lost the knack of naturalness that a good child actor must have. I
became too much interested in posing and in making my voice sound
beautiful.

We never lived near a theatre when I was a child. Probably the first
theatrical performance I ever saw was a local production of a "Miss
Hook of Holland" sort of thing. My father took me to the repertory
theatre in Sheffield and also to some plays in London. When we went
to the Sadler's Wells Theatre, which had been an eighteenth-century
music hall, we sat right up in the gods* gallery. The thing that
impressed me most as a young boy was seeing a production of "Ham-
let," in 1930. I think it was at the Old Vic, where John Gielgud
played "Hamlet" for the first time in 1930, but I'm not sure it was. I
went with my father. I had never seen a professional Shakespearean
production before. It was all wildly exciting. It was so lovely kind of a
wild dream. London itself was so exciting. It was all so foreign, so far
removed from my life. My father and I usually travelled to London on
an early-morning train, on free train passes my father got from the rail-
way. We'd go round the big shops and look at everything, although toe
didn't buy much, and once we had lunch at the roof restaurant of a big
shop, Derry & Toms. After that, we might go to Mme. Tussaud's or
to the British Museum. The first performance of an individual actor
that I remember clearly was that of Wilfrid Lawson in J. B. Priestley's
play "I Have Been Here Before/' in 1937. It was one of those Priestley

258

DONALD PLEASENCE

time plays, in which it turns out that everyone has been there before
a quite interesting play. I was eighteen and went to London alone,
sitting in the gods', as usual, and I was quite overwhelmed by Wilfrid
Lawson's playing of the lead, a businessman. Wilfrid Lawson is over
sixty now, and is a great actor, really, who has become a hero to the
younger generation of actors, because he has never been allied with the
Establishment. In 1953, he made a comeback, after some time out of
the picture, with a mammoth performance in Strindberg's "The
Father" that set everybody's eyes aflame. He's an interesting figure a
kind of outsider figure, actually.

My background was strongly Methodist, and I wasn't allowed to go
to certain films as a young child, and there were no cinemas in the
country. I remember seeing a few Chaplin films, including "The Gold
Rush." My father wanted to take me to that one, and for some reason
I didn't want to go, and was dragged off screaming to see it. I thought
it was marvellous when I did see it, of course, and remember vividly
the scene in the house on the cliff. My father gave it high praise by
saying "Quite good/' In my early teens, when the family moved near
Sheffield, I became a mad cinemagoer. The American movies of the
early thirties, in particular, had a very strong effect on me. I used to
devour the gangster ones and the prison ones. In the thirties, I was
very much impressed by Hollywood actors like Edward G. Robinson
and Thomas Mitchell, but I didn't really appreciate them until later.
Actually, I have been influenced very little by most other actors, but
James Cagney was quite an influence on me. I was terribly impressed
by his relaxation his habit of standing in a relaxed way. I'm a great
believer in relaxation and the necessity for it in acting. When I be-
come tense, I'm at my worst. If I'm having difficulty in a part, my
toes tense up and I clasp my hands. If I'm able to relax to start with,
then I can create whatever tension I need for my part. Before a per-
formance, I try to empty myself of all tension. Then one is there and
one is not afraid to be there. One uses body and mind for the task
ahead. There are some actors who believe that they so envelop them-
selves in their part that they deny themselves completely. For me, it's
a matter of the two things' coming together myself in the part, and
the part in myself. Then, there are some actors who use only themselves
in a part. That kind of acting is a different thing entirely. It has its
place, but I wouldn't want to do it. The actor who uses himself is

259

THE PLAYER: DONALD PLEASENCE

relying on tricks of his own personality vocal tricks or raising an
eyebrow that always produce certain effects and that have been de-
veloped over the years but essentially are still him. Tricks are different
from style. There are parts of Olivier's acting and I happen to think
he is the best actor in the Western world that are uniquely him.
He has great style, and I admire style, but he always plays the part.
There's a great difference between exploitation of an actor's person-
ality and individual style. An actor has almost as much right to style as
a painter. The three actors who have impressed me most in my life,
and all In different ways, are Nikolai Cherkassov, the Russian actor
who plays the title roles in "Alexander Nevsky" and "Ivan the
Terrible/' Parts I and II (all directed by Sergei Eisenstein); Wilfrid
Lawson, who combines the best of the old and the new; and
Olivier. The important thing about actors in their art and I per-
sonally think that at its best it is an art is that they do use themseves
and only themselves, one way or another. You use your own soul. You
are absolutely naked on the stage. That is what is so difficult and so
exciting at the same time. One can often see a few moments when act-
ing becomes an art, but rarely does one see an over-all performance that
is art. It depends on so many outside factors, including parts offered
and parts played. A chap might go on playing light comedy in the
West End for years, and then perhaps, if he was offered the right part,
he might have an opportunity to use his talent in an entirely new and
powerful way. An actor can't fully develop himself without a series
of first-class parts that are as demanding as possible.

I left school with a year to go, because I became fed up with the
difficulty of commuting from Conisborough to Ecclesfield about an
hour's ride on the train. I wanted to go to London and attend the
Royal Academy of Dramatic Art an institution I had known about
since I was twelve, when Cyril Maude, who was a friend of an acquaint-
ance of my father's, and who was associated with the Academy, sug-
gested and arranged an audition. At the audition, I recited a long pas-
sage from "King John," in which I played two parts the boy Arthur
and Hubert de Burgh, for whose speeches I used a deep voice. It was
quite absurd, because they didn't take children in the Academy. They
just patted me on the head and told me to come back later. Which I
did five years later, when I auditioned for the one scholarship avail-
able that paid fees and maintenance, so that I could afford to go there.

260

DONALD PLEASENCE

I didn't get it. That meant that I had to find a job. I sat down and
wrote hundreds of letters to repertory companies and theatres, and
went round to all the theatres I could. Employment wasn't easy to come
by in those- days. I couldn't get a job in the theatre, so I spent the next
year and a half as a railway clerk at my father's station and then, for
about a year, was in charge of my own little station, at Swinton, where
I sold tickets and did all the accounts. Finally, I got an answer
to one of my letters offering me a job as assistant stage manager in a
popular resort area on Jersey, one of the Channel Islands, at thirty
shillings a week about seven and a half dollars which was enough
for me to live on. I jumped at it. My board and lodging cost only
twenty-five shillings a week, and after a few weeks the stage manager
left and I was promoted to his job and given a rise of five shillings a
week. That was in May of 1939. I had never been so happy. I really
thought I had arrived. It was my dream come true. I was very good as
stage manager, because I had done two and a half years as a clerk and
was very systematic and could type. And I played tiny parts and also
did general dogsbody took care of washing up the teacups. We did a
different play every week, for an audience of holidaymakers and local
people. My first part was as Hareton Earnshaw in "Wuthering
Heights," that May, and I was probably all right, as it was a
Yorkshire part. I still had an accent. By this time, I thought I
spoke quite beautifully, but one night, in my digs, which I shared
with a fellow who had gone to public school and had the right
very right kind of accent, this chap told me I was limited as an
actor, because, with my accent, I could play only North Country
parts. I then realized for the first time that I would have to learn to
speak like a proper gent. Actually, I have a slight North Country accent
to this day. Dialect has always been such a terrible problem in the
British theatre. It's kept many talented actors out, because they didn't
sound as though they'd gone to public school, and until just recently
most plays were about proper gents who had gone to public school.
I stayed on Jersey until the Second World War broke out. During
what was then called the "phony war," all the theatres in the
Channel Islands were closed down for fear of bombardment, and a
good many of them at home. I was very politically conscious in
those days, and considered myself a pacifist. Gradually a few theatres
opened, and I found another job in a tiny repertory club in

261

THE PLAYER: DONALD PLEASENCE

Plymouth, where I played a variety of parts because the company
was small. I played ttie villain in "Gaslight/' and I played in a
number of light comedies, for which I put gray streaks in my hair and
wore a toothbrush mustache to make myself look distinguished. I had
registered as a conscientious objector, and while I was waiting to be
sent to prison or to an agricultural camp, I answered an advertisement
in the newspaper The Stage, which was the way to get employment in
those days. The ads usually read, "WANTED: ARTISTS ALL LINES TO
REHEARSE MONDAY WEEK." So you sent photographs and you ex-
aggerated particulars of your experience. I got a job with a repertory
theatre in Workington, Cumberland, which put on two plays a
week for six performances each. I played character parts, like a
prince in "The Midnight Wedding," an Edwardian play, in which I
was called upon to say, "When a man has no proof that his father was
his mother's husband, he is called ... a bastard!" From there, after my
investigation by the tribunal for the examination of conscientious
objectors, I was sent to work as a lumberjack in the Lake District,
near Workington. After six months, I changed my mind about
being a conscientious objector, partly because I found that the others
in the camp were so callous in their attitude toward the war, and also
because by then I had decided that the idea was absurd. After all, I
had been strongly anti-Fascist since the Spanish Civil War. In 1941, I
enlisted in the R.A.F., and for two years I flew in bombers as a wireless
operator. I was shot down over France, parachuted to earth, and spent
the next year in a prison camp in northern Germany. It wasn't too
bad there. Mostly, the camp was made up of Americans. We had a
theatre of sorts. The British senior officers insisted that we put on light
comedy, and so mostly we did "Hay Fever" and variety shows and
things like that, but I did play in a production of "The Petrified
Forest/' taking the part of Alan Squier, the part originally played by
Leslie Howard. After being released, I spent six months at a re-
habilitation camp, a former R.A.F. station at Wolverhanipton, because
I was supposed to be suffering from malnutrition.

In June, 1946, while I was waiting to be demobilized, I heard that
Peter Brook, the director, was holding auditions for "The Brothers
Karamazov," adapted by and starring Alec Guinness. I walked in, read
some lines, and was engaged for a tiny part, and then got the much
bigger part of Mavriky a very showy little part, very flashy at seven
262

DONALD PLEASENCE

pounds a week. It was exciting to get back to the theatre after more
than five years. I greatly admired Guinness, and loved watching him in
his part Mitya, the elder soldier brother. Guinness is remarkably easy
to work with. He gives such a great deal, and he certainly acts with
you. On the pre-London tour, I unfortunately came down with the
measles, and so I missed the opening in London, but I joined the
company in London a week later and played for five weeks. After that,
Brook asked me to appear at the Arts Theatre, in "Vicious Circle"
the English title of the Jean-Paul Sartre play that was called "No
Exit" in America. I went on to play in a verse play, Gilbert Horobin's
"Tangent/* and then, with Christmas coming and no money in the
bank, I took the part of the pirate Starkey in a rehash of "Peter
Pan," in London. I played it for six months, and I hated it. After
that closed, I was being thought of for parts in London, but I
couldn't afford to sit around waiting, so I went up to Perth, in Scot-
land, and acted in a repertory theatre there for a year. Then, in
1948, I joined the Birmingham Repertory Theatre, where I stayed
for almost two years. By now I had acquired class as an actor,
and I joined the Bristol Old Vic Company, a permanent repertory
company attached to the London Old Vic. We worked in the Theatre
Royal in Bristol, a beautiful old theatre, built in the eighteenth
century. These were my real years of training. I had ample opportunity
to play all sorts of parts, in both classics and modern plays. In Septem-
ber of 1951, the Festival of Britain year, I played in "Saint's Day," by
John Whiting, who to my mind is one of the best playwrights in
England today. The New Wave in England arrived with John Osborne
and Arnold Wesker, and their plays of social realism, but Whiting's
play "Saint's Day" is, in my opinion, one of the two best plays to come
out of England in recent years. The other one is "The Caretaker," in
which I played the part of Davies, the old, discontented, obsessed
tramp, for fourteen months in England and then after making a film
on Broadway for five months. "Saint's Day" is a most important play,
but the critics couldn't understand it, and so vented their baffled fury on
it. It's about a distinguished writer in his old age probably his dotage
who has been neglected by the Establishment but is finally about to
be honored on his birthday by a visit from a very successful middle-
aged poet, who arrives carrying a presentation copy of the old writer's
poems. He praises the old man and his work, but meanwhile some

263

THE PLAYER: DONALD PLEASENCE

soldiers in a camp nearby have deserted. The writer and his daughter
and her husband are warned by the local parson the part I played
that the soldiers are on a rampage. The deserters arrive at the house,
ally themselves with the poet, and hang the old man. It is a play of deep
religious and philosophical significance, and it is tremendously dra-
matic. When I acted in it, it was very important to me to play out the
character on the stage. Ordinarily, though, I'm not involved, while
acting, in what the deeper meaning may be. If you dwell on the deeper
significance, it seems to me, you're in danger of playing much too big.

Late in 1951, 1 came to Broadway for the first time, with the Oliviers,
playing the Major-Domo in "Caesar and Cleopatra" and Euphronius
in "Antony and Cleopatra." When I returned to London, I was
in a very, very funny North Country comedy, "Hobson's Choice,"
in which I enjoyed great critical success at the Arts Theatre, where
I have spent so much of my time. In 1952, though I'm not a serious
writer, I adapted Robert Louis Stevenson's "Ebb Tide/' and it was
a great success at the Royal Court. The following year, I accepted
an invitation to go to Stratford on Avon, which was disastrous for
me. I was too old to go there on the middle level, which is what I
did. In a big soap factory like that, I found myself feeling inhibited
about acting. I couldn't act. It wasn't because I didn't want to play in
what are loosely called the classics. I did want to. But I felt enveloped,
swallowed up, completely blotted out. I think I could cope with it now.
I'm more successful now, and more secure, and have a clearer idea of
what I want to do. I've always been interested in films. I made my first
one in 1954, "The Beachcomber," in Technicolor, in which I played
Tromp, an Indian head clerk a very good part. Working in my first
film was very frightening. One had so much to think about at once
the Indian dialect, the completely new medium, all the film things one
takes in one's stride now, like closeups, looking at a nut on the
camera instead of at the person one is supposed to be talking to, hit-
ting marks that are used to determine the camera's focus on actors,
and, most bewildering of all, the lack of rehearsal.

In 1955, I played in a stage production of Pirandello's "The Rules
of the Game/' at the Arts Theatre, which was a great success. I played
Leone Gola, which is my favorite part of all time. It calls for a strange,
bitter sort of comedy. I found the play and my role entirely satisfying
and wholly engrossing. I'm always very excited about something that

264

DONALD PLEASENCE

is neither clearly tragic nor clearly comic in the theatre, particularly
and as Leone, a very sophisticated, learned, and rich middle-aged
Italian who is a marvellous talker, I had a very interesting oppor-
tunity to go from bitter comedy to tragedy. Shallow, but tragedy none-
theless. I went on to play the Dauphin in "The Lark" and the
Cockney clerk one of the best comedy parts of all in a revival of
"Misalliance." I kept getting marvellous notices, but never made any
money. At Stratford, where I shared a dressing room with Robert
Shaw, and where we'd hear people walk up and down the corridor
visiting other people, while nobody came to visit us, we had a self-
kidding routine. I would say, "I'm the most successful club-theatre
actor in London." Then Robert would say, "Let's get the notices out!"
And he would solemnly read Kenneth Tynan's notice of "The Mer-
chant of Venice" saying, "I cannot imagine what Donald Pleasence was
trying to make of Launcelot Gobbo, who is not, I suggest, an organ-
grinder's monkey," It's very difficult to know when you're successful
as an actor. I used to say when I was twenty, "If I'm not successful by
thirty, I'll do something else." Then the war came, and I was able to
put the limit at thirty-five, because I had lost five years. Then I was
noticed, and though I got some marvellous notices, I still didn't know
if I was knocking my head against a brick wall. In my country, I'm now
very successful in the sense that I can earn a good living. I'm not, how-
ever, completely accepted by the Establishment as a leading actor.
Most of the time, I have a fairly placid temperament for an actor, but
there are weeks when I feel frightfully insecure.

In our world of entertainment, there is no set plan that an actor
can follow. When I was very young, my brightest ambition was to
play Hamlet at the Old Vic. Now a young actor's brightest ambition
is to play the lead, wearing dungarees, in a New Wave play at the
Royal Court. Shakespeare is a bit old-fashioned in England now. But
he will come back. He's such a good playwright, after all. Back when
I was dreamy-eyed, what I wanted most was to play a classical part.
Now it's all a hodgepodge. I am loosely involved in what is called the
new school, but we have no organization theatre as it exists in Con-
tinental Europe, where you can enter a company and stay for life.
One thinks enviously about it when one has dependents and is pound-
ing up and down the carpet thinking about how to pay the grocery
bill By and large, the Continental way must be preferable. Still, the

265

THE PLAYER: BONALD PLEASENCE

situation is better in England, where we have repertory companies in
the provinces, than it is in America, where it must be absolute murder.
In England, the only way you can get what you want is to be successful
first; then you can do the things you want to do. Take Paul Scofield,
for instance. He is a brilliant, marvellous actor. He's extremely per-
sonable, and he has a beautiful voice and a wonderful, remarkably
relaxed presence. He was accepted very early in life as a leading actor,
and he's always had a solid life stretching before him. He is, un-
fortunately, an exception. Generally speaking, the pattern of one's
career changes from day to day. One day I am a character actor with a
background in the provinces, where I usually played leading parts;
the next day I am making a living by working in films; the day after
that I am simply one of the best-known television actors in England.
That happened in the late fifties. Now, if I meet an English housewife
on the street, she'll say, "Oh, the man on the telly!"" She doesn't have
the faintest knowledge of me as a stage actor or of the play "The
Caretaker." The actor *s worlds are as sharply divided as that.

For four years before I went into "The Caretaker," I wouldn't act
on the stage at all, because I couldn't find anything I really wanted
to do. I did an enormous amount of work in television, for which the
subject matter is quite good in England. Harold Pinter, author of
"The Caretaker," writes original television plays. The programs are
not controlled by the sponsors, as they are in America; the sponsors
have no connection with what is being written. It's possible to do quite
a lot of good work in television, and you don't have to play down to
the audience, I've never enjoyed acting. It's more of a compulsive
thing. I alternate between being terrified and being bored, and yet
there's a curious excitement in it the whole time. Television, especially
if it's being done live, is quite terrifying. I regard acting, in a sense, as
a job, pretty much like being a bank clerk. On the other hand, I always
try to do my best. When I was very young, and very bad as an actor,
I could find delight in showing off. As I got better, I began to see
things more objectively. To play a part like the one in "The Caretaker"
and to be an individual success is still exciting. You do have a wonder-
ful mounting feeling when you've got a marvellous part and you can
tell that the audience likes it "and likes you in it. Then you do begin to
walk on air. It's almost as though the thing was running away with
you. There are times, however, when what you take for genuine erno-

266

DONALD PLEASENCE

tion may just be the result of your own impact on the audience. Even
then, though, the emotion is a vivid one, and can be used onstage for
all kinds of effects. I have no theory about acting, no method, no way,
and nobody has ever taught me a way. If somebody could teach me how
to achieve a certain look, I suppose it would be nice. As it is, I try to
know what my character would do in any circumstances, and whilst
I'm onstage I'm totally immersed in the part. But I am never lost in it.
You must constantly go back to first principles. If you find you
achieve an effect with a certain gesture or intonation or expression,
you nevertheless try to do something fresh the very next night. If some-
body onstage says a line that is not in the play, you ought to know how
to reply. I try to achieve a sort of physical and mental transfiguration,
and go on from there. When I first read a part, I don't think of how I
will look in it. At least, I try not to. These things come out of re-
hearsals. I plunge right in, but that's only at the beginning. I try to
find a clear line, and then work on the ornamentation. A lot of actors
work from ornamentation back especially film actors. And in weekly
repertory we used to have a joke that went, "Is it the week for the
mustache?" I hate makeup, putting on wigs and beards, and, whenever
possible, I like to grow my own. What is dangerous for an actor is
getting an exact physical image and then deciding, I want to look
like So-and-So in this part. I don't go to people for my feelings about
a part. I always go to animals and birds. For the part of the old, sus-
picious tramp in "The Caretaker," I thought of myself as an alley cat.
There was quite a lot of comment on my performance in "The
Caretaker/' and people asked me how I managed to get a look of
absolute desperation and terror in my eyes when the old man finally
realizes that he is going to be chucked out of the house. The old man
at this point comes as near as possible to facing up to himself; he
knows it is curtains for him. That look in the eyes arose from sheer
intensity of emotion. It arose from very powerful feeling physical
exertion, really that left me absolutely exhausted at the end. I
think I managed to achieve something three nights out of the week.
One can come halfway to doing what one is trying to do, provided one
is willing to tear one's guts out. Sometimes the whole thing was utterly
real to me, even after I'd played it for a year and a half. At other times,
it wasn't, and then I had to work all the harder to do it.

267

CAROL LYNLEY

1 never go to see plays. I want to be on the stage, not
in the audience.

I was born on February 13, 1942, in New York City, as Carole Jones.
I have a younger brother, Daniel, who is studying to become a
photographer. My father, Cyril Jones, is from Ireland, and my mother
is from New England. I'm a mixture of Irish, English, Scotch, Welsh,
German, and American Indian. Both of my maternal grandparents had
Indian blood Connecticut variety. My parents separated when I was
a small child. Neither of them has ever had any connection with show
business; my mother went to work as a waitress. I was never in a school
play. I went to fourteen schools professional and parochial schools,
all over the Bronx before graduating, in 1959, from the School
for Young Professionals. When I was ten, I started working as a
photographer's model to supplement my mother's earnings as a
waitress. Between us, we managed to support the family. Tuesday
Weld and Sandra Dee were also child models in New York at

268

CAROL LYNLEY

that time, and the three of us often competed, as fairly close friends, for
the same modelling jobs. I liked modelling. If I hadn't, I would have
quit. I don't do many things I don't want to do. As a child, I had a very
active imagination. When I was five, I saw the movie of "The Wizard
of Oz" and became hysterical over it, and about the same time, seeing
"King Kong," I nearly died. I yelled and screamed, and upset the
audience so much that I had to be taken out of the place. When I
was sixteen, and was playing in "Blue Denim," by James Leo Herlihy
and William Noble, on the New York stage, every time I did the part
about going for an abortion I'd feel sick for hours afterward. I started
acting for television soon after I started modelling. The agency I
worked for would get calls from television producers, and they would-
send me out to act in television exactly as they sent me out to model.
I was learning every minute, not only about acting but about life. I've
never taken a lesson in acting. The good acting schools don't take
children under eighteen. They think that children don't need to learn
to act, and they're right. Children act all the time. Children take the
most outrageous liberties with the truth and believe in what they say
and do. All that children can learn about acting is voice projection
and how to take direction. My first roles in television were bits or walk-
ons. Television plays were all done live at the time I started. I had to
learn to change makeup, clothes, and manner, and to run from one
set to another, in a matter of minutes. Later on, when I began making
movies, I had days in which to do the same thing.

I started taking ballet lessons when I was seven, for two hours a
week, after school. I still try to take lessons now. Dancing is a body
conditioner. If you're accustomed to dancing and then give it up,
you find yourself getting flabby. Dancing helps keep you flexible
for acting. It helps, for example, if you have to walk like a child,
or like a tomboy, which was the kind of part I played in the
movie "The Last Sunset." By the time I was eleven, I was getting
a lot of television work to do, and I was so busy that my mother
gave up working daytimes in order to be with me. When the tele-
vision roles started coming in, I thought, I'm in it anyway, so why not
try to be the best and get leading roles? It was all very time-consuming.
Out of fifty readings, I would get ten small parts. Whenever I was
afraid I wouldn't get a part I wanted, I'd think, Well, it's in the lap of
the gods, and the chances are ten to one against me anyway. All

269

THE FLAYER: CAROL LYNLEY

through school, I was a B student and could have been an A student
very easily if I'd worked at it. But I didn't like school. I loved history,
and still love it hearing about it from others or reading about it
but in history class it was only a matter of giving a date when I was
asked about an event, or an event when I was asked about a date. I
wanted to know about the way life used to be. I'm a compulsive reader.
As a child, I read everything. I didn't care for "The Bobbsey Twins"
and that kind of thing, even though they were big favorites with the
other kids. When I discovered the Encyclopaedia Britannica, I began
to devour it.

As a model, I worked under the name of Carolyn Lee. When I was
thirteen, I got a job in the road-company production of Jerome
Chodorov's and Joseph Fields' "Anniversary Waltz/' and when I ap-
plied for membership in Actors' Equity, they already had a Carolyn
Lee, so I solved the problem by keeping the same name but dividing it
up as Carol Lyn-lee, or Carol Lynley. When I was twelve and had been
doing walk-ons and bits for two years, I tried out for the part of Alice in
"Alice in Wonderland" for the "Kraft Television Theatre," one of the
bigger shows on television. It was while I was trying out for the role
that I first realized I seriously wanted to become an actress. While I
was reading for Alice, I suddenly began to understand what great
enjoyment one could get out of acting. Up to that point, I'd been
most interested in becoming a ballerina, even though I knew how hard
dancers worked and how comparatively low their pay was. But I'd
thought I might combine dancing with doing choreography. My
mother, who no longer works and is now a night student at C.C.N.Y.,
was then still working part time as a waitress, and I was worried about
making money. There was something more than that in my new inter-
est in acting, though. The producer and, for this show, the director
Murray Holland had me read four times for the role of Alice. He
wanted me to have it, but finally realized I just wasn't experienced
enough to play it. So I wound up playing a page and the Mock
Turtle. Robin Morgan got the part of Alice, and went on to play one
of the leads in the "I Remember Mama" series. But I had learned
about the joy that can come from creating a character as an actress and
trying to say something of your own as well as what the author wants
to say. Also, I enjoyed playing the Mock Turtle. It was fun. In "An-
niversary Waltz," we played Cincinnati, Detroit, and Chicago. I wasn't

270

CAROL LYNLEY

too impressed with what I was doing. Also, I didn't like those cities.
All I would do was sleep and wait to go onstage.

When I was fifteen, I got my first Broadway role. It was the part of
the granddaughter of Sybil Thorndike in Graham Greene's "The
Potting Shed/' I read for the role several times before I got it. When
I knew I had it, I decided definitely not only to be an actress but to
be a good actress. I was still considered a child actress, but I was
working in a play that had dimensions quite different from anything
I'd ever been connected with before. The other members of the cast
were all fine actors, and we had a fine director, Carmen Capalbo. I
was terribly excited about having the part and about playing with
people who were so professional and so experienced. I loved it all, but
I also realized my own shortcomings. I didn't even know if I could be
heard by the audience. I learned so much in that play. I played the part
for the run of the play a hundred and forty-three performances and
during that time I really felt that I was the granddaughter. From being
in television plays, I'd had a tendency to be aware only of the character
I myself was playing. In a play, you are forced to communicate with the
others; they are right there. You are actually talking to the person
you address, I also learned how to project my voice. And I absorbed an
awful lot from the others about acting technique. I think my way of
acting is a natural one like the way children act, a kind of natural
pretending. I lose all awareness of the audience when I'm in a play.
And I never try to imitate any other actress. The worst thing in the
world is imitation. When you see actors doing impersonations of other
actors, you realize that nothing is as good as the original.

Six months after "The Potting Shed" closed, I got my first movie
role Shenandoe, in Walt Disney's "The Light in the Forest.'* I be-
gan to learn how to do things more slowly than I'd done them in
television. I also began to want to do things for myself that would
ordinarily be done for me, like makeup. In Hollywood, they have a
whole department to make you up, but I make myself up. I got used
to putting on my own makeup for the stage and for modelling, and
to arranging my own hair, too, so I asked the Disney people if I could
do my own makeup, and they let me. For a movie, I take an hour and
a half to apply my makeup, compared to twenty minutes for the stage
and fifteen for modelling. In putting on movie makeup, I found I
could do certain things that would contribute to the role, like putting

271

THE PLAYER: CAROL LYNLEY

dark circles under my eyes. My face is so young and smooth that some-
times It just looks flat under the movie lights and doesn't show enough
character, so I learned to do little things with an eyebrow pencil and to
arrange my hair in different ways to make the character I was playing
come more alive. If your makeup isn't on just right for movies in
Technicolor, you can come out looking blue, so it demands a lot of
attention. It's an additional burden doing your own, but I think it's
well worth it. It helps me. I look at myself in the mirror for so long
that I begin to get a lot of ideas about the girl I'm playing and what
she's like.

About the only preparation I need for a role is to believe in it. I
find that if I believe in it the audience will believe in it. It's easy for
me to believe in a part. I suppose it might be better if I questioned the
role more. I practically always believe I am the person I'm playing.
Even playing the writer in "Return to Peyton Place," though I didn't
understand what I was doing, I felt natural in the part. I didn't have
to be a writer to play one; I could pretend I was one. I didn't believe
In the whole movie. I didn't believe in the situations or in the people.
In the middle of making the picture, I got married, so I look back on
the picture through a sort of haze. My husband is Mike Selsman, a
Hollywood public-relations man. He is five years older than I am. We
were married on December 30, 1960. We live in an apartment in Los
Angeles but are planning to move into a house. Mike is Jewish, and I
had become interested in Judaism years before, but I did not become
Jewish when I was married. Mike is the best thing that has ever hap-
pened to me. While I was making "Return to Peyton Place," Mike and
I were trying to get married quietly, but something always happened to
create a lot of noise around us. The way I remember that movie is: The
day of my scene with Tuesday Weld was the day of my wedding. I
was married at nine-fifteen in the morning in Newhall, California,
and then I went back to the set and did the scene with Tuesday twenty-
two times.

When I made my next movie, "The Last Sunset/' with Kirk Doug-
las, I learned the terrible hardships that must sometimes be endured in
acting. In "Return to Peyton Place," I had learned about pressure,
because of the way, while I was trying to get married, I was constantly
split between reality and playing the role. We made "The Last Sun-
set" on location in a small Mexican town. Together with the rest of

272

CAROL LYNLEY

the company, I got the local intestinal infection, and we played in
hundred-and-ten-degree heat and constantly had to protect ourselves
against baby tornadoes. I'd be playing a scene with Kirk Douglas when
someone would suddenly push me to the ground, and then I'd learn
that a tornado had passed over us. The movie company didn't take
caterers along, and in order to get something to eat at our hotel, I had
to learn to speak Spanish. I learned enough in a month for basic con-
versation. My part in the movie was that of a sixteen-year-old girl
travelling through the West with her widowed mother and a herd of
cattle. I didn't believe in this role, really, so I underplayed it. It was
the best I could do, and I think it added a touch of reality to the role.
I had to do hard things, like riding among a thousand head of cattle,
and leading mules from the back of a horse. What I remember most
vividly about "The Last Sunset" is the smell of the cattle. But playing
in that movie helped me adjust to my marriage. Because the movie,
like most movies, was made in bits and pieces, I began to find it easier
to go from being the movie character to being myself. After all, I can't
go on being the character when I come home after a hard day's work.
I don't think my husband would like it. It's hard, though, to let go of
anybody I play. I really get into the part. I'm not much of a watcher
of anyone or anything. I hate to watch. I have to participate.

I'm more in command of myself now as an actress than I was when
I was fifteen. When you're more in command of yourself, it's easier to
create a character. Just the same, acting is inborn. It's instinctive. It
can't be learned. No girl can just decide to become an actress the way
she might decide to learn to type. An actress is really an entertainer
someone who can make people forget their worries for a while. But
I act for myself. Through acting I can experience many things that
otherwise I'd be able to experience only through my imagination. And
I enjoy it. I enjoy learning things. In "Blue Denim," I learned that
even if something terrible happens to you it isn't the end of the
world. You survive. And working with different kinds of actors is edu-
cational. The male lead in the movie version of "Blue Denim," Bran-
don de Wilde, was a star. He had been a child star, and he'd had more
experience than I'd had as a child actor. But I'd had more experience
as an adult actress, so I felt I could meet him on his own ground, in
spite of his star billing. In mediocre roles, I can bring a lot of inven-
tion to the character. If a character is just true-blue and good well, I

273

THE PLAYER: CAROL LYNLEY

know no one in the world is like her. I try to show that she's not that
good, even if it's only by putting circles under my eyes. I try to make
the best of every role, and if it's hopeless, at least I try to make a dif-
ferent approach to it. In the movie "Holiday for Lovers/' I played
Betsy Dean, the younger of two sisters, who was so adorable, so good,
that no one could understand her. So I'd throw away a line here and
emphasize a line there when it was least expected. Actually, there
sometimes isn't much you can do, especially in a movie. In "Return to
Peyton Place/' I had a scene in a New York hotel room in which I
was supposed to be looking out the window, dressed in a slip, when
my editor called on the phone. I suggested that instead of looking out
the window, I take a cigarette in a long holder and swagger hippily
toward the mirror. The director let me do it my way, and afterward
they were convinced I was another Sarah Bernhardt, which, of course,
I'm not. I just wanted to do something to make that writer I was play-
ing seem not so cardboard. Acting has many negative aspects. I don't
like being stared at at parties. I'm petrified of crowds. But I find that
when I'm living in New York, and I get on the subway, if I put on dark
glasses and take off my makeup I'm not recognized. I'm free to do my
marketing. Acting isn't easy. Being a good actress is as difficult as being
a good waitress, but the pay is better.

274

ROD STEIGER

The actor reminds people of the poetry of being
alive.

I was born on April 14, 1925, in Westhampton, Long Island. My full
name is Rodney Stephen Steiger, and I'm an only child. As far as
I know, I've never seen my father. My parents were divorced when I
was about a year old. They had worked together as a song-and-dance
team in roadhouse shows. I have no idea what my father looks like,
and I wouldn't recognize him if we were in the same room. My
background is French, Scotch, and German, and I was brought up
as a Lutheran. After I was grown, my mother remarried. Whenever
I was in a play or a movie, she and my stepfather would come to see
me at least half a dozen times. I grew up in various New Jersey
towns Irvington, Bloomfield, and Newark, among others where my
mother did odd salesclerk jobs to support herself and me. In the
evenings, at home, she would entertain me by singing and accompany-
ing herself on an upright piano songs like "Roses of Picardy" and
"Shine On, Harvest Moon." My stage experience in grade school in-
cluded playing the roles of Santa Glaus and George Washington
in classroom productions. I attended Newark's West Side High

275

THE PLAYER: ROD STEIGER

School for one year, and then, at the end of 1941, when I was sixteen,
I managed to enlist in the United States Navy. I served as a torpedo-
man first class on a destroyer in the South Pacific, and in four years
I participated in most of the major operations of the Third and
Fifth Fleets. I loved the Navy. I was stupid enough to think I was
being heroic. I had always been a popular guy with other guys. I
was a good softball player in school, and I was the best storyteller
in my school gang, and the leader. In the Navy, and for some time
afterward, I was in a very disconnected period of my life. I got along
fine with the guys, and I didn't worry about anything, but my con-
nection with the world in general was not clear. As long as I could
eat and sleep, I didn't think about anything much.

I got out of the Navy with a medical discharge the day after Japan
surrendered. I went back to Newark and got a job in the Office of
Dependents and Beneficiaries, oiling the check-signing machines and
carrying boxes of checks around the office. I got paid twenty-seven
dollars and fifty cents a week, take-home pay. After eight months
of it, I found it tedious. We had a social group in the office that
put on plays. Somehow or other, I sort of got pushed into playing
the lead in "Curse You, Jack Dalton." We had a lady director, who
told me that I should take acting seriously, and that I had four years
of school coming to me under the G.I. Bill of Rights. For the next
two years, I studied acting at the New School for Social Research.
Then I went to the American Theatre Wing, and later was invited
by Daniel Mann to come to the Actors' Studio. I lived on the G.L
Bill seventy-five dollars a month, plus thirty per cent for disability.
In 1947, I got my Equity card and a bit part in "The Trial of Mary
Dugan," by Bayard Veiller.

My first real Broadway part was in the Equity Library Theatre
revival of Clifford Odets* "Night Music," in 1951, in which I played
the part of a fifty-five-year-old detective. I played in over two hundred
and fifty live television productions between 1948 and 1953. The
climactic point was reached in 1953, when I played the title role in
"Marty/* Then I went on to playing in movies, including "On the
Waterfront/' "Teresa," "The Big Knife," "The Harder They Fall,"
"Cry Terror," "Al Capone," and "Oklahoma!" In 1959, I played the
role of the Bandit in the Broadway production of "Rashomon," with
Claire Bloom, Oscar Homolka, and Akim Tamiroff. If an actor

276

ROD STEIGER

stays on one level and doesn't challenge himself constantly, he will
die. That's why I was eager to do "Rashomon," I like to be a gang-
ster, then play in a Western, then go to Shakespeare. I look to the
public to find out how I am in a part. I have great respect for the
public. In playing for it, I've been lucky in my selection of parts.

There's no one way of acting. A lot of actors present rehearsals, not
performances. They are imitating, not creating. So their acting looks
like a bad suit of clothes. Then, a lot of young actors think they're
doing Method acting when all they're doing is murdering it. Method
is anything that gets you involved personally in the part, so that
you can communicate in human terms with the audience. The essence
of any art is communication. The need of the actor is to say hello
to the audience. I get irritated with some audiences the same as I do
with some people, but I haven't lost my fakh in their intelligence.
Otherwise, I'd be bouncing a ball off a brick wall. The best actors
I know are those who try to talk to the audience, make the audience
feel and discover feelings actors who understand their audience and
excite it. I find that actors of this kind will be the same offstage as
on; they will attempt to do the same thing with anybody.

Actors may be the purest of all artists, because we attempt to reach
other people, and to give something to other people through our-
selves only. The painter can lean on his canvas, the musician on his
violin or piano. The actor has no instrument but himself. The actor
is different from other artists inasmuch as his material is intangible.
I like to think of the art of acting as an immediate reward and an
immediate death. The greater the moment on the stage, the longer
the mourning. How the actor achieves his inspired moments is only
about three-fourths known; one-fourth is completely unknown. That's
one of the things that keep acting so exciting and so uncertain. I've
become interested in the way a man can live so beautifully in the
fantasy of his art even when he can hardly live at all in the reality
of his own life. The actor's highest moments come when his instincts
and his intellect meet and together communicate something to some-
one else. No word means exactly the same thing to every person; an
actor must say what the word means to him. If he doesn't know, he
must find out, or die in a puddle of narcissism. I believe in what I
do. In the social structure that exists today, it's so difficult for a person
to work at what he believes in and loves and still make a living. If

277

THE PLAYER: ROB STEIGER

you want to act for no other reason than to be among the happy few
who are able to be beautiful in their art, then learn to be honest
with yourself and act. For the first twenty-one years of my life, I never
thought of actors as being anything but golden people from another
world; I didn't know they were really alive. When I was told that
people study acting, it came as a great surprise to me. I have my own
credo for acting. I believe the actor can, through the medium of
acting, exchange his discoveries about himself, and his beliefs, with his
fellow-man. I believe that any actor who disregards this responsibility,
that of truthfully attempting to communicate, and "acts for a living/'
ceases to exist as a creative artist. I know that all of us fail over and
over again when we attempt to communicate, but we must always
insist on attempting it. If an actor has one inspired moment in a
performance, I'd say he's good. If he has two inspired moments, he's
great. If he has none, he's going to bore himself to death. The actor
really lives for those inspired moments.

I enjoy working in television and in movies as much as I do in the
theatre. Each medium has its drawbacks. Live television is the most
difficult to do, because you have all the pressure of an opening night
in the theatre, and no chance to correct or change what you do.
An actor can develop tremendously in live television if he has some
background and training. I used to do two or three shows a month,
with only five days of rehearsal for a half-hour drama. It was wonder-
ful training and discipline. Unfortunately, live television plays have
become a thing of the past. Big money got into television in 1954 and
flattened it. But live television is still the closest thing to a repertory
theatre, which is the best kind of training in the development of an
actor. The essence of playing in a movie is remembering that it's always
the picture that is important, not the words. In the theatre, as in live
television, you must hav^ the training to sustain your performance. In
movies, you can get away with a lot, because you don't have to sus-
tain your performance for more than two or three minutes at a time.
If you're only a personality, without talent, and you're photographed
right, you can look like an actor in the movies, but the beauty of
humanness is always sacrificed for surface appearances. In New York,
you're in competition with other actors. In Hollywood, there is always
the possibility that you may have to compete with anybody who can
be photographed effectively. Wherever an actor is and whatever he's

278

ROD STEIGER

doing, he must maintain his discipline. When your mind is alert, your
performance is alert. When you're disturbed or tired, your perform-
ance suffers. That's why 111 never stay in a play for longer than six
months. There's too much chance that you may start to play it
automatically.

The more honest you are in preparing what you're going to present,
the more honest you are in playing it. There's a great difference in me
when I'm working. I keep more to myself. I get very intense. For
the stage, I don't let anybody talk to me for an hour before curtain
time. I happen to be what I regard as the nervous type. Sometimes
I play tricks on myself to get myself up to the right level. I might
come to the theatre early and walk figure eights by myself onstage.
After the curtain comes down, it takes me an hour and a half or
two hours to unwind. There's always tremendous tension. The trick
is to keep interested. If something comes into your mind, your
discipline says, "Out maybe later." You have a responsibility to
fulfill at the moment. Once, doing "Rashomon," I was sick with flu,
with a temperature of a hundred and two, and I did the part on a
pill, and everything was cockeyed. It took everything I had to stay
concentrated, but I managed it. For a couple of weeks after that,
concentration was easy for me. An actor can't base his art on making
pretty poses. Although there's no one way of acting, you have to
have talent and you have to be involved. If I had something more
important, humanly, to do than acting, I would do it. On one
occasion, during a fight with another actor in "Rashornon," I cut
his hand and he started to bleed. I looked down and saw another
human being's blood on my hands, and I thought, This is a childish
way to make a living. I still think that occasionally, but, fortunately,
the feeling doesn't last long.

I don't make decisions on how to play a part. I start off feeling
wide open to the person I'm playing and to the people I'm playing
with. I don't like to intellectualize about it. I try to feel my way, I
try to react as well as act. When I was going to play AJ Capone, I
read his autobiography and the newspapers of his time. I asked my-
self, "What did this man want?" I decided he wanted to be respected.
But there wasn't just one thing that made him be the way he was.
He was, to me, a showman, an actor. He wanted recognition. Some-
times my imagination comes into play before I start getting the part,

THE PLAYER: ROD STEIGER

sometimes after. Usually, the way it works, I read the script and
reread it, and somewhere inside me it clicks, and there's an "Oh, yes"
in a secret place. Sometimes it takes a lot of labor. For one thing, I
may not always want the world to see me in a certain guise. I play
a game with myself if I get stuck. I walk through a five-and- ten-cent
store and associate objects with the part. Say I see a toothbrush; I'll
think, How does he brush his teeth? For "The Big Knife/' I took a
walk and saw a silver tiepin with a question mark on it. In my role
as the producer, I wore it throughout the picture. Only I knew what
it meant the kid from the other side of the tracks who was always
asking himself how to get where he wanted to be. One thing I did
for Al Capone was to take out all small gestures. I played it pretty
big I wore my coat draped over my shoulders, and my hatbrim
angled because one thing I felt he wanted was to be big. I wanted
the man's natural actions to declare themselves.

One of the troubles with acting is that the more successful you get,
the more you have to keep an eye on the business aspects of it. I try
not to forget the source of creativity. I'll listen to anybody who
wants to talk to me, but after twenty minutes I know I'm going to
say, "You're entitled to your opinions, but don't exhaust my life."
When the curtain comes down on a play you're in, there's discipline,
too, in knowing how to relax. I'm always aware of the danger of
being an artist of making art all of life instead of an important part
of life. It's the responsibility of every artist to search for new stimuli.
You need another person at least one. I wrote a poem when I was
seventeen or eighteen that expressed the idea that another person,
in becoming part of oneself, makes one more completely oneself.
I believe you've got to be human to act. I don't want my personal
life ever to be one of agony, like John Barrymore's. I was married
for the first time in 1952, to an actress named Sally Gracie. We were
together two years and then we were divorced. I was married again in
1959, to the actress Claire Bloom. We have a daughter, Anna Justine,
born in 1960.

All artists have the one quality that is priceless eternal childhood.
The day I walk onstage and don't feel nervous, I'll know my ego has
got ahead of my heart. I don't ever want that to happen. I have always
done some writing, and I still do as much as I can. I believe that
anybody who has in him one sentence that can mean something to

280

ROD STEIGER

somebody else should write it down. I've written two movie scripts.
One, "In Time of War/' has been sold to Allied Artists. I wrote it
with Stanley Shpetner, and will star in it. It tells the story of six
soldiers who are destroyed by the Second World War. The other,
"The Untold Story/' is not commercial, but I hope to make it anyway.
The main character in "The Untold Story" is an actor. It takes place
in Sicily. The theme has to do with my belief that if a man creates
more beauty than he destroys, you must classify him as good; if he
destroys more beauty than he creates, you must classify him as evil.

281

CLAIRE BLOOM

No matter how great your ambition or how powerful
your need to create something on the stage, there
must be a world outside.

I was born on February 15, 1931, in London. I have a brother, John,
who is four years younger than I am, and who is one of the youngest
film editors in London. My father, Edward Bloom, was a managing
director of several businesses, including a machinery factory. He died
in 1953. My mother lives in London but spends some time with me and
my husband, Rod Steiger, and our daughter, Anna Justine, wher-
ever we happen to be. My mother was one of nine children, and
all of them were interested one way or another in the theatre.
My maternal grandparents were lovers of music and of the opera,
and of the theatre in all its forms. One of my aunts, Mary Grew,
an actress who now is also a translator of plays from the French and
German, played leading parts in London in the nineteen-thirties, and
toured in "Typhoon" with Dennis Nielson-Terry. When I was about
ten, I came to the United States with my mother and brother to escape
the blitz. At first, we stayed with an uncle on my father's side in Fort
Lauderdale, Florida. After a year, we came to New York. The three of
us lived in one room rented in another family's apartment in Forest

2S2

CLAIRE BLOOM

Hills, on Long Island. I attended Public Schools 3 and 101 in Queens.
When we had been in Forest Hills fifteen months, my mother became
ill, and because we rather regretted the whole adventure, we decided
to go back to England, which by then was no longer threatened by an
invasion. So we started back on a Portuguese ship, and were stranded
in Portugal for three glorious months, where we revelled in the warm
climate and the salt air and the peaceful beaches and the neutral atmos-
phere of the country. We made it back to England when I was nearly
twelve. For the next three months, my schooling was a haphazard affair
two makeshift schools outside London, away from the bombings
but in 1943 I enrolled, on a scholarship, in the Guildhall School of
Music and Drama, in London. For the scholarship audition, I did a
scene from "Saint Joan/'

I was a very sophisticated, priggish twelve-year-old. In America, I
had always been the youngest child in my class at school, and had
fought against getting an American accent. I used to speak in a whis-
per. I was no beauty, and I was very shy. In Florida, I recognized anti-
Semitism for the first time, and since I'm Jewish though I have no
religious affiliation I suppose that increased my standoffishness. I
suppose I set out to do what minorities generally do prove themselves.
The first movie I ever saw, as a child, was "Romeo and Juliet," with
Norma Shearer and Leslie Howard. That same year, I saw Walt
Disney's "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs," which I adored. At
seven, I saw my first play, which was a pantomime "Where the Rain-
bow Ends/' about St. George and the Dragon. I loved it. Also when I
was seven, I saw "Robert's Wife," with Edith Evans. I remember how
Mother and I sat on stools on the pavement, waiting to get into the
gallery to see it. I remember the curtain call, and wondering why all
the actors stood in line and bowed. I thought it was silly, and I still
do. Another thing I saw as a child was a play with men dressed as
women and playing women's parts. I hated that kind of thing then,
and I still do. Before we went to America, my mother read "Hamlet"
to me. I was so petrified of the Ghost that I couldn't sleep and had to
keep the light on all night By the time I was about eight, my favorite
play, for some reason, was "Julius Caesar." I suppose I liked all that
violence. My mother has always been an idealist about the theatre. In
fact, both of us have always thought the theatre was just too marvellous.
I do hate the expression "show business." And there's an expression

283

THE PLAYER: CLAIRE BLOOM

used in Hollywood a lot that I loathe, too "selling yourself." I was
never very good at the whole thing of selling myself. I was quite nasty.
In England, I always had bad press relations. I sometimes wonder how
I was able to do anything. When I played Ophelia at Stratford on
Avon, I used to hate audiences when I'd come out onstage. All the
ladies In the audience would do this terrible "Sssss-hiss-hissing-isn't-
she-sweet-sss?" I'd hate them for it. But I was seventeen an age at
which one would prefer to be a femme fatale. They don't do it any
more, fortunately, and I'm glad I'm over that period. I do care about
having an audience. I don't want to play to an empty house. But I'm
onstage primarily to satisfy myself.

The Guildhall was a reputable school, and I took acting lessons
there for about a year. It was all sort of ridiculous elocution and all
that. The Guildhall School offered to renew my scholarship, but I
turned it down and went to the Central School of Speech Training
instead, because they taught more subjects costumes, stage design,
history of the theatre, and so on. I went there for about a year and
then got a job at the B.B.C., playing Ann of Oxford Street in a drama-
tization of Thomas De Quincey's "Confessions of an English Opium-
Eater." The role was that of a sixteen-year-old tart, and I was
paid fifteen pounds for one performance. My school was furious about
my taking such a job and wouldn't let me come back, so I got a job,
a walk-on, in John Webster's "The White Devil/' produced by Michael
Benthall and Robert Helpmann, in the West End at the Duchess
Theatre. It was my first London appearance. At this point, my father
departed for South Africa to see his sister and to seek his fortune, and
I had to earn some money. I signed a five-year contract with J. Arthur
Rank, for twenty-five pounds a week, disliking everything it repre-
sented. I knew then I didn't like being tied down and having to do
things I didn't want to do. As things turned out, the only part I ever
played under the contract was that of an English aristocrat in "The
Blind Goddess," and I was just terrible. I was most unhappy, and they
finally released me. In 1948, Benthall and Helpmann held an audi-
tion for what they said was a small part at Stratford on Avon Memorial
Theatre. It was really an audition for Ophelia, but I didn't know it at
the time. If I had, I'd never have been able to do it. I was seventeen,
and I got the part. I played it for eight months, alternating it with the
roles of Perdita in "The Winter's Tale," and Blanch in "King John,"

284

CLAIRE BLOOM

in the second of which, again, I was terrible. I'm always at my very
worst in a light part, with nothing to hold on to. But I liked playing
Ophelia. I love those parts where you have to read between the lines
to find the part. I tried to make Ophelia's mad scene a little less
flowery. There are fifty possible interpretations of the role. Mine was
based on my feeling that Ophelia was fifteen or sixteen and was very
dependent, very high-strung, and that the things that happened to her
were things she couldn't cope with her father killed, her beloved
deserting her on the brink of their becoming lovers. I felt that they
were never actually lovers. You don't know, because it isn't said in the
play; you have to interpret it. The songs Ophelia sings are not the
songs of a girl who doesn't know anything about love. On the other
hand, she was not a mature woman, or she wouldn't have reacted the
way she did to what happened around her. A mature woman doesn't
react that way. At Stratford on Avon, I was very, very happy, I was on
my own, away from home, and I loved being in the country. It was a
big, big thrill to know that I was an actress. I wanted to be asked back
the next year, but I wasn't. I used to cry and howl at disappointments
in those days. But I found that I had the strength, in the end, to take
just about anything. And I learned the difference between a disap-
pointment and being faced with real horror.

When I went back to London, in February, 1949, I played Daphne
Randall in "The Damask Cheek," by John Van Draten and Lloyd
Morris. It was the juvenile lead, a charming, light, easy part, and I was
very bad in it. I had known exactly what Ophelia was about emo-
tionally. When you have very little technique, a part that carries an
emotion is much easier to play. When I played a light juvenile
part, all my mannerisms came out with my nervous tension, and I had
plenty of them. In 1949, I got the part of Alizon Eliot in Christopher
Fry's "The Lady's Not for Burning," with John Gielgud. I played the
part of a young girl and had a lovely little love scene. During re-
hearsals, I was nervous, and Gielgud didn't like me at all. I was so
scared of him. He kept telling me that I ought to have voice lessons
that he couldn't hear me, even on the stage. I was rehearsing for this
play while I was still appearing in "The Damask Cheek." Then I got
the flu and was out for five days, and I was sure Gielgud would take the
opportunity to give me the sack. When he didn't, I became more con-
fident and better in the part. It was a beautiful, beautiful production

285

THE PLAYER: CLAIRE BLOOM

like a medieval tapestry. I came to know and appreciate Gielgud, who
is angelic a quality that is unusual in any man, and especially in an
actor. We played in London for eleven months. Then I played Isabelle
in Anouilh's "Ring Round the Moon," with Paul Scofield, in a part
that everybody wanted, since it was a dream part for any young girl-
that of a poor young ballerina who comes to a chateau and is supposed
to stir up jealousy between twin brothers, both played by Scofield.
Three weeks after the opening, I had my nineteenth birthday, and I
was the happiest I'd ever been.

The world of the British theatre is a narrow, narrow world, and my
own world didn't broaden until I made "Limelight/' with Charles
Chaplin. In Hollywood, I met all kinds of people writers, directors,
producers, stars, everybody. In London, when you're nineteen you're
treated as a child, no matter how successful you are. It was completely
different in Hollywood. Arthur Laurents, the playwright, had seen me
as the ballerina in "Ring Round the Moon/' and told Mr. Chaplin
about me. In April, 1950, I left London for a week to do a screen test
for Chaplin in New York. It was a nerve-racking period. For the test,
I was jittery and nervous. Back in London, I got a wire saying that the
test was excellent, and that Chaplin would let me know his decision
in three weeks. I waited four months. In August, I gave up the whole
idea of doing the film, and then, one night, I got a telephone call
from Mr. Chaplin at the theatre where I was still playing in "Ring
Round the Moon/' Chaplin's decision was yes. I became hysterical. I
was frightened. To work with Chaplin, the greatest man in the
movies! It meant that every ambition of mine as an actress would be
fulfilled. I couldn't believe that such a thing could happen to me.
Two weeks later, I left London for Hollywood and "Limelight." The
whole experience, from beginning to end, was thrilling. It lived up
to all my expectations, and more. Everything Chaplin could do for me
he did. Just being with him and working with him was marvellous
just realizing that a man of his incredible qualities was interested.
Instead of dying of fear, I was able to talk with him. He was interested
in what I said. Socially, I had always had great difficulty, but in Holly-
wood I grew up much more.

My greatest stage success came in 1952, when I played Juliet with the
Old Vic Company. The company was on its last legs, facing bank-
ruptcy, when the decision was made to put on "Romeo and Juliet."

286

CLAIRE BLOOM

We got fantastic notices, and made a lot of money, and the Old Vic
was all right again. Then I was asked to stay on and play Jessica in
"The Merchant of Venice," which I did. But I was very bad in that
part. After that, I made a movie, "The Man Between," with James
Mason. After the movie, I fell into the trap of doing the same thing I
had done five years before in this case, playing Ophelia again. It
was at the Edinburgh Festival, with the Old Vic. Whenever you do
something again, you're open to having it said that you're not nearly
as good as you were the first time. And usually the things that you did
instinctively the first time, and that made you good in the first place,
you don't repeat, because you say to yourself, "My God, I'm years older
now." Then, after you get the bad notices, you go back to doing the
things you did instinctively. During that 1953-54 season with the Old
Vic, I also played Viola in "Twelfth Night," Virgilia in "Coriolanus,"
Helena in "All's Well That Ends Well," and Miranda in "The
Tempest," and then I experienced a difficult period. I started doing
a great many things wrong. I had had incredible luck in the beginning,
and now I started making a mess of it. I let my career go to pot. I
turned down many roles foolishly, including Anne Frank in "The
Diary of Anne Frank" and Marcelline, the wife, in Ruth and Arthur
Goetz's "The Immoralist." After doing two movies, playing Barsine
in "Alexander the Great" and Lady Anne in "Richard III," with
Laurence Olivier, I didn't have a thing to do for months. But in Octo-
ber, 1955, 1 did "Cyrano de Bergerac" on television in New York, with
Jose Ferrer, and that got me back. After that, I played Cordelia in
"King Lear," with John Gielgud, in London, and Cleopatra in "Caesar
and Cleopatra," with Cedric Hardwicke, on American television. I came
to Broadway with the Old Vic in "Richard II" and "Romeo and Juliet"
in the fall of 1956. After that, I determined not to play any more
Shakespeare if I could help it. I made a couple of movies "Look
Back in Anger," and "Duel of Angels," with Vivien Leigh. At first,
I turned down the role they offered me in "Look Back in Anger." They
wanted me to play the mistress, and I thought the part of the wife
suited me better. Then I reconsidered, decided I was being foolish, and
played the mistress. I wanted to play in "Rashomon/' because I wanted
to get away from the English classics. Now I'm sure Fd rather do
modern things. I like doing live plays on television. It's very concen-
trated, and it's exciting; it's over quickly and you've done it.

287

THE FLAYER: CLAIRE BLOOM

The most exciting thing in acting is to have a night in the theatre
when you're on wings. Craft and skill are satisfying, but having a night
on wings is best of all. You must know exactly what you want to do in
a part. What you do eventually may be different from what you
think you want to do, however. I always start working on a part by
reading a script through again and again, and thinking about it. Some
people make voluminous notes, but I don't. People think I'm lazy, but
I have a fearfully good memory, and I can remember what I want to
do. The actors you work with are important in helping you accomplish
what you try to do. If you get a good actor to work with, it helps you
to be better. If you're with a monster, you have no one to strike
sparks from. A director can help you or hinder you. If he's hindering
you, it doesn't feel right. If it doesn't feel right, ten to one it isn't
right. Your own instinct and taste have a lot to do with the way you
feel, and you have to accept them as your guides. You live the role, but
I don't believe the people who say they feel it all the time. Twenty-five
per cent of you always watches you, no matter how involved you are
with the part, and that twenty-five per cent criticizes you and helps
keep you in control of yourself. Involvement with the part is essential,
but self-pity must never be mistaken for involvement. "I'm so marvel-
lous I'm crying" doesn't mean a thing. When I first read a part, I know
as much as I'll ever know about it what I feel and how I feel it. But
you can always develop and enrich what you know. When I did the
movie based on "The Brothers Karamazov/' I reread the novel many
times. I love the books of that period anyway. I discussed one point,
very necessary to my characterization in the trial scene, with Richard
Brooks, the director-writer, who subsequently rewrote my part in the
scene. Playing on the stage takes more energy than any other form of
acting. When you do a thing eight times a week, you're tired at the end
of the week. It's an inhuman schedule to ask anybody to keep. Other
people say they're at their best by the time the Saturday-night per-
formance comes along. Like a greased wheel. But I'm better on Mon-
day. I need my rest. It takes a lot of energy and strength to bring a little
beauty into other people's lives.

When I was nine, I wanted desperately to become an actress, and at
seventeen I was really playing Ophelia at Stratford, and I didn't care
about anything, or take any interest in anything, outside of what I was
doing in the theatre. I wasted a lot of years just being ambitious and
priggish. I was so ambitious that if I hadn't been successful, it would

288

CLAIRE BLOOM

have eaten me up. When you have that kind of ambition, nothing can
stop you. I used to look forward to matinee days, when I could be in
the theatre all day long. It had such magic for me. Now I find that as
I've got older I've really got younger. As a very small child, I was al-
ways standoffish. It was in my makeup. I loved poetry, especially
Robert Browning's soliloquies. I didn't want to please the public.
What I had was the desire to create something beautiful, and it was
all-consuming. As all artists do, I wanted to express something inside
myself that nobody else had. I had tremendous drive, and at the same
time I was appallingly shy. Acting gave me a satisfaction that was to be
found nowhere else in my life. The rewards of acting are immediate.
An actor's time is now. The transitoriness of acting is what makes
people treat it as a second-rate art, as a popular art. But I think it's a
true art. It's very hard to act truthfully, but if you have the feeling
that you are another person, and you're playing that person, and yet
you're in complete control, you're able to express something that is in
you and only in you. Yet through being someone else you express the
passions of someone else, and you take the audience with you into
another world. "Look," you say. "This is what she is/* When it hap-
pens, you're absolutely on wings. You're carried. You're doing some-
thing that is coming out of you and yet you have control over it. You're
in the part, and the part is with you. What the author Is saying, you're
saying aloud for the first time. Sometimes It's there and sometimes it
isn't, and when it is, it's marvellous. When it Isn't, you have to work,
to use what is laughingly called technique. When it Is there, It's al-
most like being possessed. Yet if It worked that way all the time,
you'd be a monster. If it happens too often, It somehow seems to go
sour. You somehow become a complete narcissist. Sybil Thorndike
and Peggy Ashcroft grow more beautiful as they grow older, but
Sarah Bernhardt was a complete narcissist, and how It showed on her
facel Nobody can disguise it. All that self, self, self! Duse, on the other
hand, was an actress who became beautiful through suffering and liv-
ing. I've seen pictures of her, and I've never seen another face so
beautiful In all my life. She had a spiritual quality. She was a woman
who lived through her spirit as well as through her body and through
her talent. And I've learned that that's what is important Instead of
taking from life because "I am I," to take because "I am everybody/*
It's the safeguard against becoming a monster. Fm glad I found it out
In time.

DANA ANDREWS

I believe that all people are half actors.

1 was born on January 1, 1909, in the village of Don't, which is now
part of the town of Collins, Mississippi. I was the third of thirteen chil-
dren, five of whom are dead. My father was a Baptist minister, and I
was named after a Dr. Dana, who taught at the seminary my father
went to, in Louisville, Kentucky. My first name is Carver, after another
of the teachers, but I dropped it in college. When I was four, my
father moved the family to Waelder, in southwest Texas, and he
established quite a reputation for himself as an evangelist in the
state. I recently went back to Collins, for the first time since 1913,
and visited relatives, mostly on my mother's side, and mostly named
Speed. There are hundreds of Speeds in the area a prolific family,
consisting largely of good, solid country folk. Our own family moved
to San Antonio when I was five, and about a year later we moved to
Rockdale, also in Texas. Then, while I was still in grammar school,
we moved to Uvalde, Texas. John Nance Garner, who later became
Vice-President, lived there, and a flock of pigeons I kept used to like

290

DANA ANDREWS

to settle In his attic; I was always having to go over there and get
them back. Uvalde left the strongest imprint on me of all the places
we lived in as I was growing up. It was in a wild, colorful part of
the state. A friend of my father's joined him in trying to clean up the
town, and was shot to death in the street by a crony of the sheriffs, be-
cause the sheriff was in charge of an operation to sell bootleg tequila
brought in from Mexico. When I was fifteen, we moved to Hunts-
ville, Texas, because it had a state teachers' college, the Sam Houston,
where my father felt my six brothers and I could get an education.
Four of my brothers attended that college, and so did I. Today my
eldest brother, Wilton, is a geologist with an oil company, and, of my
other brothers, Harlan is principal of the Bellaire High School in
Houston, Texas; Ralph is an oil-company engineer; David is an execu-
tive of a warehouse company in Dallas; John is a sales manager in
Dallas; and the youngest, William, is an actor the only other actor in
the family under the name of Steve Forrest. My sister, Mary, teaches
school in Houston. I graduated from the Huntsville High School, and
immediately enrolled in the summer session of the Sam Houston. I
stayed at the college for three years, studying business administration.
In my first year, I began working on the side at a local movie house,
first taking tickets, then taking tickets and ushering, which included
maintaining order among the youngsters on Saturday afternoons. There
were two theatres in town, owned by the same man, and right next door
to each other. When I was in my third year of college, I became mana-
ger of both. I used to watch those damn movies over and over, and after
a while I began to take some notice of the way the actors went about
their work. It didn't look so difficult to me. I tremendously admired
Gary Cooper in "The Legion of the Condemned/' and Douglas Fair-
banks, Sr., in "The Thief of Bagdad." Also H. B. Warner and Ernest
Torrence and Joseph Schildkraut in "King of Kings," and Richard Ar-
len in "Wings." I felt I might even be able to do better than Richard
Arlen. This was before we had any talkies, but some movie companies
were experimenting with adding music and sound effects on syn-
chronized phonograph records, which they sent around with the films.
I decided to get together a collection of records and use them to
provide scores of my own. I even recorded some of my own sound
effects. All in all, the results were pretty corny, but any sort of sound
was quite impressive in those days. For "King of Kings" we used

291

THE FLAYER: DANA ANDREWS

a lot of sacred-music records. Someone had given me a European
record called "In the Garden/' and when I played it, it sounded sweet
and sort of sad, so in "King of Kings" I used it for the scene
in the Garden of Gethsemane. For "The Thief of Bagdad," I used
'In a Persian Market," and New York scenes always called for
''Metropolis," "Rhapsody in Blue," and "Manhattan Serenade." We
always showed a Western movie on Saturday, since that was the day
all the farmers came to town, and they didn't care much for a movie
with a complicated plot or one about city folks any more than they
do now. It's always been a source of deep concern to me that most
people don't like to learn anything new or different. In addition to the
feature film, we ran a newsreel and also a two-reel comedy, generally
featuring Laurel and Hardy, Charley Chase, or Lloyd Hamilton.

One night, after I'd gone to bed, I began to think about what I
wanted to do with the rest of my life. I didn't like business. I didn't
like keeping accounts, which was what I was learning to do in college.
I didn't want to be ordinary. In high school, I had played in some
Shakespeare and in two modern plays, "The Microbe of Love" and
"Nothing But the Truth." In college, I played in several versions of
what the college called "The Sam Houston Drama," and also in
"Lady Windermere's Fan," "The Rivals," and "Honor Bright." The
director, Dr. Charles O. Stewart, encouraged me to make the theatre
my goal. That night in bed, I realized that the only thing I had ever
done that made me feel good was acting in those plays. The other
students had told me how good I was, and some of them had really
appeared to mean it. I had watched all those pictures, and being in
movies seemed to be as far away from business as I could get, so
now I began to think seriously about movie acting. I wanted approba-
tion, and I wanted to earn it. The idea of making a lot of money
was attractive, too. The country was in a depression, and I was in
debt. I quit college and gave up my theatre job, which didn't pay
much. I was offered a job as an accountant in Houston, and worked
there for a short while, and then I became accountant for a large
stationery store in Austin. At that point, I decided definitely to try
to be an actor. I threw a large party for my friends in Austin? which
left me penniless, and then I packed my bags and hitchhiked west
to Van Nuys, a suburb of Los Angeles, where my father was then
pastor of the Baptist Church. I lived with my family again for three

292

DANA ANDREWS

months. At first, I made the rounds of the studios, but I didn't get
anywhere, and I ended up driving the Van Nuys High School bus,
for ten dollars a week. I was twenty-one years old. Then I went to
work in a filling station as an attendant. Making the rounds of all
the movie studios in my free time, I came to realize that I was only
a punk kid with a little amateur experience, like thousands of other
idiots who just walked in and asked for a job, and that I had to get
some experience. So I enrolled in the Van Nuys Night School Drama
Class, which some of the socially prominent townspeople used as a
local little theatre, and where a great time was had by all. I was the
only one in the group burning with serious ambition. I joined just
as one of the leading men in Bayard Veiller's "The Thirteenth Chair"
dropped out. He was the principal of the local high school and
couldn't spare the time for rehearsals, and I was offered his part, and
took it, even though it was the part of a sixty-year-old man with
two daughters and a son, all three of whom in actuality were old
enough to play my parents. One of the actresses in the play was a
wonderfully vivacious local girl named Janet Murray, who had just
got her M.A. in journalism at Northwestern University. A year later,
on December 31, 1932, I married her. She was an inspiration to me
in the days that followed; unlike everybody in my family, who re-
fused to recognize acting as a legitimate occupation, she consistently
encouraged me. She liked my baritone voice and urged me to become
a singing actor, like Lawrence Tibbett. I began to study singing
seriously, taking lessons with a local teacher who had sung in
the original company of "The Desert Song/' Janet and I were very
happy. In 1933, our son, David, was born, and when he was two,
Janet contracted pneumonia and died. After that, I worked on my
music like a maniac, ran two miles every day to build up my dia-
phragm, and learned operatic roles in French, German, and Italian.
All this time, I still had my job at the filling station. In 1936, I
auditioned for an agent named John Columbo brother of the
singer Russ Columbo and he told me I had a fair voice but
couldn't make any money as a singer. Second-rate actors, he said,
could earn more than first-rate singers. He suggested that I get some
acting training, and I went to the Pasadena Playhouse, and there,
after years of blundering around, I began to learn to be an actor,
I started out in small parts in "Julius Caesar" and "Antony and

293

THE PLAYER: DANA ANDREWS

Cleopatra" during the last year of a three-year festival of all Shake-
speare's plays at Pasadena, and then played the intellectual soldier
one of three men doomed to die in Sidney Howard's "Paths of
Glory/' It was a highly dramatic part, which gave me plenty of oppor-
tunity to shine. It was also a demanding role, and I worked on it with
a private coach to get every shading just right. The reviews of that
show are still among my most treasured ones. Then, in my next part,
that of a simple juvenile in a simple play called "Money/' by Aurania
Rouverol, I learned a very important lesson when I fell flat on my face.
The part wasn't good, but I was much worse than the part. I didn't
have the remotest idea how to play a straight part one that wasn't full
of emotional crises. The easy parts, the ones that help you win awards,
are those of alcoholics, dope fiends, brutes, and mentally deranged peo-
ple, because they give you so much to do. However, I slowly began to
develop a little technique. Those were hectic days of struggle, filled
with intense excitement. There was tremendous satisfaction in work-
ing and hoping, in yearning for a part, then getting it and playing
it. Playing in movies, later on, never gave me that kind of pleasure.
In 1938, while I was appearing at Pasadena in a small part in Zoe
Akins' play "O Evening Star," an agent left a note asking me to come
and see him. I did. He arranged a screen test for me on the Samuel
Goldwyn lot. Mr. Goldwyn was out of town at the time, but then he
returned and saw the test, and, as they say, I was in pictures. After I
signed a contract with Goldwyn, nothing really happened for nine
months, except that I was financially able to marry Mary Todd, a
young lady I had been courting for two years. She had appeared with
me in the play in which I fell flat on my face. Now we have three chil-
dren Katharine, Stephen, and Susan and I am building a new house
in Rolling Hills, near Palos Verdes Estates. My wife is a very talented
actress, but these days she acts at places like the Pasadena Playhouse
only to have something to do when I'm away. After I'd been with Gold-
wyn a year, at a salary of a hundred and fifty dollars a week, he sold
half of my contract to Twentieth Century-Fox, and I worked for both
alternately for the next eleven years. My first movie part, with three
lines, was in "The Westerner," starring Gary Cooper. In the next
twenty years, I played leading roles in over fifty movies, including
"The Ox-Bow Incident," "Laura," "A Walk in the Sun," "Boomer-
ang," "The Best Years of Our Lives," "My Foolish Heart," and a whole

294

DANA ANDREWS

string of pictures with titles like "Swamp Water," "Three Hours to
Kill," "The Fearmakers," "Enchanted Island," and "Madison Ave-
nue." I don't like to be ordinary. When I was told that my voice
would never be among the best, I stopped trying to sing. I once read
a Gouverneur Morris short story, "Simon L'Ouvrier/' about an actor
who is so good that no one can tell he is acting. Once, he spends
two years learning Buddhism in order to go to the forbidden city
of Lhasa. On his way there, he is crucified and almost dies. De-
termined to learn his part, he studies for three more years and success-
fully reaches Lhasa, because no one can detect the difference be-
tween the actor and the part. I used to dream of being as good an
actor as that.

Every person, whether he's an actor or not, has his own way of
communicating with other people. If your personality is unusual
enough, you can become a star in the movies. You can't get rid
of your own personality. It's going to come through, no matter what
you're doing. In certain ways, it's harder to act in the movies than
on the stage. The camera is so close. It sees so much and shows
so much. It picks up every little thing you do with your eyes and
mouth. On the stage, you don't have to be so conscious of every
little gesture. On the stage, you can lose yourself in the role more
and let what happens just happen. You get a much better opportu-
nity on the stage to develop the character you're playing. Working in
the continuity of a play rather than in snatches, out of continuity, in
a movie gives you a better view of the work as a whole, and a deeper
understanding of it. Having an audience right there while you're
acting is immensely satisfying. The handicaps you have in stage acting
that you don't have in movies are minimal projecting to the rear
of the theatre, remembering lines, playing so that everything is
visible and audible to the audience. I replaced Henry Fonda in
"Two for the Seesaw" on Broadway for a year, and it was an ex-
perience I shall never forget. I didn't miss a single performance not
even one time when I had a temperature of a hundred and three.
You can grow on the stage. After a year of playing the lead, I had just
begun to understand it, to understand what the author meant me to
be. When I started out in the play, I was overemotional. Because I
was playing the part of a self-pitying man, I had a tendency to whine.
My wife pointed that out to me, and I found that if a man

THE PLAYER: DANA ANDREWS

feels sorry for himself, he doesn't have to whine to show it. I
stopped whining at once. It's not difficult for me to hide emotion,
since I've always hidden it in my personal life. What is difficult is to
convey feelings in a quiet and reserved way. Coming to Broadway
after twenty years in Hollywood appealed to me. When I came to
Broadway, I was looking for a kind of revitalization. I found it.
Playing on the stage demands total concentration, and absolute de-
votion to the part you're playing. I'm unaware of the audience except
when it isn't with me. When the throat-clearing, coughing, and squirm-
ing start, I know I have to put in a little more effort. I need to get
the people back with me. Then I can forget them. In movies, I had
been a leading man, and in movies a leading man is usually a man
who can do no wrong. I was expected to play pleasantly, to play
pleasingly, to play a good man who is always victorious over evil. I've
always thought of it as being a boom-boom-boom actor. I'd outshout,
outfight, outcharm, out-everything everybody while acting. Mean-
while, the real acting parts were going to the character actors. After
all those years in movies, my senses as an actor were dulled. On the
stage, it was up to me to hold the interest of the people out there
in the audience. I wasn't expected to boom-boom-boom away. I was
expected to act. That one thing made all the difference. Everything
was before me, and the possibilities were endless.

296

MAUREEN STAPLETON

Actors are a much hardier breed of people than any
other people. We have to be as clever as rats to sur-
vive.

I was born on June 21, 1925, in Troy, New York. I have one brother,
John, who is three years younger than I am. My parents, both of
whom are Irish-Americans and strict Roman Catholics, were separated
when I was five, and after that my brother and I lived with my mother,
together with my maternal grandmother and three aunts and two
uncles. My mother worked as a clerk in the New York State Depart-
ment of Unemployment Insurance, in Albany a twenty-minute drive
from Troy. She still works there, and now my brother does, too. I
made my decision to act when I was five years old, when I saw my
first Jean Harlow movie. I went to movies all the time. Jean Harlow
was so beautiful, and everybody loved her. What the hell, what could
be better? I didn't dare tell anybody about my decision. I minded my
own business. In the parochial school I went to, I would go through
all the expected motions. I happened to be fatter than any other kid
on our block. At the age of twelve, I weighed a hundred and forty

297

THE FLAYER: MAUREEN STAPLETON

pounds; at thirteen, a hundred and sixty pounds; at fourteen, a

hundred and eighty pounds. I had a nice fat, unhappy teenhood.

When I was twelve, I informed my mother for the first time that I

was going to become an actress. She said, "Sure. Sure/' She didn't

know that I wasn't asking her, I was telling her. I wanted to become

an actress because that was the way to be beautiful and rich and to

have all the fellows love you. The desire was so strong that it sustained

me. I always took it for granted that if you want to be anything badly

enough, you just are that it's simply a matter of enduring. There's

a certain time in your life when you have one friend who sheds

some light on life for you. For me, that one friend was my Uncle

Vincent. When I told him that I wanted to become an actress, he

encouraged me. I could tell him anything in the world. I wasn't

afraid to say anything to him. Nothing had to be hidden. When I was

around him, I always forgot, for some reason, to feel that I was the

kid who was fat. He always told the truth, no matter how shattering

it was. He was the kind of person who gets very excited about a

book. He joined the Navy when he was fifteen, and he died at the

age of thirty-one. I was in two plays in high school "Anne of Green

Gables" and "Murder on a Ferris Wheel." In both plays, I took the

part of an old lady who was out of breath or maybe I was out of

breath. I saw my first real play when I was fourteen a stock-company

production in Albany of "A Bill of Divorcement." I went crazy.

They weren't puppets. They weren't on the screen. They were real

people, being kind to each other, alive. I loved it.

After graduating from high school, in 1942, I worked for the Un-
employment Insurance Department in Albany as a clerk, for eighteen
seventy-five a week. Then I switched to a better-paying clerical job,
at twenty-eight dollars a week, at the Watervliet Arsenal, near Troy.
By September, 1943, I had saved up a hundred dollars, and I came
to New York, determined to become an actress. After two weeks in
New York, my hundred dollars was gone, so I got a job, operating a
billing machine for the Hotel New Yorker. I knew of a drama
teacher in New York Frances Robinson-Duff because I had seen
her name in a theatre magazine, so I took lessons from Frances
Robinson-Duff for a few months and spent five hundred dollars learn-
ing the Delsarte system, where everything is supposed to be divided
into mental, emotional, and physical categories, with charts under

MAUREEN STAPLETON

each heading. There were an awful lot of charts. But I was young, and
everything was lovely. Then a friend of one of my aunts told me
about the drama courses at the New School for Social Research, where
Herbert Berghof was teaching night classes, so I registered there. It
turned out to be heaven. I roomed with two other girls taking Herbert's
course. In the summer of 1945, I followed Herbert and twenty other
actors and actresses into the Greenbush Summer Theatre, in Blauvelt,
New York. What unbelievable chaos! Twenty-two democratic voices
with equal voting power and equal say about doing a different play
every week for eight weeks! We acted everything and did everything.
Anybody who took time to wash her hair was ostracized. We didn't
even have time to eat. Not that we had much to eat. After a couple
of weeks, Herbert said to me, "Your work is improving. What are you
doing, Maureen?*' I said, 'Tm washing dishes, scrubbing floors, clean-
ing toilets." But the question scared me. I asked myself, What am I
doing? The improvement couldn't be from cleaning toilets. I decided
it was because I didn't have time to think. I was beginning to feel
my way through a role. I was just doing it.

I had the usual couple of years of living off odd jobs, taking lessons,
talking acting all the time, day and night, with other actors, making
the rounds, and smiling, smiling, smiling. Then, in the fall of 1946,
I called up Guthrie McClintic's office to find out who was going to
play the lead, Pegeen Mike, in "The Playboy of the Western
World/' By chance, McClintic answered the telephone himself.
I asked my question politely, and he gave me a rude answer, say-
ing that it was none of my damn business. This set me off. Among other
things, I told him that I didn't give a damn who was playing it. That
did the trick. He turned polite. He asked me to come see him at three
the next afternoon. I wound up with the part of one of the village girls
and was also made understudy to the lead. It was my first Broadway
play. My grandmother, mother, brother, and three aunts came to the
opening. For eight performances, in the last week of the play's run,
I played the lead. At the beginning of my first performance, I was
so terrified I couldn't look up, and when I stood up I had to hold
on to a piece of furniture to keep my legs from buckling. It was my
happiest terror*

In 1947, I played Katharine Cornell's maid in the touring company
of "The Barretts of Wimpole Street," directed by Guthrie McClintic.

299

THE PLAYER: MAUREEN STAPLETON

It was the best time of my life, going across the country, seeing all
the big cities, and working with Miss Cornell and Mr. McClintic. I
felt intoxicated all the time just being with the company. The
actor who played the father made it easy for all the rest of us, in-
cluding Miss Cornell, to believe in him. He was Wilfrid Lawson, one
of the greatest actors in the world, and all he had to do was just
show up and everybody else could get going. Miss Cornell and Mr.
McClintic did things in a way that was always considerate, always
kind, always thoughtful. Sort of old-fashioned ways that you don't
see too much of around these days. I was impressed by them then,
and I've found out since after considerable comparison shopping
that I was right. They treated actors like people. Later on that
same year, I played with Miss Cornell again, this time as one of the
handmaidens, Iras, in "Antony and Cleopatra." One day, I overslept
before a performance, was awakened at home by the stage manager,
rushed to a taxi, got dressed as we drove, and arrived at the theatre
just as another actress was stepping into my dress and the others
were taking their places. As I joined them, Miss Cornell said to
me, "I was so worried about you, because I knew how awful you'd
feel when you woke up." There may not be a lady like her in the
whole theatre.

Around then, I enrolled in the Actors' Studio for study in Robert
Lewis's class, with Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift, David Wayne,
Tom Ewell, Thelma Schnee, Karl Maiden, Eli Wallach, and Kevin
McCarthy. We were one of the first classes in the Studio's ex-
istence. In the spring of 1949, I played a small part in Sidney Kings-
ley's "Detective Story/' and that July I was married, at the Municipal
Building, to Max Allentuck, the general manager for Kermit Bloom-
garden. We had a festive dinner at the Longchamps Restaurant near
City Hall, and I just made it to the theatre for the curtain. In 1951,
I played the leading role, Serafina delle Rose, in Tennessee Williams'
"The Rose Tattoo." I took on the part three months after having my
first child, Daniel Vincent. In 1953, I replaced Beatrice Straight in
the role of Elizabeth Proctor for the last seven weeks of Arthur Mil-
ler's "The Crucible." The following year, in my fifth month of
pregnancy with my second child, Cathy, I played Masha in the Phoe-
nix Theatre production of "The Sea Gull/' The year after that, I
played one Tennessee Williams role, Flora Meighan in "Twenty-

300

MAUREEN STAPLETON

seven Wagons Full of Cotton/* and in 1957 another, Lady Torrance
in "Orpheus Descending/* I've played in three movies, "Lonely-
hearts," "The Fugitive Kind," and "A View from the Bridge/' and I
didn't like the experience. I'm now divorced, and I live with my
children in an old brownstone, half of which I own, on West Seven-
tieth Street. When I'm working, I go home directly from the play,
have a drink and a late supper, and watch the Late and Late Late
Shows on television. I try to get eight hours' sleep, because it's necessary
for your nerves. Your damn nerves have to be in good condition for
this work. I get up at noon. There's always something doing with
the kids in the afternoon taking them to the doctor or talking to
their teachers. Whenever I can, I love to play poker. It's very relaxing,
like making hooked rugs. I read poetry and other things, but I don't
ever broaden. I've been reading the same things over and over since
my English Lit. course in high school.

When you have an especially demanding part, emotionally what-
ever the hell that means- your own day-to-day living becomes less well
integrated. When I work, I get dirty and sloppy offstage. I don't take
as much care of myself personally. It could be plain, old-fashioned
laziness, but I think it's almost a moral tendency. I feel I don't have
to bother as much about matters I don't really care about. Everything
is geared to the moment of the eight-forty curtain. In the theatre, I
never have to ask myself, Am I living the role? There's usually a cer-
tain emotional holdover from the stage into your own life, and it can
become a physical thing, but you don't have to think about it. The
main thing is, you're disciplined, and at eight-forty you're oriented to
being somebody else. It's different in making a movie. I found it some-
what demoralizing, not being able to act the way I felt I must act.
There are so many reasons for that. For one thing, you sit around for
hours, and then, suddenly, you're told you're on. I was never ready. I
was too accustomed to the discipline of going on at eight-forty. In the
theatre, when you don't have to do one of those guts-away parts, it
makes it much easier on your private, away-from-the-stage life. In
S. N. Behrman's "The Cold Wind and the Warm/' my role, Ida, was
easier than the others I've played, because Ida wasn't in turmoil. Her
feelings weren't interlocked with the feelings of the other characters. I
didn't have to break my neck. In the Tennessee Williams roles I've
played, the emotional problems were so great I was living under terri-

301

THE PLAYER: MAUREEN STAPLETON

ble tension and pressure. That's when you have to call on all that inte-
rior jazz. After six months of that kind of thing, you tend to get a little
nutty. I got a little nutty in "The Rose Tattoo/' I felt anxious all the
time. After all, just one of the things I had to do in that play was the
scene with the priest, where I clawed at him, tore at his clothes,
screamed, and carried on. Something like that in one day of anyone's
life is quite enough to happen. You do that, among other things, every
night, over and over again, it's bound to take a hell of a lot out of you.
It forces you to keep yourself on an emotional track full time.

The prospect of becoming stale in a part is quite frightening. You
mustn't let yourself become like a record. Yet, at the same time, you've
got to be sure that that other person you become is going to be finished
at the end of the play. Everybody, after all, wants to be something
and somebody. In acting, it's yourself becoming something else and
somebody else. It's making believe all your life, and who says there's
anything wrong with that? If you're lucky, you become the person
you're playing. Every performance, you do new things, just as you do
all the time in real life, where you never do anything exactly the same
way twice. Someone like Marlon Brando is so complete a talent he can
draw on things inside himself for what he needs. He has more equip-
ment for doing that than most people. If it isn't there, the director has
to find something to help you put it there. The assumption is that
emotionally people are all alike, so that nothing you do is really alien
to anybody else.

I like to read a play not knowing what part I'm up for. When I do
know, I can't focus on my own part at all. There's something that
almost blinds me. The part is like a blank space. Fear sets in immedi-
ately, and I then read the play over several times. In certain plays,
when you start work you can make a strong emotional identification
right away, or get some sort of over-all picture of the characterization.
Then it's like a construction job. I often draw on other people or on
experiences that illuminate some part of the character. Then I add
things as I go along. I once worked with a woman who turned to me
suddenly, in the middle of a rehearsal, and cried, "Now we're getting
the pants on!" It is like getting dressed. After a while, as you go
along, you find that all things dovetail. The director is a guide. If I
don't trust a director, I pretend to listen to him but I muddle through
by myself. Once you set the things you do and make them mean cer-

302

MAUREEN STAPLETON

tain things, you then respond to the stimuli you yourself have set up.
Then you feel. You might set it up as a combination of mind and
feeling, but the feeling usually takes over. Crying is easy. I watch
"Lassie" on television and I cry. I watch an old man carrying an
icebox up two flights of stairs and I cry. Bobby Lewis says, "If crying
were acting, my Aunt Rifke would be Duse." All you have to do
to cry is set up the stimulus that will trigger the mechanism, and
off you go. Laughing is much more difficult. On the whole, it's very,
very hard to do a true laugh. It's that way in life, too. You hear a lot
of laughter but very little real laughter. The usual laugh is more like
a nervous mannerism. A real laugh is so real you have no control
over it. It's quite beautiful.

I believe in the toughness of actors. I have a feeling of genuine
pride in actors as my people. We're called egomaniacs; we're thought
of as children. The people out in front are regarded as heads of
state, but actors are supposed to be irresponsible, stupid, unaware,
and a kind of joke. They're accused of having big egos. Well,
the actor's ego is no different in size because he's an actor. Actors
don't need half as much of that flattery malarkey as some people
think they need, and they need much less than a lot of other artists.
A writer or a painter or a musician can go off into a corner and lick
his wounds, but an actor stands out in front of the crowd and takes
it. Actors are up for exposure night after night. Yet actors are expend-
able, like cattle, because so few jobs are available. Actors spend years
and years being treated like dirt. They're constantly in a state of de-
basement, making the rounds of casting directors and having to look
happy and great. I made the rounds for years, but I wasn't good at it.
But then nobody is. You need a very strong stomach. You need a sense
of the business as a whole, so that you don't get lacerated every time
somebody tells you you're lousy. You need strength, and no matter
how strong you get, you always need to get stronger. There's never a
guarantee you'll go on working. A show will always close, sooner or
later. If I'm not working, I just consider myself somebody who is
waiting to go on working. It's the only thing you can do. Your aspira-
tion to act is so great, so deep, so complete, that you give yourself
not ten years, not twenty, but your whole lifetime to realize it.

SOS

RICHARD WIDMARK

Your personality, for the most party is what the movie
medium draws out and uses y but somebody who really
knows his craft can act, as well as appear, in movies.

I was born on December 26, 1914, in Sunrise, Minnesota. My father
had a general store there, then later became a travelling salesman. I'm
a mixture of Swedish, Scottish, English, and Irish strains. My parents
were divorced in 1941. I had one brother, Donald, four years younger
than I was, who was a pilot in the Second World War and who died
right after the war. Our family moved around a lot when I was a child.
We lived in Sioux Falls, South Dakota; Henry, Illinois; Chillicothe,
Missouri; and Princeton, Illinois. Princeton was where I graduated
from high school and where I discovered that I was a pretty good pub-
lic speaker. My grandmother started taking me to movies when I was
three, and I was movie-crazy from then on. As a boy, I never admitted
I liked acting, because it was considered sissy among my friends.
One of my earliest favorites was Harold Lloyd in "Safety Last."
My grandmother was nutty about Tom Mix, who played cowboys,
and Thomas Meighan, a matinee idol of the time, and I began to
worship them, too. I used to go to movies about three times a week.
Later on, I worked as doorman at the movie theatre in Princeton and

304

RICHARD WIDMARK

saw scads of pictures. After high school, I went to Lake Forest College,
in Lake Forest, Illinois, on a scholarship. I took a pre-law course, and
was active in the Drama Department. I appeared in about thirty plays,
all of them modern. It was after playing the lead in Elmer Rice's
"Counsellor-at-Law," in my sophomore year, that I began to think I'd
have a go at acting for a living. I met my wife, Jean, at college, but we
didn't get married until 1942. After graduating, in 1936, I took a job
there as an instructor in the Drama Department, at a hundred and fifty
dollars a month; I directed plays and acted in them for two years.

In 1938, 1 came to New York, where Jean was by then attending the
American Academy of Dramatic Arts. A man I had gone to school with
was producing radio soap operas, and he gave me a part playing a
gas-station attendant in "Aunt Jenny's Real Life Stories." It was the
heyday of radio, and I went on to play in a lot of fifteen-minute soap
operas "Big Sister," "Joyce Jordan, M.D.," "Front Page FarrelL"
Also, I got to belong to an inner circle of actors in New York. Getting
launched was easy for me. Too easy, perhaps. That's probably why I
never got that dedicated feeling. I never considered myself a dedicated
artist, and don't now. I've never had the feeling I'd die if I didn't get
a certain part. Just the same, I love to work, and I work hard. Acting
has always been my work, and it's part of my life. When I was working
in radio, Jean and I were married, and we had a Bronxville house with
a swimming pool. I was making fifteen or twenty thousand a year, and
I'm probably the only actor who ever gave up a swimming pool to go
out to Hollywood. Radio acting is not acting, and it can be dangerous
to an actor. I'd be playing an upset young husband, say, in something
like "Life Can Be Beautiful," on N.B.C., and wind up in a gale of emo-
tions at 11:58, then rush downstairs by elevator and taxi over to C.B.S.,
where something like "Big Sister" went on at 12:15, and at 12:17 I'd
come on playing an upset young lover in another gale of emotion.
There'd be no preparation, no thought only four minutes in the
morning when you'd read through your script. You'd do a lot of radio
shows and develop a super-facility at reading lines. Fortunately, I was
aware of this; I knew enough about acting, about taste, about perform-
ance, and I knew the kind of actor I wanted to be. In my adult years,
the man I have admired most in acting is Spencer Tracy. What an actor
should be is exemplified, for me, by him. I like the reality of his acting.
It's so honest and seems so effortless, even though what Tracy does is

305

THE PLAYER: RICHARD WIBMARK

the result of damn hard work and extreme concentration. Actually, the
ultimate in any art is never to show the wheels grinding. The essence
of bad acting, for example, is shouting. Tracy never shouts. He's the
greatest movie actor there ever was. If he had wanted to go the classic
route, he could have been as great in that field as Laurence Olivier.
I've learned more about acting from watching Tracy than in any other
way. He has great truth in everything he does. You can arrive at
truth in acting only through concentration, which in the movies is
most difficult to achieve. I've always wanted to be as good as Tracy is,
and I'm still trying.

I suppose I wanted to act in order to have a place in the sun. I'd
always lived in small towns, and acting meant having some kind of
identity. I started working on the Broadway stage in 1943. Because of
one of the largest eardrum perforations on record, I was turned down
three times for the Army. I'd never had any formal training for the
stage. I'd never played any Shakespeare, and I still haven't. Also, I
was never a joiner. I don't like actor groups, which I think can be
terribly destructive, especially to a kid. In my first role, at a hundred
and fifty dollars a week, I played an Army lieutenant in F. Hugh
Herbert's "Kiss and Tell," which was produced and directed by George
Abbott. After that, I played in "Get Away Old Man," "Kiss Them for
Me," and "Dunnigan's Daughter/' and in the Chicago company of
"Dream Girl." No matter what I did on the stage, I always tried to
keep the radio work going. I actually derived certain things from radio
the self-reliance and confidence that come from sheer experience,
and the concentration you have to develop working in a small physical
area. On radio, I played parts pretty well typed a lot of young,
neurotic guys. I began to enjoy a lot of things about acting when I
started working in stage jobs building up a part, getting it all set, dis-
covering how to maintain control.

From the beginning, what I always had in mind was eventually to
go to Hollywood. I wanted to act in movies more than in plays. Now I
find the greatest fascination in the production end of movies. My idea
now is to do two movies a year one for a big company, and one I
produce myself. The first movie I did was "Kiss of Death," made in
New York in 1947, before I went out to Hollywood. I did it strictly for
fun, but in order to do it I had to sign a seven-year contract with one-
year options with Twentieth Century-Fox. Between 1947 and 1954, I

506

RICHARD WIDMARK

made about twenty movies for Fox, including "Panic in the Streets,"
"No Way Out/' and "My Pal Gus." But I knew I had to get away from
Fox, where I was being switched around from movie to movie with-
out getting a chance to do much that I liked. I didn't sign another
long-term contract. I now work as an independent. I have a farm and
ranch, where I grow barley and raise cattle, between Santa Barbara and
Los Angeles, and a house in Brentwood. Every day, I go to my business
office, which I maintain at the Universal-International studios. I have
my own film company, called Heath, which is my daughter's middle
name; her first name is Anne, and she's sixteen, going to high school
and, thank God, not acting. Occasionally, I'll go to one of those Holly-
wood parties, just to see the birds and bees all decked out, but I'm a
firm believer in keeping business separate from my home.

My first movie, and my part in it as a laughing murderer who pushes
an old lady down some stairs and kills her, practically gave me a
phobia. I'd never seen myself on the screen, and when I did I wanted
to shoot myself. That damn laugh of mine! For two years after that
picture, you couldn't get me to smile. I played the part the way I did
because the script struck me as funny and the part I played made me
laugh, the guy was such a ridiculous beast. I was doing "Inner Sanc-
tum" on radio at the same time, and I remember reading the "Kiss of
Death" script to some of the guys and saying "Hey, get a load of this!"
and laughing, it was so funny. And that's the way I played the part in
the movie. Movie audiences fasten on to one aspect of the actor; they
hold on to a piece of your personality for dear life, and decide
what they want you to be. They think you're playing yourself. The
truth is that the only person who can ever really play himself is a baby.
You seldom learn to act in movies. I learned the fundamentals on the
stage. In movies, you learn to do things on a minute scale, and there's
nowhere to go from there. If you start in the theatre, you can learn
later how to scale things down for pictures. Movie acting, however, is
the most difficult kind of all to do. Theatre acting is a breeze by com-
parison. The fact that you're working on comparatively short frag-
ments in a movie, out of context, and that you have to make them all
add up to a whole is difficult enough. But then you have all the me-
chanical paraphernalia around. True movie acting is such a rare thing.
You find a lot of effective performances, but it's hard to think of any-
one except Spencer Tracy who has really had a whole career of superb

307

THE PLAYER: RICHARD WIDMARK

acting in movies. He discounts it, but you have to have pride in what
you're doing if it's going to be really good, and it's obvious that he has
it. When he's doing a part, it's bang on the nose. The older you get, the
less you know about acting but the more you know about what makes
the really great actors. In each succeeding movie, you're virtually start-
ing all over. The actor is tested again each time. If you're successful,
you've been there, they've seen you, and they're measuring you against
the time before. Actors are a little lonely in that regard. It's you out on
the stage or on the screen. The reaction is to you. The motion picture
is a popular art, demanding a mass audience. They're the ones reacting
to what you do. The result you see on the screen is a combination of
actor and director, in most cases. There's no way of distinguishing be-
tween what the director does and what the actor does. You can't tell
by the result on the screen how it came about. Most directors are good
mediocrities; there's a dearth of really good ones. There are very few
really good moviemakers altogether.

When I'm reading a script for the first time, I read it for story. As
you go along, you see something in your part. Once you start, it's kind
of with you all the time. You can be out driving a tractor on the farm,
and the part is with you. It demands constant absorption. That as-
pect of it is pretty much as it is with a play. I learn my part first
off, line by line. My wife or my daughter cues me. I learn the whole
thing by rote, and then it's out of the way. You don't have to think
of the words; they just come. For my recent movie "Judgment at
Nuremberg/' it took me six weeks just to learn the lines of my part. Re-
hearsals are for common movement, but you get little time for that. If
we had three or four weeks of rehearsal for movies, it would make a
tremendous difference. I've got be up on a tough scene weeks before I
do it for the camera. It's tricky. You have to have the over-all idea of
what you're going to do firmly entrenched. Then, making one scene
match another is tricky, too. When you stop at 6 P.M. Monday and
pick it up again at 4 P.M. Thursday, you need to be absolutely in con-
trol of what you're doing if you want it to match. Memory counts a
lot, and, fortunately, I have a very good memory.

What makes acting exciting is that real spark you feel. For me, the
spark is a kind of elated feeling. You're zigging up in a jet. It's wow!
When it's not there, it feels like walking in mud. The audience always
sees or senses that spark, too. It's there. Nobody can explain it. A lot

sos

RICHARD WIDMARK

depends on your fellow-actors. When I'm in a scene with Tracy, I play
to him. He's the greatest listener in this business. It's a very elusive
thing. Somebody can be looking you in the eye and he's in Timbuctoo.
You can only feel it; you can't know it intellectually. Tracy plays
Judge Dan Haywood in "Judgment at Nuremberg/' and I play Colonel
Lawson, an attorney. I look at this guy, and something goes. He doesn't
talk much about acting, but he knows it all.

309

VLADIMIR SOKOLOFF

Acting is the only way I am able to live. I want to
be everybody, and I want to be everything. One life
is not enough.

I was born on Christmas Day, 1889, in Moscow. My mother died when I
was born. My father was a schoolteacher. I have an older brother and
sister, but I have not seen them or heard from them since I left Russia
in 1923. I was brought up by a wealthy merchant, a patron of my
father's school, who took me into his own family of five boys and a girl,
and who gave me everything education, travel, care, love. I learned to
read at the age of three. As a child, I also learned to speak French and
German. I started out wanting to be a bear when I grew up. Such an
enjoyable prospect lying in warm fur, in a warm den! Then I wanted
to be a beggar, roaming the country, extending a hand, and having
people give me bread and milk. After that, I wanted to be a clown. I
studied gymnastics and juggling, and then I discovered that I did not
have the necessary strength and health to become a clown. I in-

310

VLADIMIR SOKOLOFF

vented my own pantomimes, imitating cats and birds, and put on
skits for the entertainment of my patron and his family. I wanted to be
an actor, but the idea was taboo. My patron wanted me to become a
brilliant professor. I was small and looked Oriental. The old family
nurse would tell me, "Dear child, you are ugly, but you will get every-
thing, not by the way you look but by what you have inside." The
mother of the family was different. I adored her. She always told me,
"You are not ugly. You are funny."

At seventeen, I attended the University of Moscow, studying phi-
losophy and literature, but after a year I wanted to go to the Moscow
Art Theatre school. More than a hundred young men applied for audi-
tions each year; only seven or eight were chosen. Stanislavski himself
was at my audition. Instead of reading a story or reciting a poem, as
the others did, I gave a little act I had composed in which I read a news-
paper as various contemporary characters in Russian life would. Stan-
islavski told me, "You have something, but we cannot accept you, be-
cause you do not look healthy or strong enough. Get stronger and come
back next year." I burst into tears. He then agreed to put me in a
second-string school, taught by the student actors themselves. So every
day I would leave home to go to the university, and from there I would
go to the theatre school. After three years, the strain was too great. I be-
came ill with tuberculosis. I had to tell my patron what I had been
doing. He sent me to the Crimea and the South of France to recover.
I gave him my word I would forget the foolishness of acting. But after
my recovery I broke my word and joined the school again, appearing
in mob scenes in Moscow Art Theatre productions and attending the
regular theatre school. I appeared onstage in heavy disguises, but one
day I was recognized, and there was a big scandal. I felt like a
scoundrel. But I moved out of my patron's home and got a room for
ten kopecks a week about twenty cents. I was very happy. I got a
Ph.D. degree in literature from the university, and in 1914 I became a
professional actor.

I adored Stanislavski. I worshipped him. But I wanted a different ap-
proach for myself in acting. I wanted the miraculous, the fascinating,
the romantic theatre, with more music and more staging. I felt I could
play anything, but my heart from the beginning belonged to the the-
atre of Moliere and Shakespeare. I found my kind of theatre when I
joined the Kamerny Theatre, the first theatre founded as a departure

311

THE PLAYER: VLADIMIR SOKOLOFF

from the Moscow Art. My first important part was the buffoon
in an old Hindu play, "Sakuntala." Then I directed "The Taming of
the Shrew** and played the lead, and married Elizabeth Alexandrova,
the actress who played Katharina. Life was good. Life was wonderful.
Then there was the revolution, and all theatres were closed. There was
no food. There was no fuel. I went to Molvitino, in the country, about
six hundred miles from Moscow, and lived there for sixteen months,
fishing, picking mushrooms and wild berries, getting healthy. I put on
a production of Tolstoy's "The Power of Darkness," with peasants as
the actors and peasants as the audience. It was a powerful experience
the closest I have ever come to being at one with my audience. In
1920, the theatres in Moscow were opened again. Actors were given
privileges in the way of living conditions and in obtaining food. They
were considered useful as propaganda for the revolution. In 1922, I
thought of myself as an actor who should be limited to doing broad
comedy, but Isadora Duncan, who had opened a school for dancing in
Moscow, told me, when we met, that I should play tragedy. She had a
tremendous influence on me. She was a revelation to me. A great per-
son in life. Not only a dancer but a tragic actress. She had immense
generosity and understanding of art. She was the only person I had ever
met who was not a conformist. To me, she was the personification of
the great artist. She was to be an inspiration to me for the rest of my
life.

In 1923, I went to Vienna with the Kamerny company, playing the
Dauphin in Shaw's "Saint Joan," and parts in Ostrovski's "The Storm"
and in an adaptation of G. K. Chesterton's novel "The Man Who Was
Thursday/* We set out to tour Germany. In Dresden, I was in an ele-
vator that fell into the basement of the theatre during the second act
of the Chesterton play, and I broke my right foot and right leg. I stayed
on in Germany for eight months for treatment. I played occasional
parts, in German, such as a ninety-year-old rabbi in "The Dybbuk," in
which I could wear a long robe, limp, and carry a cane. I was playing
such a small part at the Kleines Theatre in Berlin when Max Rein-
hardt saw me and asked me to join his company. I played Puck for him
in " A Midsummer Night's Dream." I loved Reinhardt from the start.
Perhaps he was the greatest man in the theatre in my experience. Stanis-
lavski was a pedagogue; he was always explaining things to you in
words. But Max Reinhardt always gave you the feeling. He was the

312

VLADIMIR SOKOLOFF

greatest director of all. He was shamefully misunderstood and mis-
treated when he came to America. He was a born magician. Every actor
I know who worked with him fell in love with him. My years with him
were more than enjoyable; they were incredibly fruitful. He loved
character acting. He loved actors. I once said to him, "Professor, why
don't you act?" He said, "I act in all of you/*

I played in Germany in the twenties, and made my first movie there,
a silent film, in 1925 Berthold Viertel's "The Adventures of a Ten
Mark Note," in which I took the part of the ragpicker who finds the
bill. In 1927, 1 was in New York briefly, on tour with Reinhardt's com-
pany. In the thirties, I went to France and took French-speaking parts
in French plays. I also went to Hollywood, making German versions of
movies, to be shown abroad, but I did not care for the life, and re-
turned to Germany and France. In 1937, I came to America again and
acted under contract with Warner Brothers in "The Life of Emile
Zola/' In 1938, in New York, I played Robespierre in "Danton's
Death/' with Orson Welles a part I had played in German with
Reinhardt's company in Vienna and in New York in 1927. Then I
made many Hollywood movies, In which I played Chinese, Japanese,
Malayans, Filipinos, Hindus, Italians, Spaniards, Czechs, Mexicans,
and Germans; only twice have I played a Russian. One day in 1947, in
Hollywood, I got a call to come to New York to play in "Crime and
Punishment" with John Gielgud. I was so excited. Here I had just
finished making one of those movies about narcotics and had played
a Chinese narcotics commissioner. Now I was offered the part of
Porfiri Petrovitch the prosecutor who from the beginning feels
that Raskolnikoff, played by Gielgud, is guilty of his crime. I
tried in the play to catch him in a very subtle way, without being
too aggressive but working on his conscience. I loved the part. I had
never met Gielgud before, but I had seen him in "Hamlet" and
thought he was brilliant. I have always thought that, besides being a
splendid actor, he is a poet. That is the element I like in him. I con-
sider him in every way much deeper than almost any other actor.
From the moment we started rehearsals, we understood each other.
Seldom have I felt such ease as I felt rehearsing with him. There were
many fine actors in the cast, including Lillian Gish, who played
Katerina, and Dolly Haas, who played Sonia, the prostitute in love with
Raskolnikoff, and the whole play was one of the most satisfying I have

313

THE PLAYER: VLADIMIR SOKOLOFF

ever done. Gielgud from the beginning always asked us whether we
felt all right, and in every way he offered such gentlemanly coopera-
tion. He is so generous, so considerate of his fellow-actors a gentleman
on the stage. He made me feel, It is so simple for me to play this part.
We were rehearsing half-voice one day, very quietly, when suddenly we
saw one of the producers, Robert Whitehead, standing in the orchestra.
He asked us, "Why don't you rehearse?" And Gielgud laughed and
said, "We are rehearsing." Because our dialogue was running so
smoothly, so naturally, and with such conviction, Whitehead thought
we were just talking to each other. Gielgud stands almost alone as an
artist. After every performance, he would gather the company together
on the stage and make remarks about the night's performance. He
wasn't the director, but he felt a responsibility for all of us. We played
"Crime and Punishment" for forty performances, and every perform-
ance to me was just like a first performance. Gielgud and I had three
big scenes in which we were onstage alone together. Gielgud is so flex-
ible, so hospitable to every nuance you give him, that there was
always something new to find in what you yourself did. I enjoyed the
way he would take it and answer it. In our three big scenes, I felt as
though we were playing tennis with the audience, the ball going to the
audience and then back to the stage, and it was almost as though
Gielgud would say, "Vladimir, you take it," and then the ball would
go to the audience again, and then back, and I would say, "You take
it, John." We were playing doubles with the audience, and we always
won. It is such bliss to act with a man like that.

Every actor has, as a gift from God, his own method. My particular
method is to go first by the sense of taste physical taste. I actually have
a physical taste for every part. Then I go by the other senses hearing,
seeing, touching. Thinking comes much later. Thinking comes when
you have already molded the part you are playing. You should analyze
the part, but not too much. One of the poets has said that every art
must be a little stupid. An artist should not be overly intelligent. My
method, without thinking, is to follow the path of physical truthful-
ness. The way I ate the soup in "The Power of Darkness," which I
played again in New York in 1959, 1 was not pretending, I was doing it.
And the audience believed in me a hundred per cent. From then on, no
matter what I did, the audience believed in me, because I had already
won them. Max Reinhardt always said it is the task of the character
actor not to disguise himself but to reveal himself. The simplest way is

314

VLADIMIR SOKOLOFF

the truest way. You start to think only when the part has reached a cer-
tain age. It's like a child he's not ready to think until he has reached
a certain point of development. When you are building a part, that
point is in the last dress rehearsals or after the first few performances.

In 1934, I was sitting with Stanislavski in Paris, in the Bois de
Boulogne, and he was reading to me from "An Actor Prepares." He
said to me, "Sokoloff, if you go with Max Reinhardt to America, if you
want to help youngsters, forget all this theory. Don't apply this. Don't
pay any attention to this. Everything is different in America. The edu-
cation. The psychology. The health. The mentality. Even the food is
different there. We needed this book to open actors up in Russia. In
America, it is different. They don't need it there. If they try to use it,
they will unnecessarily spy on themselves, asking 'Do I feel it or not?'
Tell them, In America the actor is free/ " Stanislavski tells actors to
observe. I do not believe in observing too much. Eighty per cent of
observations are wrong. People do not look like what they are. There
is only one exception I know of Albert Einstein. I once observed a
man I decided was a mortician. Who did it turn out to be? Igor
Stravinsky! The clown Crock was my idol. I was supposed to meet
Grock in a restaurant. I had never seen him without his clown makeup
and costume. In the restaurant, I saw no one who could be Grock. I
saw a dull-looking white-haired man with gold-rimmed spectacles who
was sitting with a fat, typically middle-class wife wearing diamonds.
That was Grock.

However, I have great curiosity about everything. That is the only
thing that keeps an actor's acting alive. When the weather is good, I
take walks. My wife died in 1948, and I am alone a good deal. But
everything I see gives me something. I see a girl with a charming smile.
I see a child with a doll. A new tie in a window. A passing cloud. Every
day, when I am in New York, I go to some museum and absorb the
loveliness of what they have there. Every day, I find at least one
beautiful thing. It is invaluable to me as an actor. An actor has a
peculiar structure as a human being. For me, the world is divided into
two parts, and the dividing line is the footlights. You must know at
every given moment on the stage not what you feel but what you want
what Walter Huston used to call your "intention." I love to watch
children when they play. They are acting all the time. They are mak-
ing their own world the way they feel it should be. Acting is childhood
hidden under the cape.

315

,/:-

^q^^j^^Wf^H
/ I

KIM HUNTER

Onstage, I can use a lot of aspects of myself that
aren't available to me, because of shyness or various
other complications ; in my real life.

I was born on November 12, 1922, in Detroit, Michigan. I have one
brother, G. Gordon Cole, eight and a half years older than I am,
who lives in Minneapolis and works as a captain for one of the big
commercial airlines. My real name is Janet Cole. My father, Donald
Cole, was a refrigeration engineer. My mother had been trained as a
concert pianist and used to accompany choral groups in public per-
formances, but after she got married she gave it up, because she had two
children to raise. My father died when I was three. Seven years later,
my mother married Bliss Stebbins, a retired businessman who lived
in Miami Beach, and we all moved down there. When I was about
ten, I began to go to movies. The first really impressive movie I saw
when I was eleven was "The Sign of the Cross," with Fredric
March, Claudette Colbert, and Elissa Landi. I found it an incredible
experience. It seemed to me then that movies came out ready-made;

316

KIM HUNTER

it never occurred to me to make a connection between acting and the
movies. I led a kind of solo existence in my childhood. Each summer
from the time I was eleven until I was sixteen, we spent several
months at Grand Lake, Michigan, where my stepfather owned a
hotel and a cluster of small cottages, one of which we lived in. Each
summer, there would be different families living in the other cottages,
always with a lot of boys but no girls. My brother had friends, and
I got the notion that girls were rarities and boys were rather ex-
pendable. The place was wild and woodsy, and I would go off for
long walks by myself. During my first summer at Grand Lake, I came
across an old libretto of "Cavalleria Rusticana" in my stepfather's
library. It had a rhymed English translation facing the Italian text,
and I took it to one of the vacant cottages and sat down in the living
room and read it all the way through. I couldn't get over the rhythm
and beauty of the words, and the wonder of thinking that live people
got up on a stage to sing those words. I immediately felt inspired to
write a play of my own. It took me two weeks. I called it "Helena"
the most romantic name I could think of at that time and it was
probably fairly similar to the libretto of "Cavalleria Rusticana." As
soon as I got back to Florida, I got a couple of girls from school
together and said "Let's write plays," and we started writing our own
plays. It then occurred to me that I might act in plays as well as
write them.

Not long afterward, I began to study acting with a woman in our
neighborhood named Charmine Lantaff, who had worked in New
York as a drama coach and had set up a kind of acting school, with
lessons available to children and adults, in her own home in Florida.
My mother was all for it. She backed me in every way. She arranged
for Miss Lantaff to give me three lessons a week, in voice technique,
theatre history, and theory a lot of theory. In my spare time, I
studied on my own. At first, I was very shy. It frightened me to get up
in front of people to read; I could do it for Miss Lantaff, and only
for Miss Lantaff. I spent hours discussing the theatre with her, and
she led me beyond my natural capacity to act things out. I was her
best pupil. I had the child's notion that since I was able to please
Miss Lantaff, I could win the world's approval by doing the same
thing for large groups. My mother didn't have the attitude that she
wanted me to do what she had failed to do, or anything like that;

317

THE PLAYER: KIM HUNTER

she simply knew that she had had a gift that had never been utilized,
and she wanted me to utilize mine if I felt I really had it. When I
was sixteen, I had my first big theatrical experience, reciting a mono-
logue at an entertainment given by the student council of Miami
Beach High School to raise money for the school. I was asked to give
the monologue because the students knew about my acting lessons. I
chose "The Waltz," Dorothy Parker's short story about a wallflower
at a dance, to adapt as a monologue. I didn't write it until the morn-
ing of the day I was supposed to give it, hoping against hope that
something would come up to get me out of it. There was an awful
feeling inside me that I didn't want to do it. I just didn't want to
perform for anybody. I nearly panicked waiting to go onstage.
I didn't think I'd make it. But then the training and discipline I'd
got from Miss Lantaff took over, and I leaned against a pillar onstage
and went through with the monologue, and everybody clapped. After
that, with Miss LantafFs encouragement, I participated in two school
plays, and performed in plays put on by Miss Lantaff for women's
clubs. I took every role I could get. In my senior year, I was given
the leading role in the graduation play, Clifford Goldsmith's "What
a Life." My mother came to see me in it, and said I was good, and en-
couraged me to keep working at it.

After my graduation from high school, in June, 1940, there was
nothing for me to do in Florida, By that time, Miss Lantaff had
started a summer-theatre company in Hendersonville, North Caro-
lina, so I went up there and joined it. I lived in a girls' summer
camp nearby, and at the theatre, which was called the Old Mill
Playhouse, I played ingenue roles. We put on a different play every
week for ten weeks, and I played most of the leads. In the fall, I
went back to Miami 'Beach and worked as an apprentice with the Gant
Gaither Theatre, a local group that imported professional stars. I
got only bit parts to play. Then I joined the Theatre of the Fifteen,
a group in Coral Gables, where I played Cecily Cardew in "The
Importance of Being Earnest." In the summer of 1941, I went back
to the theatre in Hendersonville, this time with the Coral Gables
group, and we went on to play a season in Baltimore that fall. Then
we went back to Coral Gables for a full winter season. I played the
ingenue in "The Male Animal," "Is Zat So?," "The Man Who Came
to Dinner," "The Philadelphia Story," and others. My pay consisted

318

KIM HUNTER

of my board and room. Quite a few of the members of the Coral
Gables group had come from the Pasadena Playhouse, in California,
and one of them, a young director, left to go back there. Soon
various wartime restrictions made it impossible for our stock com-
pany to survive, and in May, 1942, we broke up for the duration. I
again went back to Miami Beach, and worked for the American Red
Cross. I thought, fearfully, of coming to New York to try my luck
here, and I wrote to the young director in Pasadena and told him
this. He wrote back and suggested that I come to Pasadena instead,
to audition for one of the student groups at the Pasadena Playhouse.
So in November of that year I went to California, and got the ingenue
part in a Playhouse production of "Arsenic and Old Lace" and an-
other sort of ingenue part in "The Women." About a year later, on
the West Coast, I met a captain in the Marine Corps, William Bald-
win, and we were married. It was one of those wartime marriages;
he was sent overseas, and when he returned, after the war, we both
knew we had made a mistake, and were divorced. We had one child,
Kathy, who was born in December, 1944. She hasn't seen her real
father since she was three. He has remarried and has several other
children. I am now married to Robert Emmett, who writes television
situation comedies and has adapted material for television and the
stage. We have a son, Sean, who was born in 1954. Both children take
my being an actress for granted. My children belong to the theatre,
just as my husband and I do. We're never away from it. We live
next door to the Cherry Lane Theatre, in the Village, and our bed-
room wall adjoins the wall of the stage. We hear the rehearsals, the
performances, and the applause, even in our sleep.

In 1943, an agent who had seen me in Pasadena and wanted to
represent me got me to sign a seven-year movie contract with David
O. Selznick. I never made a movie for him, but he was the one who
got me to change my name. Janet Cole was not theatrical enough,
he said, and besides there were a lot of other Janets around, includ-
ing Janet Gaynor and Janet Blair. I was delighted, because I loathed
my name at the time. I tossed in "Kim/' a name I admired long-
ingly the name of Magnolia's daughter in "Show Boat/' After
Selznick had arranged to lend me to R.K.O., the secretary of an
R.K.O. producer came up with the name "Hunter." Selznick put
the two together, and there I was. All I ever did for Selznick,

319

THE PLAYER: KIM HUNTER

however, was to appear in Ingrid Bergman's role in screen tests
for actors trying to get minor roles in "Spellbound." I was lent out
by Selznick to other studios, and made "The Seventh Victim" for
R.K.O., "Betrayed" for Monogram, and "You Came Along" for
Paramount. I have only a vague recollection of what the movies were
about, but a clear one that most of them were labelled "B." The
one big point that had been impressed on me was that the movies
magnified every movement a hundred times a statistic that affected
me so powerfully that I became afraid to move at all. What really
mattered to me, though, was that I was earning a living for myself and
my baby. Then J. Arthur Rank, in England, offered me a contract and
the role in "Stairway to Heaven," and Selznick dropped my option
and I was free to work for Rank for six wonderful months from June
to December, 1945. I left the baby with my mother and went to
England. It was quite an experience, being in England immediately
after the war, working with good actors, and working with Michael
Powell, who is a wonderful director. When the six months were up, I
went back to California. By 1947, I'd had enough of sitting around in
California, and I decided to return to summer stock. Through a direc-
tor, I was offered the leading role in a summer-theatre production of
Rose Franken's "Claudia," in Stamford, Connecticut, for a week. I got
my mother and Kathy into our Buick, and we drove East.

One night during the week of "Claudia" in Stamford, a representa-
tive of the producer Irene Selznick came backstage and told me that
there was a possibility that I might read for the role of Stella Kowalski
in the new Tennessee Williams play, "A Streetcar Named Desire,"
after the role of Blanche had been cast. It was a nutty conversation,
and I promised to call him before I accepted another job, and then
put it out of my mind. As things worked out, we took "Claudia" to
play in Detroit for a week, and when I arrived there, I found that the
Irene Selznick office had wired to ask me when I could be in New York
to read for the part. I was impressed by the play, but I was still such
a baby that I didn't know how seldom parts like Stella came along,
and I didn't quite realize the significance of it all. I thought it was a
rather good play, but I was so eager to do a play in New York that I
would have tried for the role even if I had thought the play was bad.
Actually, my ability to judge a play has never been very good. I
had been offered another summer-theatre job, playing Cathy in

320

KIM HUNTER

"Wuthering Heights" up at Lake George, in the Adirondacks, and
between "Claudia" and "Wuthering Heights," on a hot, sunny, beauti-
ful afternoon in late August of 1947, I went over to the Henry Miller
Theatre, and, with Irene Selznick, Elia Kazan, and Tennessee Williams
in the audience, I went out onstage and read two scenes from "A Street-
car Named Desire." I read without any idea of how to play the part.
Irene Selznick said just to make it loud and clear, so I tried to make
it loud and I tried to make it clear. The stage manager read the part
of Blanche with me in the opening scene, where she comes to stay
with us, and then he read the part of Stanley in a first-act scene with
me. During the readings, the reaction around me was so strong I
could feel the way they were breathing out there that I began to
think it was an exceptional play. I was told to go back to my hotel
they would call me. I was staying at the Beekman Tower Hotel, so I
went back there, sat down on the bed in my room, and looked out the
window for a couple of hours. Then the telephone rang, and I was told
"It's yours." I was so excited I couldn't stand it, but I was afraid to
tell anybody, and besides I didn't know anybody in New York to tell.
My mother and Kathy were in Detroit, visiting my brother. I got on a
train and went up to Lake George, where I forgot about Stella and just
concentrated on playing Cathy in "Wuthering Heights." After a week
of that, I joined my mother in Detroit, and we drove back to Califor-
nia, packed up, and moved to New York.

Rehearsals for "A Streetcar Named Desire" started on October 1st,
in the rehearsal theatre on top of the New Amsterdam Theatre. I'd met
Marlon Brando a day or so before that. He seemed like a very nice
young man, and very shy, but no shier than I was. We rehearsed for
three and a half weeks. I learned more during those three and a half
weeks of rehearsal than I had learned in all my life up to then.
Every day there was something new. The way Elia Kazan, the
director, began the rehearsals by having us sit and read and search un-
til we had established the relationships between the characters was a
revelation to me. Up to then, I had gone on sheer instinct. Now I was
really learning something. Marlon and I were the most insecure ones.
We were the untried members of the cast. Marlon kept saying, "They
should have got John Garfield for Stanley, not me; Garfield was right
for the part, not me." Of course, Marlon was just wonderful for the part.
One absolutely extraordinary thing about Marlon, which makes him

321

THE PLAYER: KIM HUNTER

my favorite actor of all time to act with, is his uncanny sense of truth.
It seems absolutely impossible for him to be false. It makes him easier
to act with than anybody else ever. Anything you do that may not be
true shows up immediately as false with him. It is a tremendous expe-
rience to play in relationship to him; he yanks you into his own sense of
reality. For example, one thing that made it all so real during my
year and a half with the show was the way Marlon played the scene
where Stanley goes through Blanche's trunk. Stanley has found out a
little bit about her at that point in the play, and is starting to ques-
tion her, and he begins to go through the things in her trunk, while
Stella tries to protect her sister's belongings. Marlon never, never did
that scene the same way twice during the entire run. He had a different
sort of attitude toward each of the belongings every night; sometimes it
would lead me into getting into quite a fight with him, and other times
I'd be seeing him as a silly little boy. I got worn out after many months
in the play, but I never got bored, even though it was hard and
painful after a year to keep it fresh, to keep myself stimulated, to
make it live.

Even before rehearsals started, the newspapers began building up
the play. Irene Selznick kept advising us not to get overconfident about
it just to treat it as a nice little play. After a while, the play got so
much publicity that we had to work hard against overconfidence. Then
we began to feel that even if it was the greatest play ever written we
couldn't live up to the reputation it had before it opened anywhere.
We kept ourselves closed up like oysters. I was young and impression-
able, and though I found the role of Stella challenging, I felt like a
scared rabbit. But Kazan got me to working rather than trembling. I
didn't understand Stella until he began directing me in the part, and
then I began to find her. By the time the play opened on Broadway, I
had learned all I could from the outside from others about Stella,
and after that I kept discovering new things about Stella from inside
myself. The New York critics were all terribly enthusiastic about the
play except George Jean Nathan, who had no patience with Ten-
nessee Williams' work but the critics don't help you learn anything
about your part. You learn by yourself, from playing the part. The
longer I played it, the more I discovered by myself about Stella. One
thing you discover is that you never quite come to an end of discover-
ing. If the playwright writes well and makes it possible for his char-

322

KIM HUNTER

acters to live, you learn more about the character each night you play
it. It's like learning more about a girl each time you see her, even if
she's your closest friend. I played in "A Streetcar Named Desire" from
December, 1947, to June, 1949, and then I played Stella in the movie
version. I won so many awards for the part that I became known just
for that. It's a wonderful part. For one thing, it's such a fully written
part. It's always easier and more interesting to realize a character that
is written fully. Very few writers know how to write parts for women
to play. Tennessee Williams does it better than any other writer I
know of. He gets the character of Stella across in his writing. Most
writers become sentimental or overly romantic when they're writing
about a woman, and that makes it difficult for an actress.

My basic aim as an actress is to bring a part to life. There are
times when a playwright will depend on the actor to convey a thought
or an emotion, or illuminate a thought or an emotion, because the
writer feels that words won't achieve it, and might even muddy the
meaning. Sometimes a writer will say to me, "You do it." He may
deliberately underwrite a part, because he won't know how to convey
a certain moment. For example, in a television play I did in 1955,
called "Portrait in Celluloid/' I was supposed to be a witty, all-
knowing, all-understanding female. But the part seemed to me to be
underwritten. The character's place in the play was clean and clear but
not completely conveyed by the writer. Once during rehearsals, when
I asked Rod Serling, the writer, how to convey the woman's
feelings, he said to me, "You do it, with a look." That sort of thing is
easier for an actress to do for the camera than onstage. The camera,
either for television or for a movie, can come in for a closeup and
catch the look that will convey the meaning. Onstage, the playwright
can't get away with the slightest neglect of duty. In film scripts, you
often find long passages of instructions for the actors. In essence, they
tell you that the camera will come up close and express what the writer
couldn't express.

In acting, there are no rigid rules. After you start rehearsing, various
unpredictables usually come to light. I start out by getting acquainted
with my part. I cling to the clues I find even when I'm at home. On my
way to a rehearsal and, later, each time Fm on my way to the
theatre I start the ball rolling by bringing the character to life
physically, picturing to myself how she appears. Once the preliminary

THE PLAYERt KIM HUNTER

work is done, I get terribly subjective about a part. I can't trust what I
think of the character intellectually, so I have to trust my instincts. If
I get myself involved emotionally and then am able to blend what I
feel with what I think, I can go ahead and do it. After a while, subtle
alterations have to be made here and there, and everything starts to
become molded, and I grow confident in the part. I carry the part with
me at all times. For instance, after three weeks of rehearsal for "Write
Me a Murder," in which I speak with an English accent, I began to use
the English accent and English expressions automatically. At that
point, I'm bringing the part home, and my family gets in on it. The
more I bring home with me about the character, the closer I know I'm
getting to the character. Then, when my husband and my children
start picking up the speech and mannerisms I have created, it feels
legitimate.

No matter what I happen to be doing during the day, I am always
waiting for the evening's performance to start. I can be sending my
laundry out or planning a meal or taking Sean to the museum, but I'm
still with my play and with my part in it. I somehow seem to become
a better person when I'm acting in a play every night. My family life
becomes more harmonious. Fm less restless in everything I do. My
husband finds me easier to get along with. In my early days in stock,
I knew only the bare minimum about acting, and it was all such a
ball. I had no problems. What I didn't know didn't hurt me. I knew
I had to get on the stage and off the stage, and I knew a few things
about each part. My feeling of obligation to the audience went only
as far as realizing that I couldn't rehearse in front of them. Plays were
geared for one week in one town. I was young and romantic, and found
it exciting. I could mess up my part, but it wouldn't make the play a
flop. Today, I know that my name is on the marquee to draw people
into the theatre. It's my job to convey whatever the playwright has
written and to do credit to his words and to him. If anything I do
unbalances the playwright's concept, I feel that I'm cheating the
audience, and I can't stand that feeling.

Acting is unquestionably an art. Duse was a creative artist, who
could find meanings in plays that no one had ever found before. An
actor takes an author's words and infuses life into them. Many actors
today are merely interpretive artists, but they can be more than that.
It takes more than talent, or even a capacity for greatness, to do it,

324

KIM HUNTER

however. It takes learning, training, guidance, and experience. What
you use in acting is everything you are as a human being. Every actor
has his own key to acting. You use what works for you. You use what
was used before Stanislavski was born. Coqueiin once said that if you
cry onstage, the audience will never cry. When Elia Kazan directed "A
Streetcar Named Desire," he told us to fight our tears, because in real
life people try to hold back tears, and that would be more truthful.
There are people today who say that what Coqueiin really meant was
that unless you cry the audience will never cry. It's a continuing argu-
ment. I don't know which is true. To judge by my own experience, if
you cry real tears, the audience does seem to cry, too. Whatever the
technique, your aim must always be to achieve command over the
audience.

325

HAROLD SCOTT

In the twilight zone I'm in, known as up-and-coming,
you go to great lengths to build versatility, but no
one wants it. Everyone wants types.

I was bora on September 6, 1935, in Morristown, New Jersey, about
thirty-five miles from New York,- City. My father, Harold Russell
Scott, Sr., is a doctor a general practitioner in Orange, New Jersey.
My mother is a housewife. I'm an only child. No one else in our family
is remotely associated with the theatre. My mother's grandfather played
the harp beautifully, and also played seven other instruments, and my
mother's brother played the piano. I'm a pretty good bass-baritone.
We moved to Orange from Morristown when I was nine. My father
is the only Negro ever to be appointed to the staff of the Orange Me-
morial Hospital, in Orange, and the Presbyterian Hospital in Newark.
He wanted me to go into medicine, and when he first heard that I
wanted to become an actor, he was furious. When I was ten, he had a
little white coat made for me that was identical with his, and I used to
hang around his office wearing it and charming the patients. It would
have been easy for me to go into medicine, but by the time I was four-
teen I knew that I didn't want to be a doctor. I wasn't brought up as a

526

HAROLD SCOTT

Negro. In Orange, we lived in a mainly white middle-class neighbor-
hood o one-family houses. Our house was within a block of an all-
Negro school, but my parents didn't want me to go to a segregated
school. I was sent to a school in another zone, and was the first Negro
in that school. I never had any trouble there, but in my neighborhood
I was once chased by some other Negro kids, who called me a "nigger/'
I ran to my father's office and asked him the old question, "Daddy,
what's a nigger?" He had an immediate "conference" with me about it.
He took me on his knee and explained that one might expect to en-
counter this sort of thing from time to time in one's life, and that the
best thing was not to get angry but to understand what was said and to
rise above it. My parents were always having conferences and dis-
cussions with me. As a child, anything I wanted had to be discussed
what it was I wanted, why, and what I was going to do with it. The
talks were endless, and occasionally took all the joy out of my hopes
and plans. I began going to plays when I was eleven. Noel Coward's
"Present Laughter" and "Annie Get Your Gun," with Ethel Merman,
were the first ones I saw. I was deeply affected by the whole aura. And
I was fascinated by the special nature of props onstage mirrors with
soaped faces, and things like that. We lived across the street from a
movie theatre, and going to the movies was a weekly ritual, but movies
didn't mean very much to me. It was the theatre that drew me.

I attended public schools until I was fourteen, and then I went to
Phillips Exeter Academy. I had applied for admission to four or five
leading Eastern prep schools and had been accepted by all of them
except Exeter, so my parents decided that Exeter was where I had to
go. In order to become eligible for admission, I had to take summer
courses in English, mathematics, and Erench, lasting about eight weeks.
I prepared at Exeter's own summer session. As far as I know, I was the
third Negro ever to be admitted as a freshman to Exeter. The second,
Monroe Bowling, was a year ahead of me; he's now a medical interne
in Detroit. The first Negro had been admitted twenty years earlier.
I loved Exeter. The way the place is set up, you have to grow up, you
have to learn to take care of yourself. I was not an honor student, but
I was good in whatever interested me language, writing, speech
just as I still am. I was not good in anything that had to do with
figures or science. It was my father who unwittingly got me started as
an actor. He always told me that it was terribly important to learn how

327

THE PLAYER: HAROLD SCOTT

to speak. He felt that a well-read man should be a well-spoken man. He
was interested in city and state politics, and he believed that a man
should know how to present his point of view objectively and intelli-
gently. When I was fifteen, he suggested that I take a course in public
speaking, so I did, and then, also at his suggestion, I took up debating.
In my third year at Exeter, I tried out for the Merrill Prize Speaking
Contest, in the dramatic division. I wanted to recite "The Tell-Tale
Heart," by Edgar Allan Poe, but "God's Trombones," by the Negro
writer James Weldon Johnson, was suggested to me by one of the
teachers. I got huffy, but I agreed to do selections from it, with a chip
on my shoulder. I did two poems from it and won the prize twenty-
five dollars. I have since recorded all the poems on a record. In my
senior year at Exeter, I auditioned for "Captain Brassbound's Conver-
sion," one of Bernard Shaw's potboilers, and got the title role sort of a
half-Arab pirate. It was my first real part except for Christmas plays in
grammar school. I played it for two performances. It was mar-
vellous. I loved the excitement, the whole feeling. Suddenly I felt that
I had some status. Other boys were successful in athletics or other
things, and although I was a good athlete, too, I felt that acting was
something only I could do in my own special way. Then I was asked
to try for the Merrill prize again. It had never been won twice by the
same person. This time, as a previous winner, I had to write my own
piece. I wrote what I now think is a little piece of slop, about a modest
man and his simple faith in God, and I won the prize again. At that
point, I decided that acting would be my profession. In my Exeter
years, I loved to go to the theatre alone as I still do. One of the few
indulgences allowed me was the theatre. I'd come home for weekends
and go to a Saturday matinee, then to a movie, then to another play
after that, and make the last bus back to Orange around midnight.

I went to Harvard, and graduated in the class of 1957. I originally
planned to major in philosophy, and then, in the middle of my sopho-
more year, switched to English literature. I wasn't a strictly A student. I
proved that I could make the Dean's List once, and then it was no
longer important to me. My main interest at Harvard was in the the-
atre and acting. I was one of a nucleus of five people who took it all
very seriously: Steve Aaron, who later worked as an assistant to Ingmar
Bergman; Glenn Jordan, who directed "Another Evening with Harry
Stoones," an Off Broadway show, in 1961; and two others, who are now
328

HAROLD SCOTT

actors Colgate Salsbury and D. J. Sullivan. In my freshman year, I
immediately gravitated toward the Harvard Dramatic Club. That year,
I played three tiny parts in "Marco Millions." I was in my glory. It was
the first time I'd gone and read for a part and been cast right away. In
my sophomore year, D. J, and Glenn spearheaded the founding of the
Eliot Drama Group, primarily for the purpose of putting on classics.
I was involved, one way or another, in about thirty productions at
Harvard. I played enormous and wonderful parts Edmund of
Langley, the Duke of York, in "Richard II" and Oedipus in "Oedipus
Rex," both with the Eliot Drama Group, and the title role in "The
Emperor Jones," in the New Theatre Workshop of the Harvard Dra-
matic Club, for which I had to dye my body black and cut my hair
very short to make myself look more of a Negro. In my senior year,
John Eyre produced the American premiere of "Death watch," by
Jean Genet, at the Pi Eta Theatre in Cambridge. I played Maurice, one
of three characters in a prison cell. It was an astounding success; we
played twice a night for a week and made money for John Eyre, who,
in association with Richard Barr and Clinton Wilder, later produced
"The Death of Bessie Smith" Off Broadway. We were then invited to
give "Deathwatch" at the Yale Drama Festival, which we did for one
night, and after that a director named Leo Garen asked me to repeat my
role in New York. I very delightedly said yes. I felt I was actually going
to be able to arrive in New York with a part. I graduated from Harvard,
went to Europe for the summer, and rushed back to New York ex-
pecting the play to be done that October. Actually, it wasn't done until
a year later. In the meantime, I suffered through a dry spell. I lived
at home with my parents and sat by the telephone waiting for calls
from producers, from directors, from casting people, from anyone. It
was a terribly crushing time. My parents were dubious about my
course. I told my father that I just had to try it, that I'd been told
marvellous things about my acting at Harvard. I told him I'd never
been panned. We agreed that I deserved to have a three-year trial
period. I said, "If somebody I respect pans me during that time, then
I will abandon acting and I will go to law school." Today, now that
my parents have seen me as an actor, they are wildly enthusiastic about
the whole idea.

In the fall of 1957, through a friend, I got my first New York job,
for ten dollars a week, in a non-Equity, Off Broadway production o

329

THE PLAYER: HAROLD SCOTT

"A Land Beyond the River," at the Greenwich Mews, as a replacement
in the last two months of the play's run. I played a young lawyer taking
a desegregation case before a court. Then, to earn money, I worked,
at a dollar an hour, for a firm called Marketing Impact Research, Inc.,
doing various kinds of surveys. In September, 1958, I was in an
Off Broadway musical, "The Egg and I," in which I played Albert,
Ma and Pa Kettle's son the romantic interest in the show. Finally, on
October 9, 1958, "Deathwatch" was put on at Theatre East, and ran
for nine weeks. It was my first Equity show, and I was paid the going
rate of forty dollars a week. My parents have always subsidized me in
my career as an actor. Without that help, it would be impossible. Any
young actor who wants to go on must either have an independent in-
come or get financial help from somewhere. For my performance in
"Deathwatch," I won the Obie Award for the Off Broadway Distin-
guished Performance of the Year. That was the first real evidence my
parents had that I had some merit as an actor. After that, I was invited
back to Cambridge to appear, as a professional actor, with a group of
undergraduates doing "King Lear." I played the title role for eight
nights and was paid two hundred dollars, plus expenses. Then I had
another long dry spell an entire summer with nothing to do.

On February 22, 1960, I made my Broadway debut, in "The Cool
World," at the Eugene O'Neill Theatre. The play lasted two perform-
ances. I played Chester, one of a group of juvenile delinquents in
Spanish Harlem who becomes the kept boy of a wealthy white man. I
had one long scene fifteen minutes in which I explained to my
friends why I was doing what I did. For this part, Variety's poll of
drama critics named me one of the most promising new actors of the
year. In March of 1960, I played the part of Tiphys-, a pirate
captain, in an adaptation of Friedrich Duerrenmatt's "The Jackass,"
at the Barbizon-Plaza Theatre. It lasted one night. In May, 1960, I
played in an Equity Library Theatre production of "Dark of the
Moon/' as John, the witch boy, for one full week. Edward Albee's "The
Death of Bessie Smith" was performed one afternoon that June at the
Actors' Studio, which I was attending at the time, and I played the
part of the young Negro orderly at the hospital where Bessie Smith's
lover tries to find help for her after her auto accident. That summer,
I was in "Program One," produced by the Theatre for the Swan at the
Gate Theatre, on Second Avenue. I was in three one-act plays: as the
330

HAROLD SCOTT

character Death in "Santa Glaus/' by e. e. cummings; as First Musician
in "Calvary," by Yeats; and as the King in "Escurial," by Michel De
Ghelderode. That repertory season lasted thirteen performances. On
March 1, 1961, I opened as the orderly in "The Death of Bessie
Smith" at the York Playhouse, at the Off Broadway minimum salary,
then forty-five dollars a week, and I closed with it on January 7, 1962.
Ironically, this part was the smallest part I'd had in my entire career.
I'd been playing very challenging parts up to then, so this was a great
blow to my ego, and I had to find a way to do the part and not resent
doing it. It was a matter of getting used to a situation you have to live
with. I was helped by something I came across around that time while I
was putting my old college scrapbook together. It was a review in the
Harvard Crimson, by a young critic named Thomas Schwabacher, of
my performance as the Duke of York in "Richard II," my first
sizable part at Harvard. Schwabacher wrote of me, "His acting is
the best in the entire production, and he makes the agony of
York's divided loyalty to both Richard and Bolingbroke clear in every
line and even the dejected shuffle of his steps; Scott proves that a
comparatively minor part can assume major importance in the hands
of a skillful performer/' After reading that once more, and pasting it in
the scrapbook, I decided that if I'd done it once I could do it again.

All in all, things have come easily to me. To a great extent, it's a
matter of luck, of being in the right place at the right time. I hope to
achieve some kind of true prominence in the theatre, to become, I
suppose in American terms a star. I think this is quite likely to
happen, because there are enough unusual things about me to make
me unique though that can take you either way, can be a hindrance
or a help. The fact that I've been trained in playing the classics as
well as contemporary plays, and that I sing as well as act, and that I'm
equipped to do character work as well as play juveniles should help
me to achieve something eventually. Versatility is a wonderful thing
once you're a star, but not before. After a while, in auditioning for
parts, you form a kind of audition-interview personality. My particular
difficulty is that I'm not dark enough to play an African and not light
enough to play a white. Not many of the good parts are designed as
Negro roles.

I go to the theatre constantly usually alone. I feel obliged to talk
about it if I go with someone else, and I'm not good at discussing

831

THE PLAYER: HAROLD SCOTT

performances. It's much too personal You understand what's wrong
with a performance, but how do you make somebody else understand?
For the same reason, I find it difficult to try to study acting. When I
tried studying acting with some New York teachers, I found I was be-
ing encouraged in bad habits, encouraged to indulge myself. Although
it sounds egotistical, I really feel that I can learn more on my own.
I'm fascinated by people. I understand people, and it gives me great
satisfaction, in acting, to use what I know about them. It's always been
easier for me to see what other people are like than to see what I am
like myself, so I enjoy the transformation onstage; I completely enjoy
becoming another person. What throws me is when another actor isn't
playing with me won't look me in the eye, won't listen, isn't picking
up his cues. Once you're onstage, you have to care about getting to
the audience. As an actor, I feel that I give an audience some knowl-
edge and information that it might not otherwise receive.

Building a character is for me a long, agonizing procedure. I'm often
able to follow through on my initial impulses in filling out the emo-
tional life of the character, discovering what propels him, but then I
spend an endless amount of time taking the role apart, figuring out
how this person will walk, speak, and dress, and what his gestures will
be. It's only after I get a sense of what his emotional life is like that I
begin to work on the externals the voice, the walk, the gestures. Does
he talk with his hands, or does he seldom move his hands? Usually,
someone who is very inhibited does a lot with his hands. The part of
the orderly in "The Death of Bessie Smith" is one of the most difficult
I've had to play, because it is terribly underwritten, or seemed so to
me. I had to be the one to fill in the gaps, to find reasons for his
behavior that were not suggested in the script. There was nothing
written about the orderly's background outside the hospital. What
I had to go on were stage directions indicating that he is cowardly and
frightened. Since many of his lines are interrupted, giving him no
chance to finish what he is trying to say, I had to go to work and
figure out what he is trying to say. At the outset, I read the script over
and over again. The most important thing I ultimately found out
about the part resulted from the author's going back repeatedly to the
fact that the orderly is frightened. But you can't play simple fear or
simple weakness; it makes a part dull. So I had to find some way of act-
ing the part. Together with Rae Allen, the actress playing the part of

332

HAROLD SCOTT

the white nurse, I worked on the idea that the orderly was sexually
attracted to her but couldn't ever touch her or say anything openly.
Still, he could stare at her body. In that way, I found something to
play against. By using the sexual attraction, I was able to show the
boy's fear. The description given of the orderly is that he is clean-
shaven, trim, and prim that's all. I had to decide that he is terribly
concerned about his appearance; his trousers must be pressed, his nails
must be absolutely clean. Onstage in that play, I'd listen intently to
the other actors. I wouldn't read a line exactly the same way two nights
in a row, or take the same pauses, or have exactly the same reaction
to someone else's pause. At the end of a performance, I would usually
feel depressed. I don't like curtain calls. If the audience is ecstatic, it
reminds me that I am an actor. If the audience is stunned or indiffer-
ent, it's difficult for me to get out of character. Either way, it's hard to
flash a smile and say "It's me."

333

MICHAEL REDGRAVE

I prefer the fiction and fantasy of acting to the truth,
but I hope I use truth in experiencing fiction and
fantasy on the stage.

I was born on March 20, 1908, in Bristol, England, while my mother
was on tour with some melodrama or other. Both my parents were
actors, and there have been others in my family, going back to the
middle of the nineteenth century. They were, generally speaking,
what we would call "touring actors." Those were the great days of the
touring actor. I was christened at the age of six months in Melbourne,
Australia, where my parents were on tour, acting together in various
melodramas, including "The Sign of the Cross." My mother continued
acting, in supporting roles, until a few years before her death, in
1957. My father, George Ellsworthy Redgrave, who was knowa profes-
sionally as Roy Redgrave, was, I am told, a very fine actor. When I
was two, I was carried onstage in his arms, and that was my first
stage appearance. A year later, my parents separated and my mother
took me back to England. My father stayed on in Australia, and I
never saw him again. On the boat going back, my mother met a rich
tea and rubber planter, whom, years later, she married. I tagged around
with my mother, living in various theatrical lodgings -or with various
relatives, and since I didn't know what a home was, I didn't miss
having one. I didn't have a real home till I was nine, when we

354

MICHAEL REDGRAVE

moved into a big house in London with my stepfather. He was a
very kind man, and I respected him, but we were never closer to each
other than we were on the day of my seventeenth birthday, when he said,
"You know, you and I don't talk the same language." I was a preco-
cious child in the usual ways: showing off, dressing up, always getting
up little plays all the signs of somebody who ought to act. But I was
never stage-struck as a child. The only time I ever felt stage-struck
was at the age of thirty-four, when I was an Ordinary Seaman in the
Royal Navy on brief leave in New York during the Second World
War. Ruth Gordon took me on a theatrical tour of the city. The last
night in town, on my own, I paid a dollar for standing room at "The
Corn Is Green," with Ethel Barrymore. I had bought an autograph
book in Macy's, and I took it backstage and asked Ethel Barrymore
to sign her name in it. I had been disappointed in the performance
for the first few minutes. Then something happened that does sud-
denly happen with great performers you get up on their plane. I
thought she was marvellous, and I was stage-struck. It may have
been because, for the first time in my life, I felt outside the theatre.
I was a successful actor, but all that was behind me. There was a war
on, I was in an Ordinary Seaman's uniform, and I was stage-struck.

My stepfather sent me to Clifton College, where I played in the
"School play" each summer and in the "House play" each Christmas
and wrote one of the House plays myself. From fourteen onward, I was
playing everything from Lady Macbeth to Captains Absolute and
Brassbound. Whenever it was possible to get up an amateur produc-
tion, I'd do it. Though I was born into the professional theatre there
were members of the family acting for much longer than anyone now
living can remember I didn't, as they say, "turn pro" until I was
twenty-six. My mother didn't encourage me to think about acting as a
profession. More than once she told me, "It's no life for a man unless
you're very successful at it and unless you intend to give something to
it, unlike most people, who just want to get something out of it," At the
age of sixteen, I grew two inches in one term almost to my full height,
six feet two and a half and that was another reason my mother dis-
couraged me. I outgrew my own strength. I'd tire easily. I have a very
good constitution, and I look younger than my age, but I still tire more
than I'd like to. I always go to bed for a little while at some time in the
afternoon or early evening. I think every actor should do that, even if

335

THE PLAYER: MICHAEL REDGRAVE

he only lies down on the floor for twenty minutes and shuts his eyes.
Physical vitality is something you have to conserve if you're to be at
the top of your form when the curtain goes up. I was a very slow
student, but I scraped into Cambridge, where I did a good deal of
acting and writing. I wrote stories; I was a drama critic and a film
critic; 1 edited the Cambridge Review, and I started a literary maga-
zine that kept alive for two years; I wrote poems. When I left, I
fancied myself as someone who might work in a publishing house,
but my only commercial asset was my university honors degree in
modern languages and English literature. I decided to take up tutor-
ing, and, to get away from home, applied for a job in a grammar
school in North London. I wrote for a testimonial to a man who had
been a master at Clifton and was now the headmaster of Cranleigh, a
public school, and he wrote back asking me why I didn't come there
instead. I told him I didn't intend to be a teacher. He suggested that I
try It for two terms. I did, and stayed three years. I produced and
designed all the school plays and acted in them, having a wonderful
time with such plays as "King Lear," "Hamlet," "As You Like It," and
"Samson Agonistes." I enjoyed teaching, enjoyed sometimes catching
the imagination of my students, but I was bad at what we call
the donkeywork. One day, I took my French class to London to
see a French repertory company, La Compagnie des Quinze, do
"Noah" and other plays. Suddenly I had a revelation. I understood,
for the first time, what it was like to be a member of a repertory
company, without big stars but with a general style of acting. After
seeing this company, and the way its members worked together all the
time, I could see how the repertory company was much bigger than the
sum of its parts. I decided that I wanted to become a director. I imme-
diately determined to leave Cranleigh, and I gave notice. I wrote to the
Old Vic, and had an audition. When, after a long wait, I had not yet
received any contract, I wrote to the Liverpool Repertory Theatre,
one of the best companies of its kind in the country, and asked for
an interview, and on my way to take the night train to Liverpool,
I stopped off at my mother's house and found a contract from the Old
Vic. In Liverpool, the director and producer of the repertory company,
William Armstrong, a Scot and a wonderful man, said he had no room
for me but told me not to give up hope. He would "let me know." I
brought the Old Vic contract tentatively out of my pocket. "When will

336

MICHAEL REDGRAVE

you be able to let me know, Mr. Armstrong? You see, I have to let the
Old Vic know." He was astounded. "How much are they offering
you?" "Three pounds a week." fTll give you four," he said, and I re-
turned to my schoolmastering by another night train. I was blissful,
but it did occur to me later that had I lied to him and said seven
pounds a week, he might have said eight. Anyway, after three months
I was playing leading parts and he put my salary up to six. At the
end of my first season, I met Rachel Kempson, who came to us from
Stratford as our new leading lady. Ten days later, we became engaged.
Her father was headmaster of the Royal Naval College, Dartmouth,
and we were married in the chapel there.

I made my first professional appearance on August 30, 1934, playing
a small role, that of Roy Darwin, a smooth New York operator, in
"Counsellor-at-Law," and spent two years with the Liverpool Reper-
tory Theatre. I was an ambitious, arrogant, conceited young man. I
wanted to play everything. I took it for granted that people should
offer me everything. And everything began to come so easily to me
I took it for granted that it would go on that way. Actually, I've never
been out of work except deliberately, for a holiday, since I started.
While I was playing in Liverpool, Tyrone Guthrie offered me a con-
tract for the 1936-37 season with the Old Vic, where I played Mr. Hor-
ner in "The Country Wife." I found myself playing with Edith Evans,
Ruth Gordon, and an all-star cast Laurence Olivier was to join the
company later that was destined for New York. I was invited to go to
New York with the company, but Edith Evans was staying in London
to play in "As You Like It" at the Old Vic. She said to me, "You
don't want to go to New York. Wouldn't you sooner stay here and
play Orlando in 'As You Like It?" There was not a moment's doubt
in my mind that I wanted to play Orlando to Edith Evans' Rosalind.
She had only to look at me. Odd that my eldest daughter, Vanessa, is
at present performing in London as Rosalind. I have two other chil-
dren, Corin William named after two minor characters in "As
You Like It" and Lynn Rachel. All three of my children intend
to work in the theatre. I was more influenced by Edith Evans than
by any other performer. I was very much in awe of her. She asked me,
"What kind of actor do you want to be?" I was taken aback by the
question. Then she asked, "Do you want to be like Johnny? Do you
want to be like Larry? What sort of career do you want to have?"

3S7

THE PLAYER: MICHAEL REDGRAVE

Suddenly I realized that she was suggesting that if I put thought,
passion, and labor into it I might indeed be like Gielgud or Olivier.
For me, Edith Evans has the authentic magic. Claptrap word though
"magic" may be, it's the only word for the stage. When she comes
onstage, the stage lights up. She's a very strict person about her own
profession and is without any of the nonsense. She's a real and dedi-
cated artist. Her art is her life. Everything she does on the stage is
interpreted through her own morality. It's the way Picasso paints. It's
the way Beethoven composed. It's the thing the great artist has that
makes him different from other people. I don't mean morality in a pet-
tifogging way. I mean moral values, without which nothing is achieved
and nothing is created. Part of it is caring enough about what you do
to achieve something beyond the mundane. One reason for the great in-
fluence Edith Evans has had on me is that she accepted me in the early
phase of my career. Until you act the great parts in theatre literature,
you really don't know what acting is. Orlando for me was a great part.
I was twenty-eight. Edith Evans was forty-eight. I had been married
about a year, and Rachel and I had just had our first child. But none of
that seemed to have anything to do with my special life on the stage as
Orlando. We played for something like five weeks in repertory, and
then we took the play to the West End and played it for three months,
which was pretty good for a Shakespeare run. Acting with Edith Evans
was heaven. It was like being in your mother's arms, like knowing how
to swim, like riding a bicycle. You're safe. The late Michael Chekhov
said once that there are three ways to act: for yourself, for the au-
dience, and to your partner. Some of the newer theorists say if it's true
for yourself, it's truthful, which is not so. The majority of actors act
for themselves or for the audience. I believe that the only way to act
is to your partner. As a partner, Edith Evans was like a great conductor
who allows a soloist as much latitude as is needed but always keeps
everything strict. Strict but free. Never is anything too set, too
rigid. The stage relationship always leaves enough room to improvise.
For the first time in my life, acting in "As You Like It," I felt com-
pletely free. For the first time, I felt completely unself-conscious. Acting
with her made me feel, Oh, it's so easy! You don't start acting, she
told me, until you stop trying to act. It doesn't leave the ground until
you don't have to think about it. The play and our stage relationship
in it always had the same shape. It was entirely well proportioned, and

358

MICHAEL REDGRAVE

yet in many respects it was all fluid. In the forest scenes between
Orlando and Rosalind, she would encourage me to do almost anything
that came into my head. Yet if I had done anything excessive, she
would have stopped it by the simplest means. Somehow it didn't oc-
cur to me to do anything excessive. For the first time anywhere, onstage
or off, I felt completely free.

The second great influence on ray acting life was Stanislavski's book
"An Actor Prepares." I had read "My Life in Art" and thought it was
all very fine but a little fancy. Then I read his other book, and for
the next six months I was terrifically upset by it. Edith Evans won't
have anything to do with theory, of course. Everything she does, she
does naturally. Stanislavski himself would have said, I'm sure, that he
wasn't teaching anything new only a codification of what all good
actors did instinctively, without having to think. So many people who
talk about Stanislavski don't understand him at all. What I got wrong
at first was to think that you should take him literally, by the letter,
when you must take him by the alphabet. You've got to soak yourself

in it.

Michel Saint-Denis, director of La Compagnie des Quinze, was an-
other very strong influence on me, beginning with the first time I saw
his repertory company, when I was still a schoolmaster. He is
one of my heroes. In 1937, I joined John Gielgud's company at the
Queen's Theatre and played Bolingbroke in "Richard II," and
in the same season I played Charles Surface in "The School for Scan-
dal" and also Baron Tusenbach in "The Three Sisters/' with
Gielgud, Peggy Ashcroft, and Alec Guinness. It was directed by Saint-
Denis. He was, and still is, a great director. Of all the directors I've
ever worked with, he is the one who best understands the style inherent
in any good play. There's a style for Shakespeare and a style for
Chekhov, and Saint-Denis has a sense of this. When Gielgud, who had
cast me as Andrei, came to me and said he was sorry but Saint-Denis
didn't see me as Andrei and wanted me to play Baron Tusenbach, I
was abashed. After three days of rehearsals, Saint-Denis said, "I don't
know how well you know the character of Baron Tusenbach, but he is
without any personality, and yet you seem to be trying to make him
have personality." I said, "But surely an actor must try just that."
But he said no, the whole point was that this man doesn't make much
sense when he talks. "Nobody listens to him," he said. I was so dis-

330

THE PLAYER: MICHAEL REDGRAVE

mayed that I just mumbled the part, and Saint-Denis immediately
said, "That's it. That's the way this man should talk." When Saint-
Denis formed a new repertory company, at the Phoenix with a
nucleus from the Gielgud group I continued working with him for
a season, and my cup of happiness was full. He took the most scrupu-
lous care with everything he did. I had utter belief in his judgment. I
believed in him the way a man believes in his priest or psychiatrist. I
revered him. I still do.

We had something very special when we were doing "The Three
Sisters." I felt, We don't have to worry, we have something beautiful
here, and if the audience doesn't like it, that's just too bad. For the
audience. I've felt nearly the same thing since, but not often. It's the
kind of feeling you get when everything comes together perfectly. That
does happen, you know, but mostly in permanent companies. I'm sure
it happened with the Moscow Art Theatre, the Abbey Theatre at its
height, the Theatre National Populaire. At Stratford, one achieves
it in one or two productions during the season. I'm sure Joan Little-
wood had it occasionally in her Theatre Workshop. I made my first
movie at this time, during the day, while acting in "The Three Sisters"
at night. I didn't take to movie-making at first, though I love it now.
At the time, I signed for pictures reluctantly, with Gainsborough
Pictures. The pay was tempting. Nobody prepared me in the beginning
for the horrors of picture-making. Nobody explained it to me. I think
I got the contract by doing a test for which I didn't give a damn. I
was playing with this wonderful galaxy at night and let everyone
know it during the day. Naturally, Alfred Hitchcock, the director of
the picture it was "The Lady Vanishes" did everything to take
me down a peg. My second picture, "Stolen Life," was with
Elisabeth Bergner, a great actress and one I adored, and although
the picture was not very good, I enjoyed making it. The director, Paul
Czinner, told me that films could do something special that stage
acting could not; there was a spontaneity that the camera could catch
when you were first feeling your way in a part, before it became too
polished. On the stage, one would work for weeks to achieve a certain
thing, but the movie camera could catch something early that w^s more
effective on the screen than the polished thing. One of the movies I
enjoyed doing most was "Dead of Night." I also enjoyed "The
Browning Version" and "The Dam Busters," and there have been a

340

MICHAEL REDGRAVE

number of others that have caught my imagination. But I confess that
many of the pictures I have made I have accepted because the money
they brought me helped me to choose in the theatre only the parts
I liked. "Dead of Night" is the one of the films that many people, oddly
enough, seem to remember me for. I played the role of a mad ven-
triloquist. The director of my sequence in the film was Alberto
Cavalcanti, and something happened, the kind of thing that happens
when a particular actor meets a particular director who excites his
invention in a particular part and works with him on a give-and-
take basis. Perhaps it's too easy an answer, but I've always believed
to a certain degree that the effectiveness of a film part depends on
whether you can say in one sentence, or on a postcard, what the part
is. For example, about my part in "Dead of Night" you can say, "It's
about a ventriloquist who believes his life is controlled by his dummy."
And everyone then is able to say "Ah!" I don't think you can describe
Hamlet on a postcard. A film has a more immediate impact than a
stage play, which is not necessarily an advantage for the actor. Hamlet
leaves a deeper impression on you when played on the stage than any
role I can think of in a film. There are differences in the satisfaction I
get in acting in the two mediums. Some of the most exciting moments
in the theatre come in rehearsals, when you're first discovering or ex-
ploring a part. The camera can catch these early moments on film.
But in the theatre you go on for several weeks making natural each
time what would otherwise become stale. During rehearsals, you find
the little truths, and as time goes on, you can work to enlarge your
part without making it seem enlarged. I made two films in Hollywood
i n i947_"Mourning Becomes Electra," which didn't come off as a
story told through a lens and "Secret Beyond the Door," directed by
Fritz Lang. Hollywood was all right for three months, but when I
stayed on to make the second picture, I couldn't take the publicity,
the status symbols, and all that foolishness.

Every part is different, and every new part demands new and
fresh consideration. I try to beware of the overly intellectual thing in
approaching a part. Some parts I feel I can get in a flash. That's when
it's most dangerous. Every good actor knows immediately whether
a part is sympathetic or not. But I'm very scared of parts in which I
give a good first reading. I think I have a quickish intelligence, but
it's dangerous to go on a radio actor's intelligence, which is the knack

341

THE PLAYER: MICHAEL REDGRAVE

o giving a good first reading of a part. Nevertheless, some of
these parts have turned out to be the best things I've done; others I
didn't get right until I had tried them in several ways. When I first
saw the Graham Greene play "The Complaisant Lover" in London,
where the part I took on for the Broadway production was played
by another actor, I didn't take to the play or the character. Then,
after I'd read it, I was attracted to it and I said I'd do it. The character
is a dentist, an extrovert, and a farceur who plays practical jokes. I am
not notably either an extrovert or a farceur, and I don't like practical
jokes, so I had to get to work and work hard in a special way on that
one. I asked my own dentist quite a lot, and I bought a dental-
association tie and wore it in the play. I found out how much money
dentists make, on the average, because in preparing for any role I
investigate the character through the method of social realism. One
must be aware of the financial pressures on that kind of character.
I tried to determine such things as whether the dentist in the piay
could afford to have his own wine cellar, which he can't, or whether
he would send out for wine. Then, for some reason, I thought he
should have a mustache, and because I couldn't think of any dentist
I knew who had a mustache, I asked about until a dental technician
told me she knew one. So I had a mustache made to wear. Later, I
decided I would not wear a mustache. In any case, I wouldn't grow
one. Then I changed my mind again. I'm the sort of actor who is helped
by a bit of disguise. Paradoxically, a bit of disguise can help to show
that aspect of yourself which is essential to the part. Like a lens. I don't
like to wear my stage personality all day. It should be something you
look forward to assuming in the evening. There have been times when
my parts affected me in my real life, but I discovered that it's bad for
the part when that happens. Mostly, it happened some years ago, when
I misinterpreted Stanislavski and thought it a good idea to live the
part. Now I never play a part for more than eight or nine months,
because I want to prevent it from affecting me too strongly.

It's important to have failures as well as successes as an actor. The
theatre is commercially tied to success. Therefore, to be able to per-
form, the actor must be in successes, and that leads him to pursue a
false ambition. I've made films sometimes to have money in the bank.
One hopes, of course, to give one's best to everything, and turning a
sow's ear into a silk purse is not such a bad proverb to go by, but the

342

MICHAEL REDGRAVE

truth is that not all plays or films inspire you to the same degree, and
the imagination is not liberated in the same way. What inspires me is
belief, of one kind or another and I don't mean just theatrical be-
lief, because actors have to make believe. Even in melodrama, there
has to be some reality. It may have a false premise, but it must
proceed logically outward toward truth.

If I couldn't act, I'd like to be a writer first of all. I could just be a
writer, but a mediocre one. I've written three plays. I'm no great
shakes as a playwright, but my first play, "The Seventh Man," a one-
acter about Arctic whalers in the eigh teen-nine ties, written in three
days when I was with the Liverpool Repertory, is still performed. My
second was a children's play, and my third a good play, I think is
an adaptation of Henry James's "The Aspern Papers," which I
directed in London. There are Sunday painters. I'm a Sunday writer.
In acting, however, a mood, an emotion, an idea, or a theory can be
conveyed more quickly, more succinctly, with more immediacy, than
in any other art. That's the peculiar advantage the actor has. Acting is
the most immediate art of all. The audience is either caught up entirely
or not; it's now or nothing.

$43

BEN GAZZARA

Actors have eyes and ears. We know we are on the
stage; we see the curtain go up; we see the audience
out there. But once in a while, if we are lucky, we get
lost, for a few moments, in the part we are playing,
and then we can reach the heights.

I was born on August 28, 1930, in New York City. My real name is
Biagio Anthony Gazzara, but my family always called me Ben, or
Bennie. My mother is the youngest of ten children of a Sicilian family
named Cusumano. Her brother Mike migrated to America in 1900 and
had brought all but one of his brothers and sisters over here by 1903.
He eventually opened a bar called Mike's, at Second Avenue and
Thirty-ninth Street. This was a neighborhood full of Italian immi-
grants, and it was where the family settled and where my parents met.
I have one brother, Anthony, who is five years older than I am, and
who works as an executive at the New York Athletic Club. My mother
was forty-five when I was born. My father, himself one of twelve
children, was a moody man who drank a lot. He worked at brick-
laying, carpentry, and other skilled jobs. We moved frequently, from

344

BEN GAZZARA

one cold-water flat to another, but we always stayed in the same
neighborhood. Between the Gazzaras and the Cusumanos, there were
over two hundred members of our family in the neighborhood. We
were inclined to hang around with each other. We ate together in one
another's houses, drank together, and had parties together, and, of
course, there were always funerals and weddings, too. Family or no
family, I felt very lonely as a small boy. Then, when I was six, I joined
the Madison Square Boys' Club. It was the center of social life for all
the kids in the neighborhood, so I went along with the others. I played
punch ball and basketball and other games in the gym, and we were
shown movies Laurel and Hardy comedies, and so on. When I was
about twelve, some of the boys in the group told me they had joined
what was called the drama section of the club. A former actor named
Howard Sinclair had charge of the dramatics. My voice had just
changed, and was very deep, and apparently the boys told Sinclair
about that, because one day when I was playing punch ball in front
of the club Sinclair stopped on his way in and asked me if I wanted to
be one of seven Arabs in a play he was putting on. At first, I said no,
but he persuaded me to give it a try. So I was one of seven Arabs in a
play called "The Gods of the Mountain/' by Lord Dunsany. All I had
to do was wear a sheet and wait around for alms, and then die at the
end. It didn't mean much to me, but I nevertheless decided to join
the drama section.

A little later, Sinclair, who had become interested in me, cast me in
the leading role in Justin Huntly McCarthy's "If I Were King." At
rehearsals, he would tell me about his own experiences in the theatre,
and I began to dream of becoming an actor. I had found a goal. Also,
I began to enjoy the attention I was getting because I was doing the
play. I started counting on it. Every day after school, I would wait
for seven o'clock, when Sinclair arrived at the club. Sinclair was a very
handsome man, with Anglo-Saxon features different from the Latin
faces I was used to. He was tall and lean, with silvery hair and a
mustache, and I considered him cultured and strange. Coming to know
him was like finding a new father, from another world a kind of world
I had only dreamed about before. His world seemed strange and new
and wonderful to me. It was as though I had found a new home.
Before I knew it, I was playing the leads in all the plays we put on. It
was marvellous to get Sinclair's approval and to feel his enthusiasm.

345

THE PLAYER: BEN GAZZARA

I really began to live on the stage. The theatre stimulated me in a way
that was entirely new to me. Sinclair would tell me about actors like
Eleonora Duse, Sarah Bernhardt, and Edwin Booth, and I would day-
dream about putting on makeup and costumes, and hearing the
applause. By the time I was fifteen, I had definitely decided to become
a professional actor. Whenever I felt doubts, I would tell Sinclair about
them, and he would say he was sure that I would have a place in the
theatre.

I attended a parochial school a Carmelite school, Our Lady of the
Scapular in our neighborhood, and then went to Stuyvesant High
School. I disliked high school, and after about two years of it I left,
without telling anyone at home. I was a truant. I spent the next fifty-
six days wandering around New York, going to the movies to see
the actors who had become my favorites Spencer Tracy, Clark Gable,
James Cagney, and Edward G. Robinson. In another way, I was also
fascinated by John Garfield. He was the first actor I had seen in the
movies who felt close enough to my own life to be reachable. Eventu-
ally, I told my mother that I had left school, and said I would return
to school if I could go to a small uptown coeducational parochial
school, where I thought I would feel more at home. So I went to St.
Simon Stock, in the Bronx. I still wanted to be an actor, but I felt that
I needed an education. When I was sixteen, Sinclair left the club, and
my interest in dramatics began to lag. One summer during high school,
I worked as a soda jerk at the Whelan's drugstore at the corner of
Forty-second Street and Vanderbilt Avenue. Another job I had during
high school was running an elevator in the Hotel Shelton, on Thirty-
fifth Street. I graduated from high school in 1947.

That fall, I entered C.C.N.Y. night school, with the intention of
studying engineering. I had put aside any thought of acting as a way
of earning a living. For six months, I worked during the day for a
shop on Canal Street as a silver replater and buffer, and was able to
bring home twenty dollars a week. Next, I worked in a place that made
slipcovers for furniture; my job was to prepare the piping for the
slipcovers. At the end of my first year at the night school, a boy who
lived in our neighborhood told me about Erwin Piscator's Dramatic
Workshop at the New School for Social Research. One night, he took
me with him to watch one of the productions o the New School. It
happened to be one that Piscator had supervised himself "The Flies/'

346

BEN GAZZARA

by Jean-Paul Sartre. I was stunned by the theatricality of what I saw.
Piscator believed in the epic style of theatre. I was impressed by his
use of music, and his use of film on the stage, and his use of lighting
to make a very small stage seem enormous. It was unabashed theatrical-
ity. I decided to quit night school and try to join the Workshop. Not
having money for tuition, I auditioned for a scholarship. I did a few
scenes from "If I Were King/' 'They Knew What They Wanted,"
and "Seventh Heaven" for one of the teachers, a man named Raiken
Ben-Ari, and I got the scholarship in September, 1948. I stayed there a
year and a half. Studying with Ben-Ari, who had corne from the
Habima Theatre, in Moscow, I was working with a man who himself
had worked with Stanislavski and Eugene V. Vakhtangov, and I began
to learn that there was a craft of acting. Piscator directed me only
once in "Macbeth," in which I played the part of Malcolm, one of
Duncan's sons. Piscator believed that it was the purpose of the theatre
to educate. He knew every aspect of the theatre: acting, staging,
directing, lighting everything. About that time, I began to go to
Broadway plays, and I began to hear reports of something else in the
theatre a departure from the Piscator school of acting. In 1948
and 1949, the talk in class and everywhere else that students of acting
got together was about the newly founded Actors' Studio.

The first play I saw on Broadway was one that astonished me
Tennessee Williams' "The Glass Menagerie/* with Laurette Taylor.
Her acting impressed me so deeply that I went back to see the play
five times. I had no way of knowing it then, but now I realize that I
was watching a truly great performance. It was the only great acting
I had ever seen until I saw John Gielgud in "The Ages of Man/' in
1959. Six months after "The Glass Menagerie" closed, I went to see
Williams' "A Streetcar Named Desire." I thought it was the most
exciting play I had ever seen. All the performances were good. Kim
Hunter's acting impressed me enormously, and Marlon Brando's got
me terribly wrought up. I reacted strongly to the raw emotion, the
animal vitality, in his acting. I found something new and poetic in all
the characters in the play. I had heard at the Dramatic Workshop that
Marlon Brando and Kim Hunter had gone to the Actors' Studio, and
I decided to audition for it. My first audition, which I passed, was for
Daniel Mann. I did some scenes from "Night Music/' by Clifford
Odets, for my second audition, for Lee Strasberg, Elia Kazan, Cheryl

347

THE PLAYER: BEN GAZZARA

Crawford, and Mann, and I was accepted. Around the same time, I
got married to a former child actress named Louise Erickson. We were
divorced four years later.

I went to the Actors' Studio regularly for three years, and I still go
occasionally. In those years, I don't think I missed a single session. I
felt inspired almost the same way I had felt as a kid with Sinclair.
Also, once again, I had a place to go that felt like home. For the first
time, I began to see action myself. In 1953, we did Calder Willingham's
"End as a Man," first at the Studio and then at the Theatre de Lys, in
the Village. I played the lead Jocko De Paris, a monstrously rebellious
student in a horribly discipline-ridden military college in the South.
I felt wonderful in my part. I felt wonderful onstage. The play was
great, and so were the notices. Then the play was moved uptown to
the Vanderbilt Theatre, and I felt that my career had really begun.
"End as a Man" ran, altogether, from September, 1953, to January,
1954.

In March, 1955, I opened on Broadway in Tennessee Williams'
"Cat on a Hot Tin Roof," in which I played Brick. When we opened
in Philadelphia, I felt that the rehearsal period three and a half
weeks had been too short. I felt that I had only a shell of a per-
formance that there hadn't been time to produce valid results. During
rehearsals, Elia Kazan, the director, and I had worked on the part
enough to create certain mannerisms, but I felt that that was all. I
wasn't able to analyze what was wrong with my performance, but friends
who were in the audience told me I sounded sonorous and inhuman. I
started to retrace my steps after the opening in New York, which
actually meant I was rehearsing in front of the audience, I stayed with
the play for seven months, but I never felt the part as a real experi-
ence. My words were measured, vocally precise, and empty. When I
was supposed to show anger, it was the vocalization of anger rather
than the experience of being angry. Later that year, I got the part of
Johnny Pope, a dope addict, in Michael V. Gazzo's "A Hatful of
Rain." At that time, if I wasn't crying or hysterical onstage I thought
there was no drama to my role. Now I realize that simpler behavior
can be more touching. I began to find this out during the run of
"A Hatful of Rain." After playing Johnny Pope from November of
1955 to June of 1957, the play closed, and I went to Florida on location
to make the movie version of "End as a Man," called "The Strange

348

BEN GAZZARA

One" my first movie. Then I rejoined "A Hatful of Rain" on the
road. Six months later, in Milwaukee, it came to me that even in a
part as serious as this one there was room for humor, and that one
must be less rigid and look for humanity. My love scenes with Vivian
Elaine, who for part of the run played my wife, became more real. The
love for the wife is there, even though the man has the dope addiction.
I found I could catch the attention of the audience by pleading with
her quietly.

The best Broadway part I ever had was in "The Night Circus/* in
1958, with Janice Rule, whom I married three years later. I had the part
of Joy, a young man who is running away from life. The play lasted for
exactly seven performances. In addition to appearing on the stage, I've
played leading roles in about twenty television dramas, including
"Moony's Kid Don't Cry" and "Body and Soul-." I would like to be
able to say that television is good training for an actor, but I don't
believe it. It doesn't offer an actor enough opportunity to develop.
I accept television roles, however, because it's necessary for an actor
to keep acting just as any man has to keep working. When I was
offered the role of Lieutenant Manion, the moody young Army officer,
in the movie "Anatomy of a Murder," I had many doubts. I walked
the streets wondering whether to accept it. The role would be too
easy for me, I felt. Like television, it wouldn't give me enough to do,
enough to solve, I finally decided to accept it, because I thought it was
important for me to be in a successful movie. This one had all the
elements of a smash, including Otto Preminger, a popular producer-
director, and the big box-office name of James Stewart, and that's what
it turned out to be. But its success didn't affect me in any way, because
I didn't have enough of the responsibility for carrying the movie. As
the star of the show, James Stewart had that responsibility. He is a
bankable star, and was counted on to bring in the dollars at the box
office, and he did. I had nothing to do with it.

Nothing is pleasanter than doing something successful. But success-
ful acting isn't necessarily good acting. An actor needs success in order
to get opportunities to be good, so he concentrates on achieving
success, and in the process he may lose whatever it is that has made him
good. In the movies, if an actor's success comes when he is just starting,
he is in danger of becoming a business expert and a tax expert. If his
devotion is to how much his last movie has grossed, he is in danger of

349

THE PLAYER: BEN GAZZARA

stopping, and never, developing as an actor. Instead, he may just
repeat what won him attention the first time. He loses the desire
and the patience and the will to work at his craft, so he ceases
to grow as an actor. I feel I'm a much better actor now than I was a
few years ago; I find that the more I do, the more colors I can use.
When I started, I was locked up, in many areas. I came out rebellious
and hostile, which was the way / was. Then I found other colors:
humor, romantic feelings, and what I call my middle human
register. I take parts wherever they are. Right after making "Anatomy
of a Murder/' in 1959, I went to Coral Gables, Florida, and played
in "Two for the Seesaw" for two weeks in stock. The following summer,
I played the title role in "Epitaph for George Dillon/' by John
Osborne and Anthony Creighton, all over the summer circuit the
Cape, Westport, Ogunquit continuing to explore the part in each
performance. I feel freer now more my own master. Even movies are
changing; one can be more selective, and one doesn't have to live in
Hollywood. I've made only one movie, "Reprieve," in Hollywood. In
the summer of 1960, I went to Italy to make "The Passionate Thief/'
with Anna Magnani and Toto. I played a professional thief who tried
to pick the pocket of a rich man on New Year's Eve. Magnani and
Toto kept getting in my way and preventing the theft. It was a diver-
tissement after all the heavy roles I had been playing. My next movie
"The Young Doctors" was made in New York in 1961. I played a
young doctor, upstanding and idealistic, in conflict with an older
doctor, played by Fredric March. I loved that story. It had a mellow
tone, and the conflicts the young doctor underwent were external, for
a change, rather than internal.

I married Janice Rule in November, 1961, and we live in a seven-
room apartment on Riverside Drive. When I'm not at home and not
in the theatre, I like to spend time at P. J. Clarke's bar, nursing a
beer. I feel happy when the place gets crowded.

350

JANICE RULE

When Fm onstage, I usually just want to be quiet,
but the audience gets me going. I know the audience
is expecting something from me, so I try to live up to
it.

I was born on August 15, 1931, in Cincinnati, the fourth of six chil-
dren. My father, John C. Rule, is a dealer in industrial diamonds, and
now lives, with my mother, in Vallejo, California. My parents have al-
ways moved restlessly from one place to another. When I was about
eight, we moved to a suburb of Chicago called Glen Ellyn. We lived in
a white frame house on a quiet street at the edge of town. I shared a
room with my sister Kathy, who is one year older than I am. Now
she is married, has three children, and lives in Pasadena, California.
My sister Anne, two years older than I am, is also married, also has
three children, and also lives in Pasadena. My sister Emily, four years
younger than I am, is one of twins and is married to Denis Sanders, a
movie director in Hollywood, and has two children not twins. Her
twin, Ralph, lives in Seattle and works for a pharmaceutical company.
Charles, three years older than I am, and the eldest of us, is married,
has one child, and lives in New York except when he is singing in the
chorus of touring musicals. He often sings in the choruses of Broadway

351

THE PLAYER: JANICE RULE

shows. I was always closer to him than to anybody else in the family.
He wanted to become an opera singer, and he taught me to love music.
I was raised as Catholic, and as a child I sometimes thought about be-
coming a nun.

All four of my grandparents lived in Springfield, Missouri, where
my parents were born, and when I was a child, I used to visit them
every summer. These visits were the happiest time of my life. My
parents were never enthusiastic about my becoming an actress. When
I was ten, I was more interested in ballet than in anything else in the
world. At home, I was forever dancing to records of Strauss waltzes
the only classical, or semi-classical, records we ever had. I went to the
movies every Sunday, but I wasn't crazy about them. The only one I
went to see more than once was "The Great Waltz/' with Luise
Rainer; I liked it because it had Johann Strauss music I knew. I was
always up on my toes, and my parents liked showing me off to the
neighbors. I kept asking to take lessons, and finally, that year when I
was ten, started in at a school in Glen Ellyn. It was held in a kind of
loft, about eighty feet by forty, and was run by Mme. Sonya Dobro-
vinskaya, who now teaches in New York, and comes to my opening
nights. I took an hour-and-a-half lesson every night, and practiced by
myself for half an hour, and also spent about an hour helping teach
the younger children. I kept that up for four years. Saturdays, I'd take
lessons all day. Mme. Dobrovinskaya used to watch over me like a
mother. I always wanted to be like Melissa Hayden, but I was never
strong. It was always a great struggle for me to maintain my strength.
In my senior year of high school, in Chicago, I studied ballet four hours
a day and practiced in between lessons. At first, my paternal grand-
father paid for the lessons. My father thought that ballet was frivolous
but all right for a girl. My grandfather died when I was fourteen, and
then my mother managed to pay for the lessons out of our grocery
budget. My brother Charles used to take me to see ballet in Chicago.
He'd keep track of everything coming to Chicago on tour, and we'd
always be first in line to see Alexandra Danilova or Alicia Markova.
Mme. Dobrovinskaya's daughter was dancing in the biggest night club
in Chicago, the Chez Paree, and when I was fifteen I got a job dancing
there, too. I worked there for several months, at a salary of about fifty
dollars a week. I'd get home at three o'clock in the morning. Danny
Thomas was playing the club at the same time, and after the late

352

JANICE RULE

Saturday-night.,.show we'd go to Mass together. He used to tell me I
ought to get out of the night club and go to college. He said he'd send
me himself, because the Chez Paree was all wrong for me. But I told
him that I wanted to be a dancer and would do anything to stay in
dancing. Actually, I hated night-club work. I would come out to do my
special toe dance, and the people would take one bored look at me
and then turn their backs and start eating and drinking and talking.
One night, Monte Proser, one of the producers of the musical "High
Button Shoes," came to the Chez Paree and saw me. He offered me a job
as a dancer in the chorus of the road company of the show, then in
Chicago, and I grabbed it. My salary went up to seventy-five dollars a
week, but it wasn't the money thaj: was the important thing. It was
being in a musical show, which meant being in a real theatre, with
an audience that had come there for the purpose of seeing the show.
The company starred Jack Whiting, Audrey Meadows, and Ellen
Hanley, and my brother Charles got a job with the company as a singer.
After I'd been in the show for a few weeks, Charles took me to see my
first play, "A Streetcar Named Desire/' with Uta Hagen and Anthony
Quinn, at a matinee on r day when we weren't performing in "High
Button Shoes." We were both floored by it. It was pretty hard to go
back to "High Button Shoes" after that. Shortly afterward, we went to
see "Medea," with Judith Anderson, and that was pretty powerful, too.
But though I was impressed, I didn't think in terms of doing that
kind of thing myself.

Around that time, my parents moved to Antioch, Illinois, so I
moved in with a family in Chicago whose daughter I'd known in ballet
school. At the same time, I enrolled for my senior year in a professional
children's high school a high school for working children. When I'd
been in "High- Button Shoes" for four or five months, the company
moved on to Philadelphia, and Charles and I went with it. With my
earnings, I bought my first fur coat, a mink-dyed muskrat. We were
with the show for four weeks in Philadelphia, and then it closed. Im-
mediately after the last performance, Charles and I took a late train
for New York. That was where we both wanted to be where we
wanted to study. I'd been dreaming of studying at George Balanchine's
School of American Ballet. I moved into a small room in a small hotel
on West Forty-sixth Street and started taking lessons at the School
of American Ballet. I was quickly disappointed. It was rigid and cold,

353

THE PLAYER: JANICE RULE

with eight or ten teachers, none of whom took any special interest in
me. In Glen Ellyn, I had thought of myself as the belle of the school;
here everything seemed to be mechanical, and there was no flexibility
in the teaching. It was exciting to be in New York, but the excitement
was all bottled up inside me; I was wholly involved with myself and
what I was doing. The only person in the city I knew besides my
brother was Jerome Robbins, the choreographer of "High Button
Shoes/' whom I had met right after I came to New York, through
Monte Proser. I looked him up, and he told me he was planning
to do the choreography for another musical, Robert E. Sherwood's and
Irving Berlin's "Miss Liberty," and promised to give me a job dancing
in it. He suggested that in the meantime I try out for the Copacabana
line, and recommended me to the club's dance director. I was hired
one of eight dancers in the line. I was there for about two months,
appearing in production numbers. I'd come out in a scanty costume
and a very ornate hat, and sort of flow about the stage. You had to
know something about dancing in order to do it, but it wasn't danc-
ing. After that, I went into rehearsals for "Miss Liberty." One night
during the Philadelphia tryout of the show, in a dance number in
which I was lifted by three other dancers, one dancer was late in setting
me down, and I broke my ankle. I had my ankle in a cast for three
weeks and was out of the show for six. I became very restless, and felt
I had to do something. A friend suggested that I use the time to study
acting with a teacher named William Hanson, who gave lessons in his
apartment. I still hadn't thought much about acting. In those days, it
seemed sort of immoral to me to be glamorous. Compared to ballet,
acting seemed highly undisciplined and very frivolous, I kept on with
the lessons just to be doing something. When my ankle was better and
I rejoined the show, I continued to study acting. I wasn't exactly in-
spired, but I wanted to be prepared to try it if the dancing didn't work
out. After seven months in "Miss Liberty," I became a member of the
chorus of the musical show "Great to Be Alive!" and was also under-
study to Bambi Linn. A little later, I was offered a seven-year movie
contract, with options, with Warner Brothers. I had been making
seventy-five dollars a week in the chorus, and under my Hollywood
contract I started making five hundred dollars a week. It was as simple
as that.

I arrived in Hollywood one morning in the fall of 1950, and my

354

JANICE RULE

agent met me at the airport. That afternoon, he took me over to the
lot and introduced me to two of the Warner brothers and to other
executives and some of the writers. We got off to a friendly start. I
moved into a one-room apartment in Burbank, right near the studio,
and then I reported for work on my first movie, "Goodbye, My
Fancy/' in which I played a college student, the young daughter of a
college president, played by Robert Young. A congresswoman,
played by Joan Crawford, returns to the college, her Alma Mater, to
get an honorary degree and renew her acquaintance with Robert
Young. That first day, I began to feel uneasy. It suddenly occurred to
me that I had never acted before. The director, Vincent Sherman,
asked me to start crying. Well, I had never cried in front of anyone in
my entire life. It was part of my upbringing not to do a thing like that.
The director kept saying, "Start crying, start crying/' and I couldn't.
I kept saying, "I can't do it." It went on this way for a while, and sud-
denly I did start crying. The director said, "That's it, that's what I
want. Let's shoot it." That's the way I became an actress. When the
movie was finished and I saw it, I thought I came out looking terrible.
When I first arrived in Hollywood, everybody said about me, "She's
pretty, but can she actT After the picture came out, everyone said,
"She looks terrible, but she can act." I now adore seeing movies, but
I've never been in a good one myself or felt I did anything good in the
ones I have been in.

I appeared in "Starlift" for Warner Brothers, then broke my con-
tract and signed with M-G-M, for which I made "Holiday for Sinners,"
with Gig Young and Keenan Wynn, and "Rogue's March," with Peter
Lawford. On the whole, I found that life in Hollywood was deadly
boring. Everyone in the community was involved in the motion-
picture industry. No matter how a conversation started out, it eventu-
ally got around to the subject of picture grosses. The only good thing
about my life in Hollywood was a little-theatre group I heard about,
headed by Arthur Kennedy. I went around there, and started studying
with Michael Chekhov, the actor and teacher. Everything I learned was
elementary how to attack a scene, and things like that but it all
deepened my interest in and respect for acting as a profession. In 1952,
on vacation from the studio, I came to New York, and was sent by an
agent to see Richard Rodgers, who was getting ready to start rehearsals
for his musical "Me and Juliet." I told him that I was hung up in

THE PLAYER: JANICE RULE

Hollywood, that it was disastrous for a young person, that I'd gone
out there not really wanting to go, and that I was miserable there.
Rodgers talked to one of the Metro executives and got the studio to
let me break my contract. I felt as though I'd been freed from jail.
Rodgers hoped I might work out in a part in "Me and Juliet/' He sent
me to a voice teacher, and I tried to work on my singing, but I didn't
think I was making much progress. Then Rodgers sent me over to
meet Joshua Logan, who was holding readings for "Picnic/' by Wil-
liam Inge, which he was producing with the Theatre Guild and
was scheduled to direct. I didn't know anything about anything in
those days. I had no Broadway show-business friends, except for
Jerome Robbins and Rodgers, who has always been very kind and
fatherly to young people. Logan gave me the script of the play and I
looked it over that night, and the next afternoon I read for the part of
Madge Owens before Logan, Inge, and some Theatre Guild people.
That same day, Logan told me the part was mine. Then he told me that
before I read for him, he hadn't planned to go ahead with the play,
because he couldn't find the actress to play the part, but that after I'd
read he could "see" the character of the girl. Then Kim Stanley came on
and read for the part of Millie Owens, the kid sister, who was supposed
to be fourteen. I'd never seen her before. She came on looking much
too old for the part she was almost twenty-eight but after one read-
ing I knew she was perfect. We hit it off from the very start. I felt her
strength.

I didn't really like "Picnic" after the first reading, yet something
about it attracted me. There was something Inge was saying about
pretty girls that hit home. It was that most people treat pretty girls
as pretty girls and nothing else as though nothing could be wrong if
a girl was pretty, so she had no right to be miserable. The play ran
for four hundred and seventy-seven performances, and I was with it
almost all the way. Every day, it seemed, gave me some further revela-
tion about acting. At that time, I was a beginner. Today I can think
of things I did in the play that I had to work so hard for then, and I
realize that they'd be easy for me now. There was a kind of frantic
grabbing at anything at some memory of something, perhaps that
might give me the feeling I needed for the part. Now I know how to
build a part in a more stable way. I discovered that acting enabled me
to do things that I could never do through dancing. Acting gave me

356

JANICE RULE

an opportunity to develop empathy. I was and still am inarticulate
in my real life. A pretended life, I discovered, could be much deeper
than a real life. I really began to live in my acting. There -was a long
stretch in the run of "Picnic" when I played the whole thing off Kim
Stanley. She was the first person I'd ever acted with who made me feel
that acting was a dignified profession. I began to respect what I was
doing. After the play had been running for a few months, most of the
actors in the cast had gone pretty dead, but not Kim. She's a very alive
person on the stage. You know she's alive to whatever you do.
Acting with Kim is like going into a room full of people and finding
one person you have a feeling of rapport with. At one point in the play,
I said to Peggy Conklin, who played my mother, "It's not enough to be
pretty." It was hard for an audience to sympathize with a girl whose
only problem was that she was the prettiest girl in town. I felt that
the audience wasn't with me. But Kim and I believed that these two
sisters were very vulnerable to each other. Kim helped me to develop
in a rounded fashion what the two sisters felt for each other. Just in
chatting with her about the characters, I began to understand what
the sisters might have been like off the stage. We worked out what kind
of things they would have liked and disliked, and what would have
amused them. Kim's lines were right for her. Every time she spoke to
me onstage, the audience would laugh at me derisively. I felt in the
beginning that the character I played was being hurt by her gibes. I
wanted the audience to feel sympathy for me, and like me, so I drew
on things inside myself to make it seem that the older sister felt in-
ferior in some way but was inarticulate was hurt by the younger sister
but was unable to defend herself. Kim was the only one in the whole
play who understood what I was trying to do, and she played along
with it. It made her part even better. And after a while the audience
stopped laughing at me.

When "Picnic" closed, in 1954, I felt somewhat lost. I went up to
Maine for a rest, but I couldn't stand the quiet. I couldn't unwind
that quickly, and had to come down to Boston. My next play was "The
Flowering Peach," by Clifford Odets, based on the story of Noah's Ark,
in which I played Rachael. After that, I was in "The Carefree Tree/'
a Chinese play about peace, by Aldyth Morris, at the Phoenix Theatre.
It was a flop, but I thought it was very sweet. Then I went down to
Acapulco and made a film, "A Woman's Devotion," with Ralph

357

THE PLAYER: JANICE RULE

Meeker, for Republic, and not long after that I made another film,
"Gun for a Coward," with Fred MacMurray. I read a lot of plays,
and in the summer of 1957 I played the leads in "Bus Stop" and "On-
dine" at the Olney Theatre, in Olney, Maryland. Following that, I
did a great deal of television one show after another. Late in 1958,
I appeared on Broadway in Michael V. Gazzo's "The Night Circus/'
with Ben Gazzara, whom I married in 1961. I have two small daugh-
ters Kate and Elizabeth by a previous marriage, to the writer
Robert Thorn.

It gives me marvellous satisfaction to make an audience react to a
situation as if it were real. Then I feel wildly alive. And you have the
advantage of knowing that you can drop that life if you don't happen
to like it. What is most difficult for me is playing myself. When a
director says to me, "You are everything this character is, just be your-
self," and I try to do it, I feel I'm exposing every part of myself. Some-
times I find myself thinking how wonderful it would be to be a sales-
girl and have the peace of knowing exactly what you would be doing
day after day. Actually, though, being a salesgirl would be deadly for
me. What really interests me is the essence of life, rather than life
itself. I would rather live at a heightened level than have to live the
dull, commonplace life of the average person, and onstage I can do
just that.

358

FREDRIC MARCH

I do the things the guy who wrote the play has written.
A writer should write. An actor should act

I was born on August 31, 1897, in Racine, Wisconsin. My father was
in the wholesale hardware business, and he was a very devout
Presbyterian Church elder. My mother, whose maiden name was
Marcher, was a schoolteacher. My real name is Frederick Mclntyre
BickeL I was the youngest of three brothers; one of my brothers
is now dead, and the other, John M. Bickel, is a retired vice-
president of the Carrier Air Conditioning Company. Jack gives won-
derful talks before Rotary Clubs something I could never do. My
father used to tell us stories when we were little boys, and he played
a marvellous Santa Claus at church socials. The very first time I ap-
peared on a stage was when I was eight and played a little page in a
church festival. After that, I gave poetry recitations at church and in
grade school. For some reason, I favored a poem called "Poor Little
Mose." I went in for oratory at my high school in Racine, and won
the Wisconsin State Oratorical Contest in 1915 with, God help me,
a speech by Henry Grattan. When I was about ten, my father took me
and my brothers to see Maude Adams in "Peter Pan" when the touring
company came to Racine. Also, I always used my dimes to go to see

359

THE PLAYER: FREDRIC MARCH

stock-company productions and vaudeville shows with other kids. I
saw plays like "Wedded but No Wife" and "My Partner." I had a
natural desire to get up and be seen and to show off, but I never
thought of myself at that time as a potential actor. However, in 1916,
when I went to the University of Wisconsin, where I majored in com-
jnerce, I began to take part in amateur theatricals. I spent a couple of
summers working in the Manufacturers Trust Bank in Racine, in-
tending to become a full-fledged banker someday.

In the spring of 1918, I left college to join the Army. After a three-
month training course, I was commissioned a lieutenant in the artil-
lery, and for the last few months of the First World War I was stationed
at Fort Sill, where I taught equestrianism. After nine 01 ten months
of service, I returned to the university, and I graduated in 1920. In
the summer of 1919, 1 had worked for the National City Bank in New
York. Then, in 1920, I was sent to take a one-year training course,
with about thirty-five other guys, for the National City Bank's program
of foreign banking. I lived in a rooming house in Brooklyn run by a
sweet old landlady, an ex-vaudeville actress, who was nutty about ac-
tors and was always talking about acting. She said I should become an
actor. Before the training course was two months old, I had an
emergency appendicitis operation. I went under the ether thinking that
I wanted to go on the stage. When I came out of the hospital, I asked
the bank for a year's leave of absence, notified my family of what I was
going to try to do, and started making the rounds of casting offices. I
still go to the annual picnics held by my old bank pals at the Sleepy
Hollow Country Club, in Tarrytown, New York. The big joke every
year is "When is Bickel coming back?" At any rate, as an aspiring ac-
tor, I beat the pavements, posed as a model for Charles Dana Gibson,
Neysa McMein, and others, and worked as an extra in a movie, called
"Pay the Piper," with Dorothy Dickson, that was being made in
Astoria. I also found an agent. Then I played for one day in the movie
"The Great Adventure," with Lionel Barrymore, again as an extra,
for seven dollars and fifty cents, seventy-five cents of which, of course,
went to my agent. I then took lessons with Mme. Eva Alberti, a great
teacher of acting, who had taught at the American Academy of Dra-
matic Arts. She'd make me do life studies imitations of people I'd
seen in subways, for example and she called me "son." She'd say to
me, "The world is your workshop, son." Everything she told me came

360

FREDRIC MARCH

as a revelation. She once told me, "Son, if you don't come off the stage
feeling you want to go right back on again and do it better, there's
something wrong."

I made my first professional appearance, as Fred Bickel, in Decem-
ber of 1920, playing the two-line part of the Prompter in the David
Belasco production of Granville Barker's adaptation of Sacha Guitry's
"Deburau." I also understudied the juvenile lead, which I got to play
for one week. Then, as Frederick Bickel, I played a good part, in "The
Law Breaker/' by Jules Eckert Goodman. In 1922, I went to Dayton,
Ohio, for a season of stock twenty-two weeks, and a different play
each week. I didn't know hdw to relax when I acted in those days, but
even so acting wasn't difficult for me, because I was playing young
men my own age. I have found out since that relaxation is the prime
requisite for acting. In those early days, I'd lock myself in my bed-
room and read my lines, getting the feeling and outlining the feeling
for myself. I'd been pretty good at memorizing ever since I was a kid.
And I suppose I did just naturally a lot of what the Method people
talk about so much today digging into your own past for clues to char-
acterization. In 1924, when I was appearing in Chicago and through-
out the Midwest in a play called "Tarnish," with Patricia Collinge, I
changed my name, because I found out there was a pretty well-known
German comedian named Bickel.

In 1926, I met the actress Florence Eldridge, who had just played
Daisy Fay in "The Great Gatsby," and we were married the follow-
ing year. In 1927 and 1928, as a general-utility actor, I toured for the
Theatre Guild, playing supporting and minor roles in "Arms and the
Man," "The Guardsman," "Mr. Pirn Passes By," and "The Silver
Cord." I was doing what I wanted to do. One of my first big leads on
the West Coast was the role of Anthony Cavendish the John Barry-
more character in "The Royal Family," both on the stage and in the
movie, which was called "The Royal Family of Broadway." The ex-
perience was a tremendous one for me, and the effect on me of the
character I played was very powerful. For a while, it was hard to break
away from it. While I was in the play, my wife used to tell me I was be-
ing John Barrymore around the house. Ordinarily, the character
doesn't really take you over. When the curtain comes down on a play,
that's it.

There's so much mumbo-jumbo about acting. Spencer Tracy, one of

361

THE PLAYER: FREDRIC MARCH

the finest actors of our time, once told me, "I just learn my lines."
Laurette Taylor really explained the way it is for actresses when she
told me, "I just pretend." Little girls, particularly, know what it's all
about. They do Method acting naturally. Some of the best actors are
the ones who aren't too crazy about it. Jack and Lionel Barrymore
didn't like it. They used to say they didn't respect it. Lionel did etch-
ing and composing, and Jack was originally a caricaturist, and they en-
joyed doing those things more than acting. Lionel used to tell me,
"All you do is listen to the other fella and then you answer him." An-
other time, he told me, "You sit on a hot stove, you burn your behind,
you jump up." The Barrymores didn't think about it too much. They
just did it. Another one like that is Spencer. I'm nuts about Spencer.
Working with him in anything is always a real joy. I think I'm a ham
who likes to act in whatever there's a chance to act in. Live television
is the hardest acting to do. Tape is less frightening. I don't have too
many years left in my life, and I like to travel, and I'd rather do a
picture and get it over with than do a play. From November, 1956, to
March, 1958, my wife and I played in Eugene O'Neill's "Long Day's
Journey Into Night," and that was too long. I've made close to seventy
pictures, beginning with "The Dummy," in 1929, and including "Jeal-
ousy," "Footlights and Fools," "Ladies Love Brutes," "Paramount on
Parade," "True to the Navy," "Manslaughter," "Dr. Jekyll and Mr.
Hyde," "The Marriage Playground," "Smilin' Through," "The Sign
of the Cross," "The Eagle and the Hawk," "Design for Living," "Death
Takes a Holiday," "The Barretts of Wimpole Street," "Les Mise-
rables," "Anna Karenina," "Anthony Adverse," "A Star Is Born,"
"Nothing Sacred," "The Buccaneer," "Susan and God," "Bedtime
Story," "The Best Years of Our Lives," "Death of a Salesman," "Execu-
tive Suite," "Alexander the Great," "The Man in the Gray Flannel
Suit," "Middle of the Night," "Inherit the Wind," and "The Young
Doctors." I never watch my own movies on television. I don't like to
stay up late, for one thing, and, for another, I'd find it depressing. I
learned about the importance of relaxation when I started making
pictures. The director of "The Marriage Playground," Lothar
Mendes, was the first person to mention it to me. He said, "Freddie,
when I say 'Camera/ all it means is relax." When you are watching a
play, the actor on the stage you go along with is the one who's most
relaxed. Some of us older actors are very much inclined to tense up.

362

FREDRIC MARCH

Younger actors, the ones devoted to the Method, have the ability to
relax. It's a terribly important element.

What I enjoy is working on a scene until I finally get it right. It's
fun to know you're hitting it. There are advantages in being in a
long run. You should see plays after they've been around for a while if
you want to see the best performances. It's the relaxation again. The
actors are more relaxed in their parts. When I first consider a part, I
find myself judging the play as a whole. Simultaneously, I try to decide
whether I can play the part, whether it's dramatically interesting,
whether I feel I can make it make sense. It's a mistake, I think, to go
for parts, as some actors do, instead of for the play as a whole. I'll
never do a part in a play or a picture that makes me lose my self-
respect. Two of the best plays I've been in both with my wife are,
I feel, "Long Day's Journey Into Night" and Thornton Wilder's "The
Skin of Our Teeth," and the best movjes are "The Best Years of Our
Lives," "A Star Is Born," "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," and "Death
Takes a Holiday." In a way, though, I've liked everything I've been in.
I'm kind of a dimwit. I just like to act.

ANGELA LANSBURY

When Fm onstage, I often think, What the hell am
I doing here? I realize that I want to go home.

I was born on October 16, 1925, in London. My father, Edgar Lans-
bury, who was a lumber merchant, died when I was nine. My mother,
the actress Moyna MacGill, had earlier been married to Reginald
Denham, the actor and producer, and I have a stepsister, Isolde, four
years older than I am. We used to put on dances and imitations to-
gether for the family. My mother now lives in Hollywood and does
quite a bit of acting on television. She's a far more ambitious actress
than I am. She wanted me to become an actress, but she could never
by any stretch of the imagination be called a stage mother. Her best
period as an actress was in the early twenties, when she succeeded
Madge Titheradge as Desdemona to Basil Rathbone's lago in
"Othello," in London. She played Lady Brockhurst in Sandy Wilson's
"The Boy Friend" in the 1954 Broadway production. I have two
younger brothers identical twins. Edgar Lansbury, who lives in
Weston, Connecticut, has designed scenery for the stage and is now
producing an Off Broadway play. Bruce Lansbury lives in Hollywood
and is a production executive at C.B.S. and is writing a play. Both

364

ANGELA LANSBURY

are married and have children. One of my grandfathers, George Lans-
bury, was a famous politician of the twenties and thirties; he was
leader of the Labour Party the Opposition from 1931 to 1935. As a
child, I was taken to large political rallies. When my grandfather
spoke at the Albert Hall, I would stand, along with several thousand
other people, and sing "Jerusalem." It was awe-inspiring. As a little
girl, I thought I might become a politician. My grandfather was a
strong supporter of women's suffrage. One of the first bits of acting
I did, when I was seven or eight, was an imitation of what I thought
women's-suffrage leaders must be like, for the family. It started me
off on being a bit of a wag. I've always had an ear that picks up ac-
cents and speech mannerisms. I was a morose little girl at times. I was
very sensitive, very easily hurt, and I would cry when my mother left
me to go to the theatre. And I would retreat into make-believe. From
the time I was eight until I was twelve, I'd go for days pretending to
be other people. I was also terribly stubborn. And I'd do all sorts of
things just to make people laugh. I was born under the zodiacal sign
of Libra, and I'm a pure example of a Libran; I see both sides of
every question, unfortunately and fortunately, and I long to break
away from the course I'm forced to stay on, and light a few bonfires.
My mother has always had a wonderful spiritual quality sensitivity,
an understanding of people. When she is working, she has a sense of
well-being and accomplishment. Acting is a thing that she feels she
needs to do, and she can't understand my attitude. She works on scenes
from Shakespeare all by herself, for herself, whereas I am strictly
practical and won't lift a finger unless I get paid for it.

In 1935, when I was ten, we moved to Hampstead, on the outskirts of
London, and I attended the South Hampstead High School for Girls.
The headmistress, Muriel Potter, was the sister of Stephen Potter, and
Stephen Potter had been my father's best friend, which is how I hap-
pened to go there. Stephen Potter and my father had played cricket
together something Englishmen do on weekends. When the war
started, the schools were all moved out into the country, but I didn't
want to leave home and go to boarding school. I was a great homebody.
So Mother said, "Look, are you interested in studying acting?" I said,
"By all means, anything, but don't make me go to boarding school/* So
arrangements were made for me to continue my studies at home, with
a tutor, and to attend evening classes in diction, dancing, and sing-

365

THE PLAYER: ANGELA LANSBURY

ing. After six months, Mother said, "Look, if you're really in-
terested, you should be going to a proper dramatic school/' I loved
the idea. It seemed very glamorous to me. In 1940, I attended the
Webber-Douglas School of Singing and Dramatic Art, in Kensington,
on a scholarship my first part was as a lady in waiting in a school
production of "Mary of Scotland" until August, when things
got hot in the war. That was right after Dunkirk, and everything
looked black. We had no ties to keep us in England. Some distant
cousins in Brawley, California, were instrumental in getting us evacu-
ated to America. My mother and my small brothers and I came to
America late in the summer of 1940, sponsored in this country by
Charles T. Wilson, a Wall Street businessman, and his wife, with
whom we stayed for a while at their summer home on Lake Mahopac,
In New York.

In September of 1940, I enrolled in the Feagin School of Drama
and Radio, in Rockefeller Center, on a scholarship arranged by the
American Theatre Wing. I didn't know what the pickings were in
schools, and I didn't care. I lived from the fall of 1940 through the
spring of 1941 in an East Ninety-fourth Street town house with a
terribly kind family named Mr. and Mrs. George W. Perkins. I had
breakfast and dinner there and took sandwiches to school. I was fif-
teen and very grown up. English girls are, for the most part. By the
fall of 1941, we had moved to a one-room apartment on Morton
Street, in Greenwich Village, and the boys were going to the Choate
School; eventually they both attended U.C.L.A. In the spring of 1942,
Mother went off to tour Canada with Anna Neagle in a variety show
for the R.C.A.F. units training there. At the Feagin School, I became a
character actress. In Congreve's "The Way of the World," I played
Lady Wishfort, who is supposed to be sixty, which was starting off on
a weird foot. After that, I played a leading part Lady Windermere. I
never had any trouble making an ass of myself. I had a sort of come-
dienne thing about me. I was never the ingenue type luckily, since
there were too many girls who looked like ingenues. But I would
have been a character actress in any case. It was my bent from the be-
ginning. In comedy, you automatically lose your own identity. You
characterize away from yourself. In comedy, I am able to recognize the
humor in life and relate it to myself. It has something to do with my
having a sense of humor of my own. I tend to see the funny side of

566

ANGELA LANSBURY

things always. It interests me. Playing the mother in the movie "All
Fall Down," I had an opportunity to play a composite human being
to make you laugh and cry at the same time. To be funny, I've always
realized, one must be deadly serious.

One of the other students at the Feagin School, Arthur Bourbon,
who studied by day and danced at night, said to me one day, "Angie,
you ought to do an act/' He worked out an imitation of Beatrice
Lillie singing Noel Coward's "I Went to a Marvellous Party" for
me and then set up an audition for me with an agent, and in the
summer of 1942 I found myself in Montreal with a job in a night
club called the Samovar, at a salary of sixty dollars a week. I roomed
with a Yugoslavian singer known professionally as Blanca, who was
also on the bill. She is now married and has a couple of kids. She
was a wonderful, peasantlike girl, and she taught me a great deal
how to put on makeup, how to do my hair, how to dress. When I first
arrived, I stayed alone at a place called the Ford Hotel, where strange
men knocked on my door at night. Arthur Bourbon had told me to
stay there, because it was the cheapest place. I was very innocent, very
green indeed. When older men made advances, I didn't know what
they were doing. I moved to a rooming house. The night club was
always filled with R.C.A.F. men. It was a bit of home to them, to
see an English girl making a fool of herself. When I received my first
salary check, I sent most of it to my mother, who was still on tour.
The job lasted six weeks, and then I went back to New York, where
the twins had returned from a summer on Long Island. I packed
them up and sent them back to Choate. At the end of her tour,
Mother had gone to Los Angeles, and she wrote saying how much
cheaper it was to live about twenty-eight dollars a month for a one-
room apartment. (We had been paying forty-two dollars a month for
ours, in New York.) And the movies were there. So I joined her. We
went round to all the studios looking for jobs, but we didn't get
anything. At Christmastime, we both got jobs in Bullock's Wilshire,
the department store. Mother was in the toy department and I was
a wrapper. Mother soon got fired, because she spent too much time
playing with the toys. After the holidays, I was kept on, as a sales-
woman in cosmetics. They thought of training me to be a buyer, but
I was no good at mathematics. I could never figure the retail and
wholesale prices. In June, 1943, a struggling young actor I knew,

367

THE FLAYER: ANGELA LANSBURY

named Michael Dyne, who was being considered for the title part in
the M-G-M movie "The Picture of Dorian Gray," told me they were
looking for a young English girl for the cast. I got the afternoon off
from the store and went out to M-G-M and saw the casting director.
I was sent on to see George Cukor, who was going to direct "Gaslight/*
with Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer, and I was told I would be
tested for the part of the Cockney maid for that movie, instead.
Mother helped me prepare for the test, which I made during a week's
vacation from the store. First, I was given a costume from Character
Wardrobe, and then they took a lot of trouble with my hair and
makeup. They padded me out to make me look bigger. I did a scene
with an actor named Hugh Marlowe, in which Nancy, the maid, sort
of seduces the character later played by Charles Boyer. It was a scene
from the play that wasn't in the movie. I can't say I was frightened.
I was terribly interested in how it was all done. After the test, they
said I was too young. But Louis B. Mayer insisted that they put me
under contract. So I signed a seven-year contract, with options, with
M-G-M, at a salary of five hundred a week. I had been making twenty-
six a week in commissions at Bullock's. I called them up immediately
and quit, over the telephone. Then Cukor took me for the part of
Nancy after all.

It's strange, but I've never worked in England. I'm a pure product
of American movies. I celebrated my eighteenth birthday on the set
of "Gaslight." They had a lovely cake, and the stars were wonderfully
sweet to me. I thought, Well, this is making movies. I never felt I was
that rare-orchid kind of thing. With me it's always been a matter of
being ready to work at nine o'clock and achieving what I can. I
happened to see "Gaslight" not long ago on television. I was amazed.
I thought, My God, how did I have all that assurance? I have much
less assurance now. In those days, I suppose, I went ahead on trust.
There's always been joy, exuberance, and fun in movie acting, but I
have never been blinded by it. I had an opportunity to do all the
things that would have led me to the glamorous side of a screen career,
but I didn't seem to want that. At M-G-M, I came in at the end of
a very lush period. L. B. Mayer was always terribly nice to me. He
always seemed interested in how the family was getting along. He
wanted to put my brothers under contract, but Mother wouldn't have
it, and we both felt that it wouldn't be fair to do that to the boys.

368

ANGELA LANSBURY

I was always able to go and chat with L. B. Mayer mostly about the
family or about the movies. I suppose I was an enigma to him. When
Dore Schary became executive vice-president in charge of production
and studio operations, in 1948, I began to get lost in the shuffle. Any-
way, once I was settled in, I found being under contract terribly
confining. From 1943 to 1950, I made thirteen movies, including "If
Winter Comes," "State of the Union," and "Samson and Delilah/'
The year after "Gaslight/' I also did play in "The Picture of Dorian
Gray" as the young girl, Sibyl Vane, who is seduced by Dorian Gray.
It was a lovely part, sort of the antithesis of Nancy, the maid, who is a
bit of a heavy. I sang a song as Sibyl "The Little Yellow Bird" and
for some reason it has always been associated with me since.

I was married for the first time in 1945, to the late Richard
Cromwell, the actor. The marriage lasted nine months, and, thank
goodness, did a great deal for me. I learned the meaning of marriage
and a lot of other things, and I had a better idea of what it was all
about when I was married again, in 1949, to Peter Shaw, a William
Morris agent, who is now executive assistant to Robert Weitman and
Benjamin Thau at M-G-M. We live in Malibu, in a house overlooking
the sea, and have two children Anthony, born in 1952, and Deirdre,
bom in 1953. I also have a twenty-year-old stepson, David. In 1952,
when Anthony was six months old, I started doing a six-week season
of summer stock in the East, playing in "Remains to Be Seen," by
Howard Lindsay and Russel Grouse, and "Affairs of State," by Louis
Verneuil. Anthony slept all over the place. We trouped round together.
I did it because Peter and I were sort of struggling along, and one
could make a thousand dollars a week in summer stock. After that,
I did a lot of acting for television half-hour films based on W.
Somerset Maugham short stories and things of that sort. It paid awfully
well and didn't take me away from home. Actually, I prefer making
movies to acting on the stage, because it doesn't take so much out
of you. I like that. Stage demands are so stringent. You're thinking
about the part all the time. I hate the idea of having people see me
and think I'm not very good. I worry about it all night. The me-
chanics of it worry me, too whether I'm going to have a cold, and
so on. You've got to be absolutely up to pitch to play on the stage.
I have a great sense of responsibility about it. Maybe that's the reason
I can't enjoy it. It means pushing all the way.

369

THE PLAYER: ANGELA LANSBURY

I have a split life, and being an actress is a very small part of it.
My role as a mother always comes first with me, and the making of
a good life. That to me is Number One. I've always had to be shoved
into acting. Because I've never had the ego or whatever it is on my
own, my moves as an actress have not been brought about by me.
They've been the result of my being talked into it by producers, writ-
ers, agents, my mother, and my husband. I find myself wanting to stay
home all the time. Living the life of an actress has always been difficult
for me. If I feel I'm going to sacrifice the children to it in any way, I
don't want any part of it. Other actresses may make acting their whole
life; that's what they want, and they put wonderful labels on it. It's
never been that driving thing with me. My children have recently be-
gun to understand just what the hell Mother is doing. I'm not too com-
fortable about it. I hope my son doesn't want to do it, too. It's a
terribly unsatisfactory life for a man, when you think of a struggling
young actor with a wife and babies to support. I wouldn't wish that
on anybody. My daughter has an awful lot of the ingredients of an
actress in her mimicking, an awareness of the peculiarities of people
even though she's still shy and gauche, as little girls are. Acting on
the stage, as far as I'm concerned, is very hard work. I've always had
parts where I'm screaming or talking my head off. But I've never felt
a compulsion to woo and hold an audience. Some actors say they
love to hold an audience in the palm of their hand then they
absolutely taste the nectar. For me, the compensations are different.
To have a chance to perform something well and be successful in it
is satisfying. Then, when you get a letter, as I do occasionally, from
someone in the audience, saying, "You gave me the greatest enjoy-
ment I've had in the theatre in five years" that is tremendous.

When David Merrick, the producer, sent me the play "A Taste of
Honey/' in 1960, I said no at first. I couldn't imagine how to arrange
it domestically. I didn't want to leave Malibu for New York in the
winter- I wanted to hole in, garden, cook, and just generally be at
home. Then I had a call from the director, who said what a wonderful
part it was the part of the girl's irresponsible mother. Then Merrick
came out. He's a very persuasive man, but I made very steep demands.
He met them. So then I had to do it, and I got terribly enthusiastic.
When I first read the play, I read it objectively, which is how I
ordinarily read a play for the first time. Then, almost immediately,

370

ANGELA LANSBURY

I put myself in the part. I'm a pretty good judge of my own
capabilities the things I'm best at. If the ingredients of a character
are totally understandable to me, if I know the character, if I know
people like the character, I know I can play it. I can work my-
self up. I agreed to do the play for only six months, however. I
moved Anthony and Deirdre to New York, and we sublet an apart-
ment on Fifth Avenue. Some nights, in playing a part onstage, I
can give the part more validity than I can on other nights. It's
pushing all the way, however, and especially when the audience has
mass ennui. Everything I do is the same in every performance. It's set.
But there are some nights when I have an extra impetus, especially
if I feel I'm ringing bells with the audience. If I give it that extra
push some night, it may not always mean it's a better performance.
I go on technique. You get it set and it goes along. If you try to do
too much, the more you do, and the more you try to win an audience,
the more it turns away. It works that way, somehow. You have to go
on technique. You can't live it night after night. Creative interpre-
tation counts for a great deal, but if you maintain that you can't say
a line until you feel it, to me that seems to be lack of discipline. Born
actors are like sponges. They go through life soaking up idiosyncrasies
and storing them up in themselves all the little bits and pieces of
what people are and what people do. When I act, it's completely apart
from me. It's like putting on a suit of clothes that doesn't belong to
me but fits me.

I like acting in movies better than on the stage, because you don't
have to keep on and on with it. I'm a traitor to the cause. I don't
indulge myself in the enjoyment of acting. I have a tremendous sense
of duty about the theatre. For instance, I have a strong sense of guilt
about being late. I become all professional as soon as I leave my home

as soon as I have my coat on and am on my way. I feel I have to be

early. And if I don't put the makeup on just right, I worry about it
all night. I have a great sense of responsibility. Maybe that's the
reason I can't enjoy it. Actors are accorded the open door. It's amazing
that this welcomeness has survived as long as it has, especially with
television and the constant exposure. I should think it would have
waned, but I find that the actor is still accepted by everyone every-
where. I have a tremendous urge to retreat from acting. But when
you're a woman and you're recognized as an actress, you feel that if

371

THE FLAYER: ANGELA LANSBURY

you give it up, you may lose your attractiveness for your husband, and
for your friends; you're afraid of replacing it with just being a house-
wife. My greatest gratification in acting, now that I'm older, is simply
that I get to play some fantastic parts. The key, I think, is that I seem
to ring a bell with women. They do understand the way I get at
them in my parts, and portray women not as famous stars portray
them but as women are. Movies are now beginning to take a
more realistic approach to life and its problems, and this is in
my favor. In the past the era of the thirties and forties women
were portrayed in a too narrowly defined way. There were no nuances
in a script. A woman was a woman; a mother was a mother; a femme
fa tale was a femme fat ale. The parts have more appeal for me now.
However, when it comes to stage parts I feel so often that it isn't
worth it all the necessary splitting up of the family, and being away
from my husband. When everybody pushes me to do it, I feel, Oh well,
all right. But I don't want to wait to be happy. I want to start being
happy now.

372

ANTHONY QUINN

On the stage, you have to find the truth, even if you
have to lose the audience.

I was born on April 21, 1916, in Chihuahua, Mexico. My father's father
came to Mexico from County Cork and was, according to my mother
who now lives in Los Angeles, is a social worker, and keeps half the Mex-
ican population of the city alive a blond and blue-eyed version of me.
My mother, who is an American, is also blond and blue-eyed. I have
a younger sister, Stella who is married to a screenwriter named Martin
H. Goldsmith. My father was tall six feet two, like me and adven-
turous and talented. He tried to work at everything bullfighting,
railroading, painting. Right after I was born, my father was con-
scripted in the Mexican revolution. Everything around us was blown
to hell. My mother took me and walked four hundred miles in seven
months to El Paso, to get away from the fighting and to look for my

373

THE PLAYER: ANTHONY QUINN

father, who was reported to be in the north. We stayed in El Paso
for two years, living in a shack near the river. My father found us in
El Paso. When I was four, we headed for California. At five, I was
working with my parents in the fields near San Jose, picking walnuts.
We lived in one migrant camp after another beautiful years for
me, in a way, because I remember how all the people used to sit
around campfires, playing guitars, singing, eating beans from a com-
mon kettle. It was all quite wonderful. Then we moved to Los An-
geles, where my father got a job taking care of the animals at the zoo
on the lot of the Selig Polyscope Company. Our first home in the
city was a one-room shack near the railroad tracks a horrible, mar-
vellous room, with a piano box for our dining room. My grandmother
my father's mother, who was a Mexican and who lived with us
and I slept next to a wood stove. My father was embarrassed about
the poverty and dreariness around us. He painted colorful pictures on
our windows to make the scene look better. My father had no fear.
One of the animals he took care of was a panther that I fell in love
with and who was in love with me. I'd go to the zoo and stare at her
for hours. Then my father got a job as a cameraman at Selig. He
worked with Rudolph Valentino and Ramon Novarro. As a kid, I
wanted to be a priest. Until I was twelve, I was a very pious young
boy. I believed in the Lord to the letter. When I was thirteen, my
grandmother got very sick, and Aimee Semple McPherson came to see
her and made her well. After that, I started preaching for Aimee Sem-
ple McPherson and playing the saxophone for her at meetings. When I
was twelve, my father died. We were so poor that I had to make the
cross for my father's grave. I became the man of the family. I quit gram-
mar school, and became foreman for the Camarillo Apricot Growers
Association until a truant officer found me and sent me to junior high
school for a year. Then I got a job as a foreman in a mattress factory.
My hands to this day show the marks of being chopped up by the
springs in the mattresses. I shined shoes and sold papers for extra
money. I had little education, and I thought I had three choices for
a career to become a gangster, a prizefighter, or an actor in the
silent movies. I was literally tongue-tied until I was nineteen.

When I was fourteen, my mother remarried. I couldn't accept
my stepfather. I went to live with my grandmother in Los Angeles.
When I was eighteen, I wanted to join a local drama group, but

374

ANTHONY QUINN

it wouldn't accept me, because o my speech impediment. I had
an operation to correct it, and paid for it on time over the next five
years. But I was a nervous kid. I was tall and scrawny. I always
looked old, even when I was a kid. I went in for boxing, and got five
dollars for a fight, and also got my nose broken. For a while, I even
worked as a janitor for my stepfather, who had a window-cleaning
business, and later I cleaned windows for him. Then, when I
was eighteen, I met a girl at a party, and when I met her mother,
the mother took me in hand. She educated me. She made me
read a book a week. To this day, because of the routine she made
me follow, I can't go to sleep until I've spent an hour reading some
book or other. This woman got me to listen to classical music, to
understand philosophy, to appreciate life. At night, I went to the little
drama group. They had accepted me after my operation but still
wouldn't let me talk, so I mostly played pantomime parts. Through a
friend, I got a small part in a movie called "Parole," with Alan
Baxter. When I told my grandmother I was in a movie, she said,
"You are going to be a great actor." She was pretty sick by then, but she
kept telling me she wasn't going to die until she had seen my movie.
I had to carry her into the Pantages Hollywood Theatre for the
opening, because she was too weak to walk. I was just a face in the
movie, but I got notices in reviews in Variety and the Hollywood
Reporter as "a face." My grandmother died a week later.

After that, nothing happened in my acting career for a while. With
the son of the woman who was educating me, I hopped a freight
train out of Los Angeles, and we went to Arizona and Colorado. I
spent six months working on ranches or as a dishwasher in restaurants.
While I was in Ensenada, just over the border in Mexico, I read
a notice in a newspaper saying that Cecil B. deMille, at Para-
mount, was looking for Indians to play in "The Plainsman," star-
ring Gary Cooper. I took the next freight back to Los Angeles,
shaved with Borax soap in a gas-station washroom, and applied for
a job as an Indian with deMille. He asked me if I was an Indian, and
I said yes, I was a Blackfoot. Being Mexican, I may actually be part
Indian. He asked me to say something in the language, and I made
up some gibberish, and he said I would have to learn to speak Chey-
enne. When he asked me, I told him that I rode well, although
I had never been on a horse in my life. He gave me the job and a

375

THE FLAYER: ANTHONY QUINN

four-page single-spaced monologue to learn, in what was supposed to
be a Cheyenne version of English. I got an allowance of ten dollars
a day, which I used for riding lessons. The monologue I learned for
that movie served me well for the next twenty years, in all kinds of
movies. I used the same accent for Chinese dialect, Hawaiian dialect,
and never got a single complaint. During the filming of "The
Plainsman," I objected to the way I was supposed to deliver this
monologue, as though I were addressing ten thousand Indians.
I spoke up and said I thought I should address my remarks to Gary
Cooper. The various assistants around deMille said he should fire me,
but he said, "The boy is right." He let me do the part the way I
thought it should be done, and he then tried to place me under
personal contract to him. I turned the offer down. I met my wife,
Katherine deMille, while I was making "The Buccaneer" with deMille.
When I first asked her for a date, I didn't know she was his daughter.
A few months later, we were married. I was twenty-one. We have four
children: Christina, who is studying business administration; Kathy,
who is in Germany with M.R.A.; Duncan, who thinks he wants to
act; and Valentina, the youngest, born in 1952, who is very musical.
At the time of my marriage, I was making two hundred and fifty
dollars a week, but I was terrified that I'd be dubbed deMille's son-
in-law. I didn't want to be at the same studio with him. I wanted
out. That led to a rupture between us.

The year before I was married, I lived off and on with John
Barrymore, who was sick at the time. He gave me the suit of armor
he had worn in "Richard III." He told me that I should be a stage
actor. I liked making movies, but the important thing for me was to
get away from Paramount. I was a very intense young man. I felt I
should try everything, do everything. So I broke my contract, went
over to Warner Brothers, and got a small part in "City for Conquest/*
with James Cagney and Arthur Kennedy. I began to go from studio
to studio. I have always been in the process of being discovered. That's
the way it was for rne then. I didn't mind playing Indians, but a lot
of the other parts I was in made me unhappy. I was frequently the
leading man's friend or a gangster. I didn't feel I was getting anywhere.
I played in a pirate picture with Tyrone Power, in "The Ox-Bow In-
cident," and in "Guadalcanal Diary/' Then I was in another Western.
I felt useless. I felt, Christ, nothing is happening to me. How long can

376

ANTHONY QUINN

I go on, being at one studio after another and not making it at any
studio? In 1946, the doors began to close. Then Sam Wanamaker asked
me to play in a Broadway production of "The Gentleman from
Athens," by Emmet Lavery. I grabbed it. In Boston, Elliot Norton,
the leading critic there, called me the greatest actor he had ever
seen. The play folded after seven performances in New York, and
I was stuck. But I had tasted the theatre. What with Norton's
review, I felt that all was not over. I had no money left. I was broke.
Then I was offered the part of Stanley Kowalski in the road-company
production of "A Streetcar Named Desire." I signed to play it in
Chicago for six months. I lived in a four-flight walkup behind a
stable. After the first six months, I felt I still hadn't made it on my
own, and I stayed in the play for another six months, and then,
because I felt I hadn't yet solved any of my problems, I stayed for
another six months after that. We brought the production to
the City Center, in New York, and got glowing notices. When I
returned to Hollywood, my salary was way down. I played in "The
Brave Bulls" for peanuts. Then I played in "Viva Zapata!" and felt,
for the first time in movies, that I was doing the kind of acting I
wanted. I still wasn't making much money, but I made a deal with
myself; I said, "The hell with it. From now on, I'm not going to be
just anybody." I won an Academy Award in 1952 as Best Supporting
Actor for my performance in "Viva Zapata!" I began to feel that
maybe it hadn't all been for nothing. I had an offer to make three
pictures in Italy with Dino De Laurentiis and Carlo Ponti. "La
Strada," in which I co-starred with the Italian actress Giulietta Masina
in 1954, was brought into the company by me. They produced it
reluctantly. I took an interest of twenty-five per cent in the picture
instead of a big salary. If I had kept my interest in that movie, which
made millions, I would be a rich man. However, my agent at the
time saw the movie and thought it would be a flop, so I sold my
interest in it for twelve thousand dollars. But things were starting to
happen to me. I made a lot of money playing the part of Paul
Gauguin in "Lust for Life," and I won another Academy Award for
it, and I made several other pictures that did well.

Then came another step in my life. Whether I was making
a lot of money or not, I felt I was in a rut. When I was offered
the part of Henry II in "Becket," with Laurence Olivier, on Broadway,

377

THE PLAYER: ANTHONY QUINN

I decided it was time to start a new phase of my life. Olivier is the
greatest actor in the world, and I had a chance to play with him.
I felt strongly that I had to come out from behind the tree. Playing
gangsters was always very painful to me. I was using only fifteen per
cent of myself in those parts. I was just renting my face out. Until
"Becket," "La Strada" had been my greatest single accomplishment.
But the theatre was a real challenge to me. The happiest period of
my entire life was when I was rehearsing for that play. After it
opened, I looked forward every night to going to work. I was very
excited by the thought that I was going to learn something new each
night. I've never felt so used in all my life. I have never been happy
unless I was using the greater part of myself, and this play gave me the
chance to do so. Oddly enough, it was my son Duncan, then fifteen,
who got me over the last hump and into the play. I was afraid that
more would be required of me than I would be able to deliver. Just
before the opening, I developed laryngitis and wanted to give up,
but Duncan told me, "You're going to have voice enough to do this
play, because this play means more to you than anything else you've
ever done/' Well, we opened and got rave notices.

In the theatre, you play to the audience. In moviemaking, the
director is your audience, and if he's pleased, you feel you've done
your job. In the theatre, you've got a whole new crowd out there
every night. You can become mesmerized by the feeling of acceptance
you get from them. You have to keep yourself in check. Sometimes you
have to step on a laugh, if you know it's a bad laugh you're getting.
Only the amateur actor looks to make himself feel good. The pro
takes his work seriously and has a constant awareness of the battle to
tell the truth. A bad actor feels good after a performance, but the pro
feels only the responsibility for finding the truth, no matter what. Some
actors say "How much of me is like this part?" and others say "How
much of me is not like this part?" I always try to see myself in the
part. You create your own propulsion for going onstage each
night. Olivier is a dedicated actor. His standards are extremely high.
He is a model of discipline. But I have to work differently from
the way he works. He finds the truth offstage and brings it with
him; I try to find the truth onstage. I'm searching for it; he's already
got it. The closest thing to acting is bullfighting or boxing. It's a
matter of adjusting to the other man's blows. You're so busy adjusting

378

ANTHONY QUINN

it's difficult to think of anything else. Your images control your
movements. It's a way of life the same all over the world. The
actor is an artist. He comments on life constantly. He's a true creator.
No one has more latitude to create than an actor. I can conjure up
all the images I want, with perfect freedom, and what are the words
until I say them? Before I go onstage, I experience the tremendous
thrill of knowing that I will feel love, hate, anger, and will transmit
them to the audience. My objective is now clear. What I want to do
is to create, to say what I have to say.

379

JASON ROBARDS, SR.

On the stage, actors have a rapport that is one of the
most precious things in their life. Other actors lean
toward you and look into your eyes and talk right into
your heart.

I was born on December 31, 1892, on a farm in Hillsdale, Michigan, a
town with a population of five thousand, about eighty miles southwest
of Detroit. I was the youngest of three children. My brother, Frank, Jr.,
who was seven years older than I was, died at the age of eighteen. My
sister, Rolla, who died recently, was always interested in painting,
sculpture, and the other arts. She married a bank teller, settled down
in Hillsdale, and then encouraged me to get out into the world. My
mother had taught school, and my father, who quit school after the
eighth grade, was self-educated and worked as a farmer and post-office
inspector. We had the usual Middle West hundred and forty-seven
acres, with corn, cows, and chickens. My father was a very voluble man,
always mixed up in politics, and, as a former strong Republican, he
shocked everybody by becoming Teddy Roosevelt's campaign manager
in Michigan for the Bull Moose Party in 1912. He was a natural
pantomimist. My mother could look out of a window and see him
standing way across a field talking to somebody, and from his gestures
she'd know exactly what he was talking about. She was a gentle,
sensitive person who couldn't ever stand a lull in conversation, she'd

380

JASON ROBARDS, SR.

get so embarrassed. When I was fifteen, we moved to Saginaw for a
couple of years, because my father had been transferred by the post
office. My mother's sister, who taught school in Saginaw, lived with a
family named Beach, whose son Louis, later a novelist, had written to
New York for the catalogue of the American Academy of Dramatic
Arts. I got to looking it over one day, and it set me thinking. I'd taken
part in some home-talent theatricals. I'd always been musical; I had
sung in our Episcopal Church choir as a soprano and could play al-
most anything by ear on the piano. When we moved back to Hillsdale,
I graduated from high school and then I took a job working for my
brother-in-law as a cost clerk, for a salary of nine dollars a week. At
night, I sang, for a dollar a night, in Hillsdale's nickelodeon, which
happened to cost ten cents. Accompanied by a piano, I sang songs il-
lustrated by colored slides. They were the most terrible things you
ever saw the fellow and the girl sitting on a bench with the big yellow
moon behind them. My son Jason and I have given many a wonderful
party at which I played the ukulele and sang. Those songs always put
Jason in stitches. Jason likes to have me sing the old tear-jerkers, like
"The Road to Yesterday," and "Dear Little Boy of Mine," and 'Tan-
sies Mean Thoughts and Thoughts Mean You." I'd sing twice a night,
and in between I'd watch a movie, like "Ramona," with Mary Pick-
ford, or "The Deerslayer/' with Wallace Reid. It was 1910 and 1911,
and if you were making fifteen dollars a week, the way I was, you
could save a lot of money. So I saved up, and, with some help
from my sister and brother-in-law, I went to New York in the
fall of 1911 to enroll in the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. It
was a pretty strange move for a boy from Hillsdale, Michigan. I lived
in a rooming house on West Fifty-seventh Street, which cost fourteen
dollars a week. My tuition was four hundred dollars for six months. It
was the greatest experience of my life. I learned all the basic things of
my craft, which is all a school can give you anyway. You can't teach
anybody to act. That's why I insisted, when my son Jason said he
wanted to be an actor, that he go to the Academy, too, and he did. My
classmates included Edward G. Robinson, William Powell, and Joseph
Schildkraut. The class ahead of ours had Guthrie McClintic.

We were all pretty green, but you immediately got the feeling at the
Academy that acting really is an art, that it's not a gay, flamboyant
life but a way of life and an art. Basically, all the good actors know

381

THE FLAYER: JASON ROBARDS, SR.

that. They have that as their belief. It's implanted in them. We had
classes in speech; diction; life study, which meant going out and look-
ing at people on the street and on the subway; dramatic reading; and
so on. We acted in plays directed by the late Charles Jehlinger, the
greatest of them all There's no doubt in my mind that acting is an
art, because it is handling the most vital thing in the world human
behavior. The writer sees something contained in his own mind and
puts it down and God bless him for it. The musician hears something
in his mind and puts it down. The painter sees something and puts it
down. What all these artists do is engraved somewhere. But acting is
a living thing. The actor creates a living human being not himself.
What you create as an actor isn't yourself any more than what a painter
creates. The painter is himself; he isn't Mona Lisa. The actor creates
something and brings it onto the stage. Then he carries it five steps
and it's gone, and he's himself again.

Everything you do on the stage has to come from your mind. As soon
as you start to do it, however, you begin to feel it. All of a sudden the
lines leap out, and you find a new meaning. Even after you've been
doing the same part for months, the lines jump out at you, and you're
always finding new and additional meanings in them. When you start
to build a character, you have to think it out: What is the author say-
ing? How does your character relate to the others? Then you start going
into very minute details, and suddenly there's a click. And you know
why. You can feel it. You get it from yourself, from your own soul,
and you get it from the other actors. It's never a routine. And always,
inside yourself, is the suspicion that you might be wrong. Any time an
actor thinks he's always right, he'd better examine himself. You have
a sense of behavior that tells you what to do, and you work with that,
together with a well-defined, well-thought-out point of view. At all
times, you're interdependent with the people you're acting with. Al-
ways, you have a deep respect for the audience. They came for enjoy-
ment, and you've got to give it to them. Some audiences are so sharp, so
wonderful, so inspiring, you work accordingly. They give you so much.

All I knew when I started going to the Academy was that I had to do
it. I had to act. My father, who just didn't want me to be an actor,
said he could get me an appointment to go to Annapolis, or was willing
to send me to the Michigan Agricultural College and give me his
farm. It was tough to turn that down, but I had to. Then my father

382

JASON ROBARDS, SR.

kept after me to become a lawyer. "That's acting, too, in a way/' he'd
say. Actors weren't held in great repute in the Middle West, But I
couldn't be turned away from what 1 felt 1 just had to do. After six
months at the Academy, my money ran out, and I couldn't continue,
so I got a job with a show on the road, understudying the lead in "The
Country Boy," by Edgar Selwyn. I was pretty bad. I'd had no actual ex-
perience. I still had ahead of me the things you sweat over for the
first few years, including appearing before an audience. We were ten
weeks out on the road, in Davenport, Iowa, when the leading man got
sick. I had got to the theatre early that night as I always still do,
because I like to adjust myself to the feeling of the part. When I was
asked if I could go on that night, I said sure. When you're nineteen,
as I was, you always say sure. So there I was, a leading man.

The next year, I toured again in the play, as the lead, up to the
Canadian Northwest. I was back in New York for one day, and was
offered the lead in the road tour of a comedy called "Excuse Me," by
Rupert Hughes. I played a young Army lieutenant, and it all took
place in a Pullman car on the Union Pacific. But I knew I needed more
experience, so I went into stock to get it. I was in a different play every
week. I played old men and young men, rich men and poor. I special-
ized in what might be called hands-in-the-pockets juveniles. I was mak-
ing fifty dollars a week, and acting in places like Lowell, Massachusetts,
and St. Louis, and Salt Lake City. I met my first wife, Maxine Glan-
ville, in Salt Lake, where she was visiting her brother. She was from
Portland, Oregon. We were married in 1914 and had two sons: Jason,
and Glenn, who is an electronic engineer with Western Electric and a
very solid citizen in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. I have a daughter,
Laurel, by my second wife, Agnes Lynch. Laurel works in a California
bank, is very beautiful, and doesn't care about acting. I sometimes
look at her with both wonder and regret.

My first Broadway play, in 1917, was "Turn to the Right," a light
comedy by Winchell Smith and John E. Hazzard, in which I played the
heavy, a rich man's son interested in making trouble for the poor
young hero. My salary had grown by then to seventy-five dollars a
week. Then I played a lead, the part of the prosecutor, in Winchell
Smith's and Frank Bacon's "LightninV In 1922, I played with Madge
Kennedy in Frank Craven's "Spite Corner," and in Chicago I played
Chico in Austin Strong's "Seventh Heaven," with Helen Menken. I

383

THE PLAYER: JASON ROBARDS, SR.

loved that play. It represented the growth of man, from sewer to sun-
light. When I came up those stairs to that little Helen Menken, with
her carroty hair, I could feel what it meant to the audience. The
play went to the West Coast from Chicago, and I went with it. I
didn't return to the Broadway theatre until thirty-five years later, to
play in Budd Schulberg's and Harvey Breit's "The Disenchanted," with
Jason, late in 1958. 1 had four studios bidding for me when I first went
out to Hollywood, and that, in those days, was enough to stop me from
coming back to New York. My first year in movies was disastrous. I
signed with Universal, because they offered me the most money seven
hundred and fifty dollars a week. Making movies was a new experience
for me. It was exciting and different. A lot of it meant working out-
doors, on location, and getting up at seven o'clock in the morning
and acting, a routine I wasn't used to. In those days, the hours weren't
regulated at all. They used to work you around the clock on weekends,
in what we called the "midnight follies." I made two movies, "Stella
Maris," with Mary Philbin, and the first of a series of Cohen-and-Kelly
movies, in which I played a Kelly, a young motorcycle officer. Each of
my movies took six or seven weeks to make. After that, for the
next thirty weeks, I was idle. In 1926, I was lent to Warner Brothers,
which put me under contract. I was in "The Third Degree," with
Dolores Costello, and in three of the early Rin Tin Tins. Then I
vegetated again. But I couldn't leave, because I was under contract,
and besides I needed money. By now I had a house in Beverly Hills,
a maid, two cars, a wife, and two children. Then talking pictures came
in. I had been filling in my time playing in local stage productions, and
there I was, right in front of them, an actor who could talk, so they
grabbed me. I started making one movie after another. I was in "The
Gamblers," with H. B. Warner; "On Trial," with Lois Wilson; "The
Isle of Lost Ships/' with Virginia Valli; D. W. Griffith's "Lincoln,"
with Walter Huston and Una Merkel, in which I played Lincoln's law
partner; "Paris," with Jack Buchanan and Irene Bordoni; and the
movie version of "Lightnin'," in which Joel McCrea played his first
big part, the prosecutor, my old role, while I played the heavy.

In 1959, after doing a play again on Broadway, I didn't like the idea
of going back to work in Hollywood television movies of the conveyor-
belt kind, but sometimes you have to go back to all those "Cimarron
City"s in order to live. I'll never forget what Jason said to me when I

384

JASON ROBARDS, SR.

I was going to be In that play with him. "This isn't any father-son
deal," he said. "We're two actors together, and we won't give an inch/'
Real life for an actor is in the living theatre. There is nothing that
compares with the living theatre. It's like telling a story and having
someone to listen to you. If there's no one in the room who cares what
you say, if your only audience is the cold camera eye, if you bobble a
line or slur a word and there's a mechanic to yell "Cut!" and you do it
over again, you feel more and more that something important is being
taken away from you. In the living theatre, you have the challenge
right there with you this is it, hot or cold, for better or worse, this is
it. The audience out there cares cares what you're doing, cares to hear
what you're saying, cares to respond to what is happening on the
stage. Why, in movies I've walked in at the start of a picture and not
even known the people I was playing with. The important things were
the lights, the dollies, the cold camera eye. The other actors had never
seen me before, and I had never seen them. We'd have that little em-
barrassed thing where we all said our names. Then we'd have a run-
through. Then the camera would shoot it. In less than a day, you pick
up your script, put on your makeup, get your wardrobe, and meet your
fellow-actors, and then the machine gets to work on you. In the old
days of quickies, I'd make a full-length feature picture in one week.
How does that compare with being in the theatre? With four or five
weeks of careful rehearsing, people looking into each other's eyes real,
living people? You're in a state of well-being. You can't find it in any
other way. Everything else is blotted out. It's plain joy. It keeps you
alive. Jason's elder boy, Jason III, is twelve and likes acting, too, and
has already been in grammar-school plays in New York. Jason and I
talk about getting up a play for the three of us to be in together.

385

MARGARET LEIGHTON

Trying to see other people from the point of view of
the character you play forces you to have a little per-
ception about the other people, which, ultimately, is
all that life is.

I was born on February 26, 1922, in Barnt Green, Worcestershire, Eng-
land, the eldest of three children. In Birmingham, which was nearby,
my father was then in the business of selling cotton to retailers, but in
his late fifties he got into steel, because the cotton shortage during
the Second World War made it necessary for him to set to and find an-
other means of making a living. In my childhood, when he was in cotton,
I used to go to his office and come home with a collection of little
samples of cloth. Today, my brother is in the steel business, and
lives in India. My sister is married to a businessman in England. I grew
up in a middle-class suburban neighborhood. I was a bored child. I
went to a school connected with the Church of England College in
Birmingham. In the holidays, I was taken to Church of England
Children's Special Service Mission meetings at the seaside, and by

386

MARGARET LEIGHTON

the time I was eight I had begun to sing at them. They were held on
the beach at Borth, in Wales, where my family rented a cottage each
summer. Theology students would come there for their holidays. They
were undergraduates, in their early twenties, but to me they seemed like
elderly gentlemen. We children would build a pulpit out of sand and
decorate it with shells and flowers. It was a rather jolly time. It was all
for a child's religious education reading the Bible and singing hymns.
I sang all the solo parts. It didn't occur to me that anyone else could
do it. I must have read the whole of the Bible by the time I was twelve.
From around that time, I never expected to do anything but go on the
stage. Before that, I had talked about becoming a lawyer. But I
couldn't imagine growing into the dull life of the Birmingham sub-
urbs. In 1938, when I was sixteen, I left school at the end of the sum-
mer term and joined the Birmingham Repertory Theatre. That Septem-
ber, I was given my first part Dorothy, the Cockney maid, in "Laugh
With Me/' by Adelaide Phillpotts. It was quite a good part, and I was
terribly frightened. I kept giggling nervously and acting rowdy during
rehearsals, and then I cried all through the first three weeks of the
play. In the part, I was supposed to laugh all the time, which is quite
a difficult thing to do, especially if you're terrified, but I managed to
get out a series of strangled wheezes. Anyway, I stuck it, and began to
learn something about the discipline of the theatre. I lived at home,
in our suburb. My family didn't take my ambitions very seriously.
When I first started, the idea of getting up and saying two lines in front
of an audience, or even in front of the other actors, nearly killed me.
It seemed entirely different from giving recitations. I'd try my lines out
at home, saying them in front of my mother, and that eased me into
it a bit. My mother became quite a devotee of the theatre. She used
to make my costumes and listen to me for hours at a time without ever
getting tired. I did all sorts of bits and pieces with the company, and
then, when I was nineteen, I played my first lead, the role of Lady
Babbie in "The Little Minister" the first time I really had responsi-
bility for a play. Acting was something I enjoyed. All this time, I was
living in a blissful vacuum. I didn't think about anything but acting.
I didn't know about anything else. I wasn't interested in anybody or
anything outside of the theatre. I found everything in losing what I
suppose I might call my own identity and becoming what I was in-
tended to become in the plays. That kind of bliss decreases with ex-

387

THE PLAYER: MARGARET LEIGHTON

perience and, indeed, it must, as you become better equipped and
grow more aware of the hazards. In those days, I wasn't aware of
audiences only of what / was doing. Today, if an audience is quiet
I know whether it's because everybody is asleep or is interested. You
can feel it, mostly. A quiet audience is either dead quiet, which means
that it's listening, or restless quiet, which means that it's not. To
act in the way one did as a child, disregarding the audience, would be
complete self-indulgence. One is there to satisfy, in whatever way one
can, the people who have paid for their tickets. But as a young actress
I was far more self-absorbed, as most young actors and actresses are,
than I think I am today. I had far less acute critical faculties.

I spent six years with the Birmingham Repertory Theatre. They
were good years, when almost everything I did was enjoyable. I had
offers after a while to go to London and appear in plays, but some un-
canny instinct told me not to accept them. It was probably the only
clever decision I've ever made in my life. I didn't have an agent in
those days. I wasn't interested in making more money. I lived at home,
for one thing, and, for another, my final salary was the top one, nine
pounds a week, which to me was untold wealth. Those years in reper-
tory were the only time I have ever fully lived for the theatre, as actors
are thought to do. When the war came along, I was allowed to stay in
the theatre, instead of being called up, as other women were. In my
sixth year at Birmingham, another instinct told me that it was time
to move on, before the audiences got tired of me. That is a thing
that is especially apt to happen in provincial repertory. It's something
like playing tennis. You're never going to improve if you play with the
same partner all the time.

Some friends advised me to go to London and see a man named
John Burrell, the chairman of the newly formed board of directors of
the Old Vic Theatre Company. I didn't really know anything much
about the Old Vic then. I did an audition for him, and he asked me if I
would book three seats at the Birmingham Rep for the next matinee.
The two other seats, it turned out, were for Laurence Olivier and Ralph
Richardson. It was 1944, all but the end of the war. Both Larry and
Ralph had been in the Fleet Air Arm, and they had decided to re-form
the Old Vic as a permanent company in London, using as many veter-
ans as possible. In May, 1941, the Old Vic's theatre, on Waterloo
Road, had been hit by a Nazi bomb. During the war, the Old Vic

388

MARGARET LEIGHTON

toured in England. What I didn't know at the time was that that sea-
son had been designed for Larry and Ralph. In the first season, Ralph
played the title roles in "Uncle Vanya" and "Peer Gynt/' and Larry
played Saranoff in "Arms and the Man" and the Duke of Gloucester
in "Richard III." When one was playing a leading part, the other took
a small one, just to appear in the same play; for instance, when
Ralph played Peer Gynt, Larry took the part of the Moulder of But-
tons. Another thing I didn't know at the time was that Burrell and
Larry and Ralph wanted to know how I would fit in with the rest of
the company. The other actress they were interested in and got that
year was Joyce Redman. At the Birmingham matinee, I was playing
the part of the daughter-prostitute in Pirandello's "Six Characters in
Search of an Author/' There was no sound from the audience during
the performance, no sound at all from in front. I thought, My God,
it's terrible, I'm terrible. I found out later that the Birmingham
audience had recognized Larry and Ralph, because both had played
there. It was an awfully small theatre, with a capacity of four hundred.
The audience was absolutely transfixed by the sight of Larry and
Ralph, and wasn't even watching me. Larry and Ralph came round
later with Burrell. We had tea, and they asked me to join them at the
Old Vic. I said I had one more play to do in Birmingham, and they
said they'd arrange to work around it. I was reasonably frightened at
their invitation.

I stayed at the Old Vic from June, 1944, to April, 1947, leaving to
appear in James Bridie's "A Sleeping Clergyman," with Robert Donat,
in June, 1947, in London. They were three extraordinary years.
Sybil Thorndike was in the company the first season, and I acted with
her in "Arms and the Man/* "Peer Gynt/' and "Richard III." She has
always been for me one of the most wonderful people in the theatre.
She's absolutely unique. She's completely tireless never too tired to
help other people, to talk with you when you want to talk. She's really
saintly. I used to sit in her dressing room between shows. She'd give
me some tea, and I always felt I could tell her anything. She's always
been most generous, particularly with younger actors. The theatre in
so many ways is slightly megalomaniacal the antithesis of Sybil.

My first appearance with the company was as Raina Petkoff in "Arms
and the Man," in which we opened in Manchester, and in which I
acted with both Larry and Ralph. Then we opened in London, and I

389

THE PLAYER: MARGARET LEIGHTON

made my debut there in "Peer Gynt." I played the Woman in Green,
the evil influence on Peer Gynt. It was a big, spectacular production,
directed by Tyrone Guthrie, with a lot of stylized dancing, and so on
a wonderful production, really. Acting with Larry and Ralph was
like starting all over. It made everything I'd done before seem like
reading telephone books. They were very kind to me. They didn't
grumble. I felt I was very unskilled. I was very shy pathologically
shy, actually. I'd never worked with London actors before, and I was
painfully unsophisticated. London was a world I was quite unused to.
I appeared in only one new play, "An Inspector Calls/' in addition to
classics like "Uncle Vanya." I loved, and still love, playing Chekhov.
It suits me. It suits the way I behave on the stage. Chekhov is tragi-
comic in a most subtle way and on a very civilized level. It's what ap-
peals to me more than anything else that combination of being very
moving and being very funny. When I was twenty-two, I played Yelena
in "Uncle Vanya," and, at twenty-eight, Masha, the unhappily married
sister, in "The Three Sisters." The part of Masha was my favorite of
all.

In looking back at the roles I've played, some of them seem to me
to have been insipid. All I knew at the time, though, was that I was act-
ing away for dear life. As soon as the role was over, I forgot it. Until
I was twenty-five, I did nothing but work. Then I got married, to Max
Reinhardt, a book publisher. I still went on acting. I still went on
working. I still had no friends outside the theatre. I went home with
the script, and that was all. When I was thirty, I looked back and felt
that I had had nothing at all. I was divorced six years after my mar-
riage. Around that time, I began to feel bored with the theatre. In
some ways, it was like a kind of strait jacket. I felt that especially when
I was playing Shaw. I would get into a certain role as it had been writ-
ten by Shaw written in a special way, so that there was only one
way of acting the part. That one way was right and any other way
was wrong. Roles like that don't give you much elasticity. Shaw writes
musically, as though for an orchestra. As an actor, you're simply one
musician in the orchestra, and, as such, you can't go off suddenly on
your own. You must play it the way it's orchestrated. It was something,
however, to discover that there was a correct way and an incorrect
way of playing a part in the light of what the author had intended.
And that, I must say, helped me become more workmanlike. I learned

390

MARGARET LEIGHTON

how to build a role into a solid structure based on the written words
in the play. But I missed having room to explore the character.

Acting is delicious in anticipation but more delicious in retrospect.
I don't always know if audiences like me. I worry about boring them.
I enjoy acting, but the special feeling of enjoyment that comes when
you get caught up in a part is rare. You're lucky if it happens once a
month. The moments come suddenly. Suddenly you're able to swim
through a scene. It happened to me occasionally when I was playing
in "Separate Tables/* Three times, in fact: the last night of the run in
London, in 1956; at the Actors' Fund benefit in New York; and my last
night in New York. It may be that I knew it was the last time or the
only time, that I wouldn't have another chance, and so I knew that
whatever I wanted to do, I'd better do it quick. I can enjoy doing a
part without being terribly glad about it. I don't clap hands, and all
that. I find it very exciting working with an American cast. American
acting has a*sort of guttiness, a complete giving up to the acting that
the young actors do here, and this is an enormously vital thing. Ameri-
can actors, on the whole, are much more perceptive about adhering to
the truth. They make more effort to seek out the truth than English
actors seem to do. English actors have more adroitness. Technically,
they're better equipped. But American actors not stars, especially,
but the people in little parts, coming on with a tea tray and that
sort of thing never fake it up. It's a matter of trying to find the truth.
Without this effort the theatre can become anemic. There could be a
lot more of that sort of thing in England.

When I'm in a play, I spend in-between times waiting to get to the
theatre. I always get to the theatre an hour and a half earlier than is
required. One has to be absolutely at one's best, and to do that one
has to turn everything into preparation for it. I can't eat before a
show. I have a light lunch, and after the show I finally have a warm
meal. One thing I can always take, physically, is bad weather. When
you're brought up in England, it's easy to take heat or cold or fog or
rain. I don't go to the theatre very much as part of the audience. It
makes me ill I have claustrophobia to be in a crowd of people. And
I find myself identifying with the actors on the stage in a way that is
exhausting. It's absolute purgatory for me to go to an opening night.
When I was younger, I worked harder and liked it better. I lived in-
side the theatre. Now I work differently and more effectively. When

391

THE FLAYER: MARGARET LEIGHTON

you're starting, your energy is different. Not that I would want to be
eighteen again. It's not a very enviable age, energy or not. The way you
feel has tremendous bearing on what emerges in a part. Health is
very important. It's awfully hard to inject anything into a part if
you feel miserable as hell. It's the churning up in acting that makes It
tiring. Only a phenomenally strong man can play Macbeth. He's got
to be extraordinarily fit. The role of Macbeth is demanding in every
sense; it never lets up.

Once I accept a part, I feel relieved for the moment that the first
important decision has been made. After that, I always think, I've got
it now; I wish it were over with. One thing I hate is having to decide
whether to do a part, although, actually, when I first read a script, I
know immediately whether I want to do it. One smells it immediately.
One thing that puts me off in reading a play is getting too strong an
impression of the author feeling that the author is intruding upon
the play. If I find myself thinking that I know what sort of chap the
author is, I know it's a bad play. In all bad plays, you see what
sort of chap the author is; that is, you have to think about it.
Finding the right part doesn't really mean that the part is right for
you; it's more that you are right for it. Some plays need more home-
work than others. You do a lot of homework on all of them, but you
pretend that you don't. More homework is required when the language
is complex, difficult, with lots of colors. When you start to work on a
part, it's easier if you know how you're going to emerge. But it's
often more exciting if you don't know. When I start to work on a part,
I read it over and over, and one little bit after another falls into
place. Then I begin to see a moment truthfully. I work up to that mo-
ment, and then I work away from it. Such moments are why you
want to play the part. When I was asked to do "Separate Tables," in
which I played two roles, I had exactly nine days in which to study
the characters, and it ordinarily takes that long just to learn the lines
and the moves. I was too tired to think about what I was doing. I just
did it. I've been in more plays than I can count in repertory and on
English and American stages over a period of almost twenty-five years.
I've been forced to examine closely, and appreciate, every character
I've played.

I've found that it's fatal to regard acting as necessarily fun. It's
marvellously exciting, but one ought not to regard it as something

392

MARGARET LEIGHTON

necessarily pleasurable. A lot of acting takes the form of self-indul-
gence. I remember one time when I was playing Ellie Dunn in "Heart-
break House" in Birmingham, the tears were streaming down, and
I was tearing the place apart. Once you get taken hold of, it's easy
to let go and go on that way, but it's not acting. The director stopped
me. He caught me between scenes and said to me, "You're here not
to enjoy yourself but to give pleasure to the audience." One must know
that before taking a part. I've made terrible mistakes in accepting
some roles and turning down others, but some good is bound to come
of doing, rather than not doing, any role. The most successful actors
are actors who simply keep acting. My theory is either do it and
don't talk about it or don't do it and don't talk about that, either.
Finding the right play is of the first importance. Good judgment is
needed in selecting roles. The judgment can be someone else's, but I
have always had to use my own. It requires a dogged perseverance to
act.

I admire Edith Evans for her taste, her discrimination, her selectivity,
her restraint. I admire Laurence Olivier and Ralph Richardson and
John Gielgud for the same qualities. I've been lucky in having had the
opportunity to act in plays with all of them. Laurette Taylor was
great. There was no chichi about her. She was a human being who
imitated no one. I somewhat resist being confined to what the author
says I must be, but I suppose authors have to reduce feelings to some-
thing that is acceptable to mass audiences. The most important thing
in acting is truthfulness to life and to the author and to the style of
the play.

393

ANTHONY PERKINS

The delineation of character may have been done
originally by the author, but you go out there onstage
and frost it with yourself.

I was born on April 4, 1932, in New York City. When I was five, my
father, the actor Osgood Perkins, died of a heart attack, at the age
of forty-five. After living in New York for a while, my mother and I
moved to Boston, where she worked as head of the Stage Door Canteen.
She's interested in the theatre, because of my father, but she's not an
actress. We lived in Brookline. I attended various schools in the
region Brooks School, North Andover, for a couple of years, then
the Browne and Nichols School, in Cambridge. From the age of five,
I wanted to act, but I was ten before I had the feeling I had to do
something about it, and it wasn't until I was fifteen that I felt I was
ready to start. Then I played in "Junior Miss," by Jerome Chodorov
and Joseph Fields, at the Brattleboro Summer Theatre, in Vermont.
I became single-minded about acting in high school, where I neverthe-
less went in for athletics and played tennis, because I hated to be in-
doors. My mother was keen on my finishing my education before I got
too deeply involved with acting. She wanted me to be educated, so that
if it turned out I didn't have ability for the stage I could do something
else. She felt there was no sense in rushing me. When I was eighteen,

394

ANTHONY PERKINS

I went to Rollins College, in Florida, where I majored in history and
English literature. I joined a fraternity, and talked girls and sports
cars and records. I was one of the few guys in the fraternity who cared
about the theatre. The college had a pretty high-powered Drama
Department and two theatres. I was happy at Rollins. I enjoyed the
Drama Department. The two teachers in charge of it, Wilbur Dorsett
and Howard Bailey, got me to learn the fundamentals of playing on
the stage walking, facing front, developing facets of a character. I
got a chance to play parts in "Harvey/' "The Warrior's Husband/'
"The Importance of Being Earnest," "The Madwoman of Chaillot,"
and many other productions. I was still too inexperienced to get to
play a leading man, so I played parts like the thirty-five-year-old
reporter in "Goodbye, My Fancy/' There was something wonderful
to me about acting on the stage. Instead of really acting, however, I
was performing in an outgoing, senseless rush at the audience, using
my appeal, taking advantage of easy situations, being charming and
lush. Acting, I was to learn later on, is more circuitous. It takes
thought, consideration, real construction.

After I had been at Rollins for three years, I hitchhiked to
California and made a screen test for a movie called "The Actress."
The following December, I worked in the picture, in the role of Jean
Simmons' suitor, and since I was on Christmas vacation, I missed only
one week of school. I returned to Rollins for one term. Then I came
to New York and got myself transferred to Columbia University,
because I thought that when the picture was released I'd get acting
jobs in television on the side while finishing college. I played in some
television dramas, put on by the "Kraft Television Theatre/' "Studio
One/' and others usually those family plays, in which I was the boy
with hair falling down over his forehead. Before graduating, I audi-
tioned for Elia Kazan for the part James Dean got in the film "East
of Eden." Although I didn't get that part, Kazan hired me to play in
"Tea and Sympathy," with Joan Fontaine, on Broadway, when John
Kerr left the play. I played the part of the young man for thirteen
months. Then William Wyler chose me to play one of Gary Cooper's
sons in the movie "Friendly Persuasion/' for which I was nominated
for an Academy Award. After that, I made more movies, including
"Fear Strikes Out," with Karl Maiden; "Desire Under the Elms," with
Sophia Loren; "The Matchmaker," with Shirley Booth; "Green Man-

395

THE PLAYER: ANTHONY PERKINS

sions," with Audrey Hepburn; "On the Beach," with Gregory Peck
and Ava Gardner; and "Psycho," with Janet Leigh. I found Hollywood
terribly hard on the nerves. In movies, you feel thwarted. No rehearsals,
just meeting your fellow-actors, and then you're right in production.
It was in "Friendly Persuasion," however, that I first realized what
acting could be. When I watched Phyllis Love and Mark Richman
work, I saw the difference for the first time. When I worked in "The
Actress," I didn't learn. In all the time I played in "Tea and Sym-
pathy," I didn't learn. But I saw Phyllis Love on the set of "Friendly
Persuasion" making copious notes and then I heard her asking the
director all kinds of questions, like "What time of day is it supposed
to be?" So I started to wonder about what I was really doing, and I'd
say, "What time of day is it supposed to be?" Then the lights began
to go on, and I was learning about Method acting. I began to learn to
rely less on intuition and to study the architecture of a role. It's easy,
as a young actor, to depend on your intuition, which often leads to an
inaccurate motivation for the character you're portraying. I began to
get a reputation for being a director-botherer. After "Friendly Per-
suasion," I made "The Lonely Man," and by that time I really
understood the Method. I worked with a girl named Elaine Aiken,
who was an absolute slave to the Method. The movie was a Western
with Jack Palance as a retiring gunfighter and together Elaine Aiken
and I finished off Henry Levin, the director, with our questions.
Usually, I'm a great believer in what a director tells me. I'm very
malleable.

Of the various kinds of acting, I prefer the stage. I played the part
of Eugene Gant in "Look Homeward, Angel," by Ketti Frings, and
the part of Gideon, the young man, in the Frank Loesser musical
"Greenwillow." After Hollywood, being on the stage felt great. You
can't separate the actor from the circumstances in which he works.
When you act in a picture, the director can threaten and bully you
or else let you do it your own way and then just cut it out of the
picture and not show it at all. The only way to keep control over what
you do is to act on the stage. Once you walk out there, nobody can
shout at you or pull strings and get you to jump. Once you're out
there acting, you're doing it on your own. Life in Hollywood is
corrosive for the actor. The minute you're through making a picture,
you're an actor out of a job. It's over. If you're a big star, theoretically
you have no worries, but even if you're the kingpin, all you can do is

396

ANTHONY PERKINS

play croquet or see that your kids don't fall in the pool. For the half-
way stars in Hollywood, life is really tense. I just can't fit into the Hol-
lywood march. I've never been ahle to swing there. All that talk about
values and yappety-yap. Getting up at six, driving out in fog and
smog to the studio. All those people who nibble at you like hungry
piranhas. The sluggishness of the studios. Everything overcome by a
kind of sleeping sickness. Even in the acting, you think you've done
something but it turns out to be not what you expected. I don't like
to go into a movie unless I can work with the very best director, of
my own choice. Being good in movies is like doing heart surgery. It's
great for some people. The fine thing about Broadway is that if you're
in a hit you can play in it for a year. Even television is better for an
actor than Hollywood movies, especially if you're making a nice,
comfortable series. At least, that way you're steadily employed. How-
ever, for myself, I want something more than steady employment from
acting. An important man in one of the big movie studios in Holly-
wood once said to me, "You're going to make good pictures and bad
pictures, and if something doesn't come off, we'll just look at each
other and say, 'It's only movies/ " I was shocked. Of course, some
movie producers don't take that attitude at all.

I'm very happy as an actor. Every night I perform on the stage is
a creative experience for me. When I'm in a play, I look forward all
day long to appearing in the play at night. Even if I have a lot on
my mind or don't feel well when I get to the theatre, as soon as I
hear my cue I feel all right again. I feel absolutely at ease in a fiction
of some kind. I might come unglued if I couldn't act. Acting is built
in, dependable, acceptable. When I first became a little well known
and had a day when I was feeling down, I'd actually say to myself,
"Well, I think I'll go out for a walk and be recognized." There's even
something to that. Onstage, you feel you can make the audience listen
to you and watch you. When I played in "Greenwillow," we'd get
terrible houses only a handful of people on some nights. I always
liked that. The audience would be feeling terrible; they'd be wishing
they hadn't come, because nobody else came. But I always felt I
could bring them out of it. I always felt that if there were five or ten
people out there, I could give each one my individual attention. The
real purpose of this particular medium, after all, is to stir people, to
touch them. You're on a raised platform taking up a small area in
front of which is a larger area with a lot of seats and people in them.

397

THE PLAYER: ANTHONY PERKINS

Before that, you're sitting in a cubicle putting stuff on your face to
make it look darker. Then you get on that raised platform with some
other people and you try to reveal situations and emotions, you try
to inform the audience and to enlighten it. When you walk out there,
you think of nothing but the application of yourself to your part. You
can't deny your own feelings; you must believe in the emotions you
express, but you have to keep some detachment. If another actor is
near you, you can't walk right into him. You submerge your own
personality, but you can't ever lose yourself entirely in the part. If
you're playing the part of someone in love, for example, you can't
make your voice a whisper, as you might do in real life. You can't do
that onstage, or your response is lost. Every night when I go out
onstage, I remind myself to keep my responses fluid, to keep them
really moving. Whatever is said to me, I can really respond. I never
walk out feeling rigid. Although I never push my responses, I do try
to coax them. I learned that from Kim Stanley, who once said some-
where, when she was in "Picnic," that acting is like playing the piano
or the guitar; no matter how good you are, you're never as good as
you can be you never realize the full potentialities of your instru-
ment, which is yourself. I believe in Method acting, but I've always
been afraid to audition for the Actors' Studio. They might say no.
When I see my mother, we don't talk very much about acting,
although she's given me some very sound advice on how to get my
own way and still not be difficult. Before I went into one of my
leading roles on the stage, she told me, "If you're the star of a
show, you've got to be just right. That's your responsibility." Nothing
is as raw as a play rehearsing. It's also at its most exalted level then.
That's when it's most involved, and you can't clutter up your life with
outside problems. In "Look Homeward, Angel," I was almost fired in
the beginning because I seemed inattentive. I have an undisciplined
appearance. I can't stand still too long; I want to get on with it. On
reading a script for the first time, I see myself in a part in two ways:
first, the qualities in the part I can dramatize through the application
of my own personality, and, second, how I can enhance the part with
aspects of my own personality. Once I've done a part right, I just
assume 111 do it again. One of my stage directors taught me that the
best acting is spare acting, the sparest, with the smallest gesture, the
greatest economy. I've learned how to mete it out.

398

SIMONE SIGNORET

Acting creates the illusion of life, because what you
give is out of yourself, but if you give everything in
yourself to the acting, you miss your own life.

I was born, to French parents, on March 25, 1921, in Wiesbaden, Ger-
many, during the French occupation after the First World War. My
father, Andre Kaminker, who recently died, was Jewish; my mother,
whose maiden name was Signoret, is Catholic. My father was a charm-
ing, brilliant man, a little superficial, and not meant to be head of a
family. I grew up with two younger brothers Alain, who became a
film director and was drowned while making a film about fishermen, and
Jean-Pierre, who is twenty-eight and is a professor of Latin, French,
and Greek in a lycee near Paris. When I was two, my father, who
knew five languages and was a professional translator, moved us to
France, to Neuilly-sur-Seine, a fine middle-class suburb of Paris, where
we tried to be middle-class and failed. I always wanted my family to be
average, to be like other families. Our family had the appearance of
being average, but we were not. After my mother, an educated woman,
took me to the Comedie Fran^aise to see the classics, I never wanted to

399

THE PLAYER: SIMONE SIGN0RET

be anything but an actress. When I was fifteen, I started to read a lot,
and the next year I went to England for three months as a paying guest
on an English poultry farm. I arrived ahead of another French girl
guest, and by the time she arrived, I had a little bit of English, so I
translated for her, and thus began to learn a lot of English. 1 have never
lost my English. Recently, when I made a French movie called "Les
Mauvais Coups," I was able to do my own English dubbing for a ver-
sion to be shown over here. I like to do that, but since a lot of the
subtlety is lost in any dubbing, I also like to feel that people here will
have the opportunity to see the original French version; in such cases,
both should be available. At eighteen, I took my last examination at
the lycee three days after the German occupation of France began. It
was a black period for the family. My father, who was already in his fif-
ties, nevertheless went to England, on June 18, 1940, to join de Gaulle
as an officer, and did a great deal of interpreting, writing, and broad-
casting for the Free French. As the eldest, I felt I was head of the fam-
ily. I felt responsible for my mother and my small brothers. In some
ways, it was the best thing that has happened to me in my whole life,
because it led me to get into an entirely different social group. I learned
typewriting and took a job typing for the Nouveau Temps a pro-Ger-
man newspaper. It was disgusting. I might have become a collaboration-
ist myself, because at that time I had no conscience about anything; I
must say I was quite tough. But through my job I met a new group of
people, the people of the Saint-Germain-des-Pres of wartime. There
were only three cafes to go to and no big lights in the district, and it
was wonderful. I met actors who were not famous but who were in-
teresting and exciting people. Some of them worked as extras in films,
I discovered people who were success-haters. And with them I found a
little bit of myself. They showed me good books, and they introduced
me to the avant-garde and to new feelings about life. In those days,
there were two kinds of people in Occupied France those with the
wallets, in which they kept all the tickets for bread and meat for them-
selves, and the others, who never had wallets and who never had tickets,
because they gave them away to other people. I discovered the differ-
ence between these two types of people.

When I was twenty, although I was tough, I was also very shy. Then
I became an extra in films, and something broke inside my shyness. My
new friends taught me to regard acting as an honest job. They told me
400

SIMONE SIGNORET

it was all right to want to act, all right to leave the typing job. Before
that, I had never said anything to anybody about acting. It was stirring
in me, but it was a secret. I thought that everybody had a need to be
an actor but that it was a dream you shouldn't talk about. I found out
that it wasn't such a ridiculous thing, that you could really do it as
well as dream it. These people who were my friends taught me such a
lot about life and about acting. Now they are getting older, and they
are on the bitter side. They talk of nothing but Brecht and lonesco,
and they despise anything that is light. But in the early days they
were very helpful to me in my life and in my career. For a young actor
to be an extra is very frustrating but very good for him. You learn to
be on time for appointments. You are treated anonymously, and it is
good for your health to be lost in the crowd. Also, you see a lot of
actors acting. The first film I worked in as an extra was "Le Prince
Charmant," in 1941. I was paid a hundred and seventy-five francs or
about four dollars a day, for a week's work. On my first day, I was
frightened and disappointed. The scene was an elegant bar, but I had
nothing elegant to wear, and because it was wartime there was no
makeup. The producers wanted the women extras to wear spring furs.
As a result, the extras who had spring furs stood near the camera, and
I, since I had no furs, was put in the background. In 1942, I was in the
chorus of a bad stage version of "Oedipus," called "Dieu Est Inno-
cent/' for fifteen francs a day and I started to learn about acting.
After two months, however, I was fired, because I was giggling too
much onstage. I learned that one must have the discipline not to giggle
onstage, and I went back to extra jobs in movies. The quality of movies
was very low in those war days. I studied acting with a magnificent
woman named Solange Sicard. With her I learned quite a lot, and one
most important thing never, in French, to put stress on a verb. Only
phonies do that.

My first real movie part was as a prostitute in "Les Demons de
FAube," made in 1945. I was married to a director, Yves Allegret, and
was pregnant when I made the movie. When my baby, Catherine, was
twenty-one days old, I was hired by Jacques Feyder to play with his
wife, Fran^oise Rosay, in his movie "Macadam." I will never be as
happy as I was the night I was chosen for the part, when they called
me and told me. Again I played a prostitute. Fran^oise Rosay is very
handsome, very elegant, and very wonderful, and I was very much

401

THE PLAYER: SIMONE SIGNORET

afraid of her. She took me aside and gave me some good advice: You
can't act unless you know your lines upside down. I call her "Madame"
to this day. She says "tu" to me. I worship her. Feyder taught me how
to act with natural gestures and not fiddle with objects for no reason.
He taught me how to be relaxed. The picture came off superbly for
me. The other actors were already known. It is always the newcomer
who steals the picture, and I was new, so I got all the attention. I was
on top of the world. I was immediately offered a part in an English
picture, "Against the Wind." It took four months, and I was away for
four months from my baby. When I came back, she didn't recognize
me. It was a horrible moment for me. After I had been married for
seven years, I met Yves Montand. It was 1949. I was on holiday in
Saint-Paul-de-Vence, in the mountains between Cannes and Nice. He
was playing on tour there. As soon as I met him, I fell in love with him.
I left my husband and my home, which was bad. I left my child, which
was worse. People didn't like it, but I had to do it. I started to live
with a man who is a performer, which was a complete change in my life.
Before I married Yves Montand, I had never made a picture without
signing up to do another, but Yves wouldn't be happy if I worked all
the time, so I decided that I would do only what I liked very much,
and I have since made very few films. My daughter Catherine lives
with us now. I remember that when my mother called for me at
school, she would be dressed to look like a maid, because we did not
have a maid. When I've called for Catherine at school, I've tried to
look like any other mother.

I like my life today. I feel I must be careful and not do too much
acting, because there is always the danger that I might forget my own
life. If you take that path, you find yourself with nothing. Yves is a
wonderful performer. I admire him very much. We are almost always
together. If you give everything to acting, you are embroiled in a con-
stant fight for a bigger part, a better part. There is no time to live.
You get old and you still want to be young. That is not life. A woman
is a fool if she does not learn this. I was lucky, also, to learn before
I was thirty that you cannot show emotion as an actress if you have
never experienced it. It is like showing the grand passion for a man.
You cannot do it if you do not feel it. There are some actresses who
are always taking and taking in life and never giving, and they live
entirely in their acting. That may be the only kind of satisfaction they

402

SIMONE SIGNORET

are seeking, but to me they look lonely and frantic. When I am making
a picture, I never feel relaxed. When Catherine is ill, it always seems
more important when I am not working. It frightens me that I don't
feel as anxious about these things when I am working. Any woman
who is an actress should be able to feel frightened by this. If she
doesn't, she should change by the time she is thirty; otherwise it is too
late. I was happy about the prizes that came to me for my acting in
"Room at the Top/' and it was one of my happiest days when I was
given the Academy Award for it. I had decided very carefully to make
that movie, just as I had decided only after great thought to make
"Casque d'Or" and "Diabolique." What was for Yves and me the great-
est enjoyment was when we played together in Paris, in Arthur Mill-
er's "The Crucible," on the stage, for one year. For Paris, a run of
one year is enormous. People came to the theatre to see the play who
had never before gone to the theatre. Yves drew them there. In France,
a popular singer is a big hero, as a football star is in Brazil or a bi-
cycle champion in Italy. We loved the audience we got. We never grew
tired of the play for one second. We lived in an apartment across the
street from the theatre we played in. Sometimes, at seven o'clock, we
would feel, Oh, not tonight again, but once we got into the theatre
we were happy. I prefer acting on the stage to acting in films, where
you do the part in little bits from day to day. You can't leave the part
while you are making a movie; if you don't hang on to the character
completely, you can lose it. But on the stage you start to be the charac-
ter at nine o'clock, and as soon as the curtain comes down, it is finished*
It is out of you. You can go back to your life.

403

ROBERT PRESTON

Next to acting myself, watching other actors gives me
my greatest joy.

I was bom on June 8, 1918, in Newton Highlands, Massachusetts. My
full name is Robert Preston Meservey. I was lucky in having young
parents, Frank and Ruth Rea Meservey, who married before they
were twenty-one. My father now works in the office of a coat-
lining business in Los Angeles. I have one brother, Frank, Jr.,
twenty-two months younger than I am, who lives in Los Angeles,
is married, has two children, and works for a beer distributor. When I
was two years old, my parents moved from Massachusetts to California,
and went to live in my maternal grandparents' house, in Los Angeles.
My grandmother was a strongly matriarchal type, and she had
decided to move the whole family out to California for the sake of
my grandfather's health; he was believed to have tuberculosis. My
father was working as a billing clerk for American Express, and it
didn't matter to him where he worked. To him, a job was a job. My
grandmother bought a large old white frame house in Lincoln Heights,
the poorest section of East Los Angeles. She thought a sanatorium was
going to be built there, because the region was higher than the rest

404

ROBERT PRESTON

of the city and was considered good for people with respiratory ail-
ments. Eleven people my grandparents, my parents, my brother and
I, and my mother's two brothers and three sisters moved into this
house. The neighborhood was predominantly Mexican, and when I
started going to school there, I found I was the only white American.
I was also younger than the other children in my class. All in all, I
felt strongly that I was a member of a minority group. It made a
listener out of me. I hung around bashfully, listening to what every-
body else said, and I've been a very careful listener ever since.

Both my parents always worked, and so did my aunts and uncles.
We had a fluid household; everyone came and went as he pleased. I'd
come home from school and find only my grandmother there, cooking
oyster stew or some other New England dish. I'd go out and hang
around in the houses of our Mexican neighbors. Poor as they were,
they had furniture and other possessions that they'd brought from
Mexico, and I loved the way their homes looked the velvet table
scarves with hand-painted designs, and all the rest. There was always
a strong, wonderful aroma of tortillas cooking in oil. I got to like their
food better than oyster stew. My mother worked at the Platt Music
Corporation, one of the leading music stores in Los Angeles, which
carried everything from grand pianos to harmonicas. She was man-
ager of the phonograph-records department, and was the foremost
authority on records in town. That was before the day of the disc
jockey. Every record-company representative or song-plugger who
came to town would get in touch with my mother. Sometimes she'd
dress up in a beaded gown and pat me on the head and go off to
attend a record-company convention at the Cocoanut Grove. A lot of
important movie people bought records from my mother, and she
knew their tastes. At home, we had a Victrola one of the early models,
with the big horn and the picture of a white puppy dog on it. Mother
was a pianist, and could play just about everything. When I was
seven, the family bought a second-hand upright piano for me to take
lessons on. It cost seventy-five dollars, and had supposedly belonged
to Russ Columbo, the singer. I took lessons for four years. There
was always music in our house. Both of my uncles tried to play the
mandolin. When I was fourteen, my parents took my brother and me
and moved into a house in a predominantly Italian neighborhood.
I still have a working knowledge of both Spanish and Italian. When

405

THE PLAYER: ROBERT PRESTON

I've had to play a Spanish or Italian role, I've never had a problem
with the dialect, because I listened so carefully as a kid. Our
neighborhood cobbler and barber had wonderful tenor voices. Mr.
Bellin, our grocer, played the zither. On warm summer nights, all of
us would get together, sitting around on front stoops, and play and
sing. I learned to play the guitar and the trumpet, and to belt out
arias from operas. I could sing "Vesti la Giubba!," from "Pagliacci,"
and the tenor part in the quartet from "Rigoletto." I also learned to
sing "O Sole Mio" in both Sicilian and Neapolitan dialect. The only
one in our family who is not musical is my father, who more or less
goes for Lawrence Welk.

My mother always brought home the latest records and made the
rest of us listen to everything she enjoyed, so I heard records of John
Barrymore doing passages from Shakespeare long before I could ap-
preciate them. Still, I always liked to listen. I began to prefer listening
to records of music to playing my own. My mother started taking me
to see plays, put on by touring companies, when I was about eight.
She'd hear about the plays in the music store, and she decided that it
was important for me to see them, even if I didn't know what they
were all about. After school, I'd wait for Mother outside the music
store, and when she got through work, off we would go. One of the
shows I remember best is the original production of "Tobacco Road,"
with Henry Hull. When I was ten or eleven, I used to sit around
for hours with the school janitor, a former Shakespearean actor, who
was about seventy years old. He'd nail me after school and talk on
and on about the theatre. I learned a lot from him. About the Broad-
way theatre in 1918, about the Hungary of Ferenc Molnar's time
things like that. My idea of homesickness isn't for a place to go back
to; it's for all the things I've heard about or read about. There are
times when I'm not sure whether some of my experience is my own
or things I've read or heard about.

Almost every kid takes part in little school plays, and I did that, and
also took part in little plays at the Episcopal Church. I started going
to movies and vaudeville shows regularly when I was ten. Vaudeville
teams Kolb & Dill, for instance, and Weber 8c Fields were in their
heyday then. I'd watch them and learn their routines and then do
imitations of them for the kids in the neighborhood. A number of
us kept little black books of the jokes we heard in vaudeville. Ernie

406

ROBERT PRESTON

Sarracino, who was one of my friends all through school and is now
a character actor, still has a fat collection of these jokes. I attended the
Abraham Lincoln High School in Los Angeles, and each year, in my
English class, I competed in the acting of passages from Shakespeare's
plays. Class winners would compete with the winners in the other
schools in the city. I had a great advantage, because I'd spent all that
time listening to recordings of John Barrymore. I was Shakespearean
champ of my school three times as Julius Caesar, as Polonius, and
as Hamlet. When I was a freshman, my English teacher was a man
named E. J. Wenig, who also headed the school drama department.
His love was Shakespeare, and he imparted his love of Shakespeare to
me. He got me to play leads in Shakespearean productions and in
"Clarence/* "The Goose Hangs High/' and a lot of other items in the
Samuel French catalogue. E. J. really led me to share his own love of
acting. I never thought about doing anything else. He was right for
me, and I was an apt learner, and everything went smoothly. I took
that for granted. E. J. knew about every acting group or theatre
company in or near the city of Los Angeles. He had a sidekick named
Hegner, who made our costumes at school and did our makeup. The
living room of Hegner's apartment was filled with racks and racks of
costumes. He could have outfitted the entire Old Vic Company with
them. He and E. J. were both wonderful guys. I graduated from high
school when I was sixteen, but E. J. wasn't letting go. He told me
about the Elizabethan Stock Company, a group headed by Patia
Power, Tyrone's mother, which had come up to Los Angeles from
San Diego. E. J. told me they were casting for some roles in "Julius
Caesar/' I was a pretty good Julius Caesar for my age, so E. J. took
me over to the company director to read for the role, I had already
reached my present height six foot one. So I read for the role and
got it. I played opposite Ty's mother. E. J. had always told me, "In
doing Shakespeare, just remember your iambic pentameter." I re-
membered it, and I played the role for several weeks. I was paid about
seven dollars a week, and then, for some sordid reason or other, the
company folded.

In 1934, we were hit by the depression. My father lost his job. It
never entered my head even then that I could do anything but act.
E. J. had contacts all over, and he took me to the Jewish Forum, a
theatre group putting on "He That Is Greatest" a play about a

407

THE FLAYER: ROBERT PRESTON

modern-day Robespierre. The star was a famous old professional
character actor named Josef Swickard. He was so old he couldn't hear,
and he took his cues by reading lips. Eventually, he committed suicide,
jumping off the big "HOLLYWOOD HILLS" sign. Each letter was as
big as a building, and I think he jumped off the "D." The play was so
far to the left that it was practically anarchistic, but I never asked
who was behind it, or even who had written it. My only concern was
that my part, that of a young anarchist, was good and I was allowed
to play it. From that point on, I began to mingle with all kinds of
bohemian and semi-bohetnian groups, and also with a lot of wealthy
people living in Hollywood Hills who wanted to sponsor plays. I'd
go along with groups giving auditions at some of the luxurious homes
of wealthy people to raise money for plays. We'd be served a good
lunch, take a swim in the pool, and spend some time lying around in
the sun, and then we'd do our stuff. It felt good to me just to get out
on the lawn and show what I could do.

Then my father went to work for the W.P.A. in San Bernardino,
putting up high-tension lines for the government, at much lower pay
than he'd been getting, so I had to buckle down and get a job to help
out at home. I became a clean-up man at Santa Anita Park, picking
up cigarette stubs and sweeping the aisles in the mornings, and park-
ing cars for the patrons in the afternoons. I got ten dollars a week,
plus tips. Will Rogers would always give a good tip, and Clark Gable
was always a cinch for fifty cents. That was big money in those days,
and the other parking attendants would fight with me to get him. He
always flipped the coin to me. I spent two seasons at the race track,
and toward the end of that time I started going along with some
members of my clean-up crew who were rehearsing for readings for
plays at the Pasadena Community Playhouse, not far from the race
track. There were no performances at the Playhouse on Sunday, and
open readings were held then. A director and actor named Thomas
Browne Henry gave me my first chance to read. After that, I got
one small part after another at the Playhouse. I kept my job at
the race track for a while, but finally the acting crowded it out.
The Pasadena Community Playhouse and the Pasadena School of
the Theatre consisted of five theatres: the Playbox, which was prob-
ably the first theatre-in-the-round in the country; the Junior Stage
and the Senior Stage, which were used mostly by junior and senior

408

ROBERT PRESTON

students, respectively, in the Playhouse School of the Theatre; the
Laboratory Theatre, for trying out new playwrights; and the Main
Stage, the largest, which was used primarily by established actors
and postgraduates. The community gave the Playhouse wonderful
support. I was one of the established actors, and the Main Stage
was my hangout. The big ambition of the students at the Pasadena
School of the Theatre was to be cast in a play with established
actors at the Main Stage. In 1940, I married one of those students,
Catherine Feltus, who had come to the school from Indiana. We
had met three years earlier in T. S. Eliot's "Murder in the Cathedral,"
when I played one of four knights and Catherine was one of twelve
members of the speaking chorus. Thomas Browne Henry played the
Archbishop. Then we acted together in "Night Over Taos," by Max-
well Anderson, in which I played the heavy and Catherine played the
ingenue. My wife and I have always had a special feeling for the
Pasadena Playhouse. In 1946, we went back there together for a
summer festival of its greatest hits and played in Victor Jory's version
of David Belasco's "The Girl of the Golden West;" Catherine took
the leading part of the girl and I was the bandit.

After we were married, Catherine had no burning ambition to keep
on acting, so we decided to have just one career in the family. My wife
enjoys what I do. We live in an old converted carriage house on two
and a half acres of land in Rye, New York, on Long Island Sound.
We take care of the grounds ourselves, and we enjoy our privacy. I
have my own woodworking shop, and my wife is an excellent cook.
We have no children. Catherine's judgment of plays and movie scripts
is unusually good, and I depend on her opinions. We may argue
about the merits of a script, but I've never done anything she hasn't
approved of.

In the spring of 1938, when I was playing the part of Harry Van,
singing and dancing, in Robert E. Sherwood's "Idiot's Delight," at
Pasadena, a Paramount lawyer named Sidney Justin, who lived in
Pasadena and saw most of our plays, suggested that I try out for the
movies. Everett Crosby, Bing's brother, who knew my mother and was
sort of my agent, took me to see a talent expert at Paramount. The
talent man took one look at me and said to Everett, "I told you to
stop bringing me truck-drivers." So I went home and decided to forget
about the movies. But the next day I received a call from the executive

409

THE PLAYER: ROBERT PRESTON

producer of B pictures at Paramount, asking me to come back for a
test, which I did the day after that. It turned out that there was a
feud going on between the producer of B pictures and the talent man,
and the producer wanted to use me to prove that the talent man was
incompetent. For my test, I did a comedy scene from "Idiot's Delight"
and a Killer Mears sequence from "The Last Mile." I did tests all
day long. The result was the best thing I've ever done for the movies.
I wound up with a contract for six months, with options, at a hundred
dollars a week. The producer of B pictures had proved something or
other, and the talent man was fired. But I wasn't given anything
to do. Paramount might have forgotten all about rne and dropped my
option after six months, but I decided not to just sit around waiting.
I did another show at Pasadena. Whenever actors talk about how
important it is to be in the right place at the right time, I always think
it is better to be in some place at some time, doing something. Late in
1938, 1 heard that Robert Florey, Paramount^ best cameraman, was go-
ing to direct a movie called "King of Alcatraz," with J. Carrol Naish,
and was looking for someone to play a sailor. I went after the part
and got it. Lloyd Nolan and I played two sailor buddies, brash young
guys, on leave. It was a good part for me, and I was .lucky to have
a good man to act with. Nolan is generous and kind, both as a man
and as an actor. We spent eighteen days shooting the film. By the
second day, I felt so much at home I forgot all about the camera.
B pictures in those days were very much in demand. Very often,
people going to a double-feature bill, which was the usual thing,
would like the B movie better than the more expensive A movie.
Many of the B products had very good actors and turned out to be
sleepers. People would sit through the A and enjoy the B. For me, the
acting in the movies was the same kind of acting I'd always done. The
main difference was that I had to learn how to stay within range of
the camera. Acting wasn't a big problem then, and, actually, I've never
made a big problem of it. In the early days, there was nothing to fear.
You'd usually have another movie to make after you'd finished one. In
my early movies, there wasn't much difference between me and my parts.
In "King of Alcatraz," Lloyd Nolan and I were rivals for the hand of
Gail Patrick; we went ashore, went to a bar, got drunk, returned
drunk to our ship, and were chewed out by the captain, played by
Harry Carey. As an actor, I was simply the author's means of getting

410

ROBERT PRESTON

to an audience. I knew what my character said and thought and did,
because I knew what I said and thought and did.

My second movie, "Illegal Traffic," had me cast as a criminal. In
my third, "Disbarred/' again starring Gail Patrick, I was an assistant
district attorney. My next one was "Union Pacific," with Barbara
Stanwyck and Joel McCrea, and in that one I got started playing the
role of a charming Western rascal. I've played all kinds of villains in
the twenty-four years I've spent acting in movies. Very often, I've
found it more satisfying to play villains than to play heroes. I made
four movies with Alan Ladd "This Gun for Hire/' "Wild Harvest/'
"We Are All Heroes," and "Whispering Smith." I understood and en-
joyed all the villains I played. The only villain I ever refused to play
was the one in the Cecil B. deMille picture "Unconquered," because
the part had no shadings; he was just a villain. After my villain period,
I made about a dozen other movies in fairly quick succession, including
"Beau Geste/' in which I was one of three brothers Gary Cooper and
Ray Milland were the others who joined the French Foreign Legion,
and I got to play a bugle and die in the end; "Moon Over Burma/' in
which I was on a teak plantation somewhere east of Rangoon, fight-
ing with Preston Foster over Dorothy Lamour; and deMille's
"Northwest Mounted Police," with Gary Cooper and Madeleine Car-
roll, in which I was in love with Paulette Goddard. Then, there was
"Reap the Wild Wind." One sequence was an old ship on the high
seas. John Wayne and Paulette Goddard were on the ship, along with
Raymond Massey, the chief. heavy, and me, the assistant heavy, who
were interested in the ship's cargo in an underhanded way. About
the only role I've ever played that I didn't believe in but let myself be
talked into doing was in "Typhoon," with Dorothy Lamour. She wore
a sarong, and I had to wear one, too. It didn't feel right. It embarrassed
me. I played a rum-soaked rotter left on an island by mutinous mem-
bers of a pearl-fishing expedition, and was discovered by a beautiful
maiden. I didn't like any of that. The only reason the movie was
called "Typhoon" was that another company had already made one
called "Hurricane." I received the most fan mail for "Typhoon"
I had ever got in my life. It made me wonder. In 1942, soon after mak-
ing "Reap the Wild Wind," I went into the Army as a private. I
eventually served as a captain in Army Air Force Intelligence, in the
European theatre of war, and I came out in 1945.

411

THE FLAYER: ROBERT PRESTON

After the first blush of enjoyment at seeing myself on the screen,
I gradually became more objective about myself. When I'd go to
see myself in a movie, it would be almost like watching another
actor. Luckily, I've never had a burning desire to exercise absolute
control over what I do. Movies are the director's medium and
his fun. It's the director who cuts and pastes and makes you come
out one way or another. I've heard some directors say, "Give me So-
and-So and let me shoot two hundred and fifty thousand feet of film
and cut it the way I want to cut it, and I'll give you the performance."
People in Hollywood still talk about the way John Ford took over
Victor McLaglen in "The Informer" and got what he wanted out of
that wonderful face. Generally, you have to trust your director, even
though you know he makes mistakes. As a movie actor, you really
have no choice. Still, it helps in the movies, as well as on the stage,
when you work with actors who know exactly what they're doing. I
loved working with Gary Cooper. People refer to Cooperisms and
Cooper tricks, but I always found him to be a tremendous actor. In
"Beau Geste," I was supposed to discover him dead. I was so convinced
by his acting that I kept saying, "Speak to me, Coop! Speak to me." I
wasn't bored while I was making most of my movies, because there was
always some little thing I could do with a part. My first movie after I
got out of the Army was "Wild Harvest," in which I played a member
of Alan Ladd's wheat-harvesting gang. After that, I did two and occa-
sionally three movies a year, including "The Macomber Affair" based
on Ernest Hemingway's story "The Short Happy Life of Francis
Macomber" in which I played Francis Macomber, and Joan Bennett,
who played my wife, shot me instead of a lion, because she was in love
with the guide, played by Gregory Peck; "Blood on the Moon," with
Robert Mitchum and Barbara Bel Geddes, in which I was a Western
heavy again; and "Big City," in which I played a Protestant minister,
Danny Thomas played a cantor, and George Murphy played an Irish
Catholic cop, and we all became fathers to Margaret O'Brien, a found-
ling. As Thomas's mother, Lotte Lehmann sang "God Bless America."
Some of my later Westerns were "Tulsa," with Susan Hayward a fe-
male wildcatter, in which I helped her bring in a gusher; "The Sun-
downers/' in which I was a talented heavy who sang and played the
guitar; "My Outlaw Brother," in which I played a Texas ranger; and
"Best of the Badmen," in which I framed Robert Ryan on a murder

412

ROBERT PRESTON

charge as a reward-hungry detective. In "The Bride Comes to Yellow
Sky" episode of the film "Face to Face/' I was a small-town sheriff; in
"The Last Frontier" I was a colonel at an old Western fort, and Anne
Bancroft, hidden under a blond wig, played my wife; in "How the
West Was Won" I was a wagon master in Cinerama, and everything
that had ever happened in any other Western ever made happened
again, good or bad wagon trains crossing the country, fights with
Indian tribes, camping out, and vying with Gregory Peck for the
hand of Debbie Reynolds. I had sporadic relief from Westerns in
"When I Grow Up/' in which a little boy thought his parents
were too severe and ran away from home, and I was his father
who drove out into a storm to find him and later died of pneumonia
trying to show the boy that he loved him; and also in "The Dark at
the Top of the Stairs/' with Dorothy McGuire as my wife, in which
I was a harness salesman who lost his job because of the horseless car-
riage. In 1961, I made the movie version of "The Music Man/' playing
the role I created on Broadway the con man selling musical instru-
ments to the townspeople of River City, Iowa, and getting his foot
caught in the door for the first time in life because he'd fallen in
love with the local music teacher.

By 1951, I'd begun to feel I was in a casting rut. I wasn't under
contract to any studio, so I came to New York to do some television.
Then I was offered a part in an English film called "Cloudburst," and
I grabbed the chance to work in England. While I was there, I some-
how began to feel more confidence in myself as an actor, and when my
wife and I returned to New York, it seemed to me that the city was
teeming with vitality, and we decided to stay here. Since then, I have
appeared in ten plays. The first of them was a revival of Ben Hecht's
and Charles MacArthur's "Twentieth Century," in which I replaced
Jose Ferrer as Oscar Jaffe, in 1951. After that, I opened as Joe Fergu-
son in a revival of "The Male Animal" at the City Center, with Elliott
Nugent and Martha Scott, and we were such a hit that we moved to
Broadway and played there for the next eight and a half months. I
then played in "Men of Distinction," by Richard Condon, a flop that
closed after four performances; in "His and Hers," by Fay and Michael
Kanin, with Celeste Holm; "The Magic and the Loss," by Julian
Funt, which was another flop; "The Tender Trap/' by Max Shulman
and Robert Paul Smith, with Kim Hunter; "Janus," by Carolyn Green,

413

THE PLAYER: ROBERT PRESTON

with Margaret Sullayan later replaced by Claudette Colbert and
Imogene Coca which played for two hundred and fifty-one perform-
ances; and "The Hidden River/' by Ruth and Augustus Goetz, with
Lili Darvas. I also made appearances in Philadelphia one summer in
"Boy Meets Girl" and "The Front Page."

When I'm on the stage, the one thing I never lose sight of is that
I'm an entertainer first of all. When I replaced Jose Ferrer in "Twen-
tieth Century," I went to see him in the show the last night he played
it. I realized that he was a powerhouse in the role, and that there were
certain things he had established in the part that I couldn't change. I
had to play almost an imitation of him, because the others in the
cast were so dependent on every little thing he did. If I had changed
things, it would have thrown the whole show off. My main obligation
was to see to it that the audience was entertained. However, in Decem-
ber of 1957 I created the role of Harold Hill in "The Music Man" on
Broadway. He's my character. Other actors may be playing him in
musical tents across the country for the next ten years, but I have the
satisfaction of knowing that I created him. I played Harold Hill for
two years and one month, which was the longest run I'd ever been
in. It was also the first musical comedy I'd ever done. When the author
and composer and lyricist, Meredith Willson, and the producers, Ker-
mit Bloomgarden and Herbert Greene, started looking for someone
to play the part, they tried several well-known musical-comedy per-
formers and found that each one wanted to add something of his own
to each scene something characteristic. So they started getting actors
to read for the rale. At the time, I was doing "Boy Meets Girl" in
Philadelphia. One night after the show, Kermit Bloomgarden came
backstage and asked me if I'd like to try out for the lead in "The Music
Man." It didn't surprise me in the least to have this visit from Bloom-
garden; I'm never surprised to see him in the audience anywhere in
the country. I found the part of Harold Hill very comfortable to fit
into. After the kind of training I'd had as a kid, the songs in "The
Music Man" seemed simple and easy to do. The minute I hit the open-
ing number for Willson, he loved it. Harold Hill was just right for me.
He was a slugger, a one-punch guy, not the kind of fellow who has to
pile up points in round after round. I thoroughly enjoyed being in
"The Music Man." I knew I was in a hit, and it gave me a feeling of
security, which must have shown up in my performance. Playing to

414

ROBERT PRESTON

an audience coining to see a comedy has certain advantages. They come
expecting to laugh, so they help you do the part. You don't have to
work so hard to get them. But you have to play each show as a separate
performance; there's no way of tape-recording what you did the night
before. I never allowed my performance to become mechanical.

If you face each new character you play with new understanding,
you become a better actor. When I begin learning a part, I don't know
exactly what I'm going to do until rehearsals start. I use externals a
lot in creating a character. If you have to play an old man, you put on
an old man's underwear and a shawl, and sit in a rocker, and, by God,
you're going to feel like an old man. If Fm aware of a feeling of dis-
comfort in myself, I know there's something wrong with me in the part.
Sometimes talking to the director can help me overcome this feeling of
discomfort. But I try not to think a lot or talk a lot about a role. Too
much talking can kill it. You can talk a character right out of existence.
Sometimes I lock myself in a room and go through a whole part in
front of the only person I can't lie to myself. Starting from the fact
that no matter what role I play, it has to be fun, untrammelled fun, I
try to find out what's wrong. One way or another, I get to feel com-
fortable in the part. I like to arrive at the theatre early. Usually, I
can't wait to go on. All the trepidation is just fine. A little nervousness
simply adds to the excitement. All that kind of thing serves to bring
the playing to its peak. I love actors, and I follow everything the other
actors do. I go to most of the shows on Broadway. I find something
good in every show. No show is all bad. I enjoy what I do, and feel
lucky that I can do it.

415

\\

WALTER MATTHAU

An actor must have senses that are spongelike and
soak up everything, and that means he's vulnerable.
This very vulnerability can make it tough for him to
work in the highly commercial, competitive field of
the theatre.

I was born on October 1, 1920, in New York City. I have one brother,
Henry, who is two years older than I am, and who is an Army-Navy-
surplus jobber. My father was an electrician and odd-job man who
worked as a process-server in the last ten years of his life. He loved
music and art and debates, and spent his money on classical records.
He left home when I was three, and died in Bellevue Hospital when I
was fifteen. I grew up on the lower East Side, where we moved every
few months, or got evicted, because we didn't have money for the
rent. I lived in cold-water flats until I was twenty-eight. When I was a
very small child, my mother worked in the garment district and would
leave my brother and me, for a dollar a week, in the Daughters of
Israel Day Nursery, on East Fifth Street; at night she'd pick us up and
take us to a cafeteria for potato soup. I went to P.S. 25, Junior High
School 64, and Seward Park High School. In high school, I had my
full growth, six feet three, but I weighed only a hundred and twenty-
five pounds, because of some nutritional deficiency. Even though I was

416

WALTER MATTHAU

the kind of kid who never bothered anybody, I'd keep having fights
with guys who picked on me because of my skinny look.

At the day nursery, I was in a religious-festival play when I was
four. I knew then that I liked to get up in front of people and do
things. When I was five, I would do an imitation of our landlady
coming to collect the rent. That always used to break my mother up.
In grade school, I used to recite poems in assembly. I had a high
soprano voice. When I was eight, I had a teacher, a Miss Creeden, who
told me my voice was beautiful. She had her hair pulled back in a bun,
and she had a sweet, soft face and wore glasses. She was always smiling
at me when I recited. As I got older, my voice got louder and better.
In junior high school, I found out that I could make the other kids
laugh with my imitations of movie stars. I played my first role in a real
play at a settlement house on Second Avenue a toff in "A Night at an
Inn." Soon after that, at another settlement house, I played Polonius
in "Hamlet." When I was eleven, I started working for the candy con-
cessionaires, selling ice cream and soda pop in most of the Yiddish
theatres along Second Avenue, for a fifteen-per-cent commission on all
sa l es places like the Second Avenue Theatre and the Public and the
National. I worked in those theatres for five years. I got to see many of
the leading Yiddish actors, like Julius Nathanson, Herman Yablokoff,
and Michael Rosenberg. I watched the way they worked. The idea of
becoming an actor was lurking somewhere in my head. The Yiddish
actor who made the strongest impression on me was Michael Rosen-
berg. The minute he walked onstage, he had his audience. He brought
a whole world out with him. He was just a little guy who wore wigs
and beards very unprepossessing offstage but he was the most
interesting actor I've ever seen. He had electricity. I learned something
of what I know about comic timing from him. I played bit parts in
Yiddish musical comedies, which were actually tragicomedies with
music, with marvellous actor-comedians, like Leo Fuchs. I earned fifty
cents a night, for seven performances a week. I soaked up everything
around me just being there. I used to feel wonderful in the theatres
with the actors talking to each other, the girls changing costumes, the
smell of stale smoke, the dampness, the upholstered chairs, the musty
rugs, the buzzing in the audience, and the dead silence just before the
curtain went up. During intermissions, I'd run out to the audience and
sell my ice cream and soda pop, which netted me about two dollars and

417

THE PLAYER: WALTER MATTHAU

fifty cents for a good week, in addition to what I earned as an actor.
I was in a play called "The Dishwasher," with Herman Yablokoff. In
the first act, I played an immigration officer who hit Yablokoff over
the head and made him blind. In the third act, I took the part of a
cellist in the orchestra Yablokoff was conducting when, in the middle of
a concert, he suddenly regained his eyesight. In "Sergeant Naftula," I
played a soldier in a pinochle game in the trenches during the First
World War, and I'd say, in Yiddish, 'Tour hundred/' after another
player said, "Three-fifty," and Leo Fuchs was a kibitzer who, when a
bomb landed on us, said sadly about me, "He never would have made
it." It always got a tremendous laugh. Once, I played an old lady wear-
ing a shawl in a play called "The Organ Grinder."

In high school, I didn't go out with girls very much, and I refused
to go to dances. Instead, I read plenty of Shakespeare. I'd lock myself
in the bathroom and read the plays and poems out loud to myself for
two or three hours at a stretch; I liked the sound of them. I managed
the campaigns of kids running for office in the student government, and
every time I got up in the school auditorium to make a campaign
speech, the audience would start to laugh even before I opened my
mouth. There was always something about the way I stood or looked
or sounded. When I graduated from high school, in 1939, I did odd
jobs as a file clerk under the National Youth Administration and
worked as a boxing instructor for the P.A.L., and then I joined the
Civilian Conservation Corps as an axeman. I was sent to Belton,
Montana, where I gained weight, broadened out, and started smok-
ing cigars. In 1940, I went to work for the W.P.A. as a basketball
and boxing coach, for twenty-three dollars a week. I tried to get
into the Federal Theatre, but I found that I was ineligible, because
I had never done any professional acting. Then I tried to join
the Dramatic Group of the National Youth Administration. I au-
ditioned by reciting "Casey at the Bat" and was turned down by a
teacher, who told me I should learn a trade. I then worked for a year
or so as a cement-bag hauler. In April, 1942, I enlisted in the Army. I
was trained in the Army Air Forces radio school in Savannah, Georgia,
then joined a heavy-bomber outfit in Salina, Kansas. I was a radio op-
erator at Attleborough, England, and then a Link-trainer instructor,
and I served in France, Holland, Belgium, and Germany as a radio
operator-cryptographer. Then I was shipped back to the States, to Reno,

418

WALTER MATTHAU

Nevada, where I was in the Air Transport Command, and in 1945 I
was discharged, in Sacramento, California. I returned to Reno for a
few months, working as a Railway Express hand, and there met a Red
Cross worker who told me I ought to go to school in New York under
the G.I. Bill of Rights. I came back, and when I heard that the Dra-
matic Workshop of the New School for Social Research, run by
Erwin Piscator, was at the old President Theatre, a block and a half
away from Madison Square Garden, where I liked to hang out and
watch the hockey and basketball games and the fights, I decided to
go there.

There were nice people at the school, and every month there was a
check from the government. It was simple. And I began to soak up
more of the climate of acting. Gradually, it started to sift down into
something I could use. Piscator was a weird, eccentric man, but he
knew more about the theatre than almost anybody else around at the
time, and there were two terrific teachers there named Raiken Ben-Ari
and Brett Warren. Piscator would come around two days before the
opening of the plays we put on every couple of months. He'd redo
everything the director had done. I began to get more of the real feel-
ing for acting from him. Once, I was playing Sadovsky in Nikolai
Pogodin's "Aristocrats," and he came around and said, "Matthau, you
say here every line wrong." Another actor might have been destroyed.
I was destroyed for about twenty seconds. Then I said, "Teach me how
to say every line right." One way and another, I began to learn how to
talk, how to look, how to walk 'how to act.

In 1946, at the Erie County Playhouse, I was in summer-stock
productions of "Three Men on a Horse," in which I played Charlie,
and "Ten Nights in a Barroom," in which I played Sample Swichel, I
had the finest compliment of my life when I played in "Three Men on
a Horse." Someone came up to me after the show and said I was the
only one in the play he didn't like. "The others looked like actors,"
he said. "You just looked like a poolroom bum." The next summer, I
played at the Orange County Playhouse in ten plays, including "My
Sister Eileen," "Saint Joan," and "Arsenic and Old Lace." In those
days, I did a great deal of brooding about myself. I wasn't handsome.
I didn't have good clothes, I used to wonder why people would hire
me when they could get college graduates and Oxford scholars. Then it
became apparent that when I got up on a stage, people actually

419

THE PLAYER: WALTER MATTHAU

wanted to look at me. What did I have to offer? I was a big, rugged-
looking guy with a big, strong voice. There was that. Also, I had a
way of showing enormous ease and enormous power onstage, both of
which were valuable in the theatre. The first time I really believed it
was when Piscator saw me as a judge in "Volpone" and said he was
impressed. I began to believe that whatever I did onstage was im-
portant to an audience. And then I began to take seriously the idea
that I was going to devote my life to being an actor. When I got my
first real job on Broadway, late in 1948, at a hundred dollars a week, as
a candelabrum-carrier in the coronation scene and an understudy to
seven old men in "Anne of the Thousand Days/' I was ecstatic. I
walked up to strangers and told them about it. I was even proud that
the combined ages of the seven old men came to four hundred and
ninety- two.

After that, I was in "The Liar," with William Eythe, playing the
fourth Venetian guard. It lasted for twelve performances. In 1951, 1 was
a foreign correspondent in "Season in the Sun" for the last eight months
of the run. I then embarked on a program of getting brilliant notices
for parts I played in a series of flops. I'd be called "an actor of un-
canny power" and "an actor of the first rank," and my performances
would be described as "sparkling" and "inventive," but the plays
flopped. Whether the plays were flops or hits, I've always liked my
parts. I played a New York detective in "Twilight Walk," in 1951; an
art critic in "Fancy Meeting You Again," a young, unscrupulous execu-
tive in "One Bright Day," an airlines pilot in "In Any Language," and
a magazine writer in "The Grey-Eyed People," in 1952; a middle-aged
salesman in "A Certain Joy" and a bookstore owner in "The Ladies of
the Corridor," in 1953; a Canadian atomic scientist in "The Burning
Glass," in 1954; Nathan Detroit, the gambler, in the City Center pro-
duction of "Guys and Dolls," a Louisiana cracker who becomes a
plantation owner in "The Wisteria Trees," and a playwright in "Will
Success Spoil Rock Hunter?," in 1955; the Sol Hurok character in
"Once More, with Feeling," in 1958; and Potemkin in "Once There
Was a Russian," in 1961.

In 1953, I made my first movie, "The Kentuckian," in which I por-
trayed a bad guy with a bullwhip. It was a ridiculous part, and, as
with most movie acting, I had no control over the situation; I did it
because I was desperately in need of money. Later, I made several

420

WALTER MATTHAU

movies between plays, including "Bigger Than Life" and "A Face in
the Crowd/' I've also done quite a bit of television acting, and I've
made a television series, "Tallahassee 7000," in which I star, about the
exploits of special agents in the Florida Sheriffs' Bureau. I did it for the
minor convenience of making a living. In 1955, when I was playing in
"Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?/' which lasted for over a year, I met
my wife, Carol Grace, a beautiful and wonderful girl who had a small
part in the play. We were married in 1959. I have two small children,
David and Jenny, by a previous marriage.

It's on the stage that I feel comfortable, relaxed, fulfilled, delighted.
I'm happy doing stage plays. Working for the screen is almost like
being in the Army; you set your mind to it and you do it. On the stage,
you're wide open. There are no tricks with the camera to make you
look a certain way. Nobody is going to cut you out, either. The people
are sitting out there, and they're going to see you full on. Nobody can
fool around with your face. Nobody can fool around with your voice.
You can taste and smell what the audience feels. You know if you're
coming across. You know if you're being heard. You know if you're
being understood. An audience deviates about a yard compared to an
actor's performance, which deviates about an inch. An audience of
ladies is good if you're in a hit. The critics have told them they have
permission to laugh, so they start to laugh before the curtain. They
come in laughing at the ushers. Theatre benefits at a comedy make
the worst audiences, because people have paid forty-eight dollars for
a seat and when you've paid forty-eight dollars for a seat it's hard to
laugh. I love to feel I have the whole stage in the palm of my hand. It's
what every actor looks for. On the stage, you have a chance to work on
a part, and then to work on it some more. Sometimes it takes me six
months before I find out what a line means, even if the writing is
superficial. Six months after I opened in "Will Success Spoil Rock
Hunter?" I stopped seeing the printed page, with all the commas and
all the notations. The printed page can remain with you for months
and months, until you are experienced enough and relaxed enough to
forget it early in the run and make what happens seem to be happen-
ing spontaneously.

To do a play right, really, I'd like to take two years of rehearsal. You
study the character by living with him. When you rehearse, what the
character is saying and how he's saying it begin to work in you. You're

421

THE PLAYER: WALTER MATTHAU

developing the character. Even when you're sleeping, you're develop-
ing the character. It's solidifying in your unconscious. An actor
shouldn't think on the stage. He must only do. I don't mind being in a
bad play as long as I have my chance to take the character and make
a real person out of him a three-dimensional character. I can always
feel the audience reacting to the natural things I do onstage. Once in
England, during the war, a magician in one of our entertainments
asked for somebody in the audience to help him, and I volunteered. I
walked across the stage to him, and later one of the guys in the audi-
ence said, "You know, you walked just like a G.I." I have a tremendous
will to be heard and I have the tools to do it with. I never want to lead
the sheltered, unmingling life. I have too much fun being anonymous,
being, say, part of a large group in a cafeteria especially since I know
I don't really have to be there. I love the chance it gives me to browse
around in people's external behavior. I can look around as much as I
like. Not that you ever imitate people as such. But you get the feel
and the smell and the taste of how they behave. I soak that up wher-
ever I am. Then, when I'm onstage, I use it. I have my own slant on
life. I always feel alive and I'm always conscious of why people are say-
ing things and how they are saying them. I have a tremendous emo-
tional reaction to social injustice and stupid behavior. I'm fascinated
by the way a businessman, for example, will speak condescendingly
to an elevator operator, or the way, if I walk into the grocery wearing
shabby clothes, the clerk says to me "Whaddya want, Mac?" and if I
wear a suit and tie, he says "Yes, sir?" When you walk onstage, you
bring all of that with you, in you. You say "Good morning," and
everybody knows whether it's going to be interesting or not.

A role I have especially loved is Benjamin Beaurevers in "A Shot in
the Dark." It's a vignette, really. I don't have to take on the job of
building the plot, making the exposition, getting the audience in-
volved in the story line. The story line is all set up for me, and all I
have to do is to sit down facing the audience for twenty minutes and
say funny lines in a funny way. I am a suave, polished, inordinately
elegant upper-class billionaire. Here is the kind of part it is. When,
sometime during our rehearsals, Harold Clurman, the director, gave
me a watch to wear, I said, "No, this man makes his own time, he's so
rich and so elegant." I remembered what Piscator told an actor who
was playing Orsino, Duke of Illyria, in "Twelfth Night." He lifted his

422

WALTER MATTHAU

head and sniffed and said, "It smells here people/' I like to work with
a director on a give-and-take basis. A director says to me, "Now you
have to assume a mask. This mask is on your face. Do you mind if
1 talk to you?" And I say, "Not at all. I'll listen to ten per cent of what
you say." At one point, when Clurman said to me, "I don't like the
way you walk. I want you to walk as though you were walking to music,"
I said, "Rock 'n' roll or Mozart?" He said, "Anything that makes you
feel like an aristocrat." So I forgot music and remembered how my
mother walked after she'd washed and mopped our floor and put
newspapers down for us to step on; she'd go delicately from one paper
to another paper, walking like an aristocrat.

When I played a detective in "Twilight Walk," I played him as a
human being who just happened to be a detective. I know about de-
tectives, because half the friends I grew up with on the lower East
Side became either detectives or firemen or sanitation men good
steady jobs in Civil Service. Most actors play detectives the way they've
seen other actors play detectives, I like to think I don't do that kind of
imitation, I don't go to the theatre much or watch television acting.
I like to watch a prizefighter or a basketball player, not another actor,
whose cliches I might automatically pick up. But I like to watch great
actors, like Olivier and Brando. They have no bad habits I could pick
up. I got a sense of a big leap forward in 1952 when I was given the part
of the cultivated, fastidious art critic in "Fancy Meeting You Again/'
I told Leueen MacGrath, the co-author, with George S. Kaufman, that
I doubted whether I could fall in love with the classy girl I was sup-
posed to fall in love with in the play; I wasn't well bred enough. Miss
MacGrath, who played the part of the girl herself, told me off for what
she called my inverted snobbism, and said that I was talking about
myself and not the character I was playing. That gave me the shock I
needed. When, finally, I was accepted as well bred and I kissed the girl
in the play and it was believed by the audience, it opened up a whole
new phase of acting for me. In fact, that's when I became an actor.

423

GERALDINE PAGE

Convincing an audience that I am somebody else
makes me feel that I am in control of something. To
feel that you, and only you, are in control gives you
the most wonderful sense of freedom.

I was born on November 22, 1924, in Kirksville, Missouri. I have one
brother, Donald, younger by five years, who today is a photographer
in Chicago. My father, a Boston-born osteopath, left New England to
attend an osteopathic college in Kirksville, and remained to teach
there for a while. He now lives on a small ranch in the Arizona desert
and writes books about his philosophy of life. My mother died in
1953. When I was five, my father decided to practice osteopathy in
Chicago, and moved the family there. We lived in one neighborhood
after another, and each time I'd go to a different school. When I was
nine, we moved to a small apartment on the North Side, where our
neighbors across the hall had a piano. I became absolutely obsessed
with the piano. I wanted lessons. I kept pestering for lessons, but my
family couldn't even remotely afford to let me take them. Finally, to
shut me up, they had me take drawing lessons once a week from a
neighbor, at ten cents a lesson. By the time I was in Englewood High
School, on the South Side, Papa was established in his practice, and he
rented a piano for me. I took lessons twice a week, a few blocks from
where we lived, and loved going to the lessons and walking back home
while I did my thinking looking at the old houses on the quiet streets,

424

GERALDINE PAGE

and at the wet leaves on the sidewalks. I still love walking. Every once
in a while, 111 walk from Times Square to Greenwich Village, where
I live.

I always wanted to be good at something, to be somebody. I used to
read biographies constantly, to find out how people did it. Leonardo,
Mme. Curie, Mozart. I kept going to art classes, but I became increas-
ingly impatient with my drawing. Mother made my brother and me
go to church Englewood Methodist Church and they had a young
people's group that gave plays. The minute I got into my first play,
which was called "Excuse My Dust" I was seventeen at the time
I knew that this was what I'd been looking for. On the piano, I'd
wanted to play a concerto right off and couldn't. In drawing, I had
to go to lettering class and wouldn't. But in a play I could get out
there onstage right away and do it. Right off the bat. I played the
part of the girl next door a sort of villainess, who causes all the
trouble. In rehearsal, I was so sincere everybody gasped. I made a
friend of mine cry by my performance. It gave me an incredible sense
of power. Then we did another play, and I couldn't wait to get on-
stage. This time, I played a character part somebody's mother, about
forty-five years old, in "The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come." The
third part really clinched it. I played Jo in "Little Women." I was just
getting out of high school, and I asked Papa if I could study at the
Goodman Theatre School of Drama, in Chicago. He said I could if I
could convince him I was Jo; he thought I was more the Beth type. I
played the hell out of Jo, and Papa was convinced. He and I used to
sit around for hours in the kitchen back home and talk, talk, talk, in
what we called "kitchen sessions." When I told him I wanted to be an
actress, he said, "What do you want to act for, and go around saying
other people's words? Why don't you write your own words?" But I'd
say to him, "You writers had better be careful. Actors, by an inflection,
can invert your whole meaning."

I had been raised on the movies, and was addicted to them, but it
never entered my head that I could be a movie actress, because I
thought I wasn't good-looking enough. Besides, nice girls from Meth-
odist families didn't drink or smoke or become movie actresses. Becom-
ing an actress at all was bizarre and presumptuous, glorious and
awful, all at the same time. I didn't really know there was any profes-
sional acting outside the movies until the drama director for our
young people's group took us to the Goodman Theatre. The first

425

THE PLAYER: GERALDINE PAGE

play I saw was Pirandello's "Right You Are If You Think You Are." I
was perfectly fascinated. It was so different from movies. I couldn't get
over the way you could see all the people at the same time, and the
way the others sat quietly while one of them talked. After getting out
of high school, in 1942, I spent the summer working at Kresge's to
earn money for the Goodman Theatre School. It was a wonderful job,
in a store on the corner of Sixty-third and Halsted the wildest corner
in Chicago. I sold powder puffs and Kleenex, and loved it. I took the
full three-year course at the Goodman School, and have never been
happier. All day long, I was doing what I was actually interested in
speech and diction, body movement, history of the theatre. We acted
in front of live audiences right away. We didn't just sit around and
theorize. I was hungry for everything. I was insatiable. The student
directors at the school found their ideal subject in me. They'd have
to con most of the other first-year students into acting in one-act plays
they directed, but Yd volunteer for all of them. I'd run from one to an-
other. I'd be in at least five at one time.

After acting in stock at various summer theatres in the Middle
West, I came to New York, in 1950. I took acting lessons with Uta
Hagen, and made the rounds asking for work. I was terrible at making
the rounds. One rebuff and I'd go home and cry, or go to the movies.
So I knew I had to get a job some other way. That's how I happened to
concentrate on Off Broadway. In 1952, I became known to the public
when I played the lead in Tennessee Williams' "Summer and Smoke"
at the Circle in the Square. I played the part for eight months, then
went to Broadway in "Mid-Summer," by Vina Delmar. Then I made
a movie, "Hondo," with John Wayne; replaced Margaret Leighton in
"Separate Tables," by Terence Rattigan, on Broadway and on tour;
and played in a number of television dramas. In my personal life, in
the meantime, I got married to the violinist Alexander Schneider, from
whom I was divorced three years later.

Acting a part can become more and more interesting with time. I
played the Princess Pazmezoglu in Tennessee Williams' "Sweet Bird
of Youth" for a year and a half on Broadway, and it took more work
than any other part I've ever played. She kept coming out different
every time I played her. I had to be objective to enjoy playing her.
When I acted her objectively, I drew on my recollections of my own
pain but it was her pain that I felt, and I was able to remember that
the character lived only in the play. When I do a part, I have a sort

426

GERALDINE PAGE

of map of what I think it should be and how it should come out. Most
of the time, the character will take over for the whole evening with
me in control, of course. Sometimes the character comes out in ways
that surprise me. What's best is when the character comes out as a
whole, an entity, a real person. That's hard to accomplish. You need
to be really cooking to get that. Lots of times, when you're not cooking,
you have to put it together. If I do something, and a bell rings some-
where in me, and it feels right, then I have a tendency to repeat what
I did and to find other pieces that fit in with it. It's like a jigsaw puzzle.
After the opening of a play, a lot more little pieces come in late. When
I played the Princess Pazmezoglu, she would come out brassy, tough,
common, and coarse, with a wonderful texture, when what I was try-
ing to give her was a marvellous kind of dignity, the imperious quality
that the director, Elia Kazan, was always talking about. I would be
giving her all those other things without thinking; they just fitted her.
Sometimes she would come out with more humor than other times.
What it takes to pull a character together is just plain physical energy.
I was just astounded the first time I realized I wa-s actually conveying
what I had intended to convey in a part. I had always had strong im-
pressions of people and things, but they'd end there. In acting, I
could demonstrate them. When I first did it, I amazed everybody, and
I loved it. Then it got better and better. I'd be another character, but
the character lived only in the play. When you take the character over
and use the character, you wreck the fabric of the play, but you can be
in control of the character without taking the character over. When
the character uses you, that's when you're really cooking. You know
you're in complete control, yet you get the feeling that you didn't do
it. You have this beautiful feeling that you can't ruin it. You feel as
though you were tagging along on an exciting journey. You don't com-
pletely understand it, and you don't have to. You're just grateful and

curious.

I've had over fifteen years of acting, and one thing I've learned is
not to be in a hurry. I love to study, to gather material. It just sits
there inside me, and I don't use it consciously. I think I am gifted as
an actress, but my range is as great as it is as a result of my having
studied Method acting. Non-Method people have a tendency to "leave
it to God." They say bringing a character to life on the stage either
happens or doesn't happen. Method people are greedy people; they try
to coax the genie out of the jar more often. Method is what all actors

427

THE PLAYER: GERALDINE PAGE

do anyway, but people who study Method do it a little more con-
sciously and deliberately. Good acting is good acting, and it can be
arrived at in different ways. People who have the ability to do what
they want to do really act in the same way that a well-trained Method
actor does. The old non-Method pros give consistently good perform-
ances, but they tire of their parts more easily. Method acting is good
for polishing rusty corners. Often, when non-Method actors do some-
thing in a play they repeat it night after night. It's a wearing-out
process, in long runs; the juice goes out of the performance. If you're
trained in Method acting, you lose your fright at trying new things;
you have the courage to try a new color onstage. It trains you to take
accidents and weave them into the fabric of the play. I played with one
brilliant actor of the old school who went to pieces one night when
another actor was late making an entrance. But I loved it; I went on
and on, improvising like mad. Another time, in the London produc-
tion of "The Rainmaker," I accidentally knocked over a pitcher of
milk. Well, I simply went around sopping up the spilled milk. I loved
that, too. In "Sweet Bird of Youth," when new things happened, all the
actors would respond. Instead of getting stale, we kept getting better
all the time. In Method acting, you're encouraged to interact.

What's wonderful about acting on the stage is that you have the op-
portunity to go out there night after night and wrestle with the same
problem. Even a writer doesn't have that kind of latitude and freedom.
Once he gets a thing written and published, that's it. Onstage, you
have unlimited freedom. When I first read a play, I can usually
visualize it and see the sequence of events. In stock, whenever I
couldn't figure out what a character was, I'd go into the costume room
and try on different things until it started cooking in my head. Ideas
just come into my mind, and I can't stop them. Then, when rehearsals
start, I can begin a process of selection. After a while, when a marvel-
lous new reading comes out at least once in every performance I
analyze what was different about it, and decide whether it was better
than the old way or whether it was fun once but I should let it go. The
main thing is the ability to control your instrument, which, in the ac-
tor, is yourself. Look the way you want the character to look. Sound the
way you want the character to sound. Once you've trained the instru-
ment to do what you want, you're in control and you're free.

428

JOHN GIELGUD

As an actor, I have authority. In everything else, I
have no authority at all.

1 was born on April 14, 1904, in London, the next-to-youngest of four
children of Frank Gielgud and Kate Terry-Lewis. My maternal grand-
mother, Kate Terry, was well known in the London theatre for her
interpretation of Juliet. She retired at the age of twenty-two to get
married. She was over seventy when I knew her, as a boy a very jolly
old lady who took me to the theatre. My great-aunt was Ellen Terry,
who died at the age of eighty, in 1928, the year before I started playing
leading Shakespearean parts with the Old Vic. When I was fifteen, I
saw Ellen Terry play the Nurse in "Romeo and Juliet" at the Lyric
Theatre. She was nearly blind and very unsure of her lines, but the
charm of her acting saved the premiere from disaster. Later, I saw her
play Portia in the trial scene from "The Merchant of Venice" in a the-
atre at the end of one of the piers at Brighton. There were a number of
those old, rickety theatres at the seaside that were cheap and quite
popular before the cinema. She was wheeled down in a Bath chair, but
she seemed a young woman when she came onto the stage, and her
white hair didn't seem to matter at all. I also heard her recite once or
twice at charity benefits, and heard her read Beatrice in "Much Ado
About Nothing" with an amateur group in a private home. Altogether,

429

THE PLAYER: JOHN GIELGUD

she was unforgettable,. She had a gruff, veiled tone of voice. She had
lightness and grace. When she moved, she gave the effect of dancing.
She had an expansive, generous mouth and a retrousse nose, and was
restless, dynamic, fidgety, and absent-minded. She always seemed to
have two or three pairs of spectacles with her, and a large bag crammed
with papers. Her hearing was none too good, but she would suddenly
and surprisingly be shrewd and attentive. She came to see me in a
special matinee of Thomas Otway's "The Orphan/' in which I played
Castalio, a romantic hero I had played Romeo the year before,
but she hadn't seen me and I heard her whispering away in the
box to her companion, asking questions all the time. Then I heard
her say, "Now I know how he must have looked as Romeo," which al-
most dried me up. She once gave me a copy of "On the Art of the
Theatre," written by my second cousin Gordon Craig, the theatre de-
signer and critic, and she had scribbled it all over with remarks and
advice. I also have letters from her, one with the stark instruction
"READ YOUR SHAKESPEARE."

I'm the only actor in my immediate family. Both my father and my
mother were too stage-struck and too frightened of acting to do it. My
father was a stockbroker for fifty years. He sang and played the piano
by ear, improvising most charmingly. I also play a bit by ear. My
mother did not care for music, but all her children except my eldest
brother, Lewis, who died in 1954, were musical. Lewis, who was ten
years older than I, worked for the League of Red Cross Societies and
for UNESCO, and never wanted to go into acting. My brother Val,
four years older, is a theatre producer and critic. My sister, Eleanor,
three years younger, is widowed, works as my secretary, and lives with
me in Westminster, in an entrancing little Queen Anne house with
four floors, one room on each floor. It's in the same district as my old
school, Westminster, not far from the Houses of Parliament. I always
liked the narrow streets there, and the old houses. Members of Parlia-
ment are supposed to have kept their mistresses there in the eighteenth
century. My father used to take all of us as children, to our delight, to
concerts and operas, while my mother remained at home. Both my par-
ents, however, were very much interested in painting as well as in the
theatre, and they took me as a child to plays, museums, and art exhibits.
In later years, I found that looking at pictures was helpful to me in act-
ing. When I see a picture or hear a piece of music, I see or hear in. a

430

JOHN GIELGUD

way that appeals to my theatrical sense. It's a part, possibly, of my pas-
sion for detail. When I'm in a room, any room, I see every item of fur-
niture, I take in every aspect of the decor, I notice the exact arrangement
of dishes on a table, of food on a platter. Similarly, I miss nothing at a
rehearsal. When I'm directing, I see everything; nobody gets away.
Many actors never know what's going on in the rest of the play; they
know only what is happening to them. I once discovered that a certain
star didn't know who her children were in her play. When I'm on-
stage, I'm terribly aware, too, of what's going on in the audience, and
I see and hear what's going on back to the eighth or ninth row.

As a child, I was always told I was sensitive and delicate, and I be-
came strong as a horse in consequence. I have terrific energy. It seems
to me that I've been acting all my life. Like most children, we had a
dressing-up box of costumes and hats, collected by my mother, and
I can remember, while convalescing from some illness at the age of ten,
draping myself in a tartan rug and marching up and down some ter-
race steps in our garden. This was done in secret, of course. I should
have died of shame if any grownup had seen me. Today, I still get fits
of wanting to dress like an undergraduate, a businessman, and a suc-
cessful actor on different days although I must say many successful
actors now try to look like beatniks: shabby exhibitionists instead of
smart exhibitionists. It's more democratic. As a boy, I became inter-
ested in the whole pictorial side of the theatre; I thought I wanted to
design scenery. My parents wanted me to be an architect. I was
terrible in mathematics at Westminster, which disqualified me for
architecture, so, at the age of fifteen, I got obstinate and told my
family I wanted to be an actor. They agreed to give me a period of
five years to try to become one. I attended Lady Benson's school for
a year on a scholarship and the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art on
another scholarship.

I was very, very bad as a young actor. I had plenty of feeling but
no idea of what to do with it. I had a beautiful voice and a dreadful
walk. When I was still a student, I made my debut at the Old Vic, on
November 7, 1921, as the Herald in "Henry V." I had one line
"Here is the number of the slaughter'd French." I was seventeen, and
was constantly giving helpful hints to the director. I was arrogant. I
always wanted to be myself in the part, whatever the part was. I always
looked to the outside for what to do with my feeling, instead of

431

THE FLAYER: JOHN GIELGUD

finding it within. As a young man, I didn't know how not to be
myself in the part, but when I learned how, I found more of myself
in the part. Mostly, my bad acting was a mannered thing. In a curious
way, you're forgiven for your mannerisms when you're playing a big
part but not when you're playing a small one. People seem to take
an especially violent dislike to a young actor with mannerisms. I meant
well, but I didn't know where to put my emphasis. I thought it was
important to achieve effect, rather than truth. It's sometimes hard to
know the difference in the theatre. I would wave my arms or stamp
my foot without finding out why I was supposed to be doing it. I put
too much energy into a part instead of making it relaxed. The first
time I played Romeo, at twenty, I was a great failure. I was too self-
conscious; I sang all the verse; I posed a lot, instead of finding the
real animal knowledge of a young man in love. A year later, when I
played the tutor in "The Cherry Orchard/' I began to find the simpler
approach to a part and to work from the inside out. I was not going
to be beautiful as the tutor; I was going to wear spectacles and an
unattractive wig, and search for the truth of the part.

After playing in "Henry V," I toured in J. B. Fagan's "The Wheel,"
as understudy and stage manager. Next, I was in "The Insect Play," by
the Capek brothers, and played a lovelorn butterfly, wearing a green
sash, holding a tennis racket, and lying about in extravagant poses
to make some sort of comment on idle, parasitic people. The play
was very advanced for its time. The same year, I played an aide-de-
camp to General Lee in "Robert E. Lee." In 1924, I joined J. B.
Fagan's repertory company at the Oxford Playhouse, left to play
Romeo for the first time, at a sort of Off Broadway theatre in London,
and then returned to the repertory company. I played several parts
in Chekhov Peter Trophimoff in "The Cherry Orchard," Konstantin
Treplev in "The Sea Gull," and Baron Nikolay in "The Three
Sisters." I succeeded Noel Coward in parts on two different occasions
as Nicky Lancaster in "The Vortex," in 1925, and, the next year, as
Lewis Dodd in "The Constant Nymph." I came to New York for the
first time in 1928, when I appeared as the Grand Duke Alexander in
"The Patriot." It closed after twelve performances. Those were the
speakeasy days. I went round to little bars and had such a good time.
In the theatre, I saw Helen Hayes in "Coquette" and Helen Morgan
in "Show Boat." Then I had no more money and went home. I

432

JOHN GIELGUD

returned to the Old Vic in September, 1929, playing Romeo, Mark
Antony in "Julius Caesar," and Antonio in "The Merchant of Venice."
Nobody starred in those days. Top salary was ten pounds a week. 1
played Malvolio in "Twelfth Night" in 1931, and in the fall of 1934
I played Hamlet in my own production of the play. It was a great
success and ran for a hundred and fifty-five performances the second-
longest run "Hainlet" had ever had in England. I played in "Romeo
and Juliet" in 1935, alternating in the role of Romeo and the role of
Mercutio with Laurence Olivier, in a London production that ran
for a hundred and eighty-six performances the longest run on record
at that time for "Romeo and Juliet." The following year, I played
Hamlet on Broadway, with a record run of a hundred and thirty-two
performances. It's difficult playing Shakespeare these days. I hate
playing Shakespeare without a really first-class company. There aren't
more than fifty good classical actors available. The middle of a
company is so hard to assemble. Today an actor is expected to achieve
skill in five mediums television, radio, the films, recordings, the stage.
The dispersion has made for a shortage of good classical actors. I've
varied playing classical roles with playing major ones in modern plays,
and, in forty years of acting, I have played hundreds of roles. I learned
some of my most important lessons about playing Shakespeare during
the Second World War, when I played Hamlet for the troops in the
Far East. One wanted so much to please the troops and give them
relaxation. At first, I was afraid they wouldn't want to see a bald actor
playing Hamlet, but then I found that they accepted the Hamlet I
played. I simplified the character, and by simplifying it I think I made
it true for them. Not by playing down to them. You never insult an
audience by playing down to it. The simplification depended on the
confidence I had in delivering the lines. The troops were a marvellous
audience. I was able to lead them the way a conductor leads an
orchestra. The baldness was never a problem. They recognized the
authority of the part and accepted it.

In four decades, I haven't been idle in the theatre for longer than
six weeks at a time, and after the first week or two I start missing the
theatre terribly. I found a special kind of enjoyment, a few years ago,
in doing "The Ages of Man" the readings of Shakespeare. I found it
exciting to gather and give out. I'd like to do it now as a film, if I
could find the right director. It would be a nice thing to leave behind.

433

THE PLAYER: JOHN GIELGUD

In Shakespeare, there's such an enormous technical amount to be
learned. You're occupied for at least the first ten years in just learning
the technical side of acting. So many young people today have a quick
success; they go into films or television, where they can make so much
more money than they can on the stage, and that's the end of it. Not
that I don't admire movies. I go to them all the time at least two
or three times a week. I'm fascinated by the way they do them. I've
been in a number of movies, but the only time I've ever been really
happy about a part was as Cassius in "Julius Caesar."

You can't teach anybody to act your own way. If you try, you get
only a poor imitation. An actor can imitate vocal tricks or special
mannerisms but can't reproduce the good thing from the mind. The
process of individual acting is so complicated speaking, observing,
and so many, many things, including emotion and control over the
emotion, as well as your own way of selecting the most telling things
out of the emotion you feel. Marie Tempest always said you ought
to be able to write up your laundry bill in your head while you're
acting. I find that I must fight to keep things away thinking of what
I'll have for supper, or engagements kept or forgotten. But you need
to maintain balance. If you become too interested in what you're
doing on the stage, you may dry up or fail to deliver the goods. Au-
diences usually think you're cleverer than you really are, but it's
a mistake, I find, to have the audience aware of what they think is
your cleverness. Today, the moment I feel I've got a performance I
immediately start to take things away from it. I try to use less voice,
less gesture, less physical effort. I try to make it more and more
relaxed.

I pride myself on the fact that I can shed tears at exactly the same
word at every performance. But if I allow my imagination to become
too moved, I find I can't utter a syllable. I try to see each word I speak
in the air. Each word has its exact value, its exact shape. The great
Edith Evans has an extraordinarily personal approach to acting. She
always manages to surprise you. I've directed her and acted with her,
and invariably she gives me new light, new understanding. She never
allows emotion to overwhelm her. She has superb control. She always
finds the simplest way. She never indulges herself. She has an enor-
mous gift of selectivity. It's very important to have ideas about a part,
but you must also have flexibility. You must adapt to the company. It

434

JOHN GIELGUD

isn't good to act your part all on your own. We have a marvellous top
line of actresses in England. I've had the great good fortune to play
with actresses whose give-and-take compels you immediately to be at
one with them. I had a thrilling experience with Peggy Ashcroft when
we met to begin rehearsing "Much Ado About Nothing." I hadn't seen
her in two years, but we were immediately in tune with each other.
When it happens, it's like being married.

If you have limitations as an actor and you face them, they can help
you. You have to know if you're very ugly. You have to make up your
mind how you look, how tall you are. Take a good look in the glass.
After a number of years, there's always the danger of falling back on
what you've found effective in other parts. I caught myself doing that
as a young man when I played in "The Sea Gull" a few months after
playing in "The Vortex." Both parts were of rather neurotic young
men. The danger and one sees it particularly in America is in
trying to find short cuts to discovering how to do a part. Every man
has his own approach and his own discipline. I suppose one oc-
casionally might find a wonderful teacher who could help one. How-
ever, I don't understand this business of going to a psychiatrist or
becoming a case in order to find help as an actor. Of all the arts, the
theatre least needs psychiatry. The theatre is a kind of psychiatry of
its own. An actor has to be a bit of a psychiatrist himself.

I love playing somebody in love. I hate a tragic part without any
humor. Hamlet has humor. There's not much charm in Macbeth, but
he does have humor. Othello does not. There's always something prig-
gish about a man who is without humor. To play Othello, one must
sustain before the audience a humorless man who has somehow to be
a hero. Gaiety is a very difficult thing to do on the stage, but I love
doing it. In comedy, so much depends on your partner. One comic
effect leads to another comic effect. When two people are playing
comedy, it's like a teacup and a saucer. In comedy, everything is always
between two actors. In tragedy, it's one at a time you're on your own.
In the last act of "Hamlet," Hamlet is the only really tragic figure; the
others are there to contribute to the situation. In a nervous or sad
part, one gets awfully tired. I think this is particularly true of women.
Women who play dominating parts become unhappy in their private
lives. Women tend, more than men, to become the part. Fve never
known whether one becomes the part or the part becomes one. My

435

THE PLAYER: JOHN GIELGUD

own personality is so mercurial that I react strongly to a sad part. But
I don't think a part has ever taken me over. When I first played
Hamlet, I was self-conscious. I worried about the audience's knowing
it was I. When I stopped trying to disguise myself in the part, I
worried about the terrible qualities in me that the audience might
not like. Then I hit on the simplifying process, and the audience
accepted me. Acting is really a compromise profession, like cooking.
You very, very rarely get on the stage the perfect play as you imagined
it, reading it, sitting by the fire at home. You must always be prepared
to make changes. So many things may go wrong, but when you add
it all up you may have a marvellous pie.

There's life for an actor in the characters he plays. Being another
character is more interesting than being yourself. It's a great pleasure
to me. I love putting on the costume, putting on the makeup. When
I did ''The Ages of Man," for which I wore an ordinary dinner jacket
throughout, I missed putting on the costume. I missed it very much.
It's such a beautiful physical escape. I enjoy the transformation of
personality. The regularity, the routine escapism of going into the
dressing room at the same time every day, is very satisfying to my
nature. And I particularly love the beginnings, with everyone wearing
ordinary clothes. All the beginnings are tremendously exciting think-
ing of the way you want to come through a door, of the way you want
to move across the stage.

An actor is really no good to anything except the theatre. Actors
are the most selfish people, especially in domestic life. We can be
such bores. We are tediously self-examining. An actor has nobody
but himself to take counsel with, because nobody else really cares what
is going on inside him. Communal work troubled me as a young
actor. I didn't want to rub shoulders with other people. In real life,
I'm not very communal; I have a tendency to cut others off and be
by myself. Now I find that in the theatre I can work communally and
at the same time be private. I can give a stage performance when I'm
ill and not feel it. I never notice when I'm hurt on the stage until
the play is over. Onstage, it's not terribly difficult for an actor to put
troubles or worries out of his mind. Even outside the theatre, if there's
unhappiness around you, you're likely to be observing it rather than
feeling it directly. You constantly catch yourself trying to study how
people really feel emotion. You store it up for future use; you re-

436

JOHN GIELGUD

produce it later in other forms. If I see a bad accident, I watch the
expressions on the faces of the people. The dramatic side of every
emotional experience seems to be always first with the actor. You jot
it down. When you see somebody dead for the first time, you can't
resist making notes of the way you yourself feeL It's one of the
poignant things you can remember when poignancy is called for.
Almost as soon as you get a feeling, you begin to observe it. It makes
you rather a monster, I think.

In the theatre, I have quite good taste; in my real life, I'm ab-
solutely tasteless. Outside the theatre, I'm clumsy with my hands, I'm
a very bad judge of character, I'm not learned. I'm always so terribly
aware of how little I know. I'm sure that Laurence Olivier and Michael
Redgrave are so much more learned than I am. I'm sure that Picasso
must know so much and must have all the wisdom I lack. I know that
I am terribly adolescent, romantic, and naive. Most actors are adoles-
cent, romantic, and naive. It's alarming when an actor becomes a
success. Immediately, he's quoted on things, and you find actors going
into political areas and places they have no business being in. 1 don't
need any other places myself. I find everything I love in the theatre.
When I go into a theatre and get into a dressing room, it's like going
into a safe place that I know, without thinking, is mine. It's like
going home.

437

INDEX

Aaron, Steve, 328

Abbey Theatre, 125, 340

Abbott, George, 57, 165, 201

"Above Suspicion," 71

"Abraham Lincoln," 175

Academy Awards, 377, 395, 403

Ackland, Rodney, 180

"Across to Singapore," 68

"Actor Prepares, An," 315, 339

Actors Equity, 29, 87, 128, 167, 251

Actors' Studio, 13, 14, 64, 99-100, 126,

129, 160-61, 166, 242, 243, 244, 276,

300, 330, 347-48
"Actress, The," 395
"Adam Had Four Sons," 40
Adams, Joey, 61-62
Adams, Maude, 359
Addams, Jane, 29
Adler, Stella, 190, 191, 205
"Adventures of a Ten Mark Note,

The," 313

"Adventure Story," 183
"Affairs of State," 369
"Africa Sotti i Man," 53
"Against the Wind," 402
Agar, Herbert, 35

"Ages of Man, The," 347, 433, 436
"Ai'da," 53
"Aiglon, L'," 39
Akins, Zoe, 201, 294
Albee, Edward, 330
ALBERT, EDDIE, 198-206
Alberti, Eva, 360-61
Albertson, Frank, 202
"Al Capone," 276
"Alchemist, The," 241
Alexander, Ronald, 36
"Alexander Nevsky," 260
"Alexander the Great," 287, 362
Alhambra Theatre (Stourbridge), 19,

20
"Alice in Wonderland," 126, 159, 250,

270

Allegret, Catherine, 401, 403
Allegret, Yves, 401
Allen, Rae, 332

Allentuck, Cathy, 300

Allentuck, Daniel Vincent, 300

Allentuck, Max, 300

"All Expenses Paid," 253

"All Fall Down," 48, 192, 367

Allied Artists, 281

"AlFs Well That Ends Well," 287

"All the Young Men," 109

"All Upside Down," 226

"Amateur Hour," Major Bowes, 217

American Academy of Dramatic Arts,

21, 56, 305, 360, 381, 382, 383
American Negro Theatre, 105, 106-107
American Repertory Theatre, 159
American Theatre Wing, 129, 134, 276,

366

Ames, Winthrop, 195
"Anastasia," 41

"Anatomy of a Murder," 255, 349, 350
Anderson, Judith, 353
Anderson, Lindsay, 147
Anderson, Maxwell, 12, 128, 129, 409
ANDREWS, DANA, 290-96
Andrews, David, 291
Andrews, David (son of Dana), 293
Andrews, Edward, 190
Andrews, Harlan, 291
Andrews, Janet Murray, 293
Andrews, John, 291
Andrews, Katharine, 294
Andrews, Mary, 291
Andrews, Mary Todd, 294
Andrews, Ralph, 291
Andrews, Stephen, 294
Andrews, Susan, 294
Andrews, Tod, 168
Andrews, William, 291
Andrews, Wilton, 291
"Androcles and the Lion," 159
"Andy Griffith Show, The," 223
"Angel," 34
"Angel with the Trumpet, The," 226,

227

"Anna Karenina," 362
"Anna Lucasta," 106, 107

439

INDEX

"Anne of Green Gables," 298
"Annie Get Your Gun," 327
"Anniversary Waltz," 270
"Another Evening with Harry Stoones,"

328

Anouilh, Jean, 36, 183, 286
ANT A Playhouse, 36, 130, 234
Anthony, Joseph, 64, 65
"Anthony Adverse," 362
"Antigone," 23
"Antony and Cleopatra," 79, 264,

293-94, 300

Antoine, Andre, 208, 209
Antonioni, Michelangelo, 109
"Apple Cart, The," 22, 23
Archer, Osceola, 106
Arden, John, 148
Arlen, Michael, 195
Arlen, Richard, 291
"Arms and the Man," 178, 361, 389
Armstrong, William, 336
"Armstrong Circle Theatre," 252
"Around the World in Eighty Days,"

23

"Arsenic and Old Lace," 319
Arthur, Jean, 46
Artists' Club, Russian, 182
Arts Theatre, 80, 130, 147, 263, 264
Ashcroft, Peggy, 143, 289, 339, 435
"Aspern Papers, The," 212, 343
Asther, Nils, 164
"As You Desire Me," 33
"As You Like It," 29, 79, 173, 336, 337,

338

Atkin, Robert, 176
"Attack!" 205
"Auberge Rouge, L'," 211
Auden, W. H., 143
"Aunt Jenny's Real Life Stories/' 305

"Back to Methuselah," 23

Bacon, Frank, 383

"Bad Seed, The," 136

Bailey, Howard, 395

Bainter, Fay, 31, 244

Balanchine, George, 353

Baldwin, Kathy, 319

Baldwin, William, 319

Ball, Lucille, 135

Ballet Theatre, 250

Bancroft, Anne, 154, 413

Bandy de Naleche, Count Gilbert, 207

Bandy de Naleche, Marc Frederix, 212

Bankside Players, 176

Barbizon-Plaza Theatre, 330

Bardot, Brigitte, 213

440

Barkentin, Marjorie, 130

Barker, Granville, 361

"Barker, The," 86

Barr, Richard, 329

"Barretts of Wimpole Street, The," 23,
127-28, 196, 299, 362

Barrie, J. M., 27, 199

Barry, Philip, 85

Barrymore, Ethel, 86, 335

Barryrnore, John, 20, 235, 361, 376, 406,
407

Barrymore, Lionel, 360, 362

Barter Theatre, 56

Basserman, Albert, 227, 228

Bates, Alan, 81

Batson, George, 168

"Battle of Angels," 243

Baxter, Alan, 375

Beach, Louis, 381

"Beachcomber, The," 264

BEATTY, WARRF.N, 48, 188-92

Beaty, Ira O., 188, 192

Beaty, Kathlyn MacLean, 188, 189

"Becket," 377-78

"Becky Sharp," 23

"Bedtime Story," 362

Beedle, Ardis Ankerson, 120

Beedle, Bob, 117

Beedle, Dick, 117

Beedle, Peter, 120

Beedle, Scott, 120

Beedle, William Franklin, Jr., see Wil-
liam Holden

"Beethoven," 242

Beethoven, Ludwig von, 210

"Beggar's Holiday," 62, 64

Behrman, S. N., 301

Bein, Albert, 126

Belasco, David, 31, 32, 361, 409

Belasco Theatre, 32, 107

Bel Geddes, Barbara, 412

Bellamy, Ralph, 29

Bellows, George, 28

Ben -Ami, Jacob, 125

Ben-Ari, Raiken, 347, 419

Bennett, Joan, 412

Bennett, Richard, 30

Benson North Company, 22

Benthall, Michael, 284

Berg, Gertrude, 23

Berghof, Herbert, 165-66, 299

Bergman, Friedel Adler, 38
Bergman, Hjalmar, 38
Bergman, Ingmar, 109, 328
BERGMAN, INGRID, 12, 38-42, 129, 320,
368

INDEX

Bergman, Justus, 38

Bergner, Elisabeth, 228, 340

Berlin, Irving, 354

Berman, Shelley, 62, 134

Bernhardt, Sarah, 20, 289, 346

"Best Man, The," 36, 236

"Best Years of Our Lives, The," 294,

362

"Betrayed," 320
"Beyond the Horizon," 86
"Be Your Age," 252
Bickel, Frederick Mclntyre, see Fredric

March

Bickel, John M., 359
"Big Knife, The," 276, 280
"Big Sister," 305
Billings, George, 86
"Bill of Divorcement, A," 195, 298
Birmingham Repertory Theatre, 22,

177, 178, 179, 180, 263, 387, 388
"Birth of the Blues," 216
"Bitter Harvest," 142
"Blackboard Jungle, The," 108
Blackfriars' Guild, 134
Blair, Janet, 319
Blanca, 367
Blinn, Holbrook, 30
Block, Bertram, 134
BLOOM, CLAIRE, 78, 182, 183, 276, 280,

282-89

Bloom, Edward, 282
Bloom, John, 282
Bloomgarden, Kermit, 300, 414
"Blue Denim," 49, 269, 273
Boardman, Eleanor, 67, 68
Bodenheim, Maxwell, 28
"Body and Soul," 349
"Bois des Amants, Les," 211
Boleslawski, Richard, 34
Bolt, Robert, 185
Bond, Ward, 93
Bonstelle, Jessie, 30-31, 194
"Boomerang," 294
Boone, Richard, 81
Booth, Edwin, 346
Booth, Shirley, 135, 168, 395
Bordoni, Irene, 384
Bost, Pierre, 184
"Bo Tree, The," 158
Bourchier, Arthur, 22
"Bourgeois Gentleman, The," 62
Boyer, Charles, 368
"Boy Meets Girl," 11, 57, 414
"Boys from Syracuse, The," 202, 204
"Boy with a Cart," 95
Bradt, Grayce, 200, 201

Brady, William A., 31

Brando, Dorothy, 84, 86

Brando, Marlon, 84, 135, 160, 170, 234,

235, 243, 300, 302, 321-22, 347
Brattleboro Summer Theatre, 394
Brattle Theatre Company, 36, 62
"Brave Bulls, The/' 377
Brecht, Bertolt, 126, 136, 401
"Brecht on Brecht," 169
Breit, Harvey, 384
Brennan, Walter, 47
Brent, Romney, 86
Brewer, George, 134
Bridie, James, 141, 389
"Brighter Day," 152
Bristol Old Vic Company, 263
British Broadcasting Corporation, 284
Bromberg, J. Edward, 125
Brook, Peter, 180, 184, 262, 263
Brooks, Richard, 288
"Brother Rat," 201-02, 204
"Brother Rat and a Baby," 202
"Brothers Karamazov, The/' 227, 262,

288

Brown, Pamela, 184
Browning, Robert, 289
"Browning Version, The," 340
"Brute Force," 57
"Buccaneer, The," 147, 362, 376
Buchanan, Jack, 384
Burbage, James, 23
Burrell, John, 388, 389
Burton, Richard, 152, 255
"Bushido," 194
"Bus Stop," 15, 17, 190, 358
"Buster Brown," 27

"Caesar and Cleopatra," 23, 79, 258,

264, 287

Cagney, James, 74, 259, 346, 376
"Call Me Mister," 35
"Calvary," 331
"Camille," 33
"Camino Real," 160
Camus, Albert, 187
"Candida/' 23, 126, 129, 131, 195
Cannan, Dennis, 184
Capalbo, Carmen, 271
Cape Playhouse, 86, 98
Capitol Records, 220
Capitol Theatre, 99
"Captain Brassbound's Conversion/*

328

"Carefree Tree, The/' 357
"Caretaker, The/ 1 81-82, 145, 257, 263,

266, 267

441

INDEX

Carew, James, 22

Carey, Harry, 410

"Carmen," 216

Carne", Marcel, 211

Carolina Playmakers, 217

"Carousel," 250, 251

Carrel, Alexis, 213

"Carrie," 204-05

Carro-ll, Madeleine, 411

"Carve Her Name with Pride," 187

"Casque d'Or," 403

Cassin, Henry, 66

Casson, Lewis T., 176

"Castor et Pollux," 210

Gather, Willa, 195

"Cat on a Hot Tin Roof," 245, 348

Cavalcanti, Alberto, 341

"Cavalleria Rusticana," 317

"Cave Se Rebiffe, Le," 211

Central School of Speech Training, 284

"Cesar," 65

"Chained," 69

"Chairs, The," 160

Chancy, Lon, 68

"Changeling, The," 148-49

Chaplin, Charles, 61, 74, 84, 130, 259,
286

"Charley's Aunt," 241

Chase, Charley, 292

Chase, Mary, 46

Chauvin, Marie-Therese, 207-08

Chayefsky, Paddy, 169

Chekhov, Anton, 125, 167, 168, 390,
432

Chekhov, Michael, 125, 180, 185, 338,
355, 390, 432

"Cheri," 16

Cherry Lane Theatre, 13, 319

"Cherry Orchard, The," 167, 168, 432

Chesterton, G. K., 312

Chicago Art Institute, 28

"Child of Our Time," 236

Chodorov, Edward, 169

Chodorov, Jerome, 270, 394

Chorus Equity, 251

Churchill, Winston, 122

"Cimarron," 227

Cinecitta Studio, 52

"City for Conquest," 376

Civic Repertory Theatre, 125-26, 128

Claman, Julian, 47

Clark, Bobby, 61

Clark, Dane, 169

"Claudia," 320

Clement, Rene, 227, 229

Clift, Montgomery, 115, 233, 234, 254,

300

Clork, Harry, 240
Clurman, Harold, 44, 46, 422, 423
Cobb, Lee J., 47, 243
Coca, Imogene, 88, 414
Colbert, Claudette, 35, 316, 414
"Cold Wind and the Warm, The," 301
Cole, Donald, 316
Cole, G. Gordon, 316
Cole, Janet, see Kim Hunter
Colleran, Kate, 255
Colleran, Matthew, 255
Colleran, William, 255
Collinge, Patricia, 361
Columbia Broadcasting System, 305,

364

Columbia Pictures, 35, 109, 118
Columbo, John, 293
Columbo, Russ, 293, 405
"Come Back, Little Sheba," 135
Comedie-Francaise, 30, 209, 399
"Command to Love, The," 31
Compagnie des Quinze, La, 336, 339
"Complaisant Lover, The/' 342
"Compulsion," 191
Condon, Richard, 413
"Confessions of an English Opium-

Eater," 284

Congreve, William, 183, 366
Conklin, Peggy, 357
Connelly, Marc, 85, 88
Conservatoire National de Musique et

Declamation, 209, 210
"Constant Wife, The," 86
Conway, Curt, 17
Conway, Jamie, 17
Conway, Lisa, 17
Coogan, Jackie, 67
Cookson, Peter, 36
"Cool World, The," 330
Cooper, Gary, 236, 291, 294, 375, 376,

395, 411, 412

Cooper, Violet Kemble, 31
Coquelin, 20, 325
"Coquette," 432
"Coriolanus," 287
CORNELL, KATHARINE, 30, 127-28, 129,

193-97, 299, 300
Cornell, Peter C., 193
"Corn Is Green, The," 335
Costello, Dolores, 384
"Counsellor-at-Law," 160, 305, 337
"Country Boy, The," 383
"Country Girl, The," 98

442

INDEX

"Country Wife, The," 337

Coward, Noel, 113, 327, 432

Craig, Gordon, 430

Craven, Frank, 383

Crawford, Cheryl, 160, 166, 347-48

CRAWFORD, JOAN, 66-72, 94, 132, 164,

355

Creighton, Anthony, 350
Crews, Laura Hope, 86
"Crime and Punishment," 80, 313-14
Cromwell, Richard, 369
CRONYN, HUME, 36, 55-52
Crosby, Bing, 216
Crosby, Everett, 409
Crothers, Rachel, 195
Crouse, Russel, 369
"Crucible, The," 300, 403
"Crunch and Dez," 151
"Cry, the Beloved Country," 108
"Cry Terror," 276
cummings, e. e., 331
Cummings, Vicki, 135
"Curly-Headed Kid, The," 190
"Curse You, Jack Dalton," 276
Cusumano, Mike, 344
"Cymbeline," 181
"Cyrano de Bergerac," 124, 287
Czinner, Paul, 340

"Damask Cheek, The," 285

"Dam Busters, The," 146, 340

"Dame aux Camelias, La," 39

Danilova, Alexandra, 352

"Danton's Death," 313

"Dark at the Top of the Stairs, The,"

136, 413

"Dark Lady of the Sonnets, The," 23
"Dark of the Moon," 330
"Dark Victory," 134
Darrow, Clarence, 28, 36
Darvas, Lili, 414
Da Silva, Howard, 125
Davies, Marion, 94
D AVION, ALEXANDER, 73-82, 143
Davion, Jack, 73
Davion, Thomas, 73
Davis, Bette, 88, 93
"Days of Wine and Roses," 255
"Dead of Night," 340, 341
"Dead Secret, A," 180
Dean, James, 395
"Dear Liar," 195, 197
"Dear Wife," 120
"Death of a Salesman," 362

"Death of Bessie Smith, The," 329, 330,

331, 332

"Death Takes a Holiday," 362, 363
"Deathwatch," 329
"Deburau," 361
De Carlo, Yvonne, 51
Debs, Eugene V., 28
Dee, Sandra, 268
"Deep Well, The," 152
"Deerslayer, The," 381
"Defiant Ones, The," 108
De Ghelderode, Michel, 331
De Havilland, Olivia, 187
De Laurentiis, Dino, 377
Dell, Floyd, 28
Delmar, Vina, 426
Delsarte system, 158, 298 ,
De Madariaga, Salvador, 58
deMille, Cecil B., 375-76
"Demons de 1'Aube, Les," 401
Denham, Isolde, 364
Denham, Reginald, 252, 364
De Quincey, Thomas, 284
"Desert Song, The," 293
"Design for Living," 362
"Desire Under 'the Elms," 175, 395
"Desperate Hours, The," 244-45
"Destry Rides Again," 223
"Detective Story." 300
Devine, George, 146, 148
DE WILDE, BRANDON, 43-49, 192, 273
De Wilde, Eugenia Wilson, 43, 44, 45,

46

De Wilde, Frederick, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47
"Diabolique," 403
"Diamond As Big As the Ritz, The,"

253
"Diary of a Chambermaid, The," 129-

30

"Diary of a Madman, The," 187
"Diary of Anne Frank, The/' 287
Dickson, Dorothy, 360
Dietrich, Marlene, 34
"Dieu Est Innocent," 401
Digges, Dudley, 129
"Disenchanted, The," 384
Disney, Walt, 271, 283
Dmytryk, Edward, 237
Dobrovinskaya, Sonya, 352
"Doctor in Spite of Himself, The," 62
"Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," 40, 362,

363

"Dodsdancen," 168
"Doll's House, A," 227
Donaldson Award, 45

443

INDEX

Donat, Robert, 227, 389

Donehue, Vincent J., 158

"Don Juan in Hell," 23, 24

Donnay, Maurice, 208

Dorsch, Kathe, 228

Dorsett, Wilbur, 395

Dostoevski, 237

Douglas, Helen Gahagan, 26, 32, 34,

35

Douglas, Kirk, 272, 273
Douglas, Mary, 26
DOUGLAS, MELVYN, 26-31, 131
Douglas, Peter, 26, 34
Dowling, Monroe, 327
Dox, Charles, 84
Draper, Ruth, 212
"Dream Girl," 226, 306
"Dream Play, The," 39
Dreiser, Theodore, 205
Drew, John, 193
Drinkwater, John, 175
"Drole deDrame," 211
"Drums Along the Mohawk," 93
Duchess Theatre, 284
"Dude Goes West, The," 203
"Duel of Angels," 287
Duerrenmatt, Friedrich, 330
Duke, Carol, 150
Duke, John and Frances, 150
DUKE, PATTY, 150-55
Duke, Raymond, 150-51, 152
"Dummy, The," 362
Duncan, Isadora, 312
Dunne, Irene, 34
"Dunnigan's Daughter," 306
Dunnock, Mildred, 160
Dunsany, Lord, 345
"Du Rififi Chez les Femmes," 211
Duse, Eleanora, 20, 289, 324, 346
Duvivier, Julien, 211
"Dybbuk, The," 312
Dyne, Michael, 368

"Eagle and the Hawk, The," 362
"East Is West," 29
"East Lynne," 19
"East of Eden," 395
"Ebb Tide," 264
"Edge of the City," 108
Edinburgh Festival, 287
"Ed Sullivan Show, The," 53
Edwards, Miss, 165
"Egg and I, The," 330
"Egrnont," 210, 226
Einstein, Albert, 315

Eisenstein, Sergei, 260

Eldridge, Florence, 361

Eliot, T. S., 77, 184, 409

Eliot Drama Group, 329

Elizabethan Stock Company, 407

Ellington, Duke, 62

Elliott, Madge, 181

Elser, Frank B., 88

Emmett, Robert, 319

Emmett, Sean, 319

"Emperor's Clothes, The," 46

"Enchanted Island," 295

"End as a Man," 348

"Enforcer, The," 63

Engle, Madeleine 1', 167

"Epitaph for George Dillon," 350

Equity Library Theatre, 13, 159, 168,

276, 330

Erie County Playhouse, 419
"Escurial," 331

Eugene O'Neill Theatre, 330
Evans, Edith, 175, 283, 337-39, 393,

434

Evans, Maurice, 255
Ewell, Tom, 160, 300
"Excuse Me," 383
"Executive Suite," 362
Eyre, John, 329
Eythe, William, 420

"Face in the Crowd, A," 221-22, 223,

253, 255

Fagan, J. B., 432
Fairbanks, Douglas, Jr., 68, 71
Fairbanks, Douglas, Sr., 291
"Fall, The," 187
"Family, The," 190
"Family Affair, A," 134
"Family Reunion, The," 77, 184
"Fanny," 65

"Far Country, A," 16, 17
"Farmer Takes a Wife, The," 88, 89
Farrel, Bernard, 212
"Fatal Wedding, The," 20
"Father, The," 259
"Father Is a Bachelor," 120
"Faust," 227, 228
Fay, Theresa, 44
Feagin School of Drama and Radio,

366, 367

"Fearmakers, The," 295
"Fear Strikes Out," 395
Federal Theatre, 418
Feist, Leo, 201
Fellini, Federico, 109

444

INDEX

Feltus, Catherine, 409

"Femmes Sans Nom," 211

Ferber, Edna, 134

Ferrer, Jose, 130, 202, 287, 413, 414

Ferrer, Mel, 81

Feyder, Jacques, 210, 401, 402

Feyer, Paul, 212

"Fiat Lux," 157

Field, Betty, 118

Field, Joseph, 270, 394

Fields/W. C., 61

"Find the Woman," 22

Finklehoffe, Fred F., 201

"Firefly, The," 251

Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 253

"Five Finger Exercise," 114, 115-16,

237

"Five Kings," 128-29
Flagstad, Kirsten, 196
Fleming, Victor, 88
"Flies, The," 346
Florey, Robert, 410
"Flowering Peach, The," 357
"Flowers of the Forest," 128
Flynn, Errol, 147, 149
Foley, Gregory, 84-85, 86
Fonda, Amy, 92
Fonda, Frances Seymour, 92
Fonda, Harriet, 83
FONDA, HENRY, 83-91, 92, 93, 94, 97

98, 102, 121, 295
FONDA, JANE, 83, 90, 92-102
Fonda, Peter, 84, 90, 92, 93
Fonda, Susan Blanchard, 92, 94
Fonda, William Brace, 83
Fontaine, Joan, 395
"Footlights and Fools," 362
Ford, John, 89, 93, 412
Forrest, Steve, 291
Forsythe, John, 160
"Fort Apache," 93
Fort Lee Playhouse, 100
"For Whom the Bell Tolls," 227
Foster, Preston, 411
"Fourposter, The," 57
Franciosa, Anthony, 13
Frankel, Doris, 168
Franken, Rose, 320
Frankenheimer, John, 48, 192
Fraser-Simson, H., 180
"Free Soul, A/' 31
"Friendly Persuasion," 395, 396
Frings, Ketti, 396

"From Here to Eternity," 160, 233-34
"From the Terrace," 246

"From Whom Cometh My Help," 108

"Front Page, The," 241

"Front Page Farrell," 305

Fry, Christopher, 95, 181, 183, 285

Fuchs, Leo, 417, 418

"Fugitive Kind, The," 301

Gabel, Martin, 131

Gable, Clark, 69, 74, 191, 346, 408

Gainsborough Pictures, 340

"Gamblers, The," 384

"Game of Love and Death, The," 87

"Gang's All Here, The," 36

Gant Gaither Theatre (Miami Beach),

318

Garbo, Greta, 33, 119, 211
Gardner, Ava, 396
Garen, Leo, 329
Garfield, John, 125, 321, 346
Garner, John Nance, 290
"Gaslight," 262, 368, 369
Gate Theatre, 330
Gaynor, Janet, 319
Gazzara, Anthony, 344
GAZZARA, BEN, 255, 344-49, 358
Gazzara, Janice Rule, see Rule, Janice
Gazzara, Louise Erickson, 348
Gazzo, Michael Vincente, 13, 348, 358
Genet, Jean, 329
"Gens du Voyage, Les," 211
"Gentleman from Athens, The," 377
"Gervaise," 227, 229
"Get Away Old Man," 306
Gibson, Charles Dana, 36
Gielgud, Eleanor, 430
Gielgud, Frank and Kate Terry-Lewis,

429
GIELGUD, JOHN, 14, 20, 78, 119, 140,

141, i42-i3, 144, 175, 181, 183,

184, 185, 258, 285, 287, 313-14,

339, 347, 393, 429-37
Gielgud, Lewis, 430
Gielgud, Val, 430
Gilbert, John, 68

"Girl of the Golden West, The," 409
Gish, Lillian, 313
"Glad Tidings," 36
"Glass Menagerie, The," 241, 347
"Go, Man, Go," 108
Goddard, Paulette, 128, 129, 411
"Goddess, The," 15, 153
"Gods of the Mountain, The," 345
"God's Trombones," 328
"Goethe," 232
Goethe, Wolfgang von, 210, 226

445

INBEX

Goetz, Ruth and Augustus, 287, 414
Gogol, 187
Gold, Kathe, 228
Goldbaum, Peter, 168
Golden, John, 165
"Golden'Boy," 118, 119
Golden Circle, the, 118
"Gold Rush, The," 259
Goldsmith, Clifford, 318
Goldsmith, Martin H,, 373
Goldsmith, Stella Quinn, 373
Goldwyn, Samuel, 32, 294
"Gondoliers, The," 217
"Gone with the Wind," 74
"Goodbye, My Fancy," 355, 395
"Goodbye, My Lady," 47
Goodman, Edward, 194
Goodman, Jules Eckert, 361
Goodman Theatre School of Drama,

425, 426

Gordon, Ruth, 335, 337
Goring, Marius, 227
Gottwald, Fritz, 31
Grahame, Kenneth, 180
"Grand Jeu, Le," 211
Grant, Gary, 54, 120
"Grapes of Wrath, The," 89
Grattan, Henry, 359
"Great Adventure, The," 360
"Great Day/' 70
"Great Expectations," 114-15
"Great Gatsby, The," 361
"Great to Be Alive!" 354
"Great Waltz, The," 352
Green, Carolyn, 413
Green, Paul, 218
Greenbush Summer Theatre, 299
Greene, Graham, 184, 271, 342
Greene, Herbert, 414
"Green Goddess, The," 55
"Green Hat, The," 195, 196
"Green Mansions," 395-96
Greenwich Mews Theatre, 350
"Greenwillow," 396, 397
"Green Years, The," 57
Grew, Mary, 282
Grey, Zane, 232
GRIFFITH, ANDY, 215-23, 253
Griffith, Carl and Ruth, 215
Griffith, Barbara Edwards, 218, 219-20
Griffith, D. W., 153, 384
Griffith, Dixie, 218
Griffith, Sam, 218
"Grip of Iron, The," 20
"Guadalcanal Diary," 376

446

"Guardsman, The," 361

Guildhall School of Music and Drama,

283, 284

"Guilt of Janet Ames, The," 35
Guinness, Alec, 119, 121, 144, 262, 263,

339

Guitry, Lucien, 20
Guitry, Sacha, 20, 208, 361
"Gun for a Coward," 358
Guthrie, Tyrone, 80, 146, 337, 390

Haas, Dolly, 313

Habima Theatre (Moscow), 347

Hachler, Horst, 227

Hachler, Oliver Christian, 227

Hagen, Uta, 353, 426

Haines, William, 68

Hall, Bruce, 12

Hall, Willis, 148

"Hallmark Hall of Fame," 255

Hamilton, Lloyd, 292

"Hamlet," 20, 23, 29, 78, 82, 140, 141,

144, 177, 182, 184, 240, 258, 283,

336, 435

Hammersmith Lyric Theatre, 183
Hammerstein, Oscar, 94
Hampden, \Valter, 124
"Hanging Tree, The," 227
Hanley, Ellen, 353
Hanna Theatre (Cleveland), 239
Hannen, Hermione, 74
Hansberry, Lorraine, 108
Hanson, William, 354
"Harder They Fall, The," 276
Harding, Warren G., 36
HARDWICKE, CEDRIC, 19-25, 287
Hardwicke, Edward, 23
Hardwicke, Michael, 23
Harlow, Jean, 297
Harris, Julie, 14, 44
Harris, Rosemary, 152
Hart, William S., 84
Harvard Dramatic Club, 329
"Harvey," 395
Harvey, John Martin, 174
Harvey, Laurence, 78
Hastings, Hugh, 80
Hatfield, Hurd, 51
"Hatful of Rain, A," 348, 349
Hatton, Frederick and Fanny, 32
"Have Gun, Will Travel," 81
Hayden, Melissa, 352
Hayden, Terese, 168
Hayes, Helen, 46, 154, 432
Hayes, Joseph, 244

INDEX

"Hay Fever," 262

Haymarket Theatre, 140

Haymore, Miss, 217

Hayward, Brooke, 97

Hayward, Leland, 88, 96

Hayward, Susan, 412

Hazzard, John E., 383

"Heartbreak House/' 23, 393

"Heart of the Matter, The/' 227

Hecht, Ben, 28, 29, 413

HECKART, EILEEN, 102, 132-37

Heflin, Van, 46

Heggen, Thomas, 89

Heimberger, Eddie Albert, see Eddie
Albert

Heimberger, Frank, 198

Heimberger, John, 198

Heimberger, Margaret, 198

Heimberger, Mary, 198

Helburn, Theresa, 194

"Helen Morgan Story, The," 245

"Heller in Pink Tights," 134

Helpmann, Robert, 181, 284

Hemingway, Ernest, 41, 412

"Henry IV," 128, 173

"Henry V," 128, 141, 181, 234, 431

"Henry VIII," 146, 159

Henry, Thomas Browne, 408, 409

Henry Miller Theatre, 321

Hepburn, Audrey, 396

Hepburn, Katharine, 11, 35, 69

Herbert, F. Hugh, 306

Herlie, Eileen, 184

Herlihy, James Leo, 269

Hess, Myra, 196

Hesse, Herman, 236

Hesselberg, Eclouard, 26, 27, 28

Hesselberg, George, 26

Hesselberg, Lena Shackleford, 26

Hesselberg, Melvyn, see Melvyn Doug-
las

"He That Is Greatest," 407

"Hiding Place, The," 139, 148

"High P-itton Shoes," 353

"High Noon," 236

"High Tor," 128

Hill, Abram, 105, 106

"Hill in Korea," 146

Hingle, Pat, 191

"Hipper's Holiday," 56

Hirschmann, Carl, 122

Hitchcock, Alfred, 57, 340

Hivnor, Robert, 13

"Hobson's Choice," 264

HOLDEN, WILLIAM, 117-22

"Holiday for Lovers," 274

"Holiday for Sinners," 355

Holland, Murray, 270

"Hollywood Revue of '29," 68

Holm, Celeste, 413

"Homme Get Inconnu, L*/' 213

Homolka, Oscar, 276

"Honeymooners Grayce and Eddie,

The," 201
"Hong Kong/' 81
"Honor Bright," 292
Hopkins, Arthur, 31
Horobin, Gilbert, 263
"Houseboat," 54
Houseman, John, 136
"House of Bernarda Alba, The/* 14
Howard, Leslie, 196, 262, 283
Howard, Sidney, 294
Howard, Trevor, 227
Howard, Willie, 61
Hughes, Rupert, 383
Hull, Henry, 406
"Human Beings," 203
"Humoresque," 69
Hunter, Glenn, 85
Hunter, Ian, 183
HUNTER, KIM, 316-25, 347, 413
"Hustler, The," 247
Huston, John, 109
Huston, Walter, 315, 384
Hyams, Barry, 130
Hyman, Mac, 221
Hymer, John B., 30

Ibsen, Henrik, 180, 227

"Idiot, The," 237

"Idiot's Delight," 140, 409, 410

"If I Were King," 345

"If Winter Comes," 369

"I Have Been Here Before/* 178, 258-

59

"Imaginary Invalid, The," 62
"Immoralist, The," 287
"Importance of Being Earnest, The,"

318, 395

Inge, William, 191, 243, 356
"Inherit the Wind," 36, 362
"Inner Sanctum/' 307
"Inspector Calls, The," 390
"Intermezzo," 39-40
Interplayers, 13
"In Time of War," 281
"Invitation to a March/* 101, 136
lonesco, Eugene, 160, 401
Ipswich Repertory Theatre, 80

447

INDEX

"I Remember Mama," 23, 270

Irving, Henry, 20, 21, 139, 174

"Isle of Lost Ships, The," 384

"Is Zat So?" 87, 318

"It Depends What You Mean," 141

"Ivan the Terrible," 260

Ives, Burl, 221

"Jackass, The," 330

JACKSON, ANNE, 159, 160, 163-170

Jackson, Barry, 177, 178, 180

Jackson, Beatrice, 163, 164

Jackson, Catherine, 163, 164, 165-66

Jackson, John, 163, 164

Jackson, Stella Murray, 163

Jaffe, Sam, 168

James, Henry, 212, 343

"Jamie," 47

"Jane Eyre," 174

"Jealousy," 31, 362

"Jeannie," 176

Jeans, Isabel, 183

Jehlinger, Charles, 56, 382

"Jenny," 211

"Jenny Lind," 211

"Jesse James," 88

"Jezebel," 88, 93

"Joan of Lorraine/* 12

Jodell Productions, 246

"John Loves Mary," 241

Johnson, Bill, 84

Johnson, James Weldon, 328

Jones, Carole, see Carol Lynley

Jones, Cyril, 268

Jones, Daniel, 268

Jones, Jack, 29

Jordan, Glenn, 328, 329

Jory, Victor, 409

"Joueur, Le," 211

Jouvet, Louis, 30

"Joyce Jordan, M.D.," 305

"Judgment at Nuremberg," 232, 234,

237, 308, 309
"Julius Caesar,*' 29, 129, 140, 283, 293,

434

"June Moon," 165
"Junior Miss," 394
Justin, Sidney, 409

Kamerny Theatre (Moscow), 311-12
Kaminker, Alain, 399
Kaminker, Andre, 399
Kaminker, Jean-Pierre, 399
Kammerspiele Theatre (Munich), 233
Kamp, Irene, 110

448

Kanin, Fay, 413

Kanin, Garson, 201

Kanin, Michael, 413

Kaufman, George S., 85, 134, 423

Kaye, Nora, 250

Kazan, Elia, 35, 63, 129, 130, 136, 160,

166, 191, 221, 222-23, 248, 253, 254,

321, 322, 325, 347, 348, 395, 427
Kean, Edmund, 20
Keith, Robert, 89
Keller, Helen, 152, 153-54
Kellerd, John E., 29
Kennedy, Arthur, 355, 376
Kennedy, Madge, 383
"Kermesse Heroique, La," 211
Kerr, John, 395
Kilty, Jerome, 195
"Kinder, Mutter, und ein General,"

234

"King John," 179, 180, 182, 284
"King "Kong," 269

"King Lear," 82, 142, 146, 287, 330, 336
"King of Kings," 291-92
Kingsley, Sidney, 300
"Kiss, The," 211
"Kiss and Tell," 12, 306
"Kiss for Cinderella, A," 87, 199
"Kiss Me Kate," 251
"Kiss of Death," 306, 307
"Kiss Them for Me," 306
"Kitty Foyle," 152
Kleines Theatre (Berlin), 312
"Klitos," 232
"Kraft Television Theatre," 190, 253,

270, 395

Kramer, Stanley, 109
Krasna, Norman, 241

Ladd, Alan, 46, 74, 411, 412
"Ladies Love Brutes," 362
"Lady Eve, The," 89, 93
"Lady from the Sea, The," 180
"Lady's Not for Burning, The," 78,

143

"Lady Vanishes, The," 340
"Lady Windermere's Fan," 292
Lahr, Bert, 61
Laine, Frankie, 152
Lamour, Dorothy, 411
"Lamp Unto My Feet," 190
"Land Beyond the River, A," 330
Landi, Elissa, 316
Landis, Jessie Royce, 168
Lang, Harold, 100
Lang, Fritz, 341

INDEX

Langdon, Harry, 67

Langton, Basil C., 177, 178

LANSBURY, ANGELA, 48, 51, 192, 364-72

Lansbury, Bruce, 364

Lansbury, Edgar, 364

Lansbury, George, 365

Lansbury, Moyna MacGill, 364, 365,

367

Lantaff, Channine, 317, 318
Lardner, Ring, 165
"Lark, The," 265
"Last Bridge, The," 227
"Last Dance, The," 168
"Last Sunset, The," 269, 272-73
"Last Tycoon, The," 253
Laughton, Charles, 114
"Laugh With Me," 387
"Laura," 294

Laurel and Hardy, 292, 345
Laurents, Arthur, 286
La Verne Players, Dorothy, 29
Lavery, Emmet, 377
"Law Breaker, The," 361
Lawford, Peter, 355
Lawrence, Jerome, 36
Lawson, Wilfrid, 259, 260, 300
Leatherbee, Charles, 86
Lee, Robert E., 36
"Left Handed Gun, The," 245
Le Gallienne, Eva, 125-26, 167, 250
"Legion of the Condemned, The," 291
Lehmann, Lotte, 412
Leigh, Janet, 396
Leigh, Vivien, 79, 113, 191, 287
LEICHTON, MARGARET, 77, 78, 141, 177,

386-91, 426
Lenya, Lotte, 169
LeRoy, Mervyn, 52
Le Sueur, Hal, 66

Le Sueur, Lucille, see Joan Crawford
Le Sueur, Thomas, 66
"Letty Lynton," 164
Levin, Henry, 396
Levin, Ira, 221
Lewin, Al, 211
Lewis, Bobby, 160
Lewis, Milton, 118
Lewis, Robert, 166, 300, 303
Liebling, William, 242, 243
"Lifeboat," 57

"Life Can Be Beautiful," 305
"Life of Emile Zola, The," 313
Light, James, 107

"Light in the Forest, The," 271

"Lightnin'," 383, 384

"Liliom," 129, 157

"Limelight," 286

"Lincoln," 384

Lindfors, Viveca, 169, 170

Lindsay, Howard, 127, 369

Lindstrom, Friedel Pia, 39

Lindstrom, Peter Aron, 39

"Lineup, The," 160

Linn, Bambi, 250, 354

"Little Blue Light, The," 36, 131

"Little Minister, The," 387

"Little Ol' Boy," 126, 127

"Little Princess, The," 27

"Little Women," 194

Littlewood, Joan, 340

"Live Like Pigs," 148

Liverpool Repertory Theatre, 336, 337,

343

Lloyd, Harold, 304
Loesser, Frank, 396
Logan, Joshua, 86, 89, 100, 135, 191,

244, 356

Lollobrigida, Gina, 96
London Mask Theatre School, 175
London Palladium, 62
"Lonelyhearts," 301
"Lonely Man, The," 396
"Long, Hot Summer, The," 245
"Long and the Short and the Tall,

The," 148
"Long Day's Journey Into Night," 362,

363

"Long des Trottoirs, Le," 211
"Look Back in Anger," 80, 287
"Look Homeward, Angel," 396, 398
"Look Up and Live," 190
Lord, Pauline, 126
Lorca, Federico Garcia, 14, 96
LOREN, SOPHIA, 50-54, 395
"Loss of Roses, A," 191
"Lost Colony, The," 218
Lothar, Rudolph, 31
"Love for Love," 141
"Love Me Long," 168
"Love's Labor's Lost/' 181
Lubitsch, Ernest, 33, 34
Luce, Claire, 176
Lumet, Sidney, 160
"Lust for Life," 377
Lyceum Theatre, 81
LYNLEY, CAROL, 268-74
"Lysistrata," 107

449

INDEX

Mabley, Edward, 36

"Macadam," 401

MacArthur, Charles, 28, 29, 413

MacArthur, Jarnes, 46

"Macbeth," 29, 78, 129

MacGrath, Leueen, 423

Mack, Willard, 31

MacLaine, Shirley, 188, 189

MacMurray, Fred, 358

Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, 147

"Madison Avenue," 295

"Madwoman of Chaillot, The," 395

"Magic Box, The/' 227

Magnani, Anna, 161, 350

"Magnolia Alley/' 168

"Main Currents in American Thought/'

205

Majestic Theatre (Buffalo), 193
"Major Barbara," 130, 159
"Majority of One, A," 23
Maiden, Karl, 48, 192, 300, 395
"Male Animal, The," 98, 223, 318, 413
Mamoulian, Rouben, 118
"Man Between, The," 287
Maney, Richard, 129
"Man and Superman," 180
"Man for All Seasons, A," 172, 178,

185-86
"Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, The,"

362

Mann, Daniel, 276, 347, 348
"Manslaughter," 362
Manulis, Martin, 36
"Man Who Came to Dinner, The," 318
"Man Who Was Thursday, The/' 312
"Manya," 118

MARCH, FREDRIC, 118, 316, 350, 395-63
"March of Time, The/' 243
"Marco Millions/' 329
Margo, 202, 203
"Marius," 65

"Mark of the Hawk, The," 108
"Mark of Zorro, The," 51
Markova, Alicia, 250, 352
Marlowe, Hugh, 368
"Marriage, The," 57
"Marriage Playground, The/' 362
Marshall, Brenda, 120
Marshall, Herbert, 34
Martin, Dean, 234
Martin, Mary, 71, 216
Martinique Theatre, 61
"Marty," 276
"Mary of Scotland," 366
Masina, Giulietta, 377

450

Mason, James, 287
Massey, Raymond, 411
"Matchmaker, The," 80, 395
Matthau, Carol Grace, 421
Matthau, David, 421
Matthau, Henry, 416
Matthau, Jenny, 421
MATTHAU, WALTER, 222, 416-23
Matthews, A. E., 22
Maude, Cyril, 260
Maugham, W. Somerset, 369
"Mauvais Coups, Les," 400
Mayer, Louis B., 68, 69, 71, 368-69
McCarthy, Justin Huntly, 345
McCarthy, Kevin, 160, 300
McClintic, Guthrie, 127-28, 129, 131,

195, 196, 299, 300, 381
McCrea, Joel, 384, 411
McCullers, Carson, 44
McDowall, Roddy, 191, 255
McFadden, Elizabeth, 168
McGuire, Dorothy, 87, 98, 413
Mclntyre, O. O., 126
McLaglen, Victor, 412
McMein, Neysa, 360
McPherson, Aimee Semple, 374
Meadows, Audrey, 353
"Me and Juliet/' 355, 356
"Medea," 176, 184, 353
Meeker, Ralph, 244, 357-58
"Meet Me in St. Louis," 152
Meighan, Thomas, 304
Meisner, Sandy, 166
"Member of the Wedding, The/' 44,

46

Mendes, Lothar, 362
Menjou, Adolphe, 118
Menken, Helen, 383-84
Menlo School, 23
"Merchant of Venice, The," 21, 75,

173, 182, 287

MEREDITH, BURGESS, 34, 64, 123-31
Meredith, George, 123
Meredith, Helen Derby Berrier, 128
Meredith, Jonathan, 128
Meredith, Kaja Sundsten, 128
Meredith, Margaret Perry, 128
Meredith, Tala, 128
Meredith, Virginia, 128
Meredith, William George, 123
Merkel, Una, 384
Merman, Ethel, 71, 327
Merrick, David, 370
"Merton of the Movies," 85
Meservey, Frank, Jr., 404

INDEX

Meservey, Frank and Ruth Rea, 404
Meservey, Robert Preston, see Robert

Preston
Method acting, 13, 14-15, 126, 136, 161,

197, 277, 362, 363, 396, 398, 427-

28
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 35, 50, 57, 67,

68, 71, 245, 355, 368, 369
Mickey, Ed, 216, 217
"Microbe of Love, The/' 292
"Middle of the Night," 169, 362
"Midnight Wedding, The," 262
"Mid-Summer," 98
"Midsummer Night's Dream, A," 143,

146, 312

Mielziner, Jo, 128
"Mildred Pierce," 69
Miles, Bernard, 74
"Milky Way, The," 240
Milland, Ray, 411
Miller, Arthur, 300, 403
"Millionairess, The," 249
"Million Dollar Legs," 118
Mills, Hayley, 113, 114, 116
Mills, John, 113
Mills, Jonathan, 113
MILLS, JULIET, 113-16
Mills, Mary Hayley Bell, 113
Milne, A. A., 180
"Miracle Worker, The," 152, 153-54,

155

"Misalliance," 265
"Miser, The," 62
"Miserables, The," 362
"Miss Liberty," 354
"Mrs. McThing," 46
"Mr. Pirn Passes By," 361
"Mister Roberts," 89-90, 94, 121, 160
Mitchell, Thomas, 259
Mitchell, Yvonne, 178
Mitchurn, Robert, 412
Mix, Tom, 304
"Modern Times," 74
Moliere, 62-63, 209, 226
Molnar, 211
"Money," 294

"Monk and the Woman, The," 22
Monks, John, Jr., 201
Monroe, Harriet, 29
Monroe, Marilyn, 69, 98
Montand, Yves, 402, 403
Monterey, Carlotta, 21
Montgomery, Robert, 164
"Montserrat," 14
"Moon and Sixpence, The," 57

Mooney, Ria, 125

"Moon Is Blue, The," 100

"Moon Is Down, The," 23, 178

"Moon's Our Home, The," 88

Moore, Archie, 108

Moore, Violet C., 10

More, Thomas, 186

Morgan, Frank, 35

Morgan, Helen, 432

Morgan, Robin, 270

"Morning Parade," 201

Morris, Aldyth, 357

Morris, Gouverneur, 295

Morris, Lloyd, 285

Morris, Maynard, 243

Moscow Art Theatre, 71, 311, 340

Mosel, Tad, 244

Mostel, Joshua, 62

Mostel, Kathryn Harkins, 62

Mostel, Tobias, 62

MOSTEL, ZERO (Samuel Joel), 60-65,

130

"Mother Courage," 136
Mount Kenya Safari Club, 122
"Mourning Becomes Electra," 341
"Much Ado About Nothing/' 78, 144,

435

Muni, Paul, 36

"Murder in the Cathedral/' 409
"Murder on a Ferris Wheel," 298
Murphy, Audie, 47
Murphy, George, 412
Murray, Stephen, 175
Music Circus Tent, 250
Music Corporation of America, 190,

243

"Music Man, The," 413, 414-15
"My Darling Clementine/' 89
"My Foolish Heart," 294
"My Life in Art/' 339
"My Pal Gus," 307
"My Partner," 360
"My Sister Eileen," 189

Nagel, Conrad, 252

Naish, J. Carroll, 410

Nash, Mary, 31

Nathan, George Jean, 322

Nathanson, Julius, 417

National Broadcasting Company, 45,

201, 305

National Theatre Stock Company, 56
Nazirnova, Alia, 125
Neagle, Anna, 366
Neal, Patricia, 160, 222

451

INDEX

Neighborhood Playhouse School of the

Theatre, 158, 166, 167
Nelson, Herb, 200
New Amsterdam Theatre, 321

"New Faces," 88

Newman, Arthur S., 239

Newman, Arthur S., Jr., 239

Newman, Joanne Woodward, see Jo-
anne Woodward

Newman, Joseph S., 239

NEWMAN, PAUL, 239-48

"New Mown Hay/' 10

New School for Social Research, 165,
276, 299, 346, 419

New Theatre Workshop, 329

New York City Ballet, 250

New York Film Critics, 41, 232, 234

"Nice People," 195

Nicholson, Kenyon, 86

Nielson-Terry, Dennis, 282

"Night Circus, The," 349, 358

"Night Music," 276, 347

"Night Must Fall," 175

"Night Over Taos," 409

"Night Passage," 47

"Ninotchka," 33, 234

"Noah," 175, 336

Noble, William, 269

Noe von Nordberg, Karl, 224

"No Exit," 263

Nolan, Lloyd, 410

"No Medals on Pop/' 46

"No More Ladies/' 34

North New Jersey Playhouse, 191

Norton, Elliot, 377

"Nothing But the Truth/' 292

"Nothing Sacred/' 362

"No Time for Sergeants," 221

Novarro, Ramon, 68, 374

"No Way Out," 108, 307

Nugent, Elliott, 413

Oberon, Merle, 11, 34

Obey, Andre, 175

Obie Award, 330

O'Brien, Margaret, 412

Odeon Theatre, 30

Odets, Clifford, 276, 347, 357

"Oedipus Rex," 329

"O Evening Star," 201, 294

Off Broadway, Inc., 13

"Off the Mainland/' 147

"Of Mice and Men/' 129

"Oh, Men! Oh, Women!" 169

"Oklahoma!" 43, 63, 189, 276

"Old Clothes," 67

Old Mill Playhouse (Hendersonville),

318

Old Vic Shakespeare Company, 22
Old Vic Theatre Company, 129, 146,

258, 286-87, 336, 337, 388-89.
Olivier, Laurence, 11, 14, 20, 21, 49, 59,

76, 79, 141, 161, 175, 181, 184, 233-

34, 260, 287, 306, 337, 377-78, 388-

89, 390, 393, 437
Olncy Theatre, 358
"Olympia," 211

Omaha Community Playhouse, 84, 87
"On Borrowed Time," 23
"Once There Was a Russian/' 212
"Once Upon a Christmastime," 152
O'Neal, Frederick, 105-06
O'Neill, Eugene, 21, 86, 362
"One Red Rose for Christmas," 154
"One Thousand and One Nights," 29
"One Woman, The," 211
"Only Thing, The," 67
"Only Way, The," 174
"On the Beach," 396
"On the Waterfront," 276
"On Trial," 384
"Open City," 40
Orange County Playhouse, 419
Oriole Terrace Club, 67
"Orpheus Descending," 301
Orr, Mary, 252
Osborne, John, 235, 263, 350
Ostrovski/312
"Othello," 23, 74, 77, 146
O'Toole, Peter, 148
Otway, Thomas, 184, 430
"Our Dancing Daughters," 68
"Our Modern Maidens," 68
Owen, William, 28, 29
"Ox-Bow Incident, The," -89, 294, 376

Packard, Mrs. Frank, 249

Packard Agency, 30

Page, Donald, 424

PAGE, GERALDINE, 98, 102, 168, 169, 170,

243, 424-28
Pagnol, Marcel, 65
"Paisan," 40
Palance, Jack, 396
"Panic in the Streets," 63, 307
Pantages Hollywood Theatre, 375
Paper Mill Playhouse (Millburn), 219
"Paramount on Parade," 362
Paramount Pictures, 118, 120, 409-10
"Paris," 68, 384

452

INDEX

"Paris Blues," 110

Parke, James, 158

Parker, Dorothy, 318

Parks, Hildy, 252

"Parole," 375

Parrington, Vernon Lewis, 205

"Parrish," 191

Pasadena Playhouse, 11, 293, 294, 319,

408-09, 410
Pasadena School of the Theatre, 408-

09

Pasadena Workshop Theatre, 118
"Passing Show of 1924, The," 67
"Paths of Glory," 294
"Patrasket," 38
Patrick, Gail, 410, 411
Paxinou, Katina, 14
"Pay the Piper," 360
Peck, Gregory, 119, 396, 412, 413
"Peer Gynt," 141, 166, 174, 389, 390
Peraberton, Brock, 31
Penn, Arthur, 153
"Pension Mimosa," 211
"Pericles," 181, 183
PERKINS, ANTHONY, 394-98
Perkins, Mr. and Mrs. George W., 366
Perkins, Osgood, 394
Perry, Antoinette, 128
Perry Award, 160
"Peter Pan," 27, 124, 263, 359
"Petrified Forest, The," 262
Pfhol, Bishop, 217
"Philadelphia Story, The," 11, 318
Philbin, Mary, 384

"Philco Television Playhouse, The," 45
Phillips, Margaret, 168
Phillpotts, Adelaide, 387
Phoenix Theatre, 160, 184, 300, 357
"Phoenix Too Frequent, A," 181
Pickford, Mary, 381
"Pick-Up Girl," 79
"Picnic," 14, 16, 17, 135, 243, 244, 356,

357, 398
"Picture of Dorian Gray, The," 51,

368, 369

Pi Eta Theatre (Cambridge), 329
"Pink String and Sealing Wax," 79
Pinter, Harold, 145, 149, 266
Pirandello, 33, 264, 389, 426
Piscator, Erwin, 346-47, 418, 420, 422
"Play," 194
"Playboy of the Western World, The,"

131, 299
"Playhouse 90," 37, 148, 223, 227, 234,

236, 253

"Plainsman, The," 375, 376

Pleasence, Angela, 257

PLEASENCE, DONALD, 81-82, 146, 148,
149, 256-67

Pleasence, Jean, 257

Pleasence, Josephine, 257

Pleasence, Lucy, 257

Pleasence, Ralph, 256

Pleasence, Thomas Stanley and Alice
Armitage, 256-57

"Plot to Kill Stalin, The," 37

Plo wright, Joan, 256

Poitier, Carl, 103

Poitier, Cedric, 103

Poitier, Cyril, 103, 104

Poitier, Juanita Hardy, 108

Poitier, Redis, 103

Poitier, Reginald, 103

POITIER, SIDNEY, 103-12

Poitier, Teddy, 103

"Pollyanna," 113

Ponti, Carlo, 51, 52, 53, 377

"Porgy and Bess," 108

"Portrait in Celluloid," 323

"Possessed," 69

Poston, Tom, 255

"Potting Shed, The," 271

Potter, Muriel, 365

Potter, Stephen, 365

Powell, Michael, 320

Powell, William, 381

Power, Patia, 407

"Power and the Glory, The," 152, 184

"Power of Darkness, The," 312, 314

Power, Tyrone, 51, 88, 376

Powers, Torn, 126

Preminger, Otto, 349

"Present Laughter," 327

PRESTON, ROBERT, 18, 404-15

"Pretty Ladies," 67

Priestley, J. B., 178, 258

"Prince and the Pauper, The," 152

"Prince Charmant, Le," 401

Prince of Wales Theatre (Birming-
ham), 19

"Princesse Eboli, La," 211

"Princess Searching for a Good Human
Being, The," 225

"Program One," 330

Proser, Monte, 353, 354

Provincetown Players, 86

Provincetown Theatre, 13

"Psycho," 396

Purcell, Van H., 132

453

INDEX

Purdom, Edmund, 77, 144
"Pursuit of Happiness, The," 12

"Quaker Oats Show, The," 169
"Quality Street/' 27
"Quartet," 211
Quayle, Anthony, 79
Queen's Theatre (London), 339
QUINN, ANTHONY, 353, 373-79
Quinn, Christina, 376
Quinn, Duncan, 376, 378
Quinn, Katherine deMille, 376
Quinn, Kathy, 376
Quinn, Valentina, 376
Quintano's School for Young Profes-
sionals, 154, 268
Quintero, Jose*, 191
"Quo Vadis," 52

R. K. (X, 57, 319, 320

"R. U. R.," 241

"Rack, The," 245

"Rage in Heaven," 40

"Rain," 69

"Rainmaker, The," 428

Rainer, Luise, 352

"Raisin in the Sun, A," 108, 110

"Rally Round the Flag, Boys!" 245

"Ramona," 381

Rank, J. Arthur, 320

"Ransom of Red Chief, The," 150

"Rashomon," 276, 277, 279, 287

Rathbone, Basil, 31, 364

Rattigan, Terence, 183, 426

Ray, Charles, 68

"Reap the Wild Wind," 411

"Rebecca," 250

"Red Ball Express," 108

Redfield, William, 160

Redgrave, Corin William, 337

Redgrave, George Ellsworthy, 334

Redgrave, Lynn Rachel, 337

REDGRAVE, MICHAEL, 175, 212, 334-43

437

Redgrave, Rachel Kempson, 337, 338
Redgrave, Vanessa, 337
Redman, Joyce, 389
Reed, Bill, 84
Reid, Ann Miller, 9
Reid, Howard, 9
Reid, J. T., 9
Reid, Justin, 10
Reid, Kenneth, 10
Reid, Wallace, 381
Reinhardt, Max, 30, 312-13, 314

454

"Relapse, The, or Virtue in Danger,"

181

"Reluctant Saint, The," 237
"Remains to Be Seen," 369
Remick, Bruce, 249, 250
Remick, Frank, 249
REMICK, LEE, 249-55
Remick, Patricia, 249
"Rendezvous with Annie," 203
"Reprieve," 350

"Return to Peyton Place," 272, 274
Reynolds, Debbie, 413
"Rhinoceros," 64, 65, 159
Rice, Elmer, 160, 226, 305
"Richard II," 287, 329, 331, 339
"Richard III," 79-80, 141, 183, 287,

376, 389
Richardson, Ralph, 77, 78, 141, 175,

181, 388-89, 390, 393
Richardson, Tony, 149
"Ring /Around the Moon," 183, 286
Ritcha'rd, Cyril, 181
Ritt, Martin, 246
"Rivals, The," 292
"Roaring "20's," 8J
Robards, Agnes Lynch, 383
Robards, Frank, Jr., 380
Robards, Glenn, 383
Robards, Jason, Jr., 381, 383, 384-85
ROBARDS, JASON, SR., 380-85
Robards, Jason, III, 385
Robards, Laurel, 383
Robards, Maxine Glanville, 383
Robbins, Jerome, 354, 356
"Robert E. Lee," 432
"Robert's Wife," 283
Robinson, Edward G., 74, 169, 259

346, 381

Robinson-Duff, Frances, 298
Rodgers, Richard, 355-56
Rogers, Will, 408
"Rogue's March," 355
Rollins College Drama Department,

395

"Roman Holiday," 204
"Romanoff and Juliet," 80
"Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone, The,"

188, 191-92
"Romeo and Juliet," 29, 125, 178, 181,

283, 286-87, 432
"Room at the Top," 403
"Room Service," 57, 202
Root, Lynn, 240

"Roots of Heaven, The," 203, 204
"Rope," 57

INDEX

ROSAY, FRANCHISE, 207-14, 401-02

Rose, Reginald, 89

Rosenberg, Michael, 417

"Rose Tattoo, The," 160, 162, 300, 302

Ross, Mr. and Mrs. John, 150, 151-52,

153-55

Rossellini, Ingrid, 40
Rossellini, Isabella, 40
Rossellini, Roberto, 40, 109
Rossellini, Roberto, Jr., 40-41
Rostand, Edmond, 39
Rouverol, Aurania, 294
Rowlands, Gena, 169
Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, 75,

76-77, 141-42, 257, 260, 431
Royal Court Theatre, 146, 148, 185,

264

Royal Dramatic Theatre School, 39
"Royal Family, The," 361
"Royal Family of Broadway, The," 361
Rule, Anne, 351
Rule, Charles, 351-52, 353
RULE, JANICE, 244, 349, 350, 351-55
Rule, John C., 351
Rule, Kathy, 351
Rule, Ralph, 351
"Rules of the Game, The," 264
Russell, Rosalind, 35
Rutherford, Margaret, 183
Ryan, Ray, 122
Ryan, Robert, 412
Ryder, Alfred, 10

Saint, Eva Marie, 192

Saint-Denis, Michel, 339-40

St. James Theatre, 79

"Saint Joan," 13, 283, 312

"Saint's Day," 263

Saks, Gene, 13

"Sakuntala," 312

"Sally, Irene, and Mary," 67

Salsbury, Colgate, 329

"Salute to France," 128

"Sam Houston Drama, The/' 292

"Samson Agonistes," 336

"Samson and Delilah," 369

Sandburg, Carl, 28

Sanders, Denis, 351

Sanders, Emily, 351

Sanders, George, 51

"Santa Claus," 331

Sarracino, Ernie, 406-07

Sartre, Jean-Paul, 235, 263, 347

Saylor, Oliver, 130

"Scamplo," 226

"Scarlet Pen, The," 211

Senary, Dore, 369

Schell, Carl, 233

Schell, Editha, 224, 233

Schell, Hermann Ferdinand, 224

SCHELL, MARIA MARGARETHE ANN, 224-

230, 233

SCHELL, MAXIMILIAN, 224, 225, 231-38
Schell von Noe, Margarethe, 224, 225
Scheuer, Steve, 165
Schildkraut, Joseph, 167, 291, 381
Schmidt, Lars, 40
Schnee, Thelma, 300
Schneider, Alexander, 426
Schneider, Benno, 126-27
"School for Scandal, The/' 339
School of American Ballet, 353
Schulberg, Budd, 384
Schwabacher, Thomas, 331
Schweitzer, Albert, 203
Scicolone, Maria, 50
Scicolone, Sophia, see Sophia Loren
Scofield, Edward Harry and Mary,

171-72, 173

Scofield, John, 171, 173
Scofield, Joy Parker, 172, 177, 178, 183,

187

Scofield, Martin, 172
SCOFIELD, PAUL, 76, 77, 78, 171-87, 266,

286

Scofield, Sarah, 172
SCOTT, HAROLD, 326-33
Scott, Harold Russell, Sr., 326
Scott, Martha, 413
Scott, Zachary, 157
Screen Actors Guild, 120
"Seagull, The," 180, 183, 300, 432, 435
"Seagulls over Sorrento/* 80
"Sea of Grass, The," 35
"Secret Beyond the Door," 341
Selig Polyscope Company, 374
Selwyn, Edgar, 383
Selznick, David CX, 97, 319, 320
Selznick, Irene, 320, 321, 322
Selznick, Myron, 77
"Separate Tables," 391, 392, 426
"September Affair/' 211
Serling, Rod, 245, 323
"Seventh Cross, The," 57
"Seventh Heaven," 383
"Seventh Man, The," 343
"Seventh Victim, The," 320
"Shane," 46, 47
Shaw, Alexander, 138
Shaw, Anthony, 369, 371

455

INDEX

Shaw, David, 369

Shaw, Deirdre, 369, 371

Shaw, Elizabeth, 138

Shaw, George Bernard, 21, 22-23, 24,

62, 64, 79, 126, 178, 180, 185, 195,

226, 312, 328, 390
Shaw, Jennifer Burke, 139
Shaw, Joanna, 138
Shaw, Peter, 369
SHAW, ROBERT, 81, 138-49, 265
Shaw, Dr. Robert, 138, 139
Shaw, Wendy, 138
"She," 34

Shearer, Norma, 283
"She Loves Me Not," 127
"She Married Her Boss," 35
Sherman, Hiram, 190
Sherman, Vincent, 355
Sherwood, Madeline, 102
Sherwood, Robert E., 354, 409
Shipman, Samuel, 29
Short, Robin, 168
"Shot in the Dark, A," 422
"Show Boat," 319, 432
Shpetner, Stanley, 281
Shubert, J. J., 67
Shulman, Max, 413
Sicard, Soulage, 401
Sidney, Sylvia, 88
"Signature," 168

"Sign of the Cross, The," 316, 334, 362
SIGNORET, SIMONE, 399-403
Sillman, Leonard, 88
"Silver Chalice, The," 244
"Silver Cord, The," 361
Silvers, Phil, 152
Simmons, Jean, 395
"Simon L'Ouvrier," 295
Sinatra, Frank, 160
Sinclair, Howard, 345-46
"Sirocco," 63
"Six Characters in Search of an Au-

thor,"389
Skinner, Otis, 30
"Skin of Our Teeth, The," 363
"Skydrift," 159

"Sleeping Clergyman, A," 389
"Small Hours, The," 249
"Srnilin' Through," 362
Smith, Kent, 87
Smith, Loring, 252
Smith, Robert Paul, 413
Smith, Winchell, 383
"Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,"

233, 283

Sokoloff, Elizabeth Alexandrova, 312

SOKOLOFF, VLADIMIR, 310-15

"So Little Time," 227

"Somebody Up There Likes Me," 245

"Some Like It Hot," 98

"Something of Value," 108

Sondheim, Herbert, 12

Sondheim, Stephen, 12

"Song Without End," 80

"Sonnets from the Portuguese," 196

"Sound of Music, The," 154

"Spellbound," 320

Spewack, Samuel, 36, 212

"Spite Corner," 383

"Splendor in the Grass," 191, 192

Stack, William, 22

Stage, The, 262

"Stage Door," 134

"Stalag 17," 120, 121

"Stairway to Heaven," 320

Stanislavski, 158, 205, 228, 311, 312,

315, 325, 339, 342, 347
STANLEY, KIM, 9-18, 102, 135, 169, 170,

243, 356, 357, 398

Stanwyck, Barbara, 93, 118, 119, 411
Stapenhorst, Karl, 225
Stapleton, John, 297
STAPLETON, MAUREEN, 47, 131, 160, 170,

243, 297-303

"Star Is Born, A," 362, 363
"Starlift," 355
"Star Wagon, The," 128
"State of the Union," 369
State Theatre of Berne, 226
Stead, Estelle, 22
Stebbins, Bliss, 316
Steele, Alfred N., 71
Steiger, Anna Justine, 280, 282
Steiger, Claire, see Claire Bloom
STEIGER, RODNEY STEPHEN, 243, 275-

81, 282

Steiger, Sally Gracie, 280
Stein, Gertrude, 13
Steinbeck, John, 129, 178
"Steinbruck," 225
"Stella Maris," 384
Stephenson, Henry, 31
Stern, Stewart, 244, 245
Stevens, George, 46
Stevenson, Robert Louis, 264
Stewart, Charles O., 292
Stewart, James, 47, 87, 120, 255, 349
Stockdale, Will, 221
"Stolen Life," 340
"Storm, The," 312

456

INDEX

"Story of G.I. Joe, The," 129
"Strada, La," 377, 378
Straight, Beatrice, 300
"Strange One, The," 348-49
Strasberg, Lee, 14, 15, 98, 99-100, 161,

166-67, 168, 347
Strasberg, Paula, 98, 125
Strasberg, Susan, 98
Stratford on Avon Memorial Theatre,

77, 78, 79, 284, 285, 340
Strauss, Johann, 352
Stravinsky, Igor, 315
"Streetcar Named Desire, A," 16, 233,

320, 321-23, 325, 347, 353, 377
Strindberg, 39, 168, 259
"Stromboli," 40
Strong, Austin, 383
Stuart, Aimee, 176
"Studio One," 395
Sullavan, Margaret, 87, 88, 96, 414
Sullivan, D. ]., 329
Sullivan, Ed., 220
Sullivan, Francis L., 77
"Summer and Smoke," 168, 426
"Sun Doctor, The," 139
"Sunset Boulevard," 120, 121
"Sur le Pont des Soupirs," 211
Surrey Theatre, 87
"Susan and God," 362
Susskind, David, 47
Svensk Filmindustri, 39
Swaboda, Mine., 250
"Swamp Water," 295
"Swan, The," 88
Swanson, Gloria, 32, 120
"Sweet Bird of Youth," 236, 246, 248,

426-27, 428
Swickard, Josef, 408
"Swiss Family Robinson," 152
Swope, John, 86

Tabori, George, 46

"Tale of Two Cities, A," 174

"Tales of Tomorrow," 243

Tallchief, Maria, 250

"Tall Story," 100

"Taming of the Shrew, The," 176, 241,

312

Tamiroff, Akim, 276
Tandy, Jessica, 57, 58
"Tangent," 263
Taradash, Daniel, 100
"Tarnish," 361
"Taste of Honey, A," 370
Taylor, Elizabeth, 245

Taylor, Laurette, 65, 347, 362, 393
"Tea and Sympathy," 395, 396
"Teahouse of the August Moon, The/'

131, 156, 169

Tearle, Godfrey, 77, 144, 181
Tebaldi, Renata, 53
Tempest, Marie, 434
"Tempest, The," 79, 255, 287
"Ten Commandments, The," 23
"Teresa," 276

Terry, Ellen, 20, 22, 24, 25, 429-30
Terry, Kate, 429
Terry, Philip, 71
"Thais," 210
Thalberg, Irving, 68, 71
"That Lady," 187
"That Uncertain Feeling," 34
Thau, Benjamin, 369
Theatre de Lys, 348
Theatre East, 330
Theatre for the Swan, 330
Theatre Guild, 87, 356, 361
Theatre Michel (St. Petersburg), 208
Theatre Moncey (Paris), 209
Theatre Montmartre (Paris), 209
Theatre National de 1'Odeon (Paris),

209

Theatre National Populaire, 340
Theatre of the Fifteen (Coral Gables),

318

Theatre Royal (Birmingham), 19
Theatre Royal (Brighton), 174
Theatre Royal (Bristol), 178, 263
Theatre Sarah-Bernhardt, 130
"Theodora Goes Wild," 34
"There Was a Little Girl," 100
"Thief of Bagdad, The," 291, 292
"Third Degree, The," 384
"Third Man, The," 135
"Thirteenth Chair, The," 293
"This Property Is Condemned," 168
"This Woman Is Dangerous," 70
Thorn, Elizabeth, 358
Thorn, Kate, 358
Thorn, Robert, 358
Thomas, A. E., 34
Thomas, Danny, 352-53, 412
Thomas, Dylan, 190
Thorndike, Eileen, 175, 176
Thorndike, Sybil, 22, 175, 176, 184, 271,

289, 389

"Three Hours to Kill," 295
"Three Men on a Horse," 57
"Three Musketeers, The," 236
"Threepenny Opera, The," 126

457

INDEX

"Three Sisters, The," 339, 340, 390

"Thunder Rock," 10, 11

Tibbett, Lawrence, 293

"Tiger at the Gates," 146, 147

"Tiger Bay," 113

"Time Out for Ginger," 36, 252

Titheradge, Madge, 364

"Toad of Toad Hall," 78, 180

"Toast of the Town," 220

"Tobacco Road," 127, 406

Tolstoy, Leo, 312

Tone, Franchot, 71

"Tonight or Never," 32

"Too Many Thumbs," 13

Torrence, Ernest, 291

"Toward the Unknown," 122

Tracy, Spencer, 35, 118, 234, 305-06,
307-08, 309, 346, 361-62

"Trail of the Lonesome Pine, The,"
27, 88

"Tramp, Tramp, Tramp," 68

Tree, Herbert Beerbohm, 21, 24

Tree's Academy, 21

"Trial of Mary Dugan, The," 211, 276

"True to the Navy," 362

Truex, Ernest, 30

Tuerk, John, 31

"Turn to the Right," 383

"Twelfth Night," 194, 287

"12 Angry Men," 89

"Twelve Miles Out," 68

Twentieth Century-Fox, 89, 92, 245,
294, 306-07

"Twenty-seven Wagons Full of Cot-
ton," 300-01

"Two Blind Mice," 36

"Two-Faced Woman," 33

"Two for the Seesaw," 295, 350

"Two Women," 53, 54

Tynan, Kenneth, 265

"Typhoon," 282

"Ulysses," 62

"Ulysses in Nighttown," 62, 64, 65, 130

"Un Garnet de Bal," 211

"Uncle Vanya," 389, 390

"Under Milk Wood," 190

"U.S. Steel Hour, The," 221

Universal-International studios, 307,

384

University Players Guild, 86, 87
"Unknown, The," 68
"Until They Sail," 245
"Untold Story, The," 281

458

"Up Pops the Devil," 56
Ure, Mary, 148, 182

Vakhtangov, Eugene V., 347

Valentino, Rudolph, 374

Valk, Frederick, 74

Valli, Virginia, 384

Vanbrugh, Sir John, 181

Vanbrugh, Violet, 22

Vanderbilt Theatre, 348

Van Druten, John, 128, 176, 285

Variety, 191, 330, 375

Veiller, Bayard, 30, 276, 293

"Venice Preserved," 184, 185

Verneuil, Louis, 369

"Victorian in Orbit, A," 23

Vidal, Gore, 36

Viertel, Berthold, 313

"View from the Bridge, A," 301

"Viva Zapata!" 377

von Nordberg, Dr. Karl Noe*, 224

"Vortex, The," 435

Voskovec, George, 169

Wager, Michael, 169

Walker, June, 88

Walker, Stanley, 11

"Walk Hard Talk Low," 105

"Walk in -the Sun, A," 294

Wallach, Anne Jackson, see Anne Jack-
son

Wallach, Bertha, 156

WALLACE, ELI, 156-62, 168, 243, 250,
300

Wallach, Peter, 169

Wallach, Roberta, 169

Wallach, Shirley, 158

Walter, Eugene, 31

"Waltz, The," 318

"Waltz of the Toreadors, The," 36

Wanamaker, Sam, 377

Wanger, Walter, 88

"War and Peace," 96

Warner, H. B., 291, 384

Warner Brothers, 41, 47, 202, 244, 245,
246, 313, 354, 355, 376, 384

Warren, Brett, 419

Warren, Katherine, 219

"Warrior's Husband, The," 395

Washington Square Players, 194

Waters, Ethel, 44

Watson, Minor, 86

Wayne, David, 160, 300

Wayne, John, 93, 122, 411, 426

"Way of the World, The," 183, 366

INDEX

Webber-Douglas School of Singing and

Dramatic Art, 366
Webster, John, 284
Webster, Margaret, 167
"Wedded but No Wife," 360
Weidman, Charles, 250
Weill, Kurt, 126
Weitman, Robert, 369
"Welcome to Britain," 128
Weld, Tuesday, 268, 272
Welles, Orson, 128-29, 130, 135, 313
Wellman, William A., 47
Wenig, E. J., 407
Wesker, Arnold, 263
Wessely, Paula, 226, 228
Westchester Players, 88
West End Theatre, 144, 148, 183, 338
"Westerner, The," 294
Westminster Theatre, 175
"West Point," 68
"West Side Story, The," 12
"What a Life," 165, 318
"What Every Woman Knows," 159
"Where's Charley?" 251
"Where the Rainbow Ends," 283
"White Devil, The," 284
Whitehead, Robert, 44, 314
Whiteside, Walker, 30
Whiting, John, 263, 353
Widmark, Anne Heath, 307
Widmark, Donald, 304
Widmark, Jean, 305
WIDMARK, RICHARD, 158, 234, 304-09
Wilde, Oscar, 29
Wilder, Billy, 109
Wilder, Clinton, 329
Wilder, Thornton, 363
"Wild River," 253-54
Wilkes, Cyril, 140, 141
Williams, Emlyn, 175
Williams, Tennessee, 159, 160, 168, 300,

301, 320, 321, 322, 323, 347, 348,

426

Willingham, Calder, 348
Willkie, Wendell, 35
Willson, Meredith, 414
"Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?"

420, 421

Wilson, Charles T., 366
Wilson, Edmund, 36, 131

Wilson, Lois, 384

Winant, Forrest, 30

Winchell, Paul, 151, 152

"Wind in the Willows, The," ISO

Windust, Bretaigne, 86, 87

"Wings," 291

"Winslow Boy, The," 23

Winters, Shelley, 114

"Winterset," 126, 128

"Winter's Tale, The," 284

"Within the Law/' 30

"Wizard of Oz, The/' 269

"Woman's Devotion, A," 357

"Women, The," 319

Wood, Natalie, 191

Wood, Peggy, 86

Woods, A. H., 31

Woodward, Joanne, 240, 242, 243, 245-

46

"Word from a Sealed-Off Box," 227
"Write Me a Murder," 324
"Wuthering Heights/' 11, 152, 261, 321
Wyler, William, 109, 204, 395
Wynn, Ed, 152
Wynn, Keenan, 355
Wynyard, Diana, 77, 143

Yablokoff, Herman, 417

Yale Drama Festival, 329

Yale School of Drama, 242, 244

Yankee, John Harrison, Jr., 133

Yeats, William Butler, 331

"Yellow Jack," 159

"Yes Is for a Very Young Man/' 13

York Playhouse, 331

"You and I," 85

"You Came Along/' 320

Young, Gig, 355

Young, Robert, 355

Young, Roland, 21, 22

Young, Stark, 126

"Young Doctors, The," 362

"Young Lions, The," 234

"Young Mr. Lincoln," 88-89

"Young Philadelphia^, The," 246, 247

"Young Woodley/' 176, 177

"Zane Grey Theatre/' 81
Zanuck, Darryl, 89
Zetterling, Mai, 183
Zinberg, Lew, 105

459

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Lillian Ross and Helen Ross, who are sisters, were
both born in Syracuse, New York. Both have written
for various publications, and this book is their first
collaborative venture. Lillian Ross is the author of two
books, Picture and Portrait of Hemingway.

(Continued from front flap)

nothing less than themselves, let them
make the most of the first person singu-
lar. By the time the final curtain falls,
this large and wonderful company has
conjured up the entire world of the
theatre and, in the process, not only has
conveyed the meaning and substance
of fifty-five extremely individual lives
but has put together, once and for all,
a portrait of the quintessential actor,
The Player.

ABOUT AUTHORS

Lillian Ross and Helen Ross, who are sisters,
were both born in Syracuse, New York. Both
have written for various publications, and
this book is their first collaborative venture.
Lillian Ross is the author of two books, Pic-
ture and Portrait of Hemingway.

114888