Acting with a capital O

I was talking to Ben about my 'what's the big deal about acting' post. His conjecture is that this kind of actor worship finds its roots in "The Method" and its mystification of the acting process. We then talked about the method vs. British technical acting. I told him the following anecdote from Don Richardson's Acting without Agony. It's a good one and should be right up there with the famous Olivier/Dustin Hoffman "why don't you try acting it my boy?" story.

"During my studies with the Group Theater, I shared a room with Lee J. Cobb, who was then a fellow apprentice. We became friends and later when he was starring as Willy Lohman in Death of a Salesman I went backstage to congratulate him. When I entered his dressing room, he was collapsed on a cot, totally spent. The blood had drained from his face, the hand I shook was icy, and he barely had enough voice to respond to my praise. At the end of the play, Willy is destroyed. He seemed to have taken Cobb with him. Lee J. Cobb is remembered as a good actor; now let's look at a great one.

In my youth an actress invited me to a matinee to see Laurence Olivier play Oedipus. She had studied at the Royal Academy in London, knew Olivier, and promised to take me backstage to meet him. His performance in this Greek tragedy was one of his greatest triumphs.

At the end of the play when, as King Oedipus, he learned that he was married to his own mother and had children with her, Olivier reached the summit of classic acting. At the moment of hearing the terrible truth, he shook the theater with an animal howl of pain. The entire audience was overcome; it brought tears to my eyes and my scalp felt charged with electricity. Then, when it seemed no greater horror was possible, he ripped off the buckles from his toga and used them to gouge out his eyes. Blood poured down his cheeks as he crumpled to the ground. His daughter helped him to his feet and started leading the broken man off the stage.

At that moment, my friend pulled me from my seat and out of the theater toward the stage door. She was running to get there before the crush of well-wishers and, in fact, we arrived just as Olivier was taking his final tottering steps into the wings. He was still in character, blind, utterly destroyed. Then, as he lifted his blood-stained face and saw my friend, Barbara, his face burst into a happy smile of recognition.

"Cocktails, Babs?" asked Olivier. The king had vanished. The lesson learned is 'Control.' "