He echoed what's been rattling around in my head lately.
Musing on the two halves of his Shakespearean career, Mr. Stewart said that acting feels different to him now. He kept himself in check in the early years, he explained, acting with deliberation rather than passion, faking rather than feeling.
“I had a certain fear of exposing myself too much in my work for a long time,” he said. “A lot of what performing to me had been was elaborate, and at times quite clever, concealment. Someone once said of acting that it is ‘telling beautiful lies,’ and well, it became just no longer satisfactory to work that way.”
More than anything, he has Shakespeare on the brain. “I have this theory that these roles, the really great roles — there are elements of them in all of us. And that is part of the greatness of this dramatist, that he taps into something which is entirely human. You feel him reaching out his hand and saying to you as an actor, ‘Come on, it’s easier than you think.’ ”
Read the whole NY Times article. It's fantastic.
Special thanks to Beth for finding this.
1 comment:
Even though it's not my field, I do enjoy reading Shakespearan plays in my spare time, especially out loud. Unfortunately, none of his plays I've read so far emphasize the fruit of productive labor born out of man's mind; they tend to elaborate on religious and warlike tones. Then again, before America came to be, wealth was thought of in static, zero-sum quantities. It was typically inherited, stolen, begged, bestowed, favored, and the like; but no concept of creating wealth; America was the first country ever in the history of humankind that coined the phrase "to make money."
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