10 Chapter 10: Acting

For many casual spectators, a movie’s star serves as the number one criterion for whether they will decide to watch a film. Even people who don’t know–or care–who a film’s director, screenwriter, or cinematographer is will generally recognize their era’s major movie stars, whether Mary Pickford and Charlie Chaplin, Bette Davis and Clark Gable, or Margot Robbie and Michael B. Jordan. While we may know the stars, though, we aren’t always sure of what makes one performance better than another. Nonetheless, when confronted with a weak performance we can generally sense that something is “off.” Conversely, a great performance can energize us even if we can’t quite explain why.

As with most elements in cinema, film acting is not a universal constant. Indeed, one of the differences between films from, say, the 1930s and the 2020s modern viewers immediately apprehend is the contrast in acting styles. We often see older styles as “cheesy” or overdramatic, for example. Take a look at Lillian Gish’s performance from Broken Blossoms (1919), for instance:

Broken Blossoms

While to the modern eye Gish’s acting can seem histrionic and forced, contemporary audiences praised the performance as one of the best ever. What can explain such a dramatic gap in what spectators value in a performance?

Stage Acting, the Delsarte System, and Stanislavski

Stage acting, of course, dates back millennia, and, as with film acting, has changed significantly from its earliest days. One significant milestone in acting occured in the 19th century before the advent of modern cinema. Recognizing the contribution of emotion to authentic acting, France’s François Delsarte created a training method that stressed the importance of an actor’s inner state. Delsarte, and, later, his American acolyte James Steele MacKaye, pushed against the oratory-based models of their day and encouraged actors to consider the motive behind every gesture.

While Delsarte, McKaye, and others envisioned this approach as leading to spontaneity, many less theory-minded followers generated a series of prescriptive poses or “gestures” intended to correspond with specific emotions. Of course, in the hands of less able actors, who were ideally supposed to transcend (somehow) the practice poses, such gestures came across as anything but spontaneous.

Genevieve Stebbins’ chart of Delsartean gestures

Enter Konstantin Stanislavski and Vladimir Danchenko. While Stanislavski would eventually receive the lion’s share of the credit, both Russians helped develop a more naturalistic approach to acting that would spawn most of the major twentieth- and twenty-first-century performance styles.

As acting theorist John Lutterbie explains, Stanislavski and Danchenko’s breakthrough involved a strict binary between intellect and emotion in which “rational thought needs to be put on hold so that the experience of images and emotional responses can play freely across and through the body” (5). Ultimately, Lutterbie observes, “remembering an emotion involves a physical reinvestment in a past event.” Stanislavski, who toured the United States extensively to promote his ideas, would inspire a host of imitators, most famously Lee Strasberg and his “method” acting school.

The Singularity of Film Acting

Delsarte and Stanislavski, of course, focused on stage acting. On the stage, actors must “reach” their spectators, including those in the back rows, in real time. Their performances are continuous, apart from any breaks in scene or act. Because of the limitations of human vision and audio processing, stage actors must necessarily be broader in gesture and louder in voice than film actors if an audience is to comprehend their actions and dialogue.

Of course, many of the first professional film actors were trained according to the principles of the stage. At first, such performance styles were suited to the fixed camera and limited settings of early films. For instance, take a look at this scene from A Trip to the Moon (1902), a film that uses limited editing and often mirrors a stage production:

Roberta E. Pearson nicely differentiates between performance styles with her notion of histrionic and verisimilar codes, with the former focusing on uniformity of gesture and the latter on psychological depth and plausible motivation (27, 34). Pearson cautions, however, that early film actors tended to use both codes.

Unlike stage actors, film actors must perform without the energy of a live audience. The camera becomes the audience, as it were. Additionally, they generally must “slice up” their performance into non-consecutive segments with out-of-sequence scenes and repeated takes, phenomena that can drain spontaneity. Editing and multiple cameras, moreover, heavily mediate the performance and wrest some control from the actors, especially if the director does not seek input during post-production.

Despite these drawbacks, film acting does allow for far more nuance than stage acting can. The camera can capture the most minute facial expressions and physical gestures, which help to expand the degree of emotion in a performance. Further, editing can help enhance a performance by juxtaposing other characters, objects, places, or even memories that help add context, create symbolism, or adjust emotional intensity. By cutting to inserts of “stage business” (handling objects or undertaking minor tasks, for instance), editors can emphasize a character’s quirks or emotional state in ways not readily observable from a stage except in the broadest terms. The use of slow motion, fast motion, and other effects can also change the tenor of an actor’s performance by making it more humorous, dramatic, supernatural, etc. Finally, by viewing rushes–unedited footage–actors can also critique their own performance “in process,” as it were, and adjust them as needed.

Evolution of Acting from the Silent to Sound Eras

As noted above, the contemporary naturalistic approach to screen acting was not always the norm in narrative film.^[1] When film began to explore the possibilities of narrative fiction in the early 20th century, it turned, inevitably, to the example of acting that had been around for centuries: stage acting. Of course, in the early years of film, before the medium gained cultural respectability, few legitimate stage actors would participate in the upstart medium, and so what we often see early on were unsuccessful stage actors giving theatrical-style performances on screen. Since there was no sound—since these actors were deprived of dialogue—they tended to overcompensate with outsized gestures meant to communicate emotion without words.

In the earliest films this worked fine. After all, as we recall, the earliest films had a static camera and maintained a relation to the set being filmed that largely resembled that of the spectator in relation to a fixed theatrical stage. Late in her illustrious career, the famed French stage actress Sarah Bernhardt began to appear in films, most famously in Les Amours de la reine Élisabeth (1912). As the most famous theatrical actor of her age, Bernhardt’s willingness to appear in film brought to the new medium a respectability it desperately needed if it were to start attracting top actors.

However, Bernhardt’s performances also underscored how profoundly different stage acting was from screen acting. It is amazing to get to see a celebrated actor from the 19th century whose performances would otherwise be lost to us, of course. Translated from her natural milieu of the stage to the new medium of film, however, these performances looks stiff, stagey, rigid. Below, for example, is a clip from Bernhard’s performance as Queen Elizabeth:

Les Amours de la reine Élisabeth

Bernhardt is performing for the stage, for an audience (and a camera) at a fixed distance from her. All the action remains locked within the “proscenium arch” of the stage, the camera fixed to capture the recordings. The film, that is, is effectively a silent recording of a stage play, missing the one element for which Bernhardt was most known: her “golden voice.”

At the same time Bernhardt was performing in 1912, in the United States, Lillian Gish was appearing in her first of many collaborations with the pioneering director D. W. Griffith in An Unseen Enemy (1912). Together Gish and Griffith would help develop a modern grammar for both filmmaking and screen acting. Griffith would be among the first to explore the narrative and emotional power not only of crosscutting but of alternating different kinds of shots—e.g., medium-shot, close-up—to capture different details. While Gish (only 19 when she began acting in Griffith’s films) had done some acting for the stage, she was among the first skilled actors to learn her craft performing for the camera. She developed a style that focused on toning down the broad movements and melodramatic style of the earliest stage acting on screen (desperately trying to compensate for the lack of voice and still imagining they had to be visible to the theatergoers in the top row of the balcony). As discussed above, Gish’s movements often still seem a bit melodramatic to our modern eyes, but she was among the first to fully explore how much screen acting depended not on the hands and body, but on the face. The ability to act with one’s face becomes crucial to the art of screen acting, as we see in this compilation of Gish’s close-ups:^[2]

Lillian Gish Close-Ups

In addition to leveraging the close-up, movie acting took advantage of editing’s ability to focus on movements hitherto beyond the range of the stage. As Victoria Duckett puts it, “acting began to capitalize upon small idiosyncratic actions and domestic props in the development of cinematic gestural language” (27). Just as the close-up helped establish a greater intimacy between actor and audience, inserts of subtle activity could help emphasize verisimilitude, as in The New York Hat (1912):

The New York Hat

Of course, the camera’s stronger ability to focus on objects could also be played for broader, comic effects, such as in this Charlie Chaplin clip:

The Passion of Joan of Arc

By the time sound was systematically introduced in 1927, silent screen acting had developed remarkably quickly in learning how to perform for the camera.^[5] So it came as something of a shock when sound arrived and brought with it a sudden need to rethink many of the basic assumptions about film acting. Initially, the changes were primarily negative. Cumbersome and limited sound equipment locked the cameras down as they had not been since the earliest years of film, and actors had to learn how to perform for microphones as well as the camera for the first time. Many silent actors discovered that the skills they had focused on during the early years of their career did not translate to the sound era.

In addition, producers realized that even when the actors could adjust to having to speak their lines for the first time, they didn’t have anything worth saying. Before the arrival of sound, screenplays were largely outlines of actions the actors were to perform. Suddenly there was a need to have proper scripts, which required the importation of skilled writers who knew how to write dialogue. Playwrights and novelists were lured to Hollywood by the studios, including Dorothy Parker, William Faulkner, and Ben Hecht. Not all of them adapted well to the Hollywood system (F. Scott Fitzgerald famously did not), but those who succeeded transformed the industry by developing the art of the modern screenplay. Now there were words worth speaking.^[6]

Charles O’Brien reports that the “impact [of sound] on editing was devastating,” as it was difficult to synchronize sound to multiple takes of a scene (8). At first, technical difficulties adversely affected acting as well because single, stationary microphones could not adequately capture the voices of “wandering” actors. As a consequence, the acting in many early sound films reverted to the early days of fixed camera cinema and was less mobile even than stage acting. Hollywood technicians soon solved the problem, however, and actors were free to roam again. Many countries, though, lagged behind and even resisted the conversion to sound. Japan, for instance, resisted full conversion into the mid-1930s.

James Naremore observes that sound served as another step in deemphasizing the actor’s autonomy, asserting that editing and camera placement had fragmented the actor’s body, and now the soundtrack furthered a movement toward invisible acting” (48). The broad gesticulations of early cinema were giving way to the interiority of the mediated performance. Compare this scene of Louise Brooks toward the end of the silent era in Diary of a Lost Girl (1929) to Gish’s performance in Broken Blossoms (above):

Diary of a Lost Girl

Despite experiencing deep emotion, Brooks refrains from broad gestures and lets her face express her torment. While most modern viewers would view Brooks’s style as more contemporary than that of Gish, some reviewers at the time found her emotionless and wooden!

Brooks was ahead of her time, though, for the more restrained performance style she employs above would come to dominate dramatic film acting, although the acting in comedy and musical films would generally be broader, as it usually is today.

Two Schools of Acting

The evolution of performance in cinema hit an inflection point around the time the Golden Age gave way to the New Hollywood in the 1960s.^[7] The young, energetic actors, writers and directors who took over cinema in the United States, at least until the blockbusters of Jaws (1975) and Star Wars (1977), brought with them a new naturalistic acting style, which curiously enough, actually started in avant-garde theatre of the 1930s and 40s. It was part of a new approach to performance, derived from, but not synonymous with, Stanislavski’s system, popularly called “method acting.”

Differences between Stanislavski system and method acting

But the Classical School of acting (sometimes called the English School), with its emphasis on the text and the precision of performance, had been around at least since Thespis himself. It wasn’t going to simply fade away. Both have their own unique take on technique, and both ultimately have the same goal, to render a performance that moves the audience. Let’s take a look at each one.

The Classical Method

As we mention above, the Classical School has been around a while, likely since Thespis first took the stage, but the modern classical approach is rooted in the British tradition of Shakespearean performance. Then as now the technique relies heavily on the text, the script itself, rather than the actor’s own emotional history. As such, a classically trained actor’s performance is external or action-oriented, caring more about what they are doing in the scene than what they are feeling, and precise, with little room for improvisation.

We most often associate classical acting with Shakespeare, and the long tradition of treating the playwright’s text as something sacred and unchangeable. That same reverence is brought to the cinema with this technique. That’s not to suggest that a classically trained actor can’t breathe emotional life into a role. Remember Laurence Olivier from the opening of this chapter? Here he is playing Hamlet in, you guessed it, Hamlet (1948):

Hamlet (1948)

His performance is true to the text, but not without emotion. It’s just that Olivier, like most classically trained actors, trusts the words to do the heavy lifting.

The Method

In contrast to the Classical School of acting, method acting is emotionally oriented, committed to a psychological realism, sometimes at the expense of whatever might be in the script. As noted above, it began in Russia at the end of the 19th century with Konstantin Stanislavski, upending centuries of classical technique by encouraging his actors to let go of their grip on the text and trust their own emotional experience to guide their performance. The result was a more inward-looking, internal, often improvisational approach to acting, not to mention a more naturalistic style, and it became a slow-moving revolution in stage and screen performance throughout the 20th century.

Stanislavski’s ideas were published in English for the first time in 1936 in the book, An Actor Prepares, and they quickly gained influence among young acting students and teachers, especially in New York in the 1940s and 50s. One of the strongest proponents of the new “method” was Lee Strasberg and his Group Theater, founded in the 1930s. He would go on to run the Actors Studio in the 1950s, working with the first crop of method actors and directors to break into Hollywood. They included directors like Elia Kazan, as well as actors like Geraldine Page, Joanne Woodward, James Dean, Paul Newman, and Marlon Brando.

Brando was perhaps the most famous of these new method actors to hit the screen. He exploded into popular culture in 1951 as Stanley in A Streetcar Named Desire. One of his first and most defining roles. He was tough, volatile, and sometimes brutal, but audiences had seen all of that before. It was his emotional vulnerability, his raw unpredictability that took everyone by surprise:

A Streetcar Named Desire

In the ensuing years, the “method” attracted wave after wave of young actors entranced by the naturalism of actors like Brando. Al Pacino, Robert DeNiro, Sally Field, Anne Bancroft, and Dustin Hoffman are just a few of the actors who passed through Strasberg’s Actors Studio. That was just one of many studios, theaters and acting schools dedicated to Stanislavksi’s method.

As more and more of these younger method actors entered the ranks of Hollywood cinema, they inevitably collided with the more classically trained actors who still dominated the industry. Neither had much patience for the other. One of Dustin Hoffman’s early film roles was in the 1976 thriller Marathon Man. His co-star was Laurence Olivier. Yeah, that guy. For one scene, Hoffman’s character hadn’t slept for three days. So, true to the Stanislavski method, Hoffman stayed up three nights in a row so he could really feel what it was like to be sleep deprived. When he bragged about this achievement to Olivier on set, Olivier smiled and said, “Why don’t you just try acting?”

Stanislavski’s method continued to gain popularity among American acting schools in the 20th century and remains a popular approach to training and performance. Today there are several variations on the technique, promoted by acting gurus in the tradition of Lee Strasberg and Stanislavski himself. Sanford Meisner is probably the most famous example. The Meisner Technique employs the same commitment to naturalism, but adds a new emphasis on being in the moment, acting, and reacting instead of thinking. (In that sense, the Meisner Technique is a hybrid between the Classical School and the Method.)

Contemporary actors such as Daniel Day Lewis, Charlize Theron, Cate Blanchett, Christian Bale, and Joaquin Phoenix are all examples of actors who, in one form or another, pursue the goals established by Stanislavski. Some of them, of course, famously take that pursuit to the extreme, losing an unhealthy amount of weight for a role, or never breaking character on or off the set during production. Not all of them call themselves “method” actors, as the term has become almost self-satirizing. Some of them would even consider themselves “classically” trained. In some ways, that’s the greatest influence of Stanislavski. His system pushed all actors, regardless of their training, toward greater interiority, toward a naturalism in performance that doesn’t simply represent the ideas of a writer but embodies a character’s emotional truth:^[8]

Travis Lee Ratcliff on Stanislavski’s influence

Types of Actors

Drawing on the work of Edward A. Wright and Lenthiel H. Downs, Dennis W. Petrie and Joseph M. Boggs developed a handy nomenclature for describing actors. They argue for placing actors into the following categories: impersonator, interpreter, and personality.

Impersonators

Impersonator actors are chameleons. They lose themselves in their roles to such an extent that their performances are dramatically different across their films. Such actors will often “become” their characters long before arriving on the set and may not even answer to their real names. These performers will alter their physical appearance and psychological traits to an extreme degree and rarely carry over characteristics or techniques from one role to the next. Some recent examples include Daniel Day-Lewis, Meryl Streep, Kate Winslet, and Jared Leto. Compare two of Lewis’s famous roles that seemingly have nothing in common, one Abraham Lincoln and the other Christy Brown, a man with cerebral palsy.

Lincoln (2012)

My Left Foot (1989)

Interpreters

The second set of actors, the interpreters, share the impersonators’ devotion to researching their characters, but they rarely go to such extremes. As such, viewers can still recognize those actors’ own personalities underneath the performance even if they alter their appearance. Such actors are often considered strong, yet they rarely rise to the height of the impersonator. Some recent examples include Will Smith, Carey Mulligan, Natalie Portman, and  George Clooney. Here are two very different performances from Will Smith, but viewers can clearly see his core personality beneath each.

Men in Black (1997)

I Am Legend (2007)

Personality

The final category consists of personality actors. This group of actors provides consistency across roles, often leaning into their personae. Such actors often draw on their physicality or dominant personality traits no matter what role they accept. Occasionally, though, such actors will take on roles that purposely go against their type, often to comedic effect. Some recent examples of personality actors include Channing Tatum, Kevin Hart, Michael Cera, and Jennifer Aniston. Here are two Michael Cera performances that use a strikingly similar style.

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (2010)

Superbad (2007)

Character Actors

If you’ve learned anything about cinema in these chapters so far, hopefully it’s that cinema requires dozens if not hundreds of professionals all working together to create the finished product.^[9] Production designers, sound technicians, editors, screenwriters, not to mention grips, gaffers, caterers, hair stylists, make-up artists, carpenters, truck drivers, the list goes on and on. How many production designers can you name? Editors? What about screenwriters? Of all those talented individuals who work behind the camera, you might be able to name a few directors, but that’s about it.

Now, how about actors? How many of those can you name?

Exactly. That’s by design, of course. The entertainment industry has long understood the value of “stardom” and the power of celebrity to sell tickets. The early fan magazines were all controlled by the studios, creating and sustaining a culture of devotion to the movie stars that populated their films, and eventually, their television shows. Audiences flocked to movies like Casablanca (1942), The Big Sleep  (1946), and Key Largo (1948) to see Humphrey Bogart, not Rick Blaine, Philip Marlow, or Frank McCloud (his characters in each film).

That tradition has continued. How many of you rushed to see Shutter Island (2010) because of Teddy Danies, The Revenant (2015) because of Hugh Glass, or Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood (2019) because of Rick Dalton? Chances are you saw those films because Leonardo DiCaprio played each of those characters. Of course, it helped that they were directed by Martin Scorsese, Alejandro Iñárritu, and Quentin Tarantino, but seeing Leo on the marquee didn’t hurt. No matter how hard he tries to lose himself in each role, we still see Leo up there on the screen. It’s why we paid the price of admission. He is a movie star after all.

This is the dilemma of the movie star in the entertainment ecosystem. The one thing that keeps them employed and well-paid as actors, their celebrity, is the very thing that consistently undermines all of the hard work that goes into building a believable character. It also makes formal analysis of performance a somewhat fraught process. How does one disentangle the charisma and magnetism of “stars” from the characters they play on screen? Sometimes that means evaluating a performance not on its own merits, but by just how much we forget who they are in real life.

Of course, given all of the discussion above about technique, the last thing a professional actor wants is for anyone to remember they are, in fact, an actor while they are on screen. There are plenty of professionals who avoid this problem and build careers that avoid the spotlight by playing secondary, often eccentric characters that we remember far more readily than we do the actors who play them. We often refer to them as character actors, which is a kind of backwards compliment. Shouldn’t all actors be “character” actors? Still, unburdened by fame, character actors can truly lose themselves in a role, bringing authenticity to the narrative by supporting the “star” at its center.

The distinction between movie stars and character actors may seem somewhat arbitrary. Aren’t “character actors” just actors who aren’t famous (yet)? And aren’t “movie stars” just actors trying to do their job despite their celebrity? It’s not their fault they’re famous. Both are true, but it points to one of the unique challenges of acting for cinema. Unlike acting for the theater, cinema is part of a larger, capital intensive, highly technical medium. One performance can be seen by billions of people for a potentially limitless number of times, and that socio-economic reality impacts both the way actors approach the work, and the way we approach their performances.^[10]

Sometimes character actors will specialize in a type of role–such as Jennifer Coolidge, who often plays blunt, slightly distracted women, or Lance Reddick, who was frequently cast as an authority figure–but others defy categorization. Margo Martindale, for instance, has played a stunning array of roles, so many, in fact, that her versatility became a running joke in Bojack Horseman, a popular animated series. Here are just two of her many roles.

Cocaine Bear (2023)

August: Osage County (2013)

Collaboration

Consistency in Fargo (1996)

Character versus Actor

Many students of film confuse actors with their characters. Simply put, a character is a role within narrative and may be completely imaginary or based on a real person or animal. An actor, in contrast, is a person who brings that character to life.

Some characters have been portrayed by many different actors, and these actors inevitably interpret the role differently even though the general outline of the character stays the same. For instance, thousands of actors have portrayed Shakespeare’s Lady MacBeth, yet the character as written always spurs her husband on with her ambition and always suffers remorse after doing so. The character of Jay Gatsby will always pine for Daisy Buchanan, whether he is played by Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert Redford, Alan Ladd, Toby Stephens, or Warner Baxter.

A more recent character, Joker, helps to underscore the differences. From his inception in the comics to the present, Joker always maintains a combination of extreme intelligence and twisted humor. Over the years, though, at least 14 different actors have portrayed this amalgamation in various ways. Cesar Romero, for instance, interpreted Joker as wacky and ultimately harmless, while Heath Ledger depicted the character as psychotic and unpredictable. It’s the same character, but the actor makes the effect quite different. Obviously, the script, director, and previous portrayals will have significant influence over a performance. Compare the excerpts below to see how differently two actors can portray the same character:

Cesar Romero as Joker

Heath Ledger as Joker