** Oscar nominations update for Brits:) Leading Actress: Felicity Jones, Rosamund Pike Leading Actor: Benedict Cumberbatch, Eddie Redmayne Supporting Actress: Keira Knightly Colin Welland won the Oscar for the screenplay of Chariots of Fire in 1981. He was mocked for the line in his acceptance speech: ‘The British are Coming’. I dedicate this post […]
Tag: screen acting
This point comes up every time I work with an actor. I spent 20 years of my life as an actor trying to sort this out. And another 20 years as a director and coach. Let’s start with the question – ‘What is a character?’ – a character is a person from real-life or fiction […]
The business of acting doesn’t lend itself comfortably to words or explanations. Acting is doing. I worked with a very famous, very cruel director once when I was an actor. But he did have one saying of great wisdom. ‘Don’t talk about it. Do it,’ he’d snarl. But of course, us actors love talking – […]
‘Let’s never betray the magic of our dreams…’ (Ingmar Bergman European Film Awards 1988) ‘Founded in 1988, the European Film Academy now unites 2,700 European film professionals with the common aim of promoting Europe’s film culture.’ (http://www.europeanfilmacademy.org/) I encourage all filmmakers to join! (P.S. The cut-down ceremony will be shown on Sky Arts1 Thurs. 6th […]
Yes – we all get frown lines eventually. And it is normal to frown. But frowning is a solo activity – by that I mean that it is when we engage with ourselves and not with other people. We frown when we are thinking, remembering in order to be precise, concentrating, squinting to see clearly, […]
Find my guest blog on Robert Donat, his views on acting and my acting notes on: http://wp.me/p1Sr2y-D
This blog on sub-text (with lots of clips!) is a guest blog on ‘The Great Acting Blog’ – find it here: http://wp.me/p2ybSN-4KJtm
Screen acting and theatre acting have differences. Here are my big three: The first and most important is often the last one that actors think about and yet the most crucial: In theatre, there is an audience. In film, at the moment of acting, there is no audience. Sounds obvious. Yet understanding this […]
A fellow Twitterer asked me recently how acting could be brave. I had been tweeting about Dominic West’s ‘brave’ performance as Fred West. Of course, I tweeted my interlocuter back explaining that, in this instance, I meant brave as in: not taking easy options, daring to fail, exciting, unusual – bravura, if you like. I […]
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