Quotes from acting from books I done read

These are all quotes from various books I read on the quest of writing a good essay.  Not sure how good the essay came out, but these are all quite interesting and relevant.



"The basis of any technique must be truth" - Dame Maggie Smith

"We make judgments about the of person the actor is just as we make judgments about the kind of person the actor is"

Intellectual judgments made by the actor, split-second hesitations which obstruct free play by emotions or any physical mental or emotional movement by the actor will colour his image of character and muddy the waters of understanding in the interpretation by the audience."

The blend of the two - the actor and the image is subtle.  You are not aware where one ends and the other begins, or which part of the mode of emotional approach in the actors and which is the characters."

The complexity of the inner action in both the actor - character and the spectator accounts in some part of our fascination with character actors and nourishes our desire to see them role after role."

Stillness is probably the most important quality an actor needs to possess if she is to be successful in the craft of acting for the camera; stillness not only of the mind and eye but also of the body"

The most captivating quality the camera has to offer an audience is an ability to capture the subtleties of expressions and thoughts.

Of course the truth, or reality you invest in a character is always subject to the style of production you are in.

Acting is a natural talent.  Effectiveness of that talent can be improved on by working on one's technique.

Actors understand what it means to behave in a role rather than "act" or "perform", to live in eah moment fully and to disconnect from the character when the job is finished.

Mental tension inhibits the functioning of our mind.  Our mind becomes blocked and loses clarity and creativity.  We can have trouble remembering things or thinking clearly.

Sometimes mental and emotional tension come as a direct result of physical tension.

We create mental and emotional tensions as self-defense mechanisms when we resist our situation and feel vulnerable or challenged.  We block ourselves from reality.  We shut ourselves off from the world and focus our attention or ourselves.

We become self-conscious.

There is a difference between actor tension and character tension.  You will often play characters who are tense, both physically and emotionally.  But if you can't release your personal tensions as an actor, those tensions will dictate what you can communicate as a character.  All of your characters will be unresponsive and closed in the same way that you are.

Control our own awareness.

It is important to be able to release our personal tensions so that we can create characters with different traits and different tensions, but it is also important for us as actors, we need to be able to understand the difference between the two states of auto pilot and presence in the moment.

Focusing on obects then back on myself.  Quiet our logical mind.

Our logical mind is necessary and we need it to collect data, analyze, dissect, draw correlations between items of information.

How do we train ourselves to hear each line of dialogue as it were the first time: in every rehearsal, in every take, the 30th time as well as the first.  As if it is different information.

Playing emotions: generalized or like

NEGATIVE ENERGY IN is suppressed NEGATIVE ENERGY OUT

When our energy is "in" we are controlling any desire we have to explode

Connecting to a character's psyche?

Let go of resistance and resentment obscure your environment

When do I display my own personality?

Quest for self knowledge

Where does one learn to illuminate the actions of the character with greater truths that will touch an audience forever

He instilled each and every student with the belief that his or her acting instrument if connected to the truth was a vehicle of expression - the deeper investigation of the feeling, moving forward