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CHAPTER 1

Norman Lloyd

In a career spanning seventy years on the stage and screen, Norman Lloyd appeared in many celebrated roles: Cinna the poet in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar under the direction of Orson Welles for the Mercury Theatre (1937); the evil Fry in Alfred Hitchcock's Saboteur (1942) who falls to his death from the Statue of Liberty in one of cinema's most famous special effects sequences; the choreographer in Charlie Chaplin's masterpiece Limelight (1952); the stern headmaster, Gale Nolan, in Peter Weir's Dead Poets Society (1989); and the list goes on. Furthermore, Lloyd is regarded as one of the most insightful and articulate experts on the actor's life and craft. I visited him at his Mandeville Canyon home, where he lives with his wife of more seventy years.

"After a lifetime in the theater and in films, how is the actor within you doing today?"

"At ninety-four, I'm no longer being offered many parts, but I still feel that I can play them and much better now. If you started as an actor, you are always an actor no matter what you do in this business — act, produce, or direct. The thing that first propelled you into the business always stays within you. So when you speak about the actor within, it's ever present. A true actor is always ready for a casting call. I made my last film, In Her Shoes, when I was about ninety-one in 2005. I felt the same way about it as I did in 1932 at the age of seventeen when I started acting with Eva Le Gallienne's Civic Repertory Theatre in New York City. I have friends who say they're retired. They're not going to act anymore. Perhaps these people who retire feel that acting was merely a youthful indiscretion or the impulse in them has died. But I could never feel like that, not I. I feel capable today of doing the best work I've ever done. But there are certain considerations. I'm not so confident about the lines anymore, that is to say, I could learn them, but when you're in your nineties, you have momentary lapses of memory. You're human, that's it. I can continue to work in pictures or television, no sweat. But in the theater, standing there with your bare face hanging out before a thousand people, it's a frightening, frightening thing to not recall your lines."

"What first attracted you to the stage, to acting?"

"When I first went into acting, I was rather romantic about it, thinking I could be like John Barrymore or Alfred Lunt. Then, during the Great Depression of the 1930s, I, and others, realized we could make a statement with this actor within ourselves about our times and the world around us — that we had power as actors. We did it in some of the work we did through the WPA (Works Progress Administration), the Federal Theatre, the Mercury Theatre, and other theaters. We felt the need and the desire to speak out like writers did. So we adjusted that need to our own art: acting."

"Reading your autobiography, Stages, I noticed that throughout your career you've been possessed of a deep restlessness and rebelliousness. Are these still present within you?"

"Damn right!" he said pounding the table. "As an actor you have to keep moving in order to work. I was fortunate also to step into the production side of the industry so that I was behind the camera, directing and producing. These were all ways of amplifying the economics of earning a living. As an actor, you don't have much chance of making money unless you are a great picture star. But there was also something else in my case. I was trying in my own way to raise the level of creativity of the marvelous actors and directors around me like Charlie Chaplin, Jean Renoir, Lewis Milestone, and Alfred Hitchcock. These were remarkable fellows who were always dreaming up projects. And I said, 'that's what it's all about.' They stirred something in me, and their influence stuck. Had I not met them, I would have sat back as an actor and just waited for the next offer. But you see, each of these men saw things on such a broad human scale; their vision had such an encompassing quality that appealed to the entire world. Renoir's Grand Illusion speaks to all mankind. And Charlie. At one time, Charlie Chaplin was the most famous man in the world. The most famous man in the world! These men were worlds, and every great artist has created his or her own world. It was true of Beethoven, of Michelangelo, of Martha Graham. He or she is as big and as important as the story they have to tell."

"Did you aspire to be your own world?"

"Yes, yes, I aspired to that — to be my own world through acting. Renoir, Chaplin, Milestone, and Hitchcock stimulated something in me, and I was fortunate to have them recognize that. But there was something else. I was dissatisfied with the condition of man. I was unhappy about the way the universe was going."

"And so you felt that you could have a hand in improving the plight of man?"

"Yes! I may have been laboring under delusions of grandeur, but as an actor I felt that I could affect my fellow man. I did feel that. And it may have been totally unrealistic. It may have just been ego, but you need plenty of ego to be an actor in this world."

"As I watched your acting in a number of films, I began to notice a presence about you, as if something of the real you had seeped into your characters. Beneath these roles, I saw a man with a strong sense of self, confident, determined. Did I get that right?"

"What you spotted, Rose, was the story that is within me, my story. I make the role I'm playing consonant with myself. I relate that which is within me to my character. Within me is the character within."

"How did you come to understand this?"

"Since I did not go to acting school, I started by imitating actors whom I admired on the stage. I watched George Arliss closely and was nuts about Lee Tracy with his rapid-fire speech — ratatatata. ... But while I was adopting all these external styles, the actor within was growing.

"Now," he continued, "my most successful endeavors as an actor were in the theater. In my own view, I never equaled that in pictures for a variety of reasons. The basic reason is that as an actor in the theater one had a relationship with the audience that was palpable if you were really in the groove. You could feel it. In the theater, I have felt inspired. When I did Caesar, when I did Mosca and Volpone, Johnny Appleseed, and so forth, I knew that there was something going on between the audience and me. I never quite had that feeling in pictures. Now, strangely enough, when I got to a certain age and by good fortune did St. Elsewhere, the writers on that television show were very, very good. They knew of my career and began to write for my character by incorporating real things about me into the stories. Curiously, this character was closer to me than anything I had done in pictures or on the stage. I had had success with Saboteur for Hitchcock and in Dead Poets Society and so forth. While playing Dr. Auschlander for six years, I never had to ask, who is this guy? It was I. The writers had gotten within."

"What is the biggest difference between stage and screen acting?"

"In the theater, you are the projector; the audience looks where you are. In films, the lens is the projector; the audience looks where the director wants them to look by cutting and shooting. You take a person like Marilyn Monroe. The lens loved her. This was the basis of her stardom. The lens on her produced this luscious creature. She didn't have to do a damn thing. It was she. In the theater, it's your whole body that's working. In pictures, the most important thing [is] the eyes, the eyes. This is why I don't understand people like Jack Nicholson and Brad Pitt who often wear shades — sunglasses — when they act. I don't get it. Look at the eyes of Garbo when she's acting or Chaplin's eyes — his looks were like lightening. It's in the eyes!"

"How do you prepare for a role?"

"What I like to do is absorb the material as much as I can, reread it over and over again. And it comes down to all of the things that Stanislavski focused on: mostly talking and listening. I think that's the natural course of preparation. There is no mystery about it. It is a craft. Just as a dancer has to work out movements and steps with counts until there are no counts and they just do it, so it goes with the actor."

"Can anyone master this craft?"

"Much of acting is instinct. They make such a big thing about teaching acting, but it's instinct. If one lacks the instinct, it just won't fly. I'm on guard about schools teaching acting. Those great old guys never went to school. Stock companies — that's where they were. And sometimes you come under the wings of someone great like Pierre Fresnay, the greatest actor I ever shared a stage with. I came under his influence by watching him every night. If you have the acting instinct, it responds to that.

"The great stage actor Laurence Olivier once said that the director William Wyler taught him how to act in pictures. I believe the film was Wuthering Heights. Olivier came in [as] a brilliant young theater star full of all the things of theater, the movement, the looks, the voice, and particularly, the projection. Wyler brought him down, taught him that the lens and the recording machine were doing that for him. As a consequence, the actor becomes truer to himself.

"One of the amazing coincidences of art and technology is that Stanislavski came along with his system of acting, which he said was really just talking and listening. And this talking and listening emerged at a time when the technology became movies. If you look at many of the films of the 1930s, you'll see a lot of actors giving performances as if they're trying to project up to the second balcony. In contrast, you had actors like Spencer Tracey and Gary Cooper, who just went out as themselves, relaxed and confident. If you watched Cooper on the set, you'd say, does he get paid for that? He's not doing anything — talking and listening, you see. As Friedrich Dürrenmatt, the Swiss playwright, famously said, 'One day an actor forgot his lines and thus naturalism was born.'"

"What is the relationship of director to actor?"

"It has been said many times with a great degree of truth that 80 percent of direction is casting. If the director puts the right actor in the part, he can just sit back and eat a lox and bagel sandwich. The director has two roles: to preserve the ego of the actor and, second, to show a constant interest in his performance."

"That's it?"

"That's it! I don't need a director to give me any profound insights, although if a director happens to voice one, I'll grab it, because as an artist you grab everything. And yes, for example, when I did Volpone in 1946, of which I scored, if I may say so, somewhat of a success, the director, Morris Carnovsky, said to me, 'You always have an imaginary gold dagger that you're wearing on your hip.' His intention was to remind me to maintain my character's attitude. And the other thing that he told me was, 'It's the look in the eye.' So yes, the fact that he said those things stirred all sorts of things in me. What he was doing was showing constant interest and as a result feeding my ego. You see?"

"How does the actor know when his character is believable?"

"With pictures, you don't know unless you see it with an audience. And in the theater, you know it if there is a stillness coming from the audience. The quiet is a presence, and you know when it's happening. It's palpable. When you do that same scene on the third night and there's rustling and movement emanating from the audience, you know it's not happening."

"What is the most common mistake that actors make?"

"Believing one's own publicity," Lloyd joked.

"How should actors choose roles?"

"I have admittedly made a lot of trash. One has the problem of making a living, supporting a family, so I've done parts that I wouldn't ordinarily choose. You just do them; you report for work. It's very difficult to say how you choose a part. In the main, actors take parts offered to them. To turn down a part, you have to be reasonably financially well off. I've done plays where the parts didn't mean a damn thing to me. But you do the best you can, employ craft because you have to pay your bills and support yourself and your family. You speak loud, you speak fast, you speak slow, you go here, you go there. This is not why you became an actor. You became an actor for roles that move you, roles that enable you to express your passion for drama and the theater. So you get through these jobs and wait for something meaningful to come along. It's the same with movies. God, I've done movies I can't even remember."

"Throughout your career, you gained the professional trust and friendship of two of the greatest filmmakers of all time — Charlie Chaplin and Jean Renoir. What did these men see in you?"

"I believe they saw in me a level of desire and professionalism. They could talk to me about their work and found in me a sympathetic ear. Chaplin and Renoir were among my closest friends at one time. Charlie considered all great men a challenge to his greatness. And at that time, some organization I can't remember ... published a list of the greatest people in history. And Charlie was on it. He was number 6 or 7, but I noticed on his copy, he rearranged the list so that he was second only to Jesus Christ. That's what I loved about him. He and I played tennis together about four times a week at his beautiful Beverly Hills estate. But the best part about that was that afterwards we'd sit together just the two of us with his favorite drink, Scotch Old Fashioned, and we'd talk. We'd talk about life, and art, theories of acting and directing, politics — an array of subjects.

"Jean Renoir was another brilliant man. He was badly wounded in World War I and almost had a leg amputated. It was around 1919, while forced to convalesce with his leg up, that he began watching this new invention: films. He had been a ceramicist but thought to himself, I'm going to do that — become a picture director. You'll find on every best picture list two of Renoir's films, Grand Illusion and Rules of the Game. The artistic world of Paris said of him, 'Sure he wants to make pictures. He'll get a free ticket. After all, he's the son of Pierre-Auguste Renoir,' the great painter. So Jean said I am determined to be as unlike my father as I possibly can. For fifty years, he was conscious of trying not to be like his father. And at the end of his life, he decided to watch all his movies and view them with his friends. My wife and I would come to his home every Sunday for screenings in his beautiful living room. One day after the last movie was shown, he said, 'When I first started, I vowed that I would do everything possible not to imitate my father. And now, after fifty years, some fifty-one films, I realize that all that time what I was doing was trying to imitate my father.' To sit in a room with the son of the great painter Renoir, surrounded by his father's paintings, and hear him say something like this, well, it knocks you for a loop."

"After a lifetime in the business, what would you say is the secret to great acting?"

Norman took a deep breath and thought for a moment. "Great acting is when the actor within and the role you're playing come together as one. I can't tell you how to achieve it or when it might happen. It's this something that lives inside certain artists. And have you that, it happens. Truly great performances happen but only a few times in the actor's life."

Frances Fisher

Frances Fisher's story reads like an independent film script: young married woman working as a secretary at the Firestone Rubber and Latex Company in Orange, Texas, decides to get involved in community theater. There she meets a retired New York actor (John Holland), who tells her, "Looks like you have talent." Realizing her true calling, the pretty redhead quits her job, leaves her husband, and hops on a Greyhound bus to Barter Theatre in Abingdon, Virginia, where she signs on as an actor's apprentice. A year later, she makes her way to New York City, where she befriends a seasoned actor who teaches her how to crash auditions and introduces her to agents. She hones her craft doing regional theater and eventually lands a regular spot on the TV soap The Edge of Night. Her next big break comes when she is cast as Lucille Ball for the television movie Lucy & Desi: Before the Laughter. The following year, she is picked by Clint Eastwood for Unforgiven (1992) and, five years later, appears in James Cameron's Titanic (1997). Today, the onetime secretary from Orange, Texas, is one of the entertainment industry's most respected stage and screen artists. Sitting in my patio, her brilliant red hair shimmering in the sunlight, Frances responds to my first question: what is the actor's job?

"To express the human condition as truthfully as possible by putting a magnifying glass on the things that ring true for all of us. There is no difference between you and me, a man and a woman, a black person or a white person, because the feelings, desires, hopes, and dreams we carry inside our shells are the same. Great actors have the ability to tap into some kind of unconscious urge or archetype that lives within us all. As actors, finding our inner truth and connecting that to the characters we play is how we bring them to life."

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Excerpted from "The Actor Within"
by .
Copyright © 2011 Rose Eichenbaum.
Excerpted by permission of Wesleyan University Press.
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