On Acting
In Uta Hagen's Respect for Acting, the celebrated actress and acting teacher credits Clurman with a turn-around in her perspective on acting. She summed up his approach as demanding the human being within the character:
"In 1947, I worked in a play under the direction of Harold Clurman. He opened a new world in the professional theatre for me. He took away my 'tricks.' He imposed no line readings, no gestures, no positions on the actors. At first I floundered badly because for many years I had become accustomed to using specific outer directions as the material from which to construct the mask for my character, the mask behind which I would hide throughout the performance. Mr. Clurman refused to accept a mask. He demanded ME in the role. My love of acting was slowly reawakened as I began to deal with a strange new technique of evolving in the character. I was not allowed to begin with, or concern myself at any time with, a preconceived form. I was assured that a form would result from the work we were doing."
Clurman died in 1980 in New York City of cancer.
Read more about this topic: Harold Clurman
Famous quotes containing the word acting:
“We are always acting on what has just finished happening. It happened at least 1/30th of a second ago. We think we’re in the present, but we aren’t. The present we know is only a movie of the past.”
—Tom Wolfe (b. 1931)
“But when I saw that they were not acting consistently with the truth of the gospel, I said to Cephas before them all, “If you, though a Jew, live like a Gentile and not like a Jew, how can you compel the Gentiles to live like Jews?””
—Bible: New Testament, Galatians 2:14.